To Darkness And To Death

Morning Prayer

Cold. The cold awoke her, creeping underneath her blanket, spreading like an ache along her hip. She tried to move, to burrow into some warm space, but the cold was beneath her, and then there was a hard, hot twinge of pain in her shoulders and she had a panicky moment of Where? What? She tried again. She couldn’t move her arms. They were pinned behind her back, her wrists fastened by something sticky and implacable.

Scream. Her cheeks and lips didn’t move. Her eyelids felt glued together, but she blinked and blinked until the sting of cold air brought tears to her eyes. Open, closed, the darkness was the same. The darkness, and the cold.

Her brain didn’t want to make sense of anything she was feeling. Was she drunk? Was this some sort of game? What had she done? She couldn’t remember. She remembered dinner. She had chickpea stew. Homemade bread. Red wine. She could picture the table, laid with her mother’s best china. She could remember looking down the long table to where her father’s picture hung on the wall, thinking, I know he’d approve. I know he would. But then what? Nothing. A blankness more frightening than the cold blackness around her. Because it was inside her. A hole in her mind.

She suddenly remembered a trip to Italy they had taken. She had been ten or eleven then. It was the summer after Gene’s mother had died, the only summer they didn’t come up to the camp. Daddy had hired a driver to take them on the drive through the mountains to Lake Como, but the morning they were to leave Pisa, he had canceled. An American had been kidnapped. She had been whiny, bored with the university town, eager for the water-skiing and boat rides she had been promised. Daddy pulled up a chair and explained they couldn’t risk it. That they would make very good targets. That was the word he used, targets. Because we’re American? She had asked. Because we’re rich, he had answered. It was the first time, the only time he had ever said that. Because we’re rich.

Kidnapped. Oh, God. She squeezed her eyes shut against a spill of hot tears and wished, for the thousandth time, that her father was still alive. To make everything all right.

Ring. Ring. The phone. She snarled, rolled onto her stomach, and pulled her pillow over her head, but the damn thing wouldn’t give up. Once. Twice. Three times. With an inarticulate curse, she reached out from under the covers and grabbed the receiver. “H’lo,” she said.

“Reverend Fergusson? Did I wake you?” She was spared coming up with an answer worthy of the question, because her caller went on. “It’s John Huggins, Millers Kill Search and Rescue. I’m calling you on official business.”

I’m so glad it’s not personal, she thought, but the only thing her mouth could manage was “Me?”

“You signed up, didn’t you?” She could hear the rustle of paper over the line. “Air force training in survival, search, and rescue? Nine years army helicopter pilot? Physically fit, has own gear?”

She shoved the pillow beneath her and propped herself up on her elbows. The only word her sleep-sodden brain latched on to was “pilot.” “You want me to fly?”

“Not hardly. We got a young woman reported missing. Went out for a walk last night, never returned. Her brother called it in this morning after he discovered her bed hadn’t been slept in.”

This morning? She squinted at the blackness outside her window. Didn’t look like morning to her. “Why me?”

“Because we’re down to the bottom of the list.” Huggins said, his voice laced with exasperation. “Two-thirds of the crew are off on loan to the Plattsburgh mountain rescue. They got an old lady wandered away from her home and a pair of hunters who haven’t reported in for three days. Can you do it or not?”

The bishop’s visit. She pushed away the last of her muzzy-headedness. Half the congregation of St. Alban’s would be at the church today, preparing for the dog-and-pony show that was the bishop’s annual visit. She should be there. But… the search and rescue team needed her. She did sign up. And hiking through the woods is a lot more appealing than counting napkins and polishing silver, a treacherously seductive voice inside her pointed out. “Sure, I can do it,” she said. “Where should I meet you?”

“A place called Haudenosaunee.”

“What’s that? A town?”

“Naw, it’s an old-time estate. What they call a great camp. Inside the Blue Line.”

“The Blue Line?”

“Inside the boundary of the Adirondack State Park.” Huggins sounded as if he were having second, maybe third thoughts about calling her.

She rolled out of bed. There was a pencil and a pad of paper on her nightstand. “Give me the directions,” she said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Ed Castle was sitting in the dark. There was no reason for it, really. He had crept out of his unlit bedroom to avoid waking his wife, but with their door safely shut, he could have snapped the hall lights on. Or turned on one of the lamps in the living room when he unlocked the gun cabinet and tucked his rifle under his arm.

Maybe it was because for so many years he had been up early winter mornings, long gone before his family awoke or the sun rose. Tiptoeing past the doors that had once led to his daughters’ bedrooms, he felt a tug, like a hook from out of the past embedded in his heart, and he had wanted to open the doors once again to see them sleeping, all silky hair and boneless limbs.

In the kitchen, he had started the coffee and found his Thermos by touch and the green glow of the microwave clock. He thought maybe he’d need some light to find the box of cartridges he kept hidden behind Suzanne’s baking tins on the top shelf, but he hadn’t. Now he sat in the dark and thought about the years of his life, which were doled out, it seemed to him, winter by winter, tree by tree, marked by a chain tread and a scarred path leading into the woods. Leading to where he could not see.

The light snapped on, starting him upright in his chair. Suzanne stood in the orange and gold halo of the hanging tulip lamp, zipped into her velour robe, her graying hair every which way. “What on earth are you doing here, sitting around with no lights on?” She stepped toward him, her slippers shush-shushing over the vinyl floor. “You didn’t get a call about a fire, did you?” Ed was a member of the Millers Kill Volunteer Fire Department.

“No.” He shrugged. “I was thinking about when the girls were little. This was the only quiet time I had back then.”

“Well, you’re going to get a chance to relive those days.” She crossed to the counter and opened a cupboard to retrieve her coffee cup. “I’m watching Bonnie’s boys while she’s finishing up that big sewing job, and Becky’s coming home for the weekend.”

He grunted. She waved the pot in his direction, and he held out his mug. “She coming up here to gloat?”

“Stop that,” Suzanne said sharply. “She didn’t force you to put the business up for sale. You can’t make the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation the bad guy in all this. It was your decision.”

“I wouldn’t have had to make any decision if the ACC wasn’t going to cut off my lumbering license.” He buried his nose in his coffee cup. “I can’t believe my own daughter turned into a damn tree hugger.”

Suzanne seated herself at the table. “It’s your own fault. You used to sneak her out to your cut sites when she wasn’t big enough to tie her own shoes.”

One half of a smile crooked his cheek. “You used to carry on something fierce about that.”

“A lumbering camp is no place for a four-year-old.”

He laughed. “Remember how she would stomp around in a fit if she couldn’t come with me?”

“Uh-huh.” Suzanne looked at him pointedly over the rim of her cup. “So now she’s grown up into someone who loves the woods, is hot-tempered, always speaks her mind-and you can’t figure out where she gets it from.” She snorted. “The only thing she doesn’t favor you in is her hair.”

Ed ran his hand over his nearly bald scalp and grinned.

Suzanne rolled her white crockery mug between her hands, a gesture he had seen her make on a thousand cold mornings like this one. “What’s really bothering you?”

“Sellin’ off the business.”

“Thought so.”

“I know it makes sense. If this land trade-off goes ahead like it’s supposed to, by this time tomorrow the van der Hoeven wood lot is gonna be off-limits to lumbering. By this time next week, the crew and I’d have to head fifty miles north to the nearest open woods. A hundred extra miles a day. Six hundred a week. With fuel prices the way they are, Suze-”

“I know.”

“Not to mention the increase in the insurance premium once we start putting that many open-road miles on our trucks.”

“I know.”

“And we’ll be getting hit with more maintenance on the trucks.”

“I know.”

“I just don’t see how we can take the increased cost and survive.” He looked down at the rifle resting in his lap. It had been his dad’s, along with the timber business. For a moment, he felt cut loose in time, unsure if he was sixty or sixteen. The gun, the woods, the coffee, even. All the same in his father’s time. In his grandfather’s.

“I always hoped to keep it in the family somehow. Maybe leave it to Bonnie’s boys. They love the woods.”

She nodded. “They do. On the other hand, do you want them risking their necks sixty hours a week to bring home twenty-five thousand a year?”

He looked at her, surprised. “You never complained.”

She laughed quietly. “I was a lumberman’s daughter. I knew what I was getting into when I married you.”

He put down his coffee and took her hand. The feel of her skin under his thumb was another bright spot against time and the dark. “I called the boys on the crew yesterday. Told ’em I wasn’t going out this winter. It’s a hell of a thing to do, to tell a man he ain’t got the job he’s been counting on. But if I sell out now to one of the larger companies, I can get a good price for the equipment. Not great, not with fuel prices high and interest rates low, but decent. Good enough so’s we could get a place in Florida. Become snowbirds. Would you like that?”

He watched her roll the thought around in her mouth, tasting it. “It’d be nice,” she finally said. “Wearing short sleeves all the time. Gardening year-round.”

“No more dark mornings,” he said.

She smiled a bit at that. “I’d miss seeing Bonnie and the boys, though. And it would be odd having Christmas where it’s sunny and warm.” She looked at him more closely. “What are you going to do? I can’t imagine you not timbering.”

He glanced down at the old rifle in his lap. That was the question, wasn’t it? “Man and boy, I’ve hauled wood out of those mountains forty years now. I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m not a lumberman. But change is coming, Suze.” He rubbed his thumb over her hand again. “And if we don’t change with it, we’ll get left behind.”

Dressed in insulated camos and a blaze-orange vest, Russ Van Alstyne padded downstairs in his stocking feet. Every chair, sofa, and table in the parlor was piled high with meticulously folded draperies, glossy stripes and chintzes that made the room look like a dressmaker’s shop gone mad. He shifted a deeply ruffled swag to grab the new Lee Child novel he’d been reading last night and heard the dry crunch of tissue paper stuffed into the folds. No wrinkles for these babies. Unlike him. Straightening, he caught sight of himself in the mirror above the mantle. I don’t look a half-century old, he thought. Do I?

The smell of coffee drew him on to the kitchen. Even in heavy wool socks, the drafts along the two hundred-year-old farmhouse’s floor chilled his feet. He stepped into the unlaced boots waiting for him by the mudroom door before pouring himself another cup from the coffeemaker. Boxes of rings and hooks and other curtain-hanging hardware took up all the available space on the kitchen table, so he stood by the sink, looking out the window into the pale darkness, Jack Reacher’s adventures abandoned on the counter.

Upstairs, a whirring sewing machine fell silent. A moment later, he heard the stairs creak. “Can I help you load any of this stuff in the car?” he called out.

“Not yet,” his wife said, toting what looked like a ball gown through the kitchen. “Let me get rid of this, and I’ll be right back.” She kneed open the mudroom door and clattered down the steps into the unheated summer kitchen they used for storage. That room led to the barn, where Russ had spent most of the last summer prying up the uneven plank flooring and laying down heavy-duty joists, making it a usable garage for the first time since the horse-and-buggy days. He was actually looking forward to the first big storm of the season, just for the novelty of getting into his truck without knocking snow off first.

“Okay, birthday boy, you ready?” Linda Van Alstyne peeked around the mudroom door. “I couldn’t wrap it, so this is all the surprise you get.” She emerged into the kitchen cradling a pristine quilted canvas rifle case.

“Whoa,” he said.

“Take a look inside.” She handed it to him. He unzipped the case. Nestled in the well-padded interior was a.378 Weatherby Mark V.

“Oh. Honey.” He drew it out reverently, running a hand along the gunstock walnut, smooth and warm to the touch, like a living thing. “It’s beautiful.” Rosewood and maple gleamed in the kitchen light. He drew his fingers across the bolt sleeve, etched with scrollwork from another century. “I don’t know what to say. This is amazing.”

Linda dimpled at him, glowing with cleverness. Dressed in a sweatsuit, her face showing the strain of the past weeks’ work, she was still gorgeous, all extravagant curves and touseled blond curls. His very own Marilyn Monroe. “How on earth did you know what to get?” he asked.

“I asked Lyle MacAuley for a list of recommendations.” His deputy chief was an avid hunter. “Last time I went to New York to buy fabric, I got it. I’m glad you like it.”

“Like it? I love it. I didn’t think I’d ever handle a Weatherby outside of a gun shop.” He glanced up at her. “Are you sure we can afford it?”

Her dimples vanished. “Russ.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I love it, I really do. But Weather-bys cost an arm and a leg. I don’t want you to be shorting your budget just to get me a pretty gun.”

“Stop worrying about the money. I’ve got more business than I can handle right now with this commission from the Algonquin Waters resort. And if I can pull it all off in time for their grand opening tonight, I’ll be able to pick up tons more business.”

“Yeah.” He replaced the gun in the carrying case. “If that’s what you want.”

She tugged a dishrag off the faucet and swiped the immaculate counter. “Don’t start with me. This is absolutely the right direction to take the business. No more running up curtains for one room or even one house at a time. The spa has almost five hundred installations, counting the interior accent decorations. That’s a year’s worth of work. It’s my chance to step up to a whole different level.”

“I just don’t like to see you working so hard-”

“Russell! Hello? Is this the man who can’t take a vacation because the police department might fall apart without him?” She tossed the rag into the sink and faced him head-on. “For years, I’ve been supportive and understanding when you’ve left dinner on the table to run to a crime scene, or when you’ve stayed out until 4:00 A.M. working a case, or when you’ve missed Thanksgiving or Christmas because you’re taking someone else’s shift. Now it’s your turn. I’ve finally found something I love to do, something I’m good at, something people will pay me for. You’ve always had that. I haven’t. You should be happy for me.”

“I am. I know when we retired from the army it was hard on you. I’m glad you’ve found something to do with yourself.” She opened her mouth disbelievingly, and he winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just… you’re spending all your time at the spa these days.”

“Have you run out of groceries? Is the house a filthy mess? Are the monthly bills unpaid? I’m keeping up my end, so get off my back.”

“Linda.” He was making a hash of this, but some shambling monster of marital discord made him open his mouth and wedge his foot deeper in. “It’s not the time. You’re… I hate that you’re working with John Opperman.” He couldn’t stop his voice from tightening when he said the resort developer’s name.

She shoved one of the wooden chairs against the table. “Mr. Opperman has been both a perfect gentleman and a generous employer who’s committed to hiring locally. If he had gone with a big commercial furnishings company, he’d have his curtains up this morning, instead of having to wait and wonder if I can pull it off before the opening ceremonies tonight.” She stalked into the living room. “I have to load the rest of this into my car. You can help, or you can go. Whatever.” She scooped up a stack of quilted shades piled so high they looked like bedding for a princess and a pea.

“For chrissakes, give me those. They must weigh a ton.” He relieved her of the stack. “I’ve dealt with Opperman. He smiles at you and he talks real smooth, and all the time he’s got the knife out, waiting to stick it in.”

“You haven’t dealt with him. You’ve investigated him. Of course you think he’s the bogeyman.” She shook out a plastic bag and slid several tissue-stiffened swags inside. “One of his business partners was murdered. His other partner tried to kill him. I’m sorry if the case didn’t turn out like you thought it would, but honey, it’s been over a year. The trial has come and gone, and Mr. Opperman wasn’t implicated in any way. Don’t you think it’s time to let it go already?”

He stomped through the kitchen with unnecessary force.

“He could have taken the insurance money and run,” Linda went on. “Instead, he built the resort. He gave a lot of local people jobs, including yours truly.” She trailed him through the open mudroom door into the unheated summer kitchen. “Let’s face it, honey, you divide the world into two categories, criminals and potential criminals.” Her words made vapor puffs in the cold air. “I’ve worked with him. Believe me. He has a clear conscience.”

In the barn, Russ lifted the back gate of her boxy old Volvo wagon and slid the quilted shades in. “Careful of those sheers,” she said.

“Jeffrey Dahmer had a clear conscience, too, you know.”

She dropped her swags in the back and slammed the tailgate. “You. Are. Impossible.” She stomped up the barn steps, strode through the summer kitchen, and let the mudroom door swing in his face.

“Honey,” he started, but she held up her hand.

“I don’t know why you’ve been such a grouchy old bastard lately, but it’s going to stop.” She threw open the refrigerator and pulled out an insulated lunchbox. “Here. I made you a lunch. Take your pretty new gun and go shoot something.”

“Honey…” He tried again.

She paused in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “And don’t think all this talk about how terrible Mr. Opperman is will get you out of going to the grand-opening party tonight. I expect you to be here, wearing your tux, car keys in hand, by seven-thirty tonight. Do us both a favor and work out your aggressions on the deer, okay?” She leaned against the doorjamb, crossing her arms over her chest. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

He was rewarded with the dimples again. “You’re impossible, but I love you.”

“I am impossible,” he agreed.

“And…”

“And I love you, too.”

She disappeared into the living room. God, she was still so beautiful. When he had married her twenty-five years ago, he had wanted nothing else than to grow old with her. And now, that had happened. He was fifty years old today. Fifty years old, and in love with another woman.

Clare pulled over to the side of the dirt road and fished her flashlight out of the glove compartment. Her sweet little Shelby Cobra, which had been such a bargain because it was rebuilt, didn’t have a working dome light. She thumbed the light on and studied the directions John Huggins had given her. She kept her right foot tromped down hard, because her car also didn’t have a functioning parking brake. The timing chain had broken twice since she bought it, and the muffler was about to fall off in a shower of rust flakes, but the Shelby went like she had a 455 rocket, and the heater was a regular blast furnace, a fact she was grateful for on this below-freezing morning.

Okay, she had gone off the paved road and had already passed two dirt roads to her left. Huggins had warned her that the multiple access roads to the Haudenosaunee land would be confusing. According to her directions, she had another half mile to go, and then a right turn into a dirt road marked with stone pillars should bring her to the main camp.

Sure enough, in a matter of minutes she was turning past two riverstone obelisks and wending her way even higher into the mountains over a switchback road drifted deep with dead leaves. She was just starting to worry that she had taken a wrong turn despite the directions when the trees crowding in on both sides of the road opened up and her tires crunched onto gravel.

Her first glimpse of Haudenosaunee surprised her. She was expecting something grand, an Adirondack-themed fantasia with peeled-birch Gothic trim and a rack of antlers over the door. Instead, she faced a simple, two-story log building with a deep-eaved roof and a broad porch that looked more like Wyoming than New York State to her. The house-camp?-fronted a gravel drive almost as wide as it was long. On the far side of the drive, opposite the porch, the trees had been thinned rigorously, leaving a dramatic view of the mountains rolling away to the north. Meant as a summer house, then. One thing Clare had learned in her almost two years in Millers Kill was that no one built a house facing north if he could help it. The view was bracketed by a three-bay garage on one end, also constructed from logs. Its doors, like the house’s door and shutters, were trimmed in Adirondack green.

Huggins’s black Dodge Ram was parked out front among several other pickups and SUVs. Clare pulled in beside them, a midget in the Land of the Four Wheel Drive.

The clammy chill of the predawn air seized her as soon as she got out of the car. She ducked back in to get her parka and gloves from the passenger seat and nearly cracked her head when someone called, “Reverend Fergusson?” from the camp house’s shadowy front porch.

“Yeah, it’s me,” she said.

“Glad you could make it.” He stepped off the porch into the gray light, a compactly built man in a blaze-orange jacket. “Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Duane.” He shook her hand.

“Sure,” she said. “You’re one of Russ’s-one of Chief Van Alstyne’s part-time officers, aren’t you?”

His teeth gleamed in the half-light. “Part-time police, part-time rescue, part-time EMT, full-time pain in the neck, my wife tells me. You got something orange or reflective in there?”

She pulled her Day-Glo green running vest out of the backseat. “I thought this would do.”

“Good enough. We don’t want you getting shot up by somebody mistaking you for a buck.”

She shrugged the vest over her parka while following Duane back to the house. “Is that a real problem?”

He glanced up at the lightening sky. “A beautiful Saturday in November? These woods’ll be full of hunters by daybreak. Which could work to our advantage in finding the missing girl. Provided nobody shoots her or us first, of course.” Duane led her up the porch steps and opened the door. “We’re meeting in here.”

Clare tried not to goggle as they entered the house. The outside may have been spartan, but the interior was everything she had hoped for. Turkish carpets covered polished floorboards, twig rocking chairs sat before a crackling fire in a massive stone fireplace, and the walls were hung with Hudson School landscapes and animal heads. She expected Teddy Roosevelt to stride into the room and welcome her at any moment.

Instead, she got John Huggins. “Fergusson! Come on over here. You’d been any later, we would have had to leave without you.”

Huggins and the five other members of the search and rescue team were clustered around a dining room table whose shining mahogany surface was cluttered with topographical maps and grease pencils.

Huggins slid a map toward her and continued from where he had apparently left off. “Okay, I want regular check-ins on the radio. We’ve notified the Fish and Game folks; they’ll be telling anyone they come into contact with. If you run across any hunters or hikers, give them the girl’s description and remind them of the emergency signal-two shots into the air. But tell ’em to get close and make sure it’s the girl-otherwise we’ll have excitable fools blasting an alarm every time they spot an old log. We’ll regroup and take a break in about three hours.” He waved a hand at the men. “You may as well get started. I’ll brief Fergusson here.” He turned to her. “You bring a GPS unit?”

“Nope,” she said.

He made a noise indicating that this lapse didn’t surprise him. “Duane, give her a unit and a radio. You do know how these things work, right?”

“The global positioning system enables the carrier of a unit to position him-or herself on an exact latitudinal and longitudinal coordinate by receiving and relaying information through the global satellite system,” Chief. Huggins reminded her of an old-school crew chief she had worked with in the Philippines who had always referred to her as “the girl” despite the fact that she outranked him. Clare had spit-and-polished him into a grudging acceptance. She figured the same approach might work for Huggins. She flicked on the unit, glanced at the coordinates, and ran one finger across the topo map. “Here we are.”

Huggins grunted, but from the corner of her eye she saw Duane grin.

“Who are we looking for? And what are the parameters? How young is the girl?”

“Twenty-six.” A rusty voice behind them startled her. She turned to see a thirtyish man detach himself from the deep shadows framing the thick-walled fireplace. Flickering firelight made a crazy quilt of light and darkness out of his face, and as he drew nearer, she saw it wasn’t an effect of chiaroscuro. Fire itself, at some time in the past, had shaped half his face, leaving behind taut, glazed skin and ropy keloid scars. “It’s my sister. Millie van der Hoeven.”

Clare blinked, realized she was staring. “Um, hi,” she said. “I’m Clare Fergusson.”

He took her hand. The left side of his face was perfectly normal, although he was looking haggard and worn at the moment. The scars ran down his neck, disappearing behind the collar of his plaid flannel shirt, and she guessed the rough, creaking tone of his voice was due to damage, not just emotion over his sister going missing. “Eugene van der Hoeven. You’re the priest at the Episcopal church in town, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” she said, surprised he knew of her. “I haven’t seen you around.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she could have kicked herself.

“I don’t get into town much.” His head twitched almost imperceptibly to the right. Clare could guess why.

“Mr. van der Hoeven, can you fill Reverend Fergusson in on what happened?” John Huggins’s usual brassy tone was downright respectful.

“My sister Millie-Millicent-has been staying with me for the past three months or so. Last night, after dinner, she said she wanted to take a walk. When I got up this morning, she still hadn’t gotten home.”

“What time did she leave the house?”

“Around eight.”

“Didn’t take her cell phone?”

