This town was having a dangerous effect on him, Tanner thought several hours later. Never in his life had he turned down what was so freely offered. There had been Ginger, warm and lush and willing, with no strings, no commitments, and he hadn’t even been interested.

And that morning there had been Ellie, sweet and eager in his arms, and he’d wanted her so much that the pain of it was a raw ache in his gut. For some reason he’d decided to be noble. Normally he wouldn’t have cared whether anyone had walked in the door. Normally he wouldn’t have cared where or when.

But he cared with Ellie. He wanted to make it right; he wanted to make it perfect. And tumbling her on Charles Tanner’s bed wasn’t the way to do it, even if right then he was regretting his decision.

He slid down a bit on the wide leather seat of Ellie’s Buick, squinting into the sunlight. She was taking a long time in the grocery store, but at least the good citizens of Morey’s Falls hadn’t noticed him lounging there. She’d parked on a side street, he didn’t know whether by accident or design, and not a single pedestrian had walked by.

He looked over at the window of the Morey’s Falls Gazette. Sunlight was reflecting off the streaked glass, but he thought he could see the figure of a man inside. Poor Lonnie, indeed. He could almost be grateful to the guy. Not that he usually cared one way or the other about virginity, but some small, irrational part of him liked the fact that he would be Ellie’s first. He had every intention of being her best.

That same small, irrational part of him wanted to carry the notion one step further. To be Ellie’s one and only. He knew that was a stupid fantasy. Ellie belonged to Morey’s Falls; he belonged to a horse ranch in New Mexico. He could just imagine her reaction to the idea of bearing Charles Tanner’s grandchildren.

What in the world was he thinking of? Never in his life had he seriously considered having children. Never in his life had he even thought about one woman and marriage and happy ever after. He sure picked the strangest times to get conventional. And with the least likely of women.

He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes. The pack was crushed—it had taken him longer than usual to smoke them, which was another strange sign. For some reason he put them back, thinking back to the night before.

He should have gotten up, risked waking her, risked everything. Outside the cabin, by the windowless hole in the rear wall, were clear, recognizable footprints. The rain had left the ground soggy enough to hold the general shape of a print. He could tell it was an average size man or a big woman, and the tread wasn’t deep, probably made by some sort of running shoe. The crumpled cigarette butts lay scattered in a pile, shredded almost past recognition. There were at least three there—the watcher had stayed a long time, staring into the moonlit cabin, staring at the people in bed.

Where the hell was Ellie?   Tanner reached for the door handle and found he was looking up into Lonnie Olafson’s pale, bespectacled gaze.

He was definitely Ellie’s type, all right, Tanner thought for a fleeting moment. Those bland, yuppie good looks, the creased pants and striped oxford shirts were more her style than his own faded flannels and denims and too-long hair, and those pale-rimmed glasses made the editor look downright studious. Poor Lonnie.

“Howdy,” he said, pushing open the door but staying where he was. Lonnie was wearing running shoes, but they were spotless, no sign of mud on them. Anyway, half the town probably wore running shoes, particularly if they were out for a night of voyeurism.

“This is Ellie’s car,” Lonnie said.

“Yes,” said Tanner, waiting.

“Where is she?”

“In the store. Why?”

Lonnie squirmed a bit. There was no noticeable hostility in him, despite the fact that he must know Tanner was well on his way to succeeding where he had failed. “I guess you haven’t heard about last night,” he said.

Tanner felt his nerves tighten. “What happened last night? More animals killed?”

“No,” said Lonnie. “Someone desecrated the graveyard.”

Tanner’s response was a short, heartfelt obscenity. “Do they have any idea who?”

“Same person who killed the animals, I expect,” Lonnie said. “Dave Martin is running around like a three-legged dog with fleas, and the townspeople are pretty upset.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you can’t blame them. It was bad enough, losing kin like that, but then to find their graves messed up is more than a lot of people are willing to accept.”

“You mean only the graves of the massacre victims were touched?” Tanner asked, already knowing the answer.

