“Don’t want her here,” he said tightly.

“That makes two of us,” J.D. grumbled.

“Never stops talking.”

“She claims to be capable of silence. I haven’t witnessed it yet myself.”

Del grabbed his arm in a viselike grip. His eyes were glassy. “Sometimes she’s the other one,” he blurted out desperately. “I don’t want the other one coming back. I don’t want anyone here. This is my place.”

“I know.” J.D. gentled his tone, reining back his own temper as he turned and faced his uncle.

His heart sank like a stone. Del was on one of his mental ledges. There had been a time when J.D. had fully expected him to hurl himself off into the great abyss-literally-but he had thought those times were past. The old soldier had been passing fair for a long time. He did well up here by himself-as well as could be expected, considering the war had fractured his mind beyond repair. He tended the cattle when they came up to summer pasture. The rest of the time he spent with his rifles and his dogs.

City people would have called that crazy, but for Del it was a reasonably sane existence, better than what he’d had in the V.A. hospital, better than what he had found in countless bottles of Jack Daniel’s after he had come back from the war. He had found a balance. Now that balance was slipping-thanks to Mary Lee Jennings.

“I’ll take her away,” J.D. said. “She’ll never come back. That’s a promise.”

A shudder jolted through Del. He stared at his nephew and wanted to cry like a child. He was a disgrace: weak, crazy, a burden on his family. The shame of that twined inside him with the threads of old memories, old fears, things from the past, from the ’Nam. All of it coiled together in his brain like snakes, writhing and biting one another, impossible to separate. He had tried to calm himself, to push all the bad stuff out of his head, but he was beyond calming. He had reached the point where the mental fist of self-protection had closed tightly over that small part of his mind that was sanity while the snakes battled and twisted and his heart pumped frantically.

“What about the other one? I don’t want the other one coming back.”

J.D. sighed heavily. “She won’t come back, Del. She’s dead.”

Del shook his head and turned away, rubbing the disk of smooth, hard flesh on his jaw, his fingers coming away wet with saliva. The North Vietnamese bullet that had shattered his face and blown a hole through his skull had severed nerves en route. Now he drooled like an idiot. He wiped the trail of spit with his shirt-sleeve. J.D. didn’t know the dead came back to him on a regular basis. J.D. didn’t know he often saw them in the trees at night, moving among the dark trunks-the corpses of men he had served with, the rotted bodies of men he had shot. The blonde. People said the dead were dead and gone. They didn’t know anything.

“You want me to send Tucker up?” J.D. asked, trying to hide the resignation and sadness in his voice with a businesslike tone. “Make sure everything’s ready for when we move the cattle up?”

“No, no,” Del mumbled, rubbing his scar, then its companion hidden beneath his graying dark hair. Sometimes he dreamed the knot of mended flesh was a screw he could remove and the whole top half of his head would come off and the serpents would crawl out and wither and die in the light of day. “No. Just want to be left alone. Leave me alone.”

J.D. watched him stagger away, his gait burdened by the leaden weight of the nightmares and torments that never left him. His heart ached at the sight. His uncle had been a good man once, honorable, strong. He had joined the marines and volunteered for combat duty because he was a patriot and his convictions ran deep. He had given himself in service to his country and his country had sent him back bent and broken, disfigured physically and mentally, a twisted shell that held little of the fine young man he had once been. He had gone away a hero and come back another responsibility to add to J.D.’s never-ending list.

When he turned toward the cabin, J.D. caught a glimpse of Mary Lee darting away from the front door, which stood ajar. His anger surging back full-force, he strode to the door and jerked it open. She stood ten feet from him, eyes wide, small hands clasped beneath an enormous pink mouth on her neon-orange sweatshirt.

He started to reach for her, then jerked his hand back and swung it in the direction of the door instead. “Get in the truck and don’t say a word,” he ordered through his teeth.

Mari obeyed without complaint. She wanted to get away from Del Rafferty. There would be plenty of time to fight with J.D. once the cabin was behind them. She darted through the door and past the snake, then stopped to roll up the legs of her jeans and slopped through the mud to the truck. Standing on the running board, she toed her gooey sneakers off and tossed them to the back. With a curt hand signal, J.D. ordered Zip to the back also and climbed in on the driver’s side. He didn’t speak until they were pointed down the mountain and the woods had swallowed up the camp behind them.

“I told you to leave him alone.”

“You’re not my father,” Mari said tightly. “You can’t tell me what to do. Come to think of it, neither could he.”

He looked at her as if just the idea of her disobedience were incomprehensible. “I told you to leave him alone. I meant it. Did you think I said it just because I like the sound of my own voice?”

“I’m sure I don’t know why you said it. You never bothered to explain. It apparently never occurred to you to say, ‘oh, by the way, Mary Lee, steer clear of my uncle because he’s certifiably bizarre.’ ”

J.D.’s grip tightened on the steering wheel as the pickup bucked down the logging trail. He clenched his jaw and blinked hard, as if his fury were impeding his vision. “You don’t have any idea what you’ve done.”

“What I’ve done! Excuse me, but I was the one he tried to shoot.”

“He didn’t try to shoot you. If Del had wanted to shoot you, you’d be dead now.”

“Like Lucy?” The words were out of her mouth before her brain had a chance to snatch them back.

J.D. shot her a narrow glare. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think it means?” she snapped. “Your uncle is a psychotic with enough guns to invade Cuba single-handed-”

“He’s not psychotic.”

“He shot at me. He mistook me for a talking corpse-”

“He’s got problems,” J.D. admitted grudgingly while wrestling for control of the steering wheel. The pickup roared a protest when he shifted gears, pumping the brakes as they angled down a steep grade. “I told you to leave him alone. If you’d listened-”

“If you’d bothered to explain-”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you!” he roared, the anger and frustration tearing through him. He hated having outsiders messing with his life, his land, his family. He especially hated this one because a part of him he seemed to have no control over wanted her so badly. “I don’t owe you nothing, lady, you got that? You don’t belong here-”

“Oh, give me a break with that King of the Mountain crap,” Mari sneered, bracing a hand against the dash as the truck pitched violently from side to side. “It’s a free country, your highness. I’m here and I don’t give a rat’s ass whether you like it or not. My friend is dead and I’m going to find out why. I don’t care what you-”

“It was an accident! Christ, why can’t you just leave it at that? It was an accident. It happened. It’s over. Justice was served.”

“Not by a long way. I don’t call a fine and a slap on the wrist justice. And frankly, there’s something about this whole accident scenario that smells like an open sewer under a hot sun at high noon.”

J.D. stared at her through slitted eyes, his foot easing off the gas. “What do you mean?”

Mari opened her mouth to answer him and had it shut for her as the front end of the truck flung itself downward and they came to a jarring halt. She slammed sideways into the dashboard and fell to her knees on the floor. J.D. banged his head on the windshield and pulled himself back, swearing loudly. He shifted the truck into reverse and tried to rock it up out of the hole, spewing mud in all directions as the tires spun. The pickup stayed rooted to the spot.