They were all friends again, forever. And there had been no more nightmares.
Renee Taunton Harper had been right when she predicted that no lawyer in western Montana would want to touch her case. The state public defender’s office had ended up assigning one of its brightest stars, a woman with a killer record, who would do everything possible to ensure that she got a fair trial. Good. She deserved that. Everyone did, but being cheated, ignored, and humiliated most of her life was no excuse for murder. It had been Renee whose presence Sarah had sensed in the woods and at the soccer field, Renee who’d cut the landline, and Renee who’d blatantly hinted to George Hoyt that he wasn’t being told the truth about the deal for Porcupine Ridge.
Vonda Brown Garrett had returned to San Diego knowing the truth about her brother’s death. They’d talked about a visit, with her husband and sons, later in the summer. Sarah, Holly, and Janine were tending Michael’s roadside memorial.
And so, in varying ways, justice was being done, with Whitetail Lodge at the heart. The lodge Ellen Lacey had built and Caro McCaskill had made into a home. The lodge now entrusted to her. What the lodge wanted most, it seemed, was justice. And a woman to tend it.
A shadow fluttered near her cheek. A copper butterfly, its iridescent wings shimmering in the sunlight glinting off the lake. She smiled and stepped out of her flip-flops, then crossed the colored cobble into the water.