Chad Garrett tipped his battered Saints cap back on his head and let the sunrise hit him flush in the face. Above the Atchafalaya the sky was aglow with soft stripes of color. Orange the shade of a ripe peach, warm and estival. Pink as vibrant and silken as the underside of a conch shell. Deep, velvet blue, the last of the night, set with a diamond that was the morning star.

He grinned to himself at the image he had painted with his thoughts. He had a natural gift for words. He figured he would write down the description as part of his makeup work for playing hooky from school. Mrs. Cromwell would give him a thundering lecture for missing English class again, but she would melt like butter when he handed in his short story about dawn in the swamp and the peace a man could find on the water. She'd do handsprings over his new word-"estival"-and that was an image that nearly made him chuckle. Mrs. Cromwell was fifty-eight and wore support hose and dresses that had enough fabric in them to clothe a family of four.

She was a good old girl, though, and Chad liked her as well as he liked any of his teachers. He was a good student, bright, capable. Hardly knew what a B was. But he didn't really care much for school, and, to the dismay of his teachers and the heartbreak of his mother, had no immediate plans to further his education once he graduated in June. This was where he wanted to be. In the swamp, observing nature, absorbing the beauty, the peace. He supposed he would relent after a year or two, go up to USL and study to become a naturalist or an environmental scientist of some kind or another. But for a while all he wanted to do was just be. He figured he would only be eighteen once. Might as well enjoy it.

He was his father's son in more respects than his big, raw-boned frame and square, good-looking face. Hap Garrett knew the value of contentment. He usually just smiled and turned a blind eye on those mornings when Chad didn't quite make it out of the boat shed without getting caught. As his dad liked to remind him, he'd been young once, too, and hadn't had much use for advanced algebra himself.

Chad steered his bass boat toward the shallows along a shaded bank, where a bit of yellow plastic ribbon marked one of his nets. The catch was good. He would make a couple hundred dollars today if his luck held down the line. The economics would appeal to Mr. Dinkle, whose class at ten he would miss.

He dumped the crawfish into an onion sack, sorting out the contorted body of a drowned water snake, which he tossed onto the bank. Some hungry scavenger would make a meal of it. Nothing went to waste in the swamp. Chad figured, if he was real lucky, he would witness nature's recycling, and that would appease Mr. Loop, fourth-period biology. He didn't figure he would have much of a wait. There was something up on the bank creating a powerful stink, the gagging, curiously sweet stench of death. The scent would act as a beacon.

Curious, he waded ashore and tied off his boat on a hackberry sapling. While he might not have given a fig how the balance of world power worked or how to find the square root of a negative, Chad wanted to know every detail about the life of the swamp.

It looked to him as if something had been dragged up on the bank. The weeds were bent and stained with blood. Might have been a deer that had gotten itself in trouble with a gator while drinking from the stream. It could have pulled itself back up onto the shore only to die of blood loss and shock. Or it could have been that a bobcat had caught himself a coon or a possum or a nutria, ate his fill, and left the rest. There were a dozen possibilities he could think of.

He pushed aside a tangle of branches and stopped cold in his tracks. Of the dozen possibilities he had considered, he hadn't included this. For the rest of his life he would see that face in his nightmares-beauty distorted grotesquely by death and the plain, hard realities of nature, blue eyes forever frozen in a shocked stare that made him think she had witnessed her own terrible fate and had seen beyond it to a terrible afterlife.

A woman lay dead at his feet. Horribly dead. Hideously dead. Naked and mutilated, with a white silk scarf knotted around her throat and a scrap of paper clutched in her stiff, lifeless hand.

Laurel woke alone. She wasn't surprised, so she told herself she couldn't be disappointed. But she was. Her brain told her she was foolish, that it wasn't practical or smart to want a future with Jack Boudreaux. He had too many ghosts, too much emotional baggage. But her brain couldn't do anything to banish her memories of the night-Jack's tenderness, the longing in his eyes, the pounding of his heart beneath her hand. Her heart was determined to hold on to those memories and the slim hope that went with them. Foolish, foolish heart.

He had gone at first light, she knew. Just as she had done before. She swept her arm across the vacant space beside her, finding nothing but a tangled sheet and a twisted spread. Not even his warmth lingered, just the scent of man and loving.

What would she do about him? What could she do? She couldn't change his image of himself. She had enough on her hands as it was.

