“Hey, Lucy told us you played,” he said, gesturing at her old guitar with the papers.

“She did?”

“Yeah, she said you were great. She said you were wasting yourself in lawyers’ offices, that you should have been in L.A. or Nashville or someplace, doing justice to your talent.”

“Lucy said that?”

It seemed inconceivable to her. Lucy had listened to her play on a few occasions during jam sessions in local bars. Sometimes during their B &B sessions in Mari’s apartment when the conversation had run out she would pick up her guitar and just toy with it, sing a few bars of something that had been taking shape in her head, absently, casually; and Lucy would listen and sip her beer and make a wry comment when she was done. You oughta be a star, Marilee. Idle talk. Just something to fill the silence after the last note.

Kevin seemed a little baffled by her surprise, but he was too well bred to comment. He stood there in navy pleated chinos and a white polo shirt. A Yale boy from his GQ haircut to the tips of his Top-Siders.

“I was just on my way into the bar to join Drew for coffee. Will you come with us?” He smiled again, even white teeth flashing in his lean face. “Maybe we’ll be able to persuade you to play something for us.”

She laughed and fell in step beside him. “Don’t worry about twisting my arm; I’m shameless.”

They sat at a table near the fire and talked over French roast spiked with Irish cream. Mari told them about her adventure with Miller Daggrepont, and they both shook their heads and chuckled over Lucy’s choice of resting places.

“That’s positively macabre,” Drew said, sipping his coffee. “How very Lucy.”

“I can’t believe she left everything to me,” Mari blurted out into the silence, needing to say it again even though she felt as if she were confessing to a crime.

Drew and Kevin exchanged a glance, but there were no exclamations of shock or denial. Drew curled his fingers over the head of the guitar she had propped against the table and rocked it gently. “Will you stay?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think,” she said, but she thought of the view off the deck of the log house, the sense of peace she absorbed from the mountains, the sense of fitting in she had longed for in futility her whole life. She thought of Rafferty rolling her beneath him in the dust of the corral, holding her awkwardly while she cried, and a warmth rose inside her that had little to do with the low-burning flames on the fieldstone hearth.

She forced herself to think of Lucy, and the questions came to the surface of her mind like oil on water.

“So what was the deal with this hired man she had working for her?” she asked. “I heard he just vanished after the accident.”

“Kendall Morton?” Kevin made a face. “Sleazy. I always thought he looked like Pigpen grown up and gone bad. Tattoos, bad teeth, B.O.”

Drew took a sip of his coffee and nodded. “Odd fellow. Never had much to say. Always skulking about in the background.”

“The guy is that weird and nobody thought to question him after Lucy’s death?” Mari said, gaping in disbelief.

“There was no reason to,” Drew explained. “Sheffield came forward and that was the end of it. Besides, Morton had no reason to kill her.”

“Since when do people need a reason?”

“Motive,” he said with an elegant shrug. “Rules of evidence. You ought to be familiar with the procedure. Morton lacked motive-”

“But not opportunity, probably not means, certainly not suspicious behavior. Do you have any idea where he went?”

His brows came together in a look that seemed more confused than curious. “Why are you trying to make more of this than what it was? It was an accident; they happen.” She felt his gaze on her for several moments, probing while she stared down into her coffee. She thought she could feel questions in it, in him, but all he said when he spoke again was “It was an accident, luv. Let it go.

“Play something for us, will you?” he said, tilting her guitar toward her so that she had to take it or let it fall. “Lucy told us you have an extraordinary voice.”

Relieved to let the topic go, Mari slid her chair back and took up the old guitar, testing strings, fiddling with the tuning pegs. “I was supposed to be a cellist,” she said. “My sister Lisbeth plays the violin; Annaliese, the flute. Mother thought it would impress her friends if we could play as a trio for charity functions.”

“What happened?” Kevin asked.

Her mouth twisted at the memory in a soft combination of a smile and a frown. “My instructor said my bow work was reminiscent of a hacksaw on a chain-link fence. I started skipping the lessons in favor of hanging out with an aging hippie who ran a health food store down the block. He used to jam with the Grateful Dead.” She arched a dark brow as she settled her fingers on the strings. “Mother was unimpressed when she found out, but… so it goes…”

She strummed a chord, appreciating as always the perfect resonance of the old guitar; then she began picking out a gentle, familiar rhythm and joined in with the melody in her low, rich voice. The song was about the rain and the end of a relationship, a woman contemplating what she’s lost and moving on with her life; a song about the rhythm of the blues. She never gave a thought to how strongly it reflected her own life. It simply came out as honest as the truth. The emotions and impressions twined together inside her and rolled out in a voice as dark and sweet as the coffee they had drunk.

When she finished she sat there for a moment, lost, unaware of the silence that had descended all around the room. A ripple of applause snapped her back. She rolled her eyes a little, feeling sheepish, and raised her hand in acknowledgment, trying to wave the bar patrons back to their conversations.

Kevin looked astonished, enormously pleased with her, which Mari wrote off as his natural state. He had that excited-puppy air about him, a sense of youthful naivete that had nothing to do with age. Drew’s scrutiny was more weighty; she tried to shrug it off, reaching for her coffee cup, wishing for a cigarette.

“Lucy was right,” Kevin declared. “You were wasting yourself on lawyers.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t know the half of that,” she said dryly, taking a sip.

“You deserve an audience,” Drew said. “We’d love to have you play here as long as you’re staying. We have a trio that plays on weekends. Do say you’ll join them.”

Mari made a face. “I don’t horn in on other musicians. Maybe I’ll talk with them.”

“You already have,” he said, green eyes shining. “I’m the piano man.”

They shared a laugh, and Mari marveled at how good it felt, how good she felt, sharing this time with these new friends. Sacramento and Brad Enright and her family suddenly seemed years in the past, half a world behind her.

“I hope that won’t be the last we hear from you, Marilee.”

Evan Bryce smiled down on her like a long-lost friend. Mari bent her mouth into a polite social smile and murmured something appropriately humble. She had taken an instant dislike to him, in part because of his connection to Lucy’s death. The rest was intangible. She didn’t question it. Her instincts regarding human nature had been sharpened to a fine point in her years of legal work. She seldom wasted time questioning those instincts. Something about his I’m-your-best-friend act just didn’t ring true.

He looked much as he had the first time she had met him-the same high-heeled boots, the same skin-tight jeans that advertised his gender in no uncertain terms, the same expensive-looking belt that was constructed of hand-tooled leather and bone ferrules that looked as if they had been “salvaged” from the breastplate of a Cheyenne warrior. He had traded his denim work shirt for a fine linen poet’s shirt with billowing sleeves. Half the buttons were left undone in a look that was calculatedly careless. She got the impression that the bare chest and tight pants were overcompensation for something-probably his height or lack thereof.