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Praise for the novels of Carla Neggers

“No one does romantic suspense better!”

—Janet Evanovich

“Worth the wait. Well plotted, with Neggers’ trademark witty dialogue and crackling sexual tension, this is a keeper.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Whisper

“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast… The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”

—Tess Gerritsen

“A believable, gripping story that will keep armchair sleuths guessing… Here is intelligent writing that remains highly entertaining.”

—Publishers Weekly on Betrayals

“Neggers’ trademark use of atmospheric mood and setting, including the mist of the title itself, comes front and center. What she’s done is add aspects of the high-action thriller to traditional romantic suspense, combining the best of both in creating a genre all her own. Flat-out great.”

—Providence Journal on The Mist

“Well-drawn characters, complex plotting and plenty of wry humor are the hallmarks of Neggers’ books.”

—RT Book Reviews

“When it comes to romance, adventure and suspense, nobody delivers like Carla Neggers.”

—Jayne Ann Krentz

Kiss the Moon
Carla Neggers

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Whenever I think about Kiss the Moon, I can feel early spring in northern New England, with its lengthening days, maple-sugaring and end of “cabin fever.” It’s the perfect time of year to set a story about an adventurous woman who discovers the wreckage of a long-missing private plane and a mystery that’s anything but forgotten.

Many of you have asked when Kiss the Moon will be available again—it’s great to see it back in print! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you’re ever in New Hampshire, be sure to visit the lakes region! We go there often, first having visited as a child when my family joined friends on a small island in beautiful, crystal-clear Lake Winnipesaukee.

Next up for me is the paperback edition of The Whisper, due out in paperback this July. It’s the fourth book in my loosely connected series about Boston detectives, FBI agents, spies and experts in Irish archaeology and folklore. The Widow, The Angel and The Mist are all available now in paperback. In The Whisper, Cyrus “Scoop” Wisdom takes center stage when a Celtic archaeologist looks him up, convinced that the bomb that almost killed him is connected to the night she was left for dead in a remote Irish cave.

In the meantime, I’m hard at work on a new book. For all the details, please visit my website and sign up for my newsletter.

Thanks, and happy reading!

Carla

P.O. Box 826

Quechee VT 05059

www.CarlaNeggers.com

To Kate and Zachary

Contents

Prologue

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 Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Frannie Beaudine had the intelligence of a Katharine Hepburn and the sexiness of a Marilyn Monroe, and he couldn’t believe she was his. That such a woman had fallen for him, Colt Sinclair, a skinny twenty-one-year-old, filled him with a pride and contentment he’d never known.

She paced in front of the tall windows of his family’s sprawling apartment on Central Park, Manhattan glittering at her feet. Her long, dark hair was swept into an elegant twist, and she wore diamond studs at her ears—fake diamonds, for she couldn’t afford real ones. She’d even borrowed her gown, a swirl of black velvet that barely contained her breasts. Her lips and nails were painted a deep red, sexy, vibrant.

Colt said nothing about the thrill he felt just watching her. Complimenting her appearance would only irritate her, add to her already heightened state of impatience. Frannie despised being beautiful. She believed it distracted people from noticing her other attributes—her skills as a pilot and art historian, her independence, her spirit of adventure. She wanted everything, she’d told Colt last summer in New Hampshire, when she still regarded him as a gawky Dartmouth graduate, a pampered rich boy. She was already something of a legend in her hometown, a poor girl from the hills who’d become an accomplished and daring pilot while simultaneously studying art history, not at a college, not with a tutor, but on her own, at the public library.

Colt, who’d been born with the “everything” Frannie wanted, knew she would get her wish. But he also knew her beauty wouldn’t be a hindrance, it would be an asset. And it was.

She’d asked him to fly tonight. Just six weeks ago she’d seemed so remote and unattainable. He fell short as a Sinclair. His father had told him as much less than an hour ago.

But now he was with Frannie, and all things were possible.

