The sheriff threw a file on Walker’s death. “Wasn’t much of a cross to set a mountain on fire. It wasn’t more than a dead sapling nailed into a dead tree trunk.”

Walker flipped open the file and scanned the arson team’s report. “If it was Xavier who nailed the sapling. . .” Walker shoved his hand through his hair. He knew a little too much about these people. “He probably only meant to ward off evil spirits with a Christian symbol. It makes no sense that he’d rub that kerosene can free of prints, then incriminate himself carrying it around.”

The sheriff shrugged. “The kerosene was poured on the base of the tree in pine debris. The team has no proof your clown ignited it.”

Who else would want to burn down the Kennedy’s mountain? The Lucys seemed the only likely suspects, but they were tree huggers, not arsonists. At least, that’s what he’d thought.

He’d had enough for one day. He needed to get back to Sam before his brain burned out. He strode out to the sheriff’s parking lot and almost ignored his phone when it rang. Sam wouldn’t be calling it. But his office might. With a sigh, he punched the button.

“Gump had Xavier transferred to a rehab in Vegas,” Sofia said curtly into his ear.

“What?” Walker shouted, hurrying toward his car. “Gump? How the hell do you know that?”

“Earlier, I asked one of the nurses to let me know if there was any change in his condition, and she gave me a call.”

“Have you located him yet?”

“It’s private information. I’d need to lie or hack their computers,” Sofia said stiffly.

“We’re legal. We don’t do things like that,” Walker assured her. Looked like his burned-out brain needed another workout. “Unless we have a case against Gump, even the sheriff can’t act. Go home. It’s late.”

“You should, too, dear. Your father wouldn’t want you to work yourself to death.”

But if he didn’t follow up the links to the killers, other people might die. He didn’t want one of them to be Sam. If he couldn’t talk to Xavier, maybe he could get some sense out of Francois. He sure as hell wouldn’t persuade a moneymaker like Alan Gump to even look at him without a warrant and a raft of lawyers.

Walker pulled out his cell phone and the file on Francois and punched in the numbers while he was still near a tower.

“Having us both in this place is what Susannah feared most, I think,” Valdis said unexpectedly, as she settled onto a rock seat and reached for Daisy’s sticks and stones.

Sam couldn’t leave after that mention of her mother. Walker would just have to wait. She added more of the statues to the outer circle but encouraged her aunt to keep talking. “Do you know how to reach Susannah? Should I let her know I’m here?”

“Mariah, bring me more of those redwood branches,” Daisy demanded.

Mariah grimaced and accepted her place of servitude in Daisy’s palace. She sent Sam a look that said she wanted to hear all about it later, then climbed out to fetch branches.

“Sue washed her hands of us,” Valdis responded in her usual gloomy voice. “She left with no forwarding address and doesn’t keep in touch. I have no good idea where she is. This place nearly broke her, broke all of us. You should have stayed away.”

“Sam, gather up some of those foundation stones over there.” Nibbling at the sandwich Mariah had brought for her, Daisy pointed at the far end of the house. “We need this wall done if you won’t leave.”

Sam began gathering stones, but at least she was still within listening distance. She looked for a way past her aunt’s gloomy prognostications. “She must have been crushed with grief, losing so much in such a short time.”

“It had been coming long before that, disaster upon disaster. They should have all left when I did. But Sue stupidly thought she could save your father. They were happy for a while, I suppose.” Val snipped wire and wrapped it around the stones, handing the rough form to Daisy to finish. “Of course, as I learned, life in the city wasn’t any safer.”

Dang, what did she have to do to get past the gloom? Sam looked for a way to carry more stones at once but she only had her pockets. “How did my mother know Jade and Wolf?”

“Sue went to the university for a while. She wanted to write and illustrate children’s books. She imagined herself as a modern Dr. Seuss. Jade and Wolf were teachers who encouraged her. She must have kept in touch when she came back here. The house had burned, and we’d lost the land by then, of course, so she and Zach stayed with Cass.”

“Do you think she’s still writing children’s books?” Sam asked cautiously, emptying her pockets in front of Val. Her aunt had never been so loquacious. Maybe she needed familiar territory to feel safe? Or to vent grief.

“Hope so. She was good, and she shouldn’t have to sacrifice everything. She sent you away because she loved you, wanted you to be safe, and she was homeless, broke, and just a teenager. Our parents were dead, and I was barely surviving as a waitress. She didn’t want to live off your trust fund or Cass. Jade and Wolf were older, already established, desperately wanted children—and promised to live a long way from here and danger. It must have made sense at the time.”

“And she didn’t want the Kennedys to have this land,” Daisy added, sounding completely coherent for a change. “Your mother gave you away in hopes the Evil One would wither and die, but evil doesn’t die,” she finished sadly. “He is up there now.”

Oh well, almost coherent. “So you had the land back by the time I was born.” She’d never quite understood the timeline of the disastrous year of her birth.

