To Darkness And To Death

An Order of Service for Noonday

Shaun Reid stood in his office, considering the rest of his life. He had driven all the way home from his AllBanc meeting only to idle in the driveway, staring at his garage door, wondering what was the matter with him. Why the hell couldn’t he take the money and run? Terry McKellan was right: He’d have enough bucks to retire and live in style with his gorgeous young wife. Hell, he was still young himself, by today’s standards. Fifty was just breaking middle age. He had thirty, thirty-five years ahead of him if he watched his cholesterol and kept active.

That prospect was like looking into a puzzle box picture, where an endless series of boxes opened before him, and each box was a gray and empty room. He reversed out of his driveway and drove to the mill, down streets he had driven for thirty years. More, if you counted the times he had been sitting in the seat next to his dad.

He had loved coming to work with the old man. When he was too small to go onto the floor, his dad had given him the run of the administrative offices. He would ride round and round in the secretary’s chair that spun and rolled, and she would let him crank the mimeograph machine and swipe candy from the bowl on her desk. When he got older, he loved the way his dad would talk to him as if he were another adult, laying out facts and figures, asking for his opinion. At home, he wasn’t supposed to pester his dad, who would stretch out in his chair, tired from a hard day’s work, reading a magazine and drinking the Tom Collins Mom always served him. But at the mill it was a different story. Dad was alert, energetic, attentive. They were a team.

He had never wanted to kick loose, to move away or strike out on his own. In college, when his classmates were studying Marxist literature and marching against the war, he had lied about being a business major, because that was almost as uncool as being in the ROTC. But he never questioned that he was going back to Millers Kill, where an office next to his father’s waited for him.

He stood there now. It was small, tucked between the reception area and what used to be the payroll accountant’s office, until they outsourced payroll to a big firm that cut the checks and handled the taxes and Social Security for them. He had hoped Jeremy would one day work there, within earshot of his father, but-he shook that thought off. Entered the office that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s.

Most of the old pictures, from the first days of the company, were in the reception area now, impressing anyone who got off on the quaint idea that a business might run for over a century without changing hands. The pictures and plaques in his office were personal, and looking at them, he realized how much his life had been shaped by the presence of the mill and his role in its continuity.

There were his mom and dad, and him in bibbed shorts and curly hair, squinting into the sunlight at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “new” dam and causeway, now forty-seven years old and aging fast. There were his high school and college graduation pictures. No honors. He had never pushed himself. Never had to. The picture of Jeremy in cap and gown, though, showed loops of gold braid and an Honor Society tassel. Even then, his son had been planning ahead for his getaway.

By his son’s graduation picture was a framed newspaper clipping with a picture of Shaun and Russ Van Alstyne at the 1968 trout tourney, showing off their winning fish, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Russ had left the year after that and not returned for a quarter century. Shaun had seen him a few times since he had become chief of police, at Rotary dinners and town meetings. They had nothing in common anymore. It wasn’t Russ personally. Shaun didn’t have much in common with many of the people he had called friends back in high school. They had aged into grocery clerks and dairy farmers, or they had left town and not come back. There weren’t many success stories in Millers Kill, not for the class of ’69.

He flopped onto the sofa Courtney had picked out for him. Soft leather as comfortable as an old glove. He had kicked and screamed, but once the old couch-picked out by his mother, circa 1964-had been carted away and the new one installed, he wondered why he had put up with the hard seat and scratchy upholstery for so long. Maybe selling the company would be the same. After it was swallowed up by the GWP empire, he’d wonder why he had ever fussed.

Sure. Just like the victims of the Borg never fussed on Star Trek. Prepare to be assimilated.

A knock on the door. He rolled off the couch as the door opened and Jeremy stuck his head in. “Hey. Am I interrupting?”

“What are you doing here?” Shaun’s tone was harsher than he intended.

Jeremy entered the office. “I’m looking for you. You weren’t home, and the Trophy Wife is at church, so where else could you be but at the Holy of Holies, the office.”

Shaun was willing to let the crack about Courtney pass. Once. “If you ever want to rise above the level of gofer, you might try a little work ethic, too. It was putting in lots of hours in this office that paid for your college and B-school.”

“And my year in London and my car. Don’t forget those, Dad.” Jeremy smiled insincerely.

Shaun jammed his hands into his pants pockets to avoid clenching his fists. It was always like this with them. Gretchen, Jeremy’s mother, liked to say they were too much alike. Shaun didn’t see it. At twenty-five, he had been a husband and father, putting in fifty or sixty hours a week at Reid-Gruyn. Jeremy was a glorified concierge who spent every minute out of the office partying. The only thing they had in common was their looks: both tall and rawboned, Shaun’s faded sandy hair the remains of Jeremy’s aggressive auburn.

“I repeat, what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see if you needed me to smooth your path tonight. I can wrangle you seats at the GWP table, if you want.”

“No, thanks.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Dad, it’s in your best interest to talk with these guys. If they make a bid for the company, your future is going to depend on them. I keep telling you, you can’t make it today just by keeping your nose to the grindstone. You have to be out there, networking. Schmoozing. Personal relationships are important.”

“I know that! Why do you think I’ve been going to those damn Rotary and Chamber of Commerce meetings all these years.”

“Oooo, the Rotary Club.” Jeremy dropped his voice from a falsetto to his normal range. “Dad, if they like your stuff, you have a chance to be a mover and shaker within the GWP structure. You know the Trophy Wife would love that.”

Shaun glared at his son. “Don’t call your stepmother that.”

“She’s five years older than I am, Dad. I’m not going to call her Mom.” Jeremy threw himself onto the couch in exactly the same position Shaun had flung himself into earlier.

“We’ve had this talk before. Call her Courtney.”

“Is she going to wear that slinky black dress tonight? The one that shows off her…” Jeremy made the universal male gesture for breasts.

“Goddammit! Show my wife some respect.”

“Sorry, sorry. I got carried away. Really, I came to offer help. Let me get you up at the head table. Courtney, too.”

Shaun sat heavily in his chair. “Listen to you. Making table arrangements. I can’t believe you got an MBA for this.”

“I’m getting the ground-floor view of a growing business. This year, I’m in charge of visitor satisfaction. Two years from now, I’ll be the assistant manager. Two years from that, I plan on being the manager, and from there, who knows? BWI/Opperman has resorts all over the country.”

“The hospitality industry.” Shaun spat the words out. It always sounded like a fancy term for prostitution to him.

Jeremy ignored his sour tone. “The future of the Adirondacks, and of the country, isn’t in manufacturing, Dad. It’s in experiences. Tourism, hospitality, entertainment, games-that’s where the money is.” He waved a languid hand at the office around them. “Unionized labor, taxes, high transportation costs-Reid-Gruyn’s cost per ream of paper produced is almost twice that of GWP’s.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

Jeremy lifted his head. “I pay attention, Dad. I’m a shareholder, remember? I stand to make a lot of money if GWP tenders a good offer.”

Shaun felt as if a live wire had just made contact with his spine. “You can’t be serious. You wouldn’t vote for selling the company.”

“GWP could be the best thing to happen to Reid-Gruyn. They can afford to update the specialty milling presses, they can funnel cheap pulp our way… hell, they can even bring in workers if the union threatens to get out of hand.”

Shaun circled his desk. “This mill has been in our family since 1872! I can’t-that you would even think of throwing it away to those… those… Malaysians!”

Jeremy sat up. “Dad?”

Shaun could only gape at him, his mouth working, trying to find words for the perfidy.

Jeremy stood up and gripped Shaun’s arm. “Dad. Serious. I don’t really want to see the old place get sold. But once that Haudenosaunee timber is taken off the market, our production costs are going to rise. With everything that’s going on in the Middle East, fuel prices aren’t going anywhere but up. Even if you can float the costs for a year or two, eventually they’ll slice so far into the profit margin, Reid-Gruyn will start bleeding red ink.”

“You talk just like my banker.” His voice sounded sulky, even to his own ears.

Jeremy shook him slightly, and Shaun had the inverted sense that he was the child and Jeremy the adult. “This day has been coming ever since you and Grandpa sold off the last of the Reid-Gruyn timberlands in the eighties. You left yourself at the mercy of the landholders, and sooner or later, all land goes for its best and highest use.”

Was this what B-school had done to his son? Bled off all his sentiment and turned him into a living economics textbook? It made him glad he had never gotten an MBA. The import of what Jeremy said sank in slowly.

“Maybe that’s it,” Shaun said, twitching his shoulder enough to break his son’s hold. “Maybe we ought to buy back our own timberland.”

Jeremy’s laugh was abrupt. “You’ve got to be kidding. The tax burden alone would sink your profits. I wasn’t criticizing what you and Grandpa did. It was the right move. Staying in your core business.”

Shaun returned to his desk and began sweeping the papers and spreadsheets and P and L statements into a folder. “I’m not kidding. Haven’t you ever heard of vertical integration? Owning the raw material, the manufacturing plant, and the means to transport it to the market. It could work.”

Jeremy shook his head. “You’ve lost it. The board would never vote to acquire forest land. And anyway, there isn’t timberland anywhere near Washington County that’s for sale.”

Shaun grinned at his son. “Oh, yes, there is. Haudenosaunee.”

Ditch the car. Ditch the car. But where? Randy’s mind ran round and round like a gerbil on a wheel. The sound of the tires on pavement thrumming the question What to do? What to do? What to do?

At one point, he realized it was the car, and not him, shaking. He checked the speedometer. He was doing seventy, twenty miles over the limit. His heart flipped over and he slammed on the brakes, a cold sweat shocking the back of his neck and his underarms. Jesus. A cop could have been hiding in a speed trap and he would have blown right by. Wouldn’t have even noticed until he was pulled over. After that, he kept his eyes on the gauges.

That didn’t solve his problem, though. He needed to dump the car. Someplace where it wouldn’t get found for a while. Someplace that wouldn’t lead the cops to him when they found it. Someplace where he could walk to Mike’s.

The sign for Lick Springs Road gave him the idea. It ran from the mountains down through rolling pastures and teed at Route 57. Route 57 rambled alongside the river that gave Millers Kill its name, through the town and east toward Glens Falls.

And the Reid-Gruyn mill was right off it.

He didn’t stop to ponder the idea. He spun the wheel and heeled the little car onto Lick Springs Road. He wouldn’t leave the car at the plant; that would be stupid. But he could pull in behind the old part of the mill, where nobody ever went, and where no one would see him. He could hike to Mike’s from there.

The only traffic on Lick Springs Road was a minivan with Vermont plates and a tractor hauling a boxy load of hay at the far edge of the breakdown lane. Good. The fewer people who saw him driving this car, the better. Traffic along Route 57 was similarly quiet. His racing heart slowed down. He stopped sweating. No one should be entering or leaving the mill’s parking lot at this time of day. He was in the clear. He slowed as the gate came into sight.

And slowed even further when he saw two cars approaching it from the parking lot. He grunted. How could anyone have such shit luck? He braked hard, yanking the little Prius to the side of the road. There were several maps in the driver’s-door pocket, and he yanked one out, snapping it open in front of his face. I’m a tourist, he thought, just an out-of-towner checking out my map before I get back on the road. I’m a tourist, don’t notice me…

He peeked out behind one edge of the map. A little BMW coupe was easing through the gate. He recognized the driver. Jeremy Reid, the boss’s son. Jeremy had been in his class at Millers Kill High School. Look at the redheaded sonofabitch, driving a car that cost as much as Randy and Lisa made in a year combined. Jeremy accelerated up the road without so much as glancing in Randy’s direction. That was good, that was what he wanted, but it pissed him off anyway.

Randy recognized the next car before he could make out the driver. Mr. Reid’s Mercedes. Oh, he remembered that car. The Joes that made Reid’s money for him would be stumbling across the employee parking lot, clutching their lunches in paper bags, and Mr. Reid would be getting out of that big German car, his cashmere coat sliding off of the leather seat. There may have been some serious belt-tightening at the mill, like Lewis Johnson said, but it sure as hell wasn’t pinching Reid.

As the Mercedes swept past him, Shaun Reid barely visible through the tinted windows, Randy spotted an Adirondack Conservancy Corporation bumper sticker and a Sierra Club decal on the rear.

Guys like Reid didn’t have to worry about losing their jobs, losing their houses. He could just picture the man, writing out checks to the ACC at some fancy fund-raiser. So what if guys like Randy were left with nothing to do but flip burgers. Reid was still going to get his. Reid, and Ed Castle, and the town, they would all get theirs. And what was Randy gonna get? Screwed.

Goddam Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. Goddam better-than-thou tree huggers. Her, too, Becky Castle, laughing at him for wanting to do something with his life instead of rolling over and giving it up to the man.

Becky Castle. Shaun Reid. The Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. It was like one of those cartoons, a big light-bulb going off in his head. He had been thinking small, thinking of stashing her car out of sight somewhere. But that was just getting some space between him and her. What he really needed to do was throw the blame on someone else, so the cops would be so busy looking at this guy they’d never go any farther.

His hands shook as he flicked on the turn signal and steered the Prius back onto the road. He drove through the gates and guided the car, not toward the old mill, as he had thought to do before, but to the administrative offices parking. There was a fancy sign fronting one spot: RESERVED FOR MR. REID. Randy pulled the Prius into the next space.

He turned the engine off and sat huddled in thought. Okay, let’s say he wanted the cops to think Mr. Reid was banging Becky Castle. She was-she had been-a pretty hot babe, in an outdoorsy way. Mr. Reid had already dumped one old wife for a younger model. Who’s to say he wasn’t looking to do it again?

He closed his eyes and pictured getting into the offices. The admin building door was sure to be shut up tight, but the plant door was never locked. From the break room, past the entrance to the mill floor, there was a dark little hall that ran all the way alongside the floor until it reached the ladies’ john. There had been three women working the floor when he was there, and that’s where they went to do their business. The trick was, the bathroom opened from both ends. It had originally been built for the reception area, and when Reid-Gruyn started hiring women at the mill, they just punched a door into the wall to give the ladies their own place to go.

Even if the door was locked on the reception side, it didn’t have anything better than one of those little punch-in buttons. He could pop that in five seconds with a credit card, plant a few things from Becky Castle’s overnight bag in the reception area, and be out again within a minute.

He grinned. And if Mr. Reid’s office had one of those feeble locks… he could really go to town.

His mother’s cousin Nane’s car in the driveway should have tipped Russ off to the chemical stench he discovered when he opened the kitchen door.

“Good Lord.” He waved his hand, trying to clear some breathing room. “What is that?”

“Happy Birthday, sweetie.” His mother sat in one of her kitchen chairs, pulled next to the sink. She was swathed in what looked like a pink plastic tablecloth. Her cousin was rolling a section of her silver hair onto a tiny pink roller.

He bent down to kiss her cheek, his eyes watering. “Hi.” He retreated as far as he could, to the edge of the washer and dryer. “Hi, Nane.”

“Hello, Russell. Aren’t you looking well? We were just talking about you, weren’t we, Margy? About the day you were born.” Nane was older than his seventy-four-year-old mom, but, unlike Russ and his maybe-relation Harlene, the two cousins bore a strong resemblance to each other. Both ladies were short and cylindrical, with plump cheeks that narrowed into pointy chins. They looked like the sort of sweet little old ladies who spent their days tatting doilies. It was a clever disguise.

“I swear,” his mother said, picking up from their earlier conversation, “I didn’t think I was going to be able to push him out.”

“You were almost ten pounds,” Nane said to him, clipping the roller into place on his mother’s head and reaching for a plastic bottle. She squirted something that smelled like chemical solvent on the new curl.

“I had an episiotomy scar you could see from the moon. They cut me from stem to stern.” She chuckled. “The first time Walter saw it he said-”

“Mom! Mom!” Russ clamped his hands over his ears. “Too much information!”

She pursed her mouth. “Really, Russell. You’re a little old to be thinking we found you in the cabbage patch, aren’t you?”

“Can you just wait till I leave before you stroll down that particular memory lane?”

“Well, what did you come for? Are you hungry? I’ve got some sandwich fixings in the icebox. Help yourself, sweetie.”

Lunch had definitely been on his mind on the drive up here, but he didn’t think he could manage eating with poisonous fumes wafting through the air. “What is that smell?” he repeated.

“I’m giving your mother a permanent wave,” Nane said. “She’s going to look like she just stepped out of a New York salon for the party tonight.”

Russ, who had been reading a new bumper sticker-THERE’S A VILLAGE IN TEXAS MISSING AN IDIOT-on his mother’s already plastered-over refrigerator, straightened. “You’re going to the dinner dance tonight? The one at the Algonquin Waters?”

“All the active members of the local ACC chapter have been invited. I told you that, Russell.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, I left a message with Linda.”

He shut up. His mother and his wife had a relationship best described as an armed truce. He wouldn’t put it past Linda to “forget” to tell him about his mother coming, just to make sure they weren’t all roped into sharing a table together. His mother must have had a similar thought, because she said, “I’m sitting with other folks from the ACC.”

“And she’s going to look just wonderful, aren’t you, Margy?” Nane smiled proudly at Russ. “We went into Saratoga and she bought a new dress.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Gee, Mom.”

Her cheeks pinked up. “Just ’cause I’m an old lady doesn’t mean I don’t like to look nice now and again.”

“I better get my reservation in for a dance right now. You’ll probably be so swamped with men I won’t be able to get near you otherwise.”

“Oh, go on. You didn’t drive up here to pitch woo at me. What’s up?”

He decided that he’d be able to stomach a sandwich in his truck. He opened the fridge and dug inside. “Do you know Millie van der Hoeven?”

“Of course. I’ve met her several times since she came back east. She’s been one of the driving forces behind this Haudenosaunee land deal, more power to her.”

He pulled out ham slices, cheese, and a jar of mayonnaise. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“The week before last. The ACC is interested in reclaiming the gardens and the cultivated areas of Haudenosaunee. Replacing the imported plants with native species. They asked for a group of volunteers, and I signed up.”

“You do love to garden, don’t you, Margy?” Nane snapped another roller into her cousin’s hair. Russ’s mother’s head was beginning to resemble a pink-and-white Wiffle Ball.

He opened the bread tin on the counter and pulled out a loaf of pumpernickel.

“We took a little tour of the grounds, made lists of what we saw, and did some brainstorming about plants and a schedule,” his mother said.

“Do you know anything about Millie’s personal life?”

“Like what, sweetie?”

“Like why did she come east, anyway?”

“Well, after her father died last year, she wanted to see Haudenosaunee in public hands. She said she thought that would be the best memorial for him, to have the land he had loved preserved forever wild.”

“Was that an issue? Developing the land?”

His mother pursed her mouth again, this time in thought. “I got the impression that money was the thing that mattered to the older sister. She may have been pushing to use some of the land to turn a profit.”

Russ plucked a bread knife from the drain board and unscrewed the mayonnaise. He looked at the unfamiliar label more closely. It was made from soy.

“Go ahead, sweetie, try it. It’s good for you.”

“Your mother and I are on the Atkins diet. Lots and lots of good protein. You should think about it, too, shouldn’t he, Margy? You’re not getting any younger, Russell. Once you reach that half-century mark, your metabolism slows right down.”

He slathered the soy spread on the pumpernickel. Suspicious, he checked the wrapper. Yep. Low-carb bread. “What about her boyfriend?” he went on.

“What boyfriend?”

“Millie’s. Her brother told me she was seeing some guy from around here. Michael McWhorter.”

Nane squirted another glob of unbelievably foul-smelling liquid onto his mother’s hair. “We know a few Michael McWhorters, don’t we, Margy?”

“Mmm-hmm. But I don’t know as Millie van der Hoeven was seeing any of them. She certainly never mentioned anyone where I could hear her.”

“You haven’t heard any talk around town? Maybe about one of the McWhorters dating a new girl?”

His mother started to shake her head and was caught short by Nane’s iron grip on a strip of hair. “Ow,” she said. “No, I haven’t heard tell of anything like that. Have you, Nane?”

“Not me. But I’m not one to listen to gossip, am I, Margy?”

“I have to say, I’d be very surprised if Millie van der Hoeven was to keep company with any of the local boys. She struck me as too much of a high flyer.”

Russ finished laying out the ham and cheese on his sandwich. Both had proudly proclaimed themselves “low fat” on their wrappers. “What do you mean?”

“She’s a nice girl, don’t get me wrong. And very, very dedicated to preserving the environment. But she doesn’t understand why the rest of us can’t simply hop on a plane and fly to wherever urgent action is needed. She wears all-natural cotton clothing and never eats anything that’s not free-range and organic. I’d like to do the same, I’m sure, but I’m on a fixed income.” She rustled beneath her pink plastic shroud. “I just can’t see her taking up with a boy who has to work for a living. At least, not the sort of work boys do around these parts.”

“Hmm.” He slapped the sandwich together and turned to her cupboards. “Any chips?”

“No chips. Nuts.”

He made a face. “What about her relationship with her brother?”

“They seem very close. She’s sounded a bit exasperated with him at times-”

“And who wouldn’t,” Nane broke in, “having a brother who lives like a hermit all alone up there, never going anywhere or seeing anyone?”

“Well, yes. But she always speaks of him with great affection.”

“Any sign of trouble between them? Him disapproving of her environmental work or anything?”

“Far from it. I believe she was fixing to have him move in with her after the estate sold.”

He picked up the sandwich. “Okay, ladies. Thanks for the lunch. Mom, I’ll see you tonight.”

“Bye-bye, sweetie. Drive careful.”

“I always do. Nane, be good.”

The elderly lady giggled. “I always am,” she said. “Except when I’m not, right, Margy?”

He blew a kiss to both women before escaping to the sweet, fresh air outside. He climbed into his truck, thinking. The boyfriend story was looking increasingly like just that, a story. The question was, had Eugene been lying to him when he brought it up? Or had his sister been lying to Eugene, to cover up absences she didn’t want to have to explain?

He took a big bite of his sandwich and almost spit it out. He stared accusingly at the low-fat, low-carb, soy-enriched crap. Maybe he could stop by the KreemyKakes Diner before he hit the station.

Clare was tromping her assigned pattern with more doggedness than enthusiasm, checking her map, crossing off the ground she unsuccessfully covered. Every step seemed to indict her for not calling Russ about Eugene van der Hoeven’s gun-waving, and every passing minute left her less and less hopeful that they would find Millie van der Hoeven on her family’s land.

When her radio crackled, she had thought it must be the usual half-hour check-in. Instead, Huggins’s voice said, “Fergusson? We’ve got a couple of replacements in from the Albany team. Hand in your map and GPS and go home.”

Always the tactful spokesman, John Huggins. She keyed her radio. “I’m not that tired,” she lied. Her overdeveloped sense of duty forced her to add, “I can keep on going,” even though she had instantly started thinking about how fast she could get to St. Alban’s to help out with the preparations.

“Don’t worry about it,” Huggins said. “These guys have years of experience on you. Of course, they weren’t in the army, but they’ll do.” She thought she could hear laughter in the background before he keyed off. She gritted her teeth. She suspected that along with experience, the relief searchers had the equipment that seemed most important to Huggins: a penis.

She waited until she was sure her voice was civil before answering. “Give me your coordinates, and I’ll drop my stuff off with you.”

Huggins gave her his location, and within twenty minutes she was handing over her topo map and GPS to a pleasant young man with a serious case of labelmania on his outdoor gear. “Thanks,” Huggins said. “I’ll give you a call next time we need you.”

“Give me a call next time you schedule a training,” she said, her tone even but emphatic. “I won’t be much use unless I get better as I go along.”

Huggins grunted.

“No dogs yet?” she asked.

“They’re still up chasing the old lady near Plattsburgh. That search has priority. Can’t disagree with them. Young girl in warm clothing and boots has a hell of a lot better chance out here than a confused old lady in pajamas.”

Clare shivered, then said her good-byes and struck off for Haudenosaunee. She wondered if she was ever going to get used to living in a place where wandering past your backyard could get you killed. Funny. She had studied at Virginia Episcopal Seminary, living in the dense suburban corridor of Arlington County, working at times in Washington, D.C., a city known for, among other things, its crime rate. Yet she had never felt menaced by her surroundings, maybe because ultimately she figured she could always deal with other human beings, reason with them-or, as had happened when she was mugged once, simply surrender her bag. But there was no reasoning with the Adirondack Mountains, nothing you could hand over to ransom your life from six million acres of trackless forest, wild rivers, and hidden lakes. Not to mention arctic air flowing south from Canada and blinding snowstorms blowing east from Lake Ontario.

The woods gave way to a blaze-marked trail, which gave way in turn to a path through the trees. When she reached the stone wall dividing Haudenosaunee’s cultivated garden from the wilderness, she was torn between knocking at the door and seeing if she could talk with van der Hoeven or beating a retreat to Millers Kill, where her church, her volunteers, and a hot shower awaited her. Her grandmother Fergusson prodded her. A lady never leaves without thanking her host. The excuse that she was one of the search team, she knew, wouldn’t cut any ice with her grandmother.

Van der Hoeven was nowhere in sight when she let herself in the front door. The den was open again, but there was no sound or movement indicating anyone was inside. As she walked toward the kitchen, she felt herself quieting her steps, as if she were walking through a museum gallery. The comparison fit. Haudenosaunee, for all its beautiful furniture and rich rugs, had a curiously empty feel to it, as if it had already been closed up for the winter, the family dispersed to their real lives.

She opened the kitchen door. The housekeeper, who was just hanging up the phone, jumped and clutched her heart.

“Sorry!” Clare held up both hands in the universal “I’m harmless” signal. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m leaving, and I wanted to pay my respects to Mr. van der Hoeven before I go.”

Lisa smiled wanly. “I guess I’m not used to other folks being around while I’m cleaning.” She stepped closer, her expression thoughtful. “Are you headed into town? Can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure. What?”

“My car’s in the shop, and my husband was supposed to come get me, but he hasn’t shown, and nobody answers the phone when I call. Could you gimme a lift into town? I’d ask Mr. van der Hoeven, but he has a thing about going off Haudenosaunee.” She glanced toward the small nook at the back of the kitchen, where, Clare saw, the cellar door stood open. Lisa looked back to Clare. “I can stay with a friend in town until I can get ahold of Randy.”

“You don’t live in Millers Kill?”

Lisa shook her head.

“Not that I don’t want to drive you, but wouldn’t you be better off staying put?”

“Um… it’s a little awkward, hanging around once the job’s done.”

Clare thought of the curiously empty feel to the house. She couldn’t blame the woman. She probably wouldn’t want to spend all afternoon waiting for a ride here. “I’ll give you a lift home. Tell me where you live, and I’ll drop you on my way.”

The housekeeper flashed her a relieved smile before bounding over to the open cellar door. “Mr. van der Hoeven? I got a ride! The, um…” She looked at Clare.

“Clare Fergusson.”

“Clare Fergusson’s gonna take me. One of the searchers.”

Clare could hear the groaning of old wooden steps. The housekeeper backed away from the door. It reminded Clare of a scene from one of those old Hammer horror flicks, but instead of pressing her fist against her mouth and screaming, Lisa stepped forward again and asked, “Can I help with that?”

Eugene van der Hoeven-or his hands and legs, all that could be seen behind another two wine crates-appeared at the top of the stairs. “No, thank you,” he wheezed, staggering toward the back door. Clare leapt out of his path. He set the crates down as gently as he could, the bottles inside clinking lightly before settling into place.