Her eyes, a deep, almost navy blue, were vivid, shining as they focused on him, and she stopped pacing just for an instant. He could feel her urgency. “You’re sure there won’t be a problem with the plane?”

“I’m positive. Everything’s ready, Frannie. Unless you change your mind, we’ll be on our way before midnight.”

She nodded, taking in a sharp, shallow breath. They had everything planned almost to the minute. First they would make an appearance at the reception honoring the donation of the Sinclair Collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Colt’s father had offered Frannie a job last fall as an assistant curator for the collection, and she’d seized it as her chance to live in New York. Colt had been barely aware she was in the city. She worked exhaustively all winter, seldom emerging as she catalogued, picked, chose, examined, checked and rechecked the history and authenticity of every painting, sculpture, artifact and bit of treasure that the Sinclairs had collected over the past century and stored in their warehouse on the lower east side. His family’s trips to South America, Central America, Africa, Asia, Russia, Australia had all yielded their prizes. Frannie worked without a break, and Colt had to admire her dedication even as he worried about how pale and weak she was from overwork, even now, six weeks after he’d spotted her at the museum and she’d turned his life upside down.

She would want to collect her kudos tonight for the brilliant work she’d done. Colt understood. Frannie Beaudine was a woman consumed with the need for recognition and affection.

In the second stage of their plan, they would make their apologies and leave early, separately, within a decent interval of each other. They had warm clothes waiting in the hangar north of the city, and Colt’s Piper Cub J-3, ready to fly. A grand adventure. That was what he and Frannie were embarking on. It wasn’t a lion hunt in Africa or an attempt at Mount Everest, but it was, finally, an adventure Colt felt the courage to undertake. He loved Frannie with all his heart and soul. That she wanted to run away with him, now, tonight, didn’t have to make sense, didn’t require a five-year plan, a vetting by a menagerie of Sinclair advisors. It required only faith, trust and the willingness to take action. All his life, one of those had been missing. Not now.

“Then there’s nothing more to do but get on with it,” Frannie said. “Your father and mother are already at the reception. We should go.”

“I’d just like to say goodbye to Brandon.” Colt observed a rare flash of nervousness in her eyes. She knew if anything could give him cold feet, it would be his baby brother. “He’s asleep.”

“Hurry.”

Colt had rehearsed this moment a thousand times in his mind. He hurried down the hall, hardly making a sound on the thick carpeting, his heart racing, his hands clammy. He passed portraits and photographs of uncles and great-uncles, cousins, his grandfather, on various adventures. There would be no photographers to record his adventure. He didn’t want notoriety or adulation.

He just wanted Frannie Beaudine, he thought, his pace slowing as he approached his brother’s half-closed door.

He pushed the door open, and his throat caught at the sprawl of boy and stuffed animal in the bed, the city lights silhouetting his bony figure. He wore pajamas with little cars and trucks on them.

Unexpected, unrehearsed tears stung Colt’s eyes. He doubted he would see his brother again for months, perhaps a year. He would have given up Bear by then, lost his boyish imagination and possibility. Sometimes Colt longed for his own boyhood, when he had liked nothing better than to roam around in the Museum of Natural History. His father had assumed his mind was filled with fantasies of becoming a Sinclair. Instead he’d memorized the form and the colors, the shapes, the essence of the birds and animals and tools on display. In dark corners, where no one would find him, he would pull out scraps of paper and a nub of charcoal and try to capture what he’d memorized.

Sinclair men did not become artists.

If Frannie hadn’t fallen in love with him, Colt was certain he would have thrown himself off the Empire State Building by now. And then he would never have seen Brandon again. Now, at least, there was a chance.

He gave his sleeping brother a mock salute and tiptoed down the hall, where Frannie was waiting for him. She had no brothers and sisters. She couldn’t know the agony of what he’d just done.

Ten minutes later they were at the museum. They made small talk and drank champagne and pretended not to be in love, and Colt thought Frannie was the most beautiful and alluring woman in the room. She seemed at ease with everyone—scholar, rich donor, journalist, poor art student—and she talked knowledgeably and passionately about the collection of art and treasure she’d helped put together even as people asked her when she would again climb into a cockpit. She was unique, and Colt could hardly contain himself at the thought that she loved him.

