“He scared me, J.D. Not just when he shot at me. What if he killed Lucy?” she said softly.

“He didn’t.”

“Can you really be that sure?”

No, he couldn’t, but he’d die before he said so. A part of him died just thinking it. Del was family. The Raffertys stuck together, come hell or high water. Lucy was gone; nothing would change that. “Let it go. It was an accident, Mary Lee.”

But as they stood there, staring out at the rain, each lost in private thoughts, neither one of them really believed it.

J.D. left at eight to go to a Montana Stockgrowers meeting in town. He would miss the bulk of the meeting, but he needed to talk with a couple of people about putting a deal together for the Flying K.

Still wrapped in the terry robe, Mari stood on the porch and watched him drive away into the gloom of the rainy night. A thick fog hugged the ground, soft gray, eerily buoyant. It crept around the tree trunks like smoke and drifted down across the ranch yard. Mari pulled the oversize robe tighter around her and shivered. It might have seemed romantic while J.D. was here. Alone it was just plain creepy.

Her thoughts kept drifting to Del Rafferty, living alone on the side of the mountain. Del and his guns. Del and his visions. He didn’t like blondes. He didn’t like strangers. Staring up at the wooded hillside, she thought she could feel his tormented gaze on her. She could imagine him bringing her into focus behind the cross hairs of a rifle scope. Had he seen Lucy the same way?

Stomach churning-from anxiety and starvation-she went back into the house. She needed to borrow some more clothes and go back to town. As peaceful as she found this place during the day, she didn’t relish the idea of being there alone at night when her mind was filled with thoughts of madmen. She preferred her room at the lodge, not only for safety purposes but because she had yet to accept that this place belonged to her. She couldn’t quite bring herself to take the gift. She couldn’t see why she deserved it. She couldn’t see what strings Lucy might have left attached to it.

She found a pair of jeans a size too small, a T-shirt from Cal-Davis three sizes too big, and a pair of Keds that fit just right. Not high fashion, but no one at the Burger King drive-thru was liable to complain. She jogged down the stairs and started for the front door with visions of bacon cheeseburgers dancing in her head. But as she turned at the foot of the stairs, her attention caught on the broken door to the study, and another jumble of questions tumbled through her mind. Questions with names attached. MacDonald Townsend. Ben Lucas. Evan Bryce.

Stepping over broken glass, she went in and flicked on a brass desk lamp that hadn’t been smashed during the vandal’s spree. The desk itself was ruined, the bronze eagle sculpture imbedded in the center of its splintered top. Another ficus had died a lingering death, uprooted from its pot. The stenotype machine Lucy had apparently kept for old time’s sake sat undisturbed on an oak pedestal near the picture window. A monument to her past life. The floor was littered with papers that had been torn from a filing cabinet. Meaningless stuff-warranties, ownership papers, llama journals, tax files.

Books had been hurled from the shelves built in along the back wall and lay scattered across the pine floor. Mari’s gaze scanned the titles and authors’ names absently. Lucy’s tastes had run from courtroom thrillers to potboiler glitz novels to The Prince of Tides. There were law books and books devoted to enhancing sexual performance. One thick volume of the Martindale-Hubbell law directory lay on the floor beside a copy of Shared Intimacies.

Martindale-Hubbell.

You won’t get into Martindale-Hubbell, but my name will live on in infamy…

The line from Lucy’s letter played through her head. She picked up the book from the floor and fanned through the pages. Volume three, listing California attorneys P-Z. Another volume rested on the bookshelf-volume nine, which included listings for six states-Montana and five that began with the letter N. There was nothing out of the ordinary about either book. They were the standard tomes, bound in mustard-gold cloth with titles in tasteful, discreet gold-foil type. Between the covers was the usual listing of practice profiles, professional biographies, services, and supplies.

A complete set would have been composed of fifteen volumes, plus indexes, but Lucy would have had no use for all of them. Mari wasn’t even sure why she would have had the book for Montana when she had left the profession before moving here. She would have expected to find only the two fat volumes embracing the names of the zillion lawyers that infested California.

Two volumes.

“So where is A to O?” she whispered.

She looked under the furniture, in the cold ashes of the stone fireplace, beneath the desk drawers that had been pulled out and dumped. There was no sign of Martindale-Hubbell volume two, California A-O.

Mari looked around the room at the utter destruction, a chill radiating outward from the pit of her stomach. What if this hadn’t been vandalism? What if it wasn’t a drunk from the Hell and Gone who had broken into Miller Daggrepont’s office? Daggrepont was Lucy’s attorney. Lucy, who had known secrets about powerful people.

We all have our calling in life. Mine was being a thorn in wealthy paws…

She thought of the ranch, the llamas, the cars in the garage, the fortune in clothes strewn across the bedroom floor. Money. Where had she gotten all the money?

Only one answer made any sense at all. A terrible logic that allowed jagged puzzle pieces to fall into place.

Blackmail.

In her mind’s eye she could see Lucy grinning her secretive, cynical grin, eyes glittering with sardonic amusement.

“Oh, God, Lucy,” she whispered, trembling. “What have you done?”

MILLER DAGGREPONT was a man who knew how and when to seize opportunity. He knew the value of patience and the advantages of remorselessness. He was a man of many talents and schemes, none of them large. The talents were just enough to navigate him through the small labyrinths of the schemes. The profits weren’t huge, but they were growing.

He had been helping himself to trust funds and estates for years. No one questioned him. He didn’t take much from any one place. In his own larcenous heart he considered the ill-gotten gains “gratuities.” A street lawyer in a place like New Eden, Montana, didn’t get a whole lot more. Most of his clients were ranchers whose wealth was tied up in land, livestock, and equipment. The new wealth in the Eden valley had come equipped with their own lawyers. Miller made out on divorces and the odd wrongful-death settlement. And his “gratuities.” And his schemes.

He eyed the woman on the other side of his cluttered desk and smiled benignly. She had already put a fair amount into his piggy bank without having a clue. His avaricious brain buzzed with thoughts of what more she might give him.

“Hey, there, little missy!” he boomed, slapping his fat hands against what little desktop showed through the mess of fishing flies and reels and documents that needed filing. “What brings you out on a night like this? It’s a real toad strangler out there, hey? You decide to sell that land?”

Mari forced a smile. Daggrepont’s eyes were swimming behind the Coke-bottle lenses of his glasses. Not even that nauseating special effect could hide the gleam of greed. “No, not yet.”

“Well, now, you just say the word and I’ll take care of the whole ball of beeswax for you.”

“Thank you. You’re very”-opportunistic, exploitative, vulturelike-“industrious.”