“Too bad you can’t talk, Clyde,” she said to the mule, stroking his slick warm neck. “You could tell me exactly what happened. Maybe we should get M. E. Fralick to help us. She could probably hang some crystals on you and commune with you on a psychic plane.”

Clyde glanced back at her, a cynical look in his eyes, long ears wiggling as a deer fly buzzed around them.

They stood at the edge of a clearing, resting. Mari had let the mule take a drink from the stream they had pretty much followed up the mountain. Now she let him bury his nose in the clover for a moment, the reins sliding through her fingers. She longed to climb down and stretch her legs, but she was already stiff and sore from her ride to the Stars and Bars the day before, and she was afraid if she got off, she might not be able to get back on.

Overhead, gray clouds were rumbling across the sky like bloated sponges, filling up the blue bowl, shutting out the sun. Great. They were a zillion miles from home, and now it was going to rain. Consulting the map, she tried to discern where they were while ignoring her stomach’s growls at the aroma of cheeseburger that clung to the paper.

She was fairly confident about having passed the blue rock, but the dead cow was another matter. They had come across a scattered pile of bleached bones, but she wasn’t exactly an expert on the skeletal remains of farm animals.

“It might have been a cow,” she muttered. “Or we might be way lost.”

Clyde’s head came up suddenly and the mule jumped forward, gathering his muscular body beneath him, ready to bolt and run. The map flew out of Mari’s hands as she scrambled to keep her seat and haul in the reins, and the rattling paper further served to frighten the mule, who leapt ahead another ten feet. Across the clearing, a pair of whitetail deer bolted in unison and glided away into the cover of the forest.

Mari pulled the mule around in a galloping circle, her heart in her throat, every muscle tensed. Stay on, stay on, stay on! The words chanted through her mind a hundred miles an hour as she fought for control of her mount. If she fell and Clyde took off, it was a hell of a long walk back. Of course, if she fell and broke her neck, she wouldn’t have to worry about walking.

The mule came in hand and stopped, his head still high, his body quivering like a race car idling at the starting line. He pinned his long ears back and blew loudly through flared nostrils.

“Good mule, nice mule,” Mari gasped, stroking his neck with a trembling hand. “Chill out, will you, Clyde?”

The adrenaline rush subsided, leaving her feeling wobbly and light-headed. The cool, meadow-scented air surged in and out of her lungs in ragged gusts. But as Clyde made no further attempt to bolt, she began to relax. Belatedly, she wondered what had spooked him. The deer, probably. Or another of Bryce’s hunting buddies?

“Hey, anybody out there with a gun!” she called breathlessly. The mule shuddered beneath her. “I’m not an elk!”

Silence. The breeze stirred. Thunder grumbled over the next mountain range to the west. A chipmunk chattered at her from its perch on a fallen tree trunk. Her call was not returned. The mule was still quaking beneath her.

She didn’t hear the crack of the rifle until a split second before the bullet smashed into the dead stump behind her. Then everything happened so quickly, her brain couldn’t keep the order straight. She was falling backward. Clyde was a rear view of bulging hindquarters and flying hooves. She wondered dimly if she had been shot. Then she hit the ground and everything went black.

When the world began coming back into focus, she didn’t know if she was dead or alive. Alive, she suspected, wincing. Dead shouldn’t hurt. Awareness of her body came back pain by pain, and she opened her eyes and gasped at the face staring down at her. It wasn’t the face of anyone she had been told she would see in heaven, and she fully expected to go there even though she wasn’t a regular at church. No, the face that stared down at her was the face of a cowboy, and something in his eyes told her he may not have come from hell, but he had very likely seen it.

Beneath the brim of his gray cowboy hat, beneath the heavy rim of his brows, his narrow eyes were a stormy mix of gray and blue, swirling with what looked to Mari like madness. Anger, fear, a brittle tension that threatened to snap. He was probably fifty. His face was lean and weathered, brown and carved with lines like a tooled belt. Some mishap had left him with a puckered round scar the size of a penny on his left jaw. It pulled the corner of his mouth into a grotesque, perpetual frown. In his big, raw hands he held a very large, very deadly looking rifle.

“Don’t kill me,” Mari whispered, wondering wildly what she might do to prevent him, wondering if death might not be the most pleasant alternative she had. She was suddenly all too aware of just how remote this area was. Fragments of lines from her guidebooks flashed through her head-nearly a million acres of wilderness, ninety percent of it roadless. He could take her anywhere, do anything to her, and there would be no witnesses except the wildlife. Her heart shuddered like a dying bird.

“If I had meant to kill you, ma’am,” he said in a low, hoarse voice, “then you’d be dead.”

The voice. She blinked hard, as if that might somehow clear her head. The voice was J.D.’s voice, but lower, rustier. The face was a harder, abused version of J.D.’s face. Slowly, she pushed herself into a sitting position, her gaze darting from the face to the rifle and back.

“Del Rafferty?” she ventured weakly.

He narrowed his eyes to slits. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And Quinn said I’d never find you.”

Del walked ahead of his horse, his mood as sour as the acid churning in his stomach. He hadn’t meant to saddle himself with the blond woman. He had meant to scare her off. The last thing he wanted was a woman at his place, especially this woman.

His mind tried to scramble things around, as it often did, tried to make him think she had followed him up here, had been stalking him because she had sensed his presence, because she knew. It tried to tell him she was the other one in disguise, come to haunt him. But he brought the boot heel of reality down on those wild rantings and squashed them like June bugs. She wasn’t the other one. She was the new one and she was just here, that was all. He didn’t have to like it. All he had to do was deal with it. Tolerate her, then get rid of her.

Her mule was probably halfway home by now. Damn shame she couldn’t have managed to keep her fanny on its back.

“So, you live up here?” she asked.

Del glanced at her over his shoulder and said nothing. She sat in his saddle on his grullo gelding, her hair a wild mop of streaky blond, a bruise darkening on her right cheekbone. He supposed she was pretty, but he had long ago given up thinking about women in a sexual way. He tried never to think of them at all, same as he tried never to think about the ’Nam or the period after he had come home, which he referred to as his black hole period, when everything had been sucked into the dark void of his mind. He lived his life a second at a time, focusing totally on the moment, just to get him from one to the next.

“My friend was killed somewhere around here a couple of weeks ago. Shot in a hunting accident. The sheriff told me you’re the one who found her body.”

Del just walked on, trying not to hear her. He concentrated on his breathing, on putting one foot in front of the other as he led the horse up the steep trail to the summer cow camp. If he ignored her, she might become invisible to him-or he to her. That idea held great appeal. If he were invisible, she might stop talking.