Book 11 in the Dismas Hardy series, 2007

On a clear, still and silent Sunday at the end of the second week in September, a fifty-year-old outdoor writer named Stuart Gorman sat on a flat-topped rock at the edge of a crystalline lake set in a bowl of granite near the California Desolation Wilderness Area a few miles southwest of Lake Tahoe. The lake's mirrored surface, unsullied by even the trace of a breeze, perfectly reflected the opposite shoreline-more granite, studded with pine and a purple sky above.

Stuart could barely be seen to breathe. In the warm afternoon, he'd removed his T-shirt and placed it beside him. Now he wore only his hiking boots and a pair of brown shorts. Though he had a good head of medium-length dark brown hair, the gray in his two-day stubble and on his chest betrayed the bare fact of his age. Without the gray, the developed torso, perhaps dangerously tan, could have been that of a man half Stuart's years. His solid barrel chest spoke of hours spent outdoors in vigorous exercise; there was a hollow of tight skin under his rib cage where most men his chronological age carried their fat.

There was age, though, in the face. Lines scored the skin around the deeply set blue eyes and at the corners of his mouth. The stubble wasn't long enough to camouflage the strong jaw nor the nearly surgical cleft in his chin; neither did the lines mar the clear expanse of his forehead. The only obvious flaw in his face, although some might not call it that, was a silver-dollar-size port wine stain high on his right cheek.

Stuart held a fly rod across his lap. He wasn't fishing yet. The evening hatch wasn't due for at least another half hour, until the sun ducked out of sight behind the foothills to the west. Then a few feeding trout would ripple Tamarack Lake's smooth and calm surface, and on a typical evening Stuart would find his spot, play out line, place his dry fly in the center of one of the few ripples and hope for a strike. The trail ran along Tamarack's shore, and so there was a great deal of pressure on the lake's fishery. The few trout that remained tended to be larger and wily, and Stuart relished the challenge. Normally, in the last moments before the beginning of the true gathering of dusk, while he waited for the first mosquitoes to hit the water, he felt closest to peace. In moments such as this one, and in the poetry, solitude, and even athleticism of the fly-fishing that would follow, he'd come to define who he was, what he was made of.

The sun kissed the top of Mt. Ralston, and Stuart caught a glimpse of the first ripple-actually a rare splash-as a fish broke through the surface of the water somewhere across the lake. Normally, this would have been his signal to stir himself, but this evening he remained where he sat, unmoving.

And very far from in a state of peace.

Two days before, he'd driven up from his beautiful home on San Francisco's Russian Hill to his family's rustic cabin at Upper Echo Lake. His mood, dark enough as he'd left the city, faded to deep black when he got pulled over for speeding a few miles east of Sacramento. At that moment, his rage with the world in general and at his wife in particular had boiled over and had so nearly overtaken him that he'd lost his temper at the highway patrol officer who was writing him up. Even if he was "barely" exceeding the speed limit, every other car on the road was passing him, so Stuart wanted to know why was he the one getting a goddamn ticket? In response, the officer then had him get out of his car and take a field sobriety test, followed by a warning that he was "this close" to getting himself arrested. In the middle of this, Stuart lucked out when the officer suddenly recognized his name-the man was a fisherman who'd read two of Stuart's books and loved them.

Apologizing, and somewhat mollified, Stuart explained that he was still reacting to a terrible fight that he'd had with his wife, that he was coming up to his mountain retreat to get his head straight. The cop still gave him a speeding ticket, but then he'd gotten his autograph and let him go.

But now he'd been up here for two days and his head didn't feel any straighter. In fact, if anything, he had grown more angry, frustrated and depressed at the realization that his twenty-two-year-old marriage to his charismatic, brilliant, difficult, headstrong and still-pretty orthopedic surgeon wife, Caryn, seemed to be over. In almost every imaginable way, they had grown apart. Her thriving practice, her investments, and the new medical office she was starting with her business partners had taken almost every spare minute of her life for the past couple of years.

Now, with a purple dusk gathering around him, Stuart looked out over the water and saw a few more promising signs of trout feeding, but he couldn't even bring himself to move from where he sat to throw his line. His mind refused to leave the familiar rut it had been plumbing since he'd come up here.

How could his life with Caryn have come to this?

They'd met when he'd been a guide on a Snake River rafting trip her parents had given her for a graduation present. He had been twenty-eight to her twenty-two, and they were soul mates from the minute they'd laid eyes on each other. She was going to med school at Stanford in the fall, but nothing was going to stand in the way of their being together. Stuart moved from Wyoming out to California, and they were married in the second week of November.

In those early days, their lives complemented one another. Caryn studied round the clock. Stuart submitted his writings everywhere he could think of and augmented his meager writer's income by working as a word processor in the law offices of Jedd Conley, one of his friends from college.

At home, Stuart kept the apartment clean, made their dinners, did the dishes, quizzed Caryn on her classes. She read and helped him edit his articles and early manuscripts and took every chance to get into the wilderness with him-the Bay Area was good for that. They jogged together three or four times a week, talking the whole while. They liked the same music, the same books; they laughed at the same jokes. Busy lives notwithstanding, they found time to make love often. They would often brag to each other that in the history of the world, nobody had ever been as happy as they were.

If that had been true then, Stuart thought, now there were few if any couples as miserable.

On Friday, the fight had erupted when Caryn came home for lunch after her hip-replacement patient had caught a cold and canceled on her at the last minute. So her entire afternoon loomed open and free, and when she got home, she was in a foul humor. Stuart, who'd been planning to drive up to Echo Lake anyway and get some writing done, suggested that she take advantage of the unexpected opportunity and accompany him.

She had no interest. No, she didn't have other plans, but why would she want to come up to his cabin for an entire weekend? What did he think they would do that she would remotely enjoy? Another hike'? She'd done her share of Stuart's hikes. Eight or ten or fifteen miles up and down steep and difficult terrain. Two or three or even six thousand vertical feet in one day? Wow, what a good time that was! And all to accomplish what? To get some outdoor exercise or a variation of a nice view that they'd both already seen a thousand times?