CHAPTER 1

THE CLANG of the gatekeeper cowbell brought Rosemary Mendes’s head up, stirring to wakefulness the twin demons of anger and fear that had lurked in the corners of her mind for almost a week.

The bell jangled again, sure sign that someone was actually coming through the tottery old rose-twined trellis that marked the entry to her front yard. Then came a furious wail, and a sharp voice in response, and Rosemary set aside thoughts of old enemies. The present problem was of another sort, and her own fault; she should have put her truck away instead of leaving it out there on the road. She laid her book on a side table, swung her feet down from the ottoman, and rose to man—woman?—the battlements.

A glance out the window confirmed her judgment; here came Kim Runyon with her son, Tyler, surely the world?s most obnoxious two-year-old. Rosemary grabbed a heavy sweater from the closet and hurried out onto her front porch, closing the door firmly behind her.

“Good morning, Kim,” she called. Sweater draped over her shoulders, she propped a hip against the porch rail and folded her arms.

Kim, a tall, sturdy woman in her early twenties, was struggling to push a stroller up the flagstone path. Tyler Runyon helped out by flinging himself from side to side in his seat, yowling at the rough ride or the belt that restrained him or just life in general.

“Jeez, Rosemary,” said Kim, shaking back a mop of permed white-blond hair that fell around her shoulders like the braided-and-combed-out tail of a show-ring palomino. “Why don’t you put in a real walk here? Eddie knows this guy does concrete work, next time he’s got some left over after a job he could come by.”

“Thank you, but I like the flagstones. They’re pretty.”

“And pretty hard on your visitors, too.”

Tempted to point out that she had not issued an invitation to anyone pushing a stroller and had no plans to do so, Rosemary held her tongue. Kim Runyon had shown herself to be of two minds about her older neighbor. Sometimes Rosemary was weird but interesting in her chosen life as a solitary, self-sufficient female; more often she was simply someone who had no life and nothing in particular to do and might as well be useful to a busy, younger, normal person. “What brings you out on such a chilly day, Kim?”

Kim’s next move, bending to unstrap Tyler and lift him kicking and writhing from the stroller to her right hip, was answer enough. Rosemary geared herself to meet the challenge.

“See, Maya called last night to say she’s got a couple perms and a frost this afternoon and she could use some help. My car died for good last week,” she added with a grimace, “so I drove Eddie to work and kept the truck. But the problem is, it turns out my mom’s got a doctor’s appointment in Redding.”

Maya, Rosemary knew, owned a hairdressing place called Casa de Beauté on the shopping strip that straggled along highway 299 on the eastern edge of Weaverville, California. Kim worked for Maya part-time, when she needed money or when she got particularly tired of being cooped up in an old double-wide mobile home with a demanding toddler.

When Rosemary didn’t leap into this opening, Kim tossed her hair back again and smiled hopefully. “So I figured, since you and Tyler got along so well when I had that problem the other day, you wouldn’t mind taking him for a few hours today.”

Rosemary still had teeth marks on her arm from Tyler’s last visit, and she suspected that under the haystack of pale hair, Tyler’s little pink earlobe still bore the mark left by her thumbnail when she pinched him in response. “Sorry, Kim, but not today. I have to shop, and then cook, for a dinner guest this evening.”

“Shit,” said Kim, without rancor. “Look, could I use your phone, to call a couple of my girlfriends?”

There was defense of privacy, and then there was churlishness. With a nod Rosemary opened her door and stood aside, to let Kim carry her still-struggling burden into the warm house.

“You know, Rosemary, I’ve been meaning to tell you. if you’d just come in and let Maya trim your hair up and color it some—she’s real good with color—you wouldn’t hardly look old at all. I mean, your skin’s real nice and you got those big brown eyes, it’s just the white hair makes you look like a grandma.”

Rosemary’s thick, curly hair had gone white early, the norm in her mother’s redheaded clan; and she didn’t mind looking like a grandmother, only being required to act like one. “Thanks, but I’m quite happy with wash-and-wear natural,” she said. “The telephone’s through here, in the breakfast nook.”