He leaned back, cracking his spine, and spotted Clare. “Reverend Fergusson. Are you sure it won’t be an imposition for you to accommodate Lisa? I’m prepared to deliver her home myself.” His face twitched faintly to the right as he spoke.

“There’s no need,” Clare said. “John Huggins has relieved me of duty, so I’m leaving anyway. And you should stay here and wait for word of your sister, not be driving all over town.”

The undamaged corner of his mouth lifted, as if thanking her for that ego-saving excuse.

“I wanted to say good-bye before I left,” Clare went on. She held her hand out. Eugene took it in his. “There are a lot of fine people looking and praying for Millie’s return. I’m sure she’ll be home soon.” She squeezed his hand, then released him. “I’m hoping I get the chance to meet her at the dinner dance tonight.”

Eugene’s eyes warmed with interest. “You’re going to the dance tonight? With the conservancy and the GWP people?”

“Yep.” It suddenly struck her that that might not be a recommendation to a man who held a gun on the ACC’s project director an hour and a half ago. But van der Hoeven surprised her by smiling.

“Could I then ask you to do a favor for me?”

“What sort of favor?”

He indicated the two wine crate towers, each one tastefully stenciled with the van der Hoeven Vineyards mark. “These are promised for the dance tonight. I thought I had hired Randy Schoof to deliver them, but he, for reasons unknown, has failed to arrive.”

No wonder Lisa felt awkward about hanging around van der Hoeven’s house. Clare glanced toward the housekeeper. Her expressionless features contrasted painfully with the pink flush of her cheeks.

“I could take them myself… but as you say, I ought to stay here until I learn something about where Millie is.”

Now van der Hoeven was pinking up. It was the Saturday afternoon embarrassment club. Clare sighed. “I’ll take what I can, but I have a tiny car. I’m afraid I can’t fit in more than four crates.”

Both van der Hoeven and his housekeeper beamed at her. “That would be fine,” Eugene said. He turned to Lisa. “If you do see your husband, you can tell him to come here and pick up the rest. Otherwise,” he waved one hand in a careless arc, “I’m sure the fates will provide a substitute.”

It had better be the fates, Clare thought, leading Lisa and Eugene across the gravel drive, because it wasn’t going to be the Episcopal church. She and Lisa were each lugging one crate, with Eugene staggering beneath the weight of another two. Reaching the Shelby Cobra, she set her crate down and opened the trunk.

“We’re not going to be able to fit four crates into that,” Lisa said.

“I know. Two have to go in back.” She reached for Eugene’s top crate.

Lisa opened the passenger door. “This backseat? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Oof.” She braced the crate against her chest before lowering it into the trunk. Eugene wedged the other one he carried in and turned to the front of the car. Flipping the seats forward and sliding them as far toward the dash as they could go, he and Clare were able to shove the wine into the back, although, like Lisa, he made skeptical noises as he wrestled the crates into place. When they finished, Eugene and his housekeeper stood back and stared at the tiny sports car.

“I wouldn’t have believed it,” Lisa said.

“Nor I.” Eugene gave Clare one of the three-quarters looks she had noticed earlier, his eyes on hers, his face sidling away. “Thank you, Reverend.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’d like to let you in on a secret. At nine o’clock, when the deed is scheduled to be signed, I’m setting off fireworks from here.” He dragged his toe across the gravel. “It’s, ah, not exactly legal in New York State, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to anyone. But I’ve been assured that if you come out to the terrace next to the ballroom at the resort, you’ll be able to see the display.” He dragged his toe the other way, sifting the gravel. “Bring your friends.”

Clare wondered for a moment at his parents, who evidently had never brought their son in for the sort of postin-jury counseling that would have strengthened him and made him able to face the world from behind his skin. She wondered who that boy might have grown up to be, instead of a painfully shy recluse. She thought of him, all alone in the dark, sending up brilliant fountains of fire into the sky. Cries for help that would never be answered.

“I will,” she said. “I’ll look for your light.”

You sure you heard it this way?” Billy Ellis looked doubtfully at his hunting companion.

“As sure as I can be. Gimme a break, Bill. Sound travels funny in the mountains, you know that. But trying to find it’s the least we can do.”

Billy sighed as loudly as he could, signaling he’d play the part of responsible citizen, but he didn’t have to like it. Chuck high-stepped over a tangle of briars and held back a handful of whiplike forsythia so Billy could follow him. Normally, he liked hunting with Chuck. They both had the same attitude: namely, that deer season was an excuse to get away from the wife and kids for a few Saturdays in a row, to eat huge, heart-attack-inducing breakfasts in a greasy spoon, and to partake liberally from their flasks of coffee brandy.

This Saturday had been all set to pleasantly repeat their usual pattern, up to the moment when they heard a faint, faraway cry for help shivering through the empty branches. Billy argued it was probably some damn fool who sat in poison oak taking a dump and who now needed help wiping his ass. Chuck didn’t buy it. A born crusader, if ever there was one, he had been dragging them over brush and briar for the last half hour. At this point, a twelve-point buck could have jumped up and offered Chuck a drink and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“Chuck,” Billy said, trying again.

“Dammit, Billy. That was a call for help. What if somebody’s seriously hurt? Maybe got himself shot?”

“Then it’s like to be some idiot flatlander on his first trip into the woods who saw a doe and shot his foot off in the excitement. If you help ’em, you know, you’re only encouraging ’em to come back.”

Chuck looked back and glared at him.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Billy said. It was hard going. This part of the forest must have been logged or burned over sometime in the past decade; the trees were slim and close-set, still competing with each other for the space and light that only a few mature trees would eventually share. Brambles were everywhere, and Billy kept his gloves cinched tight around his cuffs for protection. They broke through a final screen of bittersweet and sumac and stumbled onto a wide dirt road.

“Where the hell are we?” Billy asked.

Chuck unbuttoned his coat pocket and pulled out his map and compass. He folded the map and held both it and the compass in front of him, squinting in the strong sunshine after the fitful shade of the woods. He turned himself right, then left, then completely around.

“What are you doing?” Billy was losing his patience. “Are we anywhere near the car? Because there’s no way I’m going through that piece of woods again.”

“I think we’re on one of these lumbering roads.” Chuck pointed out a dotted red line on the map. “If we go downhill”-he pointed right-“we’ll come to Route 117. Could be whoever yelled for help is along here someplace. I don’t think we woulda heard it so well if it was on the next access road marked.” He pointed to another dotted red line farther west.

“If whoever yelled is still here-and that’s a big if-he better be downhill. ’Cause I’m damned if I’m hiking uphill for some flatlander.” Billy took off without waiting to see if Chuck followed him. He didn’t have to. He had their car keys.

“We ought to go uphill first.” Chuck ran to catch up with him. “What if we don’t find him downslope?”

“Chuck, I hate to burst your balloon and all, but I gotta tell you this, as a friend. I’ve seen you lose keys and coats and your glasses, and once at the Washington County Fair you lost your kid.”

“I found her again!”

“She turned herself in at the office. What I’m trying to say is, and don’t take this the wrong way, you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

That was when they rounded the bend and saw the girl sprawled in the road. Billy was frozen in place by the surprise for several seconds while Chuck pelted forward, laid down his rifle, and knelt beside her. He turned toward Billy. “C’mere, dammit. You’re the one who took the Red Cross course.”

That broke the spell. Billy ran downslope and skidded to a stop next to them. The girl’s head was bloody; her hand, when he took it into his own, cold. He pinched his fingers over her wrist.

“Is she…?” Chuck looked like he was going to puke.

Billy shook his head. “Get down to the road, see if you can raise some help. She’s alive.”

Sitting felt good. Too good. The tiny, enclosed area inside her Shelby made Clare forcefully aware that she had stepped in and splattered through some unpleasantly decayed substances and that, in her haste to make it out to the search zone on time, she had forgotten to apply her deodorant before she dressed. She stank.

She unrolled her window, then glanced toward Lisa. “Do you mind?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.” Wonderful. Her passenger could smell her, too. She threw the car into gear, said a brief prayer that nothing would break or fall off on the Haudenosaunee drive, and left the great camp behind.

“Where do you live?”

“You go left on Highway 53, then cross Muddy Brook Road, and it’s down Route 127 a ways.” She looked sideways at Clare. “So, I gotta ask, what was in those papers you were reading?”

Clare, startled, took her eyes off the road. That was when she heard it. Two shotgun blasts, one right after another, the sound so close through her open window that she instinctively flinched in her seat.

“What the hell?” Lisa whipped her head around, looking for the source of the shots.

“That’s an alarm signal.” Clare glanced in the rearview mirror. “For hunters. If there’s trouble, they fire twice.” The road was empty in both directions. She stepped on her brakes. She leaned out into the cool air. “Hallo the alarm!” she yelled. “Where are you?”

A garble of voices resolved into a single “Here!” Close.

Lisa pointed down the road. “There’s a dirt road that leads onto the Haudenosaunee land down thataway.”

Clare shifted the car into neutral and let it coast down the county road’s gentle incline. “Keep yelling!” she shouted.

A sound like an underpopulated pep rally swelled up from the woods in front of her. In front and to the left. It grew louder and louder as she rolled down the two-lane highway, until she reached another barely-there dirt road.

“That’s it,” Lisa said. “The lumbering company my husband works for kept its machines there over the summer. Jeez, I hope it wasn’t some kids fooling around got hurt.”

A lone hunter stood at the entrance of the road. He waved his gun in the air and hotfooted it out of the way as Clare turned off of the surfaced road.

“Thank God you heard us,” the hunter said. “There’s a girl unconscious about a half mile up the road. My buddy Billy’s staying with her. We didn’t want to move her. There’s lots of blood, and I think she’s hurt bad.”

Clare and Lisa looked at one another. “A girl?” Clare asked. “A little girl? Or a woman?”

“What does she look like?” Lisa asked, leaning past Clare toward the open window.

The man frowned. “She’s-I dunno, a young woman. Younger ’n you.” he nodded at Clare. “She’s got long blond hair. That’s about all we could tell. I didn’t want to move her any in case she’s hurt her back.”

“Do you think…?” Clare asked Lisa.

The housekeeper nodded. “It sounds like her.”

“Who?” The hunter shifted his gun into his other hand and wiped his face.

“A young woman’s been missing from the van der Ho-even estate. There’s a search team out for her now.” She glanced over at Lisa. “You did say this is Haudenosaunee land, right?” Lisa nodded.

The hunter looked back up the dirt road. “I can tell you at this point, the girl doesn’t need a search team, she needs an ambulance. Do you have a phone? A cell phone?”

Of course. She was an idiot. She reached into her minuscule backseat, tugged her knapsack into her lap, and reached inside for her phone. She turned it on and was greeted by a blank “no signal.” She hissed in frustration. Typical of the mountains. “Look,” she said to the man, “we’ll drive back to Haudenosaunee and use the phone there. That way, we can tell the young woman’s brother she’s been found. Will you stay here to meet the ambulance?”

“Course I will. Hurry,” the hunter said, unnecessarily.

“Hang on,” Clare told Lisa. She reversed the Shelby and tromped on the gas pedal, fishtailing out of the dirt access road. She zoomed back up the mountain highway. Swinging past the stone pillars marking Haudenosaunee’s entrance, she accelerated up the dirt road, her small car jouncing and shuddering. She roared into the gravel drive, skidding to a stop in a shower of small stones and clearly alarming Eugene van der Hoeven, who was crossing from the house to the pathway that led into the woods. He had on a coat, with a small day pack slung over his shoulder. Joining the searchers after the tumultuous events of the morning.

“Reverend Fergusson?” He strode across the drive.

“Some hunters have found your sister,” she said, tumbling out of the Shelby. “I need to use your phone.”

“What?” He paled, his scarred face half-twisting in concern. “Is she…?”

She shook her head, her hair flying out of its knot at the back of her head. “She’s not dead, but she’s been hurt. The hunters who found her are afraid to move her. We need to get an ambulance.”

Eugene stared at her. “Where was she? How did they find her?”

“She’s on one of the access roads, not far from here.” She jerked her thumb to where Lisa was sitting white-faced in the car. “Your housekeeper says it’s where her husband’s timber company keeps its machines.”

“Good God.” Van der Hoeven turned to look at the trail-head that opened between the house and the garage. He turned back to Clare. “Is she… conscious?”

“The phone?”

He shook himself. “Of course. God, what am I thinking?” He bounded toward the porch, took the steps two at a time, and threw open the door. He pointed toward the den. “Will you call it in? Since you know exactly where she is?”

Clare dialed 911 and described the location and what little she had heard of the young woman’s injuries. She hung up, turned, and nearly collided with van der Hoeven.

“You didn’t-you didn’t see her yourself?” His face had regained its control, but he still sounded like a man in shock.

“I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“So you don’t know what happened to her? Was it an accident? Was she attacked?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Look, I need to take your housekeeper home. Why don’t I meet you in the hospital afterward?” She hoped his agoraphobia wasn’t going to prevent him from going to his sister’s bedside.

“The hospital,” he said.

“I could…” Clare searched for a way to make her offer tactful. “I could come back and drive you. Bad news has a way of scattering your concentration. It makes it hard to do ordinary tasks, like making phone calls or driving. I’d be happy to help.”

His eyes snapped into focus. “No,” he said. “Thank you. I can make it to the hospital. I was just thinking that I need to contact the search team first and let them know.” He shouldered the day pack he had slipped to the floor while she was on the phone. “Let’s go.”

Outside, she paused at the foot of the porch stairs. “I’ll meet you at the hospital as soon as I can.”

“Yes.”

Eugene trotted around the house and was out of sight before Clare made it back to her car. “He’s going to tell the search and rescue team Millie’s been found,” she said to Lisa, buckling her seat belt. “Let’s go tell that hunter help is on the way.” Clare careened down the Haudenosaunee drive with Lisa bracing herself against the door and dashboard. The Shelby bumped up and down so violently during the brief trip, it probably shortened its life span by at least a year. Even so, it still felt like too long by the time she pulled up next to the hunter guarding the dirt roadway.

“The ambulance is on its way,” Clare said through her open window. “Do you need any help?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “My friend Billy’s kind of a pain in the ass, but he’s good at first aid. We’ll keep a watch on her until the paramedics get here. There’s no need for you to stay.”

“Her name’s Millie van der Hoeven.”

“You mean, like the van der Hoevens?” He looked around him, as if more members of the Social Register might charge out of the woods. “Geez, this whole place belongs to them.” He returned his gaze to Clare, looking somewhat embarrassed at his starstruck moment. “Don’t you worry. Billy and I’d take good care of her no matter who she was.”

The ambulance siren startled Shaun Reid. He slowed, coasting to the side of the otherwise deserted county road. The ambulance swung round the bend ahead and flew past in a whirl of lights and sound. Heading away from the mountains, toward Millers Kill and the Washington County Hospital. He pulled back onto the highway for the last mile or so to his destination. He was just about to turn into the private road leading to Haudenosaunee when a rusting Jeep Cherokee bounced into view. Shaun once more steered his car to the side of the road; the last thing he wanted was to tangle with a driver that wouldn’t care if his vehicle gave the Mercedes tetanus. After the jeep rattled down the mountain highway, Shaun pulled into Haudenosaunee’s road, only to come head to head with another truck, this one a pickup that evidently needed more than the usual number of tires.

Both drivers edged as close to the enclosing screen of trees as possible and proceeded at a crawl. Shaun powered down his window and gestured to the other driver, a youngish man whose hair, cropped like a marine’s, contrasted with his earring.

“What’s going on?” Shaun asked. “This place is supposed to be as isolated as a monastery, but today there’s more traffic than on the Northway.”

“We’re part of the search and rescue team,” the man said. “Are you a family friend?”

“Business acquaintance.” That was true. He had occasionally dealt with the late Mr. van der Hoeven over the years. “I’m here to see Eugene van der Hoeven.”

“Mr. Van der Hoeven’s sister Millie went missing last night. We’ve had a team here since dawn, looking for her.”

Shit. It would fit in with his current run of luck, wouldn’t it. Van der Hoeven probably wouldn’t even be able to see him. “That’s terrible,” he said with feeling.

“No, she’s been found, which is good, but she’s been hurt. Mr. van der Hoeven was still at home when we left, but he’ll probably be taking off for the hospital any minute now.”

Shaun, digesting the news, barely managed to thank the other driver as he rolled up his window and continued up the road. If that had been van der Hoeven’s sister in the ambulance, as seemed likely, he didn’t have much time to meet the man and make his pitch. Unfortunately, a succession of hulking SUVs and pickups retreating down the road required him to keep wedging his car between their mud-spattered sides and the trees. By the time he reached the gravel expanse of Haudenosaunee’s drive, his hands were clenched and his head pounding. His mood wasn’t improved any when, after parking, he circled his Mercedes and found several fresh scrapes on the passenger side.

Shaun stomped across the gravel and up the porch steps. He paused before ringing the bell, giving himself a moment to get into the right frame of mind. Cheerful. Upbeat. This would only take a moment. He had something to offer that was going to make Mr. van der Hoeven a very happy man. He leaned into the doorbell, then rocked back on his heels. Cheerful. Upbeat.

He glanced around while he was waiting. The so-called great camp wasn’t very impressive. Oh, it was sizable, all right, but if he had had the van der Hoeven money, he’d have put in one of those big, two-story-high windows and decorated the porch with brass lights and done some first-class landscaping. Look at the door, for chrissakes. It was right out of Little House on the Prairie.

The plain door swung open so suddenly he forgot to be Cheerful and Upbeat. “Uh,” he said.

Eugene van der Hoeven stood precisely halfway in and halfway out. He was dressed for the outdoors, in a dark sweater and pants topped by a blaze-orange hunting jacket. His face was tilted, so that one side was less visible than the other, but what Shaun could see was enough. He had heard about van der Hoeven’s boyhood accident, but Christ, he hadn’t expected it to be so…

“May I help you?” Van der Hoeven’s voice was chilly.

Shaun pasted on a smile and stuck out his hand. “Mr. van der Hoeven? I’m Shaun Reid, president and CEO of Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper.”

“Mr. Reid,” Eugene said sharply. He closed his mouth and started again, his voice softer, his irritation controlled. “Mr. Reid. I’m sorry, but you’ve caught me at a bad time.”

“I understand,” Shaun said. “I heard about your sister. I’m so sorry she’s been hurt. I certainly don’t want to keep you. However, if you could spare me just a few minutes of your time, you won’t regret it. I have a business proposal for you that will benefit us both.”

Van der Hoeven managed to peer at Shaun without turning his head and revealing his scars straight on. “Are you sure you’re the president? Of Reid-Gruyn? The same company that owns the mill?”

Shaun raised his hand. “I swear. I’m not trying to sell you vacuum cleaners or life insurance.”

Eugene stepped into the house. Shaun stood, paralyzed. What had just happened? Was he supposed to come in? He took a step forward and then scrambled backward as van der Hoeven surged out of the door, a backpack over his shoulder.

“I’m on my way out,” van der Hoeven said. “You have five minutes.” He continued past Shaun and down the steps. Shaun clattered after him.

“You and your siblings are selling off the Haudenosaunee lands. I’m guessing there was a problem with your father’s estate planning and that you all owed a lot more in taxes than you expected.”

Eugene’s step faltered. He shot a look at Shaun.

“You may have thought only a large operation like GWP could afford to make an offer on your property. Not true. I’m here to propose Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper as your partner.”

They came to a stop in front of the three-bay garage. “Reid-Gruyn can afford to purchase a quarter of a million acres?” Eugene said. “I’m impressed.” He bent to lift the garage door.

Shaun wondered if the lack of an electric door opener indicated the van der Hoevens were worse off than he suspected, or if it was more of that old-money-cheaper-than-thou act.

“I was thinking more of fifty thousand acres,” Shaun said, grabbing the edge of the door as it rose and helping it up. “That would still leave two hundred thousand to be preserved in their natural state,” he added, in case van der Hoeven was more of a tree hugger than he thought.

“GWP and the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation want to preserve the whole parcel.” Poised once more between the sunshine outside and the shadow within, van der Hoeven’s face twisted in an expression of disgust. “My family has managed and protected this land for a century and a half, and a fifteen-year-old organization staffed by out-of-state do-gooders and underemployed biologists believes it can do a better job.” He snorted. “I’d like to see the nonprofit that can hang together for as long as the van der Hoevens have.”

Yes. This was it, this was what Shaun had been looking for. A kindred soul, who understood that it wasn’t about the business. It wasn’t about the money. It was about stewardship. Accepting the responsibility from the previous generation, holding it for the next.

Unwarmed by the day’s sunshine, the interior of the garage was dank and cold. The first two bays held a Land Cruiser and a Volkswagen Beetle and smelled of oil and old packed earth. The third bay stored wicker lawn furniture, a garden cart, a folded canvas sun umbrella, and an ancient lawn mower. It smelled faintly of Shaun’s eighteenth summer.

Eugene fished a single key from his pocket. Shaun darted past him to the side of the Land Cruiser. “You and I are in the same situation,” he said, hurrying to make the sale before van der Hoeven got into his vehicle and drove away. “We both head family concerns. And both of us are being pushed by people who think GWP will do a better job than we can. I don’t want to take Haudenosaunee land away from your family. I want to go into partnership. Reid-Gruyn will manage the timber harvest, and the van der Hoevens will continue to protect the land as they see fit.”

Eugene sidled past him and opened the driver’s door.

“Except unlike a onetime payment that you’ll receive from GWP, our partnership will provide a steady stream of income.”

One foot in the truck, van der Hoeven paused. “How’s that?”

“The sale will be in cash and stock. The van der Hoevens will become part owners in Reid-Gruyn. Hell, between our two families, we could take the company private again.”

“I’m not a businessman, Mr. Reid. I have no interest in running a company. And our family investments are very well managed by A. G. Edwards and Sons.”

“You don’t have to be a businessman. You have the natural resource. I have the experience.” Shaun inched closer. “Do you really want to sign over all control of your land to the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation? Those people will micromanage your home so thoroughly you won’t be able to plant a tulip or burn off a caterpillar nest.”

Eugene opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. “It doesn’t matter. The land isn’t going to be sold.”

Shaun felt his jaw hanging open. He scrambled for solid footing. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. We won’t be signing over any control to anyone.”

Shaun was baffled. “But a representative of GWP spoke with my board members just two days ago. He was confident the deal was going through.” It had been the man’s assurance that had scuttled his remaining support on the board.

He gathered his proof. “And my son works for the Algonquin Waters. He just stopped by this morning to talk to me about the banquet tonight. My wife and I are attending.”

“You are? Excellent.” Van der Hoeven leaned into the backseat and tugged out a crate. Shaun could hear bottles clinking inside. “I’m trying to make sure this gets to the hotel in time for the ceremony tonight. If you’d deliver it, I’d be grateful.”

I’d be grateful. Shaun put on his best smile. “Be happy to help.” He accepted the crate from van der Hoeven’s hands and turned toward his Mercedes. He was surprised to hear more clinking. He swung around. Van der Hoeven had another crate of wine out of the Land Cruiser. The younger man nodded at Shaun to lead the way.

Now this is surreal. The dazzle of sunshine, after the darkness of the garage, made his eyes water. He had left his keys in the ignition, so rather than retrieving them to pop the trunk, Shaun opened the rear passenger door and slid his crate onto the backseat. Van der Hoeven nestled the second crate next to the first.

“So you’re supplying Château van der Hoeven for the party, but you say there’s not going to be a deal.”

The younger man flushed, on one side of his face only, and twitched his head to the right. “They’re getting our wine. They’re not getting our land.” He stepped backward. “I thank you. And now, I have to bid you good day.” He turned and strode toward the garage, leaving Shaun standing there like a delivery boy who’s just gotten his order form signed.

“But-” Shaun said.

“Thank you,” van der Hoeven tossed over his shoulder.

Shaun shut the rear door, crossed around the back of the car, and opened the driver’s door like a man in a dream. He keyed the ignition and looked one more time toward the cold darkness of the garage. He couldn’t see van der Hoeven. He shifted and looped around the drive, heading for the private road. What the hell had just happened? Could van der Hoeven have been telling the truth? Was that it, all his worries about losing their source of pulpwood, gone in an instant? It didn’t seem believable. And why would the van der Hoevens just pass up the millions they stood to gain on the deal? It sure as hell wasn’t because the stock market’s performance had wiped away all their money worries.

Unless… his foot eased off the gas as the thought formed itself. Unless the van der Hoevens and GWP had decided to cut the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation out of the deal. The price to be paid to the family was based on the value of the land, but that value must have been adjusted downward to compensate GWP for turning all the easements over to the ACC. GWP would be the landholder in name only. All the potential economic value from the property-money from natural resources, money from development-would belong to the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. And the ACC wasn’t going to use it. They would never realize one red cent from Haudenosaunee. But what if GWP had decided to keep all the property rights? With their money and lobbying power down in Albany, they could buy approval of any number of “ecologically sensitive” developments around the lakes and mountains encompassed in Haudenosaunee’s vast acreage.

Christ. The money from timber was nothing. Hell, a year’s-five years’ profits at Reid-Gruyn were change from a lemonade stand compared to the money that could be made developing real estate at that scale.

Shaun had reached the county highway. He looked left, then right. The coast was clear. Was he going to slink back home with nothing more to show for his efforts than a few bottles of wine?

He rammed the Mercedes forward, backward, forward, in a tight three-point turn that put him nose up on the Haudenosaunee road again. He stomped on the gas. He considered the chance he might crunch into van der Hoeven’s Land Cruiser, heading down the drive, Eugene hurrying to his sister’s side. Bring it on. A collision would hang up the bastard for as long as it took a tow truck to come up from town and clear the narrow road. And if Shaun couldn’t get the whole story out of him by then, he’d follow van der Hoeven to the hospital and hang around the waiting room.

Randy had walked out of the Reid-Gruyn parking lot without running into another soul. He headed down the side of the road toward Glens Falls, but when, after fifteen minutes, he came to a Stewart’s convenience store, he figured he’d give it a shot and see if Mike was already home.

Mike picked up on the third ring. “Hey, man,” Randy said. “Can I ask you a favor? Can you meet me at the gas station just down from the mill?”

“What are you doing there?”

“Long story. I’ll tell you later. Can you come get me?”

“Sure. You got good timing-I just got back from hunting. I got my buck this morning, isn’t that cool?”

Mike was at the Stewart’s in ten minutes. Everything was humming along, right like it ought to. Randy thought of all those times he had heard somebody say, He’s getting away with murder. And now he was.

Randy hadn’t realized that “just back from hunting” translated to a freaking big bloody deer corpse tied to the hood of Mike’s car. He couldn’t stop staring at the thing, its head lolling and bouncing with every pothole they hit, its big brown eyes staring sightlessly at him through the windshield.

“So my brothers were totally whipped when I bagged him,” Mike was saying, the glow from his victory in the sibling wars still shining from his face. “Two years in a row, I got my buck first. Two years! Yeah!” He raised a clenched fist in salute.

“That’s great, man.” They bumped over a frost heave in the road, and the deer nodded in agreement. You bet! “They still out there looking to get theirs?”

“Nah. By this time of day, the deer are all bedded down. They’ll be back out there tomorrow at dawn, I bet. While I’m sleeping in, dreaming of venison steak.”

