“WHAT THE FUCKING HELL HAPPENED? Who the hell was that woman? Where did she come from?”

Mac was in his cottage. Graybill was still on the courthouse steps.

“Mr. Coltrane, may I ask if you intend for me to attempt to answer these rhetorical questions, or are you venting?”

Oh, for God’s sake.

“Well, obviously the latter, Graybill,” he said through gritted teeth. “But if you can address the former, you’d have my utmost gratitude.” He mimicked Graybill’s clipped English.

“She went off with the auctioneer, Mr. Coltrane. If I’d known you’d wanted me to give pursuit I might have.”

Mac sucked in another breath, as if he hoped oxygen would behave like Ativan. His equilibrium remained thrown. “What did she look like?”

“She was about five feet five. A bit sweaty and disheveled. Frankly, she looked a bit as though she might have slept in her clothes. I at first took her for one of the homeless women who camp out here, or for someone late for a meeting with her parole officer. Then I realized she was wearing what I believe were lululemon yoga pants and Armani sunglasses.”

Mac was momentarily speechless. “What in the . . . how in the . . . lululemon? Are you kidding me with this, Graybill?”

“I wouldn’t presume to kid about this, Mr. Coltrane, given how important the matter is to you. You may thank my wife for my knowledge of lululemon.”

Mac rubbed his forehead with his hand. “Is that all you’ve got on her?”

“She had a very determined air. Hysteria channeled in a very goal-oriented way. Knew exactly what she came to do and wasn’t going to leave without accomplishing it.”

Mac was momentarily distracted by wondering about Graybill’s marriage, given the things he noticed about women.

“And she wasn’t unattractive, Mr. Coltrane. Her hair was a sort of dark red. Her form was pleasing. Her face was covered mostly with the aforementioned sunglasses. Though I thought I saw freckles. It of course might have been, er . . . dirt.”

The word “freckles” pinged somewhere in the vicinity of Mac’s heart, which he used these days strictly as an organ for pumping blood. Certainly no woman had seen the inside of it, to be euphemistic, in eons.

But the word was like a little pinprick puncture. Oddly, he felt the anger seep out of him.

And for a vertiginous millisecond, a slippage in time, he was that uncertain kid again. Hurt. Inwardly flailing, outwardly frozen.

For just a second, however. He might as well be made of rock these days.

“I do wish I could be of more assistance, Mr. Coltrane,” Graybill said into the silence. Graybill was starchy, but Mac believed him, because he was a decent guy.

“What a pity I’m not a police sketch artist, Graybill. Or a psychic. Or both.”

“All viable career alternatives, Mr. Coltrane, should you wish to abandon the agrarian life. A psychic works downtown in Hellcat Canyon, I’m given to understand.”

“Thank you, Graybill. I, too, have seen the giant palm over the New Age bookstore on Main Street. That was more humor on my part; please don’t bill me for it.”

They remained connected in a sort of commiserating silence.

“Mr. Coltrane, I would be happy to act as your agent should you wish to contact Tiberius in New York.”

That was about as delicately put as any human could put anything. Graybill knew exactly how Mac felt about the house. And about his brother, Ty. It was a testament to how well he knew how much this meant to Mac.

“No,” Mac said shortly. “Thank you,” he added a moment later, after a pointed delay, to punish Graybill a very little for even asking.

“Very well,” Graybill said evenly.

Mac cleared his throat. “That woman was attractive, huh? At least that gives me something to work with.”

“I’ve every confidence in your eventual success, Mr. Coltrane.” Admirable dryness, that.

“And your bill will reflect today’s efforts, no doubt.”

“We do understand each other, Mr. Coltrane.”

Mac pressed the call to an end and stalked out to stand at the threshold of his cottage. He sucked in a long, cool, deep breath.

He’d stop by his mailbox to see if that promised envelope had appeared. His instincts told him he’d come up empty yet again.

Then he’d go burn off his frustration with a hike downstream from Devil’s Leap, take his fishing pole, maybe.

And work out a new plan.

One thing he’d learned over the years: a perverse elation often followed on the heels of a defeat. It was like discovering a little sliver of light indicating a window in a room you’d thought was airless. All defeat meant was another opportunity to prove himself yet again. And then again. Until he won.

One day, maybe, he’d be invincible.

He especially liked to win when the odds were stacked against him, especially if he had a worthy opponent. It was such a delicious feeling it was a wonder his father had bothered cheating.

Unless you counted that whole choir of cheerful birds singing their heads off in time to the wind soughing through pine boughs, not another soul in the world knew she was standing here right now, at ten thirty in the morning, in front of a house that looked like a giant pink birthday present. She was cleaved between a sort of exultant terror and a strange relief.

It felt like she’d just rescued something in the nick of time. Though she couldn’t quite say what or why.