“It’s still plugged into the recharger in her room.”

Clare glanced at Huggins. “That’s kind of late to go wandering out into the Adirondack forest, isn’t it?”

Eugene frowned, considering. “Is it? I didn’t think so. Anyway, she had a flashlight. And there are trails all through these woods.”

“Didn’t you worry when she didn’t show up at bedtime?”

“I was readying myself for bed when she decided to take her stroll.” He gestured toward an oak-and-glass gun case mounted on the far wall. “I had planned to hunt this morning.”

You and every other man in Millers Kill, Clare thought. She turned to Huggins again. “Is Millie in good shape? Any physical issues that might slow her down? Is she familiar with being in the woods?”

Eugene van der Hoeven answered. “She’s in excellent health. I’ve known her to readily hike ten miles in a day. As for familiarity, she summered at Haudenosaunee every year from the time she was born until she went to college.”

“We’re guessing she got disoriented in the dark,” Huggins said. “If she was smart, and it sounds like she is, she hunkered down under some brush and is waiting on daylight. We’re working the search with the starting assumption that she walked for up to two hours before she realized she was lost.”

Clare bit off an expletive before it could escape. “That’s a six-mile radius.”

“Maybe more.” Huggins rocked back on his hiking-boot treads. “Hopefully, she figured out she was in trouble after forty-five minutes and she stayed put after that. But I’m not in the hopeful business, so we’ll plan for the worst.”

Russ downshifted and let his truck grind its way farther up the logging road, bouncing from rock to rut. He figured he was a few minutes away from permanent kidney damage when he spotted a gleam through the trees. Around the last bend, where the road petered out into brush and stumps, Ed Castle had parked his Ford Explorer. Russ pulled up behind him and got out. “Did I keep you waiting?” he asked.

“Naw. Perfect timing. Official daylight’s in fifteen minutes. Then we can get started. This gonna be your year, is it?”

“You bet.” Russ hauled his pack with his lunch and Thermos out of the cab and settled it over his shoulders. “Twelve points or bust.”

Ed snorted a laugh. Russ had been hunting with the man for three falls now and had yet to bring down a yearling stag, let alone one with a twelve-point spread of antlers.

He filled one pocket with spare cartridges and then unzipped his new gun case. Ed whistled as Russ withdrew his Weatherby. “Will you look at that,” Ed marveled. Russ held it out for the older man to inspect. Ed rested his own gun against the truck and took the Weatherby reverently. “This is a beaut.”

“Birthday present from my wife.”

“Now that’s a woman. Know what I got for my last birthday from my wife? A dinner out at a restaurant where I had to wear a tie, and a fish on a plaque that sings songs when you walk by it.” He stroked the Weatherby’s stock lovingly. “You treat this woman right.”

“I try.”

Ed handed the rifle back to Russ. “Ready?”

“Lead the way.”

They walked in silence for a while, watching as branches etched themselves in detail and bittersweet berries flushed from gray to orange in the gathering light. Russ loved the woods this time of year, loved the dry, half-musty smell of the fallen leaves rustling underfoot, loved the snap of the cold and the tracery of frost on tree bark and pine cones. Here and there, a lone oak still held its foliage, and he and Ed brushed under tanned leather leaves, acorn hulls crunching beneath their boots.

“So,” Russ said. “Haudenosaunee. I haven’t hunted here since I was a kid. Have you heard it’s a likely spot?”

Ed shook his head. “More of a busman’s holiday for me. I harvest timber from the estate. Or I did. They’re setting to close it to timbering after tonight.” He glanced up at Russ. “You know about the land deal they’ve cooked up for this place?”

“Yeah.” Russ stepped over a mossy rock. “Some big wood products company is buying the whole estate and then turning it over to the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. I’m supposed to go to the damn party where they sign the papers tonight.”

Ed’s eyebrows shot up. “How’d you rate that?”

“Linda was invited. Her business is doing all the curtains for the resort.”

“Right, right, that’s right. My oldest girl, Bonnie, she does sewing for your wife, you know. Don’t think she was invited to the party, though.”

“I’d give her my invitation if I could wiggle out of it. Unfortunately, Linda has me in the crosshairs. So I have to show up in a rental tux and make small talk with a bunch of suits.” He took a deep breath of the thin, cold air. “Not my favorite way to spend an evening. But my wife cuts me a lot of slack. I owe her.”

“I hear that.”

They walked on for a while, quiet again, eyes scanning for a telltale flash of white or a trace of spoor. It was true dawn now, rose-gold light shafting high into the treetops from the east, brightness hanging in the air. The deer would be on the move, heading back to their beds, pausing to snatch a mouthful here or there before retiring to sleep away the day.

Over the rise of a slope, the heavy forest opened up to a long glade. Rotting stumps sprouted saplings and mushrooms, and the grass was still shaggy and green under a rime of frost. Spindly young birches and maples shone in the dawn light. The forest was reseeding itself.

“I did this,” Ed said. “Cut it eight years back.” He gestured upward. “It goes way up, between these two hills.”

“How many acres are there?”

“To Haudenosaunee? Two hundred fifty thousand.”

Russ whistled.

“Ayeah. It’s been my primary harvesting area for a good ten years now. Used to cut in forest that was close enough to make it easy to get to, up past Tenant’s Mountain, but Global Wood Products bought it up a decade ago. We’d leased the yearly rights from Haudenosaunee, from way back when it was my daddy and old Mr. van der Hoeven. When I was younger, I didn’t understand why my dad didn’t do more in these woods, since he paid for the license. But as one piece of land and then another shut down to timbering, I was grateful he’d held this place close to his pocket.”

“Isn’t the company that’s buying the land for the conservancy GWP, Inc.? Is that Global Wood Products?”

“It’s their American subsidiary. All these big foreign companies got themselves an American subsidiary these days.”

“So why aren’t they harvesting the timber themselves?”

“Oh, they may some time in the future. Right now, it’s more valuable as a tax write-off to them. It works like this, see. If you’re the owner, you pay six, seven dollars an acre on these woodlands in property tax. That’s sumpin’ like two hundred thousand dollars a year for Haudenosaunee. And the owner pays that whether he’s taking timber from the holding, or building vacation homes, or just sitting on it watchin’ the leaves fall. The Adirondack Conservancy Corporation loves getting their hands on great big tracts of land like this one. But they’re hard-put to buy ’em, unless the owners can afford to give ’em a break on the price. So the ACC teams up with a business like Global Wood Products. The business buys the land and gives the conservancy the development rights to it. GWP takes a big yearly tax writeoff, and the conservancy gets to save the woods from guys like me, as they’d say.”

“Why doesn’t GWP harvest the timber?”

“Don’t be fooled-they hold on to the logging rights. They just agree not to exercise ’em for a decade or two and to give the ACC first option to buy ’em outright. Gives ’em a place to put their profits, while locking up some choice timber for the future.”

“And meanwhile, the giant corporation gets a reputation as a warm and fuzzy, environmentally friendly kind of place.”

“Yeah. And nobody notices that they’re getting rid of all the little guys in the timber products business at the same time.”

Russ looked at him sharply. “Little guys? Like you?”

Ed shrugged. “Looks like it.” He let his gaze drift out over the green and sun-splashed glen he had created. “What the hell. I had a good run. Everything ends eventually.” Then his breath caught. He pointed.

At the other edge of the clearing, a young buck emerged from the wood, lured into the open by the rich feeding. Russ had a glimpse, for a moment, of the way it all worked: the man felling trees to make his living, the cleared land running thick with grass, a new feeding ground for the deer. Eventually the trees would grow over it all, and the cycle would begin again. Or not.

Ed nudged him, gesturing, Take your shot.

Russ shook his head. He swept his arm, indicating the clearing. You made it. You take it. It should go to you.

Officer Mark Durkee straightened his hat as he walked up the driveway toward the entrance of 52 Depot Road. He knew the current tenant, Mike Yablonski, from three disturbing-the-peace calls and a suspicion-of-dealing relating to a large quantity of pot that had circulated through Millers Kill last fall. He knew the man he was here to pick up from Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners.

Mark pressed the buzzer for Apartment B. And pressed the buzzer. And pressed the buzzer. On the fourth ring, he heard a slam and someone clumping down the stairs inside. “For chrissakes, I’m coming! Shut up already!” The door flung open, revealing Mike Yablonski, barefooted, wide-eyed, in sweats and a saggy T-shirt. “Uh,” he said.

Mark noted Yablonski neglected to look through the window or even pause to unlock the door before opening it. Not the habits of a drug dealer-at least, not one who hoped to remain in business. Chief Van Alstyne might want to drop him from the watch list. “I’m here for Randy,” Mark said. He skipped the pleasantries; he wasn’t this man’s friend, and he didn’t want Yablonski thinking he was.

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” Yablonski leaned forward, looking at the battered blue pickup parked in front of Mark’s squad car. “You taking his truck, too?”

“He can come back and get that later. I’m just delivering him home to his wife.”

“Sure. I’ll go get ’im. You can, um-”

Mark put his foot in the door. “I’ll wait here.”

Yablonski looked at Mark’s shoe. “Yeah. Sure.” He trudged up the stairs. Mark examined the walls, old horsehair plaster cracking and bulging away from the lathes. The hallway smelled like cat urine. He crossed his arms, drawing his uniform jacket snugly over his shoulders. The only reason Randy wasn’t living full-time in a dive like this was because he had had the good sense to marry a smart woman. Mark’s wife’s sister. Too bad she hadn’t been smart enough to avoid a loser like Randy Schoof.

He heard voices, faintly, from above. “C’mon, man, time to get going. Your brother-in-law’s here.” Then stumbling steps. Finally, Yablonski appeared, one arm wrapped around Randy’s waist, supporting him on his ham-sized shoulder.

“Hey. Mark.” Randy waved blearily as his buddy helped him ascend the stairs. “Whaddya doin’ here, man?”

“Lisa called me.”

“Did I… did I forget to call her?”

Yablonski answered. “No, man, you called her last night after you decided not to drive home.” The big man looked at Mark, as if seeking approval. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Stay over, ’stead of driving.”

“That’s right.” Mark reached for his brother-in-law. “C’-mon, Randy. I told Lisa I’d bring you home.”

“I knew I called her. I always call her. I don’t want her to worry.”

“Yeah, you’re a saint, all right.”

Yablonski stepped back, giving Mark space to maneuver Randy out the door. “Hey,” he said. “Anybody ever say how much you two look alike?”

“No,” Mark said. In truth, he had heard the remark more than once, and it pissed him off every time. Yeah, he and his brother-in-law were both several inches shy of six feet. And they both kept their dark hair short, Mark in the high-and-tight of his academy days, Randy in an angry-white-guy buzz. And they both had more than a few muscles, Mark from regular weekly workouts in his basement gym, Randy from swinging a chain saw and unloading crates and whatever other backbreaking work he could find to keep him in cigarettes. But all anyone had to do was look at the tattoos crawling up and down Randy’s arms, at his idiotic Yankees rally cap, at his jeans flopping past his boxers. Nothing could be further from Mark’s spit-polish and shine, as he pointed out to anyone tittering about the Bain girls marrying mix-and-match husbands.

He deposited Randy in the squad car and went around to the driver’s side. Yablonski was still standing in the doorway. Mark stopped. “Thanks for letting him stay the night,” he said grudgingly. Whatever else he thought of Randy’s companion, Yablonski had kept Randy from driving drunk. That was worth thanks. “Sorry about waking you so early. I’m on my way home after my shift. This was my only chance to get him.”

“No prob. I was planning on hunting today, anyway. You kept me from being later than I would’ve.”

Mark nodded. He slid behind the wheel of the squad car and chucked his hat onto Randy’s lap. “Don’t throw up on it,” he warned as he reversed out of the driveway.

“I’m not going to throw up.”

“You look like you’re gonna throw up.”

“I’m not gonna throw up.”

Randy reeked of old cigarettes and stale alcohol. Mark navigated the twists and turns out of town silently. As he drove west, toward the mountains, the rising sun exploded across his rearview mirror. He tilted the mirror and rolled down his window. Cold air battered his face. Randy mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said thanks. For picking me up. I got kinda messed up last night.”

Mark considered pointing out that Randy had gotten messed up considerably before last night, starting with dropping out of school at the end of tenth grade.

“I’m losing my job.”

“Which one?”

“Working for Castle Logging. The old man called me yesterday morning. Said he was sorry, but he wasn’t going to be able to cut the costs of moving the operation up north. So he’s putting the business up for sale. Says he’ll give me a good reference if I find a job with another timberman.”

“Jeez. I’m sorry to hear that.” Randy’s lumbering job ran from whenever the forest floor froze hard enough to support the weight of trucks and skidders until the thaw threatened to mire the heavy vehicles in their tracks. Usually late November through April. Getting laid off so close to the start of the season would make it hard to find a place on another crew. “Does Lisa know?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said I’d find something.” He slammed a shaky fist against the edge of the door. “Find something. Like what? There’s nothing around here in winter except lumbering.”

“Take it easy on the car. It’s not mine.” Mark turned off Old Route 100 onto a dirt road that would shave five minutes off the time it would take to get to the Schoofs’ house. They were about as far away from Mark and Rachel’s Cossayuharie home as they could get, tucked up in the mountains, inside the Adirondack State Park. “There’s plenty of work around here in winter. Retail in the mall-”

“At minimum wage plus a buck or two. Cutting timber paid sixteen thousand in a season. There’s nothing else I can do that’ll get me that much money.”

“Why don’t you try going back to work at the mill?”

“Reid-Gruyn? Christ, they’re in as bad shape as the lumber industry. Plus, they’d want to put me on the overnight shift like they did last time I worked there. That sucks.”

Mark didn’t comment on the fact that he worked the dog shift. From the dirt road, he turned onto a county route, startling a passing SUV, whose driver slammed on the brakes at the sight of his black-and-white. “You got a trucking license for Castle, didn’t you? Why don’t you see if there are any local carriers hiring?”

“Staying up twenty hours in a row and never seeing my wife? No, thanks. Besides, I like working outdoors, not behind a wheel. I just got the license so old man Castle wouldn’t have to spend the bucks to hire an outside delivery service. Fat lot of good it did me.”

Then go hire yourself out as a compost heap, you complaining sack of shit.

The turn-off to the Schoofs’ house was hard to see, just a narrow gravel way shrouded in bony bushes that grasped at Mark’s car like witches’ fingers. He jounced over a few ruts, then pulled into the clearing in front of the house. He hadn’t reached the end of the drive when Lisa bounded out the kitchen door. In her red woolly jacket and matching hat, she looked like a cardinal against the graying house and the November trees. Mark pulled alongside her and killed the engine.

“Hey, babe.” Randy staggered out of the car into Lisa’s arms.

“Are you all right, baby?”

“Yeah. Still kinda out of it. I’m sorry I didn’t come home. I was feeling so lousy about losing my job that the guys started buying me quarter shots to cheer me up.”

Lisa looked past Randy’s shoulder at Mark. “I gotta ask you another favor.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I’m supposed to be cleaning at the Haudenosaunee estate right now. My piece-of-crap Ford fell apart last week, so we’re down to just Randy’s truck. Could you give me a ride?”

Mark’s heart sank. He was hoping to catch some quality time with Rachel before she left for her shift at the hospital. Sometimes, if Maddy was still asleep when he got home, they had time for a quick one before Rachel had to shower and get dressed.

His dismay must have shown on his face, because Lisa added, “I’ll trade you a favor.”

“Like what?”

“I know Rache would love to do something special for your anniversary,” Lisa said. They had been married right before Christmas, which had seemed romantic as hell at the time but which in practice meant they ignored their anniversary in the rush of preholiday shopping, cooking, and cleaning. “I’ll stay overnight with Maddy, and you two can go to a bed-and-breakfast.”

“Yeah? That would be great. Okay, you got it.” He suddenly felt a lot cheerier. A bed-and-breakfast. He’d find one with a big fancy four-poster and a fireplace in the room. And a restaurant within walking distance, so they could have a bottle of wine and after-dinner drinks without worrying about driving. He was sprawled across the bed and Rachel was peeling off her clothes in the firelight when his sister-inlaw’s voice brought him back to reality.

“We gotta go right now.” She grabbed Randy by the jacket shoulders and kissed him. “Go to bed and sleep it off, baby.”

“How are you going to get home?” Mark asked.

“Randy can come get me on his motorcycle. You’ll be okay by noon, won’t you, sweets?”

Randy grunted over his shoulder as he shuffled toward the door.

Mark swung back into the squad car, and Lisa dropped into the passenger seat. “Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.”

“It’s not a big deal,” he said.

“Yes it is,” she said, “and you’re a good sport. You’re my favorite brother-in-law.”

“I’m your only brother-in-law.” He grinned despite himself. He liked Lisa; he always had. Both she and Rachel had inherited their dad’s relentless work ethic and their mom’s broad streak of common sense. Which is why he still couldn’t figure out what she was doing with Randy Schoof. “Are you two going to be okay? With Randy losing his lumbering job?”

“Sure. He’ll find something else. He turns jobs up all the time during the rest of the year. I’ll see if I can pick up a few more cleaning jobs in the meanwhile. Mrs. Reid, the lady I clean for Thursdays? She says she’d be glad to recommend me to her friends.”

Mark kept his mouth shut as he pulled onto the paved road. He and Rachel had both argued with Lisa before. She ought to be in school. She ought to be working a real job, with real benefits and pay that counted toward Social Security instead of cleaning houses under the table. Her answer was always the same. Randy needed her. He needed her steady income. He needed her to do all the things around the house he didn’t have time to do. As far as Mark could tell, Randy needed Lisa to wipe his ass for him.

They drove in silence along the winding mountain highway. Dead leaves swirled behind the squad car and rattled into drifts at the edge of the road. The woods were dark now, the colors of October fallen away, the weathered trunks of the deciduous trees rising among the mournful evergreens like smoke from a funeral pyre.

“Slow down. The entrance is right here.”

He slowed and turned between two riverstone pillars. There was no indication they were the entrance to the fabled Haudenosaunee, only a mailbox on a wooden post and a sign reading PRIVATE WAY. The road to the great camp wasn’t much different from Lisa and Randy’s driveway, except that the dense firs and tangled brush were kept back far enough to allow a plow to get through. And you’d need a plow, not a snowblower, Mark realized, as the road wound on and on with no sign of a house. “How long is this drive?” he asked Lisa.

“A couple miles.” She looked at him. “What did you expect? It was built to be a wilderness camp. Mr. van der Hoeven told me the paved county road wasn’t built until the eighties. Before that, this went six miles and hooked up with Lower Egypt Road.”

The trees and brush opened at last to reveal an expanse of gravel, a staggering view of the mountains, and a sweeping two-story log palace. “Wow.” He whistled. “It’s huge.”

“What the heck?” Lisa leaned forward. “What are all these trucks doing here?”

Mark surveyed the ragged row of pickups and SUVs. He was about to ask Lisa where she wanted him to let her off when he spotted a tiny car tucked in behind the bigger vehicles. “Wait a sec.” He drove toward the sports car. “This is Reverend Fergusson’s car.”

“Who?”

“She’s the rector over at St. Alban’s.” He slowed as he passed the back of the car. THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH WELCOMES YOU, read one bumper sticker. The other one told the world MY OTHER CAR IS AN OH-58. “Yeah, it’s hers all right.”

“How do you know what a minister’s car looks like?” Lisa grinned at him uneasily. “Please don’t tell me you’re finding religion.”

“Not me. But I think my boss is.”

Lisa raised her eyebrows. He ignored the implicit question. It wasn’t anybody’s business that the chief had been getting in and out of this car, despite having a perfectly good truck at home. He didn’t approve, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to gossip about it.

“So, you want me to walk you to the door? Check out what’s going on?”

It took him a moment to decipher the expression on her face as reluctance. Getting a ride from her off-duty brother-in-law was one thing, but she didn’t want to appear at her employer’s door escorted by a police officer asking questions. “Um…,” she said.

He grinned, letting her off the hook. “Okay, I get the picture. Give me a call later if you need a ride home.”

“Randy’ll come and get me.”

Yeah. ’Cause he’s just so reliable. He watched her whisk around the corner of the house, presumably headed for the kitchen door. He had done what he could. Some people… you just couldn’t get through to them. His eye fell on the red Shelby Cobra, its chrome winking in the early sun. Some people… were going to shoot themselves in the foot no matter what you did.

She opened her eyes and saw it was light. It must have been growing brighter for some time now, but after her first thrashing panic attack, she had drifted into a stupor of defeat. She didn’t want to-she couldn’t-think about what was happening to her, what might happen to her. So she went away, inside her head, tuning out her body and her surroundings.

But now it was light. Suddenly, she was aware of everything. Her arms were numb. Her hip felt bruised, her neck muscles bunched and painful. Her stomach growled. She had to pee.

She rolled across the wooden floor, out of the blankets that had enclosed her. She was wearing one of her flannel shirts and sweatpants, but whether she had dressed herself or someone else had was a mystery. She had on socks and hiking boots, and her ankles had been wound about with duct tape in a wide figure-eight. Probably the same stuff that covered her mouth and held her wrists pinned behind her back. Somehow, she had expected something more exotic. Not the old handyman’s standby.

She twisted fully onto her back and contracted her stomach. She slowly jackknifed into a seated position. The effort left her trembling and breathing heavily through her nose. If she could just get to her feet… she tried rolling forward, but her knees wouldn’t spread far enough. She wiggled from side to side until she flopped over again, but she couldn’t get her feet beneath her. Tears of frustration stung her eyes. She rolled, contracted, got herself seated again.

She was in a small room. Cell. Unfurnished, except for the tumble of blankets that had kept her warm and a five-gallon bucket. She could guess what that was for. One wall, to her left, was post-and-beam timber, with a small and solid door set well into a massive lintel. The other wall curved around her in a perfect half circle, its dressed stone pierced with three… arrow slits. A tower. A stone tower. She was being held prisoner by the sheriff of Nottingham. Beneath her duct-tape gag, she started to laugh. She laughed and laughed until her breath caught in short hitches and she was gasping, flaring her nostrils, sucking down oxygen.

She finally settled herself down. She was sweaty from her contortions and her panic attack. She wrenched her wrists up and down, hoping her skin was slick enough to slip beneath the duct tape. Nothing. She snorted in disgust. At least she was warm now.

Then she looked around again. The stone walls, the arrow slits. She realized where she was. And suddenly she was very, very cold.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

Clare forced herself to keep her steps even, her head moving methodically as she climbed up the increasingly steep slope. Tramping through the woods on a fine and frosty November morning was great. It was the actual searching part of it that was, well, boring. After an hour, she had given up on the idea that she was going to stumble over a tearfully grateful Millie van der Hoeven at any moment. She was, she had to admit, too impatient to be a naturally good searcher.

So to compensate, she plodded. She looked from side to side with mathematical precision. She called out, “Millie? Millie van der Hoeven!” every five minutes by her watch. She tried to keep her attention focused on where she was and what she was doing, rather than worrying about tomorrow’s visit from the bishop. Everything was going to go fine. Glenn Hadley had waxed the woodwork until you couldn’t lean against the old rood screen without slipping to the floor. The altar guild was coming in today to polish the silver-oh, God, the locked cupboard. Where the good stuff was stored. She thought of the little key, hanging from her key chain. Which was in her car. Did Judy Morrison have a copy?