Randy wondered if anyone had found Becky Castle yet. Should he drive by later to see? What if somebody saw him? He glanced out the side window at the clear sky. No cloud cover. Cold tonight. Below freezing and then some. He and Lisa would roll tight together under their quilts, keeping each other warm. And Becky Castle?

It might be better if nobody finds her. The idea scared him. The idea of going back there scared him. But it wouldn’t go away, the dark thought, like a long afternoon shadow seen out of the corner of his eye. If she wasn’t found, there would be no need for him to sweat and worry and wait to see cops at his door, looking for him.

After all, he hadn’t meant to kill her. He hadn’t even meant to hurt her, just to get the damn camera back. If she… disappeared… there wouldn’t be anything pointing to murder. Just another person who went into the mountains unprepared and never came out again. It happened every year.

A bad pothole jolted them down and up. The deer’s head thumped and nodded on the hood, its dry eyes on Randy. Life’s hard out in the mountains. It’s easy to die.

He didn’t have to make up his mind. He could just go over there. See if she’d been found. He’d just check. He turned to Mike. “I gotta go pick up Lisa from her cleaning gig. You mind if I don’t help you get the deer off when we get back to your place?”

Mike shrugged. “I can handle it.”

“Look, would you do me a favor? If it comes up, I been with you the last hour and a half.”

Mike took his eyes off the road to glance at Randy. “An hour and a half ago I was humping the deer outta the woods.”

“There wasn’t anybody with you, was there?”

“No.”

“Did you stop to register the deer at a station?”

“Nah. I figured I’d call it in.”

“Well, there you go. Nobody can say that we weren’t together.”

Mike looked suspicious. “What’s up?”

Randy hesitated. “I don’t want to tell you. But it’s nothing that’ll come back and bite you in the ass, if you’re worried.”

“You ain’t screwing around on Lisa, are you?”

Randy’s jaw dropped. “No! I’d never do that.” He shook his head and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s got nothing to do with her.”

“Okay, then.” Mike nodded, satisfied. “You were with me.”

This would be perfect. On his way to pick up Lisa, he would cruise past the logging road where he’d left Becky Castle. See what was going on. If anyone was there-he had a vague image of a scene from CSI, with a fire truck and an ambulance and cops-he’d just keep on going. If she was still there… no one would be surprised at the sight of a hunter coming back out of the woods empty-handed.

They pulled into Mike’s driveway and stopped. The stiffening deer sagged in its ropes, as if relieved to have reached its final destination at last.

“Hey. Can I borrow that extra orange vest you got? And your orange gloves?”

Mike looked surprised. “You going into the woods?”

“Lisa’s working way up in the mountains. I figure it can’t hurt to be careful.”

Mike opened his door and unfolded himself from the tiny seat. He stretched and thumped the buck’s rump affectionately. “You got that right. Some of the guys wandering around up there? You can’t be too careful.”

To his surprise, Shaun didn’t meet Eugene van der Hoeven on his precarious ride back up the Haudenosaunee road. He roared onto the gravel drive and parked. Getting out of his car, he could see that the garage door was now shut. What the hell? There was no way the man could have left without passing Shaun.

Was there another way to the county road? Shaun studied the open space between the garage and the house. Framed by stalks and stakes from now-dead flower beds, there was enough room to drive a vehicle through, a path leading past the house and gardens into the woods. He glanced back at his Mercedes and amended that to a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

He rattled across the gravel drive and peered through the streaky, cobwebbed window at the side of the garage. The Land Cruiser was still there. He glanced at the porch. There was something about the blankness of the windows that made him think, There’s no one home. In an instant, he abandoned the garage and headed up the path. If he were a scientist, he’d examine every location, in order, to determine van der Hoeven’s whereabouts. But Shaun was a businessman and experienced, he could say without bragging, in making decisions based on a handful of facts and a gut feeling. Right now, his gut was telling him that if he wanted to buttonhole Eugene, he was going to have to find him in the woods.

Ten yards or so past Haudenosaunee’s stone-fenced backyard, the trail split. He stood, indecisive, reaching for a spark of intuition, when a faint noise to his right made clairvoyance unnecessary. He went as quickly as he could without kicking up the leaves drifted over the path. He couldn’t have said why, but silence seemed like a good idea.

The way was broad and easy. Shaun wasn’t one for botany-he left the flowers to Courtney-but even he could recognize that this branch of the trail wound through overgrown apple trees and berry bushes run wild. Cultivated land, then, or at least it had been a few decades ago. It wasn’t until he saw gray stone and charred timber through the gnarled branches that he realized where he was headed. The old Haudenosaunee. The first great camp.

He stood stock still and stared. It was like stumbling over the corpse of a dragon, its massive ribs burnt and broken, its stone skin tumbled in or scattered piecemeal on the ground. Holly and boxwood advanced across what must once have been a lawn, their hard-edged, dark green foliage an impenetrable wall. Feral rose vines clawed up the remaining walls, and through the outlines of windows and over the jagged fence of scorched timber, young hemlocks bristled out at him like adolescent giants.

It was a scene out of a fairy tale, complete with a single intact tower rising out of the forest at the far edge of the ruined house. What were buildings like that called? He had seen some on a historic-houses tour in England.

A folly. That’s what it was. This one must have been meant for viewing the scenery; he could see two wide, Roman-arched openings, each tall enough to accommodate a small cluster of sightseers, the lower one facing due west, the next a quarter turn round to the south and a floor higher. The airy effect was spoiled, though, by the blank stones and arrow slits piercing the other parts of the tower. It looked as if the architect and the owner had disagreed about whether they wanted an Italian duomo or a battlement, and each had gotten half his own way.

As he marveled at the architectural oddity, a man passed through the southern gallery and disappeared.

Shaun blinked. Had that been Eugene? He had only glimpsed the figure from the waist up, wearing blaze orange over something dark. Shaun walked a few steps toward the tower, then faltered. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but wrecked mansions and vanishing figures were out of his usual arena. Maybe… maybe coming out here wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe he had better go back down the path, get into his car, and drive away. He could catch van der Hoeven another time. If it was van der Hoeven he had seen.

But who else could it be?

He took another few steps. Then another.

One part of his head was already gone, down the path and in the Mercedes. Picking out a CD. Going home.

The other part of his head was whirling with opportunities, with advantages, with unanswered questions about the GWP deal, about Haudenosaunee, about this place, which everybody knew had been the site of van der Hoeven’s great tragedy.

Then he saw the blanket. Heavy wool, brightly striped, dangling off the upper branches of a birch tree growing hard by the edge of the tower. Clean of bird droppings and dried leaves. Unstreaked by rain, unfaded by sun. That blanket hadn’t been outdoors very long. And it hadn’t gotten into the tree by someone throwing it up from the ground. He glanced up at the dark rectangular openings at the top of the tower. Despite the brilliant sunshine, he felt a shiver go through him.

What the hell was Eugene van der Hoeven doing?

He ran for the tower door.

Clare had wanted to wait until the ambulance arrived. It seemed wrong somehow, driving on while a young woman was bleeding on a dirt road a half mile away. But the hunter had pointed out she would have to move her car anyway, in order for the ambulance to get in, so she and Lisa, who clearly just wanted to get home, took off.

“I’ll swing by the hospital after I drop you,” Clare was saying. “Poor woman. God, who would do something like that?”

“That boyfriend they were talking about? Maybe someone from that group that sent her the brochures?” Lisa shuddered in her seat. “I just hope her brother’s not around when they catch the guy.”

“Mr. van der Hoeven? Why?”

Lisa’s eyes widened. “You saw him this morning, didn’t you? With the rifle? I swear, I think if you hadn’t yelled, he would have shot that girl. If he was willing to do that to someone delivering bad news, just think what he’d do to someone who hurt his sister. He really loves her.”

“He’s never been violent before, has he?”

Lisa shook her head.

“Then it was probably a onetime thing. His sister was missing, he was stressing about the land sale, and he acted irresponsibly with a firearm.” Lisa gave her a jaundiced look. “Okay, very irresponsibly. I don’t condone it, but that doesn’t mean he’s about to go out and act like Dirty Harry.”

“Who?”

And Russ thought he was getting old. “It means to be a vigilante.”

“Whatever. I’m just saying. He looked like he was ready to get medieval all over that woman. If he hadn’t had that shotgun, he would have been all over her anyway.” Lisa pointed to where a sign announced the intersection of Muddy Brook Road with Highway 53. “Turn right there.”

“From what I’ve seen of him, Eugene doesn’t seem like the type of man who’d let himself get physically close enough to anyone to assault them.” Clare signaled and turned onto the road. “He’s carrying around a load of baggage from that fire he was in.”

“No lie. You know, his mother died in that fire.”

“Good God, really?” Clare slowed down as Muddy Brook Road approached another narrow blacktop.

“Go left here. Yeah. I guess she and his father had been divorced for a while, but she was up at the camp visiting. From what I heard, she was looking for stuff to take from the old building, you know, to use in her new home? Mr. van der Hoeven-well, he was Eugene then, wasn’t he? Only, like, fourteen years old. He was helping her.”

“How did the fire start?”

“I dunno. I wouldn’t have known all that about his mother, except the lady who used to clean for them, she filled me in when I took over for her.”

“Had they had a bad divorce? Eugene’s mother and father?”

“According to her, it was all smiles and roses. Whatever fucked him up, you can’t blame it on a bad childhood.” There was a beat. Clare waited for it, and wasn’t disappointed. “Sh-” Lisa clapped both hands over her mouth before she could swear again. She looked at Clare with enormous eyes. “I forgot you’re a minister. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’ve heard the word before. Even said it a time or two.”

“Really?” Lisa jerked her gaze away from Clare. “There. There’s our drive.”

Clare turned into a rutted dirt road remarkably like the one to Haudenosaunee, complete with kidney-jarring bumps and exhaust-scraping potholes. It never ceased to amaze her, the number of country residents in the Adirondacks who had driveways longer than the average suburban street.

There were several cars in the side yard, none of them looking remotely drivable. She pulled in close to the forlorn steps leading up to an unadorned front door. The house, set in the middle of a bare expanse of dying grass and dirt, seemed unspeakably lonely. No flowers, no bushes, nothing but the limitless forest stretching away in all directions. Lisa climbed out of the car.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay all by yourself?” Clare asked.

“Sure.” She smiled crookedly. “I don’t know who did it, but I can guarantee you whoever worked over Millie van der Hoeven isn’t coming after me.”

Millie never would have guessed fear for her life could be washed away by sheer boredom. At first she had waited, her heart pounding with a combination of fear and rage, next to the door. Later, she hobbled around and around the circumference of the walls, peering as best she could out of the arrow slits, going over and over her plan in her mind. As time slipped past and the sunshine disappeared from the wooden floor, she found it harder and harder to focus-on her planned attack, on her anger, even on her fear of what was to come.

The adrenaline that had spurred her to action earlier burned away, leaving her cold and shaky and tired. She had used the bucket twice more, each time successfully. She tried to ease the cramping pain in her shoulders by leaning into the stones, by sitting, finally by lying on her side on her remaining blanket. She came close to drifting off, only to be snapped awake by the distant cawing of a raven.

The boredom was as painful as her shoulders and wrists-nothing to do, nothing to look at, not even her own voice to keep her company. She began to yearn for her captor to come back, not so much so she could escape but so the endless, monotonous waiting would be over.

Plus, she was hungry. And thirsty. Her stomach had started rumbling at least an hour ago, and beneath her duct-tape gag, her mouth was tissue-paper dry.

What if no one came?

What if she wasn’t being held for ransom but had been snatched by someone who wanted revenge? Although it was difficult to imagine who, or who the target of the revenge might be. Once in a while her mother offended some other Palm Beach matron with whom she played bridge, but those ladies were more likely to spike her mother by tittle-tattling on her face-lift than by kidnapping her daughter. Eugene’s poor mother, who might have held a grudge against the woman who stole her husband, was dead. And Louisa’s mother didn’t give a damn about anything except her horses.

Millie rolled from her side to her back, wincing, and rocked herself into a seated position. Her lower back twinged, and her stomach growled. Stones, bucket, blanket, floor. Nope, nothing had changed. The thinnest line of sunlight striped the floor beneath the western window. Must be past the noon hour.

What if no one came?

There was a scrape at the door. A bolt drawn back. A shock of amazement surged through her, and for a split second all she could do was stare. Then her head caught up with the rest of her senses, and she kicked against the floor furiously. She scooted across the planks, desperate to reach the wall and get on her feet. The door swung open.

It was a man. The brilliant blue sky framed in the open gallery arches behind him cast him into shadow, making him hard to see. Boots, dark pants, a dark sweater, and a blaze-orange jacket. Face hidden by an olive green balaclava. All of it straight off the floor of an army-navy surplus or hunting supply store. In his hand, a dark backpack, just large enough to hold a lethal explosive. Weapons. Surgical tools. A video camera.

He stooped over to set it on the floor. She thrust against the wooden planks once, twice, and fetched up hard against the solid stone. She raised her knees, planting her boots on the floor. With aching thighs, she heaved herself into a standing position.

Her captor stood as well. He held up his hand, one finger raised, as if to ask, Can you wait just a moment? He reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a horn-handled knife, and unfolded it.

Some remote part of her stood apart, amazed that she didn’t fall on the floor in a dead faint. Instead, Millie braced herself against the wall and let the iron hinge pin slide from between her wrists into her palm. She felt clearheaded, weirdly calm, like a shock victim before the pain sets in. She prepared to fight for her life with both hands tied beneath her back.

The man paused. Looked behind him. Then she could hear it, too, a rhythmic creaking noise. She was utterly incapable of placing the sound until the man flipped his knife shut and ducked back out the door, closing it. Of course. The stairs. The winding stairs between the galleys were wooden, and old, and a memory fell into her head, entirely complete, of climbing them, her father’s big hand holding hers, letting her peep over the railing at the mountains rolling away on every side. Her father’s step made the stairs creak just like that.

The man had gone. He had shut the door.

But not locked it.

Was it a trick? Was there a whole gang of them out there? Maybe arguing over what to do with her? She gripped the pin, her only weapon, more tightly. Swaying forward, she hobbled toward her cell’s single flat wall. Not toward the door itself. Next to the door. Where someone whose eyes were filled with the bright November sky would find it hard to see her, if only for a moment. She knew what she had to do.

Shaun didn’t like the stairs. They were lit only by the residual light from the galleries, so that in the very middle of their wall-hugging curve, he climbed in darkness. The stone walls pressed suffocatingly close on either side, and decades of raw weather blowing in from the open arches had left far too many steps half rotten, the tread sagging beneath his weight.

It was hard maintaining forward momentum under circumstances like that. The higher he got, the slower he climbed, at every turn wondering who-what-awaited him at the top. His head and shoulders felt hideously vulnerable. Every instinct for self-preservation shrieked at him to turn around and go home and never look back, but an imperfect, unarticulated thought kept him climbing. He couldn’t put it into words; it was more of an equation. Secret+van der Hoeven=leverage. Or perhaps IF van der Hoeven’s actions=illegal, THEN opportunity. Whatever it was, it was enough to spur him slowly upward, despite his skin shrieking that something bad was about to happen.

“What the hell are you doing here?” The shape looming over him was much too big to be van der Hoeven, and Shaun knew a strangled instant of panic. Then the man yanked his balaclava over his head, and Shaun realized it was van der Hoeven’s angle, above him on the stairs, and his oversized sweatshirt that had made him appear larger than life.

“This is private property,” Eugene hissed. “Get out now, before I call the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”

Why was he whispering? Shaun’s glance flicked past van der Hoeven to the gallery just visible beyond his shoulder. What was he hiding? “This is a very interesting place you’ve got here,” Shaun said loudly.

Eugene’s head whipped around to look behind him. That was all Shaun needed. He charged up the stairs, slamming bodily into van der Hoeven, and kept going.

The younger man let out an outraged cry and grabbed him by the shoulders. Shaun bent forward, breaking van der Hoeven’s grasp, and stumbled up another step. “What do you have up there?” he asked. “What’s going on, Eugene?”

“Get out! Get out!” van der Hoeven’s voice was almost shrill. He lunged at Shaun, but the heavier man squared his shoulder and absorbed the blow before knocking van der Hoeven back. The younger man stumbled, caught himself, but retreated a step.

Shaun almost smiled. Lightweight. This was what not having to work did to a man. “C’mon, Eugene,” he said, lowering his voice. “I want to be your friend. Just tell me. I won’t blab it around.”

Eugene’s face was a stark divide: the unscarred half bright red, the scarred half ice white. He lunged for Shaun, who danced up three steps and avoided him. Eugene’s outstretched hands slapped against the wooden tread.

“What’s going on, Eugene?” Shaun glanced over his shoulder. He was almost at the gallery. The light from the open arches showed, instead of the wide and empty circular rooms of the first and second floors, a wall. And a door. With a keyhole. “Is there something in there? Shall I take a peek?”

“It’s my sister.”

The voice was so low Shaun wasn’t sure he had heard what he thought he heard. “Your sister?”

Eugene bent over, hands on his knees, nodding.

“Bullshit,” Shaun said. “I spoke with one of the search and rescue team. Your sister’s been found.”

Eugene shook his head. “No. That’s what I told him. To get rid of them.”

“The ambulance passed me on the road! Don’t tell me the paramedics were hauling ass to the hospital because you told them to.”

“I don’t know who they actually found! Somebody they mistook for my sister!”

“There was another woman, hurt and unable to tell anybody who she is, who just happened to be found on your property. And you’ve got your sister, who everybody thinks is this injured woman, locked up in a tower.” Shaun stared at van der Hoeven, amazed that he had sweated bullets over pitching a partnership deal to this guy. “You are one sick freak,” he said, and strode up to the gallery.

“Wait!” Eugene scrambled after him. “Goddammit, wait!”

Shaun reached for the iron door handle. Eugene knocked him out of the way. Shaun stumbled back. The door swung open, and a blond battering ram exploded from out of nowhere, head-butting van der Hoeven in the gut, sending him flying into the next level of stairs.

Shaun caught a glimpse of wild, panicked eyes and a mass of hair before the woman’s unchecked momentum sent her sprawling on the floor. Her hands and feet were bound, and she was squalling loudly, in a horrifyingly voiceless way that made him wonder if she was a deaf mute-or worse, if her tongue had been cut out.

“Christ,” he said. “Holy Christ.” He turned, ready to hammer van der Hoeven into the floor. The younger man’s blow caught him by surprise and sent him reeling. He clawed at thin air, desperate for a purchase to stop him from a fatal tumble backward down the stairs. He twisted, grabbed the edge of the archway, and stumbled forward.

Eugene pounced on the woman, seizing her ankles and dragging her back into the room. Shaun lurched toward them, knocking into van der Hoeven, but the other man was ready for him this time and rolled back with the blow, sending Shaun sprawling onto the floor inside the room. Eugene tried to grab the woman’s ankles again, but she twisted and kicked so violently that he gave up and shoved his hands beneath her torso instead, shoving her with enough force to flip her over.

Shaun staggered to his hands and knees, shaking his head to clear it. The woman-the girl, she looked young enough to be his daughter-grunted and groaned as van der Hoeven shoved her even farther away from the door, but he could see the gag preventing her voice from spilling out. She was still fully dressed, so the bastard hadn’t molested her yet-

Van der Hoeven straightened. Dug a long iron key out of his pocket. Sprang for the door. The door with the decorative lock that must, Shaun realized, be fully functional. The bastard was going to lock him in.

It had been over thirty years, but by God he still remembered how to tackle. Eugene went down, half in and half out of the doorway. The key thunked on wood somewhere beyond his head, but as soon as Shaun loosened his hold to climb off the floor, van der Hoeven kicked him in the face. Shaun howled, clutching at his nose, blood spurting from between his fingers. Eugene was all over him, punching, clawing, shrieking, “Leave her alone! I’m protecting her! Leave her alone!”

Roaring, Shaun surged to his feet, using his weight to slam van der Hoeven backward. “Give me the goddam key!” he snarled.

Van der Hoeven rolled, faster than Shaun would have thought possible, his hand closing over the key. He continued to roll, evading Shaun’s lunge, scrambling to his feet. He kicked up, like a kid playing soccer, and connected with Shaun’s breastbone. His air rushed out so fast Shaun thought a lung was collapsing, and his heart-he clutched at his chest. Jesus Christ, was he having a heart attack?

“I told you to leave!” Eugene rushed him. Shaun, still flailing and airless, feebly warded off the blow. “I told you!” He slammed into Shaun again, sending him tottering through the open door.

Shaun tried to demand van der Hoeven let the girl go, but he was wheezing so hard, what emerged was “Let… girl…” and a series of gasps.

“She’s here for her own protection,” Eugene said, and his hand closed over the edge of the door, and Shaun saw what was going to happen, saw himself imprisoned by this lunatic, this fucking rich man’s son who hid out in the woods so no one knew he had gone insane, and his rage and fear filled him up until it stretched his skin and then even the bounds of his body couldn’t hold it back and he was surging, up, forward, plowing into van der Hoeven with all the force his seventeen-year-old self had used plowing into a row of defensive linebackers and the key arched out of van der Hoeven’s hand and Shaun roared and they thudded against something hard and unyielding and van der Hoeven tilted-

– and there was a moment, before gravity caught him, his eyes wild with fear, looking at Shaun, begging him, begging him-

Shaun slammed forward. Eugene fell over the gallery rail, screaming, screaming until there was a wet thud and the scream cut short.

Shaun stared at the unmoving figure that used to be Eugene van der Hoeven. There was noise around him: the rattle and rustle of the wind in the November trees, the cawing of crows, a rhythmic muffled whine behind him. But he was staring down into a well of silence, into a place where noise and movement and life were swallowed and went still.

He stared and stared, waiting for an arm to twitch, for a chest to heave upward, knowing as he did so that it wasn’t going to happen. The rhythmic noise wormed its way into his frozen brain, first as a whine, then as an annoyance, and then, as his brain unfroze and the living world closed over the well, as a fear.

He whirled. The blonde in the room had squirmed across the floor and was inching her way into a standing position against the far wall. She met his eyes, and he could see she was terrified.

“It’s okay,” he said, approaching her. She shrank against the wall in a way that made him feel like a loathsome worm. “Really. It’s okay. He can’t hurt you.” He reached for her duct-tape gag. She flinched away, her eyes flooding with tears. “I’m going to take this off. I’m sorry, but it’s going to hurt.” He pried off a tiny edge while she stood, trembling, and then yanked as hard as he could.

She made a noise he would never forget as long as he lived-half scream, half wail. “You killed my brother,” she said, her heart breaking in her voice. “You killed my brother. I saw you.”

Shaun stood there, the duct tape dangling stupidly from his fingers, while the young woman sobbed. “Your… brother.”

She nodded.

“You’re Millie van der Hoeven?”

She nodded.

He was utterly lost. What was going on? Were they into some sick bondage fantasy? “What the hell was he doing with you up here?” he asked.

Her lunge took him by surprise. He fell heavily backward, Millie thudding on top of him. With her hands held behind her back, she tried to hit him with her head. He shoved her away roughly and scrambled to his feet.

“He was trying to rescue me,” she said, her voice twisted by grief and rage.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Shaun’s confusion was settling into his stomach as an ache and an anger. He had rescued this girl, goddammit. She should at least show him some gratitude. Not try to club him unconscious with her skull. “You were the one who knocked him on his ass when he came through the door! Don’t tell me that’s how you get rescued.”

She pressed her cheek flat on the floor. Tears ran over her nose and dripped onto the wood. “He hid his face,” she said more quietly. “He hid his face and he had a knife and I didn’t recognize him.”

“Yeah? Well, when a masked man with a knife comes after you, it doesn’t commonly mean that he’s here to save you.” He strode to the backpack lying near the door. It was the same one van der Hoeven had been carrying earlier. “Let’s just see what he had in store for you, shall we?” He unzipped the bag and upended it.

A Thermos fell out, clanging dully on the wooden floor. Two sandwiches followed. An apple rolled out, landing on the sandwiches. He shook it again, numbly, and a roll of toilet paper bounced to the floor. A slim thermal blanket slithered out after it.

Shaun stared at the young woman sprawled on the floor. She looked at the food and supplies, then at him. “You killed my brother,” she said.

He backed out of the room and slammed the door. The key. The key. He scrabbled around the base of the stairs where he had seen the thing fall. When his hand closed over it, he sagged with relief before turning to the door and locking it. He pocketed the key, and then, without being conscious of descending, he was outside the tower.

It was the same day it had been when he went inside. The sun had hardly budged in the sky. The trees, the ruined house, the forest closing in all around-it was all the same as when he set foot in the tower.

Except that he had killed a man.

Okay. He wasn’t going to panic.

He was a smart man. He was going to figure out what to do, and in what order to do it. He tried on the idea of heading for his house and calling the police. Who would then arrive and take Millie van der Hoeven’s statement that he had killed her brother before locking her in a tower room. No.

He considered calling his lawyer first. No, calling his lawyer and getting her to give him the name of a good criminal attorney. Who would stand beside him when the police asked him how Eugene van der Hoeven had toppled from the tower. And why he had shut the man’s sister up instead of freeing her, as any innocent person would have done. Oh, yes, having an attorney there would certainly reassure the police that Eugene’s death had been an accident.

Hadn’t it?

He thought about that moment, about van der Hoeven’s expression, about the rage and frustration that had been coursing through his body, pounding in his head. He sucked in a breath. Of course it had been an accident. He had no motive to wish van der Hoeven dead. Not one.

Of course, now he knew for sure that one of the three owners of Haudenosaunee wasn’t going to be signing anything over to GWP tonight.

And the second of the three owners was trapped in a tower. No one knew she was there. Except Shaun.

What if Millie van der Hoeven didn’t show up for the ceremony tonight? The sale of the land would be, if not voided, at least delayed. Eugene’s estate would have to be settled. There would be time for Shaun to unearth alternate financing. Buy back-stock. Maybe tender his offer of partnership to Louisa van der Hoeven.

Admittedly, she wouldn’t be likely to be receptive if he had been arrested for her brother’s death in the interim. But he could cross that bridge when he came to it.

Meanwhile, his thoughts circled around to tonight’s ceremony. To Millie van der Hoeven. The person who had walked into the tower, the man who hadn’t ever caused anyone’s death, was horrified. What are you thinking of? Just keeping her?

The old nursery rhyme sang in his head. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater. Had a wife and couldn’t keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell. He looked up at the tower. And there he kept her very well.

He was thinking what to do with the body as he walked around the tower. He wasn’t cocky, but he was rather pleased by his composure and rationality-until he stepped around a birch tree and finally saw Eugene van der Hoeven up close. There was something wrong about the way Eugene’s limbs lay. As if he were a mannequin put together in a hurry. Or a marionette doll flung aside by a careless child. Shaun started shaking. His breath sawed in and out, too fast, until black spots swam in front of his eyes. Eugene wasn’t a person anymore; he was a broken thing. And Shaun had done it to him.

He bent over and lost his lunch.

