Bitterroot Lake

“I’m tempted to feel slighted,” Nic said wryly. “Seriously, I have no idea. Did he think I might report him to the bar association for misconduct? It doesn’t add up.”

“That brings us back to yesterday’s question,” Holly said. “Did he think we wouldn’t tell each other about the letters? That we wouldn’t tell you?”

Nic swirled the deep red wine. “I don’t know. He left me out for a reason. But what?”

“Did he?” Janine asked. “Do we know that for sure? Maybe it was lost or stolen when your mailbox was smashed.”

“What? What happened?” Sarah asked. The thing they hadn’t told her—or one of the things, she realized as she looked from Nic, her jaw tense, to Janine, focused on their friend, and Holly. Holly, who met her gaze with an expression of acknowledgment and apology.

Nic exhaled. “Stuff—happens sometimes, when I’ve been in the news with a client. Usually a queer client, but sometimes it’s because of the environmental activism. We’re not in the phone book, but nobody’s hard to find these days.”

“So,” Sarah prompted. “What happened?”

“Someone took a baseball bat to our mailbox a few days ago. A bunch of our neighbors fly Pride flags in support of us, and a few let Tempe paint rainbows on their mailbox flags when she painted ours last summer for Pride Day, but their boxes were untouched. Which suggests it might have been random, or because I was on the news last week, testifying against expanded wolf hunting. Part of the state’s proposal to update the wolf management plan. We don’t know. Kim was pretty shaken by it. I know it’s not my fault, but it feels that way.”

Sarah squeezed Nic’s hand. “People are idiots sometimes. I’m sorry.” She nodded at the letter on the table. “We have to tell Leo.”

“And give him one more reason to think I killed Lucas,” Janine said.

“We can’t blame him for sniffing around your life,” Nic said. “That’s his job. The longer he takes, the more time we have to convince him he’s wrong. But I’m still puzzled about the letters. Why anonymous? And they couldn’t have been mailed at the same time, not if Sarah’s arrived before she left Seattle on Sunday and Janine didn’t get hers until Monday.”

Sarah didn’t care about that right now. She couldn’t sit, not one more minute, not with all this adrenaline, this anger, this fury racing through her. Bad enough, fucking shitty enough, to lose her husband—though he wasn’t lost; she knew exactly where he was. Dead, that’s where he was. She had a tube of ashes in the zippered compartment inside her tote bag, the only place she’d felt safe carrying it on the train ride.

Bad enough, but then to have all this crap from the past rising up again …

“Lucas wanted to scare us. Intimidate us. Make sure we kept quiet.” She pushed away from the table and stood. “Because we knew something that scared him. Something besides the assault. But what?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Holly said. “He’s dead. He can’t scare us anymore. He can’t hurt us.”

“He can. He did. Why?” She looked at each woman in turn, her sister, her oldest friends. “He tore us apart. We can’t let him win.”

They talked about her conversation with Renee Harper, about Nic’s interviews with Lucas’s neighbors, about Misty Calhoun Erickson. They dredged up every single reason the sheriff might cite to suspect Janine of murder. They drained the bottle and Holly opened another and even Nic had a second glass. But they came up with nothing.

While she’d been in town, the others had cleaned the girls’ bunk room and started on the cabin Nic and Janine had claimed. Sarah dragged her suitcase up the stairs and set it on the trunk at the foot of her bed.

In the bathroom, she was afraid to look in the mirror.

Suck it up, Sarah. It can’t be as bad as you think.

But it was. Her eyes were wild, her brows shaggy. Had she packed tweezers? Might be better off using pliers. Needle-nose—there had to be a pair on the workbench in the carriage house. Gad. She ran her fingers through her hair, rough with sweat and yesterday’s hair spray. It didn’t help. The circles under her eyes had grown steadily deeper and darker over the last six months, and they hadn’t improved in the last nineteen days.

Should she stop counting? Probably. But not yet. Not until it stopped hurting.

“You need a project,” her mother had said when she’d urged her to come to the lodge. Turned out Sarah herself was the project.

And what about solving a murder? Truth was, she didn’t much care who shot Lucas Erickson. For all the grief he’d caused back then, and was causing now with his anonymous letters, he was better off dead.

“Oh, Sarah, how can you say that?” she asked the shadow in the mirror. “The man had children. A mother. A sister.” That was reason enough to pray that Leo solved the murder soon.

Who cared now why he’d sent the letters? He had no more power over them. She rummaged in her cosmetics bag. “Yes!” she said when she found the tweezers, then started plucking. Washed her face, brushed her teeth, and turned out the light.

The dark, the night, the fear—she was done giving it power.

* * *

The scream woke her.

“Sarah, Sarah,” her sister said, bare feet thumping on the floor between their twin beds. “It’s okay, Sarah. I’m here.”