The scratch and tug of brambles drew her back to the present. She was taking the path of least resistance through the undergrowth, but a tangle of blackberry stopped her. She backed off and thrashed sideways through a thigh-high stand of brown, papery fern to where the trees grew taller and the vegetation was scarcer. This was ridiculous. No one would have fought her way uphill through this in the dark of night. Even if she thought she knew where she was going.

“Millie! Millie van der Hoeven!” It wasn’t even seven o’clock and she was already well and truly grubby, one leg slimed where she had slipped on some rotted leaves, her clothing pocked with tiny burrs and clinging seeds, riding along in a last-ditch attempt at procreation. Despite the freezing-point temperature, she had worked up a sweat, and she guessed a mirror would reveal dirt grimed on her face. She would have to scrub herself down as soon as she could-she could just imagine meeting the diocesan deacon like this. The bishop’s front man, he was scheduled to arrive today to make sure all was in readiness for the visit. Normally that meant transporting the bishop’s elaborate vestments and going over the paperwork of candidates for confirmation, but Clare had received a letter just last week from Deacon Aberforth inviting her to a “chat” Saturday. Attendance, she gathered, was not optional. It was probably routine. She was closing in on her second year at St. Alban’s; they were in the middle of a capital campaign. He was probably just taking her temperature. Unless… unless someone told him about you and the chief of police, a voice in her head pointed out. It sounded like Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright, the man who had tormented her and taught her and toughened her up during her survival training. When you’re behind the lines, don’t forget about friendly fire, Wright said. It may be coming from your team, but it’ll kill you just as quick as your enemies.

She shook off the thought. Looked left, right, left again. Maybe the missing woman was over the next rise. Maybe.

Shaun Reid pretended to sleep. His wife moved through the darkened room quietly, slipping into her running gear, easing herself onto her side of the bed in order to tie her shoes. She leaned over him and kissed his temple softly. He let that rouse him enough to open his eyes.

“Go back to sleep,” Courtney said. “I just wanted to give you a kiss. I may not see you until this afternoon. After my run, I’m doing some shopping and then heading straight over to St. Alban’s.”

He made a sleepy, inquiring noise.

“Tomorrow’s the bishop’s visit. Please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. I’m chairing the preparation committee. How will it look if my husband doesn’t come to church? Just this once? For me?” She kissed him again before rolling off the bed. “I dropped your dinner jacket off at the dry cleaners. Make sure you pick it up before they close.”

He closed his eyes and kept them closed, listening to the tread of her running shoes disappear through the hallway, down the stairs, through the foyer. When he heard the thunk of the front door, he opened them again.

The bishop’s visit. Maybe he should go. The last time he had been to church was their wedding, seven years ago. But what the hell. He needed divine intervention at this point. Dear God, I’m in deep shit. Give me a shovel.

An acid twinge scorched his stomach. He heaved himself out of bed and headed for the bathroom. He had a few antacids left in the giant economy-sized bottle he had bought. Last week. He needed to see his doctor, get a prescription, but he had been too pressed for time. Pressed for time. And now he was almost out.

He shook four tablets into his palm and knocked them back, crunching them into powder before swallowing. He winced at the chalky-sweet taste. He examined himself in the mirror. Christ, he looked terrible. Like he hadn’t slept in a week. Maybe a month. He bent over the sink and splashed cold water in his face. He couldn’t meet Terry McKellan looking like he was on the edge of a breakdown. Confidence. That’s what he had to project. Energy. Resoluteness.

He checked himself out again. Tried a smile. Maybe caffeine would help.

In the kitchen, he plugged in the machine and shook a mound of ground coffee into the filter. He thought about cereal or toast, but his stomach roiled in protest. When the coffee was done, he took a cup into his office. His desk, his papers, his open laptop drew him unwillingly, in the way that a gruesome accident demands you slow down and stare. He set his mug beside the computer and turned the machine on. A spreadsheet sprang to life. He went over the numbers again, as if the cobbler’s elves might have come in and done some creative accounting for him while he slept, but no such luck. They were exactly as they had been last night, as they had been at yesterday’s board of directors’ meeting, as they had been since GWP, Inc., had pinned Reid-Gruyn in its massive sights and indicated it might be interested in acquiring the operation.

Shaun had thought he was safe. He had thought they were too small to draw any of the big boys’ attention. Too specialized. With too slim a margin of profit. That was what was going to sink them, now.

“We’re not saying that we like the idea of selling up to GWP,” Clyde McAllister had said at the directors’ meeting. “But let’s face it.” He pointed to the spreadsheets in front of him. “If we have to start importing pulp from Canada, the additional costs are going to cut our after-tax profits to the bone. The next slack time or economic downturn, we’ll have to start eating our own belly to survive. We have to recommend the takeover be placed before the shareholders.”

Where were all the directors that jumped through hoops at their CEO’s command? Why didn’t he have any? Just a group of stone-faced men and women, people who had known him since childhood, for chrissakes, telling him it was their responsibility to the shareholders. Tolling a death knell for the business he had inherited from his father, and his father’s father, and his father before him.

His hand closed over a short stack of correspondence. Replies from merchant banks in New York, declining to invest in upgrading the depreciable assets, declining to lend the business capital, declining his corporate applications for loans that would let them buy back stock. Terry McKellan was his last hope. If Shaun could get a personal loan, enough to increase the family shareholdings from 49 percent to 51 percent, he could stop the buyout dead in its tracks.

“If it weren’t for the sale of the Haudenosaunee woods, Shaun.” That had been Elaine Parkinson. “If we weren’t losing that source of pulpwood, we wouldn’t be entertaining this motion. But the new numbers don’t add up.”

He had read a science fiction story once about a girl who stowed away on a spaceship that was bringing medicine to some far-off planet. The ship had just enough fuel to make it-without the added weight of the girl. So the pilot had shoved her out the airlock. He had been regretful and all, but hey, it was the good of the many against the good of the one. It had been titled “The Cold Equations.” That was what he was in the grip of: cold numbers. Estimates of the cost of pulp imported from Maine, from Canada, from the northernmost reaches of New York. Cold places, where the forests grew unbroken for a million acres and lumbermen drove in in the dead of winter so their ten-ton machines wouldn’t mire on dirt trails. Places he could fly to in an hour, or two, or three. But you can’t fly lumber out. You haul it, board inch by board inch, and every foot of the way costs: the taxes, the insurance, the man-hours, the fuel.

His board of directors had read all the cold numbers. And they were willing to throw Reid-Gruyn out the airlock.

He opened a drawer and swept the politely worded turn-downs into it. He turned off his laptop. Time to hit the shower. Put on his most expensive casual clothes-no suit; he wanted to look affluent, not desperate-and go see the corporate loan officer of AllBanc. His last chance. He paused in the doorway. I’m looking for that shovel. Any time now.

She counted off the exits as she drove past them. Tuxedo. Half Moon. Clifton Park. Saratoga Springs. Every mile Becky Castle put between herself and Albany felt like another stone rolling off her shoulders. She was headed home for the weekend. Home to the mountains. She triggered the cruise control and jammed her finger on the radio scan button until she found a bouncy country song she loved. “Just before dark, jump in the car…” she sang, wishing she had a convertible so her hair could whip all around. Except they didn’t make hybrid convertibles yet.

Before ski season and after leaf peeping, the Saturday morning traffic was light on the Northway. She had missed the turning leaves, missed them entirely this year, cooped up in the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation’s office in Albany writing grants and copyediting the Your Adirondacks… and You! brochure. It was not what she had envisioned when she had joined the conservancy. Not by a long shot. She had pictured herself in the thick of things, carrying a green banner, saving land for future generations. Now, thanks to Global Wood Products, Inc., she was going to get her chance.

Becky was the one who had put it together. She was the one with the personal contacts with the Haudenosaunee heirs. She was the one who had sold the idea to her higher-ups at the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. She was the one who came up with a list of prospective buyers, researched the tax advantages, met with the executives of GWP. She was the one who had wrangled, cajoled, kissed up to, persuaded. And tonight, she was going to be at the head table with the conservancy’s president and lawyer, at a ceremony that would take a quarter of a million acres out of private hands, restoring it to the “forever wild” state called for in the New York constitution.

She grinned as the Glens Falls-Queensbury sign disappeared behind her. She was, no lie, officially Hot Stuff. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to talk with Millie. She fished her phone out of her bag and speed-dialed her friend’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, then Millie’s voicemail clicked on, asking her to leave a message.

“Hey, girlfriend. What are you, sleeping late? I’m in my car, headed for Millers Kill, so give me a call when you get this. Love ya!”

As her thumb hit the end-call button, she realized she should have told Millie she was coming to Haudenosaunee this morning. Maybe she could reach her using the camp’s phone? Becky scrabbled through her bag, hauling out a bottle of water, her camera, a Baggie of yogurt-covered raisins. She finally found her address book, flipped it open, and laid it on her knee. She entered the number and pressed the send button.

The phone barely had time to ring. “Hello?”

Becky blinked at the unfamiliar female voice. “Hi. I’m trying to reach Millie van der Hoeven?”

“I’m afraid she’s not here.” The voice on the other end seemed to deflate.

“Have I reached Haudenosaunee?”

“Sorry. I mean, yes, you have. I’m sorry, I should have said. I’m Lisa. I’m Mr. van der Hoeven’s… I clean house for him.”

“Okay. Can I leave a message for Millie?”

There was a long pause. Becky wondered if Millie’s brother, Eugene, had hired some sort of mentally disabled woman to work for him.

“Look, when I said she wasn’t here, I didn’t mean she’s gone out shopping or anything,” Lisa said. “I mean she’s missing. Supposedly she went out for a walk last night and never came back. There’s a search and rescue team out looking for her right now.”

The Northway stretched out ahead of her, long and gray and undulating over rise and hollow. “Missing?”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“Yeah. I’m…” What was she? Were there special categories of friends that got information? And others who would have to wait to read about what happened to her? Becky went for the easiest, the longest-running, choice. “I’m her college roommate.”

“If you leave me your number, I can make sure someone calls you. When we know something.”

Becky shook her head. “I’m going to be at Haudenosaunee later this morning.”

“She’ll probably be back by then.” Lisa’s voice was hearty and hollow. “You can talk to her yourself.”

“Right.” The sign for the Millers Kill exit flashed by. Her heart thumped. She braked too fast, and a station wagon swerved past her, horn blaring. Becky signaled, swiveled to look behind her, and veered into the right-hand lane. “Thanks,” she managed to say into the phone. “Talk to you later.”

“Can I say who-” But she had cut off the signal and dropped the phone into the passenger seat before the housekeeper could finish her sentence.

She took the exit and turned northwest, to the road that would lead her to Fort Henry and Cossayuharie and Millers Kill. Missing. Millie. The woman who had hiked the Appalachian Trail through New York and New England. Who ice-climbed in British Columbia. Who had summitted the Grand Teton from her adopted home out west.

Something has happened to her. With that thought came another, one she was ashamed of. The deal. The deal will fall apart without her. And then where will I be?

The questions hung in the stale air around her. She lowered her window, letting the icy air whip through her car. She wanted to concentrate on her friend, on the edge of worry coiling low in her stomach, but she was picturing herself standing on a platform with the president and CEO of GWP, Inc., and her bosses from the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. They were all waiting… waiting… waiting.

She stopped for a red light. Early shoppers trickled into the Super Kmart parking lot. Through the windshield, she could see the road to Bonnie’s house, just past a nursery shuttered down against the coming winter. She flicked on her turn signal. She needed comfort, and encouragement, and reassurance. That meant she needed her big sister.

Bonnie was almost twelve years older than Becky, the long gap between them punctuated by several miscarriages their mother didn’t like to talk about. When Becky was a little girl, her sister had been like another mother to her, a young, fun version who painted Becky’s nails and taught her to dance to Adam Ant’s Strip. In her teens, thrashing against the confines of their small town and their parents’ overburdening protectiveness, Becky would escape to Bonnie and James’s house, to play with their little boys and complain endlessly to her sister. Becky was long past that stage, and long gone from Millers Kill, but her career as an environmental advocate was a touchy subject with her parents, and she still looked to Bonnie as the conduit, the place where the family’s lines of communication crossed.

The Liddles lived in a small ranch, flanked by houses that had been identical when they were built in the 1950s. A half century of tinkering by owners had personalized them, although their tightly controlled lawns and greenery still gave them a certain sameness. Becky parked behind Bonnie’s Taurus, walked up the drive, and let herself in.

Her younger nephew, Patrick, sprawled pajama-clad on the couch, gazing slack-jawed at a hyperkinetic Japanese anime on the tube. “Hey,” Becky said.

His eyes snapped into focus. “Aunt Becky!” He jumped up and hugged her.

“How are you, Squirtle?” The nickname wasn’t going to fit him much longer. It looked like he had shot up at least three inches since she last saw him.

He wrinkled his nose in scorn. “Nobody’s into Pokémon anymore, Aunt Becky.”

Uh-oh. Better rethink her Christmas gift. “Where are your folks?”

Patrick collapsed back onto the couch. “Dad’s taking Alex to a meet. Mom’s sewing.”

Just then, her sister bellowed, “Patrick! You had better be in your clothes, young man. You’re going to Grandma’s in five minutes!”

“Okay, Mom!” Patrick didn’t move.

Becky crossed through the kitchen to the sun-splashed addition James had built four years back. It was a dining room-family room-sewing room ell, and she could hear Bonnie before she could see her, the sewing machine whirring, her sister muttering under her breath.

“Don’t let me startle you,” Becky said.

Bonnie whipped around in her chair. “Good grief, what are you doing here?”

“I’m on my way to Mom and Dad’s.” Becky slid a pile of folded fabric to one side and made herself at home on the built-in bench. The bright fabric, the sunshine, the hominess of the room lifted her spirits again. She smiled smugly. “I’m going to be at the signing of the Haudenosaunee land transfer to the conservancy tonight.”

“Believe me, I know. Mom hasn’t stopped talking about it. Neither has Dad.”

“Is he still pissed at me?”

“Who knows. He’s tearing what hair he has left out over selling the lumbering company. But he’s also bragging about ‘our college girl.’” Bonnie turned back to her machine. “While you’re wining and dining with the upper crust, be sure to check out these curtains. Made by yours truly.”

“You’re making curtains for the new hotel?”

“Linda Van Alstyne got the contract. There are two other seamstresses besides me on the job.”

“Shouldn’t they be done already? I mean, the grand opening is tonight.”

Bonnie looked at her sideways. “Thanks for the reminder. Yes, they should already be done. I’ve got at least two carloads to run up to the spa, and I still have to take Pat to Mom’s.”

“He can come with me.”

“Really? That would save me a half hour.”

“Sure. I don’t have anything to do until later this morning.” She opened her mouth to tell her sister about her other responsibilities for the Haudenosaunee land transfer, then closed her trap. Her sister got the brunt of their parents’ opinions on Becky’s life. Bragging about how great she was would be uncool. She needed to be sensitive to her sister’s position. Like Millie, who had always been careful not to draw attention to the fact that her family was richer than Croesus. Millie.

“I tried to call Millie this morning, and she’s gone missing.”

Bonnie raised her eyebrows without taking her eyes off the raw silk gliding beneath her needle.

“According to the housekeeper, she went out for a walk last night and got lost. The search and rescue team is looking for her.”

“What’s the big deal?” Bonnie stopped the machine. “She’s probably out there somewhere with a knapsack on her back. Val-de-ree, val-de-rah.” She pulled the curtain forward and snipped the trailing threads with her scissors.

“She wouldn’t just go wandering off. Not on the most important day-” Becky broke off before she could complete the sentence. Of my career.

“That sounds exactly like something she would do. That girl’s got all the dependability of a mountain goat.” Bonnie stood, shaking the curtain out. “Help me fold this.”

“That’s not true. She’s taking responsibility for her brother Eugene. She wants him to come live with her in Montana.” Becky took the end of the drapery and brought it up to meet her sister’s hands. “Why do you dislike Millie?”

“I don’t dislike her. I think she’s a spoiled little rich girl, and I think she’s been a bad influence on you.”

“On me?” She and Bonnie each took an end and brought it up. They met in the middle.

“She can afford to spend her life living in trees to save old-growth forests and traveling the country to every eco-protest meeting there is. She doesn’t have to work for a living. But you do.”

“I have a job! A good one. I have a health plan!”

Bonnie folded the curtain over her arm and laid it on a pile of similarly colored chintz. “You spent two years living hand to mouth after college, following Greenpeace ships around. Stuffing envelopes for fund-raisers and writing grants for crackpot back-to-the-land groups. Is that why Mom and Dad sacrificed to send you to school? They wanted you to have a better life.”

“I like my life. I’m doing work that’s important to me and to the world around me. It pays enough for me to live the way I want to. I don’t need a lot of money or things.”

“Oh, grow up.” Bonnie twisted around. “Patrick! If you aren’t dressed with your bed made now, you’re never watching TV again!” She turned back to Becky. “Someday you’re going to be married and have children. Believe me, when you have to tell your kid that he can’t go to the college of his choice because you can’t afford it, you’ll feel differently.”

Becky bit her lip. “Alex?”

Bonnie scooped up a stack of curtains. “He got accepted at Cornell. But the aid package wasn’t enough.” She nodded toward another pile of cloth. “Grab those, will you?”

“So where is he going?”

“State University at Plattsburgh. Between the loans and the track-and-field scholarship, we can manage it. I hope. If the car lasts another four years and we don’t have any medical bills.”

Becky followed her sister. She was amazed to find Patrick fully dressed in the living room. He had even remembered to brush his hair. “Get your Game Boy if you want to bring it to Grandma’s,” she said. “I’m driving you.”

“All right,” he said. “Can we stop at Kmart? There’s this game cartridge I want to look at.”

“Maybe,” she said. She carried the curtains out to Bonnie’s car and shoved them in alongside the rest of the piles and boxes.

“It’s game cartridges and braces and shoes and class trips.” Bonnie leaned, on one hip, against her aging Taurus. “It never ends, Beck. And then when the kids are gone, you have to think about yourself, about whether you can retire, whether you can afford to move to a place where you can walk around outside in the winter without worrying about breaking your hip.”

“You mean like Mom and Dad.”

“God only knows, I understand the lure of those woods. It’s kept them scraping by for forty years. But it’s sucked so much life out of them. Dad may be cussing and kicking about selling out, but I think it’s the best thing to happen to them in a long time. If he can get a decent price for the business.” There was an edge to Bonnie’s voice. In the cold sunlight, Becky could see the lines around her eyes.

She shifted from foot to foot. The deal she was so proud of, the deal that was going to make her a player in the conservancy and in the national arena of land preservation, was the reason her dad was selling Castle Logging. She wanted everything she was going to get from this deal, but she also wanted her parents to be healthy and solvent and living in the same house they had always lived in, not forced into retirement. “I’m sorry,” she said, not really sure what she was sorry for.

Patrick bounded out of the house. “Go back and get a coat on!” his mother yelled. Bonnie let out an impatient breath. “Don’t worry. It’s me. It’s been-things have been tense with them lately. Everything will be okay.”

Because Becky wanted to, she tried to believe.

Russ had been prepared for the sight of Haudenosaunee. He knew the history of the camp, and although he had never been a visitor before, he had seen black-and-white photos of the World War II-era construction, deliberately simple in a time when both men and materials were hard to come by. He had been prepared for the glorious view of the mountains, where the trees and brush had been cut away to expose range after range fading into the northwestern sky. What he hadn’t been prepared for was the number of vehicles parked in the drive.

“What the hell’s going on?” Ed Castle asked, descending from his SUV. They had pulled in along one side of the drive, closest to the road out, intending to thank Eugene van der Hoeven for opening his land and to let him know about the fine six-point buck dangling off an old bike carrier bolted to the back of Ed’s Explorer.

Russ walked past his hunting partner toward the row of trucks. He pointed toward the nearest, a wide-bed pickup with double rear wheels supporting metal gear lockers. “This is John Huggins’s.” He glanced at the next truck. “Uhhuh. And here’s a search and rescue sticker.” He turned toward the log house. “Let’s see what the search and rescue team is doing here, shall we?”

Russ let Ed lead the way. The older man rang the doorbell. The wait for someone to answer was long enough for Ed to turn to Russ with a worried frown, but then the door opened, cutting off whatever it was he might have said.

“Ed Castle. Hello.”

“Eugene.” Ed shook hands with the man in the doorway. “Good to see you again. I’ve been hunting on your property today, brought a friend of mine. I don’t know if you’ve met him. Russ Van Alstyne. Police chief down in town.”

Russ had heard the stories, of course, so the face that turned to him wasn’t too much of a shock. “Mr. van der Ho-even.” He extended his hand. “You’ve got good hunting land up here.”

Van der Hoeven’s grip was cool and dry. “I like to think so. Did you take anything?”

Russ shook his head. “Afraid not. But Ed here harvested a beauty.”

“Six points.” Ed rocked back and forth on his heels, every orange-and-camo-clad line of him radiating satisfaction. “We field-dressed the old boy and hung him up, and after having to do some work, Russ decided he’d had enough.”

Russ smiled good-naturedly. “No use letting the meat sit around getting old. Gotta get it home and butcher it.”

“It’s just as well.” Eugene looked toward the woods visible from his front door with an expression of resignation. “The search and rescue team is out there searching for my sister. Any game in the area is gone to ground today.”

“Your sister?” Russ spoke more sharply than he had intended to.

Eugene looked at him for a moment, then stepped back from the door. “Why don’t you two come in?”

Ed made some noise about their smell-dressing out a buck wasn’t a clean process-but Russ followed van der Hoeven in without comment. He didn’t think a little fresh blood from a healthy deer made them offensive. He had seen and smelled far, far worse in twenty-seven years as a cop.

The interior of the great camp should have felt welcoming. The wood and rugs made patches of quilt-warm color, and the spindly antiques were balanced by genuinely comfortable chairs and sofas, but there was something off-putting about it. Cold. Maybe it was the sheer size of the place; the living room-dining room was almost as big as the footprint of Russ’s house.

“I set some coffee and pastries out for the searchers. May I offer you anything?” Van der Hoeven waved toward a sideboard that would have filled up half the Van Alstynes’ kitchen.

“No. Thanks.”

Ed wasn’t as reticent, grabbing a muffin out of a basket made of looping silver wire set next to a coffeemaker.

“So what’s this about your sister?” Russ asked.

“Maybe I should have rung up your people instead of John Huggins.” Eugene’s gaze was unfocused, as if he were looking into the misty past. “But I reasoned the only thing the police could do would be calling out the search and rescue team.”

“Are you sure she’s lost?”

“It’s the only thing I can think of.” Van der Hoeven ran a hand over the back of his head, smoothing his overgrown hair, bunching it into a little ponytail in his fist. “Millie and I were having dinner last night-”

“Millie is your sister?”

“My younger sister, yes. Our older sister, Louisa, lives in San Francisco. Anyway, after dinner, she said she was going to take a walk. I was tired, and planning on getting up early to hunt, so I said good night. When I arose this morning, she wasn’t in her room. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. I took a quick turn around the paths and buildings nearest to the house, and as soon as it was obvious she wasn’t anywhere nearby, I phoned search and rescue.”

“What time did your sister go out on her walk?”

“We dined at eight, so it must have been close to nine.”