Clean, hard lines—the slant of the roof, the long narrow front porch—met gentle bulges—the turret, the four sets of vast, multipaned bay windows that let in glorious amounts of sunlight, each of them trimmed in a rectangle of dazzling William Morris–esque stained glass across their tops. Two balconies and two wide decks—one above and one below. French windows led out onto the top deck, and she’d once imagined herself bursting through windows like those while she was wearing a gossamer nightgown, the wind whipping her hair out behind her, like a heroine in a Gothic romance. From that deck you could see Devil’s Leap, the namesake rock rucked up through the magic of tectonic plates eons ago. It rose twenty feet or so in the air, and in her mind, the smooth granite surface was the size of a Broadway stage.

She was as breathless as the first time she’d heard Clair de Lune.

Also . . . kind of like someone had dropped an anvil on her chest.

The driveway was sandblasted smooth, spotlessly white, crack-free and swept clean of leaves and pinecones and the various animal droppings that tended to wind up anywhere you went in Hellcat Canyon. Her beautiful blue car looked right at home in it.

She finally ventured forward. Glossy, well-established azaleas and camellias hugged the walls of the house and the rails of the porch. A silvery cluster of venerable but still lissome birches arched up from the corner of a lawn which undulated moatlike around the house. It was lushly green and neatly barbered. Ancient oaks with huge heavy branches already naked of leaves for the season now mingled with a full dozen or more other trees, pines and a young redwood, liquidambars, and dogwoods, in a planned yet casual disarray.

She saw nothing that could be construed as superfluous flora, a miracle considering how opportunistic Scotch broom and Indian paintbrush and firethorn were in Hellcat Canyon. The Harwoods had once found a potato, a carrot, and a little rose growing out in their front lawn. It was always a surprise come spring to see what had gone wayward.

The groundskeeper under contract clearly took the job seriously.

Avalon became aware of a stabbing pain in her hand. She uncurled her fingers and found a perfect imprint in her palm of the house keys she’d been squeezing. They were all hot as little brands and damp with her own sweat.

“Here goes,” she breathed. She took a decisive step forward.

Something white darted in her peripheral vision. She spun about.

A white-and-brown tabby cat was staring at her in astonishment, frozen midstride, its front paw in the air. Clearly, he or she had been going about its usual rounds and Avalon was obviously unexpected.

“KITTY!” She realized she sounded for all the world like her niece, Annelise, when she’d first met their cat, Peace and Love, when she was three years old.

The cat turned around and trotted down the flagstone path that made its serpentine way across the lawn. It had a startled rather than a low-to-the-ground terrified gait. It glanced over its shoulder once. Almost as though it wanted her to follow it. Or so she told herself.

So she followed.

The flagstone path terminated some ten yards later, and she was now on a sort of paved red-dirt drive liberally sprinkled with gravel. It stretched on for about a hundred feet or so, ending in a barred metal gate about the length of her dad’s old blue pickup truck. The gate divided the drive from another long narrow road that led into Devil’s Leap from Old Canyon Road.

That was the way her parents had driven them into Devil’s Leap during that summer.

Now she realized what a symbolic divide that barred gate was.

Disappointingly, the cat seemed to have vanished. Which was very catlike of it.

Outside of the gate a pair of mailboxes were mounted on wooden posts, which was a bit odd. Surely there was only one house on the property?

She jiggled at the latch of the gate to free it, and then gave it a hearty shove, which made it groan and creak in protest, and walked its considerable weight almost to the far end of the road, until it was most of the way open.

There. That was better.

The freshness in the air hit her like a wine distilled from childhood and freedom. From here, she could probably find her way to the Devil’s Leap swimming hole with her eyes closed. She’d get there by texture: the scratch of the blueberry vines when you dove down the dirty path, the stones, some smooth, some coarse, arranged by nature, that formed a risky sort of staircase up to the top of the rock—

A text interrupted her reverie. It was Rachel:

Avalon texted: Perfect!

A little rustle and a thud next to her feet made her jump.

“Well, there you are!”

The cat had long white legs and a brown tabby saddle and its homely face was the sort a child might draw—comprised of spheres and triangles. He was also missing about a third of his tail. But it had a certain rakish nonchalance that conferred presence. He reminded Avalon of Humphrey Bogart.

“Well, hello, Humphrey!” She knelt to get closer to cat height. “Do you come with the house?”

He wasn’t wearing a collar but he was plump and a quick peek told her he’d been divested of testicles, so maybe he was someone’s pet roaming far afield.

“Prrrrrp!” He bumped her hand with his hard little noggin. His eyes were as yellow as doubloons, but little shavings of darker gold floated in there, lending him an air of mystery.

She scratched him under his chin until he purred. She was vaguely aware of other ambient sounds. Squirrels making their scolding chuckling sounds from up in the trees. Was that bleating off in the distance? The creak and scrape of metal. She didn’t pay much attention to that last one.

The cat was much smarter.

Its eyes flared hugely and—VROOM! It was out of there.

“What the—” Avalon gave a start and turned to look behind her.

Just in time for that long metal gate to collide with her forehead and smack her flat.