He staggered back around the base of the tower until the corpse was out of sight. He bent over, breathing deeply, willing the light-headed, spots-in-front-of-his-eyes feeling to go away. Okay, he thought. Okay. Eugene is dead. He was not going to touch Eugene. But he had Millie. He had to see the opportunity in it. Everything was an opportunity, if you were gutsy enough to take it. He would get Millie out of the tower, take her… someplace. A motel. The van der Hoevens don’t show at the signing ceremony tonight. Haudenosaunee keeps producing cheap pulpwood for Reid-Gruyn.

And what do you do with her after? the old Shaun asked. But the new Shaun, the one who was going to come out a winner in this debacle, was already figuring how he could get a vengeful, uncooperative Rapunzel out of her tower.

He would need something to carry her in. He flashed back to the garage, talking with Eugene, the garden cart in the third bay. Perfect.

The walk back to the drive passed in a blur. There were the trees, the still-green grass, the dead hydrangeas, and then he was standing in front of the garage, thankful, now, for van der Hoeven’s out-of-date, manually opened doors. He hauled up the far door. There it was, the garden cart, stored against the coming winter. Rectangular, with metal-bound wooden sides, it was big enough to hold a grown woman, if she curled up.

He rolled it over the gravel, past the edge of the house, along the broad part of the trail. He could see the stone wall enclosing the back lawn and the mellow, peeled logs of the house’s rear facade. He was just swinging the cart onto the edge of the trail to the old camp when he heard it. The crunch of tires on gravel. He shoved the cart ahead hurriedly, only to stumble in its wake and nearly fall.

A door slammed. He froze in place. He heard the sound of footsteps, gritting over the gravel, thumping on the wooden porch. There was a pause, as if the unseen visitor had rung the bell and was waiting.

Shaun took a deep, silent breath.

“Hello!” a voice called. “Anyone home?”

Randy had his excuse for being on Fire Road 52 all ready. The Haudenosaunee entrance was marked only by stone pillars and was easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. He was on his way to pick up his wife. He was absentminded. He thought this was the road. Who could argue with that?

Of course, he hoped there wouldn’t be anyone to argue with at all. He slowed as he approached the entrance to the logging road. No sign of any activity. He signaled, then turned in. Was she there? Undiscovered? Should he risk going on? He accelerated gently, rolling uphill. Just a guy out to pick up his wife. That’s all. He rounded a bend.

He almost hit the red pickup parked in the middle of the road. He jammed on his brakes, the slight shuddering stop making his stomach swoop as if he were on a roller coaster. Past the truck, he could see-oh, shit-a cop car. No ambulance, no hearse, no sign of her. He didn’t see anybody. He worried his lip. Should he back out? Would that look more or less suspicious than getting out and taking a look-see? He sat in the driver’s seat, paralyzed by his options, until a man in hunter’s camos and a blaze-orange vest wrenched through the thicket of brush lining the road and walked toward him.

A hunter. He started to smile in relief, until the man looked at Mike’s license plate. Looked at the tires. As he approached Randy, the man ambled wide of the car, in a path that might have been dictated by a rut in the dirt road but that also placed him in a position where he could see what was coming at him if Randy opened the door. He took off his cap, and that was when Randy saw it was the chief of police.

Russ Van Alstyne smiled and motioned for him to crank down his window. The handle stuck at each rotation, and the resulting squeak of glass on rubber sounded like a chorus in Randy’s ears: You’re screwed, you’re screwed, you’re screwed.

“Hey, son,” the chief said. “What’re you doing out here?”

Randy blanked. What was he doing out here? He was… he was… “Looking for my wife,” he said.

Van Alstyne’s blue eyes sharpened. “When was the last time you saw her?”

Oh, shit. The chief thought he meant Becky Castle. Probably had him tagged as a wife beater. Randy shook his head. “She works up to Haudenosaunee. Cleans house for them. Our car’s in the shop, so I had to come get her.”

“Cleans house for Eugene van der Hoeven? I think I met her this morning.” Van Alstyne stepped closer and peered into the window. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Mark Durkee’s brother-in-law, right? Schoof? Randy Schoof?”

Randy nodded. If being Mark’s relation by marriage saved him, he would hug the self-righteous prick the next time he saw him.

“So you’re looking for your wife, Randy?” The chief’s voice was relaxed, friendly. His eyes, however, were as bright as ever, his glance flickering from the backseat to the passenger side to the well beside the door to Randy’s clothes. “What’s that on your pants, there?”

Randy looked at his lap. To his horror, a smear of blood stained his jeans. His mouth worked soundlessly, searching for some explanation. Why was there blood on his pants? He cut himself shaving? Jesus, that was ridiculous. He looked up at the chief, caught like a deer in the headlights. A deer. Mike’s deer. “I went hunting this morning. My friend took a buck. I helped him with it.” His relief at coming up with a good answer made his smile genuine. He gestured toward the chief’s hunting gear. “How did you do? Got yours yet?”

Van Alstyne shook his head. “I have lousy luck.” He grinned. “But I’m persistent. So, you’re out here looking for your wife?”

“At Haudenosaunee,” Randy repeated. “Isn’t this the road to the house?” He slapped at his jacket pockets, as if searching for a telltale crinkle of paper. “I have the directions written down here somewhere.”

“Have you been out here before?”

Randy froze. “Before?” Shit. If he told the chief he’d never been here before, he could easily get caught in the lie. His brother-in-law could tell them Randy used to work for Ed Castle.

“Yeah. Were you and your friend hunting out here or anything?”

Randy tried to sound relaxed. “Nope. Why?”

“A couple hunters found a young woman on the road here. She’d been hurt real bad.”

Hurt? Hurt? What did that mean? Randy stopped himself from blurting out You mean she isn’t dead? Instead, he pursed his lips in a look of concern and said, “I hope she’s all right.”

“Maybe. She’s been taken to the hospital. She was in pretty bad shape. Unconscious. Internal injuries.”

He wasn’t a murderer. He wasn’t a murderer. He wanted to kiss the cop standing by his window. “That’s terrible,” he said, trying not to beam his relief.

“It is. What makes it worse is that another young woman is missing.”

“Huh?”

“Millie van der Hoeven. I’m sure your wife will tell you all about it. The hunters who ran across this girl thought they had found Miss van der Hoeven, but now it seems she’s still out there somewhere.” The chief’s unshaven face settled into hard lines.

Randy searched for something, anything, to say that would make him sound like an innocent bystander. “Uh… any idea where?”

The chief shook his head. “No.” He pierced Randy with a look. “I think your wife must be around the same age as these two girls. Keep an eye on her. Don’t let her hang around outside on her own.”

“I won’t.”

“To get to Haudenosaunee, you want to get back on the county road and turn right. The road is about a mile up. It’s marked by two stone pillars.”

Randy shifted the car into reverse. “Good luck in finding the missing girl!” He cranked the window up as he backed out of sight. The chief watched him the whole way.

Randy cursed himself as he drove up the county road. He had to get Lisa, drop her off home, and talk to Mike Yablonski. He needed his friend to say that he picked Randy up after his bike got wrecked. Randy didn’t want Russ Van Alstyne even thinking about him in Becky Castle’s car. The man saw way too much for comfort. Christ, why had he insisted on taking the bike to Jimino’s? Frank Jimino would know it was his. If he had let it go to whatever the nearest garage was, he could, if he had to, abandon it. Now there was a clear trail: him to Ed Castle’s, then Becky taking responsibility for his bike.

He was so distracted by his thoughts he nearly plowed into the black Mercedes at the top of the Haudenosaunee drive.

“What the hell?” He parked his truck near the front door and got out. There was nobody in the car. He walked closer. Except for a fresh scratch on the passenger side, it was an exact duplicate of Shaun Reid’s car. He walked to the rear. Yep. There they were. Sierra Club and Adirondack Conservancy Corporation stickers. What the hell?

He circled the Mercedes before heading toward the front porch. He climbed the steps and knocked on the door. No one answered. He knocked again. Then he opened the door and took a single step inside. “Hello? Anybody home?” he shouted. The echo of his own voice convinced him of what he had already felt. The house was deserted. He closed the door and wandered out onto the gravel drive. Where was his wife? Could van der Hoeven have given her a ride home? From what Lisa told him, her employer never left Haudenosaunee if he could help it. That was why-oh, hell. He slapped one hand over his face. Lisa had told Mr. van der Hoeven that Randy would deliver some boxes of wine for him. If van der Hoeven had to take Lisa home and make the delivery himself, Randy would never hear the end of it. Never.

But if Lisa and van der Hoeven were gone, what was Shaun Reid doing here? Hiking by himself in the woods?

“Hello,” Randy shouted, crossing the drive toward the back of the house. “Anyone home?” He listened as he walked to the head of a well-marked trail into the forest. “Is anybody here?”

He heard nothing except the dry rustle of wind through dead leaves. The place gave him the creeps. The hell with it, he thought. His life had been unfolding like a bunch of horror movies today. He didn’t want to add The Blair Witch Project to the playlist.

He made a beeline for the back door. Inside the kitchen, he was relieved to find two crates of wine stacked by the cellar door. He had thought it was supposed to be more-that was the whole point, that he could bring his pickup and take a bunch-but at this stage, he wasn’t arguing. He picked up both crates at once and walked back to his truck, staggering slightly under the load.

He’d make the actual delivery later. Right now he would go to ground at Mike’s-hang out and help him cut up his deer and polish up his alibi. In the back of his head, the flip side of his not being a murderer loomed: Becky Castle, alive, could identify him. He didn’t know what to do about that. He didn’t even know how to think about it, other than by denial. He needed time. He needed a few minutes of normality in the midst of this crazy-ass day to catch his breath and get his feet under him. But he couldn’t take too much time. He thought of the deer waiting for him back at Mike’s. Just like him, that buck had been in the gunsights. And it had waited a fraction of a second too long before making its move. Now it was brisket and ground venison. He shook his head. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

The name tag on the nurse across the admissions desk from Clare read HOLLI MURRAY, LPN, CMA, but it might as well have been HOLLI MURRAY, LPN, PIA for all the help she was. Pain in the ass, indeed, Clare thought, giving it one more try. “Just look her up. Millie van der Hoeven.”

“I’ve told you already, ma’am, we don’t have any Millie van der Hoeven registered.”

“I think her full first name is Millicent. Maybe they dropped part of her last name when she was admitted. Can you try Van Hoeven or just Hoeven?”

“Ma’am, we don’t have her.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” Clare dropped her hands heavily on the admissions desk to avoid clutching at her hair. “Could you check and see if she was admitted at Glens Falls, then?”

Holli Murray, LPN, CMA, gave Clare a condescending look. She was a tall, stick-thin woman, with peroxide-brittle hair and a heavy hand with makeup. She looked like she was auditioning for the run-down-and-tired “before” spot in an ad for iron supplements. “Ma’am,” she said, “are you a family member?”

“No, but I’m a priest.”

Murray’s overplucked eyebrows rose as she very visibly gave Clare the once-over, taking in her baggy, stained pants, her aged thermal shirt, and her hair, flattened by her hat and escaping in straggly pieces from the knot at the back of her head.

“Really!” Clare protested. “I’m one of the hospital chaplains!”

The Washington County Hospital was too small to have its own social worker, pathologist, and chaplain. The first two it shared with Glens Falls and the county medical examiner’s office. The latter post was filled on a rotating basis by Millers Kill’s Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian ministers-and by its Episcopal priest.

“Uh-huh,” Holli Murray, LPN, CMA, said. “And I’m Clara Barton.”

The elevator chimed, and Clare caught sight of a familiar face getting out. Alta Brewer, the senior emergency department nurse.

“Alta!” Clare called. “Can you vouch for me?”

“Hey, Reverend Fergusson.” The nurse switched directions, bearing down on the admissions desk. A head shorter than Clare, Alta was built like a miniature Humvee and had the same approach to obstacles in her way. She glanced up at Murray. “The reverend’s on the roster. Give her what she wants.”

“But she was asking for confidential patient information,” Murray whined.

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Alta bumped Murray away from the computer screen. “Go get yourself something to eat, will ya? Before you keel over and give us all more work to do.” She punched her password on the keyboard as Holli Murray, LPN, CMA, huffed away into the back office. “Fuggun’ stick women. Can’t stand ’em.” Alta glanced up at Clare. “Whatcha looking for, Reverend?”

“Millie van der Hoeven. She should have come in on an ambulance within the last half hour. She had been injured up in the-”

“I know who you’re talking about.” Alta keystroked furiously. “Holli couldn’t find her because she’s not Millie van der Hoeven.”

“What?”

“The cops went out to where she was found to have a look-see, and they got her purse. Her name’s Becky Castle.”

Clare felt her jaw drop like a character’s in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

“The name Millie van der Hoeven never even made it into the computer, because Chief Van Alstyne called with the update right after she arrived.”

“I saw her today! Becky Castle! At Haudenosaunee!”

Alta looked at her sharply. “Yeah?” She trundled around the desk and took Clare’s elbow. “Come with me. Holli!” she yelled toward the office. “Get back out here! You’re on duty!” She steered Clare toward the elevator.

“Why am I coming with you?” Clare asked, as the elevator doors opened, then closed behind her.

“The patient’s parents just got here. The mom asked for a minister.”

“It’s Dr. Feely’s week.”

“He hasn’t answered his page yet. You’re here.” The elevator chimed. Alta pushed her out onto the third floor.

“But…” Clare plucked at her grubby clothes. Alta looked at her unsympathetically. “I thought I was meeting Eugene van der Hoeven. Millie’s brother. He’s already seen me like this.”

“They asked for a minister, not a model.” She recaptured Clare’s elbow and led her to the surgery waiting room. “There they are. Go on.”

“What’s going on with their daughter?” Clare hissed.

“She’s in surgery now. Internal bleeding.” Alta gave her a little shove. “She’ll probably live,” she added, with the bluntness of a twenty-five-year veteran on the front lines.

Clare instantly recognized Ed Castle from their earlier meeting, and she kicked herself for not putting the two names together. She kept forgetting one of the primary rules of Millers Kill: Any two people who share a last name are related in some degree.

When Russ had introduced them, Ed Castle had been bundled up in a Day-Glo vest and camouflage jacket. Now he looked softer and infinitely more vulnerable in a flannel shirt and padded windcheater. Most of his hair was gone, and he had the pale line of a farmer’s tan high across his forehead. He was sitting with his head in his hands, and she could see his neck, cracked and lined from decades of exposure to the elements.

The woman next to him was, like Ed, in her early sixties. Her pastel makeup was marred by streaky shadows of mascara, and her mouth was wiped clean of lipstick. Despite her too-good-to-be-true blond hair, she looked old, stitched and seamed by a lifetime of hard work or the strain of the recent news.

“Excuse me,” Clare said, her voice low. “Mr. Castle? I’m Clare Fergusson. We met this morning at Haudenosaunee. I was one of the team searching for Millie van der Hoeven.”

He looked up at her blankly. “Oh,” he said. “The lady minister. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.” He waved a hand at the woman sitting next to him. “This is my wife, Suzanne.”

The woman’s good manners kicked in and she automatically smiled at Clare, as if she really were glad to meet her, here in the hospital where they waited on word of their daughter. When she isn’t ravaged by grief, Clare thought, she must have a soft, sweet face.

“What did you say your name was, dear?”

“Clare Fergusson. I’m the priest at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. I understand you asked for a minister. Is there anything I can do to help you? Anyone I can call?”

The older woman looked vaguely across the waiting room. “My younger grandson is already here. I let him go to the gift shop, poor thing. It’s hard for him to sit around waiting.”

“Hard for me to listen to that damn Game Boy of his,” his grandfather grumbled.

“Our other girl, Bonnie, is working up at the new hotel today. I’ve left a message there and on her answering machine at home. I’m sure as soon as she gets word, she’ll be here.” She smiled again, but the effort seemed too much for her, and the expression slid off her face into oblivion.

At that moment, a woman with dark blond hair and reddened eyes appeared in the waiting room entrance. “Mom? Dad?” She hurried toward her parents, her arms open.

“How is she? Have you seen the doctor yet?”

“Just for a moment,” Suzanne said. “She’s in surgery now. She was bleeding internally.” Her soft features crumpled. She leaned her head on her daughter’s shoulder and began to cry.

The woman-Bonnie, Clare guessed-looked over her mother’s head to her father. “What happened?”

“Internal injuries consistent with assault,” Ed said, his voice low and hard. “You know what that means? Some bastard beat the crap out of her. Broke her ribs and busted her up inside and left her on one of my logging roads up to Haudenosaunee. One of my roads.” Ed Castle bowed his head again, exposing his shiny skull and thread-fine silver hair. A penitent, hopelessly seeking forgiveness. “It was my fault.” His voice broke. “I should never have sent her up to Haudenosaunee alone. I knew that other girl was missing. But I was too damn full of myself to give her the lousy damn insurance papers.”

His wife, still weeping, broke free of her daughter and laid her hands over his shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault, Ed. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was!” Ed Castle stood abruptly, walking around them in short, jerky steps, propelled by the galvanic force of his pain. “Who told her she had to see Eugene van der Hoeven? Me!”

Okay. At least this thorn she could pull. “Becky wasn’t hurt when she went to see Eugene van der Hoeven,” Clare said, projecting her voice just enough to arrest Ed Castle’s attention.

“What?” He turned to her.

“I was there. I saw the confrontation. Things got very tense, yes, but Becky walked away unhurt. In fact,” Clare smiled crookedly, “she was full of what my grandmother would have called ‘spit and vinegar.’ Yelling at Eugene that she would be coming back and he couldn’t stop her.”

Bonnie and Suzanne bumped together and wrapped their arms around each other. Ed Castle squinted at Clare. “What do you mean, things got tense?”

Clare hesitated, uneasy. She hadn’t even had a chance to tell Russ about Eugene’s behavior that morning. “You know. Some conflict. Some shouting. Eugene wouldn’t let her into the house.”

“Did he… did he lay hands on her?”

“Good Lord, no. He did… okay, he did point a rifle at her. Ordered her off his land. But I swear, nothing happened. He was overwrought, she was overwrought. She left, he put the gun back in its case, that was the end of it.”

“When was this?”

“Midmorning. About an hour after you left, I guess.”

Ed’s bald head flushed red. Bright spots appeared high on his cheekbones. “I sent her to get insurance papers from Eugene this afternoon. At lunchtime.”

A ghastly silence filled the waiting room. No one moved. Ed stared sightlessly into nothing. “Eugene van der Hoeven,” he whispered. He blinked. A tear spilled over his cheek. Clare thought, It’ll be all right, it’s grief, it’s just grief, but then Ed’s face crumpled into a tinfoil ball of rage.

“Eugene van der Hoeven!” he snarled. “I’ll kill the bastard! I’ll kill him!” Then he was gone, pounding down the hallway.

Suzanne Castle screamed. Clare turned toward her. She was crumpled in Bonnie’s arms, wailing. Her daughter looked at Clare through a swamp of disbelief. “I’ll get him,” Clare said.

She sprinted toward the elevator, but it had closed and was already descending by the time she skidded to a stop in front of it. “Stairs?” she shouted to an unnerved technician. He pointed toward the end of the hall. She thundered past him, dodged an elderly lady in a walker, and whipped the heavy door open. Down the stairs she thunked, two at a time, until she reached the first floor. She flung the door open, spotted Ed crossing the lobby, charged toward him, and slipped and fell on a sopping-wet piece of tile flooring. She hit with enough force to knock the breath from her body. The first thing she saw, when she levered herself up on one elbow, was a bright yellow plastic floor sign. piso mojado, it warned her.

“Holy cow, I’m sorry!” A young man in janitorial green sloshed his mop into a bucket and reached to help her to her feet. He had the wide-spaced eyes and curving cheeks of Down’s syndrome, knit into a look of fierce remorse. “I shoulda put the sign closer to the elevator before I started cleaning the mess. Are you okay?”

Clare squeezed his hand. “It’s my fault. I was running not looking where I was going.” Her backside was damp and smelled-she sniffed-bad.

“A little kid threw up,” he confided. “It’s still pretty stinky.”

She squeezed his hand again. “Gotta go.” She took off, his warning trailing after her: “Don’t run!”

She dodged past visitors and patients being discharged, shoving against the automatic-opening doors in a hurry to get outside, but once she had stumbled out of the lobby foyer and into the cool sunlight, she couldn’t catch a glimpse of Ed Castle.

She mentally reeled off a string of curses. She abandoned the idea of racing to the visitor parking lot in the hopes of spotting his SUV. It wasn’t as if she could stop him once he was behind the wheel. Call the police. That was the best thing she could do.

She slapped her pockets. She had left her cell phone in the car. She loped to the admissions desk, leaving a trail of wrinkled noses behind her. Holli Murray, LPN, CMA, looked at her with unconcealed dismay.

“Can I use your phone?”

“Pay phones are over there.” Murray pointed across the lobby.

“I don’t have any change on me. It’s an emergency.”

Murray opened her mouth, then paused. Her lip curled. “What is that smell?”

“The phone?”

“The admissions phone is not for the use of hospital visitors or patients.”

“Look.” Clare leaned over the desk. “Here’s the deal. You let me use the phone, and I won’t hang around you smelling like baby barf for the rest of your shift.”

Murray hooked the phone in her fingers and slid it across the desk.

Clare dialed Russ’s cell number. It rang once.

“Hello.”

She closed her eyes at the sound of his voice. “It’s me,” she said.

She could hear him smile. “Hey, you.”

“Are you anywhere near Haudenosaunee?”

“No, I’m at the Washington County Hospital.”

She stared at the phone. “Are you here to talk to the Castles?”

“How do you know about the Castles? Where are you?” he asked.

“In the lobby of the Washington County Hospital.”

He made a noise that might have been a snort. “I’m headed that way from the ER. I’ll be there in thirty seconds. I take it I’ll recognize you by your all-black outfit accessorized by a classic white collar?”

“No, but don’t worry. Unless you have a head cold, you won’t be able to miss me. Bye.” She hung up.

Murray pounced on the phone. “That didn’t sound like any emergency to me.”

Only the sight of Russ emerging from the hallway stopped Clare from telling Holli Murray, LPN, CMA, what she thought of her little admissions Nazi routine. She left the woman wiping down the receiver and crossed the lobby to his side.

“Cell phones. You gotta love ’em.” He grinned at her. “You look like you came straight from the search party. How did you know about-” He paused. Sniffed. “What in God’s name is that smell?”

“Don’t ask.” She sketched in her involvement with the young woman she had thought was Millie van der Hoeven and with the Castles. When she got to the part where she spilled the beans about Eugene and Becky’s confrontation, Russ frowned.

“How come I haven’t heard this before?”

“I was going to call you. It’s been kind of a crazy day.”

“Jesus, you can say that again.” He winced. “Sorry.”

She flipped the blasphemy away. “This is why I was calling you. When Ed heard about what happened, he just about bust his gut. He ran out looking like the wrath of God, swearing he was going to kill Eugene van der Hoeven. Eugene might not even be at Haudenosaunee-I told him the injured girl was his sister, and I doubt anyone called him from the hospital to tell him otherwise. Did you?”

Russ shook his head.

“I was worried Ed might be a threat to Eugene. Was I overreacting?”

Russ looked down at her. “No. Ed Castle’s been known to have a temper. You don’t run a successful logging business for forty years by always being Mr. Nice Guy.” He glanced at his watch. “Tell Suzanne there’ll be an officer in to speak with her and to gather as much information as possible about Becky.”

She nodded. “I’ll stay with them until Becky’s out of surgery.”

“Okay. I better head out and stop Ed before he does something stupid.”

“I’m going to get my phone from my car. Will you call me? Let me know what’s happening?”

His weight already shifting away from her, ready to go, he paused. He looked at her, looked into her, his blue eyes full of words he wouldn’t say. He nodded.

Then he was gone, leaving her with the work she had to do.

Shaun Reid crouched, frozen, next to the garden cart, as the footsteps crunched closer and closer.

“Is anybody home?” a man called. Shaun ducked his head, as if averting his eyes could keep him invisible. The footsteps paused. Shaun held his breath. Then he heard the man walking away. He listened as the sound of stones scattering beneath his shoes grew fainter and fainter. There was another noise, he thought-a door opening? He pushed the cart silently forward, one foot, two feet, four. Then he heard the footsteps again, not moving toward him, but heavier somehow, as if the walking man were carrying a load. Shaun waited, unmoving, until he heard the distant noise of a car engine firing up.

He stood and stretched, and when he was limber again, he trundled the cart swiftly through the forest, its hard rubber wheels rolling over root and stone effortlessly. By the time he reached the old camp, he was overheated, sweating, and anxious to be done with the job.

He left the cart at the tower door, stripping off his jacket and tossing it inside before climbing up the stairs. They seemed even narrower and darker than they had the first time. If he had to spend much more time here, his touch of claustrophobia would flare into a full-blown panic. But not yet. He still had to get the girl out of the tower.

He was smiling grimly at that turn of phrase when he reached the wooden door to her cell. He dug the oversized key from his pocket and, mindful of how she had knocked her brother ass-end over teakettle, he turned the key, kicked the door open, and stepped back into the gallery landing.

Nothing. He walked into the room. Millie van der Hoeven sat Japanese style against the far wall. She had somehow moved the contents of the backpack, the empty sandwich wrappers and apple core testifying to her ability to eat while her hands were tied behind her back.

She stared at him. He could see a resemblance to the unscarred half of her older brother-the pale skin, the fair hair. Her eyes, swollen and rimmed with red, were the same cool blue-gray. She said nothing. She stared at him.

“I’m taking you out of here,” he said, his voice loud in the silence. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She didn’t react. “I’m going to move you to someplace where you’ll be safe.”

Her face shifted minutely, from blankly hostile to scornful. Shaun spoke more loudly, as if volume could convince her of his sincerity. “I’m going to keep you overnight. That’s all. I don’t know what your brother was up to or what he thought he was protecting you from, but I promise you, no harm will come to you. You’ll be free to go in the morning.”

He wasn’t sure if this was a lie or not.

He crossed the floor cautiously. He had already seen she could move, despite being bound. There was a lavender blanket crumpled beneath one of the arrow-slit windows, and he picked it up. He shook it out so it trailed across the floor.

“I’m going to roll you in this so it’s easier to get you down the stairs. I don’t want to hurt you, so let’s make this easy on both of us.”

She sat. Stared.

He approached her in a defensive posture, low, arms out, blanket clutched between his hands. Her head turned to follow him as he enclosed her in the blanket, but she remained as she had been, silent. Motionless. He wrapped both ends around her in a gesture that reminded him uncomfortably of a lover helping his beloved into her coat, or a father wrapping his child in a towel.

She sank her teeth into his arm.

“Jesus Christ!” he screamed. She wouldn’t let go. The pain was blinding. He smacked her head almost by accident, trying something, anything, to make the hurt go away. He jarred her, but she bit deeper, so he balled his free hand into a fist and slammed it into her temple, once, twice, three times.

She pitched to the floor. Blood poured from his upper bicep, staining his expensive shirt and dropping on his made-in-Bermuda pants. He staggered to his feet, pressing his other hand against the wound, blood smearing his fingers. “God Damn!” he spat out. He had never hit a woman in his life, but right now he could cheerfully kick the shit out of the blonde crumpled over the blanket. Instead, he took advantage of her temporary acquiescence and, grabbing her shoulder, hauled her onto the blanket.

She moaned and stirred feebly. He let go of his arm and tossed the edge of the blanket over her, wedging it under her body before rolling her up tight. In a moment, she was trussed like Cleopatra in the fabled rug.

