Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter One

      David softened his death grip on the steering wheel, wincing as he rubbed his pounding temple. He hoped the rental agency didn’t inspect its cars too closely because countless deep ruts had kept him bouncing as he careened up the rough Montana mountainside. Forced to reduce his speed to five miles an hour, it was all he could do to take it slow and not bottom out on the isolated dirt road, dusty with July heat. Peering through the windshield, he tried to recall where the potholes were, but he’d been gone too long, and the light was fading, getting on to twilight.

      Still, the evergreens were as tall as he remembered, casting the same deep canopy of shade that had made him so uneasy as a child. Even now, twenty years later, and he a grown man, they seemed ominous and forbidding. Interesting how the lush evergreen forests of upstate New York, where he now lived, didn’t make him feel this way at all. Another mile up the mountain, a darting jackrabbit or two, and a house—a veritable mansion—finally came into view.

      His childhood home.

      David shivered, surprised that after all these years it could still affect him so, this dark pile of brick that belonged on some lonely moor in England, not sculpted into the side of an obscure mountain in the Midwest. Well, he thought as he sighed, no one ever denied that the law was a lucrative profession, and his father had certainly been a most successful lawyer. All this was history; now John Hartwell was dead. Hard to believe, that. John had thought he would go on forever, had warned everybody he would, joked about it all the time, although it had never seemed funny to David.

      And leave it to dear old dad to have the last laugh, David thought wryly, the way he’d up and died during the first vacation David had allowed himself in years. A vacation that forestry headquarters had practically forced upon him, insisting that it wasn’t healthy for a lone man to take on so much. Finding himself scuba diving in Antigua, sipping margaritas, dozing on a hot, sandy beach—things he’d never done before—David had thought maybe they’d been right. So it was frustrating to get a telegram insisting he fly home, until he realized that it was for his father’s funeral. To settle John’s estate, as it turned out, because it had taken so long for headquarters to track him down that he’d missed the actual burial.

      But he was home, now, staring up at the towering, grand house that John had built, homage to a beloved wife who hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy it. Mullioned windows, elaborate turrets, opulent gardens… David shrugged away memories that haunted him still. It was all so long ago, but now…

      Now he was stalling, he realized ruefully. Taking a deep breath, he forced himself