Val pushed back her veil to sip from her water bottle. In the dying light of the sun, shadows danced on her angular face. “I remember my parents when they were good people, talented, generous, gregarious. My childhood was happy, if a little strange, with so many people wandering in and out of it. I think the intentions of the commune were initially sound. But drugs and jealousy consumed them and blackness descended. The land returned after their souls departed.”

That sounded vaguely ominous. Sam wasn’t certain she wished to explore this path any longer. “So you and my mother inherited the result of your parents’ lawsuit?”

“The vultures lingered,” Daisy said. “They had to be dispersed.”

Val gestured toward Daisy with her water bottle. “We scattered the ashes and fled to all the corners of the earth. And the land was happy again.”

“So twenty-five years ago, your parents died, and my father died, and you and Susannah left, so there was no one left to fight?” Sam suggested as she gathered stones.

“We buried Evil’s eggs, but they’re still hatching,” Daisy said in a voice almost as mournful as Val’s.

Yup, the Lucys had their own language. Sam could understand Walker’s frustration. “Evil can’t be a person if he’s hatching eggs. Where did you bury them and how do you know they hatched?”

“Daisy mixes up time periods,” Val offered. “The evil in this ground has been here since prehistoric times, if it’s in the rock crystals as we suspect. The only thing we buried was my parents’ artwork, and maybe some others. They were corroding and probably should have been set on fire, but others had been saved, so we’d hoped someday these might be too.”

“So that’s what we’re protecting with the sculptures, artwork?” That almost made sense in its own weird way. Sam carried more of the small army to the outer foundation.

“And ourselves, for now,” Val added. “If Evil is back, we have no shield.”

Sam hid a sigh of exasperation. “Fighting evil requires identifying the source—and rocks can’t be evil. Polluted maybe. The Kennedys are not evil just because they’re trying to save their property and offer jobs to people who live up here. They may be going about it the wrong way, but being wrong is human, not evil.”

“Greed is evil,” Valdis said prosaically. “My father’s desire to be rich and famous was evil. He drove an entire community to drugs and destruction.”

This was an argument she couldn’t win. “I need to get home. Walker is expecting me.” Sam prepared to leave—until Mariah’s distant call intruded like the cry of an eagle high above.

“Green jacket at Bald Rock!”

Sam thought the call emanated from the copse of redwood near the bluff, but she didn’t see anyone. Green jacket? Xavier? Was Mariah speaking in code?

Looking around, she thought she saw Harvey striding up to the ridge above Bald Rock. And was that Aaron hiking up from the direction of the vortex? Neither of them wore green.

“The battle is nigh,” Daisy said prosaically, as if she’d just been waiting for this moment. “Put the rest of the lamassu across that open space.” She gestured at her hastily assembled army and a break in the foundation where a door might once have been.

With her sprained ankle, Val wasn’t hurrying anywhere. Feeling as if she’d fallen through the rabbit hole, Sam gathered as many of the figurines as possible and contemplated some way of getting the heck out of there. She might want to know about her past, but she was starting to think it was best to leave it to a good psychiatrist.

“Why are we in a hurry?” she demanded, even as she did as told.

“He’s here. The only way to fight him is to unite, just as in the old days.”

“Who’s here?” Sam demanded, not expecting a sensible answer but searching the rocks above for something clearly labeled Evil.

“Do we need Mariah?” Val fretted. “She’s a powerful force.”

“No time. And the eagle flies better free,” Daisy said, setting down her wire.

The eagle flies better free? After thinking Mariah’s cry had sounded like an eagle, Sam wondered if Daisy was reading her mind.

“Time for the shelter.” Daisy used her staff to pull herself up, obviously stiff from so many hours of sitting. “Sam, help Val. I’ll open the door.”

Confused, Sam obeyed the command to help her aunt. As Daisy shoved aside what had appeared to be a stack of dead brambles, revealing a steel door, Sam didn’t know whether to cringe in horror or explore her morbid curiosity. “Is that a bomb shelter?”

“The finest homes had them,” Val said dryly, taking Sam’s arm and using her stick to stand.

“And by now, they’re home for spiders and snakes,” Sam said in distaste. “I think I’d rather take my chances in town.” She really, really did not want to enter that black hole for reasons known only to two half-mad old women. Mature women, she mentally amended. They had to be about the same age as Jade would have been had she lived.

“Hurry,” Mariah’s voice carried from a greater distance than earlier.

Sam glanced back up the mountain, but she still couldn’t see Mariah. She did, however, catch a glimpse of emerald green behind Bald Rock.

Conquering her fear of snakes to help two addled women feel safe inside a bomb shelter made perfect sense in Hillvale. She shot a nervous glance back to the various Lucys gathering in the hills. They couldn’t all be crazy, could they?

Walker drove into Hillvale and screeched to a halt before he ran over a wheelchair granny shouting and swinging a cane.