“Let me go,” she said, her voice raspy.

“So you can snack on my other limbs? Fat chance.” He bent to her and heaved her over his shoulder in a firefighter’s carry. The exertion caused a fresh gout of blood to swell out of his arm. Balancing her with both hands, he could feel drops running into his armpit. He walked, stiff-legged, to the door.

She grunted and writhed inside the blanket, thrashing her legs in an attempt to hit some part of him. He slapped her butt through the layers of fabric. “I’m going to tell you this once,” he said, “so listen up. We’re going down the stairs. They’re steep and twisty, and some of them are in none too good condition. If you try to escape or hurt me, I’m dropping you. I want you alive and whole, but I’m not going to risk my neck to keep you that way.”

She stilled. “I’ll get you, you bastard,” she hissed. Carefully, slowly, he began his descent. The treads creaked and complained beneath the double weight. Millie’s body remained still, but her mouth ran at full speed, growling out a series of threats and warnings and accusations. His arm throbbed and his legs shook and he had shooting pains from his lower back.

Trembling, he emerged from the tower. He stumbled to the garden cart and dumped the woman in, ignoring her shriek and the thump as her head hit the wooden side. He shoved her into a rough fetal position.

“Stay there,” he ordered.

“Fuck you!”

“Christ,” he muttered, picking up the handle and setting off toward the woods. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Stockholm syndrome? Don’t you know enough to ingratiate yourself with someone who has the power of life and death over you?” The weird thing was, when he said it, he realized he meant it. Not that he would kill her, of course-he wasn’t a monster-but that really, truly, he had the power. “I could do anything to you,” he said, trying out the idea. “And nobody would know.”

She shut up after that.

He bumped her along the now-familiar trail. When he got near the house, he paused and listened for any signs that they weren’t alone. He was too tired and wrung out to remain at the peak of alertness, though, and after a few seconds of silence, he rolled the cart onto the gravel drive, heading for his Mercedes.

His Mercedes. Crap. Whoever had been up here earlier must have seen his car. He shut his eyes, his temples pounding. Okay. Some variables were out of his control. He would have to accept that and move on.

He retrieved his car keys-smearing more blood on his pants-and popped the trunk. “I’m putting you into the trunk of my car,” he said to the girl. “I’m going to drive you to a secure location. I expect it will be uncomfortable, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“You can let me go,” she said, her voice bitter.

Shaun ignored her. He slid her tightly wrapped form forward until he could hoist her over his shoulder. As he heaved her into place, he heard her whimper, an admission of fear too great to be contained. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, angry that she kept misinterpreting his actions, that she had put him in this position by refusing to believe that her brother had been the villain here, not him.

He dumped her into the trunk. He had time to notice her eyes, wide with terror, before he slammed the lid down. He pushed the cart into the garage, retrieved his jacket-the only item of clothing he had not fouled with his own blood-and made his way back to the car. His legs were shaking as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat. He started the ignition, and k.d. lang began singing, “Black coffee…” He glanced at the clock. He had arrived at Haudenosaunee an hour ago. An hour. For a moment, he could almost believe he had gone back in time. There was his water bottle in the cup holder. There was his phone plugged into the recharger, and his CD case on the passenger seat. As if nothing had ever happened.

Then he heard a thump from the trunk, and his arm throbbed in response. He pulled on his jacket, covering most of the bloody marks, and started down the long dirt road. The wine bottles in the backseat clunked against each other, k.d. lang kept on singing about walking the floor at 3:00 A.M., and he nearly wept with relief when he pulled out onto the highway blacktop.

Glancing into his rearview mirror as he drove down the highway, he glimpsed a brutish SUV with a bike rack muzzling its grill turning into the entrance to Haudenosaunee. He lifted his foot off the gas, staring into the mirror. No mistake. Someone else was headed for Haudenosaunee. He caught his breath. That was the margin that separated success from failure. A minute. Maybe less.

He accelerated. He planned to be far away from Haudenosaunee when the cops showed up.

Russ had left the siren screaming all the way up the dirt road, wanting anyone up at the camp to know the police were on the way. In his experience, unless two guys were already way into it, incipient fights usually dissolved as soon as a cop car made its appearance. He hoped the sight of his red truck would have the same effect.

Ed’s SUV was in the middle of the gravel drive, not so much parked as abandoned. The driver’s door was still open. Russ pulled in behind his friend’s vehicle, switching off the siren and toggling the light. He slid from his seat with the sound still echoing in the air.

“Ed!” he shouted. “Eugene?” He took a few steps toward the open garage, close enough to see that Eugene’s and Millie’s cars were still parked inside. He tipped his head back and filled his lungs with air. “It’s Russ Van Alstyne! I want to talk with you!”

You, you, you, you, the blue hills sang back.

The door to the house swung open, and Ed Castle stumbled onto the porch. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Thank God it’s you. He’s dead. Van der Hoeven. He’s dead.”

Russ felt the weight of dread settle over his shoulders. God, he hated this. He was getting too damn old to play this scene one more time. And he liked Ed Castle. He liked him a lot. “What happened?” he asked dully.

“I don’t know.” Ed clunked down the porch steps. “I got up here, and he wasn’t in the house. So I was looking around, thinking he was maybe hiding out, and I saw the trail.”

“What trail?”

“Come take a look.” Ed beckoned Russ toward the wide, hydrangea-framed trailhead that lay between the house and the garage.

Past the low stone wall marking the edge of civilization at Haudenosaunee, the trail split off in three directions. “I was walking along here, see.” He could tell Ed was rattled. “I could see where the search and rescue team blaze-marked their trail this morning.” Ed pointed to a tree on the edge of the wider middle path, sprayed with a single orange stripe. “Then I noticed the trail on the left.” Ed pointed.

The long, thick grass growing between the trees had been recently trampled and torn. A single rut, the width of a bicycle tire, had dug into the earth in spots, leaving a crumbling of rich brown loam in its wake.

Russ’s mind supplied a picture of the open garage he had scanned a few minutes ago. Land Cruiser. VW Bug. And in the last bay, a garden cart, carelessly shoved inside, its handles almost protruding out into the drive.

“So I took off this way. C’mon, he’s up here.”

They both struck out along the trail. Russ kept his eyes moving, scanning the grass, the dead leaves drifting among the trees, the gray-limbed distances closing all around them.

He knew what the ruined buildings were as soon as he saw them. He could compare them, in his mind’s eye, to the black-and-white photos he had seen in the historical society archives. Saturated in the honey tones of the afternoon sun, even the subdued November colors were beautiful: granite and lichen, oak and boxwood, grass green and blaze orange.

“That’s where I found him.”

Russ swore under his breath. He headed toward the still figure in the grass, Ed at his side. “I touched his neck, you know, to see if I felt a pulse,” Ed said. “There wasn’t nothing.”

Russ slowed as he got close to Eugene’s body. “Oh, Christ, Ed. Jesus Christ.”

“What?” Ed drew himself up, outraged. “You don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you?”

“Ed. You heard this guy pulled a gun on your daughter. You ran out on your family at the hospital screaming that you were going to kill him.” Ed looked down. His face flushed. “I get here, you’re holed up in the house, and Eugene van der Hoeven’s dead.” Russ bent over the body. No gunshot wounds. No knife wounds visible. The angle of van der Hoeven’s head looked wrong. “What did you do?” Russ barely got the question out. He took a breath and said more loudly, “Hit him with your car?”

“T’hell with you! I got here, I followed the trail, I found him! Period!”

“What’s he doing way out here?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Russ dropped his hand on Ed’s shoulder. “Come on back to the house.”

Ed shrugged him off. “What for? You gonna arrest me?”

“I’m going to call in the crime scene unit. Then I’m going to ask you to come to the station and answer a few questions.”

“The hell you are! I’m not the bad guy here!”

Russ put his hand more firmly on Ed’s shoulder and turned him toward the trail. The older man jumped, spinning around to face Russ, his fists up.

Russ was six inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Ed, and he loomed over his hunting partner now, letting his size remind Ed what a bad idea this was. He had no gun, no cuffs or stick or radio. If Ed attacked him, he was going to have to hurt the man in order to control him, and he didn’t want to do that. God almighty, he didn’t want to do that.

“I’m not arresting you,” Russ said quietly. “I’m asking you to come in for questioning.” He stepped forward, toward the trail.

Ed stepped back. “I’m not saying one word without a lawyer.”

“You have the right to retain an attorney.” Russ took another step. Ed retreated back. “I hope it doesn’t have to come to that.” Another step forward. Another step back. “It’s just questioning. You’re not being charged with anything.”

“Yet.” Ed turned away from Russ and marched ahead of him into the forest.

When they reached the great camp, Russ asked Ed to turn over his car keys.

“What?” Ed dug into his jacket pocket. “No. Never mind. I know.” He pulled out the keys and bombed them onto the gravel. “There. Now I can’t escape. Are you sure you don’t want to tie me up, too? In case I knock you out and steal your truck? ’Cause you never know what I might do, do ya?”

Russ bent and picked up the keys without comment. “You can wait in the house,” he said.

“I’m gonna use the phone,” Ed announced, stomping up the porch steps.

“There’s one in the kitchen,” Russ said. Ed, slamming through the door, ignored him. Russ tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He hated this. He absolutely hated it. He lived in the town he was born and raised in, but he could count the number of people he called “friend” on one hand. And he had just lost one. He fished his phone out of his pocket. No signal, of course. He sighed and crunched across the driveway to the radio in his truck. He had thought no birthday could ever be as bad as his twentieth. He and his platoon had spent the day pinned down under heavy fire. He watched Gary Weyer, the radio guy, bleed to death over the course of the afternoon, and when they finally got air support in, the freaking flyboys nearly blew up their LZ. His buddy Mac kept saying, “At least it’s not raining! At least it’s not raining!”

He opened the door and reached for the mike. “At least it’s not raining,” he reminded himself.

Shaun heard the siren before he saw the car. He had gotten into town a few minutes before and was looping around, Main to Church to Elm to Washington, facing up to the flaw in his plan to scuttle the sale of Haudenosaunee land tonight.

He didn’t have any idea where to stash the girl.

At first he had thought a motel, but the more he considered it, the more dangerous it seemed. Unless he was willing to stand over her all day and all night-and he could just imagine trying to explain that to Courtney-there was no way he could guarantee she wouldn’t be able to attract attention, by banging on the door or blasting the television or even breaking a window.

He had a friend with a camp up past Lake George, but Davis liked to hunt, and Shaun wasn’t going to gamble that he’d stay away this weekend. His son’s apartment? He could say he wanted Jeremy to spend the night at home. But then, even if he could con his son, which he doubted, he faced the same breaking-the-window problem. The basement in his house? Forget it. Maybe he could drive into the country and find an old hay barn in someone’s back field. There was one they used to use for making out when he was a teenager. If he could remember where it was.

Then he heard the siren. He took his foot off the gas and craned his neck, trying to spot from which direction the sound was coming. It grew louder. Louder.

Shit, it was right behind him. He felt as if all the blood in his body had drained away, to be replaced by ice water. He glanced down at himself. The jacket covered most of the blood on his shirt, but the smears on his pants would be visible to any cop looking through the driver’s window. The siren was shrieking in his ears. The cars ahead of him were pulling over. Hands shaking, he steered the Mercedes to the side of the street. He had nothing to cover his pants with. Nothing to disguise the telltale stains. Nothing-he registered the water bottle in the cup holder. He yanked it up, unscrewed the top, and dumped it over the bloody spots on his pants.

A red pickup truck with a whirling light clamped over its driver’s side hurtled past him. Dumbly, he watched it go, the plastic bottle still upended in his hand. Beneath him, water squished and puddled, soaking his pants and boxers, ruining the SL-7’s leather seat.

He hurled the empty plastic bottle to the passenger-side floor, where it ricocheted and rattled before rocking to a halt. Gritting his teeth against the exquisitely uncomfortable feel of wet fabric clinging to his thighs, he merged back into traffic. People like to say, “It was the worst day of my life,” but Shaun realized the cliché was literally true for him. He had broken his leg on a ski slope once and had to wait over an hour for the ski patrol to rescue him. He had sat through a counseling session where his soon-to-be ex-wife told him everything he ever did wrong in twenty years of marriage. He had buried his parents. But this, today, was the worst day of his life. Sitting in wet shorts, every muscle aching, a woman in his trunk and a dead man on his conscience, he wished, as he had never wished for anything, that he had never set foot out of his office this morning.

His office. He blinked. Up ahead, a red light slowed the line of traffic, and he braked. His office. No, the mill. The old part of the mill. The original building, now half-crumbling into the river, unused for the past twenty years except to store machine parts too valuable to junk. No one went there. The doors locked securely, to prevent vandals from getting in and trashing the place. There were windows, but they overlooked the Millers Kill, the river that gave the town its name. No one could get close enough to hear a single voice over the rush and fall of water over the dam and into the millrace.

It was perfect. And it was his.

For the first time on the worst day of his life, Shaun Reid grinned.

Suzanne Castle stumbled back into the waiting room from the nurses’ station, where she had been called to the phone several minutes ago. She stared at Clare and her daughter, slack-jawed and blank-eyed. “That was Ed. He’s been…” She paused. “Your father’s been arrested.”

Bonnie Liddle straightened in her seat. “What? Arrested? What on earth for?”

Suzanne shook her head. “Not arrested. I’m sorry. He said they’re taking him in for questioning. That’s what it was. Questioning.”

Clare’s stomach clenched. “Questioning him on what, Mrs. Castle?”

Suzanne turned toward Clare, although Clare wouldn’t have bet the older woman was actually seeing her. “Eugene van der Hoeven’s death. Ed says he found his body. But the police are taking him in for questioning.”

Bonnie rose and put her arm over her mother’s shoulders, hugging her. “It’s a mistake, Mom. It has to be.”

“He asked me to get him a lawyer as soon as possible. To meet him at the police station.” She turned to her daughter. “Should I call Woodrow Durkee?” Suzanne’s voice was detached. Floating somewhere above reality. “He’s handled some things that have cropped up over the years. With your dad’s business.”

“I think we need to contact a criminal lawyer, Mom.”

Suzanne frowned. “Your father is not a criminal. He’s not. He’s not.” She burst into tears.

Bonnie looked at Clare. “What are we going to do about a lawyer? How are we going to find one on a Saturday afternoon?” Suzanne Castle wept, rocking into her daughter’s shoulder. Bonnie held her mother more tightly and spoke over her head. “I don’t even know what questions to ask. No one in our family has ever been arrested.” For a moment her face wavered, and behind the competent, take-charge woman Clare could glimpse the scared eyes of a child lost in the woods. Then she blinked, and the child was gone. “Do you know anybody?”

Clare hesitated. “I don’t think I ought to be recommending a lawyer for your dad. That’s a huge decision.”

“It doesn’t have to be permanent. All we need right now is someone who’ll be with Dad when he’s questioned. Someone who will know what to do if Dad… if the police decide to charge him. So Dad doesn’t have to stay in jail.”

Suzanne Castle wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. “No,” she agreed, her voice shaky. “He doesn’t go to jail. Whatever it takes. We’ll mortgage the house if we have to.”

Bonnie bent down toward an end table and tugged several tissues out of a waiting box. She handed them to her mother. “I don’t think it’ll come to that, Mom.”

Clare blew out a resigned breath. “The junior warden at my church does criminal defense work. His name’s Geoffrey Burns. I can call him for you.”

“Mrs. Castle?” A well-built man in scrubs stood in the entrance to the waiting room.

Suzanne nodded, snuffling wetly into a sodden Kleenex. “It’s Dr. Gupta, Becky’s surgeon.” Dr. Gupta crossed the room to them. Up close, he looked more like a dashing Bollywood star playing a part than a real physician. Clare half expected him to launch into song.

He smiled, displaying perfect white teeth. “I have good news. Becky is out of surgery and doing well. We’ve caught all the bleeding. I want to keep a close eye on her kidneys for the next few days, but she’s young and strong, and I think there’s an excellent chance she’ll pull through with no permanent damage at all.”

Suzanne Castle burst into tears.

Dr. Gupta smiled understandingly. “She’s in recovery right now,” he told Bonnie. “After she wakes up, you and your mother may go in and speak with her.”

“Thank you,” Bonnie said. “Thank you so much.”

“Do you have any questions?”

Clare waved a brief “excuse me” and retreated to the other end of the waiting room, out of earshot. She fished her cell phone from her pocket. Fortunately, she had her junior warden’s home and office numbers saved in her phone’s address book. Unfortunately, no one answered at either location. She left messages for the lawyer to call her as soon as he could. He was probably, she realized, at St. Alban’s, helping to set up for the bishop’s visitation. She should head over there herself-catch Geoff Burns in person and spend at least some time aiding the volunteers.

She was about to return to Suzanne and Bonnie and make her farewells when her phone began playing “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.”

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s me,” Russ said.

“I thought you might be Geoff Burns.”

“What a horrible thought. Why?”

She glanced at the Castles and sat down, turning away from them. “I’m here at the hospital with Suzanne Castle and her other daughter. They asked me to help them find a lawyer for Ed.”

“Ah.” There was a pause. “You heard, then.”

“Are you going to arrest him?”

“I don’t know. A lot’s going to depend on the autopsy. We’re still not sure how he died.”

“Why do you think Ed did it?”

“I’m not sure he did. He was in the house when I got here. Said he followed one of the trails back to the old part of the camp-the burned-out buildings I told you about?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He said he found Eugene there. Lying in the grass.”

“What do you think?”

“Somebody used the garden cart to move something heavy from the house to the old buildings this afternoon. There’s a raw track cutting through the trail and dirt stuck in the cart’s tread.”

“You think Ed killed Eugene and tried to hide his body?”

“Maybe. We’re waiting for the crime scene team to arrive. They’ll set up for prints and pictures and tracks. We’ll see what they say.”

“Are you going to be questioning Ed yourself?”

He sighed heavily. “I can’t see handing the job off to anyone else.”

“I can. Ask Lyle to do it.” Russ’s deputy chief was the most experienced man on the force. “You shouldn’t have to do it yourself. Ed’s a friend of yours.”

“I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

Her heart ached for him. “Oh, Russ.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Stop it.” She curled her feet up under her in the squishy seat, tuning out the rest of the world. “Do you want to talk about it?”

There was a pause, and she could picture Russ pinching the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “Not right now. Kevin’s taking Ed to the station, and I need to be here while the team works up the crime scene.”

“Later.”

“Where will you be?”

“If the Castles don’t need me, at St. Alban’s. Or the rectory. I haven’t done anything to prepare for the bishop’s visit tomorrow.” She brushed a clot of dried leaf rot off her pants. “Or to get ready for this dinner dance tonight. God knows I need a shower.”

“You’re going to be at the new resort tonight?”

“Yeah. My friend Hugh Parteger was invited. He works for an investment bank in New York City. You met him at Paul and Emil’s last year.”

“Oh, yeah.” Russ’s voice was devastatingly unenthusiastic.

“His firm wound up investing in the resort, so Hugh’s driving up this afternoon for the grand-opening celebration.” She tried to keep her voice neutral. “I’m going as his date.”

There was a long pause. Somehow, she didn’t think he was rubbing the bridge of his nose this time. “Nobody drives up from the city for a party and then turns around and goes home,” he said. “Where’s he spending the night?”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just thinking of your reputation.”

“Do you mean to sound like a pompous hypocrite, or was that accidental?”

“I worry about what people might say about you!”

“You’re jealous.”

“I’m not going to get into this right now.”

“Hypocrite.” She knew she sounded childish and spiteful, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“I’m not the one who has to set a good example for my flock. What is it your church teaches? Sex should be reserved for marriage?”

“For a committed, monogamous relationship,” she said snottily. “Since I haven’t dated anyone other than Hugh for the past two years, I think we qualify.”

“A high roller from New York is only interested in one thing, and it’s not the Book of Common Prayer.”

Suddenly she deflated. “I kind of wish that was true,” she said quietly. “But it’s not. He likes me. A lot.”

There was a long pause. When he finally spoke, Russ’s voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry. I have no business sticking my nose into your relationship with him. Forget I said anything.” He paused, then went on with badly faked cheer. “If you two are, you know, moving ahead… that’s great. I mean it.”

“Well, there’s your trouble, as the song says. He’s moving ahead. I’m not.” She stared at the stains on her pants as if the secrets of the universe were written there. “I can’t give him something that already belongs to someone else.” She gave herself a shake. “And you know what? You’re right, this is the wrong time to talk about this. Compared to the Castles and the van der Hoevens, I have no troubles.” She smiled brightly. “Time to go where I can be useful. Don’t worry about trying to catch me later. You’re going to have your hands full.”

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.

She paused. “No, I’ll be at the-”

“We’re going, too. Linda and me.” She could hear his humorless smile. “We’ll see you and Hugh there.”

She was going to die. She realized, now it was too late, that her panic at waking up in the tower room of the old house had been more like playacting than the real thing. She raged and shook and whimpered out of the unknown, the faceless whoevers who had put her there. But she had been on Haudenosaunee land, at home, in a way, and some part of her must have been soothed and strengthened by that realization. She prepared to be the heroine in her own action film, counting on a lucky break like the ones that heroines always catch by the end of the third reel.

Shut in the stifling trunk of a car, she lost any illusions she had left. There was only the darkness, and the noise, and the continuous rolling and thumping and jolting, leaving her bruised and breathless and unable to think. She was in the hands of the man who had killed her brother, and she was so afraid she couldn’t even grieve for him.

The car stopped. She heard the driver’s door open, then one of the back doors. There was a clinking sound and then footsteps going away. After a while, they came back. She braced herself, but once again she heard the clinking in the backseat and then the footsteps disappearing. The next time they returned, though, there was an electronic click, the trunk sprang open, and she was blinking in the light, unable to make out anything other than a blurred black silhouette. He tangled his hands in the blanket that was still wrapped loosely around her and was hoisting her out before she could collect herself enough to protest.

She opened her mouth to scream, but he slung her over his shoulder, knocking the wind out of her. He climbed a short set of stairs, teetering under her weight, and she had the stomach-jolting sensation that she was about to fall. The steps were old, massive stone slabs instead of concrete, and there was a cold, fresh wind and the sound of water. That was all she absorbed before he passed into a dim, still place. He swung around, and she glimpsed a whirl of worn wooden floor and two small wooden crates, and then he flexed beneath her, straining, and she heard the squeak of unused wheels on a metal track.

“Nooo!”

The rumble of the door rolling shut cut off her despairing cry.

He didn’t bother to tell her to shut up. That, more than the cavernous, disused space around her, convinced her she was well out of earshot. Whatever happened here, no one would hear.

He humped her across the floor, between tarp-covered lumps and pallets of old-fashioned wooden crates, much larger than the ones he had stepped around at the door. Despite the golden afternoon sun outside, the huge space languished in twilight.

Facedown, she had no idea how high the vast room was, but overhead she thought she heard the sound of wings. The place reeked of machine oil and damp wood and mouse droppings. As her captor crossed the floor, the dust-flecked air grew lighter and the shadows clouding the machinery and the crates grew more defined. She noticed another thing: The sound of water, faint at first, was increasing steadily.

He stopped, leaned forward, unseated her from his shoulder, and thumped her onto a crate like a sack of grain. She tilted her head back. Above her, I-bars and rafters glinted in the pale light streaming from lozenge-shaped windows set high in the wall behind her. She looked at the man who was going to kill her. She had always thought of herself as a fighter, as a leading-the-charge-from-the-deckof-the-Rainbow-Warrior sort. Now she discovered it was possible to be so tired, so hurt and sad and scared, that the Rainbow Warrior sank beneath a black sea, leaving her adrift, no surface under her feet. “What are you going to do to me?” she asked, her voice bleached of emotion.

“For chrissakes.” The man wrapped his hand around his upper arm, where she had bitten him. “I told you before, I’m not doing anything to you. You’re going to stay put for tonight. I’ll let you go tomorrow.” He paused. “Or Monday, at the latest.”

“You’re going to let me go.”

“I’m not the bad guy here. Christ! All I wanted to do was talk with your brother about buying some of the Haudenosaunee land. I didn’t know he had his own sister locked up in some kinky game of hide-and-seek.”

“That’s not what was going on!” She was grateful for the tears rising in her eyes. It meant she could still feel grief and outrage. “My brother was protecting me.” At some point between seeing her brother’s face in the tower and facing his murderer here, she had come to accept that Eugene hadn’t discovered she was missing and come creeping in to rescue her. He had put her in the tower, given her a bucket and blankets and food, and if she couldn’t imagine the reason right now, it didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

“Okay, then I’m protecting you, too. In better style, I might add. I’m leaving your gag off, for one.”

He didn’t have any duct tape. Not that she was about to point that out to him.

“There’s a washroom over there.” He pointed toward a dark shaft of a doorway at the far edge of the room. “It’s not in great condition, but it works. And I’ll bring you something to eat and a sleeping bag later. There’s even two cases of your family wine by the door. Be good, and you can have some later on.”

Along with grief and outrage, she could still feel amazement. His tone of voice clearly invited her to admire his generosity. To thank him. He stared at her, expecting some reaction. She didn’t know what to give him. He huffed and turned away. “You’re next to the kill,” he said over his shoulder, and for a moment she had an image of a serial killer’s dumping ground, before common sense reasserted itself. The kill. The river. “You can’t be heard, so don’t bother to wear your voice out yelling.” His figure blurred into the darkness at the other end of the building. “I’ll be back later.” His voice floated through the dusty air.

She expected to see a blaze of light as the wide door-a type of loading dock, she recognized now-slid open. Instead, she heard a muffled thunk and click from another, smaller, unseen door. She was alone.

She waited, unmoving. Was it a trick? Did he want to toy with her before doing whatever it was he was going to do with her? Her proximity to the river suggested several unpleasant possibilities. She could hear it more clearly, now she wasn’t focusing all her attention on her captor. Water gurgled and swished directly below the wooden floor, and to her left she heard a steady rumble and hiss, water falling, fast, over an obstacle.

She waited some more. Minutes passed. More wings overhead. Birds. She hoped they were birds. The idea of sitting in this echoing space as the sun went down, surrounded by flying creatures that weren’t birds… she shivered. Then caught herself. She was thinking of the future, wasn’t she? At least, a future a few hours from now.

Her heart, painful, tender, hopeful, resurrected itself in her chest. He had really gone. She had time. She had an entire warehouse of possibilities. And tucked inside her sleeve, she still had the sharpened iron rod from the door hinge. She stood, a movement that was much easier from a crate than a floor. Better get started.

John Huggins was ticked off. “You mean it wasn’t Millie van der Hoeven?”

“No,” Russ said for the third time. He was in van der Hoeven’s study, sitting in the dead man’s chair, using the dead man’s phone. He was not a happy man at the moment.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” There was a pause. “I didn’t just decide to call off the search, you know. Mr. van der Hoeven told me his sister had been found. If anybody’s screwed up here, it’s him.”

Russ pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “Eugene was… mistaken. Did your searchers leave all together? Or did they straggle out one by one?”

“No, we always do a head count and equipment check before we break a search. We all left together.”

“What time was this?”

“Half past twelve or thereabouts.”