He avoided his father, fearful Willard Sinclair would penetrate his older son’s mind and find out what he was planning. When the time came, Colt had no intention of telling his father goodbye. His mother, either. She would be impossible to extricate from her friends and her champagne.

Across the room, he saw Frannie, impatient, unable to stay still, slip down a dark corridor past indulgent guards. Colt followed, stifling a surge of panic. What was she doing? They were to make their apologies and separate exits in minutes. He glanced at his father, who was regaling eager listeners with tales of his latest expedition up the Amazon. If only he could give his two sons as much care and attention, Colt thought bitterly, and tried to ignore the tug of regret for his brother, who would no longer have a buffer between their father’s increasingly domineering temperament and Brandon’s zeal to take him on. After tonight, Brandon, just eleven, would be on his own, at least for a while.

Colt shook off his sudden melancholy and followed Frannie into the bowels of the museum, where she had been granted a closet-size office to continue her work on the Sinclair Collection. She used her key to open it, moving quickly. He could hear her rapid breathing. She left the door ajar, but he remained in the dark shadows, trying to ignore a sense of foreboding. This wasn’t in their plan.

Seconds later she emerged from the tiny room, and he heard her check a laugh.

In her hand was a black, hard-sided case the size of a small artist’s painting case.

Colt took a step forward, and she stopped, her already pale face going paler still. “Colt, good heavens, you startled me!”

“Frannie?” He pointed. “What’s in the case?”

She caught him by the arm and pulled him down the corridor. “It’s no time for questions,” she whispered fiercely, “or for the fainthearted. You’re in, Colt. You’re in all the way.”

“Frannie…”

“We have to go.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t speak.

“Now.”

Wisps of hair dripped from their pins, her dark blue eyes shone even in the shadows, and her chest heaved, not from fear but breathlessness. Excitement. She was so certain. Always so certain. He hadn’t asked about how many men she’d loved. She was twenty-six, and she was Frannie Beaudine, beautiful, intelligent, spirited.

Her expression softened. “Colt…I can’t do this without you.”

Still he didn’t move. “What’s in the case, Frannie?”

Her lower lip quivered, the red stain gone, and he could see uncertainty creep into her eyes.

“It’s something from the collection,” he said.

“Of course it’s something from the collection. Diamonds, Colt. Valuable, perfect diamonds of an uncertain provenance. No one but me even knows they exist. God knows how long they sat in that dusty warehouse.”

“Frannie, I can’t.”

Irritation set her jaw. “It’s the only way for us to be together. You know that as well as I do. Colt—please, we have to go. If the guards catch us now, it won’t be Canada we’ll be seeing at dawn, it’ll be the bars of the jailhouse.”

He followed her out. There was nothing else he could do. They would take a cab to the airfield where his Piper Cub was waiting. She’d asked him to fly it. He’d been so stupidly pleased. Now he knew he was a romantic, idealistic fool, just as his father had told him.

In the cab, Frannie covered his hand with hers. “I do love you, Colt Sinclair.”

Maybe she did. He stared out the cab window as they crossed the bridge. It was a cold night for flying, but they had a full moon. It was so huge, and it seemed so heavy and big that even the night sky couldn’t hold it. Colt pretended he was on it, looking down at the shiny cab, at the beautiful aviator, the rich twenty-one-year-old and their stolen diamonds. He had fancied them living by their skill and wits in Canada until his family accepted them and what they’d done. But Frannie had wanted it all, and she’d wanted it now.

For six weeks, Colt had deluded himself into thinking he was enough.

He remembered reading Treasure Island aloud to his little brother under a full moon last summer, and he wished he could be with Brandon now, poking him in the ribs and sneaking him into the kitchen for hot cocoa.

Wouldn’t their father be surprised, Colt thought. He was a Sinclair, after all. He had given up the love of his brother for a misguided, wild adventure, and in so doing, he had given up himself.

