Odd and memorable days often have odd and memorable starts. 63-year old Police Chief Ben Perdy's day was beginning and he didn't know it yet, sun rays still creeping toward his bedroom window, the flash momentary, sleep trying not to let go.

At that precise instant, beside the Passimaquik River at the edge of Saxon, two town boys came carefully through heavy growth by the river's initial bend near Saxon Center, their lips shushed, their cameras in hand. Discovery and highlight of the new day came for the boys near the river edge. Sitting on the bank as if a sensual, long legged blonde or redhead had just stepped out of them, a pair of fiery red high heels. Red, sexy even in their emptiness — but dancing shoes, dating shoes, going-out shoes for sure. The sun caught them in an illuminating shot and quickly bounced away from its own glare. But there were no tracks, no sign of either long or short journey, no story to go with such abrupt high-heeled punctuation.

Trouble shoes, each boy thought.

The placid morning rolled around the pair of shoes the way a fog lifts, as though a vagrant artist had placed them there for a vision to collect, paints to speak his mind. Nearby, in the tall and mass-struggling reeds, a remnant April breeze sounded like a comb making its way through old corn stalks. Out of the northeast the night wind had stopped its gallop, had laid down its head to sleep in the early sun. River waters, at a point of tidal change, sat still as molasses.

Questions, doubt, mystery all melded in the morning pot.

Ben Perdy rolled out of bed on the button of 5:00 A.M. Without a glass of wine the night before there was no need for an alarm clock. He often wondered if morning birds at high choir did it or some trick his blood performed. Or else a place in the back of his mind that snapped a flag for attention, some other-world retreat he'd been off to. Then, as always, without doubt, Molly Popp's face came at him from that dark distance, sweet Molly, always potential Molly. Something electric, deep but not foreboding, moved within him. With an unsure touch he rubbed his stomach searching for an elusive gas pocket that might have roused him.

The youngster Darren was the first up out of the brush, saying to his pal Michael, "Think she drowned, Mike? Think some guy pushed her in, right out of her shoes? We have to tell Ben Perdy. He'll put yellow tape around the whole area. And I don't see any pocketbook. There's always a pocketbook hanging around with chicks. They carry their own rubbers. I heard my sister Dollie telling Josie on the phone, 'You got to have your own rubbers 'cause they don't care half the time.' Jeezus, it's like nothing to them the way they talk about it!" His head was full of pictures he had seen in a few magazines; red high heels, long bare legs and the other bare mysteries that so often dried his throat. He wondered if this girl of the shoes had been a redhead, or a blonde, and that hard to tell.