Russ looked at the dining table, a shining mahogany plain dominating the room. Hell of an overkill for two people. “Kind of late to be taking a stroll in the woods, wasn’t it?”

“The lady on the search team said the same thing.”

Russ raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t heard of Huggins adding any new members to the team. Let alone a woman.

“I’ll tell you what I told her,” van der Hoeven went on. “Millie knows this land. It’s been in our family since the time of the Civil War. She and I have roamed these woods and hills since we were first able to walk. It wouldn’t intimidate her any more than an after-dinner stroll around the block would scare you.” He bunched his hair in his hand again. “However, that’s not to say she couldn’t get lost. I’ve done it myself on more than one occasion, and thank God it’s always been in daytime and I’ve managed to run across a familiar marker to lead me home.” He looked toward the door, as if expecting his sister to burst in at the next moment. “I have confidence in her woodsmanship. As soon as she realized she was lost, Millie would hunker down and make a shelter.”

She’d have had to. It must have been in the midtwenties last night. The temperature was probably just breaking freezing right now. Still, if she had the sense to pull some pine branches over her as a windbreak and bury herself in dead leaves, there was no reason to suspect she wouldn’t come through okay. Scared and cold, but okay. Unless…

“There’s no chance she might have taken off by herself? Driven into town to meet someone?”

Van der Hoeven shook his head. “Her car’s in the garage.” He pronounced it oddly, accenting the first syllable.

“Could someone have come up here to meet her? After you were in bed?”

“No. Well…” Van der Hoeven paused. “It’s not impossible, but it’s damned unlikely. I don’t have many guests.” His head twitched to the left. “And my sister doesn’t live here. She’s just visiting.”

“No old friends looking her up?”

“None that have made themselves known to me.”

Russ thought that was a damn funny way to answer the question. Then again, van der Hoeven was clearly ill at ease with other human beings. Russ was framing a polite way to pry further into Millie’s personal life when the front doorbell rang. Eugene gave him a pained look before excusing himself. Poor bastard. He was probably seeing more people today than he normally would in the course of a year.

Ed Castle sidled up to Russ, brushing muffin crumbs off his face. “What’s with the third degree?”

Russ shrugged. “There’s a woman missing. It’s my job to ask questions.”

“I thought you were off today?”

Like Linda. Like anyone with a normal job; you’re either working or not working. “I’m off in the sense that I don’t have to be at my desk or on patrol. I’m on duty in the sense that I’m always on duty. Crime never sleeps and all that.”

Ed grunted.

At the door, visible from their slice of the living/dining room, a pair of men were stamping their boots and brushing off their jackets before entering the great camp. Russ heard Huggins’s voice booming off the rafters. “Mr. van der Hoeven! Hope you don’t mind us showing back up. ’Fraid we’re empty-handed. Mind if we use the facilities and help ourselves to some more coffee?”

Eugene was murmuring something about his housekeeper making them breakfast while the guys on the rescue squad walked warily through the door: Russ’s part-time officer Duane; Dan Hunter, who worked at AllBanc; Huggins’s cousin Mike; and at the tail end, the “lady searcher” Eugene had mentioned. She tugged a knit toque off, and her hair, the color of sunshine through whiskey, fell to her shoulders in a messy tangle. Her oversharp nose and blunt cheekbones were red from the cold, her lips were colorless and chapped, and her parka and stained twill trousers hid any suggestion of her figure.

When he had first seen her, he had thought her plain. He could remember the thought, remember his sober assessment of her face and form. When had she become beautiful to him? She laughed at something Duane said and, laughing, turned, and that was when he met her eyes.

Oh, love.

The radio hanging from her shoulder crackled. “Fergusson?”

“Fergusson here.”

“See anything?”

“A lot of trees. No sign of Millie van der Hoeven, though.”

“Okay, come on back. We’re gonna debrief and take a break.”

“I’ll be there.” She thumbed off the radio. She was glad she had her GPS unit and her map. From where she stood, the forest stretched out vast and quiet, seemingly unbroken and eternal. She knew she walked on Haudenosaunee land, that lumbermen and hunters and hikers all came here, shaping it and leaving their marks, but slipping between the grave gray alders and the massive toad-colored oaks, the idea that humans could own this land, that anyone had ever set foot where she was stepping now, seemed unreal.

She hiked over a rotting log, crushing coffee-brown pulp and meaty fungus beneath her boots. The smell, rich and wet, mingled with the odor of pine sap. A flash of movement caught her eye, and she whirled, just in time to see a gray fox vanish like smoke into the earth.

With no slow and careful searching to delay her, the walk back was much faster than the walk out. The trail became more and more pronounced. She passed one trailhead to a waterfall-marked on her map-and one to the tumbledown 1860s camp house, ditto. She thought about taking a detour to get a look at either of the sights, but her stomach growled in protest. If her conscience wouldn’t keep her on the straight and narrow, evidently her appetite would.

The trees thinned, and she saw the rest of them, hurrying along the trail toward the low rock wall that encircled Haudenosaunee’s back garden. Duane, straggling behind the others, waved. “Hey, Reverend.”

He waited while she passed through the gate, crossed the still-thick grass, and skirted a flagstone patio running almost the length of the house. Tarp-covered shapes marked the outdoor table and chairs, and empty chains hung loose from a wooden frame. She imagined a wicker swing, too delicate to last outside through the long Adirondack winter.

“Pretty nice, huh?” Duane thumbed toward the French doors. “How’d you like to come out here for a barbecue?”

“Right now, I’m more interested in checking out the bathroom,” she said, heading around the corner toward the thrum of voices at the front of the house. She and Duane strode past the brown stalks and seed pods marking the graves of perennial borders. They crunched across part of the gravel drive, mounted the steps, and came to a halt, stymied by a logjam of searchers, all trying to squeeze through the front door at the same time. She turned for a look at the long mountain view and saw Russ Van Alstyne’s pickup parked at the edge of the drive.

Her heart made a ridiculous, giddy ger-thump. She breathed in deeply. Okay, there was a missing person. Eugene van der Hoeven must have called the police. Although, come to think of it, Russ had told her he wasn’t going to be on duty Saturday. Maybe the department was overwhelmed and had to call him in? Logical thoughts, none of which wiped the foolish smile off her face.

Walking into a home where there’s been a tragedy grinning your head off is just plain tacky, her grandmother Fergusson chided. Everyone would think she knew something, had seen something. She swallowed her smile and pressed forward behind Duane with as much sobriety as she could muster.

A petite, dark-haired woman, clad in jeans and a sweatshirt, held the door wide. She looked at the trail of leaf rot and dirt accumulating on the floor with dismay.

Eugene van der Hoeven stood apart from the search team clustered around the table, conversing with two men in leaf-print camouflage and hunter-orange vests. The taller of the hunters was half-turned toward her. Russ’s eyes widened a fraction, then eased. The corners of his mouth crooked up in what might have been a smile. Happy Birthday, Clare mouthed. She ambled toward the men.

“Chief Van Alstyne.”

He nodded his head. “Reverend Fergusson. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I volunteered for the search and rescue team last year. John Huggins finally got down to the bottom of the list and called me in.” She glanced at the older man next to him: gray-haired, what was left of it, and close to her height, but broad, with powerful shoulders and a chest like a tree stump.

“This is Ed Castle. Ed, Reverend Clare Fergusson.”

Clare’s hand was enveloped in a calloused grip. “Pleased to meet you,” Castle said. “Sorry it had to be under such circumstances.”

“Are you”-she looked back and forth between them-“here to help the search?”

“We’ve just found out about the missing girl.” Russ glanced at Eugene. “Ed and I were hunting on van der Hoeven land. We stopped in to pay our respects.”

“Mr. van der Hoeven,” Huggins called from the dining room table. “If I can have a minute of your time?”

Van der Hoeven ducked his head toward Clare, paused, as if he were about to make a remark, then slipped away.

“Poor guy,” Ed Castle said. “This must be real hard on him.”

“His sister missing?”

“Yep. But I was thinking more along the lines of him having to put up with all these people. He’s a real private guy. Likes to keep to himself.”

“How do you know him?” Clare said.

“I’ve had the license to harvest timber offa Haudenosaunee for twenty, thirty years now. Had it from old Jan van der Hoeven, and now from his kids. ’Course, it’ll all be smoked once the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation gets their hands on the property.”

“How’s that?”

Ed Castle told Clare the details of the impending land sale. She glanced back at Eugene van der Hoeven, bent over a topo map. “He’s going to stay in this house, right? I mean, he didn’t talk like a man whose home is being sold out from underneath him.”

“Dunno,” Castle said. “Alls I know is, no timbering licenses from the new owners. Buncha tree huggers. Don’t realize how important harvesting is to the health of the forest. Think it all happens naturally.”

“Fergusson!” Huggins’s head popped up from the huddle. “Bring that map of yours over here.”

Clare complied, squeezing in between Duane and a slim redheaded man, spreading her map next to the others. She pointed out the ground she had covered.

“We need to rethink our strategy,” Huggins began, only to be interrupted by a low rumbling from Duane’s midsection.

“Sorry.” He grinned. “No breakfast.”

“You all need some food,” Eugene said. He sounded embarrassed, as if he had invited them there for a cocktail party and had forgotten the drinks and nibbles. He stood up, looking around the room. “Lisa? Lisa!”

The dark-haired young woman appeared in a far doorway. “Let’s get these people breakfast. Can you rustle up eggs and bacon and toast, whatever we have?”

“Me?”

The entire male contingent stared at the housekeeper expectantly. Clare rolled her eyes. They looked like a pack of hounds with their ears pricked, waiting for the sound of the can opener. “I’ll help you,” she said loudly. No one else leaped in to volunteer.

Snorting, she strode toward the door. Lisa jumped out of her way and fell in behind her. “Thanks,” she whispered. “It’s not that I’m not willing. I’m just not much of a cook. Especially not for a gang like this.”

The doorway led though what had probably been called a butler’s pantry into the kitchen. It was roomy, meant for serious cooking for large numbers, but its vintage fifties decor had outlived the institutional look and was now funky. Clare prised open the refrigerator. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She pulled out eggs, milk, and bread. “Let’s make French toast. It’ll go farther and fill people up more.” She emptied the vegetable bin of a few oranges, an apple, and a single bunch of grapes. “See if there’s any canned fruit in the pantry. We can mix up a big macédoine.”

Lisa scurried to the pantry. Clare laid the ingredients out on the pristine white counter and started opening up cupboards, looking for bowls and frying pans.

“I really appreciate this,” Lisa said, setting canned pineapple and pears and a jar of maraschino cherries on the other side of the sink.

“You do windows but you don’t do meals?” Clare straightened, a nest of mixing bowls in her hands.

Lisa smiled. “You got it.”

“Have you worked for the van der Hoevens long?”

“About four years now. What are we going to do with these?” She held up the cans.

“Let’s drain ’em, then empty them into a bowl. Then we can chop up the fresh fruit and add that.” Clare made a sound of satisfaction and emerged from a lower cupboard clutching two heavy-duty cast-iron skillets. “So you weren’t here last night when Millie and Eugene had dinner.”

Lisa shook her head. “I come in Wednesdays and Saturdays. Usually I don’t see much of Millie.”

Clare turned on the water to scrub her hands. “You don’t?”

“She doesn’t actually live here,” Lisa explained. “Her home is in Montana. But she’s been staying with Mr. van der Hoeven for the past few months. Working on this deal to sell the land and… stuff.”

There was a noticeable pause. “Stuff?” Clare said, drying her hands on a faded cotton towel.

Lisa kept her eyes on the apple she was peeling. “You know. Environmental stuff.”

Clare touched the younger woman’s arm. “Lisa. If there’s anything we should know that might help us find her…”

Lisa turned, apple in one hand, knife in the other. “I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want to get one of the van der Hoevens in trouble, either.”

“What is it?”

Lisa dropped her head, frowning furiously, as if weighing a series of pros and cons. Finally she looked up. “I’ll let you look. You can tell me what you think.” She crossed the kitchen, past the back door, to a built-in desk beneath a wall-mounted phone. She opened the desk drawer, scooped out several envelopes and papers, and laid them atop a stack of wooden crates waiting to be unpacked by the kitchen door. The boxes were stenciled VAN DER HOEVEN VINEYARDS. Having your own vineyard. Now that was one perk of wealth Clare actually envied. She picked up the papers. They were pamphlets, giving information on “extreme eco-activism” and “defending your mother earth against all enemies, domestic and foreign.” She looked for the organization name. She whistled.

“The Planetary Liberation Army.” She looked up at Lisa. “No wonder you were worried. This is the group that fire-bombed a research lab in California last year. Killed three people.”

Lisa nodded grimly. “I saw this special about them on MTV News. It said they also blew up an SUV dealership in Michigan.” She held up another pamphlet. “This one is all about the evils of big, gas-guzzling, four-wheel-drive trucks.”

“They’d have a field day with the search and rescue guys,” Clare said, picking up a typewritten letter. It was addressed to Millie van der Hoeven. It thanked her for her cash donation and her interest in aiding the PLA in its mission. It suggested any further discussions be held in person.

“These started showing up after Millie got here at the end of the summer. I found ’em in the drawer when I was looking for a piece of paper to write down a phone message. I didn’t say anything to Mr. van der Hoeven, ’cause I figure it’s nobody’s business.” At Clare’s look, she frowned. “I didn’t want to cause bad blood between the two of them. He thinks her environmental causes are crazy enough without this.”

“What do you think?” Clare asked.

Lisa shrugged. “Maybe she had some sort of secret meeting with them? It says meet in person.”

“But why wouldn’t she have returned already? You’d think the last thing she’d want to do would be to draw attention to herself.”

Lisa looked into the middle distance for a moment. “If I was going to do something illegal-like blow up a car dealership?-I’d think being lost in the woods was a great idea. Get someone to pick me up, do the dirty, then get dropped off at one of the access roads that lead onto the property. Come wandering out, tired and cold and hungry. Who’s to say she hasn’t been lost the whole time?”

“You don’t like her very much, do you?”

Lisa raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t know her well enough to like her or not. But, you know, nowadays, you gotta be on the lookout for terrorists everywhere. There’s no reason they might not go after Millers Kill.”

Clare thought Millers Kill would fall pretty far down on the list of possible targets for an environmental terrorist group. But then again, she would have thought that about an SUV dealership in Michigan. And wasn’t one of the dealerships in Fort Henry selling Humvees now?

Clare held up one of the pamphlets and the letter. “Can I keep these? If the police get involved-” Lisa’s dismayed face stopped her. “Not that they necessarily will. But I’d like to show this, unofficially, to the chief. He’s a friend of mine. He might have some ideas about finding her.”

Lisa was shaking her head. “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. I know how the cops are. Nothing’s ever unofficial.”

“Have you thought that it might be the other way around? What if Millie met with these people, decided she didn’t want to take part in whatever they were planning, and they’re holding her against her will?”

“Riiight.” Lisa’s face showed what she thought of that idea. She swept the pamphlets off the wine crate and held out her hand for the remaining papers.

“Please?” Clare said.

Lisa sighed. “Oh, all right.” She shoved the pamphlets into the drawer. “But you don’t mention my name. I didn’t show these to you, and I don’t know anything about it.”

“Deal.” Clare sniffed. One of the skillets was beginning to smoke. “We’d better get back to breakfast. ’Cause God knows none of those men is about to feed himself.”

The duct tape wasn’t coming off. She had tried stretching it, rubbing it against the edge of the door lintel, working her hands back and forth until her wrists were raw. Nothing.

Using the bucket had been a nightmare of complications. It had taken her five tries to stand upright, a feat she accomplished finally by rocking back and forth on her aching arms until, in a kind of reverse somersault, the velocity of her forward roll brought her to her feet. She hopped all the way to the wall to keep herself from falling forward. Standing, she discovered that the stretch of duct tape between her ankles served as a shackle, and she was able to shuffle slowly to the bucket. Getting her sweatpants down was a matter of plucking with her almost-numb fingers and hopping up and down, but when she lowered herself over the pail, she lost her balance and tumbled over. She had to go through the whole rigmarole again, this time with her sweats sliding around her thighs and the bucket rolling across the floor.

Once she was erect, she shuffle-walked to the bucket and, with tiny kicks and nudges, shoved it against the wall. She couldn’t figure out how to get it upright with her hands behind her back and her feet only inches apart, so she thudded painfully to her knees and head-butted it into its final position. It was there she discovered she could get to her feet by leaning hard against the chilly stone wall and forcing her feet under her. She kept her arms and back to the wall this time when she squatted. When she was finally able to relieve herself, it felt like a victory on par with winning the Tour de France. Civilization one, barbarism zero.

Scootching her sweatpants back up with the help of the wall, she considered what to do next. At least using the bucket had given her a goal. Now she was down to two choices: collapse into a motionless heap or find some way to get out of her cell. Since she had already done the motionless heap thing, an escape attempt seemed to be in order.

That was when she discovered that duct tape, the handyman’s friend, was a lot more resistant than she had ever realized.

All right, if she couldn’t saw, stretch, or slither herself free, maybe she could get out while still bound? The arrow slits were at an easy height; standing, she could look out any one of them and see sunshine and bare-branched trees and sky. They opened wide into the cell, maximizing light, but their external openings were narrow enough to repel invaders-or prevent determined children from killing themselves while playing King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Besides, even if she could wiggle her way between the constricting stones, where would she be? The view from the arrow slits showed the tops of the trees. And she knew from painful experience there was no handy fire escape.

She dismissed the curving wall with its deceptively open windows and considered the door. She had read a book once where someone freed himself from a locked room by removing the door’s hinge pins. These hinges were large, faux-medieval things, stretching a quarter of the way across the face of the door. The pins holding them in place were topped by pointed iron finials, reminding her less of the Middle Ages than of the tops of flagstaffs. She shuffled to the oak slab, turned around, and slid down until her hands touched the triangular top of a pin. She pulled it. Nothing. She twisted it. It moved. She twisted the other way, then tugged and pulled, her thighs straining with the effort of squatting. The pin moved upward. She felt like Galileo-e pur se muove! It moves! Excited, she tried a mighty wrench. The pin slid another inch and stuck fast. Beneath her duct-tape gag, she groaned in frustration, then bit the sound back. She wouldn’t be discouraged. She would be… smart.

She attacked the pin again, this time twisting and teasing and scraping it upward, bit by squeaky bit, her arms shaking, sweat slithering under her flannel shirt. More and more of the narrow metal dowel rose from the hinge until she could feel it wiggling loose, and with a final pivot and pull she had it. She bent forward and straightened, her long thigh muscles complaining the whole way. She stood upright, swaying slightly, letting her heart, which she hadn’t realized had been pounding, slow down to normal. Letting her legs stop shaking, letting her shoulders relax.

The hinge pin was cold and heavy between her fingers. She let it go. It rang and rang again against the stone floor before coming to rest next to her boot.

“One down, one to go,” she said, and that was when it hit her. She whirled, staggered to catch her balance, and stared at the door. Stared at the top hinge, the uppermost hinge, the curlicued, black-iron, hand-forged hinge whose pin sat at the same level as her head. Her hands, taped behind her back, twitched. The pin might just as well have been on the ceiling for all that she could reach it.

The disappointment, the unfairness of it, pressed against the back of her eyes like knuckled fists. Tears of rage spilled down her cheeks, scalding her skin. She keened in her throat, a strapped-down, inexpressible sound that made her even more angry-she couldn’t even shriek and howl, goddammit!

She kicked one hobbled leg in fury. The duct tape yanked against her ankles, and the lower hinge pin rolled across the floor with an old, hollow sound of iron on wide wooden planks. She blinked. Sniffed hard. Stopped crying. Looked at the pin, six or seven inches long, slender enough to conceal in her sleeve. But heavy. One end flat, circular. The other-pointed. She looked again at the door with its unreachable hinge. Okay. She didn’t have way out.

She had a weapon.

Clare was finally seeing a look of admiration on John Huggins’s face. Unfortunately, it was for her cooking.

“This is great,” he said around a mouthful of French toast. “You have to do this for our annual firehouse breakfast fund-raiser.”

Clare made a noncommittal noise that was swallowed up in the clink and clatter of forks hitting plates and spoons stirring coffee. She cleared away an empty jam jar and the denuded butter plate and headed back to the kitchen. Maybe if she rooted way in the back of the fridge, she could find another stick of butter. She was head-down, checking out the produce bin, when she heard the door open and close. Whoever it was simply stood there. Saying nothing.

It struck her what she must look like, presenting rump-out like a primate in a National Geographic special. She jerked her head from the refrigerator and whirled around.

Russ lifted his eyes to meet hers. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She gestured toward the Frigidaire humming behind her. “I was looking for more jam.”

He grinned suddenly, wiping ten years off his face. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Huh.” She cocked her head. “What, exactly, did you come in for?”

He stepped toward her, and she could swear that she felt the air moving, giving way. He stopped before he got too close. He was good about that. They both were. “I thought you might need some help.”

She wiped her hands on her pants. “I think that’s my line.” She pointed toward the pantry. “Take a look in there, will you?”

He nodded, ambling to the pantry and clicking on the light. “So what do you think of Haudenosaunee? I bet you love this kitchen.”

Cooking was one of her passions. He knew that, of course. “It beats the pants off of mine, that’s for sure.” Hers had been installed in the rectory during the reign of the last rector of St. Alban’s, an elderly celibate who had, Clare suspected, lived on TV dinners and casseroles donated by the ladies of the parish. “I’m a little disappointed, though. I expected something grander from a great camp. You know, an Adirondack Victorian extravaganza.”

“The style you’re thinking of’s called haut rustic,” Russ said, emerging from the pantry clutching a jar of blackberry jam. “The old Haudenosaunee had Victorian extravaganza in spades. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a firetrap.”

She leaned on the granite-topped work island. “How do you know?”

“Everybody in Millers Kill knows at least the bare bones of the story. The van der Hoevens were downstaters who made a bundle in the Civil War, and the head of the family liked to hunt. But he liked to do it in comfort. So he dragged his wife and kids and the servants and the dog up here-in those days it was by private rail and boats and portage-pitched a dozen tents, and oversaw the building of Haudenosaunee.” Russ put the jam on the island top and hitched up onto a stool. “At first it was a big, plain log building, styled like the communal hunters’ lodges that were popping up throughout the mountains.”

“Sort of like this building,” Clare said.

“Sort of. Anyway, twenty years later, it was rebuilt in the grand Adirondack style by a van der Hoeven trying to please his pretty young wife. There are pictures in the historical society-I guess the best way to describe it was Swiss chalet meets twig Gothic.”

“Did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“Did he please his young wife?”

“She couldn’t have been that impressed, because she took off for Europe with their son and stayed there for the next few decades.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“Well, the son returned from Europe right before the First World War broke out.”

“Good timing.”

“This would have been Eugene’s… let me see… greatgrandfather. Can’t remember his name.”

“You’re really good with all this local history.”

He smiled like a shyly pleased schoolboy. “I did a report on it in high school. Even then, I was into old houses.” Russ had extensively rebuilt his Greek Revival farmhouse. The house where he and his wife live, she reminded herself.

“That van der Hoeven thought what the place needed was Old World elegance, so he added on turrets and towers and battlements and the like, trying to turn a Swiss-Gothic chalet into a castle. Even in his day, when rich people were building privies shaped like Versailles and carriage houses that looked like the Tower of London, it was considered a great big ugly heap.”