“You got it. Red paint spilled over each tombstone and cross, all in the town graveyard. And none of the other graves were touched.” Lonnie brushed a careless hand through his boyish mane of hair. “Except, of course, your father’s grave.”

Tanner stared at him in amazement. “My father’s buried here?”

“Where else would he be buried? He has a corner all to himself in the town cemetery. People usually ignore it, but whoever it was didn’t last night.”

Tanner was getting the oddest feeling that Lonnie was enjoying all this, enjoying making Tanner squirm. Maybe it was his only form of revenge for Ellie. “What did they do to his grave?”

Lonnie smiled sweetly. “You know those plastic flowers and wreaths people use to decorate cemeteries? Davidson’s Market does a big business in them right before Memorial Day. Well, every single bit of fake flowers was taken from the graves and piled on your daddy’s corner. It looks like the gaudiest funeral this side of Salt Lake City. I imagine it’s the first time anyone’s ever put anything on your father’s grave. Apart from spit.”

He could see the hostility now, just dancing in the back of Lonnie’s pale eyes. “Well, then,” Tanner drawled with just the right note of insolence, “I guess I owe someone a debt of gratitude now, don’t I?”

Lonnie nodded, accepting the open warfare. “I wouldn’t be in any hurry to repay that debt if I were you,” he said. “People are a mite upset right now. They’re doing a good business in rope down at the hardware store. Heaven knows, there’s more than enough plastic flowers to go around.”

Tanner looked down at Lonnie’s feet again. The running shoes were so clean they might have been freshly washed. They looked damp, but the streets of Morey’s Falls were still wet from last night’s downpour. While Tanner would have liked nothing more than to have pinned the latest occurrence on the man in front of him, he had no reason to. And Lonnie’s history of cowardice and ineptitude didn’t make him a likely possibility.

He smiled then, and Lonnie took a nervous step backward. “I think the flowers will keep,” Tanner said softly. “Nice seeing you, Lonnie.”

Ellie’s hands were empty when she finally reappeared from the grocery store. Her limp was more pronounced, and the sunlight had gone from her eyes. She slid into the driver’s seat without a word and started the engine, backing into the empty street with far more concentration than the simple act required.

“I gather we’ve got more trouble,” he said, watching as she drove blindly out of town.

She glanced at him, startled. “How’d you know?”

“For one thing, you’re acting like you’ve seen a ghost. You went in to get some groceries, you came out a long time later without your purse.”

“Damn.”

“Apart from that,” Tanner continued, “I had a little visit from Lonnie Olafson while I was waiting for you.”

“Double damn.”

“Indeed. He says the townspeople are buying rope.”

She cast him a quick, worried glance. “He’s probably lying. The only one who’s a little…irrational on occasion is Pete Forrester.”

“Pete’s Fireside Cafe,” Tanner supplied.

“Exactly. But while people like him and feel sorry for him, they’re not about to go out and form a lynch mob on his say-so.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said. “You want to tell me where we’re going at sixty-seven miles an hour?”

She looked startled, immediately slowing her pace. “I don’t know. I just wanted to get away.”

So did he, damn it. But he couldn’t. Not yet. “I think the best place for you is your house,” he said after a moment. “You haven’t had anything to eat yet, you’re still looking tired, and driving around with me is asking for trouble. We’ll drive back to your house, I’ll check the place out and make sure it’s safe, and then I’ll leave you to have a nap.”

“Where will you go?” she asked in a forlorn little voice, already slowing to turn the car around.

“I want to go talk to Doc.”

“You think he’ll have some idea who might be doing this?” Ellie questioned, and for a moment he wanted to kiss her. Not for an instant had she suspected that he might be the one who was doing these things. Or if she had, she’d clearly dismissed that suspicion the moment she’d had it.

“He’ll probably have as good an idea as anyone. He’s just about everyone’s doctor around here, isn’t he? He should know who’s depressed, who’s been acting weird, who’d be capable of going off the deep end.”

“Maybe,” she said, but the doubt was clear in her voice.

“You don’t think he’d know?”

“Well, people don’t, do they?” she countered. “Everyone thought Charles Tanner was just a little bit eccentric. When you read about other mass murderers you hear that they appeared perfectly normal. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to tell.”

