Not that it had made much of a dent in Les’s psyche. Few things did. Les prided himself on a laid-back approach to life, “Mr. Mellow,” they had called him in graduate school, and not just because he’d been a pothead back then. Take things as they come, that was his motto. Nobody gets out of this world alive, and you might as well enjoy things while you’re here. A good part of the enjoyment, he’d learned, was watching other people unnecessarily screwing up their lives every which way they could.

Life was complicated enough without inventing problems, but sometimes he seemed to be the only person who understood that.

Now take Miranda’s letter, for example. He’d received it that afternoon at his office on Mission Street. Assuming the others had gotten it today, too, there were four people who were pulling their hair out over it right now: Nellie, Leland, Harlow, and Callie. Well, not Nellie. No hair to pull. But none of them could be real happy about going back to Whitebark Lodge. Talk about bad karma.

If they’d just come out right at the start and told everybody what had happened, it’d all be ancient history by now. Les had said so at the time, but everyone else had shushed him, and so he’d gone along, dumb as it was. And now, for ten years, whenever they met, there had been this undercurrent, this squalid, crummy little secret between them.

They’d played it so close to the vest, in fact, that even Miranda hadn’t been told what had happened. She lived in Bend, not far from the lodge, and she’d been lucky enough to be at some kind of family affair that night-probably getting married or divorced; she did a lot of both. All she knew was that Jasper had decided to leave suddenly, no explanation, which was true enough. Obviously that was still all she knew about it, or she’d never have arranged another meeting at Whitebark.