Clare looked around her at the clean lines of the current Haudenosaunee. “Is that when the family built this house?”

“No, that came when Eugene’s grandfather tried to modernize the old building. Evidently the older van der Hoeven wasn’t content to merely build castles. He wanted to live in the Middle Ages.” Russ tapped his temple meaningfully.

“You mean…?”

“No running water, no electricity, no central heating. He actually disconnected the bathrooms that had been state-of-the-art in 1880 and installed drop toilets.”

Clare made a face.

“Yeah. So when his son inherited the place, he decided making the fourteenth century fit for human habitation wasn’t worth the trouble, and he had this house built.”

“What happened to the old camp?”

Russ’s blue eyes clouded over. “It burned down.”

Comprehension dawned. “Is that what happened to Eugene?”

He nodded. “Whoever says money solves all your problems never met the van der Hoevens.”

She was climbing onto the stool kitty-corner from Russ when the letter and pamphlet crinkled inside her pocket. Speaking of problems. She pulled them out. “Take a look at this.” She held them out to him. “Have you ever heard of this organization?”

He scanned the letter and unfolded the brochure. “One of the radical environmentalist groups, right? Like Earth First? Volunteers living in trees, that sort of thing?”

She shook her head. “More like spiking the trees and then blowing up the loggers’ equipment. The Planetary Liberation Army believes in direct action.”

“That’d be pretty direct, yeah.” He read the back of the pamphlet. “I don’t see anything here about the Adirondacks. And I’ve never heard of them operating in our area.” He looked up at her. “Where’d you get these?”

She had thought out her answer when she persuaded Lisa to let her keep the documents. “They were here in the kitchen.” She opened the drawer and tossed the remainder of the pamphlets on the stack of wine crates, just as Lisa had done. “I was opening up drawers, looking for utensils and stuff.” There. Absolute truth. “These are more in the same vein.”

He ruffled through the brochures. “These could be anybody’s.”

“The only people who live here are Eugene and Millie. One of whom is now missing.”

“You think this may have something to do with her disappearance?”

“She gave them money. It’s not like mailing in your annual donation to the Sierra Club. These folks aren’t sending her a preprinted thank-you letter and a calendar.”

He glanced at the paper again. “If she’s the outdoorsy, save-the-earth type, she probably gets solicitations from every group under the sun. Lord knows, my mom does.” Russ’s mother was an environmental activist whose various causes and concerns came close to giving her son an ulcer. “Adirondack Conservancy, Stop the Dredging, Mothers Against Nuclear Waste Disposal-Mom supports ’em all. It doesn’t mean that she’s plotting to blow up Nine Mile Point.”

Clare flipped her hand open. “But what if she were? Millie van der Hoeven, I mean, not your mom.”

He looked at her skeptically. “And this is based on?” He flapped the brochure at her. “One letter inviting her to talk and a diatribe about the evils of development? That doesn’t make her a terrorist.”

“I’m not saying she is. But we have this supposedly woods-wise young woman who goes out for a walk after a late dinner. She’s spent every summer of her life right here in these mountains. And she gets lost? On the same day that she’s supposed to sell her family’s land to a multinational wood products corporation?”

“Which is then signing it over to the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. They’re not going to be clear-cutting the place. They’re going to put a stop to all development. And logging. The PLA people should be doing the happy dance over this. If they know about it.”

She thought about what Lisa had said. About how being lost in the woods could make a convincing alibi. “It may not have anything to do with Haudenosaunee. Or maybe it does. Maybe she didn’t like the idea of selling off to-what’s the name of the company?”

“GWP, Inc.”

“To GWP. Maybe she didn’t trust them to give all the easements or whatever to the conservancy.”

Russ rolled his eyes. “Maybe she’s being held prisoner by the president of GWP, who’s planning on selling her into white slavery after the signing ceremony tonight. Have you seen that picture of her in the hall? She’s quite a babe.”

Clare made a face. “You’re impossible.”

“That’s what Linda says.”

There was a pause. When Clare spoke again, her voice was quiet. “It could be nothing. But someone ought to be aware of it.”

He kept his eyes on the letter as he carefully folded it into thirds. “And now I am.” He held it up. “Mind if I keep it?”

She shook her head. He unsnapped a pocket on the outside of his camo pants and stuffed the papers inside. She tossed open the door to the pantry and snapped the light on. Surprise, surprise, there was an unopened jar of marmalade sitting next to a tin of tea and a box of farina. She turned back to Russ and set the jar next to his blackberry jam, thinking, Why am I bothering with this? A loaded question.

“I’m sure the team will appreciate your search efforts,” he said.

She snorted. “This is the problem with letting people know you can cook. I’ll probably be relegated to chef and bottle washer for every rescue they call me in on, for ever and ever, amen.”

He grinned. “C’mon, Julia Child. I promise I won’t stick you in a kitchen. Let’s ask Eugene if there’s anything else he can tell us about his sister’s disappearance.”

Randy didn’t set out from his house intending to drive to the Reid-Gruyn mill. He had woken at nine fresh and clear and full of energy, despite his heavy drinking the night before. His dad had been the same way. He used to tell Randy the secret was to eat lots of protein all the time. He had lived on eggs, chicken, and venison, and if he hadn’t fallen to lung cancer after forty years of a two-pack-a-day habit, he’d probably be partying still.

Randy rolled out of bed, scrubbed the stale smoke and alcohol smell off in the shower, and ate six eggs scrambled for breakfast, accompanied by the frenetic blare of a morning game show. He was going to take his bike into town and retrieve his truck from Mike Yablonski’s. That thought, combined with the noise from the television and the simple necessity of washing, dressing, and making breakfast, all kept the great dark heavy truth of being laid off at bay. It broke through in flashes-when he reached for his motorcycle boots and saw the steel-toed boots he wore lumbering, or when the bills piled on the corner of the kitchen counter caught his eye-but for the most part he moved in a state of deliberate unawareness.

Oddly enough, it was on his bike, headed into town, that he started to come to grips with it. The wind was whipping around him, the sun shining through the bare branches, swirling trails of fallen leaves marking where he passed. He felt good, and when he felt good, he thought of Lisa, and when he thought of Lisa, he heard her sweet voice, so full of confidence in him. “He’ll find another job. He always does.”

Shit. He couldn’t let her down.

It was bad enough she was wasting herself, scrubbing other people’s toilets. He knew she was thinking about a baby. She was nuts about her niece, Maddy-always offering to have the kid over, spending money on cute little dresses for her. Lisa deserved a kid of her own, and she shouldn’t have to leave it at home to go out to work. He wanted to support her, to give her the freedom that his brother-in-law, with his polished shoes and his creases in his pants, couldn’t give his wife.

God damn, but he had counted on that logging money. He supposed he could try for a team working farther up north, but that would mean moving out for the winter, getting home a few weekends every month if the roads were passable and he wasn’t too exhausted to drive. He couldn’t do that to her. She needed him. And as the new man on the team, he’d get the shit jobs and the shit hours. With no guarantee that he could come back the next year.

No, what he needed was a real job again. Regular hours, benefits, something he and Lisa could rely on. And with this thought, his Indian Chief Springfield seemed to turn, of its own accord, onto Route 57, leading him along the river, toward the Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper mill.

He dismounted in the employee lot and hung his helmet over the back of his seat. Just looking at the place depressed him. Red brick, with high narrow windows, it squatted in its own chemical stink like an animal too sick to move. Past the “new” building-which had been completed the year his grandfather was born-the “old” wooden mill moldered into the river, surrounded by weeds and discarded machinery. He and Mike used to sneak over there on break and smoke joints until the big Mohawk foreman had caught them and knocked them both to the floor, screaming that the place was a freaking firetrap, for chrissakes, and didn’t they have the sense God gave geese?

That hadn’t been the last straw, but it was near enough, and the next time Randy got into trouble, fighting in the break room with an asshole who tried to stiff him on a bet on a Giants game, he had quit before he could get fired. That had been three years ago. Now he was back, tail between his legs, asking for a chance to close himself inside with the foul air and the fluorescent lights and the foreman chewing his ass if he missed two minutes on the clock.

He closed his eyes against the cold fresh air and the sunshine and went in.

The Saturday morning shift was light, and nobody was in the break room yet. Randy walked past the scrubbed pine tables and the scarred door to the men’s room, past the battered green lockers, lifted the heavy latch, and walked out onto the mill floor.

The sickly sweet smell of fermenting pulp hit him like a blow to the face. His eyes watered and he sneezed. The air was hot and heavy and moist, pulsing with the sound of the pulper and the rollers and the constant boil and slosh of water. He skirted the edge of the floor. If there hadn’t been a change in the past three years-and “change” wasn’t usually in the Reid-Gruyn vocabulary-Lewis Johnson would be hanging out at his stand in the northeastern corner of the floor, where he updated stacks of forms and quality reports and kept an eye on the men.

Randy found the foreman where he had expected. Same hours, same spot, same dark green uniform with LEWIS in a red oval over the chest pocket. In three years, while Randy had gotten married, buried his father, moved into the old man’s house, and added four tattoos to his collection, Lewis Johnson had done nothing. He looked exactly the same: solid, square-faced, his skin like badly cured deer hide that had started to crack. He still had all his hair; one of the older guys had once confided to Randy that Indians didn’t have any hair below the neck, so they got to keep what they had on top.

“Randy Schoof.” Johnson didn’t sound thrilled to see him again.

“Hey, Lewis.”

“What are you doing here? Last I saw you, you were wiping the pulp off your boots, promising we’d never have the pleasure of your company again.”

“Well. You know. Times change.” God, this was going to be hard. He postponed his complete humiliation for another minute. “I got married.”

“I heard. One of the Bain girls, right?”

“Yeah. We got us a house up past Barkley Mountain and everything.”

“Wasn’t that where your dad lived?”

“Ayeah.” Ayeah. Christ, he sounded like a hillbilly. An old hillbilly. “Yes,” he tried. “I got it when he passed.”

Johnson nodded. “I’m sure you miss him.” Randy was glad Johnson didn’t try to hand him a line about how sorry he was. Steve Schoof had been everything the Reid-Gruyn foreman wasn’t: fun-loving, easygoing, hard-living. Randy’s dad had worked so that he could afford to party. If Johnson had ever even had a beer after eight hours on the floor, Randy had never heard about it.

“So,” Randy went on, “there’ve been a lot of changes in my life in the past three years. I been working every winter as a logger for Castle Logging.”

Johnson nodded. Randy wondered if he’d show more of what he was thinking if he weren’t a Mohawk.

“But, um, Ed’s decided to close up shop. He’s retiring to Florida. And so I’m looking for work.” He blurted the last sentence toward the stained concrete floor.

Johnson sighed. “Believe it or not, Randy, I’d probably hire you back if I could.”

Randy scrunched up his face. What?

“I know Ed Castle some. He supplies us with pulp. And if he’s kept you on for the last three years, you must be settling down some. Of course, getting married does that to a man.”

Randy nodded. Where was this going?

“Problem is, we’ve got a freeze on. No hires. No overtime. Ed Castle’s getting out of the lumbering business because Haudenosaunee is going to be closed up tight, isn’t he?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, the same problem is affecting us at Reid-Gruyn. No local pulp means costs go up. Mr. Reid says we’ve got to tighten our belts.” Johnson’s dark eyes were-regretful? Worried? Randy couldn’t tell. “Rumor has it one of the big multinationals from Malaysia has made an offer for the mill. God only knows what’ll happen to our jobs then. I’m hoping to hang on until retirement.”

Randy looked around him. The tanks were full, the rollers grinding and thumping, the stench and the noise and the movement of the men on the floor the same as it had been three years ago. “This is Millers Kill,” he said, bewildered. “What the hell does a company from Malaysia have to do with us?” He wasn’t even sure where Malaysia was.

Johnson allowed himself a ghostly smile. “You don’t pay attention to the news much, do you, boy?”

Randy bristled. “Just because I didn’t graduate-”

“Calm down. I’m not yanking your chain.” Johnson sighed. “It doesn’t matter anyway. No jobs here. And if you’re looking for another logging job, you’d better get to it, because a lot of the big outfits are bringing up Mexicans to do the work now. Cheaper than a white man, you know.” He grinned outright.

“Yeah. Thanks for the tip.” Randy spun on his heel and marched away before he could say something to get himself into trouble. It wasn’t Johnson’s fault there was no work to be had.

No work. A cold wind blew up inside him, and despite the heat on the pulping floor, he shivered. He had always thought of the mill as the workplace of last resort. A place he might not choose to go but that would always be there. Stupid. Stupid.

What was he gonna do? Trucking? Work at the Kmart? Clean up after tourists at a ski lodge? None of that would cover the bills sitting on the kitchen counter right now, let alone support his family if a baby came along.

He emerged into the same cold, bright air. What was he going to do? What?

Russ watched Eugene’s face as he read the letter and examined the brochure from the Planetary Liberation Army. In the dining room, breakfast was winding down to the last few scrapes across syrup-coated plates and the dregs from the coffeepot. Russ had asked their host quietly if he and Clare might have a word. Eugene had led them into the living room. Leather and wool-blanketed chairs sprawled invitingly around them, but no one sat.

Van der Hoeven looked up at him. “I’ve heard of the group.” He frowned at the letter. “She’s always been a bit of a nut about her causes, but I can’t believe Millie would get involved with extremists like this.”

“How long has your sister been living with you?” Russ asked.

“Since late August.” He turned the brochure over. “There’s no date on either of these. Perhaps she brought them with her?”

“They were in the kitchen,” Clare said. “Is that likely to be where she would store papers she brought from-where’s her home?”

“Montana.” He was standing near the enormous river-stone fireplace, in such a way that his scarred flesh was partially in shadow. Russ wondered how much of his positioning was deliberate and how much an old habit. “No, I have to confess it’s more likely any mail in the kitchen arrived here. I pick things up from the box at the end of the road, and I tend to dump it on the kitchen desk. It’s where I do the bills.”

Russ glanced at Clare, and he swore he could read her mind. Maybe the rich aren’t that much different from you and me. Of course, when he wrote out checks in his kitchen, it wasn’t next to crates of wine from his own vineyard.

He focused in on Eugene. If his sister was mixed up in a piece of nasty work, he might be genuinely ignorant. Or he might be protecting her. “Mr. van der Hoeven, I know you’re worried about your sister.” Russ dropped his voice. He was concerned. Eugene could confide in him. “I’m starting to be worried, too. You say she’s good in these woods, that she’s known them all her life. Does it make sense that she’d wander off at night and get herself lost?” Toward the other end of the great room was a glassed-in case of hunting rifles and a table, next to the window seat, made from what looked to be elk antlers. It didn’t take much detective work to figure out where van der Hoeven’s sympathies lay. “Or could it be that she’s been sucked in by some radical environmentalists? Gotten in over her head? Could that have anything to do with her disappearance?”

Eugene nodded thoughtfully. “I did hear a car, early this morning. Before I discovered Millie wasn’t in the house.”

Russ smoothed the surprise off his face. He hadn’t expected to get anything from his fishing expedition. He just liked to tie off any loose ends.

“You didn’t mention a car to the search team,” Clare said.

Their host quarter-turned to her, just enough to be polite, still keeping his good side toward her. He did it more with Clare than with the men in his house, Russ noticed. He wanted to say, Don’t worry about it, buddy. She’ll take you as she finds you.

“I didn’t think it signified.” Eugene gestured toward Russ’s camo and blaze orange. “On a Saturday in hunting season, it’s not unusual to have cars or trucks drive in here by mistake. Hunters looking for one of the access roads.”

“Do you have any reason to think Millie might have been involved with the PLA?” Russ asked.

“If she was, she certainly didn’t tell me. She’s hooked up with the local chapter of this Adirondack Conservancy Corporation.” Eugene’s face was still expressive enough to register what he thought of them. “A bunch of old ladies and newcomers from New York City. She had them up here just this past week. Do you think they…?”

“Are a front for the PLA? No. I, um, know the president of that group pretty well. They’re more into… passive resistance.”

Clare looked at him, one eyebrow quirked. Mom, he mouthed. “Any other organizations she’s gotten involved with?” he asked van der Hoeven. “Meetings she didn’t tell you about? Absences she didn’t explain?”

“She is seeing someone from town,” van der Hoeven said slowly. “Romantically, I mean. At least, that’s what she told me. I have to say, that’s unusual for her. She doesn’t have much of a track record with men.”

“Maybe she prefers women,” Clare said, her face bland.

Eugene dropped the coy sideways glance and stared her straight in the face. “Certainly not.” Russ could see him reassessing the priest in light of her scandalous statement.

“What made you think she didn’t go with her boyfriend last night?” Russ asked.

“She’s always told me before. That she’d be away.”

“How long has she been seeing this guy?”

“Almost since she got here. At least since early September.”

“That’s fast work for someone who doesn’t have much of a track record with men.”

“She’s twenty-six,” Clare pointed out. “You fall madly in love overnight when you’re that age.”

“That’s true,” Russ said. “It’s also true that the presence of a boyfriend, real or not, can cover up all sorts of activities.” He turned to van der Hoeven. “Have you met this guy? Has she had him over to the house here?”

“No.” He said it slowly, as if considering for the first time that there might be more to his sister’s nocturnal activities than young love’s first bloom. He looked down at the letter in his hand. “Do you really think-is there a chance she might really be in danger?”

Russ made a noncommittal noise. “We might all be blowing smoke at this point, but I think it’ll be worthwhile to track down this friend of hers. What’s his name?”

“Um…” Van der Hoeven tilted his head back, thinking. “Michael. Michael McWhorter.”

“And when did you hear the car in the drive?”

“Before I was up. So it must have been around four, four-thirty.”

“You told us her bed hadn’t been slept in,” Clare said, “but she could have made it up before leaving.”

“Of course. I just never considered Millie might be… sneaking off without telling me.”

Russ raised his hands. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. The first assumption has to be the original one. That she got lost while walking last night and needs help finding her way back.” He nodded toward Clare. “The second assumption I’m going to work on is that she decided, for whatever reason, to meet up with this Michael McWhorter in the wee hours, and the car you heard in the drive was him picking her up.” He nodded toward van der Hoeven. “The search team will work on the first assumption. I’ll take care of the second.”

Eugene was clearly worried now, his shoulders hunching, his hands clenching and unclenching. Russ gentled his voice. “Chances are, if she’s not out in the woods, she’s holed up with her boyfriend. Clare’s right, at twenty-six, you don’t always think about notifying other people before you dash off to do something stupid and romantic.” He glanced toward the dining room, where the other members of the search team were clearing away the dishes. “Why don’t you go talk to John Huggins and let him know the police will be following up on this possible boyfriend thing.”

“Right. Of course. I…” Van der Hoeven scrubbed his hands across his shirt. “I just don’t ever want anything to happen to her.” He took a deep breath and straightened, his hands falling to his side, his shoulders squaring. Becoming-what was the old word? The patroon. The master of the estate. “Right,” he said, more confidently, and left to join Huggins, who was now spreading maps over the table again.

“I have to join them, too,” Clare said. She lowered her voice. “What do you think?”

“I think if I were trying to come up with a hard-to-verify name for someone, I’d pick Michael McWhorter. There are hundreds of McWhorters in Millers Kill, Fort Henry, and Cossayuharie. Thousands, if you include the area between Lake George and Saratoga. The business with the car-I don’t like that, either.”

“You don’t think it could have been an assignation?”

He looked at her skeptically. “Twenty-six-year-old women may do a lot for love, but in my experience, they want to look good while they’re doing it. Would you haul yourself out of bed to rendezvous with your lover at 4:00 A.M.?”

“With messy hair and morning breath and my face all creased from my pillow?” She grinned. “Probably not.” Her smile faded away. “But I’d haul myself out of bed at 4:00 A.M. to do something I didn’t want anyone to know about.”

“Maybe she was counting on getting home before her brother woke up.”

“Eugene told us he had planned to go hunting. He would have been up and out before dawn.”

“Even better. He’s out of the house until ten, eleven o’-clock. That gives her six hours or so to do what she needs to do and get back into the house undetected.”

“If he hadn’t happened to peek in on her before he left this morning, he never would have known she was gone at all.”

“What about the cleaning lady?”

Clare glanced around. “I can’t imagine she’d go in Millie’s bedroom unless she was sure it was empty. And if Millie bumped into her walking in, so what? She says she got up and took a little stroll before breakfast. This house is so big, two people could spend all day in it and never see each other.”

Over her head, Russ could see Huggins staring at them. “Unless the two are you and John Huggins. Better get back to business, darlin’.”

He loved watching her cheeks go pink. Her voice was as steady as ever, though. “He’ll only keep us at it for another hour or two before we get relieved. I’ll be at home after. Give me a call. I want to know what you find out about Michael McWhorter.”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am.”

Her mouth twitched in a half smile before she spun and walked away. He shook himself. He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out the keys to his truck. He’d drive over to the department and assign this to someone and then hightail it out of there. It was his day off, after all. Although, they might be stretched thin, what with it being a hunting Saturday and Duane unavailable and Pete on leave. Maybe he’d take care of it himself. Linda’s words came back to him: Is this the man who can’t take a vacation because the police department might fall apart without him? Maybe she had a point. His gaze settled on Clare, bending over the table, tucking a falling strand of hair behind her ear. Maybe.

Driving up the main road to Haudenosaunee-if two dirt ruts and some gravel could be called a road-felt odd to Becky. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been on the property many times before. As a kid, she would visit her dad as he hauled logs out of the Haudenosaunee woods, sometimes riding behind him in the seat of the skidder, her breath clouding the air, sometimes bouncing in the front seat of the truck as it crunched over the frozen trails toward the main road. Then, as a college student, she had visited the great camp itself as Millie’s guest. They would hike to the waterfall for a swim and then smoke pot in the ruins of the first great camp, the only spot where Millie’s dad was guaranteed not to stumble over them. Summer’s green or winter’s snow, that was her experience of Haudenosaunee, not this gray, splay-limbed November landscape, and never alone.

Around a gentle curve, and she stepped on her brakes, seeing a big red pickup headed straight for her. The truck, driven by an equally big man in hunting camouflage, slowed to a crawl, then nosed its way as far off the road as possible. The driver gestured her to proceed. As she crept past him, he rolled his window down. She stopped and did the same.

“You’re not Millie van der Hoeven, are you?”

One of the search team, then. “I’m afraid not. I’m a friend of hers. She’s still missing?”

He nodded. “Hopefully not for long, though. You say you’re her friend? Has she ever mentioned someone she’s seeing in the area? A boyfriend?”

Becky propped her arm over the edge of the window. “No, she hasn’t.” What a weird thing to ask. Unless-“Does she have one? Do you think she might be with some guy instead of lost in the forest?”

The man nodded. “Maybe. It’s something I’m following up on.” He leaned forward and fired up his truck. “Sorry to bother you. You looked sort of like her picture.”

“No problem. Sorry I couldn’t help.” She raised her hand and shifted into gear again. When she was past the truck, she rolled her window up. Looked like Millie. She wished. She supposed that to a guy as old as her dad, any two girls with long blond hair looked alike.