“There will be this time,” he said grimly.

“You think there’ll be a ‘this time’?” she asked, her voice raw. “You think someone’s going to get a gun and do what Charles Tanner did?”

He could hear the faint trace of panic in her voice. “I don’t know.” He wished he could comfort her, soothe her, but he didn’t want to lie. “All I know is the only way to be safe is to be careful.”

She shivered in the hot June sunshine. “It can’t happen twice,” she said. “It just can’t.”

He only wished he could be as certain.

The house felt cold and dark and empty without him but Ellie knew that it only seemed that way to her. It was unseasonably warm outside, in the eighties, and that heat penetrated even the sullen reaches of the Judge’s house. Bright sunlight poured in every available window, flooding the usually dark rooms, and the house wasn’t empty. There were ghosts all around her.

He’d bullied her into eating some soup. She hadn’t wanted to, but he’d ignored her, heating the Campbell’s Turkey Noodle on the old gas range and standing over her until she finished it. She found herself enjoying the soup, enjoying him. No one had ever looked after her, harangued her into doing something that was good for her, prodded and pushed and browbeaten her into taking care of herself.

She’d finally relaxed when he’d disappeared outside, only to come back a few minutes later with his handful of shredded cigarette butts and his eyes opaque.

“These were outside your bathroom window,” he announced, dropping them on the scrubbed wood table in front of her. “Do you have any idea whose they are?”

She had stared at them as if they were dehydrated cobras, waiting to come to life and strike. “Outside my bathroom?” she echoed, aghast.

“I’m sure he would have preferred your bedroom,” Tanner said, offering cold comfort. “But you sleep on the second floor, don’t you?”

She’d been hoping to show him her second-floor bedroom. Looking at the shredded paper in front of her, she suddenly lost her appetite for a romantic interlude. “Yes,” she said dully. She poked at the stuff. It was in varying degrees of decomposition. Clearly her watcher had spent more than one night peering in her bathroom window. She looked up into Tanner’s expressionless face. “Didn’t you find one of these at the base of the memorial?”

“And outside my cabin. Whoever it was was there last night, while you slept.”

“Weren’t you sleeping?”

“Not all the time.” He seemed to hesitate. “Those cigarette butts are crumpled just the way my father used to crumple them.”

She fought back the frisson of horror that swept down her backbone. “How do you know that?”

“Doc mentioned it when he saw me do the same thing. It’s not uncommon. People are taught it in the army. People do it in the wilderness. It’s so they don’t leave a trace. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t you? No, of course it wasn’t.” She answered the question the moment she asked it. She answered it too late.

Tanner was looking at her strangely, the warmth gone from his eyes. “I’m not sure of anything,” he said. “Or anyone.” He turned and headed for the back door.

“Take the car,” she offered, knowing right then he wasn’t going to take anything from her.

“Lock your doors,” he said in response, and closed the kitchen door quietly behind him.

She got up and watched him leave. He skirted the Buick parked in her driveway, heading north toward Doc’s end of town. The Barlow house was only a mile away; it wouldn’t take Tanner more than twenty minutes to walk there, if that. As long as no one pulled up beside him, as long as Pete Forrester kept his distance.

She reached out to open the door, to follow him, then stopped. He wouldn’t thank her. She’d already been less than tactful, and right now he needed some fresh air and time alone. She’d do as he said, she’d go upstairs and take a shower and a nap. By the time she woke up he’d be back, maybe with information, at least in a better mood, and the two of them could figure out what to do.

One thing she wasn’t going to do was lock her door. It would be giving in to cowardice and terrorism, and once she started, she doubted she could stop. It had taken everything she had in her to learn to walk without peering over her shoulder, listening for the sound of an M-l being readied, looking for snipers in every flowering bush and tree. But she’d triumphed, and she wasn’t going to let anyone drive her back into paranoia.

Another thing she was never going to do again was use the downstairs bathroom. She didn’t have that much time left in this gloomy old house. For the days remaining she could just climb the extra flight of stairs to the second-floor bathroom. Her knee could use the exercise.

