Alice begged Lindy to stay on and see things through from the comfort of her cantaloupe-colored guest room, and Lindy calmed her down with the promise of a return visit during the trial. She couldn’t wait to leave. Everywhere she looked she saw reminders of what she was losing. Even the lake lurking around every corner, running alongside the roads, a hidden presence, seemed tainted by her memories.

On Friday, she located a clothing store willing to sell her used designer clothes on consignment and a jewelry store that offered her two thousand for her twenty thousand dollar watch. She took it.

Back at Alice’s, she threw the dazzling array of fashion she had acquired for all the charity functions and fancy dress parties into four fluff-filled boxes.

Alice came into the room to watch her pack. She had her hands in her pockets, and her chin-length blond-streaked hair framed the tense expression on her face. She dressed as well as she could on a very limited income as a florist. Today she wore a plum-colored blouse with a shawl-length scarf thrown around her shoulders and looked like a million bucks.

“Where are you taking those boxes?” Alice asked. “Not out to the dump site?”

“It’s not a dump, it’s a trailer, a perfectly nice one. I’m storing these… in a shed on the property,” Lindy lied. She didn’t want to admit she was selling them. Alice would be too upset and might just go off into one of her tirades about Mike.

“Why don’t you stay with me? It’s the least I can do for you after all you’ve done for me.”

“Stop talking about that. I didn’t do anything.”

“Oh, no. You didn’t do anything,” Alice said, crossing her arms and snorting. “That night I was lying in the bathtub with a razor at my wrist and a bad attitude, you didn’t break in the door and pour Ipecac down my throat until I threw up the pills. You never dragged me out of that party when I knocked out that Italian guy with a bottle of Bushmills, before he woke up enough to kill me. You didn’t pay my rent until I could get a job or help me buy my business. And you had nothing to do with the down payment on this house ’cause you’re just a parasite on society, a real rich bitch, aren’t you?”

“Quit it, Alice. You know I appreciate the offer but right now, I’m so angry and hurt I really need to get out of town before I do something awful. I have these fantasies…” Lindy’s thoughts weren’t good. She had been having nightmares. She thought that out there in the canyon, maybe all that earth and sky would leach the badness out of her like rain washing the dirt. “I’m afraid of myself, sometimes.”

“You’re not going to do something stupid, are you?” Alice asked. “Don’t go and hurt yourself.”

“No, not myself. Actually, that would be better than what I’m thinking.”

“Oh, you’re stuck in the murder and maim mode that comes right after he makes his announcement about the babe.”

“I guess I am.”

“I used to think of all the ways to kill him, lingering lovingly over the details. How I’d pluck his eyes out and squish them. What I’d do to his you-know-what. How I’d repair that undescended brain of his with a hammer. I’d be worried about you if you weren’t having those thoughts. Mike’s a bastard. My advice is, you go for it, sister. You take out that gun of mine from where you have it hidden and you blow his head off.”

“Alice…”

“Crime of passion. You might serve two, three years, and it’s so worth it. Maybe you’d get lucky like I did and end up in a hospital, supposedly correcting the error of your ways but instead medicated into a state of zombiedom.” She took a scarf off the bed and removed her shawl to try it on, looking at herself in the mirror. “That was pretty restful. No cooking, no cleaning. Hardly any sex.” Removing it, she tossed it into a box. “But you won’t because you are basically a civilized person.”

Lindy did not hate Mike. She hated Rachel. Alice wouldn’t understand that. Alice blamed everything on men. She had recently made friends with her ex-husband Stan’s girlfriend.

“Well, I’m glad you think I’m so civilized,” Lindy said. “And I’m going to work on maintaining that reputation in spite of the baseness of my instincts.”

She dropped the boxes at the cleaners, who agreed to deliver them to the consignment store in a few days. Then, dressed in her oldest, warmest parka, she drove her beautiful black Jag to the top of the Emerald Bay overlook, playing her favorite compact disc, driving slowly, enjoying the ride and wistful at the same time, knowing something beautiful in her life was over and it was too early to be thinking about new beginnings.

Once at the pull-out, she parked, got out, and stepped across the wet granite rocks to Tahoe’s most famous view.

She couldn’t see their house, which was located about a half mile south of the big green bay along the main body of the lake, but every boat that was willing to brave the cold that day she examined, as she had for the past months, looking for Mike. She climbed up the boulders for the highest perch, then stood in a cold wind, until her wet boots nearly froze to the rock.

Back in the car, she drove the Jaguar to a car dealer at the “Y” where the two local highways intersected. He offered twenty-five grand for her sixty thousand dollar car, and threw in an old Jeep in trade. She had very little to move from the Jag to the Jeep, just her battered leather suitcase.

She was close to the plant. Before she left town, she would take one more look at the place that had been her second home for the past dozen years. Turning on the noisy heater of the Jeep, and throwing it groaningly into gear, she drove up Tucker from the “Y” until their factory came into view. If he was telling the truth about abandoning the business, Mike wouldn’t be there today, so she didn’t have to steel herself for a chance encounter for a change.

She parked at the far end of the lot next to the building. Looking smaller than she remembered, their first factory stood on a low hill abutting a stand of fir trees. Its corrugated metal roof and red painted sides made it look more like a barn full of animals than a business, but the second story had windows on each end. The marketing group-three people-and the bookkeeper had offices up there. Mike and Lindy had worked up there occasionally.

Time sure got away from you, she thought, rolling her window down to examine the building for signs of neglect. But the place looked spiffy as ever, and she could hear the hum of a saw, probably doing up a redwood frame for a spa. Business as usual.

They had set the wheels efficiently in motion. She shouldn’t be surprised to see that these wheels continued to turn without them, but she was. All the machinery should halt, shouldn’t it, without her and Mike, the heart, soul, and guts of that business?

Dressed in slacks and a sweater, the petite figure of a woman appeared in the doorway. Rachel Pembroke. That’s right. Rachel and Hector were running things now, weren’t they? What a laugh. Rachel couldn’t count her change from a movie ticket purchase, and worse, had no interest in anything smaller than a hundred dollar bill. Hector was a nice guy who knew his numbers but had the imagination of a stuffed duck.

Wrapping herself up in a sealskin coat, Rachel jumped into her company car, a golden-brown Volvo sedan, and turned left, heading downhill toward town.

Strange how things turned out. Lindy hadn’t even thought about finding Rachel here. But here she was, dumped in Lindy’s lap, just as if Lindy had studied a timetable and plotted logistics. Why Lindy wasn’t even driving her usual car. Nobody would ever suspect Lindy Markov would be caught dead in this rattletrap. She was anonymous. And she couldn’t control the jealousy that rose up so powerfully in her she almost choked.

Lindy gunned the Jeep and followed.