It was, of course, the Sinclair way.

One

Five hours after she’d headed onto Sinclair land to check out sugar maples for tapping, Penelope Chestnut sank onto a granite boulder and admitted she was lost. The sun had sunk low in the sky, the temperature had already started to drop, she was down to the last of her water, and she didn’t have the vaguest idea where she was. New Hampshire, in the woods above Lake Winnipesaukee, probably still on Sinclair land. More specifically than that, who knew?

Her parents were expecting her for Sunday dinner at six. If she didn’t show up, they’d worry. Given her history, they’d worry all of ten minutes before calling out a search party. Dogs, snowmobiles, helicopters, men on snowshoes with flashlights. They’d all join in the hunt. Not one would be a stranger. And not one wouldn’t be just a little pissed at her for taking them out on a chilly March night.

It was galling. She’d rather spend the night in the woods. She could make a little fire, boil snow if she couldn’t find a stream, survive quite nicely until daylight. With the clouds pushing out, the temperature would drop overnight. Not that she minded—the cold nights and above-freezing days of early March made the sap run. Her current predicament notwithstanding, Penelope was an accomplished hiker. She wouldn’t freeze.

Maple-sugaring season was what had ostensibly brought her onto Sinclair land in the first place. A tiny corner of their vast tract of central New Hampshire wilderness abutted the ten acres she’d inherited from her grandfather, and she’d wanted a few more maples to tap. So she’d set off for an hour survey, with anorak, gloves, a hip pack of water, a Granny Smith apple and two Nutri-Grain bars. One thing had led to another—through a clearing, up a hill, over a stone wall, across a stream—and pretty soon she was sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere.

All because she didn’t pay attention. She’d spotted a woodpecker fluttering among the hemlock, an osprey nest high in a tall half-dead pine, followed the sound of a waterfall newly formed by the melting snow, thought about tea and warm scones with her cousin Harriet tomorrow afternoon, when she would return from ferrying two businessmen to Portland, Maine. Provided her father let her carry passengers. He didn’t like the way she’d been flying lately. A wandering mind was a dangerous thing on foot in the wilds of northern New England, but in the air, it could be fatal.

Which, Penelope decided, didn’t bear thinking about while she was lost in the woods with dusk encroaching.

She had hoped to find something on top of the hill to orient her. A view of the lake, a stream, a stone wall, smoke curling from the chimney of a nearby house, something. But below her was just another steep, narrow, dry ravine. There were no landmarks. No promise of a way out. She had to go down this hill and up the next and just keep hoping for the best.

“I need another Nutri-Grain bar,” she said aloud in the stillness and silence that seemed to envelope her. But she’d consumed her last one an hour and several over-hill-and-over-dales ago.

She blinked back fatigue and the eye strain that came with hours on snow-covered hills without sunglasses. She hadn’t brought a compass, either. Or her wilderness medical kit. If she tripped and fell, she’d just have to lie there until someone found her. She’d tried following her trail in the snow, but it wasn’t good snow for tracks, and the two times she did pick up her trail, she found herself back where she’d started. So she’d given up, figuring that even if she could follow her tracks, there were five hours worth of them. They wouldn’t exactly provide the shortest, most straightforward route home. And she figured she had no more than ninety minutes of daylight left.

She was doomed. A search party was inevitable.

The sun poked through gray clouds that had been hanging over the lakes region for three days and were due to move out tonight. Everyone’s mood seemed to have suffered because of them, including her own. Heading into the woods by herself had seemed like a damned good idea five hours ago.

She scooted to the edge of her boulder and looked at the steep, tree-covered, rock-strewn hill. The going certainly wasn’t getting any easier. It was a north-facing hill, still encased in snow and ice, with small patches of wet, slippery leaves where the snow and ice had melted in circles around trees and rocks. She was sweating from temperatures in the upper forties, exertion, frustration. She’d worn none of her specially designed hiking clothes, just jeans and an anorak over a red plaid flannel shirt she’d been maple sugaring in since she was seventeen.