In the meantime, for no reason whatsoever, she was going to change the sheets on the big double bed upstairs, even though she’d changed them two days earlier, and see if she could find that pretty eyelet and cotton nightgown Maude had given her. And maybe Tanner would return in a better mood.

“Son,” Doc said wearily, “I just don’t know.”

They were sitting out on his back porch, each with a cold bottle of beer, staring out into the heat-soaked landscape that stretched in a flat plain up to the foothills. Wildflowers dotted the thick grasses, and for a moment Tanner remembered that hidden meadow up in the mountains, and a woman riding bareback in the hot summer sun. He wished to God he’d never come down that mountain.

“What about Pete Forrester? It sounds like he’s not completely sane,” Tanner said, taking a deep gulp of the Coors.

“Oh, Pete’s sane all right. He’s just violent and bitter. The one thing he wouldn’t do is sneak around. He might try to force a shoot-out on the main street, or get a crowd riled up enough for a lynching, but he wouldn’t go peering in windows and shooting animals. Neither would most of the people I know, people who took the massacre particularly hard.”

“What about someone like Lonnie?”

Doc shook his head. “I’d find that hard to believe. A boy like that, who’s never had the gumption to do more than sit in his father’s newspaper office, would hardly be the type to start terrorizing everybody. Besides, why now?”

Tanner set his beer down. “What about you?”

He had to give Doc credit—he took it well. He just turned and fastened those world-weary eyes on him. “Now why would I want to do a thing like that? These people are my friends and neighbors. I brought a goodly number of them into the world. Why would I want to hurt them?”

“I don’t think these things are directed at the townspeople. They just started a couple of days ago, the moment I got into town. I think they’re directed at me.”

“Your ego’s not hurting you much, is it?” Doc inquired kindly. “Must be kinda hard, carrying something that big around with you. What do you think I have against you?”

“Ellie.”

The name hung between them like a tangible thing. A dozen emotions swept over Doc’s face; anger, denial, embarrassment and eventually a reluctant resignation. “You see too damned much, Tanner,” he said finally. “Does she know?”

“I don’t think she has any idea.”

He sighed, draining his beer. “Keep it that way, will you, son? It’s just an old man’s foolishness. She’s my daughter’s best friend, and she thinks of me as the sort of father she never had. I’d hate for anything to hurt that.”

“I won’t say anything.”

“Thanks. And trust me, Tanner. There’s a part of me that’s jealous as hell of you, but there’s another part of me that’s grateful.”

“Grateful?”

“Ellie’s a fine woman. She’s wasted here, wasted in a town where people can’t stop looking backward. She needs someone like you to shake her up, get her out of here.”

“I think you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

“Maybe I am,” Doc said. “Maybe that’s my right. All I know is, you’re good for her. And I wouldn’t do anything to interfere with that, no matter how jealous I am.”

Tanner leaned back in the chair, reaching for a cigarette, then thinking better of it. If he had one, Doc would want one, and he’d already started taking part in Ginger and Ellie’s conspiracy to keep Doc’s blood pressure down. “If it’s not Pete or Lonnie or you,” he said, “who is it? Are you sure my father died that day?”

A spasm of pain crossed the older man’s face. “I’m sure. I signed the death certificate.”

“You signed a lot of death certificates that day,” Tanner said brutally. “You saw a lot of death. Are you absolutely certain?”

Doc reached over, took the cigarettes out of Tanner’s breast pocket, and helped himself. “I told you, I’m certain. And I’ll tell you something else, something I’ve never told a living soul. You’re the only one who might understand. When I examined your father he had the strangest look on his face. For twenty years he’d been plagued by misery and despair, and for the first time since the war he looked almost happy. It wasn’t because he’d killed sixteen innocent people, either. It was because he was finally at rest.”

Tanner took the pack back and lit Doc’s cigarette and his own. He noticed absently that his hands were shaking. “All right,” he said. “I believe you. He’s really dead. That leaves one other possibility.”

Doc blew out a long, pleasurable stream of smoke. “Who?”

Tanner grimaced. “Me.”