The guests milled around at a cocktail party held in Del Rafferty’s cabin. Her family stood off to the side, near the guns, refusing to mingle. Kendall Morton leered at them from the corner, where he stood in a cloud of self-generated dust.

Mari walked in wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and a vest and nothing else, and realized immediately that she was severely underdressed. Her mother and sisters shook their heads.

“Marilee, you’re just not one of us,” her mother said.

“She’s sure as hell not one of us,” Will said.

They circled around her and started moving in closer and closer, their faces grim with disapproval. Except Lucy’s. Lucy was smiling her wry half-smile. J.D. stood beside her.

“Here, peach,” she said, holding out the Mr. Peanut tin. “Something to take with you on your trip.”

“What trip?”

“The trip to find yourself.”

Then the floor opened up and she was falling straight down into a black hole, staring up at the ring of faces and half faces.

Lucy waved. “Be sure to send a postcard!”

She jerked awake and her heart sprinted into high gear as she tried without success to get her bearings. Darkness. Cool, damp. She was sitting up… on the deck outside Lucy’s house.

Drawing in a deep breath of night air, she pressed a hand over her breastbone and assured herself that she was real and alive. Her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and familiar shapes came into focus-the rail of the deck, the towering pine trees, indistinct outlines of the llamas in the pasture near the creek.

She had come out from town to feed them, had meant to sit in the Adirondack chair on the deck only a moment or two as the sun set. She had certainly never meant to fall asleep. Now the sense of being alone in the wilderness seeped into her like cold dew.

Three people had died violently in this dark paradise. Each of those deaths had touched her in some way. She could feel them touching her now, like bony fingers reaching up from the afterlife, clawing at her, pulling at her, trying to draw her deeper into the evil.

And she was going with them. Willingly. Not exactly the kind of trip she’d had in mind when she piled her business suits in the back of her Honda and left Sacramento a lifetime ago.

She had come here for fun. She wasn’t having any. She had come here to find herself and was instead trying to find a killer. She had come here for companionship. She was alone.

Somewhere down the valley, coyotes began to sing. In contrast to their high, thin voices, the air on the deck seemed to thicken with an electricity that raised the hair on the backs of Mari’s arms. She was alone, but suddenly she didn’t feel alone. She felt the intensity of a gaze on her, eyes that could have been anywhere in the darkness.

Kendall Morton’s round, ugly face floated through her imagination. She had called a friend who worked the night shift in the California Highway Patrol computer room and called in six years’ worth of markers for favors. Could he contact the Montana computer banks-providing Montana had computer banks-and get a rap sheet on Kendall Morton? He had sighed heavily, made noises about losing his job, then promised to have something for her by morning.

Kendall drifted away and a vision of Del Rafferty took his place. An apparition. A ghost. Another of the walking dead from her dream. One of the suspects. She wanted to pity him, but she couldn’t discount him. He had been a paid killer in the service, and the war had never ended for him. Or maybe he had traded one war for another; service to his country for service to the Rafferty land.

She didn’t want to find out the hard way.

She eased herself forward in the chair, trying to breathe slowly, straining to hear above the drumbeat of her pulse in her ears.

“You sleep like a city girl.”

J.D. eased out of the shadows at the corner of the house, hands in the pockets of his jeans, big shoulders hunched. Mari glared at him over her shoulder as she rose from the chair.

“What are you doing here?”

“Some big mountain lion could have had you for supper.”

“Not likely,” she retorted, calling up her guide-book facts. “There’s never been a report of a mountain lion attacking anyone in this area.”

He raised a brow. “Maybe the poor son of bitch wasn’t around afterward to tell the tale.”

Refusing to play games, Mari ignored his line of questioning and stuck with her own. “I asked you what you were doing here, Rafferty. You weren’t invited.”

“I saw a light in the upstairs window,” he said, leaning back casually against the railing. He didn’t feel casual. He felt like a clenched fist. He felt pressure from all sides compressing him into something hard and dangerous. And she looked soft and sleep-rumpled. If he pulled her against him now, he imagined her body would be warm, her nose cold, and her hair would smell like dew and pine. But her eyes were wary beneath the slash of dark brows, and he knew she wouldn’t willingly come to him now. He had seen to that. He had pushed her away. Because it was for the best. Because he didn’t want the distraction or the danger of a woman in his life.

Never been a liar, J.D.?

“You’ve been relieved of your duties as caretaker,” Mari said. “You’re not responsible for this place.”

His concern hadn’t been for the place, but he wouldn’t admit that. It wasn’t the time. The time had passed.

“Habit,” he said.

“Break it.”

“Del says he saw a big cat up along Five-Mile Creek,” he said, looking off to the south, as if he half expected to see something prowling among the dark stand of trees.

“Yeah, I’ll bet Del sees a lot of things,” Mari said, more sharply than she had intended. She would have skinned snakes with her teeth for a cigarette. Her fingers flexed and clenched, nervous for something to do.

“Don’t, Mary Lee,” J.D. warned, his voice tight and weary. “This day’s been too damn long already. I don’t want to talk about Del.” Or think about Del, or deal with Del, or believe what Del might have become while living under the protective banner of the Stars and Bars.

“Tell me about it. I started out the morning by finding a dead body. That just set the tone right off, you know what I mean?”

J.D. pushed himself away from the railing and stared at her. “You what!”

She gave a look that said she had been the butt of a tasteless practical joke. “Found a dead body. Yesterday was your lucky day; today was mine.”

“Who?”

“MacDonald Townsend. Esteemed judge. Philanderer. Cokehead. That MacDonald Townsend. You’ll like this; it’s very macho: he blew the top of his head off with a.357 Colt Python.”

“Judas,” he said, the word blowing out of him on an exhaled breath. He narrowed his eyes and focused hard on Mary Lee’s face. She looked as pale as cream in the dark. “Are you all right?”

She jammed her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and tipped her chin up, as if he had affronted her pride. “I don’t think I’ll eat grits again anytime soon.”

“Judas,” he muttered again.

He had to give her credit for not falling apart just in retelling the tale. He thought most women would have. But then, as Mary Lee liked to remind him, she was not most women. She was seldom what he expected her to be-or wanted her to be, for that matter. She stood there beside him with her chin up, daring him. Tough little cookie.

“Where did you find him?” J.D. asked in a thick voice, stepping back as she stepped away.

Mari cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind one ear, staring hard at the boards of the deck. “In his study. I went to talk to him about Lucy. I thought he might know something. They were involved, you know. I think Lucy might have been blackmailing him.”

She cut a glance at J.D. for his reaction. He didn’t so much as blink at the suggestion. As if he expected as much from Lucy or thought that blackmail was perhaps a common hobby among the kind of people Lucy had associated with.