She hoped Millie had an unknown, undisclosed boyfriend. It made more sense than getting lost at Haudenosaunee. And, that selfish voice in the back of her brain said, it would mean she’d still show up on time for the ceremony tonight. Becky shoved the thought away. The ceremony was going forward. Everyone would be there to sign papers and shake hands and smile for the cameras. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, consider the alternative.

Even this trip to Haudenosaunee was going on faith. If she had had any real doubts about the sale going through, she could have called the contractor and told him to dismiss the crew that would be meeting her at the great camp within the next half hour. She glanced at her car’s clock. Make that twenty minutes. She hadn’t canceled. The planning walkthrough would go on as scheduled. She and the crew would discuss the most economical and efficient way to dismantle all the modern Haudenosaunee buildings.

Then came the hard part of the day. She had to tell her father, as the owner of Castle Logging, that his equipment, which he had garaged over the summer at his most recent cutting site, had to go. The conservancy’s lawyer had asked her to get a detailed inventory, because they would be responsible for any buildings and machinery on the property after the title changed hands. She wasn’t looking forward to getting the document from her dad. As much as she loved Bonnie, she really preferred to stay with her parents when she visited. She wasn’t sure her dad would want to have her in his house after she had hit him up for his inventory and proof of insurance.

But whether or not Dad tossed her out on her ear, by 7:00 P.M. she was headed for the Algonquin Waters Spa and Resort in her party dress and new shoes. And if Millie van der Hoeven hadn’t shown by then, Becky would by-God go out and find her herself. A fierce smile snapped across her face. Her dad always said she was as hard to budge as an old oak tree. It was time to prove him right.

She considered the blankets. Could they be used to attack somehow? To defend? They were too tough to tear. One was heavy wool, almost a horse blanket, the kind you’d use as a topmost layer on a bed because it would make you itch if it was sandwiched between the sheet and the quilt. The other two were more modern, lofty fake-fiber things, soft and warm. They had satin edging. Now those, they might be useful. If she could figure out a way to rip them from the rest of the blanket.

It was funny, really. All those years of trying to shuck off her belongings, trying to find out what was intrinsic to herself instead of what was bought and paid for with her family’s money. As an adult, she had tried to live simply, first from conviction and then from necessity, as her funds dwindled and her support of various organizations grew. If she ignored the fact that she didn’t have to work for a living, that she could stay at her father’s Park Avenue apartment in New York City and at her mother’s Palm Beach cottage in Florida, she could pretend she had the same sort of life as most of her friends.

Standing in the chill of her cell, she could see how badly she had been fooling herself. Take away her parents’ homes and the great camp and the private schools and trips abroad. She was still rich. She had a home and a car and a thousand objects filling them both: furniture and clothing and camping gear and books and CDs and pots and pans and sharp, long knives that rested in their own square of cherrywood. What she wouldn’t give to have those knives. Now. Now that all her earthly goods had been reduced to the clothes on her back, an iron hinge pin, and three blankets.

And a plastic five-gallon bucket. When whoever imprisoned her here came back, maybe she could spill pee on their shoes.

When whoever imprisoned her here came back. She had been concentrating so hard on what she could do to get away, she had overlooked the fact that she was missing. Not where she should be. People would be looking for her. Wouldn’t they?

She looked at the blankets. At the arrow slits. At the blankets again. She shuffled to the pile. The heaviest one, she thought. She teased it out with one boot-clad foot, balancing carefully to avoid knocking herself over. Once she had a sizable piece separated from the rest of the pile, she hobbled toward the nearest window, dragging the blanket beneath her boot tread. It was as tedious as positioning the bucket had been-step, scrape, step, scrape-although at least now her full bladder wasn’t making it hard to think. Instead, she was charged with the idea that her unknown captors could return at any moment.

The dense wool blanket unfurled from the pile. She scuttled back, positioned herself at the trailing edge, and booted it across the floor. When she had it bunched beneath the arrow slit, she considered a moment, then dropped to her knees on top of it. Shuffling slowly off the fabric, she bent over like a supplicant before an almighty god and worked her head as far under the blanket’s heavy folds as she could. Butted hard against the stone wall, she pressed upward. The blanket rose. She inched it higher and higher, until her kneeling form made an acutely uncomfortable triangle with the curved wall.

This would be the hardest part. Leaning into the stones until she thought the top of her head would split open, she curled her toes underneath her and pushed with all the strength in her thighs. Her legs straightened, her neck trembled, and, greased by the blanket’s smooth surface, her head skidded upward. She was standing. She shuffled close to the wall. The pinned blanket rose until she could feel a change in the angle of the stone beneath her head. The wide embrasure. She pushed, rolling her head up until her face was buried in the scratchy wool. Desperate for extra height, she went on tiptoe. She felt the blanket slide upward, then catch. Pressing her chest against the stone to stop the blanket from backsliding, she risked raising her head.

The blanket was stuck in the middle of the arrow slit. She bent again, rolling her head up against the dangling edge, forcing more material into the opening. It bunched fast. Half of it must be dangling from the outside right now. For a moment, she considered letting it stay like that, but then she realized people might walk by without ever lifting their eyes to see her banner. She pressed her face against the wool and sprang up as best she could, making an awkward en pointe in her boots.

It worked. The blanket slithered through the window and was gone. She heard nothing except a brief crack where it caught and broke a brittle branch. Was it spread out like a picnic cloth on the ground? Draped over a bramble bush? Hanging from a branch? It didn’t matter. It was large, it was white and red and yellow and green, it didn’t belong out there. Anyone who came by would notice it.

She thought of the way it had bunched in the opening, half in and half out. She looked at one of the remaining blankets, a fluffy, fuzzy lavender. She imagined a searcher spotting the wool blanket on the ground, glancing around, seeing another blanket flapping from an arrow slit high above the ground. Imagined friendly feet pounding up the stairs. Imagined someone saying, Hang on, I’ll have you out of here in a moment.

She shuffled over to the blanket pile and began kicking.

Clare was in the middle of listening to Courtney Reid’s litany of complaints when she heard a woman shout from the drive. The search and rescue team had completed their huddle, gone over the topo maps, and accepted assignments in different parts of the wood. The possibility that Millie had simply debunked to her boyfriend’s house had acted as a sort of antienergizer, making it that much more difficult to whip up the necessary enthusiasm for hours of careful searching through cold, bare woods. Even though she was privy to Russ’s doubts about the existence of the alleged boyfriend, Clare’s zeal was starting to flag as well. She kept thinking about the whirlwind of activity that must be going on at St. Alban’s. Next to Christmas and Easter, the bishop’s annual visit was the most important Sunday of the year, at least in terms of polishing silver and waxing wood and laying out the fatted calf. Or the individual puff-pastry quiches, in this case.

“She was supposed to pick up individual pastry shells from the bakery,” Courtney was saying. “Instead, she got phyllo dough. We now have phyllo dough for two hundred and no quiche pastries. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Hang on just a second,” Clare said. “Someone’s hollering out in the drive.” When she had asked Eugene if she could use his phone, he had escorted her to a small den on the opposite side of the foyer from the living room. He had shut the door to give her privacy, but John Huggins, whose ideas of delicacy were somewhat different from van der Hoeven’s, had stuck his head in the door and reminded Clare in no uncertain terms that she’d better not sit yapping on the phone all morning. When he left, the door was still ajar. If she stretched to the length of the cord, she could see out the wide window to the drive. Her view of the porch was restricted; she couldn’t see Eugene, but she could hear him. He must have left the front door open.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

So the young blonde in barn coat and jeans walking toward the porch wasn’t Millie. Clare sighed. It would have been too much to ask, she supposed.

“Reverend Fergusson?” Courtney Reid demanded from the vicinity of Clare’s chest.

Clare brought the phone back to her ear, keeping her eye on the people outside her window. “I’m here.”

“Okay, so my problem is, what am I going to do? Serve baklava? I could send one of the other volunteers to the baker’s for the puff pastries, but I don’t think our budget will stretch that far.”

Eugene had stepped off the porch. The young woman approached him. She said something Clare couldn’t make out, then gestured to the two-no, three men clustered behind her. Like the blonde, they were dressed in sturdy coats and jeans. One of them carried a clipboard. One had a camera looped around his neck. All of them had metal measuring tapes hanging off their belt loops.

“You can use the phyllo dough to make the shells,” she said into the phone. The unheard conversation continued. The woman’s body language said, I’m being polite, but I’m in charge here. Eugene was stiff, as he had been when Clare met him. A shy man shielding himself with an aristocrat’s hauteur. “You’ll have to separate the dough and bake them before you fill them, of course.”

“I thought of that,” Courtney said impatiently. “We don’t have any individual-sized tins to bake them in.”

Clare couldn’t remember why full-sized quiches, sliced up, were unacceptable. She suspected raising the issue would be a lost cause at this point. “There’s a great kitchen supply store in Saratoga. Send someone down to pick up a couple stacks of disposable baking tins.”

“To Saratoga?” Courtney screeched.

The woman handed van der Hoeven several sheets of paper. Clare could spot a letterhead but couldn’t make it out. Eugene bent his head over the documents.

“It’s a forty-five-minute drive,” Clare said, in as reasonable a tone as possible. “Surely you can find someone willing-” Courtney cut her off with a wail of reasons why it would be impossible, impossible, to spare one of the already-too-few volunteers for a daylong trip to Saratoga. Clare let her rattle on. It never ceases to amaze me, how many folks jump straight over ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I can’t,’ Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright drawled.

Eugene turned and disappeared into the house. No farewell, no acknowledgement that the blond woman still stood there. Clare blinked. Not that she was an expert on Eugene van der Hoeven, but that seemed out of character. She heard his footsteps ringing over the floorboards, headed away from her into the living room.

“… and Judy Morrison hasn’t even shown up like she promised…,” Courtney was saying.

The young woman turned to the men gathered behind her and began speaking. She motioned toward the house, the garage, the utility shed. One of the men snapped the measuring tape off his belt, and another produced a fat, dog-eared notebook from the depths of his jacket. Surveyors? Tax assessors? They couldn’t be painters-it was far too late in the season to paint outdoors.

She heard van der Hoeven’s tread returning through the foyer and out onto the porch. Through the front door, she heard his voice. “Hey. You.”

The young woman and the men looked up. The woman’s eyes and mouth widened. Everyone froze in position, except the man holding the notebook, who dropped it, bent over, scrabbled it off the ground, then hotfooted back several paces.

“Get off my property,” van der Hoeven yelled. He descended from the porch into Clare’s view. She nearly let go of the phone. Eugene was carrying a rifle. Not carrying it, aiming it, stock up and butted against his shoulder, sights pointed toward the pale-faced, motionless group in his drive. “Get off my property, I said.” He was shouting; Clare could hear every word.

“Courtney.” She cut off the banquet preparation committee chair ruthlessly. “Find someone to go to Saratoga.” She let her command voice out, the one that crackled with authority. The one that brooked no disagreement. “I don’t care who, just do it. Something’s come up. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” She stalked to the phone, replaced the receiver, and hurried back to the window.

The young woman, with more guts than sense, had stepped forward. Clare couldn’t make out what she was saying, but whatever it was, it didn’t have the effect of calming van der Hoeven.

“I said now,” he said, chambering a round.

Oh, no. Clare was out of the den, hurtling down the hall toward the front door, when she heard the shot go off. Oh, God, no. She lunged for the handle, flung the door open, and stumbled onto the porch.

The three men were fleeing to their cars and trucks, parked on the far edge of the drive. The young woman teetered on the toes of her boots, two bright pink spots burning high on her cheekbones. “I’ll be back!” she screamed. “You can’t stop this, Eugene! I’ll be back!”

Eugene chambered another round and sighted the rifle at the infuriated woman.

“Stop!” Clare yelled. Eugene whipped toward her. She ducked out of the line of fire, but as soon as van der Hoeven saw who she was, he lowered his weapon. Clare sagged with relief.

Behind her, she heard the clatter of feet down the stairs. “What the hell was that?” Lisa said. Eugene turned back toward the drive, but the woman had finally come to her senses and fled. She dove into a green Toyota Prius as the three men’s trucks roared to life. They spun out on the drive and disappeared down the road, gravel spitting in their wake.

Eugene mounted the porch steps slowly, his rifle uncocked, held loosely in his hand. He looked at Clare, clutching the edge of the door, then at Lisa, poised halfway down the stairs. “I open my land to hunters,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I allow anybody and everybody on my property.” His voice was calm, but his hand was shaking.

He trudged past them, down the hall, into the living room. Clare heard the clunk of the gun case opening. She looked up at the housekeeper. “Do you think I should…” What? Report the incident? Ask if Eugene needed help? Get herself and Lisa out of the house?

Eugene returned. He stopped in front of them. “Reverend Fergusson, have you finished with your phone call?”

She nodded, speechless.

“Good. I’m going to retire to my den. Lisa, you’ll find your envelope on the kitchen desk in the usual spot. Please don’t disturb me.”

He continued on toward the room Clare had recently vacated. She looked at Lisa, who shrugged. “Mr. van der Hoeven? Eugene?” He paused in the doorway. Half-turned toward her. “Do you need any… can I help you?”

“I believe, Reverend Fergusson, that the Lord helps those who help themselves.” The den door clicked behind him, closing the world out.

Shaun Reid ran his thumb and index finger over the crease in his navy serge pants, then glanced up quickly to see if Terry McKellan had noticed. He hadn’t. Eyes on the proposal Shaun had brought to the meeting, reading glasses slipping down his nose, Terry was abstracted, rolling his cigar-brown mustache between his fingers, occasionally tapping out the beat of some song only he could hear against the spreadsheets scattered across his messy conference table.

Shaun congratulated himself on choosing just the right look for this meeting-country club casual. He had bought the pants and shirt in the Bahamas during his honeymoon with Courtney, from an exclusive shop with a PATRONIZED BY THE PRINCE OF WALES sign by the door. They had cost more than he usually spent on a suit, tie, and shoes combined, but Courtney had said they made him look young and fit and successful.

Terry, on the other hand, with his round moon face and vanishing hair, looked like what he was, a guy rapidly headed north of middle age, who had given up the fight to stay fit and any hopes of rising past senior vice president long ago. With his shapeless sweater stretched over his belly and his shiny-kneed corduroys, he resembled an untenured academic more than a commercial loan officer.

Looking the part wouldn’t win Shaun his loan, but it couldn’t hurt. In truth, he was feeling more relaxed than he had all week. He had good numbers on the past three years’ profit-and-loss statements. He had a great proposal, laying out all the ways in which Reid-Gruyn could expand and grow with the future. He had highly favorable estimates of the value of his personal property. And he had a relationship with the man across the table from him. For God’s sake, he and Courtney had had the McKellans to their house for dinner.

Terry propped his chin in his hand and removed his reading glasses. Shaun knew speaking first would betray his weakness, his eagerness, but he couldn’t help himself.

“What do you think?”

Terry rolled one end of his mustache thoughtfully. “I gotta ask you, Shaun… why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you twisting yourself into financial knots like this? You know that as a creditor, AllBanc has already seen the preliminary proposal from GWP. You stand to make a bundle if the mill sells. Certainly more than you’d realize in ten years if you went on as you have been, taking the same level of salary out of the business.”

He could feel sweat starting in his armpits, damp and sour. McKellan didn’t get it. He didn’t see it. “That’s one of the points of my proposal,” he said, forcing strength and confidence into his voice. “That we don’t go on as we have been. That we make a concerted effort to grow and develop the specialty paper market.”

“But the capital costs of retooling the mill-”

“Are accounted for in the third section of my proposal.”

“Shaun, I won’t argue that those figures show a sufficient amount to upgrade the plant and still maintain operations. But you haven’t taken into account any market variables. If the economy takes a downturn, if the state raises the workers’ comp rates, if you can’t get the union to fall into line with you, you’ll be screwed. There just isn’t enough of a safety net.”

The sweat was creeping down the middle of Shaun’s back now. His expensive Bahamian shirt clung to his spine.

“You’ll be putting yourself personally in debt-deep in debt,” McKellan went on. “And if it doesn’t work out a few years down the road, GWP has moved on to bigger and better things. You’ll have a business weighed down with excess obligations and no white knight on the horizon to bail you out. So I ask you, why?”

Shaun leaned forward, hands curling around the table’s edge. “Terry, my great-grandfather founded that mill. I’m the fourth-generation Reid to run the business. I’ve got a son who’ll be stepping into my shoes someday, just like I did with my dad and he did with his dad before him.” That was not, strictly speaking, the truth. Jeremy had shown no signs of interest in his family’s generations-old trade. As far as he was concerned, the money to be made in the Adirondacks was in tourism, not in timber. But the kid was young yet, still in love with his first job. Shaun would bring him around. If there was a Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper to bring him around to.

“If GWP buys the plant, they’ll still need your expertise to run it. They’ll be able to make the upgrades you’d like.” Terry tapped the proposal. His cheery, pep-up tone scraped Shaun’s nerves like nails on chalkboard. “Reid-Gruyn could become a name in specialty papers. There’s a legacy to hand on to Jeremy.”

“But I’d be working for someone else! It wouldn’t be mine!” Shaun clamped his mouth shut. God almighty, he sounded like a whiny three-year-old.

Terry raised his eyebrows. They looked like two woolly caterpillars climbing Mount Baldy. “You’re already working for someone else,” he said. He used the mild and reasonable tone appropriate to a fussy preschooler. Shaun’s face grew hot. “The Reid family owns forty-nine percent of the company. The rest of the shares are held by individual and corporate investors.”

Some of which, he didn’t have to say, were AllBanc’s own trust accounts.

“Right. I misspoke.” Shaun leaned back, propping his arm over the back of his chair in what he desperately hoped was a casual gesture. “What I meant to say was, we’ll lose our local control. Decisions about the mill, the employees, the dividend payouts-everything will be coming from Malaysia. You and I have seen too many Washington County businesses get bought out and then abandoned. With me at the helm, you know the needs of our community will be at the forefront. Money is not the most important thing to me, you know that.”

“I do.” Terry gazed at him with his big brown eyes. Brown, brown, brown-Shaun had never realized how much like a seal the loan officer looked. A mournful seal. “And I respect that. Unfortunately, as an officer of the bank, I have to put money first. I’m afraid I won’t authorize additional capital loans to Reid-Gruyn.”

“Then give me the personal loan. You and I both know I have enough collateral. I can buy back enough stock to tip the family holdings to fifty-one percent. With that, I can stave off takeover attempts till doomsday.”

Terry recoiled. “That’s insider trading, Shaun. When GWP announces their bid publicly, there’s no way the share value isn’t going to shoot up. For you to buy in advance, knowing the offer will be made within days-”

“So give me a loan for home improvements, then. I don’t care what it says on the paperwork. I just need the money, and I need it by Monday.”

Terry’s seal-like eyes looked harder now. “No. The SEC would be all over your buy. They’d look at the loan, and the first thing they’d see would be the bank’s notice of inquiry from GWP. You may be fine with doing three-to-five in the federal pen, but I’m sure as hell not.”

“But-” The phone rang. Terry held up a finger as he snatched the receiver off the hook.

“Terry McKellan here,” he said. His caterpillar brows went up, and he looked at Shaun. “Hi. Were you trying to reach your husband?” Shaun tensed. He hadn’t told Courtney about this appointment. How had she tracked him down? “I can see where that would be a problem,” Terry said. Shaun locked his hands over one knee. Casual. Casual. “Saratoga? I guess I could. What’s the name of the place?” Terry jotted down something on a notepad. “Sure. Glad to be of help. I should be able to have them there in about two hours. Would that work for you?” He looked at Shaun again. “Okay. I’ll see you then.” He hung up.

“That was Courtney,” he said. “She’s at St. Alban’s. There was a mix-up, and they didn’t get the little pie tins for the quiches they’re making for the reception tomorrow.” He ripped the note off its pad. “So I’m detailed to go to the kitchen store in Saratoga and buy two hundred of the things.” He stood up.

“But… the loan?” Shaun remained seated. He didn’t want to acknowledge the meeting was over. Over, and a complete failure.

“I’m sorry, Shaun.” Terry shook his head. “There isn’t going to be a loan. I know it’s hard, but maybe the best thing is to acknowledge that times change and businesses, like people, have a natural life span. Maybe you need to stop the extraordinary life support and let Reid-Gruyn go.”

Clare found the documents tossed on a table near the gun cabinet. She debated with herself less than five seconds before picking them up.

The uppermost letter was from the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. It was addressed to Louisa van der Hoeven, Eugene van der Hoeven, and Millicent van der Hoeven. She shook her head. Let no one say the van der Hoevens went in for trendy names. Dear dat-da-dat-da-da… She skimmed the first paragraph, which was an effusive thank-you for the family’s agreeing to the buyout. Clare wondered for a moment if they were letting Haudenosaunee go at a reduced rate. That might be behind Eugene’s anger. Perhaps he felt he was getting stiffed?

The second paragraph held the meat of the matter. Under the terms of the preliminary agreement, the ACC has consulted with the New York State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation’s Bureau of Historic Sites, which has rendered up its opinions on the various buildings now located on Haudenosaunee land (see attached). Clare pulled the papers apart. Sure enough, there was a letter from the Bureau, stapled to documents that presumably held its opinions in greater detail.

First, to address issues related to the original “great camp” built in 1867: The BHS has examined the historical record of this building and its current physical condition. Although the original Adirondack Gothic construction would have been deserving of landmark status, the decay following the van der Hoeven family’s move into the modern house in the years following World War II and the subsequent fire have left the building damaged past restoration. The ACC has accepted the Bureau’s recommendations that the building shell remain in situ, in part because of the historical value of the ruins and in part due to the difficulty and cost of removing the extensive stone structure.

Clare translated the bureaucracy-speak in her head: Tearing down old walls into heaps of stone isn’t worth the time and effort.

Secondly, as to the modern house and dependencies: The conclusion of the BHS is that the current habitation, also known as “Haudenosaunee,” is historically unremarkable, being constructed in no particular architectural style in the 1940s and added on to from time to time in the 1960s and 1980s. The loss of integrity suggests no reason to include the house and its outbuildings on the state list of protected properties. Therefore, in line with the ACC’s mandate to keep the protected area of the Adirondack State Park “forever wild,” the ACC has developed a plan to dismantle the currently existing “improvements” to the property and to replace alien plantings with native species.

Clare frowned at the letter. Did the mean what she thought it meant?

The plan is an follows: Within one week of the land transfer scheduled for November 14 (please see the Preliminary Deed of Transfer and Grant of Easements Agreement, dated August 14 of this year), all family members and personal property shall remove from the buildings of Haudenosaunee, including the main house, garage, gardening shed, storage shed, and boathouse.

Clare hadn’t seen a boathouse. Must be by the waterfall-slash-swimming-hole. She flipped to the letter’s second page.

The ACC will engage a construction crew to dismantle the existing buildings. To whatever extent it is possible, the materials will be removed from the site and reused. Unless specific exemptions are requested by the family members, all architectural items including doors, windows, wood stock, trim, light fixtures, hardware, etc., will become property of the ACC and may be sold or auctioned by it to defray any costs associated with returning Haudenosaunee to its natural state.

She looked toward the dining room, with its gleaming wood floors and its antler chandelier. Historically unimportant or not, she suspected the ACC could defray a whole lot of costs if they dismantled the place carefully enough. It would take advance planning and a skilled work team-the image of the men standing by the young blond woman popped into her head. Clipboard, measuring tape, camera. Exactly what you would bring along if you were planning the step-by-step deconstruction of the house.

