Lacy wasn’t much of a housekeeper. He noted a scattering of dead flies on the sunny windowsill. The makeup mirror on the side table, where, the night before, she had razored out skinny, precise lines of cocaine. A fifty-dollar bill lay on the carpet beside the bed, rolled so tightly it resembled a budding palm leaf or some bizarre stick-insect, a rust spot of dried blood on one end.

It was early fall, still warm in Constance, Minnesota. Balmy air turned gauzy curtains. Chris relished the sense of being in a place he had never been and to which he would in all likelihood never return.

“You’re actually going to the Lake today, huh?”

He reclaimed his watch from a stack of the print edition of People on the nightstand. He had an hour to make his connection. “Actually going there.” He wondered how much he had said to this woman last night.

“You want breakfast?”

“I don’t think I have time.”

She seemed relieved. “That’s okay. It was really exciting meeting you. I know lots of people who work at the Lake but they’re mostly support staff or retail. I never met anybody who was in on the big stuff.”

“I’m not in on the big stuff. I’m just a journalist.”

“Don’t undersell yourself.”

“I had a good time too.”

“You’re sweet,” she said. “You want to shower? I’m done in the bathroom.”

The water pressure was feeble and he spotted a dead cockroach in the soap dish, but the shower gave him time to adjust his expectations. To ramp up whatever was left of his professional pride. He borrowed one of her pink disposable leg razors and shaved the ghostly image of himself in the bathroom mirror.