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“I think you're a motor-mouth when you drink too much. I think you're driving me to distraction with all this talk. I think I'm going home.”

And she'd done just that. Stood up and put on her coat and walked out without even saying good-bye.

Eileen related the gist of this to Cecca, who said, “I still don't see anything to make you so certain she was lying.”

“You weren't there, honey. You would if you'd been there.”

“And she wouldn't talk about it after that?”

“Froze me out completely. Closed issue, she said.”

“That's it, then,” Cecca said. “If you think of anything else, anything at all, call me. Okay?”

“Maybe I'd better just come home.”

“Oh, Eileen, no. You've been there only one day.”

“There might be something I can do.…”

“There isn't. What could you do that Dix and I can't? You stay right where you are.”

“How can I relax with this going on?”

“You'll find a way. I'll let you know if there's anything to report. Just do me one favor—don't tell anyone else about this.”

“Not even Ted?”

“Ted, yes, if you swear him to secrecy. But not Laura, Beth, any of our friends.”

“Honey, one of them might know something …”

“Then Dix and I will find it out. Please, Eileen? The worst thing right now is for too many people to know, rumors to start flying.”

Motor-mouth Eileen. Can't keep a secret for ten minutes. Well, it was true, wasn't it? Biggest gossip-monger in Los Alegres … no wonder Katy hadn't confided in her. She sighed. “Ted and nobody else. I swear. But you have to promise me you'll call the minute you find out anything or anything else happens.”

“I promise.”

As soon as she put the receiver down, her eye fell on the jars and the loaf of bread on the table. I don't want any more of that, she thought, and immediately made herself another sandwich, thicker than the last one, so that some of the jam squeezed out when she bit into it and plopped on the floor. She left it there, the hell with it. She was too upset for housekeeping chores.

There was something Cecca hadn't told her, she was sure of it. Some even more startling piece of information. Didn't trust her with it, which meant that it must be really explosive stuff. She couldn't imagine what it was. Her fault for being the way she was—though she had every intention of keeping her promise not to blab to anyone but Ted. But still she felt left out. Of all times to be away on vacation! Maybe she should go home, Ted and the boys could fend for themselves … no, that was silly and selfish. Cecca was right, there wasn't anything she could do. Except fret, and she could do that right here at Blue Lake.

She finished the sandwich and went into the bathroom to wash her hands. She felt bloated and a little sick to her stomach from all the food. But her mind was active, and as she dried her hands something began to scratch at her memory like a cat trying to get through a door. Something about Katy … something she'd done or said. Not that half-drunk June Friday; later, quite a bit later. It hadn't had anything to do with a lover, but … what the devil was it?

There was a banging out in the kitchen. Footsteps. Ted's voice: “Eileen, where are you? Come take a look at what the old man caught this morning.”

She'd remember it sooner or later. That was the good thing about a memory like hers—she always remembered what she wanted to sooner or later. She put the towel down and hurried out to tell Ted about the awful phone calls and Katy's affair with a maniac.

EIGHT

Lone Mountain Road was narrow and not in the best of repair. Edges had crumbled away in places, making it even narrower; if two cars met at these places, one would have to back up or down to let the other pass. The road corkscrewed its way up into the hills for more than six miles, finally deadending just beyond the gate to the Chenelli ranch near the top of a piece of high ground some obscure local wag had christened Lone Mountain. Once you were on the road, there was no way to get off except to turn around and drive back down to the intersection with East Valley Road. It had been built in the twenties by the county to accommodate the ranchers whose property flanked it. The only other people who used it, as far as Dix knew, were kids on beer parties and lovers looking for a private place to park and screw.

It seemed incredible, now, that he hadn't questioned Katy's presence up there on the night of August 6. Just assumed she'd taken Lone Mountain Road on a whim, as part of her pattern of aimless driving. Blind trust. Now, though, his faith had been badly shaken. Women alone don't drive out to a remote lover's lane for no good reason; they drive there to meet a man, a lover. Park and screw. Forty-one years old and humping in the backseat of a car like a teenager.

Why?

And how did he get her earrings that night?

There were plenty of places to park off the road. Little clusters of oak and madrone, cowpaths that skirted hummocks and the boulder-size rocks littering the hillsides. Occasionally county sheriffs deputies cruised up there, when one of the beer parties got too noisy or out of hand and a rancher called in a complaint. But for the most part nobody bothered the lovers in their parked cars. None of the ranchers gave much of a damn, and why should they? A minor trespassing offense meant nothing as long as their fences weren't knocked down or their cows harmed or spooked.

This is a waste of time, Dix thought. I shouldn't have come up here. I don't want to look at the place where she died.

His hands were sweaty on the Buick's steering wheel. But he didn't brake or turn around; he continued to drive slowly uphill, through the monotonous series of twists and turns. He had gone about three miles now and there were no dropoffs or dangerous curves at the lower elevations. Just the scattered trees, the rocky fields of summer-cured brown grass, the placidly grazing cattle—Friesians, black with white harnesses, and brown and white Guernseys. And ranch buildings clustered here and there in distant hollows.

He had the window rolled down and the air was breezeless, sticky with early-afternoon heat. Dry grass and manure smells clogged his nostrils. When he glanced up at the rearview mirror he saw the valley spread out behind him, watery with heat haze. If a wind came up later, fire danger in the general area would be high. Especially in the hills to the north, behind the university, where there were more homes and fewer cattle to help keep the grass cropped low.

Four miles by the odometer. The highway patrolmen hadn't told him the exact location of the accident, just that it was “near the top of Lone Mountain Road.” Getting close; the pitch of the road had grown steeper, twisting through cutbanks, along sere shoulders. His back had begun to ache from the stiffness of his posture. He bent forward, squinting against the sun-glare.

Another half-mile, the road climbing at a sharper grade. The terrain on the south side had begun to fall away—gradually in some places, more steeply in others. Around a curve, through a stand of trees. A brush-choked ravine opened up below on his right. Another curve—

And there it was.

Sheer, rocky slope, at least twenty degrees down and a hundred yards long, from the road to the ravine. Gouges in the earth, dislodged rocks, burned grass, shards of glass and pieces of metal agleam in the sun—a trail of destruction that ended in a huge blackened section of the ravine and the higher ground on both sides of it. Dix's stomach churned. He drove past the place where she'd gone off the road, up to where there was a flat parking area half-hidden beneath a clump of oaks. For half a minute he sat there, gathering himself. Then he got out and walked back down to where it had happened.