The next two paragraphs were given over to plants. The plan was to rip as much out of the gardens and borders as possible before snow started to fly, then to resume in the spring by “reintroducing native plant life as horticulturally advisable.” Apparently rosebushes weren’t as valuable as doorknobs and countertops, and removing them was not as expensive. The letter referred to “local ACC volunteers” who would tackle the project using a checklist of approved planting materials, which was, like the reports from the Bureau of Historic Sites, attached.

Given the narrow window of time afforded by the November weather, and the inadvisability of leaving the buildings uninhabited and untended throughout the winter, the ACC would like to proceed as quickly as possible post the transfer of land rights. If you have any objections to the proposed plan, including of timeline, please notify project director Becky Castle as soon as possible. If you assent to the abovementioned plan, as detailed here and in the accompanying documents, please sign below and return to the ACC… it wound up with an Albany address and an injunction to the recipients to keep a copy for their records. Beneath Becky Castle’s signature, there were places for all three van der Hoevens to sign. All three lines were blank. Clare flipped back to the first page and looked at the date. August 30.

Who had signed off on the plan to demolish their family’s summer home? Louisa, in far-off San Francisco, was a cipher; the only thing Clare could deduce about her was that her use of the Haudenosaunee house-if any-was restricted to occasional visits. Millie had been living here since August; surely if she had agreed to the plans she wouldn’t have been whiling away her time? Anyone expecting to move in a week should be hip deep in boxes by this date. At least she knew where Eugene stood. Or did she? Maybe he was all for selling off the land but was holding out for the right to remain in his home. Maybe Millie didn’t want to let go of either the land or the house and was hiding herself away in passive protest against her siblings’ decision.

It all hinged on a question that sounded like a bad light-bulb joke: How many van der Hoevens does it take to transfer 250,000 acres?

She looked toward the kitchen. There was a phone in there, hanging above the desk, next to the tower of wine crates Russ had joked about. Russ. She should call him. She should-The crackle of her radio snapped her to the awareness that there was something she definitely was supposed to be doing. And it wasn’t standing around speculating on the van der Hoevens or making phone calls.

“Fergusson? What the hell happened? You fall into the toilet or something?”

She bounded toward the front door and managed to make it off the porch before keying her response, so that she could honestly tell John Huggins, “I’m on my way.”

The only thing that would have made Randy Schoof feel better as he entered the post office would be a notice from the state saying he and Lisa had won the lottery. Except he didn’t think they mailed those out. Weren’t you supposed to call them when you saw the numbers on TV?

Lewis Johnson’s words ringing in his ears, he had gone from the mill to the county employment office. The prospects were as bad as Johnson had painted them. A well-meaning girl who looked to be barely out of high school had shown him how to search the database for the help-wanted listings and told him he was free to use the computer to update his résumé and the phone to call prospective employers. But he had found that anything offering a decent amount of money required at least a high school diploma, and most wanted people with college degrees and related work experience. There was one trucking company looking for drivers, but it was based in Plattsburgh and ran mostly into Canada, which would mean days, if not weeks, away from home. There was a shipping company in Saratoga looking for loading-dock workers, but when he called, the position had been filled.

No logging companies were listed. He figured he could get some names and numbers from Mr. Castle and call them himself. For the money he could earn in a season of cutting, maybe he and Lisa would just have to suck it up and live apart for a few months. Discouraged, he logged off the employment office computer and left, giving Miss Helpful a flop of a wave as she caroled, “Have a nice day!” at his back.

There was a Certified Mail postcard in his postal box. He took it to the front desk. “Hey, Randy.” Geraldine Bain, the elderly postal worker holding down the desk, was his wife’s second cousin. “How’s it going?”

Randy almost snarled, It sucks, but the sight of a poster-ASK ABOUT OPENINGS FOR RURAL DELIVERY ROUTES!-shut him up. “Good,” he answered. “It’s going good. What’s this about needing deliverymen?”

She glanced at the sign. “You interested? I can give you the form for the test.”

“There’s a test?”

“Yep. And they’ve just started this new thing where you got to have a security check. But once you get those under your belt, we can put you on the list.”

“The list?”

“Ayeah. We start you out as a substitute. If you work out good, you can become a regular as soon as there’s need of one.”

“How long’s all this take?”

“We can have you up and running come early summer.” She grinned. “That’s less’n you’ve ever made anthrax, of course. Then all bets are off.” She laughed.

He slid the Certified Mail postcard across the counter toward her. “I’ll think about it.”

Geraldine picked up the card and went hunting for the corresponding piece of mail. She emerged from the back holding up an envelope. “From the town.” She pointed to where he had to sign it. “You two aren’t adding on up there, are you? Sumpin’ you need a building permit for? Like a nursery?”

Nosy old bitch. “Nope. Nothing to report.” Geraldine ripped off the confirmation tag and handed Randy the envelope, which he tucked beneath his arm along with the three bills, grocery store circular, and Motorcycle magazine he had already retrieved from the postal box. “Have a nice day, hon,” Geraldine said as he retreated outside the post office to check out his letter in peace.

One of the town benches, set out a century before, had been placed in front of the post office. Randy had sometimes wondered why whoever had laid out the benches had picked this spot, with no tree or view or any other reason to settle, as a likely place to sit. He supposed now it was for just this purpose, to let a man open a certified letter without having any gossipy relations check it out. He ripped open the envelope and pulled out a lengthy letter on the town’s letterhead. The tiny print and legal language swam before his eyes. Third notice… significant unpaid taxes… interest and penalties… lien on the property…

The town had put a lien on his land. For $5,693.47 in back taxes. Randy dropped the letter in his lap and stared across the street at the Millers Kill Free Library. Someone had taped pictures of fat-faced Pilgrim children in the windows on either side of the door. The girl was leaning against a shock of corn, and the boy had his arm around a happy turkey’s neck. Randy picked up the letter and reread the notice of lien. $5,693.47. Where was he going to find that kind of money? He and Lisa were up to their necks in debt as it was.

Lisa. He had to call Lisa. He was off the bench and had taken three steps down the sidewalk toward the pay phone in front of the IGA when he stopped himself. She didn’t like to get called when she was at a client’s house. He sank back onto the bench, braced his elbows on denim worn to white over his knees, and hid his face like a little kid. This was going to be a nasty surprise to Lisa. It drove her nuts, the way he dealt with difficult news by putting it off. If he didn’t see bills and demands for back taxes, he could ignore them. If Lisa saw them, she’d storm at him, demanding that he take care of this or make a phone call to that. So, and this was the part that was going to kill him when she got home, sometimes he made certain bills and demands and notices disappear.

He had shrugged off the letters from the town looking for payment of his property taxes. What could they do to him? His parents had paid off the mortgage in 1985. When they divorced, his dad had swapped his mom’s half of the house for half his pension, the RV, and her name on his life insurance policy. His mom had come out the better in that deal two years ago, when his dad, sick of getting yelled at by his girlfriend for his hacking cough, went to the doctor’s for an antibiotic to clear it up and walked out with a diagnosis of metastasized lung cancer. He died five months later. He had been fifty-six. Randy had inherited the house and land, free and clear.

What did they mean, a lien? He envisioned the cops coming to his door, turning him and Lisa out, the house foreclosed on and auctioned off. Where would they go then? Homeless, jobless, the credit cards maxed out. He winced, envisioning asking for a loan from Lisa’s parents. Or worse, having to move in with them. He could just imagine what his disapproving sister-in-law and her prick of a husband would make of that.

He needed his job back. That one thing, Ed Castle not closing up shop, would make the difference between Randy and Lisa having a life or going straight down the toilet. Maybe Castle could be persuaded to hand over the machinery to Randy and the rest of the crew. They could keep the operation going, even send a little money to Ed down in Florida. Surely that would set him up better than just tossing in the towel and living on Social Security.

The blinding rightness of this idea was like hot, strong coffee on a cold morning, filling him up, warming his fingers and toes. He stood up, excited to talk with Ed, to point out retiring didn’t have to mean the end of the business. Then he’d get hold of the other guys. He was sure they’d want to continue logging if they could. They would all toss in together. One of those-whaddya call it?-collectives. Boot heels ringing on the sidewalk, Randy made for his motorcycle. Lisa was right. He always managed to come out on top.

There were blood smears on her father’s SUV. The Explorer was blocking the driveway, an anodized rack mounted over its back door. It looked like any other bike carrier, except that this rack was stained with red and crusting blotches that spattered a trail up the drive toward the detached garage. Looked like he got his buck this year. Becky stepped carefully as she crossed to the front steps. Her mother would have her hide if she tracked blood onto the floor. She checked the bottom of her boots and scraped them hard on the brushy doormat before opening the door.

“Hey,” she called. “Anybody home? Mom?”

The small downstairs was deserted. She walked through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. She could hear an electric whine. “Dad?” she shouted.

“Around here,” came an answering yell.

Becky clattered down the back steps and followed the sound around the edge of the garage. The coppery smell of blood nearly overwhelmed her. Her father had the deer hanging upside down from a metal bar chained to a rough wooden frame. Its gut was slit stem to stern, and its hind legs, which were spread wide and clamped to the bar, glistened in the cold sunlight. They had been skinned and cut off below the joint.

“Eugh! Dad, what are you doing?”

Her father paused from sawing straight into the buck’s crotch. “I’m skinning out my deer.” He was wearing baggy coveralls that looked like the aftermath of a terrible fight-all bruise-yellow, greasy grime, and blood. “Then, after he’s hung for a few days, I’m gonna butcher him.”

Becky winced. “Can’t you get someone to do that for you?”

Her father turned, the hacksaw in his hand. He had that look on his face, the one that said, Goes off to a fancy college and she loses all common sense. “Sure I could. But I’m not about to spend good money paying someone to do what any fool with a knife and a saw can do.” He replaced the hacksaw on a strip of cardboard that was laid out like a serial killer’s surgical set, with two wicked knives and a pair of long-handled pruning shears.

“I expected to see you on your last legs, the way Bonnie was talking this morning. Shows what she knows.”

Ed worked his hands well into the hide near the deer’s hindquarters and began to peel the skin off the body. “Bonnie’s just worried about your mother and me.”

“And I’m not.”

“Didn’t say that, did I?”

“You don’t say a lot of things. You’ve barely spoken to me since I started working on the Haudenosaunee project.”

“That what you call it? A project?” The hide stuck. Ed tugged it, then reached for one of the knives. “So what are you doing here? I mean, besides giving me grief. Weren’t you supposed to be over to Haudenosaunee puttin’ chains across the roads so’s no one could get in tomorrow?”

“Nobody’s chaining up the roads, Dad. I was visiting the great camp with a contractor. I’m trying to get things in order, so that after GWP buys the land and signs it over to us tonight, the ACC will be ready to implement its vision as soon as possible.”

The words were barely out of her mouth before she wished them back. Sure enough, her father’s eyebrows rose, in an exaggeratedly impressed expression.

“Implement your vision. ’S that what you people at the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation call shutting down the timber harvest and throwing folks out of work?”

Becky felt her face flushing hot. “No, that’s what we call returning the land to its natural state.”

“This land’s been occupied three hundred years. More, if you count the Iroquois. What’s this natural state you think you can get it back to?”

She knew she wasn’t going to win this, but she wanted her dad, for once, to get at least part of what she was trying to do. “We’ll be taking down all the buildings. Volunteers will remove the alien plants and replace them with native species. The forest will have a chance to resume its natural life cycle, unmanaged by harvesting or planting.”

“Firetrap, that’s what you’ll get with no harvesting. Just like you get diseased herds if you don’t hunt the deer.” He sawed in and out with his knife. The hide sagged away from the raw flesh beneath it. “Your group really tearing down the Haudenosaunee buildings? I was up there this morning, you know. Didn’t look as if anyone was getting ready to move. What does Eugene van der Hoeven think about you putting the wrecking ball to his home?”

For a moment, Becky considered telling her father the whole story of this morning’s disastrous visit to Haudenosaunee. If she did, though, God alone knew how her dad would react. He might be mad at her for her role in closing off the land to logging, but that didn’t mean he’d take kindly to a nutcase threatening her with a gun. Her dad had always been overly protective of his girls.

“He’s not happy about it,” she said, truthfully enough. “But it’s not as if the ACC is tossing him out into the snow. Millie has arranged for him to move in with her, when she returns to Montana. He’ll be set for life with what he’ll make from GWP.”

Her dad circled the deer, his knife lolling in his hand. “It ain’t always about the money, Becks. I don’t know as Eugene van der Hoeven has left Haudenosaunee since he came back from the hospital, after the fire. That was, what, seventeen, eighteen years ago?” He grabbed the flopping white-and-brown tail, pulled it away from the body, and began hacking it off. “So you’re all done with your work for today, and the only thing left to do is go swanning off to the ball tonight, huh?”

“It’s a signing ceremony, Dad, not a ball. And no, I’m not done with my work today. That’s why I’m here.” She folded her arms across her chest and took a slow breath. She wanted to sound relaxed and authoritative, not like a girl asking to borrow the family car. “As you may know, after GWP transfers the rights to Haudenosaunee to the ACC, we’ll have the landowner’s responsibility for all preexisting conditions on the property.”

Ed’s knife cut more delicately now, as he teased the tail off. “You mean if one of them contractors of yours trips over a sticking-up board, he can sue you?” He tossed the tail onto the frost-scarred grass.

“Basically, yeah. But we’re thinking here of a particular liability. Your machinery.”

Her father straightened. “Whaddya mean, my machinery?”

“Didn’t you leave Castle Logging’s machinery near your cutting site when you shut down last spring?”

“Course I did. You know that. Why the hell should I pay a couple thousand to garage the skidders and pickers in some truck depot when I can keep ’em for free on the van der Ho-evens’ land? They’re on one of the access roads. They’re not in anybody’s way-any hikers come through, they can waltz right past ’em.”

“That’s just it, Dad. Anybody can reach them. And as of tomorrow, if your equipment is stolen or vandalized, you could conceivably hold the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation liable as landholder.”

He flung the knife into the earth. It stuck deep in the ground, quivering with a violence to match his voice.

“I could ‘conceivably hold’ you liable? What the hell kind of man do you think I am? I’ve stored my machines on Haudenosaunee land for more’n a decade without a single problem or a complaint from the van der Hoevens! I suppose you want me to move ’em all off the sacred property before sundown.”

“You may never have had a problem, and I hope you never do! But that won’t let us off the hook with our insurer if we don’t take care of the details. I’m not asking you to move the skidders. I just want an inventory of what’s on the land and some proof of your insurance.”

“To save your butts if somebody decides to blow up one of my trucks.”

“Cut me a break, Dad. This is for your protection as well as for the ACC’s. What if something did happen to one of the pickers or skidders or trucks before you could sell them? Would you really want to be stuck in court, your insurance company fighting ours?”

He looked at her suspiciously. “Why’d you say I’d be selling the machinery? Who told you that?”

Becky blew out an exasperated breath. “Bonnie, of course. You are planning to sell, right? She said you didn’t want to try to keep the business going if you had to travel up north for the timber.”

“I’ll be selling, all right. You’ve seen to that.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes!” She actually stamped her foot, a gesture she thought she had left behind with her childhood. “Just give me an inventory!”

“You want to count my machines and find out if there’re any dings in ’em, missy, you can go out in the woods and do it yourself! They’re on fire road number 52. Have a good time communing with nature while you’re there.”

“And the insurance?” she gritted out.

“Eugene van der Hoeven has a copy of the current policy. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hand it over to you, since he won’t need it come tomorrow.”

“Van der Hoeven has a copy!” She pointed a finger at him. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, giving me that ‘what kind of man do you think I am’ line. The ACC isn’t asking anything more from you than what you were already giving the van der Hoevens.”

“There’s one difference, missy.” He leaned in so close she could smell the iron-and-earth scent of raw meat and blood. “With the van der Hoevens, it was give-and-take. With your crew, I’m bending over and taking it. And I don’t like it.”

There was no place for Randy to park at the Castles’. The old man’s SUV was pulled up by the barnlike garage, and the rest of the short driveway was occupied by one of those experimental gas-electric hybrids Randy had read about but never seen. He looked around. Technically, there wasn’t any on-street parking allowed on Sherman Street, but he figured no one would complain if he pulled his bike up close enough to the Castles’ drive.

He dismounted and hung his helmet on the back. He walked up the drive and was about to mount the stairs to the house when he heard the faint sounds of voices coming from behind the garage. He headed past Ed’s SUV toward the noise.

“Fine!” A woman shouted. “Fine! I’ll go get it myself!”

“Good!” That was Ed; Randy had heard him roaring too often before not to know his voice. “Maybe if you actually have to work for something instead of gettin’ it out of a book, you’ll appreciate it more!”

Randy rounded the corner of the garage. The first thing he saw was the bloody skinned deer dangling from a homemade frame. The next thing that caught his eye was his employer-his former employer-nose to nose with a fine-boned blonde who looked like Ed with all the ugly and old squeezed out of him.

“I am not staying here with a man who can’t respect my choices!” She whirled away from the old man. The fact that Randy was in her way didn’t even slow her down. He jumped to one side, and she glared at him as she swept past.

“Nobody’s holding you here at gunpoint!” Ed yelled after her. Randy doubted she heard; the thunder of her boots as she stomped up the back stairs drowned out any other sound.

Ed made a noise in the back of his throat. He glared at Randy in exactly the same way the girl had. “Don’t ever have daughters,” he snarled.

“Okay.” Whatever. Randy was prepared to agree to almost anything if the old man’d give him a listen.

Ed bent over and wrenched a knife out of the ground. He wiped it against his leg, then laid it neatly next to several other knives and saws on a piece of cardboard. He picked up a hacksaw. “What are you doing here?”

“I was thinking about this plan of yours, selling off the business.”

Ed took one of the deer’s front legs and drew it up, resting the hoof and first joint against his coverall-clad thigh. He raised the hacksaw. “Look. Like I told you when I called you yesterday, I’m sorry to have to pull the rug out from underneath you. As soon as you talk to someone else about a job, you have ’em call me. I’ll give you a good recommendation.” Ed began sawing off the deer’s leg above the knee joint.

“No, that’s not it. I was thinking, what if, like, the guys and I took over the business from you?” Randy spoke loudly, over the wet grinding sound of the hacksaw blade chewing through bone. “I know you’re tired of the work and all, but me and the other guys on the crew, we’re still young enough to make it work.”

Ed laughed shortly. “You’re a good logger, Randy, but you’re a long way from being a businessman. Take my advice. Head up north and find an outfit that needs extra hands for the winter.”

“I don’t wanna go up north. I wanna work near home. C’mon, Ed, give me a chance.”

“You think you can run a timber operation, fine. You come up with two hundred thousand and I’ll sell you the business, lock, stock, and skidder.” With a wrenching crack, the deer’s lower leg snapped. Ed sliced through the remaining string of tendon and hide and tossed the mutilated limb next to the hide and tail piled on the ground. He stretched, cracking his back, and looked at the corpse with satisfaction.

“Two hundred thousand?” Randy could barely get the sum out.

“That’s what my trucks and skidders are worth, fair market value.” Ed grabbed the deer’s last remaining leg and slapped it against his thigh. “And that’s just the start of what you’ll have to lay out. There’s money to insure your equipment, and money for fuel, and money for the men, and money for the licenses.”

Randy was still getting his brain around the cost of Ed’s beat-up old machines. “Maybe we could work something out,” he said. “Like, I could have the use of the machines and pay you back out of what I earn.”

Ed sawed into the long, thin leg. Randy watched as hair, skin, meat, and muscle severed and the blade bit into bone. “Kid, cutting a deal like that would be robbing both of us. I’d wind up with no money for my retirement, and you’d wind up broke and in the hole.” Ed shook his head, his eyes on the steady back-and-forth of his saw. “Even if you could run a timber business, getting hold of my machines wouldn’t help you out if you want to stay put in Millers Kill. I know I seem like Methuselah to you, but I’m not selling up ’cause I’m too old. I’m selling out because there ain’t any more logging in this area.” The second foreleg broke away. Ed stood and tossed it into the growing pile of body parts.

“Once Haudenosaunee’s gone, that’s it. Next available woodlot’s another fifty miles to the north, if you can get a license. And that’ll be closed to logging as soon as the landowners get a big enough offer from the developers.” He wiped the saw on his coveralls and laid it on the cardboard. “Pretty soon, the only outfits making money off the woods’ll be the big guys. You want a job? Go on over to the new resort and talk to the big shots from GWP. They’re gonna be the only game in town.”

“But if I just had the equipment, just, like, one skidder and a truck, I could-”

Ed unfolded a length of rough sacking and draped it over the frame, enclosing the deer. “Randy. You’re not listening to what I been saying. A skidder and a truck isn’t going to get you anywheres.” He unspooled twine from a ball and, gathering the bottom of the fabric together, looped it several times around, a makeshift body bag. He straightened, groaning, and tossed the twine ball onto the cardboard. “Now if you don’t mind, I got a date with a couple ibuprophen and a long, hot shower.”

Randy tagged after him as he crossed the yard to the back steps. Ed paused. “Look, kid. I was born and raised in Washington County. I never wanted to leave it. So I’ve outlived all the decent jobs-that’s not a tragedy for me. I’m old enough to retire and spend the rest of my years hunting and hanging out with my grandsons.” He settled his hand on Randy’s shoulder, as weighty as time itself. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is the only place in the world you can be happy. Huh? Okay?” He vanished into the house.

Randy stood for a moment, the cold November sunshine bright on his face. Ed didn’t sound like he was retiring. He sounded like he was getting ready to slit his throat.

From the front of the house, he heard a door slam. Ed had some nerve, telling Randy to move away for work, when it was him who was throwing in the towel. There were always good-paying jobs, if you were willing to hustle. Guys got old, they forgot that. He looked at where Ed’s hand had curled over his shoulder. A bloody smear blotched the denim.

From the front of the house he heard a car starting up, the squeal of tires laying down rubber, and then the unmistakable sound of something big and heavy crunching into his bike.

Becky tumbled out of her Prius and stared in horror at the motorcycle lying in the street. She wasn’t sure what had happened; she had felt the bone-shuddering impact and then heard a sound like a dumpster full of recycled cans dropping onto the asphalt.

“Holy shit! What did you do to my bike?” The guy who had come to see her dad ran past her. He skidded to a stop in front of the motorcycle. “Oh, man, you’ve torn up my fuel line!”

“I’m so sorry.” Becky glanced over her shoulder to see if her dad had heard anything. That would really be the icing on the cake-to have him charge out of the house and find her here like a sixteen-year-old screwing up on her learner’s permit. “Look, let me pay for the damage, please.”

His back was still toward her. He held his hands out over the machine as if he were commanding it to rise from the dead. His voice held the disbelief of a child faced with an inexplicable loss. “How the hell am I going to get it to the garage?”

He seemed to be talking to himself, but Becky answered him. “I’ve got Triple A. I can call them. They’ll pick it up for you.”

He turned toward her. He was a few years younger than she was, attractive in a farm-boy-meets-skinhead kind of way, dressed in JC Penney hip-hop, the look of someone whose only inner-city experience has been downtown Schenectady. “It’ll need to go to Jimino’s, out to Fort Henry.”

