Mari still harbored the weary hope that people were essentially good, even though she had seen that many were not. Appearances seldom impressed her because she had grown up in a neighborhood where the phrase “all style and no substance” was the battle cry of most of the women as they ran to their BMWs, charge cards in hand, to race to the latest sale at Nordstrom’s. She had no aspirations to fame or fortune and dreamed mostly of a quiet place where she could fit in unnoticed.

Their differences had only served to balance their relationship. They had shared a lot in those late-night beer and bullshit sessions. Then Lucy had come into some money, chucked her job, and moved to Montana, and while the bond between them hadn’t broken, it had been stretched awfully thin.

The intervening year had been a long one. Mari had missed her friend. Neither of them was good about writing letters, and time slipped by between phone calls. But she knew the friendship would still be there. Lucy would welcome her with that same kind of casual amusement she turned on every other aspect of her life. All Mari would have to do would be to step out of her car, shrug her shoulders, and say, “It started out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there.”

Her eyes darted to the rearview mirror, betraying her as the tide of depression tried to rise again inside her. She frowned at the state of her wild, streaky blond mane. Who was she kidding? Her whole life had been a series of bad hair days.

While her two sisters had inherited their mother’s champagne-and-satin locks, Mari had been given a tangle of rumpled raw silk with dark roots that turned nearly platinum at the ends. It was an unmanageable mess, and she wore it sheared off just above her shoulders in a bob that somehow never lived up to the description of “classic” or “stylish.” Long ago she had decided her hair was a metaphor for her life: she was wilder than she ought to be; she didn’t match the rest of her family; she never quite lived up to expectations.

“It doesn’t matter, Marilee,” she declared, leaning over to shove a cassette into the tape deck and crank the volume. “You’re in Montana now.”

Sacramento was just a dot on the map behind her. The life she had led there was in the past. She was officially on hiatus with no plans, no prospects, no thoughts for the future beyond spending a week or three with her old friend. A vacation to clear the mind and soothe a bruised heart. A pause in the flow of life to take stock, reflect, and burn the pile of business suits that covered the backseat of her Honda.

She buzzed down the car’s windows and breathed deep of the sweet, cool air that rushed in. A wondrous sense of liberation and anticipation filled her as the wind whipped her hair and Mary-Chapin Carpenter proclaimed to feel lucky in spite of the odds. Life began anew right now, this instant. Glancing down, she fished the pack of Salems out from among the mountain of travel guides on the seat beside her, but she paused as she started to shake one out. Life began anew. Right now. Grinning, she chucked the pack out the window, stepped on the gas, and started singing along in a strong, warm alto voice.

The mountains to the west had turned purple as the sun slid down behind their massive shoulders. The sky above them was still the color of flame-vibrant, glowing. To the east, another range rose up in ragged splendor, snow-capped, the slopes blanketed in the deep green of pine forests. And before her stretched a valley that was vast and verdant. Off to her right, a small herd of elk grazed peacefully beside a stream.

The sight, the setting, shot another burst of adrenaline and enthusiasm through her. The trip to euphoria from near depression left her feeling giddy. She imagined she was shedding her unhappiness like an old skin and coming to this new place naked and clean.

This was paradise. Eden. A place for new beginnings.

Night had fallen by the time Mari finally found her way to Lucy’s place with the aid of the map Lucy had sent in her first letter. Her “hideout,” she’d called it. The huge sky was as black as velvet, dotted with the sequins of more stars than she had ever imagined. The world suddenly seemed a vast, empty wilderness, and she pulled into the yard of the small ranch, questioning for the first time the wisdom of a surprise arrival. There were no lights glowing a welcome in the windows of the handsome new log house. The garage doors were closed.

She climbed out of her Honda and stretched, feeling exhausted and rumpled. The past two weeks had sapped her strength, the decisions she had made taking chunks of it at a time. The drive up from Sacramento had been accomplished in a twenty-four-hour marathon with breaks for nothing more than the bathroom and truck-stop burritos, and now the physical strain of that weighed her down like an anchor.

It had seemed essential that she get here as quickly as possible, as if she had been afraid her nerve would give out and she would succumb to the endless dissatisfaction of her life in California if she didn’t escape immediately. The wild pendulum her emotions had been riding had left her feeling drained and dizzy. She had counted on falling into Lucy’s care the instant she got out of her car, but Lucy didn’t appear to be home, and disappointment sent the pendulum swinging downward again.

Foolish, really, she told herself, blinking back the threat of tears as she headed for the front porch. She couldn’t have expected Lucy to know she was coming. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to call ahead. A call would have meant an explanation of everything that had gone on in the past two weeks, and that was better made in person.

A calico cat watched her approach from the porch rail, but jumped down and ran away as she climbed the steps, its claws scratching the wood floor as it darted around the corner of the porch and disappeared. The wind swept down off the mountain and howled around the weathered outbuildings, bringing with it a sense of isolation and a vague feeling of desertion that Mari tried to shrug off as she raised a hand and knocked on the door.

No lights brightened the windows. No voice called out for her to keep her pants on.

She swallowed at the combination of disappointment and uneasiness that crowded the back of her throat. Against her will her eyes did a quick scan of the moon-shadowed ranch yard and the hills beyond. The place was in the middle of nowhere. She had driven through the small town of New Eden and gone miles into the wilderness, seeing no more than two other houses on the way-and those from a great distance.

She knocked again, but didn’t wait for an answer before trying the door. Lucy had mentioned wildlife in her few letters. The four-legged, flea-scratching kind.

“Bears. I remember something about bears,” she muttered, the nerves at the base of her neck wriggling at the possibility that there were a dozen watching her from the cover of darkness, sizing her up with their beady little eyes while their stomachs growled. “If it’s all the same to you, Luce, I’d rather not meet one up close and personal while you’re off doing the boot-scootin’ boogie with some cowboy.”

Stepping inside, she fumbled along the wall for a light switch, then blinked against the glare of a dozen small bulbs artfully arranged in a chandelier of antlers. Her first thought was that Lucy’s abysmal housekeeping talents had deteriorated to a shocking new low. The place was a disaster area, strewn with books, newspapers, note paper, clothing.

She drifted away from the door and into the large room that encompassed most of the first floor of the house, her brain stumbling to make sense of the contradictory information it was getting. The house was barely a year old, a blend of western tradition and contemporary architectural touches. Lucy had hired a decorator to capture those intertwined feelings in the interior. But the western watercolor prints on the walls hung at drunken angles. The cushions had been torn from the heavy, overstuffed chairs. The seat of the red leather sofa had been slit from end to end. Stuffing rose up from the wound in ragged tufts. Broken lamps and shattered pottery littered the expensive Berber rug. An overgrown pothos had been ripped from its planter and shredded, and was strung across the carpet like strips of tattered green ribbon.