“Might as well get on with it,” she muttered, the silence and stillness almost eerie.

She lowered herself off her boulder, and her foot slipped on a patch of wet, brown leaves. She caught herself before going down on her butt, her heart rate jumping at the close call. A broken ankle and hypothermia were just what she needed. She scooped up a handful of snow and stuffed it down her back. It melted instantly on her overheated skin, cooling her, soothing her. There were worse things than having her parents call out another search party on her. She just needed to stay focused and make their job as short and simple as possible.

She wished she’d brought her cell phone. Flares. Even a book of matches would be welcome.

The sun glinted off something down the steep hillside, drawing her eye to her right. Her heart skipped. Now what? She edged down a few steps, trying to get a better view through the pine, hemlock and naked birches and oak. She squinted, wondering if the sun had just caught a rock with a lot of mica at the right angle.

No, there was something there.

Penelope took another couple of steps to her right. The snow was wet and slippery on the steep hillside, and getting a good purchase in her day hikers wasn’t that easy. She grabbed the thin trunk of a birch for balance and leaned over as far as she could for a better look.

Metal for sure, a lot of it, in a compact heap amidst the tumble of rocks and half a dozen pine trees. In summer, ferns and brush would leaf out and make the pile even harder to spot. If not for the sun striking a bit of metal at just the right moment, Penelope would have gone past it even at the end of winter with the landscape at its starkest.

And for the sun to glint off it, it wasn’t completely rusted, and that meant it was aluminum.

She held her breath. No.

The frame of Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair’s Piper Cub J-3 was aluminum tubing. Its fabric covering would have rotted away by now, forty-five years after it had disappeared in the skies above Cold Spring, New Hampshire, last seen by a half-dozen locals out on the clear, chilly night. Penelope wouldn’t expect to find much more than a crumpled heap of struts and trusses, rusted engine, bits of wing and tail assembly, whatever hadn’t succumbed to the crash and decades of exposure to the harsh weather of northern New England.

But she hadn’t expected to find Colt and Frannie’s plane here. According to her own pet theory, they’d faked a crash in New Hampshire and made it to Canada. Whether they’d crashed there or were living happily ever after was open to question.

Except it wasn’t anymore. This had to be Colt and Frannie’s long-missing Piper Cub. Penelope suddenly shivered as she stared at the wreckage. What else could it be?

A leap of the imagination, brought on by fatigue, low blood sugar, her own fascination with the ill-fated flight of the two lovers. Even as a kid, she would wander the woods with one eye searching for a downed Piper Cub. Later, she’d started collecting information—newspaper and magazine articles on the weeks-long search, headed by Willard Sinclair himself, then articles on the Sinclair Collection and Frannie’s role in pulling it together, turning it into a magnificent, coherent whole instead of a mishmash of stuff generations of Sinclairs had picked up on their various expeditions. In the past year, Penelope had started interviewing local residents who remembered Frannie Beaudine as a little girl and a young woman, who had known the Sinclairs from their years of mountain climbing, fishing, hunting and boating in the lakes region. The men were all Dartmouth alumni. Colt was barely a year out of Dartmouth when he disappeared.

The intensive, exhaustive search for the missing plane had turned up nothing, not one clue beyond the separate, positive sightings of it in the sky over Cold Spring. It was possible it wasn’t Colt’s Piper Cub J-3—but who else’s could it have been? When the news came out of New York that he, his plane and Frannie Beaudine were missing, the search was mounted, focusing on the New Hampshire lakes region.

After a while, people stopped looking. If the plane turned up, it turned up. Most believed if it was in New Hampshire at all, it was at the bottom of a deep part of one of its many lakes. Sections of Winnipesaukee, a clear, glacial lake, were ninety feet deep—nobody could see that far down. If the plane was ever to be found, whether in water or on land, it would have to be by accident.

In the forty-five years since Colt and Frannie had disappeared, not one Sinclair had set foot in Cold Spring.