The whole damned parking lot was churning with Nulls and Lucys screaming and swinging at each other. Flabbergasted, Walker sat there for half a minute just making sense of the scene. It was almost good enough for a movie comedy, if it weren’t so tragic.

Monty and Kurt had stripped off their fancy suit coats and were jabbing at each other like old-fashioned English boxers. Pasquale, the grocery store owner, was in Dinah’s face, shouting and gesticulating. People Walker had never seen before argued, struggled, and swung at folks he’d only occasionally seen in the diner. The town’s whole entire population of 350 had to be out here.

Sam was not.

That’s when Walker’s observational skills kicked in. All the stores were closed and dark. Mariah wasn’t here. Neither were Aaron, Tullah, or any of the people he identified as active Lucys. He parked in the lot, cut off his engine, and warily climbed out. The people here now, the ones not identifiably Null like the Kennedys, were mostly the elderly and infirm, swinging their sticks and shouting the usual incomprehensible gibberish about Evil.

The Nulls were fighting them as well as each other. He couldn’t arrest the whole town.

So he aimed for the men he’d counted on to be sensible. Not even bothering to tune into the arguments, Walker strode through the melee.

He blocked a cane blow with his forearm and winced at a kick to his ankle. He was less than happy when he finally reached the Kennedys. He grabbed Kurt by his starched collar and yanked him backward, unbalancing him before the lodge manager could swing. Monty’s cross blow just missed Kurt’s jaw.

“Take different boxing classes next time, will ya?” Walker advised, gripping Monty’s right fist and shoving him off before he could swing again. “You know each other’s moves before you make them.”

Both men glared and appeared on the verge of turning on him. Not having time for a brawl, Walker yanked their arms behind their backs, hard. “Where’s Sam? And all her friends?”

Kurt and Monty looked blank, then glanced around. Both muttered the same expletive in the same tone. Walker released them.

“Last I saw, Sam and Mariah were headed up to visit Daisy,” Monty said, rubbing his wrist and glancing up the bluff behind the town.

The summer sun hadn’t completely set. Golden light illuminated sandstone outcroppings and cast crevasses into shadow.

The border of evergreens prevented any good view of the flat farm land.

Walker’s instincts screamed for action, but experience had taught him to go in with all the information available. “What’s going on here?” He gestured at the melee, although it appeared as if the fury had gone out of it and now they were just getting their jollies by dodging each other.

Kurt frowned. “Monty and I were arguing. My security guy stepped in. Then Pasquale intervened, and I don’t know what happened from there.”

“I think they were trying to keep us from blows,” Monty said, frowning in the same manner as his brother. “I was pissed that no one had seen the actual deed to the farm. Pasquale took my side. Alonzo took Kurt’s.”

Idly swinging a frying pan, Dinah stepped in. “Mariah and Valdis took food up to Daisy half an hour or more ago. Mariah said she’d be right back and that Sam was supposed to go straight home and stay there. There’s bad auras all over, including yours.” She pointed at the Kennedys.

Walker’s gut twisted, but he clung to the hope that Sam was waiting for him at her place. Still, with bad news piling up, he had to ask, “By any chance did you see Alan Gump or Xavier Black here today?”

“They locked Xavier up, didn’t they?” Kurt asked. “If the law can’t keep arsonists—”

Monty interrupted. “Alan was up here earlier with the engineering team. They’re probably back in the city by now.”

“Gump ain’t,” Dinah corrected. “He was watching the two of you make fools of yourselves just a bit ago. Looked like he had a bee up his rump.”

“While they were arguing over farm deeds?” Walker asked. His brain was adding two and two and a cold chill ran down his spine. “Could Gump hear what they were saying?”

“They were shouting it to the world,” Dinah agreed.

Anxiety levels rising, Walker checked the bluff for movement. Was that a glint of steel? He turned to the Kennedys and demanded, “Did Gump ever say anything about negotiating with the owners of the trust?”

“Gump assured us the deed had been settled,” Kurt shouted. “There should be no negotiating necessary! He was here with the original development team and knew all the details. That’s why we hired him.”

“Is he the only one on the team who was up here when my father died?” Walker asked pointedly.

“Gump is old enough to have been,” Kurt admitted. “I’ve not met all his sales people. It’s only the engineers who’ve been up here, and they’re all too young to have been part of the original group.”

Not proof positive, but enough to raise Walker’s hackles. “If you see Gump, hold him. I need to talk to him. I’m going up to check on Sam. Whether you like it or not, you have a murderer on the loose, and Gump is the one who broke your arsonist out of rehab.”

Walker strode off, leaving the brothers to act on the information as they thought fit.

Why would Gump take poor muddled Xavier out of rehab?

Not until Walker reached Sam’s studio and found it empty did his anxiety reach full-fledged fear.

When he turned to find a bruised, bleeding, and jacketless Xavier pointing up the mountain, fear escalated to alarm.

“He’ll kill them all, just as he did the others,” Xavier said, before collapsing.