Right around the time when Becky Castle was being taken to town in the ambulance. “Did any of you see Eugene van der Hoeven?”

“Sure. He came out and thanked us all for our help.”

“Was he inside or outside when you left?”

“Inside. He went inside after he spoke with us. I figured he was fixing to head out to the hospital to be with his sister.”

“Did any of your team go inside the house before they left?”

There was a stack of catalogs by the phone. Russ picked up the top one. Hunting gear. He flipped through a few more. L.L.Bean, Eddie Bauer, army-navy surplus. It made sense. A man like Eugene van der Hoeven, phobic about leaving his house and grounds, probably did all his shopping over the phone.

“No. What the hell’s going on?”

Russ uncovered another catalog. “I can’t say right now. Did you notice anything odd or unusual, anything at all, in the time between breaking the search and leaving?”

“No.” Huggins paused, then said, “Yes. Sort of. When I was driving down the road to the county highway, I passed a car coming up. It wasn’t actually coming up right then. It had pulled off as far as it could to let us through. We make quite a wagon train when everybody’s truck starts rolling.”

“What sort of car?”

“It was a black Mercedes. Looked kind of new, but you know how they are. Hard to tell.”

“Do you know the model?”

Huggins laughed. “Do I strike you as a guy who spends a lot of time around Mercedeses? Ask me about Chevys, then I can help you out. It was a four-door hardtop, New York plates, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Did you see who was in it?”

“Some guy. I couldn’t make out any details from my angle. I ride a lot higher up than that Mercedes.” His voice turned serious. “Look, if Millie van der Hoeven is still missing, do you want me to reassemble the team?”

“You got your dog handler back?”

“She’s on her way down from Plattsburgh right now.”

Russ thought for a moment. “We’re in the middle of an investigation, so I can’t have your people up here until we’ve cleared the scene. But put everyone on hold. Especially the dog handler.”

“Okay.” Huggins was clearly consumed with curiosity, and only his image of himself as a hard-bitten professional was keeping him from breaking down and begging Russ to tell him what was going on.

Russ said his good-bye and got off the phone. Outside, Lyle MacAuley was squatting in front of the third bay of the garage, squinting at the garden cart stowed there.

“What do you think?” Russ asked.

“It’s been used. Today. Look.” He pointed to where a torn blade of grass, still green, clung to a dab of dark soil. “That’s fresh.” He stood, stretching. “I don’t need some fancy-pants statie technician to tell me that. And take a look at the handle.” He pointed. “Smear of blood.”

“Yeah, I noticed that as well.” Russ pinched the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t see any open injuries on Ed when I took him into custody.”

“What about van der Hoeven’s body?”

Russ shook his head. “I asked Emil Dvorak to get the preliminary results to us as quickly as possible. There’s something about this whole situation”-he waved, indicating the cart, the house, and the wide woods beyond-“that sticks in my craw.”

“I dunno. I like Ed Castle as a suspect. He gets here, smashes into van der Hoeven with his SUV, and then dumps the body in the back of beyond.” Lyle spread his hands as if presenting a fait accompli. “We’re back home in time for the evening news.”

“Somebody else was here.”

Both of Lyle’s overgrown eyebrows rose.

“John Huggins saw a black Mercedes driving up the road to Haudenosaunee when the entire search team was making their way down.”

“Tight fit.”

“Huggins couldn’t identify the year or model, just that it was a sedan with New York plates.”

“Great. I’m sure there aren’t more than two, three hundred thousand Mercedeses in New York. Saratoga alone probably has more’n a hundred. I’ll get right on it.”

“We have a blank spot in van der Hoeven’s timeline as well,” Russ said. “An hour, an hour and a half between the time the search team left and you found him here with Ed.”

“Any possible witnesses?”

“He had a part-time housekeeper. I can’t remember her first name, but the last name’s Schoof. She’s Mark Durkee’s sister-in-law.”

“Lisa.”

“Good memory.”

Lyle leered. “You may be getting too old to notice, but the day I forget a good-looking woman’s name is the day you can haul me away in the garden cart.”

“I’m going to radio Kevin Flynn. Have him question her. Her husband came by to pick her up, so he may have seen something as well.”

“Kevin?” Lyle looked skeptical. “You sure about that?”

“He needs to start somewhere.”

“What about me?”

Russ grinned. “You’ve not only started, I think you’ve damn near finished as well.”

“Smart-ass. What do you want me to do?”

The whoop-whoop-whoop of a siren stopped Russ before he could answer. He watched as a paneled van emblazoned with NYSP CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION UNIT pulled up between Lyle’s and Noble Entwhistle’s squad cars. Russ let himself feel relieved when Sergeant Jordan Hayes stepped down from the driver’s side. Hayes had worked scenes for the Millers Kill PD before, and he was close to local law enforcement’s ideal of a trooper-smart, willing to take direction, and not likely to push for jurisdiction.

“You were going to tell me where you wanted me,” Lyle reminded Russ.

“Yeah. Get over to the hospital and take Becky Castle’s statement. She’s out of surgery.”

Lyle looked surprised. “The hospital called you?”

“Uh.” Russ forced himself not to look away from his deputy chief. “No. I was talking to Reverend Fergusson. She told me.”

“Ah.” Lyle paused. “You know, at fifty you’re supposed to be too old and too smart to be messing up your life.”

Don’t go there. Just don’t go there. Russ strode across the gravel toward the van, where another technician had joined Hayes in unloading the gear.

“Sergeant Hayes,” he said, his hand outstretched.

The trooper shook his hand briefly. “Chief Van Alstyne.”

“Ready to help us make a quick close on this one?”

“You bet. Show us the way.”

Russ pivoted toward one of the squad cars. “Noble,” he shouted.

Noble Entwhistle popped up from his slouched position against the side of his car.

“You’re with me.” Russ pointed a finger toward Lyle, who had drifted up beside him. “You. To the hospital.” He lowered his voice. “Be good.”

“Funny,” Lyle said. “I was going to tell you the same thing.”

Clare had always considered the narrow brick stairs leading from St. Alban’s semibasement kitchen to street level her own private escape hatch. The great double door of the church was for Sundays and weddings and inconveniently faced Church Street’s public square, in the opposite direction from the rectory. The doorway out of the upper parish hall, opening onto Elm Street and the large parking space the church rented, was much more frequently used, like the driveway-side entrance in a house where the front door is too grand and inaccessible. As a result, the chances of Clare slipping in and out unobserved were slim to none. But few people used the kitchen stairs, which scuttled steeply up to St. Alban’s own minuscule parking lot and from there to a tall boxwood hedge dividing the rectory from the church grounds.

Her plan had been to sneak down the stairs, find Geoff Burns, and then hightail it out of there to her own house. She needed food and a shower. Or a shower and food. Maybe a sandwich in the tub.

The presence of an unheard-of three cars squeezed onto the postage-stamp-sized asphalt square was a tip-off that her plan was about to require some modifications. She nosed her Shelby against a plastic garbage bin and opened the door gingerly, so as not to smack into the neighboring Volvo.

She could see a sliver of the top of the door. Open. The sound of cascading silverware and voices conferring was almost drowned out by an enthusiastic rendition of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” That would be Judy Morrison, former Lutheran. Since her interpretation of gourmet cooking was crushing Pringles over her casseroles, Clare hoped she was on cleanup rather than the food prep crew.

Then she caught a whiff of something buttery and delicious. Her stomach lurched forward, and her feet followed. She pattered down the stairs, salivating.

Courtney Reid and Sabrina Campbell were talking, heads bent together, stirring pots on the eight-burner stove. Judy Morrison was elbows-deep in sudsy water, pans and canisters of silverware piled on the counters around her. All three women wore the HAVE YOU HUGGED AN EPISCOPALIAN TODAY? aprons that had been such a hit at the springtime fund-raiser.

“A bulwark never failing,” Judy sang. “Our helper he amidst the flood-” Courtney shot her a glance, rolling her eyes, and spotted Clare.

“Reverend!”

Clare smiled to keep from wincing. She never heard the word without hearing her grandmother Fergusson sniffing, Reverend. Why, you might as well start calling priests ‘Holy.’ It’s just as grammatically incorrect. Although Clare accepted “Reverend Clare” as a compromise-since she manifestly wasn’t a “Father,” and “Mother” made her think of aged Armenian nuns-she much preferred to be addressed by her first name than by a naked “Reverend.”

“Hey, everyone. How’s it going?” The source of the mouthwatering odor was a huge baking tin crammed with tiny quiches. “This smells amazing. Can I have one?” Her hand was almost on one of the miniature tins when Courtney pinned her with a coolly arched brow.

“Only if you want to risk running out at the reception tomorrow.” Courtney’s nose wrinkled. “What is that smell?” She peered into the sink. “Judy, did you put something rotten down the drain?”

Clare made a tactical retreat. “Anything in the fridge?” She wrenched open the professional-sized refrigerator. “Holy cow, you’ve been busy.” Crustless, quartered bread towered next to mixing bowls filled with tuna salad and thinly sliced ham. Scallops enveloped in bacon strips awaited the broiler. Tiny, perfect strawberry cheesecakes bumped into miniature shish kebabs ready for reheating. And in pride of place, Clare’s own suggestion for the lunch: deviled eggs. Her favorite. Could she appropriate one or two? To taste-test? She glanced over her shoulder. Courtney was watching her.

“Uh-uh-uh,” the woman singsonged. Clare shut the door with a sigh.

Sabrina Campbell stuck a spoon into the pot she had been stirring and lifted it to her mouth, blowing on it. It was, Clare saw with a dizzy yearning, chocolate. “Where have you been?” Courtney asked. “We expected you hours ago.”

“I thought you’d be done by now. I mean, I’m really headed home to take a shower.” Clare realized that this statement didn’t cast her in the best light. She hesitated, not wanting to go into too much detail. “I got an early morning call from the search and rescue team. There’s been a young woman lost in the woods. I filled in until one of their more experienced volunteers replaced me.”

“Well, I won’t even begin to tell you what a nightmare it’s been here,” Courtney said. Judy Morrison, her face hidden from the younger woman’s view, grimaced; whether in exasperation or solidarity, Clare couldn’t tell. “First there was this awful mix-up with the crusts for the individual quiches. Then we had to go back to the store because the kiwi and the strawberries weren’t fresh.”

“There weren’t that many that had gone bad,” Judy said under her breath.

Courtney rolled on as if she hadn’t heard her. “And then we had a terrible time making the crème fraîche. I suspect the fat content wasn’t all it could have been.”

Judy mumbled something that sounded like “… if we had settled for whipped cream…”

“Anyway, we’re well sorted out now. D’you want to come upstairs and see how the setup is going? I was just headed up.” Courtney whipped off her apron. “Sabrina, you can keep an eye on my rémoulade, can’t you?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Sabrina said, tucking a strand of silvered blond hair behind her ear and tasting the now-cooled chocolate.

“Reverend?” Courtney was holding the kitchen door open. Clare tore her eyes away from Sabrina Campbell’s now-clean spoon and trotted after the fast-moving brunette.

Courtney strode down the dank hallway, passing the boiler room, the sexton’s supply closet, smelling of disinfectant, and the shuttered doors to the undercroft, the church’s subterranean attic. She pounded up the narrow steps, Clare following on her heels, and burst through into the sunlit parish hall.

Noise assailed them. Three women and two men snipped stems and chattered loudly across the room. A tropical forest of blooms and branches was spread out on a plastic-sheeted table. Terry McKellan and Tim Garretson wrestled folding round tables off an enormous dolly and rolled them into place, rumbling like Ezekiel’s chariot wheels. A phone was ringing in the office. From the church, Clare could hear the music director and the choir, going over a particularly difficult section of the choral evensong they’d be singing tomorrow at four.

“God of love and God of power, Make us worthy of this hour,” the basses thundered down, only to be cut off by a shrill “No! No!”

The members of the floral guild spotted Clare first. “Thank heavens you’re here,” Laurie Mairs said, dropping her intertwined stems of roses and stephanotis and hurrying toward Clare. “The silver vases are all locked away, and Delia’s lost her spare key!” She shot a glance at the guilty woman, who shrugged her shoulders, smiling sheepishly.

“Delia, you have to let me or Mr. Hadley know if you lose one of the keys,” Clare said, raising her voice to be heard across the room. “That silver is irreplaceable. We can’t allow-”

“Clare!” Mae Bristol cut off what was threatening to become a rant with the authority only a forty-year career as an elementary school teacher can bestow. “Where have you been?” She bore down on Clare from the upper hallway, stopping only when she got within sniffing distance. “And what have you gotten into?”

“Miss Bristol.” Laurie Mairs, like many of the other parishioners aged forty-seven and under, seemed to find it impossible to address Mae Bristol by her first name. “I was just about to have Reverend Clare open the-”

“This will only take a moment, Laurie.” Mae peered up at Clare with her black-currant eyes. “Mr. Hadley has brought every banner ever sewn up from the undercroft. We need you to help us select which ones to hang. Some of the older ones are quite lovely, but I’m not sure they’ll take the strain of being hoisted up to the ceiling.”

“Reverend Clare!” Clare swiveled, following the alto voice to the hallway, where Karen Burns was waving a sheaf of pink message slips. Clare stared at Geoffrey Burns’s wife.

The Castles. “Excuse me for just a sec,” she said, shouldering her way past Miss Bristol, Laurie Mairs, another member of the floral guild who had arrived to press their claim against Mae Bristol’s, and a miffed-looking Courtney Reid. Courtney, lovely, chestnut-haired, perfectly shaped, should have resembled Karen Burns, who was also all these things, but Karen wore her self-confidence and her simple, expensive clothes with an effortless style, while Courtney always seemed to be trying too hard. There was no love lost between the women.

“Have I rescued you?” Karen said, baring her perfectly white teeth. “Has Courtney spoken to you about making her the events coordinator at St. Alban’s?”

“What on earth do we need an events coordinator for?”

Karen shrugged. “Well, you know, she was the cruise director aboard one of those ships before she snagged Shaun Reid.” Her eyes glittered. “I understand she was ‘Kourtnee’ before the marriage.”

Clare tried to smother her smile. “That’s not very nice, Karen.”

“We first wives have to have some fun at the expense of these youngsters stealing away husbands twenty years older than themselves.”

“Somehow, I can’t imagine any twenty-four-year-old stealing Geoff away.”

“He knows what would happen.” She held up one hand and made a snipping motion.

Clare quickly stifled her laughter. No need to give the cluster of ladies glaring at Karen any ammunition. “Speaking of your husband, where is he?”

“He should be here any minute with the booze for the postevensong reception.”

“Oh, God, I’d forgotten about that.”

“How on earth could you forget the fifty biggest donors to the church meeting the bishop for an intimate cocktail party?”

“Do we have to serve drinks?”

“If you want to hit people up for money, believe me, it helps to liquor them up first.” She rustled the pink slips in her hand. “I’ve been calling everyone who’s RSVP’d to the evening reception. I’m reminding them that we’re asking everyone to bring a nonchurchgoing friend to enjoy the beautiful music in our stunning Gothic Revival sacred space.”

Clare could never figure out if Karen was serious or being ironic when she spoke as if she were reading out of a guidebook.

“After all,” Karen went on, “it’s all about bringing new members into the fold. New pledging members.”

Clare groaned. “I used to believe the three legs supporting the Episcopal Church were scripture, reason, and tradition. That was before I became a priest. Now I know the three legs are really get ’em in, get ’em back, and get their pledges.”

“He may already be down in the kitchen,” Karen said. “Let’s go see.” Clare trailed her down the stairs, through the hall, and into the kitchen. “Aha.” She pointed to a cardboard box containing several fifths on the counter.

Clare heard the sound of feet clattering down the stairs, and here came a small, sandy-haired man in a leather bomber jacket, arms wrapped around another box.

“Hi, sweetheart.” Geoff leaned back and pecked Karen on the cheek before depositing the second box on the counter. He sniffed. “What’s that smell?” He checked his pants. “Is it me? I was carrying Cody earlier-”

“It’s not you.” Clare stepped forward. “I was looking for you. I have a favor to ask.” She cocked her head toward the kitchen stairs. “How ’bout we go outside and I stand downwind?”

Squeezed in behind the Burnses’ Land Rover, Clare told Geoff about Becky and the hospital and Ed and the arrest. Burns didn’t say anything while she rattled out all the details she could remember, just hmm and go on and I see. When she finished, he folded his arms and frowned.

“Can you take his case? Even though he might not need to keep you on?” Clare asked.

Geoff nodded. “I’ll charge him a flat fee for advising him during questioning and arranging bail, if it becomes necessary. He can apply that toward my retainer if he decides he needs my services further.”

Clare blew out a breath in relief. “Thanks, Geoff. When can you get to the station?”

“I’ll go now if you help me hand Cody off to Karen.”

“You’ve got a deal.”

Geoff opened the back door and handed Clare a diaper bag disguised as an expensive tote. She slung it over her arm while Geoff eased the sleeping toddler out of his car seat. Cody Burns had dark hair pasted to his sweaty temples and was clutching a rubber squirrel scored by dozens of teeth marks. He let out a protesting whine and dug his face into his father’s shoulder. Burns shushed him and carefully transferred him to Clare’s arms. She buried her face in his fat neck and breathed in his sweet and pungent baby-boy smell. Still sleeping, he clutched at her. The squirrel fell, squeaked once, and bounced under the Land Rover.

“For God’s sake, get Mr. Squeaky,” Clare whispered. Burns dropped to his hands and knees, groping beneath his vehicle for the toy. Mr. Squeaky was vital to Cody’s happiness. The two-year-old came to church every Sunday with his parents, who did not like to leave him in the nursery, and Clare had grown almost used to the rhythmic squeaking that accompanied her sermons.

Geoff clambered up from the pavement and handed her the toy. “Don’t you need to give Karen the car seat?” Clare asked.

Geoff looked at her as if she had suggested he strap the kid to the running board. “We have car seats in all our cars,” he said. “But thanks.”

“Okay. Bye.” She turned and stepped slowly down the stairs, keeping a tight hold on the sleeping toddler and the toy.

Judy Morrison let Clare know Karen had returned to the office. Clare followed, Cody heavy and warm in her arms. When Karen spotted them, she crossed from the secretary’s desk and met them in the office doorway. She raised one perfectly groomed brow. “I take it my husband agreed to do that favor for you?”

“Yep. I’m sorry, I didn’t think of Cody. Is this going to be a problem for you?”

“Not if I can use your office instead of Lois’s,” Karen said, glancing behind her at the church secretary’s desk. “I just need a telephone.”

“You’ve got it.” They retreated to Clare’s office, which was warm for a change and filled with liquid afternoon light. Karen retrieved a baby blanket from the diaper bag and, easing Cody away from Clare, nested the sleeping toddler on Clare’s aged and saggy sofa.

“He can finish out his nap there,” Karen said.

“Great.” Clare bent over and kissed Cody on one rosy cheek. “I’d better get back to the others.”

“Oh!” Karen ducked out into the hall and reappeared a moment later, waving another stack of pink phone message slips. “I almost forgot. These are for you.” She laid them in Clare’s hand.

“All of them?” Clare couldn’t keep a note of horror out of her voice.

“Most of them are from Willard Aberforth. Diocesan Deacon Willard Aberforth.” Her exaggerated baritone gave Clare the feeling that Karen had spoken with the deacon herself-and had not been impressed.

“Yeah, he contacted me earlier this week. He said he wants to have a meeting with me.”

“He’s the bishop’s hatchet man, you know.”

“Karen!”

“I’m serious. One of the duties he performs for the bishop is making sure everything is ready for the annual visit. Another thing he does is make sure priests and congregations are toeing the line.” She leaned forward, her face grave. “Watch yourself with him. You’ve already had more controversy and publicity in two years than Father Hames had in twenty. I doubt the bishop looks favorably on that.”

“I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition,” Clare said weakly.

Karen’s mouth curved. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” she said, completing the quote. “Don’t let Aber-forth get you in his sights. I think he’s got a lot more up his sleeve than the comfy chair.”

Surgical recovery was an open room, with six beds widely spaced to admit crash carts and a team, if the worst happened. Not that it was going to be necessary for today’s solitary patient. She had been stirring fitfully for several minutes, her arrhythmic breathing and occasional moans a good sign that she was surfacing from anesthesia normally.

Since she was the only one in the room, the recovery nurse was ready when the young woman’s eyes cracked open. She laid her clipboard down and dropped her pen into her tunic pocket.

“Wha…” her patient croaked.

“Hello, Becky.” The nurse leaned over, not close enough to disorient the girl, but near enough so she could see and hear her. “You’re in the hospital. You were brought in with internal bleeding. You’ve had an operation, a splenectomy.”

“Hurts.”

“I bet it does.” The girl’s face was pale, throwing the rapidly purpling bruises on her jaw and temple into stark relief. Somebody sure did a number on her. “Dr. Gupta’s prescribed Percocet for you. Do you think you could swallow a pill if I helped you?”

“Mouth… dry.”

“That’s a normal effect of the anesthesia. Do you feel at all nauseous?” She reached toward the stainless steel bedside cart, where she had put a large plastic cup of crushed ice and water.

“No. Thirsty.”

“Okay. I’m going to press the button and raise the head of your bed… okay? Not too much?”

“My shoulder hurts.”

“That’s the gas left inside during the operation. It’s going to make you a little uncomfortable for the next few days.” She shook the Percocet out of its small paper cup.

“Ha… uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, I know. Medical terminology. We’re afraid if we tell you it’s going to hurt like a bear, you’ll get discouraged.”

Becky swallowed the pill. The nurse held the ice water upright for her while she drank it through a bendy straw.

“Not too much, now. Dr. Gupta will be in to see you soon, and when he gives the go-ahead, we’ll move you to your room. Then you can see your family. If you want to.” She had dealt with enough domestics, as the staff called them, to know that sometimes family members were the last people a battered woman wanted to see.

Becky closed her eyes. Opened them. “Police,” she said. Her face twisted. She tried to sit up.

“Ssh.” The nurse laid a hand firmly on the young woman’s shoulder. “We’ve already informed the police that you’re out of surgery. As soon as you’re strong enough to talk, an officer will be in to interview you. You can talk to him alone or have one of the nurses with you-whatever you feel comfortable with. In the meantime, you’re safe here. I promise you. No one can harm you.”

“Randy Schoof.”

The nurse paused, one hand on the bed’s controls. “What?”

“Randy. Schoof. Hit me.” She sank back with the bed, trembling with exhaustion.

“Take it easy,” the nurse said automatically.

“Randy Schoof,” Becky said. Her eyes slid shut. “Hurts.”

“The medication will take effect soon.” The nurse looked up at the wall clock. Dr. Gupta wouldn’t be back for another check until she called him. She looked at the phone hanging from the wall behind her station. Internal line only. “You rest,” she said. “I’ll let Dr. Gupta know you’re awake. Don’t try to talk.”

She crossed the white room. The doors hissed open as she approached and hissed shut behind her. She turned right down the hallway, where the floor station gleamed ahead of her like the light at the end of a darkened tunnel.

“Stacy?” The charge nurse glanced up, startled. “Can you take recovery for five minutes? The patient’s still resting. You don’t need to do anything.”

Stacy frowned. “It’s not your break time.”

“Please? I need to call home. You know how it is.”

Stacy groaned exaggeratedly, getting up from her chair. “You gals with young kids. I swear, it really does take a village to raise a child. A village of coworkers.”

“Thanks.” She swung behind the counter and had her hand on the phone when Stacy called to her from halfway down the hall.

“Rachel? You owe me one.”

“I do.” Rachel Durkee forced a smile before picking up the receiver. She had to call her sister. Fast.

Shaun pulled into his garage and waited until the door shut behind him and the fluorescent lights popped on before getting out of the car. He stared in dismay at the caramel-colored leather seat, which now looked as if a big baby had wet all over it. God only knew if it was salvageable or not.

Slamming the door shut, he dug out his garage door key and let himself into the breezeway. He eased off his shoes, crusted with mud and leaf rot, and went on stocking feet through the kitchen and up the stairs. Jeremy was certainly at work, and the cleaning woman didn’t come on Saturday, but he was worried Courtney might be home already from her church thing.

He slipped into the guest bathroom and locked the door, stripped off his bloody shirt and trousers, and tossed them into the bathtub. His arm was a mess-a deep row of bite marks clotted with drying blood, surrounded by plum and indigo bruises. The skin around the bite already looked inflamed. He remembered, from the days when Jeremy was in preschool and biting was part of his peers’ social coin, that the human mouth was worse than any animal’s for germs and infections. Could you get tetanus from a human bite? It didn’t matter, he supposed-he wasn’t going to the doctor’s for any treatment, that was for damn sure. He reached for the medicine cabinet and froze as his face came into view.

He was a mess. His nose was puffy, the flesh beneath his eyes purpling. His skin had split over his chin, and a goose egg was hatching on his forehead. He looked like someone who had been in a knock-down, drag-out fight. Courtney was going to freak.

Shaun flipped the door open and grabbed the hydrogen peroxide. He unscrewed the top and, holding his arm over the bathtub, poured half the contents onto his wound.

He bit down on his yell. Holy God, did that sting. The peroxide bubbled furiously in the bite marks. He turned on the tap, and when the antiseptic had done its job, he used a washcloth to sluice away the dried blood. He let the tub keep filling, soaking his clothes, while he bandaged the bite. He scrubbed off his face and dabbed antibiotic cream on his cut. Short of breaking into Courtney’s cosmetics, there wasn’t anything he could do for his black eyes.

He leaned in closer to the mirror. Behind the bruising, his eyes looked the same as they always had, pale blue and preoccupied. He marveled that he didn’t look any different. That his eyes didn’t show he had killed a man.

He blinked. Of course, technically, he hadn’t killed van der Hoeven. He had simply… let him fall. They had been struggling, and perhaps he had pushed him harder than necessary. But still, he knew now. What it felt like.

He remembered a conversation with Russ Van Alstyne. He had been in college, and Russ had been home on leave. It was before they had given up on their awkward attempts at rejoining the severed ends of their friendship. What does it feel like? he had asked. Killing someone?

It doesn’t feel like anything, Russ said.

C’mon. You have to feel something.

Russ had taken a long pull on his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When you’re doing it, he said, you feel hot. And fast. Like doing speed in a sweatbox.

And after?

Russ’s eyes looked a long, long way off, into a place Shaun couldn’t go. After, he said. After, you feel cold.

Shaun looked into his own fifty-year-old eyes and felt something Russ had left out. Or maybe, being a nineteen-year-old grunt, he hadn’t known the feeling for what it was. Exultation. And power. Let Terry McKellan sit behind a desk and say yes or no. Let the Reid-Gruyn board cluster around a table voting up and down. He had exercised real power, the ultimate power. He was taking his destiny into his own hands.

Don’t get cocky, he thought. Events were still too fluid, too slippery. Squeeze too tightly or hold too loosely and he could be right back where he had been, waiting for the ax to fall on Reid-Gruyn. Except this time he’d be waiting inside a jail cell. But if he were smart, and daring and, most important, willing to use the power he had taken into his hands… he looked down at them. Flexed his fingers. Let himself think, for the first time since he had hauled Millie van der Hoeven out of that tower, that maybe there could be another accident.