“Well, okay. Hey, after I get things set up, remind me to tell you about the dead body.”

Having delivered that hook, Kim sat down at the table and picked up the phone, enclosing Tyler in the crook of one arm as she prepared to punch out numbers. Sure that such confinement would last about thirty seconds, Rosemary moved through her small house reducing temptations. She closed the rolltop of her modern, low-profile desk over computer gear and telephone, pulled the fireplace screen tight, closed off bathroom and bedroom. Returning to the kitchen to put on water for tea, she gave Tyler a meaningful glance: Remember, little kid, I’m bigger, smarter, and tougher than you.

Tyler’s eyes were a pale yellow-brown under stiff white lashes. he sent Rosemary’s look right back at her, lurched free of his mother’s grasp, and stumped off in search of devilment. Rosemary filled the teakettle, set it on a high flame, and went to keep an eye on her wandering guest.

“Okay!” called Kim from the kitchen several long minutes later. Tyler, deprived of Rosemary’s open book, the television remote control, a pretty bowl made by a local potter, and a piece of fireplace kindling, turned at his mother’s voice and headed for the kitchen, stopping short of that goal to reach for the doorknob of the closet originally used for storing a folding bed. Ignoring Rosemary’s “No, Tyler,” he pulled the door open and scuttled inside. Rosemary was interested to see the door swing shut of its own weight; clearly the hinges needed shimming.

“Liz says no way, but Becky says she’s home for the day, I can take Tyler over. Oh, tea will be real nice,” she said as Rosemary put two Irish Breakfast teabags in a teapot and poured water over them.

“Dead body?” Rosemary reminded as instructed, setting cups on the table along with sugar and spoons. Weaverville, the unincorporated county seat of Trinity County, had a stated population of thirty-five hundred spread over a large area, and a low rate of serious crime. Probably what Kim had to report was the late-discovered death of some lone elderly person, or maybe a result of domestic violence, something low population didn’t seem to protect against.

“Oh, yeah. See, Eddie was on afternoon shift at Rob’s yesterday, and this sheriff’s deputy he knows came by. Eddie’s thinking about training to be a deputy; he’s big and strong and knows the area and the people real well and it’s fulltime work, with decent pay and benefits. his favorite cousin used to be a deputy.”

Eddie Runyon, obvious physical source of blocky little Tyler, had a high-school athlete’s body going soft and an expression that said life wasn’t turning out the way he’d expected and he meant to find out whose fault that was. Rosemary had several in-laws who wore that look, and she’d be sorry to see any of them with a badge and gun. “That would be interesting,” she said to Kim. “What did the deputy tell him?”

“Well, you know that woman called herself Mike, had a place north of here in the Shasta–Trinity?”

In the nearly-a-year she’d lived here, Rosemary had spent most of her time working on her house; nesting-in, her husband would have called it. until the last few months she’d had only minimal social contact with local people. “No, I don’t. Was this Mike the dead body?”

“Right, isn’t that what I said? Thanks,” Kim added, as Rosemary poured tea. “I heard Michelle was her real name, Michelle Morgan. Anyway, they found her dead, out there in the woods not far from where she lived—on national Forest land. Shot in the back.”

“Do they know who shot her?”

“Deer hunter, they figure—some dude that saw something move and just blasted away, more or less blew her head right off and then lit out real fast when he saw what’d happened.” Kim stirred sugar into her tea and took a sip. “She hiked in the woods a lot, I heard. But she got careless, or maybe forgot it’s deer season, anyway wasn’t wearing red or orange. Which is really stupid.”

National Forests sprawl across northern California: expanses of green, many of them contiguous, taking up most of the map. The local green patch, part of the Shasta–Trinity national Forests, was a maze of Forest Service roads and trails; and Rosemary, who had hiked a few of these trails alone, hugged herself now against a sudden shiver. “The really stupid person was the hunter.”

Kim frowned. “I guess you’re one of those animal-rights people, think hunting is, like, immoral or something.”

“My father hunted, my brothers hunted,” said Rosemary. “So did my husband and our sons. None of them ever mistook a person for a deer.”

