“Donnie helped a lot-we’d never have dared such a big tree without him. It’s been a boon for us, to suddenly have him here, he’s done so much to the house. I didn’t know he had those skills. He’s been doing some jobs around the village, too, and people have already started to seek him out. He just finished a renovation for Sicily Aronson’s gallery.”

Davis nodded. “Opening it up to the café and bookstore. Makes all three more inviting.”

“I wanted to pay him for our work, but he refused. Said if we wouldn’t let him pay rent and board, he’d work for his keep.” Cora Lee smiled. “He said, ‘If you ladies keep feeding me so elegantly, I have to do something or you’ll be rolling me down the driveway.’”

“Sounds like a nice guy. I saw him in the village the other day; Dallas pointed him out. He was talking with a middle-aged couple-tall, dark-haired woman, strangers. He’ll have all the work he wants, as difficult as it is to get skilled craftsmen.”

“What did happen last night, Juana? You’re pretty concerned about the little girl, if Max didn’t tell the reporters about her.”

“I’d already gotten her away from the scene when the reporters showed up.” Juana described the events of the previous night. And the anonymous phone call, like tips they had received in so many other cases, this one telling them about the child.

“The caller said she was clinging to the dead man,” Juana said. “When Brennan found her, she was huddled in that little pump house behind the dog fountain, and those two cats were with her, Clyde’s big tomcat, and the Greenlaw’s cat cuddled right up to her.”

“I guess even that macho tomcat might have a soft spot,” Cora Lee said, smiling.

“She was afraid of Brennan, shrinking away from him. That’s when he called for a woman. She likes Jimmie McFarland, though, maybe because he’s quieter. She didn’t shy away from the chief and Dallas, either. I think it was just last night, so soon after the shooting, and Brennan’s voice is loud and gruff.”

“Can’t she stay here with us?” Cora Lee said. “We’re all women in the house, except for Donnie, and he’s a gentle soul. She and the guard could sleep in my room, with the dogs in there, and in the daytime she could hang out with Lori and Dillon while they work on the playhouse.”

Though there was two years’ difference in age between Lori Reed and Dillon Thurwell, the girls were fast friends, in part because both rode together, both keeping their horses up at Chief Harper’s ranch. Lori Reed, though she was the younger, had helped Dillon in school. Lori was intently committed to “real history,” as she called it, and to English, and her eagerness had rubbed off on Dillon, an interest that had changed Dillon a great deal.

Juana looked out to the living room, where the big poodle and Dalmatian and the little girl had curled up in a tangle among the floor cushions, the dogs panting.

“There’s no name tag on her clothes?” Cora Lee said. “No labels you can trace?”

“Kmart labels, could have come from anywhere. I bathed her last night, bagged her clothes for evidence, put her in one of my T-shirts. This morning Officer Kane brought me some clothes, his boy’s about the same size.

“There’ve been no California missing reports,” Juana said, “for an adult or for a child of her description. Nothing so far on the West Coast, and nothing yet in the national reports. Taking the word of our informant that there was a dead man, we’re guessing he was a tourist.”

“You think she was kidnapped?”

“It seems unlikely if, as the caller said, the child was snuggled up to him. It’s possible that an estranged father could have taken her, and run, against a court order. We have no report to that effect, yet, where the child fits that description.”

Cora Lee shivered. The two women looked at each other, both touched by the horror that the child must have experienced, if she was in that man’s arms when he was shot.

Though the child seemed busy with the dogs, they kept their voices low. She might not speak, but it was obvious that her hearing was just fine, turning when a dog huffed, glancing up at the women if they laughed. When they finished their pie and coffee, Cora Lee called the dogs, Juana wrapped up the child’s pie for later, and they headed out the front door, across the front deck, and down the four steps to the big garage, where Lori and Dillon were building their contest entry.

P ASSING THE WIDE garage doors, Cora Lee and Juana stopped to wait as Jimmie McFarland pulled in, then the three adults moved, with the child between them, around the side to the pedestrian door accompanied by the two gamboling dogs. They could hear, from within, the buzz of the electric screwdriver and the rhythmic pounding of a hammer, and the two girls bantering and laughing. Pushing the door open, Cora Lee turned, looking across the yard for Donnie, but his truck was still gone. His wheelbarrow and bags of cement and tools were scattered where he’d been working, which wasn’t usual for him. But he’d been at work since dawn, and was obviously coming right back-he must have run out of something unexpectedly.

When she and her housemates had bought the house, the yard was a mass of weeds. But once they’d moved into the neglected dwelling, most of their work had at first gone into the interior, painting and repairing, decorating the communal living area in a way to bring their divergent pieces of furniture and tastes together. Each of them had designed her own room as she pleased. Blond Gabrielle, who wasn’t much for yard work and who didn’t like to get her hands dirty, was a fine seamstress and had made all the curtains and draperies. That, in Cora Lee’s opinion, took far more patience and skill than wielding a garden trowel or a paintbrush. Holding the child’s hand, she led her inside. “You have an audience,” she called, “a special visitor.”

Along the walls of the three-car garage, Cora Lee and the girls had constructed a sturdy cutting table and a paint table out of sawhorses and plywood. The permanent workbench offered ample room for hardware, nails and hinges, and the small power tools. Ordinarily the garage was Cora Lee’s furniture studio, and she had orders nearly three years ahead. But until later this week, when the girls would deliver the playhouse to the contest grounds, this space belonged to them. The playhouse nearly filled it.

There were twenty-three entries, most of them produced by adult teams and professional builders. Once the winner was chosen, all the other entries would be auctioned off. Given the popularity of custom playhouses along the coast, Cora Lee had no doubt they’d all sell at a profit-in her mind, it was a win/win situation; but the girls were set on getting the first prize.

Above them, Dillon Thurwell was perched atop a six-foot-high platform of joists, the red-haired fourteen-year-old carefully balancing as she screwed lightweight cedar boards onto the raised deck-the playhouse, which was nearly finished, could be taken apart in three sections to be transported by truck. If the girls’ dream came true, their entry would win twenty thousand dollars to be split between them, to add to their college funds.

Dillon’s parents had started her college fund long ago, and added to it regularly; but Dillon’s mother was a real estate agent, and her father a college professor. Lori, on the other hand, with her father in prison and her mother dead, had little more than odd jobs and her own ingenuity with which to amass the huge sum she would need for her education. And Lori Reed was dead set on college, no matter what it took. Lori had lived with the four women since her father was sent to San Quentin to serve a sentence for second-degree murder, a crime that everyone who knew him felt they might have committed themselves, considering that the man he killed had brutally murdered innocent and very bright children, and had intended to kill Lori.