“Wherever you like.” She smiled apologetically but couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder again.

“What is it?”

She snapped around. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not going to, you know, tell your dad on you.” He bent and lifted the bike by its handles. The arms and back of his jacket bulged with the strength of a man who makes his living by his muscles instead of his brain.

“You can park it in the neighbor’s driveway until the tow truck comes.” She pointed toward the Bells’ next door. “They’ve already left for Florida for the winter.” He shot her a suspicious look. “It’s closer than our-my parents’ driveway,” she added helpfully.

He grunted but rolled the bike up the driveway next door. Becky retreated to her car, grabbed her wallet, and unplugged her cell phone from its charger. She dashed over to the Bells’ driveway. “Look, I can call Triple A right now.” She juggled the wallet and the phone until she wiggled her membership card out of the billfold.

He held up his hands. “Calm down, will ya? You’re acting like you think I’m gonna call the cops.” He squinted at her. “You carrying or something?”

She didn’t have to worry about the police finding drugs in her possession, but he looked as if he might. “No,” she said. She glanced back toward her house. “I just had a big fight with my dad-well, you heard the end of it-and I’ll never live it down if he finds out I wrecked somebody’s bike backing out of the damn driveway.”

“Ahhh.” He nodded, satisfied. “Now I get it.” He looked at his bike, at her car, at her. “I got my truck over to a friend’s house. He’s out by Glens Falls. Could you give me a lift? I’m gonna be late picking my wife up from her job.”

Glens Falls. Exactly the opposite direction from where she needed to go. “Where’s she work?” Becky asked, mentally crossing her fingers. If it was right here in town…

“Haudenosaunee. It’s a camp up past-”

“I know where it is! I’m headed there now to pick up some papers. Why don’t you come with me, we’ll pick up your wife, and then I’ll take both of you to your truck.”

“Uh.” He swayed back and forth indecisively.

“Please? It’s the least I can do.”

He shrugged. “Okay. I’m Randy Schoof, by the way.”

“Becky Castle.” She led the way back to her car. “Go ahead, it’s open,” she said, as he stood by the passenger door. “You can see how I managed to run into your bike,” she explained, sliding behind the wheel. “I hung my dress on the hook in the back, and it completely obscured my view.” She stretched her arm over the seat, unhooked the dry cleaner’s bag, and tossed it on the backseat. “I should have just settled for a few wrinkles.” She looked pointedly at the seat-belt strap. “You all set?” He buckled up.

Randy Schoof sat silently as she pulled away from her parents’ house, stayed silent as she put in her call to Triple A to ask for a motorcycle tow to Jimino’s, and remained silent while she returned her phone to the charger. It was weird. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking, or sulking, or shy. It put her on edge, and she found herself rattling on to compensate, telling him about her friend Millie going missing, railing against Eugene van der Hoeven’s parochial frontier macho mentality, complaining about how utterly unreasonable her father was. He just sat there, looking out the window, making the occasional noise of acknowledgment.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as they turned onto Route 53 and headed up the mountain toward Haudenosaunee. “I don’t usually hijack people with nonstop talking. It’s just that I woke up this morning expecting everything to be great, and so far it’s been an incredibly crappy day.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” he said. “It’s been a pretty shitty day for me, too.”

She opened her mouth to ask him why he had been to see her father, but the sight of the access road wiped the question from her mind. “Fire Road 52!” She slowed her car down. “Would you mind terribly if we made a stop here before we hit Haudenosaunee?”

Randy Schoof glanced at her assessingly. “I’m not late to pick Lisa up yet.” He looked out the window. “Why here?” he asked, his head turned away.

“This is where my dad has his logging equipment. I need to inventory it for insurance purposes.” She turned into the road.

“Come again?”

“The trucks and feller-bunchers and all are insured against damage or loss. Like your motorcycle and your truck.” It occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t like his motorcycle and truck. It wasn’t hard picturing him as the sort who maintained his insurance just long enough to register his vehicles, then let it lapse.

“Oh,” he said. Then, “Okay.”

She swung her car onto the dirt road. It was wide and hard-packed, a road meant for log-heavy trailers and dump trucks full of pulpwood, navigating through the icy depths of winter. It was made wider by the dead zones on either side, gullies wiped bare of life by the heavy concentration of salt washed off the road. Another damning aspect of logging her father would not allow.

She bumped maybe a half mile uphill and then shut down her car.

“What’s up?” Randy said. “We’re not nearly there yet.”

A childhood of traveling into the woods with her father had taught her that you never drive up an unmarked Adirondack road unless you have four-wheel drive and a winch chain. “I didn’t want to get stuck in a boggy spot or burn out my bushings trying to climb the mountain,” she said, grabbing her purse before getting out of the car. “You can wait here for me. I won’t be long.”

She started the long uphill slog. She had friends in Albany who would be aghast at her leaving her car and keys in possession of a man she had just met, but this was Millers Kill. In twenty minutes, without his even saying much, she knew his name, his wife’s name and where she worked, and where he had his motorcycle fixed. They probably had a dozen acquaintances in common. Not to mention her father.

At the thought of her father, her stomach clenched. She had sworn to herself she was going to act like, and be treated as, an adult this visit. Instead, she had been reduced to a level of discourse with her father no better than “You can’t make me!” “Oh, yeah? So there!” Punctuated by storming out of the yard without saying good-bye.

The echo of a slam cut off her self-recrimination. Must be Randy, bored with the view through the windshield. She didn’t wait for him, pressing upward against the bright cold sunlight, looking past the tenacious brown weeds, clinging to the poisoned soil, to the forest vaulting up on either side: heavy, dark hemlocks, the ghostly remains of birch trees, mummified blackberries caged inside their briar tombs.

She could hear the clearing site before she could see it. There was something about a large open space amidst all the trees-a nonsound, a negative space in the thick mass of the forest, a pause in the breath of the woods. The road curved, leveled, and opened up into the expanse of a battlefield. She winced at the enormous gash in the forest’s face, the battlement of stumps that had been chained out of the ground and discarded, the crackle-dry heaps of brush and junk wood piled like funeral pyres to the sky. The place, even abandoned, pulsed with a kind of energy, lingering ghosts of men ready to muscle miles of board feet and tons of pulp out of the raw wilderness. Machines waiting only for the overnight frosts to become a good hard freeze before tearing into the barricade of trees all around them.

They were all here, just as she remembered them from her childhood: the crawler tractor, the skidders, the bulldozer, the loader, the trucks. Back when she was a kid, her dad had tied and staked tarps over the equipment, protecting the heavy machinery from rain and leaf fall. Now he used pop-up portable shelters, which gave the machines the appearance of a herd of dinosaurs on a camping trip.

Becky sighed and dug into her purse for her portable camera and notepad. She flipped the notepad open and wrote No. 1: bulldozer. She walked around the dozer, snapping pictures from the front and back and sides, trying not to envision riding on her dad’s lap on the thing as he leveled out a new access road.

Will you name the road for me, Daddy?

I sure will, sweet pea.

Sure enough, he had bought one of those sign kits at the hardware store, and the access road for that winter’s cut was Becky Avenue-“avenue” because she thought her dad’s suggestion, Becky Lane, sounded like an actress’s name. That had been when she thought making her mark on the forest was the way to show how much she loved it.

She hissed, impatient with her own sentimentality, and moved on to the next vehicle. No. 2: skidder.

Randy Schoof appeared over the rise where the road met the clearing. He waved, and she waved back before raising the camera and capturing a side view of the skidder for posterity. Randy strolled past her as she jotted down a description of the skidder’s condition, glancing at the feller-buncher and the dump trucks, resembling nothing so much as a Sunday shopper on a car lot.

We’re not nearly there yet. He had said that, when she parked the Prius. She went around to the other side of the skidder. “Have you been here before?” she called out.

He stopped. “Uh. Yeah.” He took a few steps toward her. “Actually, I work for your dad. I mean, I did. Before he decided to pull the plug.”

Great. She was up here with a disgruntled former employee. What if he decided to goof up one of the engines to get back at her dad? “It’s not really his decision,” she said in a loud voice. “Once the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation takes control, logging’s going to be forbidden on this land.”

He looked at the slumbering giants all around them. “There’s still work if you’re willing to go for it. Travel farther up north for the cutting. Or harvest small private wood-lots. You know, fifteen acres here, fifteen acres there.”

She crossed to the feller-buncher and started taking pictures. The sooner she finished up, the sooner she-they-could get out of here. “Fifteen acres here and there won’t pay my dad’s costs.”

“Yeah, but what about just a few guys, throwing in together?”

She looked at him sharply. “What were you seeing my father about earlier?”

“I wanted to work something out to, you know, keep the business going. Like, pay him over time for the equipment.”

“It’s pretty valuable.” Becky tried to keep the skepticism from her voice. “I don’t know if he can afford to take back a note on it.” The young man’s blank face indicated he had no idea what taking back a note was. “Sell the equipment to you on credit and let you pay the loan back on time,” she explained.

“So he’s going to sell all this.” He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and rocked back and forth on his boot heels.

“Yeah.” She moved to the front of the crawler tractor and took another picture.

“Man, all I need is one break. I know I could make a go of it.”

She forced herself to keep her eyes on her notebook as she wrote down the condition and VIN of the crawler tractor.

“I mean, what if a couple machines went missing? Your dad wouldn’t be hurting. He’d get the insurance money.”

Was he suggesting what she thought he was? She lifted her head. Randy was staring past her, past the crawler tractor, into some limitless future that existed only in his mind.

She brought the camera back up and snapped off a shot of him.

“Hey,” he said.

She took another. Then another. Stepped to one side so she could center him in front of the feller-buncher.

“Quit it. What are you doing?” He took a step toward her.

“I’m taking your picture.” She looked at him over the top of the camera. “I’m not sure if you got this when I was talking about my work earlier, but I work for the ACC. If you’re thinking about sneaking back here and making off with some of this equipment-which is a pretty damn stupid idea all around, since you can’t even move half this stuff without a flatbed-I think you ought to know you won’t just be ripping off my dad, you’ll be ripping off my employer.”

She snapped off another picture.

“Cut it out!” He lunged toward her.

She danced back out of his way. “You really are that stupid, aren’t you?” she said. “Jesus! You’re actually thinking about making off with a skidder!”

“Gimme that! You can’t take my picture!” He swiped one long hand toward the camera. She held it back and over her head, out of reach. “Give it to me!” he repeated.

He charged at her. At the last moment, she dropped her notebook and purse and grabbed one of the aluminum poles holding the canopy over the tractor. She swung herself around it, flying free. Her boxed and bound rage tipped over and shook loose, burning out of her skin, rendering her weightless, invincible. She touched ground, light as a feather, her eyes fierce and her chest full of a triumphant crow. To hell with Eugene van der Hoeven. To hell with Millie. To hell with her father. She could outmaneuver this idiot forever. She bared her teeth at him.

“Bitch!” He lunged for her again. This time she leaped onto the tractor itself, one foot on the tread, the other on the seat, and then over the side.

He surprised her then. She thought he would follow her route, a filing to the magnet, but instead he circled the tractor so fast she had to scramble back across the seat to the other side. She barely avoided his reach, and she nearly fell off the tread getting back to the ground. A cold bucket of reality upended over her. She was alone in the forest with a guy built like a jackhammer. He came around the back of the crawler, his body much faster than his brain, and this time she neither crowed nor grinned, just tucked her chin down and ran, flat out, toward the road. Toward her car. Toward escape.

She pounded through the clearing, eyes fixed on the ground, leaping over a wind-scattered branch, dodging a rut gouged by a massive truck tire. She was deafened by her thudding feet, her sawing breath, the blood pistoning through her, so she was caught off guard when the blow came out of nowhere, snapping her head sideways, reeling her around, filling her skull with a terrible pain that was a sound, impossible to separate from the sound he was making, rage and pain twisted together.

She staggered, tripped, caught herself, and ran again, tears blurring her vision. She got three steps away before he tackled her, sending her head snapping against the ground and all the breath jarring out of her so she couldn’t make a sound when he slapped her, hard, and clawed at the camera still clutched in her hand.

“Gimme… the fuckin’… camera!” As he reached, he stretched, and from some well of self-preservation she saw her opportunity and took it, punching him in the throat.

He gargled horribly, like a drowning victim, and she shoved him off her and staggered to her feet. He was clutching his neck. It sounded as if he couldn’t breathe. She stood, tiptoe, suspended between flight and responsibility. Oh, God! What if I’ve killed him? She, who had never hit or been hit before this.

Then he sucked in a rattling, tubercular breath and lurched toward her. She ran again, for the first time knowing the wild, muscle-bunching, adrenaline-spiked velocity that means run for your life, commonplace words she had said herself, never imagining the terror behind them. The road her father had plowed through the forest flew beneath her, tree and rock and green and gray flashing by, her heart beating Daddy, Daddy, Daddy-another blow, tumbling her, rolling her in the dirt-save me, and he was on her, punching, kicking, crying, and the pain took away every memory, every thought, took away who she was, so that there was nothing left of her but arms folding over her head and legs curling up over her belly, and the pain…

… and there was a terrific crunch to her head, and then nothing.

Randy rolled away from the woman and lay in the dirt, his hands clenched, his breath sobbing in and out. He thought he was going to retch. He was trembling uncontrollably. His chest felt tight and hot, his heart trip-hammering as it never had before. He was having a heart attack. That must be it. He lay in the dirt and waited to die.

After a while, his heart slowed. He looked at the blue November sky, running like a river between the trees that enclosed his line of sight. His breathing came easier. His trembling slowed to twitches. He still felt feverish and sick, as if his skin were too small for his body, but he had to accept that he wasn’t going to drop dead on the spot. Which meant he had to face the crumpled, unmoving heap beside him. The woman. He turned his head, his throat aching. She was still, too still, and there was blood all over her white face. He rolled his head back. Looked at the river-sky. Oh, God. He was going to die. Not right now, not here in the dirt in the middle of the woods, no. He was going to die strapped to a gurney in a clean room with bright lights in Clinton. Because he had finally, irrevocably lost his temper.

He started crying again, tears spilling hot over his cheeks and running into his ears. His nose clogged and mucus clotted his throat, until he couldn’t breathe and he had to heave himself into a sitting position and hack.

He looked at her again. Should he go to the cops and turn himself in? Did he need to get a lawyer first? How was he going to afford a lawyer? Oh, God, what about Lisa? This would kill her. He had just wanted to stay with her, and now he was a murderer and he was going to be locked up for the rest of his life and die. He rocked back and forth, clamped in place by misery.

What should he do? What should he do? His whole life ruined because he hadn’t been able to keep a lid on it when that teasing bitch taunted him and took his picture. He looked at the disposable camera, abandoned in the dirt. That was it. That was what he was going to the death house for.

Unless he wasn’t.

The thought seemed to settle over him from the cold blue sky, to creep up on him through the gray and groaning trees. What if-he didn’t turn himself in? What if he wasn’t caught? What if he walked-no, ran down the hill and took her car and drove away? Was there any way to connect him to-he didn’t want to name her, but he gave her a wary glance. To her?

He thought about his day, about the trail he had left behind him. As far as Lisa and his brother-in-law were concerned, he was still at home. Lewis Johnson had seen him at the mill this morning, and Geraldine Bain at the post office at maybe ten o’clock. He hadn’t said anything about his plans to Ed Castle. So he was good there.

It broke down with his bike, though. Triple A would have a record. They had picked up his bike on her card, and he hadn’t even been there. Any cop asked, it’d be pretty damn obvious he had gone with her.

He had figured, when she offered him a ride, to have her drop him off at Mike Yablonski’s. He could pick up his truck there and take Lisa home.

Mike Yablonski’s. What if he had asked her to take him there first? That would have made good sense. If anybody asked, Yabbo’d say Randy had been with him the whole time, no sweat.

He didn’t waste any more time thinking. He snatched up the camera and rolled to his knees. Avoiding looking at her, he rose unsteadily to his feet. After a few tentative steps, he walked, then jogged, then ran the last of the way to her car. His throat ached with every breath. He flung open the door and bounced into the driver’s seat.

The sound of the engine was like the blast of doom. He froze in his seat, waiting for the fury of the law to hear and overtake him, but nothing stirred. He drove forward. His hands were shaking so, he had to clamp them tight on the wheel. He reached the surfaced road. Stopped. The worn and rutted edge where the dirt road bled onto asphalt stretched before him like some vast gorge. If he crossed over, he was out there, in public, where anyone could see, driving the car that belonged to the woman he had-he shook his head. Took a deep breath. The only thing more stupid than going was staying.

He swung out onto the two-laner, trading the grind of tires over packed dirt for the smooth hum of macadam. The shake became a shiver running down his spine. He had gotten away with murder. Now he had to figure out how to keep getting away with it.

Russ shoved his chair back from his desk, frustration a bitter taste in the back of his throat. He had been tracking down McWhorters for an hour, looking for a Michael who might be Millie van der Hoeven’s lover, without success.

Harlene Lendrum shouldered aside his office door, which he had left half open to let the warm air circulate. She clutched a coffeepot in one hand. “Well, it’s no birthday cake and champagne, but you can have the rest if you want it.”

“Now that’s an invitation I’m hard-pressed to pass up. Three-hour-old coffee dregs. Yum.”

Harlene skewered him with a glance. “Nobody made you come in here on your birthday, mister, so don’t get all snippy with me.” The dispatcher, who had outlasted two prior police chiefs and was bidding fair to outlast him, didn’t put much stock in rank or deference.

“Sorry.” He slapped his pencil against one of a sheaf of papers he was working from. “This search is ticking me off. Finding the right guy is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I ran a printout of Michael McWhorters and M. McWhorters and split it with Noble.” Noble Entwhistle, a fifteen-year veteran of the Millers Kill Police Department, was Russ’s first choice for jobs like this. Noble didn’t have an original idea in his head, but he was dogged, organized, and content to ring doorbells all day, meeting people and checking names off lists. Work that would drive a brighter guy, like his up-and-comer, Mark Durkee, nuts.

“I take it you haven’t rustled up a likely suspect over the phone,” Harlene said.

He grunted. “I eliminated the ones I knew who were too old or too married for the girl, but there are still a lot of names on the list.”

“Being older and being married’s not necessarily going to stop a girl.”

He looked at her sharply. Her face was bland. “I had to do something to whittle the size of the pool down, or I’ll be here all day. There are just too damn many McWhorters.”

“Before you start in on the McWhorters, I’ll remind you my mother was a McWhorter before she wed.”

“So was my maternal grandmother. I’m sure you and I are related somehow.”

Harlene patted her springy gray curls. “You can tell by our resemblance.” Harlene was a good ten years older and a head shorter than he, as straight and square as a weathered wooden plank.

“We-e-ell,” he temporized. “I’ll ask my mom. You know how she is. Loves all that genealogy stuff.” The idea waltzed in on the heels of his statement. “My mother.”

“What about her?”

“You know how she is,” he repeated. “What does she love even more than genealogy?”

“All her causes. Save the whales and get out the vote and all that.”

“Exactly. She’s president of the local branch of the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. And I’ll bet five bucks for the doughnut kitty that she knows a thing or two about our missing girl. Eugene van der Hoeven said his sister had met with the local ACC members.” He stood. “I’m going to my mother’s house. I’ll keep my truck radio on in case anyone needs to reach me.”

His dispatcher eyeballed his baggy camos and long-sleeved thermal T-shirt. “If you’re going to go on duty, you ought to check out a squad car and get changed. You still keep the spare uniform down in the evidence locker, don’t you?”

He waved her suggestion away. “As soon as I get a lead on this Michael McWhorter, I’m out of here. I plan to spend the afternoon reading a good thriller.”

She snorted. “Now I know you’re over the hill. Taking the day off when there’s a live case to work? I’ll believe it when I see it.”

There was cold air. The smell of earth. And blood. Where was she? The pain made it hard to think. Becky tried to take a deep breath to clear her head, but the movement jolted her sides as if someone had touched her with a live wire. Little, shallow breaths, then. Dog-panting.

She opened her eyes. Her face was half in the dirt. She could see the road, and beyond that, tree trunks, bracken, and dead leaves. The angle was wrong. It made her feel queasy. She shut her eyes. She pressed against the ground, trying to shift her weight. Her arms shook. With a stabbing pain, she rolled onto her back.

She didn’t want to move; she didn’t want to think; she didn’t want to be in her body right now. She stared into the sky. Why was the November sky, even on a sunny day, so much less blue than in October? In October, it always felt like she could reach up and touch the sky. Now, high and pale, it had retreated to the edge of the world. Soon it would snow.

The noontime sun shone straight overhead, warming her and the rocks and the dirt indiscriminately. But this was mid-November, and the sun was like a ball tossed in the sky, quick up and quick down. Within a few hours, it would be growing dark. And cold. When the sun set, the temperatures would sink below freezing. She ached so badly, she wanted to lie in the dirt and the sunshine and pretend that her dad would discover her at any moment. But she couldn’t count on that.

She rolled over again. Palms flat against the ground, she pushed herself, shoulders up, rump up, until she was on her hands and knees. She would get herself to her car. She wasn’t too far, maybe a hundred yards, maybe two hundred. If she could make it to her car, she could roll it down to the county highway. There would be traffic there, people that would stop at the sight of a woman with a bloody head. She could use the cell phone hanging off its charger.

She crawled downhill. Small rocks bit through the knees of her jeans, adding an undercurrent of teeth-gritting pain to the constant, throbbing ache that was her head and the sharp electrical jolts whenever she breathed too deeply or moved the wrong way. She inched forward, and forward, and forward, in a haze of pain and sweat and dirt and sunshine, and when she paused to see how far she had come she almost wept.

She wasn’t more than fifteen feet from where she started.

Think. What if she tried to walk? It would hurt, sure, with her broken ribs, but it already hurt crawling. At least she’d get to her car before sunset. Recalling that ribs were supposed to remain stable, she sat back on her heels and wrapped her arms around herself. Then slowly, ponderously, she staggered to her feet. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. She bared her teeth in a half smile, half grimace. Took a step. Took another. Her mind supplied her with an inane song from one of those Christmas shows that ran every year. Put one foot in front of the other. Down the road. Around the bend.

Where her car should have been, there was nothing.

A part of her mind that was well away from the pain noted that her Albany friends were right. She shouldn’t have left her keys in the car.

She wrapped her arms more tightly around her. She was cold, cold from the inside out, her feet and fingers almost numb. Okay. She was headed for the county highway. She’d just have to walk, that’s all.

So she walked. Put one foot in front of the other. She walked a yard, two yards, three. Made it past another bend in the road. Her head swam, and for a moment everything darkened, but she breathed, and the world came back into view. She was tired. So tired. She had to sit and rest. For just a moment. She sank onto the road, bracing herself with one hand. “Help,” she called tentatively. She took a deeper breath. “Help!” Noticeably louder. “Help!” she screamed, causing a group of crows to burst out of the trees and wheel through the clear sky above the road before disappearing up the mountain. “Help! Help! Help!” she howled, until the woods around her echoed with the sound.

Enough. Get to the road. She rolled to her knees and pushed against the dirt, trying to leverage herself up again. She felt a hot pain, biting and chewing at her guts. Deep inside her, something tore loose-oh, that’s not good, that’s not good, she thought and then everything tilted and a stream of dark bubbles roared up around her head and she was gone.