Sleep was dreamless and morning dawned a little chilly, something she realized the moment she put a foot down on the wood floors in the turret. She fished about in her gym bag to see if her mom had donated any warm things. She found woolly rainbow-colored socks, the sweatshirt featuring the giant disembodied face of Annelise’s cat, Peace and Love, that Annelise had given her grandpa for Christmas, and a pair of slippers with cocker spaniels on the toes. She put all of them on. The sweatshirt hung down almost to her knees.

She fumbled for her phone; it was only seven in the morning. How about that: the gently increasing light in her room had been her alarm clock. She decided to give herself a reprieve from looking at emails and texts until at least eight. Instead, she reflexively moved to open a window to let in birdsong and country air.

She stopped a few inches from the window.

And frowned.

And sniffed a little.

What the hell was that smell?

Heart pounding in dread now, she flung open a window, then slammed it down like a guillotine and scrambled backward. “Oh Jesus. Oh sweet Jesus!”

Only a thousand cows cooperatively farting in unison would create a smell like that.

She lunged for the hand cream in her purse, whipped the top off and snorted the vanilla-sandalwood blend like she was Al Pacino in Scarface, then bolted down the stairs, her hand sliding along the silky wood of the banister.

“Please . . . not . . . the . . . septic. Please. Not. The. Septic.”

That was her prayer, one word per stair, like they were rosary beads, all the way down.

She froze in the foyer. Through the door she could hear a muffled BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .

It sounded for all the world like a big truck was backing up outside.

And all at once a hundred nightmare scenarios flitted through her mind like bats released from a cave, all of them involving Mac and revenge.

She flung the door open. Nobody was out front. That was a bit of a relief.

She followed the sound, bolted down the path and out onto the drive and up the flagstone path as fast as her spaniel slippers could carry her.

She came to an abrupt halt at the fork in the road, just before the gate, and stared.

Mac was standing out there, hands planted on his hips, a few feet apart, looking like a happy pirate on the deck of his ship.

In front of him was a huge red truck, the movements of which he appeared to be directing.

“Good morning, Mac,” she called. “What fresh hell have we today?” Ava said it as brightly as a kindergarten teacher.

“Fresh manure,” he corrected with cheery self-satisfaction. “Not fresh hell.”

The manure in question was heaped in the back of said bright red truck, which was driven by a big guy wearing a white undershirt and a San Francisco Giants baseball hat. One tan arm bulging with muscle was propped on the open window.

The guy shouted merrily down to her over the sound of his idling engine. “Mac doesn’t cheap out when it comes to his crops. This is some good shit. Top notch! About time Mac decided to do some winter planting. You been out here, what, three years now, Mackie?”

Avalon turned very, very slowly to Mac. “Your crops?”

“My winter crops,” Mac reiterated in a tone that reminded her of a Buddhist monk she’d once met, who had clearly successfully meditated away every shred of anxiety, past and future. There was, however, a faint and very wicked hint of “duh” in his voice. “Fresh Loads is my go-to guy.”

At first Ava thought Fresh Loads was one of those terrible nicknames men give each other instead of demonstrating affection, like Bumpy or Skid Mark (two guys she’d actually gone to school with), but Mac gestured with his chin and she looked. “Fresh Loads” was indeed lettered on the side of the truck, in an ornate old-timey font embellished with feathery stalks of corn and lusciously blooming flowers.

Mac glanced over at her, and the glance became a comical double take. He whisked her from the top of her sloppy ponytail to the spaniels on the toes of her slippers, and, depending upon how sharp his vision was, in between might have noticed she hadn’t shaved her shins in a few days, and now little bristles sparkled in the direct sunlight.

“You sure you got that fuse in okay last night? You kinda look like you got dressed in the dark. You did look a little dazed when you walked away from my place.” His brow was furrowed in mock concern.

He was a wicked, wicked man.

“This is what I wear to work every day,” she informed him loftily.

He grinned at this as if she was a slot machine that had just paid off.

The driver cut the engine. The truck shuddered like a big animal. “Is there a problem, ma’am?”

“No, no. I just thought I might have a septic emergency.”

“Understandable,” he said solemnly. “Pretty pungent. The good stuff always is.”

“Don’t worry, Avalon,” Mac soothed. “It’ll only smell like this when the temperature gets into the high seventies or eighties. Which it will be for . . . oh, the next few weeks. We’re looking at a warm spell. Or when a breeze sends it up toward the house. Which is usually only during the day. It’s a little more pungent in the summer though. When I plant my summer crops.”

All of which of course meant she had to cancel with Rachel indefinitely.

He was a stone-cold evil genius.

“I kind of like the smell,” she lied coolly.

“Smells like prosperity, doesn’t it?” said the philosopher in the truck, in all seriousness, listening to this exchange. He sucked in a long breath and sighed it out with pleasure bordering on a purr. “Farm-to-table vegetables! Nothing like it! Knowing who grew your food and where it grew and in what it grew. It’s how food should be. Mac is great at it.”

Despite Mac and the Stench (now there was a band name if she ever heard one), Avalon was charmed. She supposed she was glad there were people in the world who took pride in doing things like scrubbing crime scenes or cutting linoleum with those terrifying knives shaped like little scimitars or formulating gourmet poop, things she was ill-equipped to do.

But something about it made her wistful and restless again. It was pretty clear that even the gourmet poop guy was more fulfilled than she was currently.

Fresh Loads gave his truck door a friendly pat. “Well, if everything’s okay here, I’m going to go drop this load off. You comin’, Mac?”