Except for Harriet, of course. Penelope grimaced in anticipation of her cousin’s reaction to what she’d just found. But Harriet was another matter. Penelope couldn’t concentrate on scoping out plane wreckage, finding her way out of the wilderness and the oddities of Harriet Chestnut.

She squinted at the heap of metal. It was unquestionably a plane. Anyone in New Hampshire would be thinking just what she was thinking—this was the spot where Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine had gone down.

From her position, Penelope couldn’t make an educated guess about what had happened to the plane, why or how it had crashed into the steep hillside. She imagined the Piper Cub coming in low on that dark night, in trouble, possibly clipping trees before slamming into the hill. Colt and Frannie saying their goodbyes, guessing their fate. Penelope wasn’t a romantic, but the image of the two young lovers plunging to their deaths brought tears to her eyes.

Her pulse pounded in her ears, and she didn’t move as she absorbed the impact of what she had stumbled upon. To get to the wreckage, she would have to climb over icy rocks and big boulders, fallen trees and limbs, patches of slippery leaves covered in thin, clear ice and rough, snow-covered, nearly vertical ground. It would take time she didn’t have, and it would involve risks she didn’t need to take. Given that Frannie and Colt’s plane had lain here for forty-five years without being discovered, Penelope didn’t like the odds of what would happen to her if she fell and couldn’t get up again.

Not that anyone in Cold Spring would appreciate her reining herself in. Being lost in the woods at dusk was enough for them to assume she was back to her old tricks, taking unnecessary risks, not thinking, not considering who might have to strap on snowshoes to come fetch her on a cold, dark night.

She frowned, preferring not to think about past transgressions. She was thirty, after all, not twelve. She hadn’t been this lost in years.

Naked deciduous trees stood outlined in sharp relief against the gray sky, every twig sharp and clear and black. Soon pinks and lavenders would streak across the horizon, and they’d seem so bright and vibrant against the grays and whites of the late winter landscape.

Darkness would fall rapidly, and the temperature would plummet.

She had to get back. Tearing her gaze from the wreckage, she crawled over another boulder, then carefully made her way through young trees and stick-like brush, through more wet, dense sugar snow—not the light and fluffy snow of January—to the bottom of the steep, narrow ravine. There was no stream, there were no trails, no stone walls, no hunter’s lookouts—there was no reason for anyone to have stumbled on the wreckage in the past forty or so years.

Colt and Frannie’s bodies.

Penelope came to a sudden halt, imagining the skeletal remains of the two lovers above her on the hill. This wasn’t merely the solution to a forty-five-year-old mystery. It was a tragedy. Two people had died up there.

She shook off the morbid thought and started up the opposite hill, her legs aching, her stomach begging for a Nutri-Grain bar. She needed home, food, water and rest. Then she’d figure out what to do about Colt and Frannie and their Piper Cub.

A twig—something—snapped, and she stopped. Went still. Listened.

Had she heard anything? A squirrel, birds prancing in the branches of a nearby tree? She couldn’t be sure.

“You’re tired.”

Her voice seemed to go nowhere in the quiet, still, late afternoon air. Maybe she’d heard a deer or a moose, even a bear venturing out of hibernation.

Yep. Best to get on home.

Her water-soaked socks squished inside her day hikers. No blisters yet. She was lucky. She hadn’t bothered with boots or snowshoes, never imagining she’d end up lost. A little lost was one thing. That she could manage. But she was a lot lost.

Then, there in front of her, at her feet, was a melting trail of footprints. Not moose or deer or even bear, but human prints. And not her own. They were big. Probably male. She pivoted and stared toward the opposite hill, unable to make out the wreckage from her position. The snow, the gray rocks, the gray trees, the gray sky. The heap of plane tubing was gone, as if it had been a mirage.

The footprints ran down the hill to the left of the way she’d come, weaving among maple and oak and hemlock, even, unhurried. They had to be relatively fresh prints. The warm temperatures had barely melted them, and the last snow had been just two days ago, four inches that freshened the landscape and heartened the skiers who loved to see March stay a lion for as long as possible.