Lisa Schoof held the telephone tightly, as if loosing her hold, even for a moment, would let the malevolent black thing fly apart, its shrapnel embedding in her flesh, her blood seeping around the plastic wounds, her life dripping away from a hundred openings that could have no healing.

“Say something,” her sister hissed over the line. “For God’s sake.”

The thing that came to mind, I wish you had never called me, I wish I didn’t know, I wish it were still ten minutes ago, was useless. Lisa didn’t bother to ask for reassurance-Are you sure? Couldn’t there be a mistake?-because Rachel, smart, precise Rachel, didn’t make mistakes like this.

She cleared her throat. “How long?” she asked.

“How long what?”

“Until it’s out.”

Rachel clicked her teeth. A habit she had had since girlhood. “I can justify not calling the doctor in to see her for another half hour or so. She’s still sleepy and just had her medication. After that…”

She didn’t have to finish. Lisa could guess. The patient tells the doctor. The doctor tells the police. The police arrest her husband. It reminded her of the circle game they played as kids. The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone…

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’m doing this for you, not for him,” Rachel went on. “If anyone finds out, it’ll mean my job. Not to mention what it’ll do to my marriage. Be smart. Take care of yourself for a change.”

“Thank you,” Lisa repeated.

“I love you,” her sister said.

“I love you, too.”

Rachel’s voice was replaced by a toneless buzz. Carefully, carefully, Lisa replaced the receiver in the cradle. She caught a glimpse of her blurred reflection in the microwave door. I’m happy, she thought. She pinched her cheeks for color, ruffled her hair jauntily. It’s just another Saturday afternoon. She strolled back into the living room.

Kevin Flynn, who had been examining the photos hanging on the wall, turned. “Everything okay?” he asked brightly.

“Yep.” She settled herself in the middle of the sofa, tucking one leg under her. She wasn’t up to controlling her face, voice, hands, and legs all at the same time. She grabbed a pillow, a souvenir from their honeymoon in Aruba with scenes from the island stitched on the cover. She wrapped her arms around it, one hand on a conch shell, one on a palm tree. “Just my friend Denise. Denise Hammond, you remember her.”

It helped if she thought of him as little Kevin Flynn, who had been a painfully thin freshman during her senior year at Millers Kill High. Skinny Flynnie, that had been his nickname. She did her best to ignore his uniform, the belt strapped around his waist like Batman’s utility belt, for chrissakes, his gun.

She wouldn’t think about his gun.

Kevin lowered himself into the only other seat in the room, the wooden rocking chair. “Yeah, I remember her. Whatever happened to her?”

“She moved to Glens Falls. Got a job at the Post-Star.” She put on a teasing voice, one part of her marveling that she sounded so natural. “You should look her up. She’s still single, and she says a good man is hard to find.”

Kevin blushed. “She’s older than me.”

“That only matters in high school. Once you’re both out, who cares?”

He shook his head. Evidently she wasn’t the only one who remembered Skinny Flynnie.

What would I be saying if I didn’t know what I know now? What would she have done if the phone hadn’t rung a minute after Kevin knocked on her door, asking to come in? She’d ask him why he was here. Innocent people did that.

“You didn’t come all the way out here for dating advice,” she said, still using that where did it come from? teasing tone. “What brings you to my door?”

“Uh, is Randy at home?”

She concentrated on keeping her voice even, her hands relaxed. “No, he’s been gone all day. Running errands. You know. Typical Saturday stuff.”

“He didn’t bring you home? From your job at Haudenosaunee?”

“No.”

“Oh. See, the chief bumped into him while he was on his way up there-Randy, I mean, not the chief. I wanted to ask him if he had seen anything while he was up there. And you, too, of course, I want to ask you.”

She was lost. Did Kevin have a coldheartedly clever way of befuddling suspects until they spilled everything? What the hell did anything up at Haudenosaunee have to do with Randy and… and… Her mind slid over the rest of that sentence. “I don’t understand,” she said honestly.

He sighed. “Sorry. I’m still getting the hang of questioning people.” He drew himself up straight and tilted forward, stopping the gentle rocking he had slipped into. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your employer, Eugene van der Hoeven, is dead.”

What he said was so far from what she had expected, it took her several minutes to decipher his meaning.

“Lisa? Are you okay?”

She stared at him. “Mr. van der Hoeven’s dead?”

“Yeah.”

“How? What happened to him?” She hoped her voice wasn’t as light and bubbly as she felt. Poor Mr. van der Hoeven. She tried not to smile. Poor, poor Mr. van der Hoeven.

“Uh, I don’t think I can give you any details yet. We do know he was killed sometime between twelve-thirty and two o’clock. I was hoping you could give me some details.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you. He was alive and well when I left at noon.”

“Did you drive yourself home? Is that why Randy didn’t pick you up after all?”

Careful. “No, I got a ride with a woman named Clare Fergusson. I knew Randy was going to be running around town, so I told him I’d find my own way home. He must have forgotten.”

“Reverend Fergusson?” Kevin glanced up from the small wire-bound notebook where he was writing down her words. “Do you think she might have gone back up to Haudenosaunee after she dropped you home?”

“I don’t think so. She was done with the search team for the day.”

“Do you know if Eugene van der Hoeven had any enemies? Had he fought with anyone?”

She made a face. “I cleaned up after him for four years, but I don’t know much about the man. He was neat, polite, and always gave me a good Christmas bonus. He never had anybody to stay at Haudenosaunee except family-his sisters and his dad, while he was alive.” She hesitated. “I was worried that Millie van der Hoeven was getting into something not so good.”

Kevin looked up from his notebook.

“But your chief probably knows about it. I told it to Ms. Fergusson this morning, and she said she was friends with the chief and she would tell him.” She untwisted her leg and tucked the other one up. “Starting from when Millie got here at the end of the summer, I’ve been finding these pamphlets and letters from the Planetary Liberation Army.”

Kevin looked impressed.

“You’ve heard of them? Yeah, they’re a nasty bunch. Anyhow, it worried me. Millie is one hardcore earth mama. And it always struck me as strange, the way she just up and left her own home in Montana to move in with her brother.”

“Did she ever mention leaving?”

“Nope. Isn’t that weird? Makes me wonder if she maybe had to leave her other home.”

“Huh.” He riffled through his notes. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

The innocent question punched her in her gut. She shook her head.

“Okay.” He flapped the notebook closed. “It looks like Randy was one of the last people up there before Mr. van der Hoeven was killed, so we’ll want to talk with him as soon as we can. Let him know when he gets home, okay?”

She nodded. “Let me walk you out,” she said, unfolding herself from the couch, pleased to find her legs didn’t wobble at all. At the front door, she blocked his way with her arm on the doorknob, smiling up at him. He blushed again. “Give some thought to what I said about Denise, hmm?”

He mumbled something, and she opened the door.

Just in time to hear tires crunching down the drive. She and Kevin both looked out as her husband’s pickup rolled to a stop next to where Officer Flynn’s squad car was parked.

Kevin turned to her.

Skinny Flynnie, she reminded herself. Skinny Flynnie.

“Hey,” he said happily. “Randy’s home.”

We are not the first to be, Banished by our fears from Thee; Give us courage, let us hear, Heaven’s trumpets ringing clear.”

“No! No! Tenors-you’re supposed to be trumpets! Not kazoos!”

Clare, unfolding a chair, paused. “They sounded pretty good to me,” she said to Terry McKellan.

He opened another chair and drew it up to one of the round tables. “Me, too. But then again, I have lousy taste in music.”

“Nonsense,” Courtney Reid said, snapping a tablecloth between them. Settling in generous folds, it transformed the battle-scarred folding table into white linen elegance. “I’m sure you have very nice taste in music. Who’s your favorite group?”

“Herman’s Hermits.”

Clare and Courtney looked at each other. “You’re right,” Clare said. “You do have terrible taste in music.” She wrenched open a final chair and slid it beneath the snowy waves. All around her, tables and chairs waited for linen and china and silver to work their magic. “Courtney,” she said, eyeing the large stack of tablecloths and napkins heaped on a still-bare table, “do you want me to help with those?”

She could see Courtney catalog the mud splatters and stains on her clothing. She resisted the urge to curl up her hands. Lord knows what her nails looked like right now.

“No-o-o,” Courtney said, giving a credible imitation of someone who was sorely tempted to say yes. “I think I can handle it. And Sabrina’s finishing up in the kitchen. She can help me. I’m sure you want to…” She gestured with her hand, a neutral movement that might have indicated “read a book on theology” or “scrub yourself with Lysol.”

“Okay. Thanks. I really need to get things ready for tonight.”

“What’s tonight?” Terry asked.

“A friend from New York City’s arriving this afternoon. We’re going to the dinner dance at the new resort tonight.”

Courtney brightened. “Are you really? Shaun and I are going too! I got a fabulous dress on a shopping trip to Manhattan.” She dropped her voice, despite the fact that only Clare and Terry were there to listen. “We’re going to be at the VIP table, so I wanted to make a good impression.”

Clare smiled wanly. She would be wearing a dress she had snapped up on sale in Germany during a three-day layover waiting for her unit’s helicopters to be loaded into a C-141 and flown to Saudi Arabia. It had been cutting-edge European designer chic-in 1991.

“One of the sponsors of the evening, GWP, is ferociously courting Reid-Gruyn.” At Clare’s blank look, she explained, “Shaun’s business. Pulp and paper. They want it bad.” Courtney glowed at the prospect. “I can’t wait. With the buyout, Shaun won’t ever have to work again. We can spend our time traveling and having fun-” She caught sight of Terry McKellan’s astonished expression. “Oh, and work for the causes we hold dear, of course. Like St. Alban’s.”

“That sounds wonderful.” Clare tried to inject some enthusiasm into her voice. Coming to rest after a half hour of nonstop activity brought the hunger and the icky-sticky feeling roaring back. She could swear she was hallucinating a hamburger floating in front of Courtney’s face.

“You look done in,” Terry said. “Let me walk you to the rectory.”

She straightened. “I’m fine.” The last thing she wanted was for one of the old-guard vestry members to think she didn’t have the stamina to set up a few folding chairs.

“Humor me,” he said. “I want to catch you up on some vestry issues.”

Surprised, Clare nodded. “I guess I’ll see you tonight,” she said to Courtney.

“Well… during the dancing. We’ll be up at the VIP table during the dinner, remember.”

“Mmm.” This smile was even less convincing than the last. Terry McKellan tucked her hand under his arm and shambled out the back door. “What’s all this about vestry issues?” she asked as soon as they were out of earshot.

“Nothing. I just wanted to get you alone without having to explain everything to Courtney Reid.” He angled across the withered grass toward the sidewalk. “This may not fall under the rubric of ‘need to know,’ but I’m aware you like to keep your finger on the congregation’s pulse.” His big, round face fell into serious lines. Clare had long ago pegged Terry as “the jovial one” in her vestry lineup, and it was disconcerting to see him so grave.

“What is it?”

“It’s what Courtney Reid was saying. About her husband selling out and retiring.”

They reached the sidewalk. “Yes,” Clare said, giving him permission to continue.

“It’s not going to happen. Well, it is, but not the way she describes it.”

They walked past the hedge dividing the church from the rectory. “Uh-huh,” she said. What did Courtney Reid’s husband’s business plans have to do with her? She wondered if too many years in the corporate loan department had slanted Terry’s view of life.

“As far as Shaun Reid is concerned, any move by GWP will be a hostile takeover. I believe he’ll do anything, including putting his house, his savings, and his family’s stock holdings on the line, to stop it.” He shook his head. “He’s not going to succeed. And when he loses control of his family’s company, he’s going to lose everything, as far as he’s concerned.”

They had gone down the driveway and reached Clare’s kitchen door while Terry was speaking. She rested her hand on the railing and turned to him. “So the happy retirement and the traveling and all that?”

“That’s Courtney’s fantasy.” Terry sighed, puffing out his great brown mustache, increasing his resemblance to a walrus. “I feel a little… guilty, because I turned him down for a loan today. It was the right decision to make, but…”

She smiled. “You have a good heart, Terry.”

His face reddened. “That makes me sounds like a character out of a Dickens novel.”

“Okay, then, despite your razor-sharp business acumen, you have a good heart.”

“Better.” He smoothed his hairy brown wool sweater over his expansive stomach. “Will you… I don’t know, keep an eye on Courtney Reid?”

“I will. Thanks for letting me know.” She climbed the two steps to her kitchen door. “I’m going to go off duty for a bit. I’ll see you later.”

Terry waved good-bye and shambled back down the driveway. Clare slipped inside, closing the door with a careless kick and sinking into one of the old wooden chairs she had purchased in an attempt to warm up her all-white, straight-out-of-the-box kitchen. She sat for a moment, listening to the silence. Blissful silence.

This, she thought, is the real reason for celibacy. She had no husband, no children, not even a dog or a tropical fish relying on her, yet she still felt as if she had half the weight of the world sitting on her lap. She tried to imagine what it would be like, dragging home all the concerns and issues of people who needed her as a priest, only to deal with the people who needed her as a spouse and parent. She could remember how exhausted her mother had always looked at the end of the day, riding herd over two high-energy girls and twin boys. And she didn’t have an outside job. How had she done it? How did any woman do it?

Groaning, she pushed herself up from her chair. Time to shower. Then she’d raid the fridge and pour herself a glass of wine. She crossed through her living room, taking a moment to look over the framed photographs clustered on the sofa table. Come to think of it, that had been her mother’s method, too: a long, hot bath and a martini.

She had one hand on the banister when she heard the knock at her front door. For a split second she debated ignoring it, but even as her head urged her to stay still and be silent, her feet were crossing the foyer.

She opened the door to a looming crow of a man. “Ms. Fergusson?” he said. “I’m Deacon Willard Aberforth.”

They walked slowly down the path, single file, Sergeant Hayes and the assisting technician in the lead, then Noble Entwhistle, then Eric McCrea, who had been called on-shift early and had made it to Haudenosaunee just in time to join the trek to Eugene van der Hoeven’s last resting place. Russ brought up the rear. He and his two men carried Maglites, long flashlights that were heavy enough to be potentially lethal and could light up an entire grove in this forest if they had to.

They might. Twilight came early in the mountains, and the sun already sat on the high horizon like a campfire burning out. Orange light stretched in long, dying streamers through the trees, stitching a shadow forest across the landscape.

Hayes paused every now and then to take a picture of the trampled grass or the single rutted track of the garden cart. There was no other evidence as to who or what had been down the track.

The forest opened up onto the red-washed remains of the old Haundenosaunee. Russ heard someone whistle. “Watch out for Count Dracula,” Eric said.

“Is this it?” Hayes asked.

“Yeah,” Russ said. “This is it.” They skirted the blank-faced wall of boxwood and approached the place where Eugene’s body had been found. Hayes and the technician began to set up a lamp on a tripod for photographs. Russ glanced up at the tower. When he had been here with Ed Castle, he had looked briefly for a sign that Eugene’s death might have been a cruel accident, but from the ground, the stone balustrades that bound the galleries and circled the top of the tower were aggressively intact.

“Noble. I want you to circle the base of this thing, see if you find anything. Eric, you’re with me. Let’s take a look inside.”

The men split apart, Russ and Eric going along a rough path toward the open tower door, Noble into the deep grass. Russ took the corroded handle and opened the tower door, creaking the hinges. He switched on his flashlight, throwing a bright circle on a bare flagstone floor, and moved from that to a flight of wooden stairs running up the inner wall. “Up we go,” he said. “Watch your step.”

The treads creaked and groaned. Russ tensed with every step, ready to leap to the next step if the wood beneath his boot gave way. When they reached the first open landing, he leaned over the carved stone banister. Sergeant Hayes and the technician were hard to his right, just visible beyond the edge of the gallery.

They mounted the next flight of stairs. They were circling around the tower, corkscrewing higher and higher. At the next balcony, they could see Noble below, methodically sweeping through the shaggy grass. Russ squatted down and examined the edge of the balcony and the floor in front of it. “Nothing,” he said.

“It’s all stone,” Eric said. “You could go over it without a snag. Hell, those balcony rails are so low you could fall over just by leaning out too far.”

Russ looked at him sharply. “You okay? With the height, I mean?”

Eric jerked his chin up and down. “It’s not my favorite thing. I’ll be okay.”

The third level held the surprise. Instead of the open interior of the first two stories, this one was bisected by a sturdy wall with a thick door, standing just ajar.

“Jeez,” Eric said, reaching for the handle. “It looks like something out of Young Frankenstein.”

Russ grabbed his wrist. “Don’t touch it. Prints.”

Eric’s face flushed red. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“’Sokay.” Russ dug into his pocket for the pair of latex gloves Hayes had handed him and wrestled them on before tugging the door wide.

“Holy shit,” Eric breathed. He paused for a moment before fumbling to switch on his flashlight.

Russ’s first thought was Everything’s empty. The crumpled blanket, the husk of a backpack, the plastic sandwich wrappers littered across the floor. The smell of urine made him realize that not everything had been turned out and abandoned.

He and Eric circled the floor, cataloging the apple core-“May be DNA on that,” he said-and the Thermos, which Eric unscrewed after putting his own gloves on.

“Chicken soup,” he said, sniffing. “Cold.”

Russ spotted the olive green balaclava, tossed near the door, and was about to bag it when Eric whistled.

“What?”

The younger man was on his hands and knees at the opposite side of the tower. “I think I’ve got some blood on the floor. A few drops.” He sat back on his calves and looked up at Russ. “What the hell was going on here, Chief?”

Several possibilities came to mind. All of them were bad.

He crossed to the stone banister outside the door and leaned over. “Hey!” He called. He was, he saw, directly over Jordan Hayes. The state trooper looked up, his face blurring in the swift-moving shadow. “We’ve hit the jackpot. Get your stuff up here.”

He stepped back and beckoned to Eric. “Let me have your radio.”

The officer unhooked his radio and passed it to Russ. Russ keyed the mike. “Dispatch? This is the chief.”

A squeal of interference and a swish of static. He glanced at the stone walls around him and moved to the edge of the banister. Beneath him, the evidence technicians were packing up. “Dispatch,” he said again. “This is the chief.”

Harlene’s voice was faint but recognizable. “Go ahead, Chief.”

“Who’s on duty at the station?”

Static.

“Come back?”

“Tim Foster.”

“Okay. I want him to take Ed Castle’s statement on the events this afternoon at Haudenosaunee. And then tell Castle he’s free to go. With our thanks and apologies.” He thought for a moment. No, any apology from the department was as likely to land them a lawsuit as anything else. Better he apologize to Ed in person. “Cancel that last.”

“No apology. Got it.”

“I want you to call everybody in. Mark, Duane, everybody.”

Even with the bad reception, he could hear the surprise in her voice. “What’s up?”

He glanced toward the room behind him. Food. A toilet. Blood. “Damned if I know.”

“Come back?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“I have-” The last word was swallowed in static.

“Come back?”

“I have a message from your wife. ‘Don’t forget you promised-’” A squeal of static wiped Harlene’s words away.

He didn’t ask her to repeat. He knew what the message was. He stared down at Hayes, lifting his collection box on his shoulder as his tech tagged along with the light. This place would be dark within the hour. They had an unaccounted-for death in the morgue, an unaccounted-for woman somewhere out there, and an unaccounted-for assault suspect on the loose. If ever he should be on the job, it was tonight.

He thought about what Linda had said, about her work. It’s my turn now.

“Tell my wife I’ll be there as promised. Chief out.”

He stood for a moment in the freshening breeze, the last of the sun-warmed air flowing toward the cold dark. At the mountains’ edge, the sky was enough to make a man believe in glory, red-orange and pink and lavender. It was going to be cold and beautiful tonight, no clouds, the moon one day from full.

Too bad Eugene van der Hoeven and Millie van der Ho-even and Becky Castle couldn’t enjoy it. He closed his eyes briefly before turning from the beauty. Back to work.

Once, Lisa Schoof had driven home drunk. She hadn’t been Lisa Schoof then but Lisa Bain, nineteen, partying all afternoon at Lake George and then setting off home because she had to work early the next morning. She had been muzzy-headed, happy, sailing along, until she saw the state trooper in her rearview mirror.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, she had thought. She was going to get arrested. She was going to be disgraced, fined, lose her license, which would mean losing her job. The world narrowed around her. Some things faded away-the green of the trees, the other cars, the music on the radio. Other things sprang into terrible clarity-the lines painted on the road, the odometer, her rearview mirror. She drove for miles and miles, her heart pounding, all the time intensely aware of the lines, the speed, the cop car relentlessly behind her.

She felt that way now, standing at the door with Kevin Flynn, watching her husband sitting in the front seat. Why wasn’t he getting out? Any moment now, Kevin was going to ask her what was taking so long, and then he’d walk over there and pull Randy from the truck, and then-

Randy opened the door. He sauntered toward them, smiling, but Lisa knew it was a fake smile, knew this was a Randy she had never seen. His teeth glared in the sunlight, like the headlights of the state trooper in her rearview mirror, and as she looked away from his face, unable to bear the sight, she saw he had blood on his clothes.

Blood. On his clothes. And he was walking toward her, saying, “Hey, honey,” walking toward her, and Lisa thought her driveway was stretching down one of those optical illusion tunnels in the Washington County Fair funhouse, stretching out forever.

She heard Kevin Flynn breathe in, saw the rise of his starched tan uniform shirt, and between then and the moment he opened his mouth, she had time to think, Should I yell, ‘Run?’ If I knock Kevin to one side, will Randy have time to get away? But instead of ordering her husband to stop, Kevin said, “Hey, Randy. How you been?”

“Been good,” Randy said, and he marched up the front steps one, two, three with his big fake smile and grabbed her hand, grabbed it. There was the real Randy, his hand shaking, holding on to her tight enough to break bones. He kissed her cheek casually. “Good hunting weather, I can’t complain. My buddy Mike took a buck.”

“Good on you,” Kevin said, his voice betraying no suspicion, no reservations, no coolness.

“I’ve been helping him dress it out,” Randy said. “He’s giving us some choice cuts, babe. Get out the grill, ’cause I have a hankering for Bambi burgers.”

The men laughed. Lisa, squeezing against the pressure of her husband’s hand, was focusing too hard to join in. Was that a bruise on Randy’s face? A scratch on the back of his hand?

“Hey,” Kevin said, “I stopped by because I wanted to ask you and Lisa if you saw anything suspicious when you were at Haudenosaunee.”

Something flickered over Randy’s face, and for the first time, it struck Lisa that there might be a connection between Eugene van der Hoeven’s death and his presence there. She looked at him, this man she had known since she was in sixth grade, and wondered what he was capable of. If he could beat a woman into unconsciousness…

“What do you mean, suspicious?” Randy asked.

“Out of the ordinary.”

“Nope. Nothing. Except that Lisa wasn’t there.”

She squeezed his hand. “You forgot I told you you didn’t need to pick me up today, didn’t you?” she said, her teasing voice as fake as his smile.

“Uh, yeah.”

“You didn’t see any other vehicles?”

His hand went still in hers. “What’s this all about?”

“Did you see any other vehicles? Any sign that anyone else was there?”

Time slowed down again. She could see Randy’s mind working furiously, wondering which was the right answer. Kevin had said Randy was one of the last people to see Mr. van der Hoeven alive. The important thing was that he not be the last person to have seen him alive.

“Oh, honey, it’s terrible,” she burst out. “Mr. van der Hoeven’s been killed!”

Randy’s jaw dropped. He pulled his hand from hers and stared at her as if she had spoken Swahili. “He’s what?”

At that moment, Lisa had never been happier. Whatever else he had done, Randy had nothing to do with Mr. van der Hoeven’s death. Suppressing her giddy relief made her voice shake, so it sounded as if she were trying to keep from falling apart when she said, “The police think it happened sometime after all the search and rescue team folks left. Were you there after everybody else was gone? If you know anything, it may help them find whoever did this to…” Her voice broke, of its own accord.

“Oh. Wow.” Randy turned to Kevin Flynn, who had flipped open his little notebook again.

“Did you see any other vehicles?” Kevin asked for the third time.

“Yes,” Randy said. “They must have belonged to the search and rescue guys. I ran into Chief Van Alstyne, and he told me about van der Hoeven’s sister being missing.”

Kevin went on with “Did you see Eugene van der Hoeven while you were there?”

“I didn’t see anybody. I wandered around a bit, looking for Lisa. I yelled for her a few times, but nobody answered me.”

“Randy!” Her indignation popped out, as if there were still a need to worry about what Mr. van der Hoeven would think.

“Sorry, honey.” He shrugged at Kevin. “If there was anybody in there, they were keeping quiet.”

“Okay.” Kevin shut the notebook. “Thanks for your time.” He took a step toward his cruiser. Stopped. As if he had thought of something else. He turned to Randy. “Do you know a Becky Castle?”

Randy was silent. He had recaptured Lisa’s hand and was squeezing it harder than ever.

“There was a Becky Castle a few years ahead of us in school.” Lisa was amazed at how normal her voice sounded. If she lived through this, she was going to Hollywood, because she was one hell of an actress.

“Castle,” Randy said. “Is she related to Ed Castle? I used to work for him. Last year.”

Lisa cast about for a plausible question. “Is she a suspect?”

“Oh. No. Just a thought I had.” Kevin’s eyes had gone unfocused. “Thanks,” he said vaguely.

“Don’t forget to call Denise,” Lisa said.

With a flush of red beneath his freckles, Kevin came back to earth. He mumbled something under his breath and waved before trotting to his car.

Lisa waited until he had pulled up the drive and out of sight before she turned to Randy. “Inside. Now,” she hissed. “We have to talk.”

Clare was trying to decide who Willard Aberforth reminded her of. He was tall, several inches taller than Russ, which put him in the six-and-a-half-feet and up camp. However, his bones and flesh were afraid of heights; he stooped forward, arms dangling, while his jowls and eyelids and earlobes sagged toward the safety of the ground.

His face was all she could see, because Father Aberforth was in full clericals, black-swathed and white-collared, black shoes polished to a high shine, black jacket and black coat. He gave her a long once-over as she stood at the door, taking in her bean-sprout hairdo, her ratty thermal shirt, her stained pants, and her grimy sweat socks.

“You are the Reverend Clare Fergusson?” he asked doubtfully.

Sometimes, Hardball Wright drawled in her ear, the only option you have is to go straight ahead through the firefight. “Yes,” she said in her most chipper tone. “I am. Would you like to come in?” She stood to one side and opened her front door wider.

“Thank you.” He stepped past her.

“May I take your coat?”

He handed her his overcoat, his gaze traveling across her living room. The coffee table was entirely hidden by old copies of the Post-Star and stacks of books. Her running shoes and socks lay abandoned in front of the sofa, and one of the club chairs was occupied by a sweater and a bag of overdue videos.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting you.” The words were out before she could stop them. Damn. She hated apologizing for the state of her house. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

He coughed, a strangled sound that made her think of tubercular wards. “No, thank you. I trust this won’t take long.”

She had the same sinking sensation she used to get when her CO called her into his office. She indicated the chairs and sofa, darting forward to kick her shoes out of sight and remove the video bag from the chair.

She sat. He sat opposite her.

“The bishop asked me to speak with you, before his visit, on a serious matter. He didn’t feel he could give it the attention it deserves during his visit tomorrow.” He smiled thinly. “Between the Eucharist, the luncheon, the evensong, and the reception afterward, you’ve got him quite swept off his feet.”