“Oh, well then.” Kim sipped her tea.

“Had she lived here—there—long?”

Kim shrugged. “A couple years maybe, she never came to town much. Eddie said she was a stuck-up bitch, and she for sure didn’t hang with anybody I know. Anyway, she had a big piece of scrub land out there, with a shacky little house even smaller and older than this one—except you’ve got yours fixed up real nice, Rosemary,” she added kindly.

“Anyway, the interesting thing Ray, he’s the deputy, told Eddie, is that nobody knows who to tell, who her relatives are, like that. She’s—she was—a mystery woman.” She straightened suddenly and cocked her head. “Hey. Where’s Tyler?”

“In the living room, I think,” said Rosemary.

“Could he get the front door open? He’s strong and real fast.” Kim scrambled to her feet and dashed into the living room, where the front door was closed tight. “Tyler? Baby?”

“Maaamaaah!” The roar was underlined by thumps that set the nearer, narrower wooden door a-rattle.

“Oh, the bed closet. I wouldn’t have thought he could reach that knob,” Rosemary added as Kim yanked the door open.

“Poor baby,” crooned Kim, scooping him up. “Boy, he’s really dirty,” she said accusingly to Rosemary.

“It’s only dust,” said Rosemary. “There’s nothing else in there. But you can see that my house is simply not set up for small children.”

“Hey, we could baby-proof this place in ten minutes.”

“No, we couldn’t.” Rosemary looked pointedly at her watch, then moved toward the front door. “I should get moving, Kim.”

“Oh, right. Thanks for the tea,” she said. “Come on, Tyler, I bet Becky’ll give you lunch.”

Rosemary closed the door gratefully and turned to survey her domain. if it looked like a shack to the casual eye—little old three-room wooden house—that was all right with her. But those three rooms were larger than usual in a house of its age, one of the reasons she’d bought the place. And beyond that, the kitchen and bath were redone down to the studs, the sagging pine floors replaced with oak throughout, all the windows and the French doors to the terrace newly made. The roof, too, was new; she herself had helped pull the old one off. She had mended and painted the old lath-and-plaster walls, had rolled out the thick batts of insulation that carpeted the shallow attic. And underneath the whole was a full basement, snugly watertight, its new concrete floor smooth and crack-free. In the spring when she could work outdoors with the table saw, she’d finish the basement off with wallboard and…

Ah. And have a place for houseguests rather than for her washer and dryer and exercise bike and furnace. Remember the real point of a one-bedroom house, Rosemary.

Most mornings she went for a good long walk in the woods, but today was cold and bleak, the end of September more like November. And if she went out there even in her bright red anorak, she’d be jittery as a rabbit in owl territory. Damning the flatland jack-asses who came to the woods once a year and shot at anything that moved, Rosemary looked for her truck keys for several moments before remembering she’d rescued them from Tyler and put them on the fireplace mantel—right on top of the printed copy of the e-mail from Peter Jeffries, her attorney in Arcata, her former home on the coast.

She’d had no real need to print the thing, which he’d sent as a follow-up to last week’s very apologetic telephone call. A temporary employee working with his secretary had inadvertently revealed Rosemary’s present whereabouts to a young woman who claimed to be an out-of-town relative frantically searching for her. Alice, his secretary, had apologized and offered to quit her job, an offer he was still considering. But the upshot was, someone out there now knew that Rosemary was in Weaverville.

Rosemary had no doubt about the identity of that enterprising young woman. But there was nothing to be done about it except perhaps find a new attorney, which struck her now as double damage rather than justified revenge. She opened the fireplace screen, gave the sheet of paper a couple of good twists, and tossed the result onto the logs laid for the next fire.

WHEN she returned from town more than an hour later, she put her truck away in the shed behind the house, carried her groceries inside, and locked her doors—something she always did anyway, but today her action was purposeful rather than automatic. The dead woman, Michelle called Mike, had she been solitary for the pleasure of it? From fear, or pain of loss? And why on earth, after two years in this rural area, had she gone into the woods in deer season without wearing colors?