But who could have ventured out here, possibly have seen the wreckage and not mentioned it?

“Bubba Johns.”

Of course. He would have no interest in a lost plane.

Penelope could feel some of the tension ease out of her. She wasn’t afraid of Bubba. He was the town hermit, a recluse who had a shanty on the edge of Sinclair land—technically on Sinclair land, but no one had made an issue of it in the twenty years since he’d set up housekeeping there.

“Bubba!” she called, her voice dying in the ravine. There was no echo. “Bubba, it’s me, Penelope Chestnut!”

She could almost feel his ancient, some said crazy, eyes on her, a frosty gray that went with his unkempt white beard and scraggly white hair, his tall, rangy body. Sinclairs or no Sinclairs, it was Bubba who owned these hills and had for years. Penelope’s parents had warned her as a child to stay off Sinclair land, not because she was trespassing, but because she might run into Bubba Johns. But at ten years of age, she’d found herself out in the hills, exploring on her own, pretending, fantasizing, not realizing until it was nearly dark that she was lost. Bubba had materialized out of nowhere and silently led her home. She had been terrified, and her active imagination had conjured up images of Little Red Riding Hood meeting up with the big bad wolf. She half expected Bubba to drop her over a cliff or toss her onto a fire even as she’d followed him home, chattering at him as if she’d known him all her life. Without ever speaking, he’d left her at the end of her parents’ driveway and disappeared, not waiting for thanks or an invitation for coffee and cake. Her parents hadn’t seemed too sure they should believe their only daughter’s story about the silent hermit who’d seen her home.

Bubba Johns was as much a part of the landscape as the moose, deer, hawks and chipmunks, and like everyone else in Cold Spring, Penelope left him to his chosen life of isolation and solitude.

She turned and continued on her way, feeling the sun sinking in the west even as the sky melted into a pink so deep and dark and beautiful it made her want to lie on the snow and stare at it. But she kept walking, her head spinning, her legs leaden, her mind full of thoughts of Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine buried in their twisted metal grave and Bubba Johns out there in the gathering darkness, waiting, perhaps, to see if once again he needed to lead her home.

Wyatt Sinclair gave up on sleep and kicked off his blanket sometime before dawn. He didn’t know the exact time because Madge, his ex-lover, had insisted on removing the clock radio from his nightstand. It was bad chi, she’d said. Apparently he was a walking time bomb of bad chi. That was spooky enough, but then she did his astrological charts using some computer program. She’d plugged in the date, time and place of his birth, and out popped stuff that had compelled her to pack up.

“I have to move out,” she’d told him, whipping things into her suitcase. “There’s just too much negative energy around you. You’re—well, to be very straightforward with you, Wyatt, you’re one scary son of a bitch.”

He’d grinned. “You needed a computer to tell you that?”

Ten minutes later, she was out the door. She’d left the cat. Allergies.

He stumbled out to his living room, tripping over the cat en route. It got up and did its cat-stretching thing. It wasn’t much of a cat. Short gray hair, yellow eyes, lean. Bad tempered. Madge called him Sarsaparilla, but Wyatt thought that was a hell of a name for a cat and just called him Pill.

A New York apartment, a cat, an ex-lover like Madge. No wonder he had sleepless nights.

He flipped on lights, put on coffee, poured some orange juice and clicked the remote. “Headline News” came on. He flopped on his couch, noticing on the TV clock that it was four-eighteen. Early, especially for New York. The city was strangely silent at this time of day, at least from the vantage point of his fourth-floor upper east side apartment.

He liked New York on and off. His mother, the first of Brandon Sinclair’s three wives, had raised him there through eighth grade. Then the Sinclairs had taken over, and it was off to prep school, Dartmouth and Wharton. He’d endured, struck off on his own for a while and returned to the city of his childhood eighteen months ago. Who’d have ever thought.

If Hal hadn’t died, Wyatt supposed he might still be tallying new bird and plant species in remote parts of Australia and South America. But Hal had died, and Wyatt had come home.

