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they were getting into with him. You know the story about Coyote and the pretty girl?”
    Detective Varney shook her head.
    “From one of the books I illustrated,” Felicia said. “They cleaned up the original tale for the kids. It goes like this: Coyote was made up like a hurt little bird, but if you looked hard, you could see it was Coyote, all right. And this pretty girl comes by and sees the bird limping along. She says, ‘You can’t fool me. My grandmother told me about you. Go on about your business.’ Coyote looks at her with a pitiful expression. ‘I’ll die out here in the cold if you don’t warm me under your blanket.’ He shivered and shook and she took pity on him and picked him up and put him under her blanket. And soon, he had his way with her. She screamed and cried, and coyote laughed and said, ‘You knew what I was when you picked me up.’” Felicia smiled gently at the detective. “They all knew what he was, you see, and I don’t think he ever deliberately hurt a person in his life.”
    “If some of the women he caught were married, maybe their husbands weren’t happy about his romances,” Varney said.
    “Maybe, but no one ever came here saying anything like that to my face.” She considered this for a moment, then said, “I assume that a crime of passion, which would include vengeance and jealousy, I suppose, would be committed during the height of the emotional turmoil, not years afterward. And he’d been seeing Willa Ashford for over two years. A long time to wait when you’re feeling an uncontrollable desire to get revenge.”
    “You know her? Willa Ashford?”
    “I introduced them,” Felicia said. “Willa was putting together a retrospective of art by local artists, and she was out here several times to discuss it, and select pictures to include. He dropped in one day when she was here and they hit it off just fine. I don’t believe he had eyes for anyone else after that.”
    “We’ve heard that he wrote about the people he knew, the residents around the lake. Did anyone mind that he did?”
    “Have you read his books?”
    Detective Varney shook her head.
    “You should. You really should. He used the lake here as the setting, you know. He changed it around, put in a resort instead of these cottages, and added a village down the road a ways, but it was this lake, and some of these people he wrote about. And truthfully, I don’t know if any of them realizes it to this day, or if they do, they don’t recognize themselves. You see, he wrote fiction, but fiction is always derived from experience if it’s any good at all. And his was very good. You really should read his novels.”
    “I will,” Varney said. “What other residents were here that weekend?” she asked then.
    “Well, I know Doris and Joe Manning were. They’re in the last cottage. And the Beardwells were. He’s a veterinarian in Bend and they come every other weekend when his partner is on call.” She named two others, and dismissed them. “Summer people. That leaves Gary Evans, and I haven’t seen him for months. He’s separated from his wife Virginia, and she comes now and then, but he’s moved up to Washington state, I think. I doubt that she was here. She would have dropped in, I think. I imagine they’re planning to sell the cottage to the state; at least that’s the rumor going around, and she’s been moving stuff out each time she comes. The deal is that we can stay here as long as we want, but if we sell, we have to sell to the state. It’s like a little pocket of individually owned property in the middle of a state park, but that’s the deal we made when the state began buying up all the surrounding area.”
    “I noticed that the first cottage is boarded up, empty. Is that what happens when the state acquires the property?”
    “Not always. There were nine cottages at one time. One burned to the ground in the sixties and wasn’t rebuilt. The state bought one back around the middle of