Will sat on the back steps of the little house he had once shared with his wife. Ex-wife. Ex-wife. The word still pulsed in his brain. The moon was up, shining down on the fenced backyard. Rascal had been busy excavating. The place looked like the site of a treasure hunt. The pup lay on the steps beside him with his big head on his big clumsy paws, twitching as he dreamed puppy dreams.

The house behind them was dark and empty. Sam had abandoned it. Will wondered if she would ever come back once she’d gotten a taste of life on Mount Olympus.

“What’s she got to come back to, Willie-boy?” he asked, Jack Daniel’s turning his speech to a molasses drawl. The bottle stood between his booted feet, empty. He wasn’t drunk. He couldn’t seem to get drunk tonight. The liquor couldn’t penetrate the fear, it only slowed down time, an ugly trick. He didn’t want more time to think. His thoughts ran around and around, like a pup chasing its tail.

He didn’t want a wife. Marriage was a prison sentence. He’d seen that growing up. His father had sentenced his mother to a life she’d grown tired of, then held on to her anyway. Marriage was stupid. He’d thought so all along. People should be free to move in and out of relationships as the tides of attraction dictated. No ties, no guilt, no hard feelings.

So why did you marry Sam in the first place, Willie-boy?

And why did that word stab at his chest like a dagger? Ex-wife. Ex-wife. Ex-wife.

And why did he sit there feeling so damn scared and so damn lonely when the moon was bright and the night was fragrant with the perfume of other women?

Because you love her, stupid.

“You screwed up again, Willie-boy,” he whispered as two tears swam over his lashes and streaked down his face.

MARI WOKE in the Adirondack chair as the first hint of morning turned the sky a pearly gray. Every part of her hurt from sleeping out in the cool damp night in an unnatural position. She struggled up out of the chair and slumped around the deck like Quasimodo, trying to work the kinks out, snagging the feet of her convenience store nylons on the wood planks of the deck. Her head was pounding from the French cigarettes and from the dreams that had wrecked what little sleep she’d gotten. The images had slammed around inside her head, screaming to get out, never finding the door, never lining up neatly the way she wanted them to so that she could make sense of all the dark clues and sinister feelings.

She leaned against the back of the chair and groaned, bringing a fist up to rub her eyes and push her hair back. Still clutched in her fist was the letter Lucy had left behind for her. Unable to face it before coffee, she tucked it under the base of the dew-covered peanut tin and went inside.

While she heated water on the stove for instant caffeine, she went into the powder room off the kitchen and went through an abbreviated version of her usual morning routine, trying not to look at herself in the mirror. But like driving by a car wreck, morbid curiosity got the better of her and she chanced a glance, gasping in horror at the reflection. Her eyes were shot through with jagged bolts of red and underlined with raccoon rings of mascara. Rummaging through the small medicine cabinet, she found a bottle of Murine and a jar of petroleum jelly and did her best to repair the damage.

In Lucy’s bedroom, where the aftermath of the vandals had yet to be cleared away, Mari dug through the rubble for something fresh to wear. The mattress had been torn off the bed and slit open. A table lamp had apparently been hurled into the large beveled glass mirror that hung above the dresser. Clothing spewed out of open dresser drawers and trailed across the floor from the closet, blouses and dresses lying on the carpet with sleeves bent at strange angles, looking like inanimate casualties. The only piece of glass intact in the room was a goldfish bowl on the nightstand that was half full of condom packets.

Mari pretended there was no mess. She ignored the condoms and the statement they made about Lucy’s lifestyle and went in search of something to wear, digging up clean underwear, jeans, a T-shirt from Mazatlán, and a neon-orange sweatshirt with an enormous, raised hot pink outline of a woman’s lips slanting across the front.

Coffee in hand, she went back out to the deck and lit the last of the Gauloises. As sweet smoke curled up from the end of it, she picked up the letter and studied it again.

We all have our calling in life… Mine was being a thorn in wealthy paws… It got me where you are today. Or did it get me where I am?

The lines had made no sense at all when she had first read the letter. Now her attention homed in on two sentences: It got me where you are today. Or did it get me where I am?

Where you are today-the ranch. Or did it get me where I am-dead.

Mari bit her lip as she sifted through the possibilities, each one uglier than the last. Her heart picked up a beat and then another. Caffeine, she told herself. Nicotine. Or the chance that Lucy had foreseen her own murder.

Murder. She couldn’t think of the word without seeing blood, without seeing the photos from Sheriff Quinn’s file. Lucy’s lifeless body lying in the grass, a hole blown through her.

Lucy knew things she shouldn’t have about people with power, people with money. The summer she had been sleeping with Judge Townsend, he had brought her to Montana for a weekend. She told Mari that was how she found her little ranch. Her hideout.

Outlaws had hideouts. Outlaws got shot.

Dr. Sheffield claimed he hadn’t seen her. What if he had? What if Lucy had known something she shouldn’t have about him? What if the tears he’d spilled at the hearing hadn’t been from abject grief, but abject guilt?

She stared down at the peanut tin, acutely aware of the expensive log house behind her and the priceless land that stretched out before her, of the llamas and the Range Rover, the pricey clothes strewn across the floor of the bedroom, and the lavish lifestyle.

Lucy knew things she shouldn’t have known about people with money and power. Lucy was dead.

Mari folded the note and tapped it against her pursed lips. She had to see where the shooting had happened, to see for herself if it could have been an accident. And she had to talk to the man who had found the body-Del Rafferty-J.D. or no J.D.

By noon Mari and Clyde were headed up the mountain, map in hand, for all the good it would do her. Sheriff Quinn had drawn it on the back of an old Burger King wrapper, scrawling instructions such as “bear left at the blue rock” and “head north at the dead cow.” Mari figured she would be lucky if she didn’t end up in Canada.

The sheriff’s words regarding Del Rafferty had been less than encouraging. “You won’t find him unless he wants you to, which he won’t. He don’t take to strangers.”

Mari tried not to dwell on J.D.’s claim that his uncle could shoot the balls off a mouse at two hundred yards.

The higher they climbed up the side of the mountain, the more nervous she became. The terrain was rugged, the trail obscure. The scenery might have taken her breath away if she hadn’t been too preoccupied to notice it. Fragrant, shaded pine forests gave way to beautiful green meadows, which gave way to more forest. All of it pitching up and up, hurling itself at the huge Montana sky. All Mari could think was that the Lucy she had known would never have taken the time to bruise her butt in this godforsaken saddle, riding a mule halfway up the side of a mountain. Never-unless there was something major in it for her.

Maybe she had come to rendezvous with Sheffield for a liaison. But why here, when there were a million easier private places to get to?