That reminder brought thoughts of Savannah, and Laurel's stomach tensed like a fist at the thought of the conversation she would have with Aunt Caroline this morning. Restless, anxious, she climbed out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and panties, and went in search of her pocketbook and the roll of Maalox tablets therein. It lay on the bench in the courtyard, where she had left it, the fine calfskin coated with thick, velvety dew. She wiped it off with the tail of her oversize T-shirt and went back upstairs to sit on the bed.

Careless, Laurel thought, reaching into the bag in search of her antacid tablets. She knew better than to leave a purse lying around, especially one with a semiautomatic handgun in it. Instead of the roll of tablets, she came up with the gaudy heart-shaped earring that had no mate and no explanation. The ear wire had caught the chain of the little gold necklace, and she fished that out as well to untangle the mess and to work at untangling the mystery. It would give her mind something to do besides worry about her sister for a few moments. It would delay her conversation with Caroline.

The chain was twisted and knotted, and there seemed to be too many dangling ends. Strange, she thought, noting dimly that her heart was beating a little faster and her fingers fumbled at their task. She plucked at the gold butterfly and tugged a little harder at the chain, her breath coming in shorter bursts. Tears brimmed up in her eyes, not from frustration, not for any discernible reason. Silly, she thought, scratching at the tangle with the stub of a fingernail.

The butterfly and its necklace came free of the snag and fluttered to Laurel's lap, forgotten as cold, hard fingers of terror gripped her throat and squeezed. Hanging down from her trembling fist was a fine gold chain, and from the chain, swaying gently, a diamond chip winking as it caught the morning light, hung a small gold heart.

Savannah's.

"Oh, God. Oh, my God."

The words barely broke the silence of the room. She sat there, shaking, icy rivulets of sweat running down her spine. Her lungs seemed to have turned to concrete, crushing her heart, incapable of expanding to draw breath. She stared at the pendant until her eyes were burning, fragmented thoughts shooting across her mind like shrapnel-Daddy standing behind Savannah at twelve, fastening the chain, smiling, kissing her cheek; Savannah at twenty, at thirty, still wearing it. She never took it off. Never.

It swung from Laurel's fist, the tiny diamond bright and mocking, and dread crept through her like disease, weakening her, breaking her down. Tears blurred the image of the heart as she thought back to the night she had gone into Savannah's room. The feeling of stillness, of loss, of an absence that would never be filled.

"Oh, God," she said, choking on the fear, doubling over. She pressed her fist and the necklace against her cheek as scalding tears squeezed out from between her lashes.

She couldn't deal with this, couldn't face what she knew in her heart must be true. God, she couldn't go to Aunt Caroline and Mama Pearl-She couldn't go to Vivian-She didn't want to be here-should never have come back. She wanted Jack, wanted his arms around her, wanted him to be the kind of man she could lean on-

Selfish, weak, coward.

The recriminations came hard, as sharp as the crack of a whip. She had to do something. She couldn't just huddle here on her bed, half naked and sobbing, wishing someone else would be strong for her. There had to be something she could do. It couldn't be too late.

"No. No. No," she chanted, stumbling away from the bed.

She repeated the word over and over like a mantra as she tore open her wardrobe and drawers and grabbed a wrinkled pair of jeans, never letting go of the necklace. It wasn't too late. It couldn't be too late. She would go to Kenner and make him see. She would call in the damn FBI. They would find Savannah. It couldn't be too late.

Wild urgency drove her as she tugged on the jeans. At the heart of the feeling was futility, but she refused to recognize it or accept it. The situation couldn't be futile. She couldn't lose her sister. She wouldn't let it happen. There had to be something she could do. Dammit, she would not let it happen!

Frantic, she flung the bedroom door back and ran down the hall and down the stairs, the railing skimming through one hand, Savannah's necklace gripped tight in the other. Her sneakers pounded on the treads, her pulse pounded in her ears. She didn't register the pounding at the front door.

Caroline came into the hall from the dining room, already dressed for the day in stark black and white. She glanced up at Laurel, concern knitting her brows, her hand reaching out automatically for the brass knob.

As if in a dream, time became strangely elastic, stretching, slowing. Laurel's perceptions became almost pain-fully sharp. The blocks of white in Caroline's dress hurt her eyes, the smell of Chanel filled her head, the creak of door hinges shrieked in her ears. She tightened her fist, and the golden heart burned into her palm.

Kenner stepped into the hall, lean and grim, eyes shaded. The shadow of death. His hat in his hands. His lips moved, but Laurel couldn't hear his words above the suddenly amplified roaring of her pulse. She saw the color drain from Caroline's face, the stricken look in her eyes. Together Kenner and Caroline turned and looked up at Laurel, and the knowledge pierced her heart like a knife.