“Check it out. Over there. We got a ’coon bit the big one.”

Fennel shone his light on the limp corpse of a raccoon.

“Think he’d do that? Why?”

“Goddamn,” Heck whispered in dismay. He was looking not at the body of the animal, however, but at a narrow beam in the ceiling from which dangled some spring animal traps, toothless but big-the sort that would easily snap the neck of a fox or badger or raccoon.

Or the leg of a dog.

The reason for Heck’s dismay wasn’t the traps themselves but rather the three empty pegs where, presumably, three other traps had hung until not long ago. Several large bloody bootprints were directly below the pegs.

Heck asked, “Your girls heel?”

“Not when they’re on track. Emil?”

“He’s slow to, if the scent’s fresh. We’ll have to tie the lines back and keep ’em next to us. Hell, if he takes to the grass we’ll just about have to crawl on our bellies. Hrubek’ll be in Boston by the time we get to the county line.”

They walked back to the highway and shortened the lines as Heck instructed. He left his pickup at the truck stop with the third deputy, who remained there in case Hrubek wandered back this way. The Boy accompanied Heck and Fennel in his squad car, the headlights dark, just the amber flashers on. The dogs caught a whiff of the scent and started east once more.

“Down the middle of the friggin’ road.” Fennel laughed nervously. “This boy is nuts, that’s for damn sure.”

But Heck didn’t respond. The giddy excitement of earlier in the evening was gone. The night had turned coarse. Their quarry was no longer a big silly fellow, and Trenton Heck felt the same chill he remembered when, four years ago, outside of a neon-lit 7-Eleven, he’d glanced at what he thought was a branch moving in the breeze and saw instead a sphere of muzzle flash and felt a ripping jolt in his leg, as the asphalt leapt up to meet his forehead.

“You think he’d set traps for dogs?” Fennel muttered. “Nobody’d do that. Nobody’d hurt a dog.”

Heck reached down and held up his hound’s right ear, in which was a smooth hole the exact size of a.30-’06 slug. Fennel whistled out his disgust at humankind, and Trenton Heck called, “Find, Emil, find!”

Lis stood in the greenhouse, taping bold X’s over the glass that she could remember being glazed into place twenty-five years ago, her mother standing in the construction site, arms crossed, her austere eye on the contractors. Often she frowned because she believed that people wouldn’t cheat you if it was obvious that you suspected they were capable of it.

Taping windows as she went, Lis moved slowly around the large room, which was filled with hybrid tea roses in all shades, and grandiflora blushes dotted with the blood-red John Armstrongs, and High Noon yellow climbers twining around an antique trellis. She had large-cluster floribunda Iceberg whites and Fashion corals. A thousand flowers, ten thousand petals.

She preferred the striking shades, the stark colors, especially in the most fragile of flowers.

Recalling the thousands of hours she’d spent here-as a girl, helping her mother, then more recently by herself-she pictured the many times she’d cut back shoots, pruned flowered laterals and snipped away unvigorous stems. Her hands, thorn-pricked and red, would scoop a dormant eye from the budding and peel the bark to make a shield then slide it into the t-cut rootstock, binding the incision with raffia.

Glancing at several recent grafts, she heard a sound behind her and turned to see Portia rummaging through a box on the floor. She was no longer wearing her Manhattan outfit but had finally acknowledged that she was in L. L. Bean country and accepted Lis’s offer of jeans, sweater and Topsiders. Lis was overcome with an urge to thank her again for staying. But the girl wasn’t interested in gratitude. She seized several rolls of masking tape and disappeared, saying, “Too fucking many windows in this house.”

Her footsteps pounded up the stairs, a teenager sprinting to take a phone call.

Lis was suddenly aware of the greenhouse’s overhead lights, one bank of which Owen had turned on when he was looking for burlap bags. She now doused them. Lis respected the daily cycle of plants-in the same way that she herself never woke to an alarm if she could avoid it. The rhythm of our bodies, she believed, is linked to our souls’ pulse. Plants are no different and in deference to them Lis had installed, in addition to five-hundred-nanometer artificial-sunlight lamps for overcast days, a series of dim blue and green bulbs for nighttime hours. These lights let her flowers sleep-for she believed plants did sleep-while illuminating the greenhouse.

This was what horticulturists call a warm greenhouse. Ruth L’Auberget had scattered archaic heaters around the room but they never worked well. It seemed as if the woman was daunted by technology and had been content to let nature and fate decide whether her roses prospered or died. That wasn’t good enough for her daughter. This was after all, Lis reasoned, the computer age, and she had the place outfitted with a microprocessor climate-control system that kept the temperature above sixty-two degrees even on the coldest of nights and operated the automated vents along the roof ’s peak and roller shades on the south-facing panes (sunlight being as potentially dangerous as frost).

On one side of the thirty-five-by-twenty-foot room were the cuttings, rooted in sand, and the seedlings; on the other were the growing plats for mature bushes, and propagation benches. Soil-warming cables snaked under the cutting area, and hoses, trickle-irrigation pipelines and capillary sand benches provided the water. The connected potting area and lath house were floored in concrete; the greenhouse floor itself was gravel, through which wound a serpentine path of slate-also selected by Lis (to replace the original concrete). The slate was deep green-blue and had been picked by Lis as a reminder of a rose yet to be, the L’Auberget hybrid. This was an ambition of hers-to develop a luminescent teal-colored rose, an All-American Rose Selections designation in her name.

The crossbreeding of this flower had a particular appeal because she’d been told it was impossible; fellow rosarians assured her that the elusive color couldn’t be bred. What’s more, she was bucking the trend. The current strategy among growers was to cultivate for fragrance and disease resistance. But color and form, now traits in disrepute, were what excited Lis Atcheson. Logically she appreciated the difficulty of the crossbreed. But the irony is that by nature rose lovers have deep romantic streaks and aren’t easily discouraged. So, working with a number of yellow varieties and pinks and the Blue Moon hybrid tea, Lis spent hours here grafting and budding as if it were merely a matter of time until she found the evasive color.

From literature, Lis had learned the transcendence of the imagination, which she’d come to believe was God’s main prize to us, all things else, even love, being more or less honorable mentions. But from flowers, she learned a better lesson-the persistence of beauty: petals bursting, growing, falling, and curling into dry, colorful flakes.

Roses were more than animate to her; they were virtually human. “Think about it,” she’d tell students of hers invited to the greenhouse for informal Saturday-afternoon horticultural lectures. “The history of roses? They migrated west to Europe and America, mostly from the Orient. Their culture? They grow in increasingly sophisticated social clusters. And how about religion? Roses’ve had as bad a time on that subject as we have. They were burned by early Christians because of pagan-excuse the expression-roots. And then what happened? The Pope converted them. Now, ask a Catholic what roses represent-Mary, of course. That’s the Mother, by the way, not the prostitute.”