It was better than brooding, Layla decided. Maybe she thought it was odd for a lawyer, even a small-town lawyer to drive an old Dodge pickup with a couple of Ring Ding wrappers littering the floorboards.

“What are you doing for the second client?”

“That’s Charlie Deen. Charlie got clipped by a DUI when he was driving home from work. Insurance company’s trying to dance around some of the medical bills. Not going to happen.”

“Divorce, wills, personal injury. So you don’t specialize?”

“All law, all the time,” he said and sent her a smile that was a combination of sweet and cocky. “Well, except for tax law if I can avoid it. I leave that to my sister. She’s tax and business law.”

“But you don’t have a practice together.”

“That’d be tough. Sage went to Seattle to be a lesbian.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry.” He boosted the gas as they passed the town limits. “Family joke. What I mean is my sister Sage is gay, and she lives in Seattle. She’s an activist, and she and her partner of, hmm, I guess about eight years now run a firm they call Girl on Girl. Seriously,” he added when Layla said nothing. “They specialize in tax and business law for gays.”

“Your family doesn’t approve?”

“Are you kidding? My parents eat it up like tofu. When Sage and Paula-that’s her partner-got married. Or had their life-partner affirmation, whatever-we all went out there and celebrated like mental patients. She’s happy and that’s what counts. The alternate lifestyle choice is just kind of a bonus for my parents. Speaking of family, that’s my little brother’s place.”

Layla saw a log house all but buried in the trees, with a sign near the curve of the road reading HAWKINS CREEK POTTERY.

“Your brother’s a potter.”

“Yeah, a good one. So’s my mother when she’s in the mood. Want to stop in?”

“Oh, I…”

“Better not,” he decided. “Ridge’ll get going and Mrs. H has called Mrs. Oldinger by now to tell her to expect us. Another time.”

“Okay.” Conversation, she thought. Small talk. Relative sanity. “So you have a brother and sister.”

“Two sisters. My baby sister owns the little vegetarian restaurant in town. It’s pretty good, considering. Of the four of us I veered the farthest off the flower-strewn path my counterculture parents forged. But they love me anyway. That’s about it for me. How about you?”

“Well…I don’t have any relatives nearly as interesting as yours sound, but I’m pretty sure my mother has some old Joan Baez albums.”

“There, that strange and fateful crossroads again.”

She started to laugh, then gasped with pleasure as she spotted the deer. “Look! Oh, look. Aren’t they gorgeous, just grazing there along the edge of the trees?”

To accommodate her, Fox pulled over to the narrow shoulder so she could watch. “You’re used to seeing deer, I suppose,” she said.

“Doesn’t mean I don’t get a kick out of it. We had to run herds off the farm when I was a kid.”

“You grew up on a farm.”

There was that urban-dweller wistfulness in her voice. The kind that said she saw the pretty deer, the bunnies, the sunflowers, and happy chickens. And not the plowing, the hoeing, weeding, harvesting. “Small, family farm. We grew our own vegetables, kept chickens and goats, bees. Sold some of the surplus, some of my mother’s crafts, my father’s woodwork.”

“Do they still have it?”

“Yeah.”

“My parents owned a little dress shop when I was a kid. They sold out about fifteen years ago. I always wished-Oh God, oh my God!”

Her hand whipped over to clamp on his arm.

The wolf leaped out of the trees, onto the back of a young deer. It bucked, it screamed-she could hear its high-pitched screams of fear and pain-it bled while the others in the small herd continued to crop at grass.

“It’s not real.”

His voice sounded tinny and distant. In front of her horrified eyes the wolf took the deer down, then began to tear and rip.

“It’s not real,” he repeated. He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt something click. Something inside her pushed toward him and away from the horror at the edge of the trees. “Look at it, straight on,” he told her. “Look at it and know it’s not real.”

The blood was so red, so wet. It flew in ugly rain, smearing the winter grass of the narrow field. “It’s not real.”

“Don’t just say it. Know it. It lies, Layla. It lives in lies. It’s not real.”

She breathed in, breathed out. “It’s not real. It’s a lie. It’s an ugly lie. A small, cruel lie. It’s not real.”

The field was empty; the winter grass ragged and unstained.

“How do you live with this?” Shoving around in her seat, Layla stared at him. “How do you stand this?”

“By knowing-the way I knew that was a lie-that some day, some way, we’re going to kick its ass.”

Her throat burned dry. “You did something to me. When you took my shoulders, when you were talking to me, you did something to me.”

“No.” He denied it without a qualm. He’d done something for her, Fox told himself. “I just helped you remember it wasn’t real. We’re going on to Mrs. Oldinger. I bet you could use that chamomile tea about now.”

“Does she have any whiskey to go with it?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

QUINN COULD SEE CAL’S HOUSE THROUGH THE trees when her phone signaled a waiting text-message. “Crap, why didn’t she just call me?”

“Might’ve tried. There are lots of pockets in the woods where calls drop out.”

“Color me virtually unsurprised.” She brought up the message, smiling a little as she recognized Cybil’s shorthand.

Bzy, but intrig’d. Tell u more when. Cn B there in a wk, 2 latest. Tlk whn cn. Q? B-ware. Serious. C.

“All right.” Quinn replaced the phone and made the decision she’d been weighing during the hike back. “I guess we’ll call Fox and Layla when I’m having that really big drink by the fire you’re going to build.”

“I can live with that.”

“Then, seeing as you’re a town honcho, you’d be the one to ask about finding a nice, attractive, convenient, and somewhat roomy house to rent for the next, oh, six months.”

“And the tenant would be?”

“Tenants. They would be me, my delightful friend Cybil, whom I will talk into digging in, and most likely Layla, whom-I believe-will take a bit more convincing. But I’m very persuasive.”

“What happened to staying a week for initial research, then coming back in April for a follow-up?”

“Plans change,” she said airily, and smiled at him as they stepped onto the gravel of his driveway. “Don’t you just love when that happens?”

“Not really.” But he walked with her onto the deck and opened the door so she could breeze into his quiet home ahead of him.

THE HOUSE WHERE CAL HAD GROWN UP WAS, IN his opinion, in a constant state of evolution. Every few years his mother would decide the walls needed “freshening,” which meant painting-or often in his mother’s vocabulary a new “paint treatment.”

There was ragging, there was sponging, there was combing, and a variety of other terms he did his best to tune out.

Naturally, new paint led to new upholstery or window treatments, certainly to new bed linens when she worked her way to bedrooms. Which invariably led to new “arrangements.”

He couldn’t count the number of times he’d hauled furniture around to match the grafts his mother routinely generated.

His father liked to say that as soon as Frannie had the house the way she wanted, it was time for her to shake it all up again.

At one time, Cal had assumed his mother had fiddled, fooled, painted, sewed, arranged, and re-arranged out of boredom. Although she volunteered, served on various committees, or stuck her oar in countless organizations, she’d never worked outside the home. He’d gone through a period in his late teens and early twenties where he’d imagined her (pitied her) as an unfulfilled, semidesperate housewife.