“Then this,” Tinker said gravely. She turned to a brick-and-board bookcase filled with field guides to birds, bats, edible plants, herbs, and mammals of Isle Royale, bits of rock, bones, dried plants, and melted candle stubs. From beneath the bookcase she took a small glass container so clean it looked polished. She set it on her palm and offered it up to Anna.

Anna reached for it, then stopped. “May I?” she said, adopting the ceremony that seemed so natural to these two.

“Yes,” Damien replied formally. “We would not have come to you had we not found proof Scotty devoured his wife. It is a serious charge.”

Anna lifted the jar carefully from Tinker’s hand and turned it in the flickering light. It was several inches high, wider at the bottom than the top, and had ridges at the mouth where a screw cap had once fitted. If there had been a label it had been scrubbed off completely.

“A jar,” Anna said blankly.

“A pickle relish jar…” Damien encouraged her.

Anna began to feel her brain had fogged up somehow. Could there have been something in the tea? Was Tinker a self-styled witch? Damien a warlock hopeful? Or were they merely a couple of eccentrics, the kindhearted flakes she’d thought them to be? One thing was certain: Anna was not making sense of much of what they were saying. If they did have a puzzle, the pieces they offered didn’t seem to fit any picture she could come up with.

“A pickle relish jar,” she repeated.

“Heinz,” Tinker added.

“That”-Damien pointed to the little bottle as if it were something unclean-“is not an isolated incident. The last food order Scotty Butkus sent to Bob’s Foods included an order for an entire case of pickle relish.”

ISRO employees ordered their food for a week at a time, sending lists to several markets in Houghton. Every Tuesday the food was shipped back on the Ranger III.