MARI WALKED the streets of New Eden in the predawn gray. Fog shrouded the buildings and houses, casting everything in an indistinct haze, like a half-forgotten memory. Somehow the old buildings looked older, the old business obsolete. Quaint traditions hanging on as progress overtook them. Sweet and sad. Lockhart’s Ladies’ Shop with its window display of polyester pant suits next door to the trendy Latigo Boutique. The shabby old Rexall drugstore with its original soda fountain and special on Geritol standing shoulder to shoulder with Mountain Man Bike and Athletic. Monroe Feed and Read combination feed store/bookstore, its shelves stocked with teat dip and fly spray and dehorning paste, its racks full of old Louis L’Amour titles and hunting magazines and cheap cookbooks printed on Xerox paper by the ladies auxiliary of the Lutheran church, just down the street from M. E. Fralick’s New Age bookstore with its Zen master clerk and thousand-dollar quartz crystals.

Sadness seeped into her muscles and bones, and she curled her hands into fists in the pockets of her old denim jacket. She jaywalked across the street to the square and settled on a bench in front of the Carnegie Library. Across the park, Colleen Bentsen’s sculpture, which Mari had first appreciated as a symbol of cooperation, was taking shape in its pen in front of the courthouse. The courthouse had been built of red brick in the 1890s. A pair of Doric columns held up the portico at the top of the stone stairs. The paint was flaking off them like dandruff, but it was a venerable old building. Not very big, not very fancy, but proud of its heritage. Out in front of it the sculpture looked like a chunk of wreckage from a collapsed suspension bridge. Out of time, out of place, an unintentional insult on the place it was meant to honor.

Restless, and disgusted with herself for her melancholy mood, she left the park and started back toward the Moose. She wouldn’t stay there much longer. A week or so. The suite Drew and Kevin had given her was beautiful, but it wasn’t a home. The ranch was a home. Hers. It was time to accept it, to stop questioning Lucy’s motives in leaving it to her. She might never know exactly what had compelled Lucy. She might never find the evidence that would explain so many things. That wouldn’t change the fact that the ranch was hers now. As soon as she felt comfortable being out there at night alone, she would move into the house for good. Work on her music. Hang with the llamas. Maybe start a garden.

And up the mountain Rafferty would prowl the boundaries of his kingdom and look down on her.

The pickups were gathering in front of the Rainbow. Ranch dogs patrolled the open truck beds with ears up and eyes eager for the sights of town. No blue and gray Ford with a Stars and Bars bug guard. No sign of Zip. Mari contemplated a cup of coffee and a plate of steak and eggs with crisp hash browns on the side, but her heart wasn’t in it. She wasn’t in the mood for camaraderie. Maybe she’d stop by for a late supper and she and Nora could go honky-tonkin’ after her shift was over. But the chance of running into Will dampened the prospective fun and she discarded that idea too.

She cut through the lobby of the Moose, not expecting to see anyone but Raoul at that hour, but Kevin stood behind the desk, scowling down at a computer printout. He glanced up at her with tired eyes and a face drawn from lack of sleep. He looked like a man sorely in need of a shave and a cup of coffee.

“Hey, Kev, what’s up?” Mari asked, propping herself against the counter. “You pull the graveyard shift?”

The boyish smile made a halfhearted appearance, flickering and fading in the blink of an eye. “Not exactly. I knew I wasn’t going to get any sleep, so I gave Raoul the night off.”

“Insomnia?”

“Fight with Drew.”

“Oh.” She winced in empathy. “Ouch. I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he mumbled, flipping a page of green-lined paper without even looking at it.

“Bad one, huh?”

“Bad enough.” He shook his head, staring across the lobby and into the bar, his gaze fixed on the moose head that hung above the fireplace. “You think you know someone and then suddenly you look at them and you don’t know them at all…” His thoughts trailed off into a sigh of frustration and confusion. He snapped his mouth shut and shook his head again, his brown eyes bleak.

“Is he around?” Mari asked. She didn’t want to meddle in their personal lives, but Kevin looked so forlorn, and then there was the matter of Townsend. She wanted to bounce the news off Drew in hope of getting something more from him. No harm in killing two birds with one stone.

“I don’t know where he is,” Kevin mumbled, glaring down at the computer paper. “He blew out of here last night. I haven’t seen him since.”

Mari’s eyebrows scaled her forehead. It had to have been some fight. She wondered if there was any possibility it had to do with what Drew knew of Lucy’s life and times, then she chided herself for being a mercenary. Poor Kevin looked like a lost puppy.

“You’ll work it out,” she said softly, touching his sleeve.

He didn’t meet her eyes. His face tightened and he flipped another page on the printout. “Yeah. Sure. Umm-a-will you excuse me, Mari? I think I hear the phone in my office.”

He turned away and was gone through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY before Mari could so much as nod.

She went into the empty lounge and slipped behind the ornate bar. A multiline telephone sat beside the cash register. She hit an open line and punched the number for the CHP computer room in Sacramento.

“California Highway Patrol.”

“This is Marilee Jennings. Can I speak with Paul Kael, please?”

“Hang on.”

She jammed the phone between her shoulder and her ear and passed the time picking at her ragged cuticles. When she had begun to think the connection had been cut, Paul came on the line, out of breath.

“You owe me, Blue Eyes,” he said without preamble.

“Not hardly,” she scoffed. “Did I or did I not introduce you to the lovely Mrs. Kael?”

“Irrelevant. She is outranked on the list of women who strike terror into my heart by one Beverly Tarbon, my supervisor, who damn near caught me violating about a million rules.”

“Close only counts in horseshoes,” Mari said without sympathy. “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah. You’re not dating this guy, are you?”

“Don’t make me gag. He’s a major sleaze.”

“You don’t have to tell me; I got a peek at his report card. He flunks social skills in a big way. The guy’s had half a dozen charges filed and dropped. Two stuck and he went away to the state resort for a while.”

“For what?”

“Criminal sexual conduct and assault. You sure know how to pick ’em, Marilee.”

Mari’s heart dropped into her stomach. “It’s a talent.”

She let herself out the side door of the bar and walked in a daze to the parking lot, fishing in her purse for the keys to her Honda. The llamas needed feeding. There were still rooms in the house that hadn’t been put to rights.

Kendall Morton was a sex offender.

She shuddered at the thought and the implications. Lucy’s hired man had been a rapist. Was there any way she could have known that? More important, did it have anything to do with her death? Mari recalled the coroner’s distinct lack of enthusiasm when she had asked him whether Lucy had been sexually assaulted. He hadn’t bothered to check.

She stopped at the Gas N’ Go on her way out of town, bought a jumbo coffee to go, a bear claw, and a chocolate doughnut, hoping to pique her appetite. She drove out the ridge road listening to Vince Gill’s thin sweet tenor voice lament the pains of love.

The fog dissipated bit by bit as she climbed up out of the floor of the valley, tearing apart like wisps of cotton candy and disintegrating. But the sun refused to shine. The big sky hung like a leaden blanket, threatening rain but not making good on it. Beneath the gray the shades of green on the hills and in the valley looked deeper, richer. The wildflowers hid in the grass, their heads bowed demurely in deference to the wind. The mountains looked black in the distance, their snowcaps hidden by the bellies of low-hanging clouds.