“Right behind you, Randy.”

Randy fired up the engine again and steered his fragrant load off to wherever Mac would be planting his winter crops.

Mac turned to her. “So what’s the deal, Harwood? Are you on sabbatical? Are you going to be here indefinitely?”

“Why? Trying to suss out how fast I need to sell this place so you can plan another skirmish? How stupid do you think I am?”

“Not even a little bit stupid. Now, if you’d asked me about your judgment . . .”

Her temper was ramping. “If I’d angled the ramp just a little farther back, I would have made that jump across Whiskey Creek.”

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing. So is physics. Funny thing is, now I could easily calculate the right angle for a ramp that might get you across. If the mood strikes you.”

“And now you’re trying to kill me?”

“Why? You tempted to make that jump?”

The word tempted, with all its soft plump consonants, hung there, throbbing with dimensions of meaning.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

“I notice you haven’t made me a new financial offer for the house yet,” she countered.

His expression didn’t change in the least. It was like he hadn’t even heard her. She was positive he had.

“The giant cat on your shirt is staring at me and you’re wearing dogs on your feet. Don’t you think you’re overcompensating for not having a pet?”

“My mom donated this stuff to me.”

She realized that raised a lot more questions than it answered, so she hurriedly added, “How’s your mom, Mac? What does she think of your farming and groundskeeping career?”

“Who knows?” He shrugged with one shoulder, indolently.

But then he looked away from her.

The indifference threw her. He didn’t talk to his brother and he didn’t talk to his mom. He could have good reasons. But she had no vocabulary, she realized, with which to discuss someone who seemed to have severed himself from his family.

He turned back toward her again, and he suddenly looked weary.

“For crying out loud, Harwood,” he said gently, almost exasperated. “Get a pet. It’s pretty isolated out here. You should get a dog. A really big one. The kind that barks loudly at predators and prowlers and fetches the sheriff when you do things like fall down wells.”

Just the very notion of a pet made her go silent against a swoop of yearning.

He reached into his mailbox then and retrieved a flyer he must have missed yesterday.

“I’m not going to fall down a well,” she said finally. Sounding nine years old.

“I won’t hold my breath,” he said absently. He ducked his head to read the flyer, then he turned to walk away without saying another word.

She turned away, too, and sighed heavily, and the next intake of breath was richly redolent of manure.

Maybe she’d get used to it.

Damn, but it was practically a coup de grace. It was brilliant. And she ought not to admire it, but she was nothing if not fair.

And she was nothing if not a competitor.

Her trip back to the house was a little more leisurely than her initial bolt from it. Suddenly her phone erupted into The Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away.” Her sister. It was kind of nice that she wasn’t actually a million miles away now. She was just about twenty minutes away.

“Hey, Edie. What’s shakin’?”

“Avalon, I have to hit you up for a favor, and it’s a big one.”

Ah, siblings. Formalities like “how are you?” went right out the window in favor of expediency.

“Well, you know me. Go big or go home. Or go buy a big home. Ha ha. Ha.”

“Yeah. Ha! I’m so sorry to dump this on you, but I can’t believe I forgot it was my turn to host the Hummingbird meeting at my house today! We’re supposed to make friendship bracelets and plant seedlings in egg cartons or some such shit, because they need their gardening badges and I have to feed them lunch. I have all the egg cartons and the dirt. But a big order for a Saturday funeral came into the shop and my supplier sent me daisies instead of lilies and do you have any idea how ridiculous it will be to cover the scion of an old Sacramento family in Gerbera daisies? And now I have to scramble to find the right flowers and drive to Black Oak to beg Cheryl at ‘Coming up Roses’ for her supply of flowers or I could lose the funeral business and I can’t let this happen. Do you think you can fill in for me for at least an hour? I can get them all set up for you and I’ll be back as fast as I can. Probably inside an hour.”

Eden made it sound as though she’d forgotten to lock the lion cages at the zoo.

But Eden was burdened with perfectionism. The prospect of failure was probably torture, not to mention letting people down. Avalon wanted to save her, because she really hated it when Eden suffered.

Also, she knew she could bank the favor. Because that was the law in the world of siblings.

“Wait—the Hummingbirds are Annelise’s scout troop, right?”

“Yes. About eight little girls. Smart ones. Darling girls. So sweet and good and just a dream.”

Eden oversold it. Avalon was suspicious now. “Didn’t you tell me one of them is mouthy? The one who has a brother with a sad mustache and a skeevy vocabulary?”

“Yeah. You should get along great with her.”

Avalon snorted.

She could only imagine what the others were like.

She loved kids. She was, by nature, whimsical and energetic and prone to non-sequiturs even as an adult, and she wasn’t particularly daunted by the prospect of wrangling a whole passel of little girls. It sounded like a blast.

In that little pause she could hear goats bleating.

And the metallic, rhythmic clang of some kind, reminiscent of weekend mornings and her dad attempting to whack their old lawn mower back into life.

And just like that, an evil little lightbulb pinged on above her head.

“Hey, Eden—you know what? You should bring them up here! We’ll drag a picnic table out front and do the crafts there. Plenty of room for them to run around and have a good time and tire themselves out.”

“That’s a fantastic idea!”

“And hey, do you think you might have any old clothes you can spare that might fit me?”

“I’ll look. And I swear I’ll only be gone and leave you with the girls for an hour or so. You’re the best!”

“I am,” Avalon agreed placidly, turning around and looking in the direction of Mac’s cottage, as if she was addressing him. “I am indeed.”