“I’m sorry,” she began automatically. A serious matter. Her heart sank. There were almost too many possibilities. In the two years she had been at St. Alban’s, she had wound up in the newspaper or on television far too many times. She viewed it as an unfortunate consequence of her work as a minister. Russ, on the other hand, referred to it as hanging around with losers and butting into police business. Perhaps the bishop agreed.

Aberforth waved off her apology. “The bishop would rather this not get around any more than it has. It’s better for all concerned if we deal with the situation quietly.” He leaned forward. “I’m sure you’ll appreciate that we don’t want to be giving any of the other clergy in the diocese any ideas.”

There was another possibility, of course. She didn’t want to imagine it; the thought skittered around like a mouse trying to hide in the dark. What if gossip had reached the bishop’s ears? Gossip about her and Russ.

Oh, God, she thought. Oh God, oh God, oh God. She tried to settle her churning stomach with the thought that the bishop couldn’t know anything, that he couldn’t have anything other than rumors and innuendo.

“This bishop understands that a new priest, untested and untried, can make mistakes.”

Who told him? One of the vestry? One of her congregation? She felt another nauseating lurch. What if it were Linda Van Alstyne? Oh, God, what if she’d been followed around by a private investigator and there were photos of Russ coming in and out of the rectory, of them lunching together, of her walking at his side along dark streets?

“It’s easy, without proper guidance, to believe you’re making decisions out of compassion. Or that your decisions only affect the people involved. But,” he smiled his thin smile again, “as you can see, nothing stays secret in a small town. And every individual congregation, whether in Millers Kill or in Manhattan, is a small town.”

But still. There was nothing to prove that they had slept together, because they hadn’t. The times they had touched, over the past two years, she could name, date, describe, because they were so very rare. And precious. She could bull her way through this, because she had done… nothing… wrong.

Aberforth’s black eyes searched hers. “I can see you’re troubled. Please. I’m not here to punish. I’m here as the shepherd, seeking the straying lamb.”

She flashed on a picture of Aberforth scooping her up in his scarecrow arms, carrying her bleating back to the fold.

“So, I’d like to hear in your own words why you broke your vows of obedience to your bishop and performed a”-his mouth worked as if the words inside had a bad taste-“ceremony of union between two homosexuals.”

Clare stared at him. “What?”

“Why you gave the church’s blessing to an invalid union.”

She knew she must look poleaxed, but she couldn’t help it. “What are you talking about?”

His face collapsed into deep folds as he frowned. “Ms. Fergusson, feigning ignorance is unbecoming. The bishop has received reliable information that this past January, you celebrated a public ceremony wherein two men exchanged vows with one another. Whether you call it a blessing or a ceremony of union, it-”

“You mean Emil and Paul’s service? That’s what this is all about?” She started laughing in relief.

“Ms. Fergusson! This is hardly the response I was hoping for!”

She bent over, laughing and gasping for breath. “I’m… I’m sorry,” she managed. “It’s just… Ithought…” She pulled herself together, sniffing and wiping her eyes. Father Aberforth was looking at her as if she were the scriptural woman possessed by unclean spirits. “I apologize,” she said, under control now. “I… when… it was the stress.”

“Ms. Fergusson, are you aware that the bishop has stated explicitly that no such ceremonies will be performed in his diocese?”

She folded her hands. “Yes, I am.”

“And you did, in your ordination, promise to, and I quote, ‘obey your bishop and other ministers who may have authority over you and your work’?”

“Yes, I did.”

He sat back and let the words hang in the air. “Well?” he said finally.

“When I performed the ceremony of union, it was at a local inn, not at St. Alban’s. I didn’t mark down the union in our church register, and I made sure both of them knew I was there as a friend, not as a representative of the Episcopal Church.”

“Were you wearing your stole?”

The long, scarflike symbol of her priesthood. “Yes,” she said.

“Did you pronounce God’s blessing over them?”

“Yes. But you don’t have to be ordained to bless-”

“Don’t equivocate with me, Ms. Fergusson. You were acting as a priest of the diocese of Albany.”

“Father Aberforth, I interviewed both the men involved, as I would any candidates for marriage. They had been together ten years. No one could claim they were rushing into it ‘unadvisedly or lightly,’ to use the words from the marriage ceremony. They satisfied me that it was their desire to formalize, as best they could, a loving and monogamous relationship.”

Aberforth crossed one long black-clad leg over the other. “I’m willing to accept that you mistakenly thought you were not acting as a priest and that your inexperience clouded your judgment. Are you willing to confess that you were wrong in what you did?”

She phrased her answer carefully. “I felt that they were reaching out to God. I wanted to reach back, to help them connect.”

“Then you should have done so by gently correcting their sin, not by encouraging it.”

“I cannot believe that two adults in a faithful and self-sacrificing relationship are sinning.”

“Ms. Fergusson.” Aberforth speared her with his black eyes. “You have been ordained a scant two years. Bishops and learned theologians have been debating these issues in our church for longer than you’ve been alive. Do you really think you are the best judge of what is a sin or not?”

She kept silent.

“Are you willing to confess and repent?”

Are you now, or have you ever been… Ridiculous, the way her mind ping-ponged sometimes. She took a deep breath. “I confess my disobedience. And I’m sorry to have caused the bishop any distress by failing to follow his guidance on these issues.”

“You’re equivocating again.”

“Father, I cannot repent of what I did. I don’t think I was wrong.”

He sat in silence. What happened next? Was the bishop going to issue a commination against her in the pulpit, denouncing her? Was she going to be kicked out of St. Alban’s and bounced to another diocese?

And even now, the treacherous thought: If I leave Millers Kill, I’ll never see Russ again.

“The bishop asked me to call him after I spoke with you. I will lay this information before him.”

She nodded.

Aberforth stood. “If you have anything further you wish to add, or if, upon prayerful consideration, you change your stance, you can reach me at the Algonquin Waters.”

She stood as well. Great. Let’s meet up tonight after the dinner dance. You and me and Hugh and Russ. We’ll all have a drink together.

“One more question, before I go.”

“Yes, Father?” She sounded as if she were being catechized.

“At the start of our conversation, you were listening closely to what I was saying, and you were obviously concerned. Yet when I mentioned performing the illegal ceremony, you were”-he twisted the word-“surprised. To say the least.”

“I am sorry about laughing. I didn’t mean to offend or belittle-”

He cut her off. “What I want to know, Ms. Fergusson, is why you were so distressed.” From his stoop-shouldered height, he examined her. “What did you think I was going to say?”

Lisa shut the door, locked it, and barred it with her body, facing her husband.

“What’s the matter, babe?” he said.

She had heard naughty six-year-olds fake innocence better. “You beat up Becky Castle.”

His face went white. His eyes bugged out. “N-no,” he stammered.

“You worked her over so bad she wound up in the hospital getting surgery to stop her internal bleeding!”

He shook his head, his mouth working.

“I know you did, you shit!” She started to cry. “My sister was her postop nurse! She called to warn me.”

In the middle of the living room, he fell to his knees. “Oh, babe.” He reached for her. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do it, I was just trying to get a break, to save my job, and Ed Castle turned me down flat and she laughed at me and said she was going to spread my picture around and have me arrested, and I got so mad, so out-of-my-skull mad, and she was such a smug-faced bitch, one of those people who get everything handed to them and can’t understand what it’s like to try so hard, and then she was so still, and I thought she was dead, I really thought I had killed her…”

Lisa wiped her arm across her eyes. Randy’s agonized expression, his pleading confession, steadied her. “For God’s sake, Randy. Get up.” She reached down a hand. He staggered to his feet. He looked as if he wanted to hug her but was afraid to move closer. “How could you think she was dead? Didn’t you feel for a pulse? See if she was breathing?”

His face sagged. “I didn’t think of that.”

She sighed. “That’s because you’re not the detail person. I am.” She rubbed her hands over her eyes and looked at him wearily. “So did you think of what you could do to not get your butt hauled into jail?”

He stared at the wall-to-wall carpet. “I… I didn’t think…” He looked up at her hopefully. “Maybe she won’t remember?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Shook her head as if to dislodge something from her ear. “For God’s sake, Randy, she already told Rachel. Any minute now she’ll be speaking with her doctor, and as soon as she points to you, he’ll have the cops on you. We’ve got maybe thirty minutes before Kevin comes back. If we’re lucky. And he won’t be smiling and all ‘Hey, Randy, how’s it going?’ this time.”

“I never meant to hurt her in the first place!” Randy looked as if he were going to cry.

“Baby, that’s not going to stop them from putting you in Clinton for the next ten years.”

“Look. There’s no evidence. It’ll be my word against hers if she tells the cops.”

“Oh, Randy.” She couldn’t help it. She wrapped her arms around him. “You spilled your guts to me in fifteen seconds. How much longer do you think you could hold out to the police?”

He buried his face in the crook of her neck. “What should I do?”

That was the question. She hadn’t had a chance to gather her thoughts since Rachel’s call. “Did you leave anything behind? Any evidence?”

She felt him shake his head. “I drove her car to the Reid-Gruyn plant.”

“The mill? Why on earth did you dump her car there?”

He leaned back so she could see him. “I was thinking, there should be another story, right? Another version of how it happened. So I parked it in Mr. Reid’s space. Then I left some of her personal stuff in the office.” He held his hands out. Don’t you get it? “Reid belongs to some of those environmental groups. And he likes young babes-look at who he dumped his first wife for. I figured, if worse came to worse, I could argue that they were getting it on, and he hurt her, and she didn’t want to turn him in.”

She squeezed him. “That was smart. But what about fingerprints and bloodstains and stuff like that?”

“I wore my gloves.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek, staring into the middle distance. He waited. Finally she said, “I think you need to disappear for a while.” He opened his mouth to protest, and she went on. “Just for a while. You made a good start, making it look like Mr. Reid was involved. If we have a little time, I can think of a way to back that up, so the cops will seriously look at him instead of you. If it comes down to a trial”-he made a whimpering sound, and she gripped his shoulders-“if it comes down to a trial, all we’ll have to do is cast a reasonable doubt that you did it.”

She wasn’t sure if he followed her reasoning, but he grasped the essential thing. “Where do I go? And how long do I have to stay away?”

“Go to one of your buddies’ hunting cabins. Or, here.” She broke away and hurried into the kitchen, where she kept cash payments in the cookie jar until she could deposit them. “Head up north and stay in one of those no-tell motels.” She handed him the cash. “Wherever you go, you need to stick to the back roads, because they’ll probably be looking for your truck.”

He had been thumbing through the bills, impressed, but mentioning the police tracking him brought his head up. “That’s right,” she confirmed. “Whatever you do, don’t let anybody see that license plate.” She turned him toward the stairs. “Grab one of the duffle bags and throw in enough clothes for a few days. I’ll pack you some food. It’d be better if you stayed out of stores. Especially convenience stores. Those places have security cameras every two feet.”

He stopped, his hand on the banister. “You really do think of everything.” His voice was threaded with awe.

“Go on, you don’t have much time.”

Lisa unhooked one of the plastic IGA shopping sacks from behind the pantry door and began emptying out the refrigerator. A loaf of bread, a jar of mayo, an unopened package of bologna. Hard cheese and applesauce in a jar and Randy’s favorite pickles. Stuff that could fill him up and last, if not in a fridge, then hanging outside a window in the cold November air. All the while, the back of her mind kept count of how many minutes it had been since Rachel called. She tossed in a bag of Chips Ahoy and a jar of instant coffee, on the chance that he’d have hot water. She threw in a couple of spoons and a knife sharp enough to slice the cheese and twisted the bag handles in her fist and lugged it to the foot of the stairs.

“Hurry!”

A moment later he appeared, a backpack slung over his shoulder and one of their sleeping bags beneath his arm.

“Good idea,” she said.

He stood before her, unsure, not Jesse James making a break for the border but a kid heading out to summer camp for the first time. She hooked him around the neck with her arm and pulled his face close to hers. “First thing,” she said quietly, “is that I love you. Second thing is, if you ever, ever lift your hand to me, I’ll cut off your balls and feed ’em to the fishes. And then I’ll move out west and you’ll never see me again. Got it?” She pulled him tighter into the crook of her arm.

“Yeah,” he breathed.

She released him. “When it’s safe, give me a call.” She handed him the bag of groceries.

At the door, he hesitated. “Maybe I-”

“Go on,” she said, cutting him off. He nodded. Stepped outside and closed the door behind him. She didn’t stand at the window to see him pulling out. Randy could talk of omens and foretelling, of bad luck and good luck. She knew it was thinking and planning that made the difference between success and failure. She flung herself onto the sofa and picked up the Aruba pillow. She had a lot of thinking to do if she was going to save them from disaster.

Kevin bounded up the granite steps to the Millers Kill Police Department. He knew Mark Durkee thought it was an old dump, the brick-and-stone exterior unchanged since it was built over a hundred years ago, but it still pumped Kevin up every time he passed beneath the carved sign. Knowing that he belonged here. He had wanted to be a cop since he was six years old, and how many other people could say they were living out their dreams?

He yanked his cap from his head and struggled out of his jacket as he headed up the hallway to the squad room.

“Hey! Kevin!” Harlene’s voice. He swerved into the dispatcher’s office, where she was enthroned on her swiveling, adjustable, ergonomically correct Aeron chair in front of a bank of phone lines. He had asked her once, on a dare, how she rated a seat that cost ten times more than any other piece of furniture in the station. She had looked up and up and up at him-like the chief, he was over a foot taller than she was-and said, “Because I’m worth ten times more than any runny-nosed police academy graduate.”

“Where’s the chief?” he asked, throwing himself into a chair. “Still up to Haudenosaunee?”

“The birthday boy just called in. He’s en route to the ME’s office. Don’t you get comfortable over there,” Harlene said. “Lyle’s been trying to get ahold of you. He interviewed the assault victim, and she’s ID’d her attacker. The deputy chief wants you to meet him and be in on the arrest.”

Kevin felt a warmth, like the sun rising in his chest. “Me?”

She looked over her half-glasses at him. “It’s Randy Schoof.”

The sun sank. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was.” She swiveled away from him, needlessly snapping one of her monitors on. “The chief asked me to call Mark in early before we heard about this latest development. God only knows who’s going to tell him his brother-in-law’s put a girl into the hospital.”

Randy Schoof. He had stood on the man’s front steps and talked with him, smiled at him, taken his information. And all the time he had been eating a bunch of lies.

“Not that any of us will have time to sit and soothe him,” Harlene was saying. “Everybody’s coming in, off duty or not. Part-timers, too. Chief’s found something up at Haudenosaunee, mark my words.”

No. Not lies. He had been asking the wrong questions. And Schoof had taken advantage of his idiocy. Thank God Harlene had caught him before he entered his report. He would have never lived it down.

“In all the years I’ve worked dispatch I’ve never seen the like. A murder, a missing person, and an assault case all in one day? It’s like one of those signs of the Apocalypse, that’s what it is.”

Kevin jammed his hat on his head. “I’m outta here.”

“You be careful.” Harlene always made the words sound like a direct order.

“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “If anybody’s getting hurt today, it’s not gonna be me.”

Randy Schoof was on the road toward Lake George when he heard the siren. He floored the gas pedal, one eye on the road and another on the rearview mirror.

When he saw an intersection ahead, he slammed on the brakes and fishtailed into a turn. He immediately stood on the gas again, sending the truck leaping forward on the deserted road, and when he spotted a farm stand whose sign read CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, he didn’t hesitate. He spun into the U-shaped drive and bumped over the dying grass to pull in behind the small wooden building. He killed the engine and rolled his window down.

The siren wailed through the rapidly cooling air, faint and getting fainter. He waited, his heart pounding, until he heard nothing. Then he started up the truck and headed for Route 57.

He had had the idea in the back of his mind the whole time Lisa had been talking about hiding out at a buddy’s cabin or finding a motel. The problem with both those ideas, he figured, was that wherever he was, somebody would know. But there was a place he could go-at least for tonight-that no one would know about. He wouldn’t have thought of it if it hadn’t had been for his earlier visit to Reid-Gruyn.

The old mill. He could park his truck right in the regular employee parking lot. No one would think twice about it being there-there were always cars and trucks around, and if anyone realized his truck was there and he wasn’t, they’d put it down to a mechanical problem. Then he could hike over to the old mill and sneak inside.

He grinned. Lisa would be pleased. It was the perfect spot. No one ever went there. No one would ever think to look.

Despite having the bathroom door shut tight to keep the steamy warmth in, she heard the kitchen door open as she shut the shower off. The rectory was an old house, and it thumped and creaked and popped with every change of pressure, whether it was a door opening or a footstep on the floor or a stair tread swelling and shrinking as the humidity rose and fell.

Good Lord, it had better not be Deacon Aberforth, coming back for another round. She had barely escaped intact that last time, when he asked her what she had been so apprehensive about. She had stammered something about the fund-raising for the roof repairs and stuffed him out the door.

But no, she couldn’t imagine Aberforth letting himself in. It had to be Hugh Parteger, stopping by on his way to the bed-and-breakfast where he would be spending the night. She had been surprised he hadn’t arrived before now; although New York City was light-years away from Millers Kill in every way that counted, it was only a four-hour drive.

She grabbed a towel and bent over from the waist, flip-ping her hair down before wrapping it into a terrycloth turban. She lifted her robe from its hook and slipped it on, belting it firmly. She stepped out of the bathroom in an explosion of steam and checked herself out in the mirror at the top of the stairs. Swathed in white toweling from her head to her ankles, she looked like someone auditioning to be an extra in a remake of The Mummy. Hugh would be amused. She briskly rubbed at her hair through its wrapping, then took the towel off and tossed it over the banister.

She padded down the stairs. “Hey,” she yelled. “Is that-”

Russ was standing next to her sofa table.

“-you?” she finished, her voice gone small.

“Uh,” he said. “Um, I was on my way back from the ME’s office…” His voice trailed off. He was holding a picture of her with her family, taken this past summer when she had gotten away to Virginia for two weeks. He tried to put it back, but he was watching her instead of his hand and wound up bumping the heavy silver frame against two others, knocking them down.

That got his attention. He tore his gaze from her and started propping the pictures up, nearly tipping over three more in his haste to clean up after himself. “Sorry,” he said. She could have sworn he blushed.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I shouldn’t have so many on that table anyway. They’re bound to fall over.” Part of her was thinking at how pleased her grandmother Fergusson would have been to hear her taking the blame on herself, like a good southern belle. Another part of her was acutely aware that under her all-enveloping robe, she was naked.

That thought must have occurred to Russ as well, because when he turned back to her, he looked not at her face but at the tie belted around her waist. Her heart was trip-hammering, blood like heated honey flowing through her veins, raising her body temperature until it seemed the cloud of steam was still with her, enveloping her in dampness and warmth.

He looked at her, his blue eyes that crackled like the glaze on a Japanese pot, and the fierceness and the ache she saw there dropped the bottom out of her stomach and made her go loose-limbed.

She stepped toward him. Something flared in his eyes. She took another step. She wasn’t going to stop. She couldn’t stop. She was alone with him, in her own house, on her own time, and they were both adults, and why should she stop? She wanted, and she realized that everything she believed in, everything she placed between this man and herself, was just another robe, and she could shrug it off and be naked. Be nothing more or less than who she was.

She took another step. It was easy. She wanted to laugh. She took another-

– and he looked away. Turned his whole body, so that he was edge on toward her, and she thought stupidly, Oh. So that’s the cold shoulder.

“Don’t,” he said, his voice tight.

In an instant, every cell in her body was icebound. She had never been so mortified in her life. “I’m sorry,” she managed to get out through her constricted throat. “I’m so sorry. I was-”

“For chrissakes, Clare, it’s not that.” He wouldn’t face her. “What, do you think I don’t want you?” He clenched his hands. “I can’t be responsible for both of us. You sashay across the room with your eyes saying, Take me, take me-what do you think I’m going to do? I’m not a monk.” He turned back toward her.

She stared at him. He stared at her. She felt her lips twitch. Then grin. Then she started laughing, hard, clutching her stomach through the robe.

“Okay, okay.” He sounded abashed, but he was grinning, too. “The monk remark was not well thought out.”

Sighing from laughter, she wiped her eyes. “I love you,” she said.

She had never told him that straight out, without an apology. He looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I love you, too,” he said.

They stood there, three feet apart, not knowing what to say. Clare glanced down to where her feet were peeking out from underneath the robe. “Well,” she said finally. “Now that we’ve covered that, would you like some soup?”

She walked to the kitchen without waiting for his reply, knowing that doing something, keeping busy, was the safest course. And even though she wasn’t the least bit hungry at the moment, she also knew she’d be starving once he left.

She had her head in the fridge when Russ pushed through the swinging doors separating the kitchen from the living room. “What kind of soup?” he asked. She could hear it in his voice, too, a deliberate attempt to be casual, as if the two of them hanging out in her house while she was practically undressed was a normal thing.

“Butternut squash. I made it yesterday. It has squash, onions, chicken broth, peanut butter.” She pulled the Tupper-ware bowl from the bottom shelf and placed it on the counter.

“Uh…” He looked dubious. “I’ll pass.”

She shrugged. “More for me.” She retrieved a pot from the dish drainer and poured the soup in.

“So,” she said, opening the fridge again and bending down for the good bakery bread. “If you didn’t come here to have your way with me, why did you come?”

Silence. She straightened, turning, in time to catch him staring at her rump. His eyes looked glazed. “Uh,” he said.

Flustered, she nearly dropped the bread. She grabbed at the first topic to come to mind. “You said you were on your way back from the ME’s office. What’s happening in the van der Hoeven case?”

His eyes snapped into focus. “Ed Castle’s off the hook. Dr. Dvorak confirmed that Eugene died from a fall. As in, off the tower where we found his body.”

“The tower?”

“I told you about it, remember? A nineteenth-century folly.” He flattened his hands on the kitchen table. “Even if I could spin a theory whereby Ed chased Eugene up to the top of the tower and threw him off, the weird setup we found would argue for something entirely different. What different thing it was, I don’t know yet.”

“What did you find?”

“It looks like someone was being held there. There was food, articles of clothing, blankets…”

“Good Lord. Millie van der Hoeven?”

“That’s my thought. The crime tech guys didn’t find any prints, but there were a number of long blond hairs around.”

“Becky Castle has long blond hair,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but she wasn’t unaccounted for for any length of time. Besides, we know who assaulted her. Lyle interviewed her when she got out of surgery.”

Clare stopped, her serrated knife halfway through the loaf. “Who?”

“A guy named Randy Schoof.”

“Is he related to Lisa Schoof? The woman who works at Haudenosaunee?”

“They’re married. And he’s Mark Durkee’s brother-in-law. It’s a small town.”

She shook her head. That poor young woman. “How do you handle something like that?”

“Obviously, we keep Mark away from that investigation. Believe me, there’s more than enough to keep him busy elsewhere. He’s following up on a black Mercedes some of the search and rescue guys saw driving up to Haudenosaunee before Eugene died.”

“You think the driver might be Eugene’s killer?”

“At this point, I’m more concerned with finding Millie van der Hoeven. There’s nothing I can do to help Eugene now. But Millie… hell, I have no idea if she’s alive, if she’s dead, what she was doing in that tower room, who was keeping her there.”

“Sounds frustrating.”

“It is.” He sniffed at the soup. “Can I have a taste of that?”

She slid the bowl along the counter. He downed a spoonful. Then another. He looked at her, surprised. “Is it too late to change my mind?”

She grinned. “According to my theology, never.” She fetched another bowl from the cupboard and filled it from the pot. “Let’s eat in the living room,” she said. “My feet are cold.”

He took both bowls from her while she slapped the bread on a plate and followed him through the swinging doors. He laid the bowls carefully on the square coffee table before sinking into one of the cushy chairs facing each other across it. She settled the bread plate between the bowls, then turned on two lamps and the CD player. She glanced out the window before sitting down. “It sure gets dark early these days.”

“It’s November.”

She tucked her feet under her and smiled. “I didn’t get a chance to say this before, but happy birthday.”

He looked embarrassed.

“So you’re fifty now.”

He leaned forward, put his face in his hands, and groaned.

“That’s really, really old.”

He gave her a stony look. “Brat.”

She laughed. “Then don’t be in such a funk about it. As my grandmother used to say, getting old isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” She picked up her soup bowl. “What do you want for your birthday?”

“To find Millie van der Hoeven alive and well and to nail Eugene van der Hoeven’s killer.”

“Any ideas?”

He plunked his spoon into his soup. “The guy didn’t get out and about enough to make enemies. Unless he was harassing somebody through the mail for the past umpteen years, I don’t see how he could have whipped anyone up enough to kill him.”

“He whipped Becky Castle up when he chased her away at gunpoint.”

He flipped his hand open. “I’m damn sure Becky Castle didn’t kill him.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that. I was suggesting that the land sale itself may have stirred somebody to kill him. There’s a lot of money involved.”

“Yeah, but the main players are all benefiting. GWP gets glory and a big tax break, the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation gets more protected parkland, and the van der Ho-evens carry home bags of cash.”

“There are people who depend on access to Haudenosaunee land for all or part of their livelihood.”

“Like who? Ed Castle? I told you, he simply doesn’t fit as the killer.”

“What about Shaun Reid?”

Russ sat back. “What about Shaun?”

“Do you know him?”

He paused for a moment, as if thinking her question over. “He was my best friend in high school.” He leaned forward again and took another spoonful of soup. “We drifted apart after I went into the army. He was in college when I was in Nam, and by the time he returned to live in Millers Kill, I was long gone.”

“You didn’t pick things up again after you moved home for good?”

“Too many differences. Too much water under the bridge. Besides, you put on a uniform, people look at you differently.”

“I’ve noticed that,” she said dryly.

“Yeah, but at least you don’t have to worry that you might wind up arresting one of your buddies.” He shifted in his seat. “You start to get kind of friendly with someone, you think, here’s a guy I’d like to hang out with, go fishing, and then you think, what is it gonna be like when I pull him over for DUI? Or go to his house because he’s been brawling with his wife? Or surprise him at work because his boss finds he’s been cooking the books?”

“You don’t have a very upbeat view of human nature, do you?”

“Linda said the same thing to me this morning.”

Clare smiled a little. “She knows you well.”

“Yeah.”

She studied him for a moment while he ate his soup.

He lifted his head. “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking something.”

She smiled. “I wonder if one of the reasons you let yourself get close to me is because you felt, somehow, that a woman priest was less likely to fail you.”

He thought about it. “Less likely to wind up in trouble, you mean?”

“Or less likely to have any human frailties.”

“Well, if that was what I was thinking, the joke’s on me, isn’t it? I’ve never met anybody who attracts trouble like you.”

“That’s not fair! Just because I’m called to get involved-”

The smirk behind his soup spoon alerted her to the fact that her chain had been yanked. She picked up her bowl, trying to keep a scowl on her face. “You think you’ve got me all figured out, don’t you?”

“No.” His voice was low. “I think you continually surprise and delight me. And that’s why I let you get close.”

She stared at him, her face growing hot. He looked back at her, steadily, and it felt as if they were sinking in deep water, holding each other by their words alone. If she looked up, she would see the pale blue surface of the ocean, far, far above her.

The kitchen door crashed open.

“Vicar?” a British voice called. “Are you home?”