He stared at the reporter on the screen and yawned, not out of fatigue, he realized, but boredom. Stress was not a factor in his intermittent insomnia. He had money, food, lodging and—dear God, it was true—a good job. He would be at his desk on Wall Street in another five hours.

His office had a view of the harbor. It was something.

He watched a commercial pushing laxatives, then a report about the latest scandal in Washington, and he was about to flip to “Nick at Nite” when the anchorwoman started in on her next news item.

“The solution to one of the more tantalizing mysteries of the past half-century may be at hand. A New Hampshire woman claims she’s found the small plane adventurers Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair were flying the night they disappeared.”

Wyatt sat straight and turned up the volume.

The woman was named Penelope Chestnut, she lived in Cold Spring, and she had stumbled on the wreckage while she was out hiking on Sunday, the report continued. She would be leading local authorities to the crash site today, Tuesday, for verification.

Contacted at his vacation home in St. Croix, Brandon Sinclair had declined comment.

Wyatt wasn’t surprised. His uncle’s disappearance was the most enduring and mysterious scandal involving a Sinclair, if hardly the only one. Or the most recent. Hal’s death and Wyatt’s near death—and presumed culpability—in Tasmania had garnered their share of headlines. His father maintained his only son was a throwback to previous generations of Sinclairs, who had been adventurers and daredevils since Roger Sinclair had taken on the English as a privateer in the American Revolution. Naturally, he’d made a fortune, pissed off friend and foe alike and died young.

“Headline News” put up the famous picture of Frannie and Colt taken the night of their ill-fated flight. Wyatt was struck by how young they looked. Frannie was from Cold Spring, a captivating mix of daring pilot and self-taught art historian whose exploits, intelligence and beauty had drawn her rich lover’s eye. They’d cut out of a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took off in Colt’s Piper Cub and were never seen again. No trace of them or their plane was ever found.

Until Sunday, Wyatt thought, wishing they’d put up a picture of Penelope Chestnut instead of his uncle and Frannie Beaudine. He was generally an excellent judge of character, and if he could see what she looked like, he would be better able to assess if this was a hoax. But there was no picture, no footage, even, of Cold Spring, New Hampshire.

He debated calling his father. Colt’s disappearance was still a raw wound that infected everything Brandon Sinclair did, including raise his only son. He seldom talked about his brother, brushed off questions Wyatt would ask. Wyatt wasn’t sure whether his father’s reticence stemmed from the lingering pain and grief of losing his only brother or from embarrassment. Even after forty-five years, Colt could still attract national headlines.

To his credit, Brandon had worked hard to change the Sinclair way of doing things. He wanted to preserve their spirit of scholarship, exploration and adventure but without the penchant for scandal and premature death. He was determined his brother’s example would not extend to another generation. Colt would be the last Sinclair whose recklessness and zest for adventure would leave behind mourning parents, wives, children—and younger brothers.

Not that Brandon had ever told Wyatt he’d loved his older brother, missed him, felt hurt and betrayed because he’d abandoned him for Frannie Beaudine. But if he knew nothing else about his family, Wyatt knew that love was never enough for a Sinclair. That was their abyss. It was impossible to fill with money or adventures. No matter how many lions they shot or mountains they climbed or discoveries they made, the abyss remained unfilled.

He wondered when his father had realized his only son was that way, too. Another Sinclair destined for notoriety and adventure.

But no more. After the disaster in Tasmania, Wyatt had opted for the safe path. A desk, a suit, a job putting his MBA to use. He’d already thrown his trust fund in his father’s face, so there wasn’t that. But there was plenty of money. Even a disinherited Sinclair was good at making money.

The cat jumped up on his lap and started pawing, and Wyatt shut off the television and listened to Manhattan awaken on a dreary March morning. Garbage trucks, cabs, dog walkers, hospital workers, a siren off in the distance. He patted Pill, although he didn’t much like cats, and he told himself that Penelope Chestnut and her discovery in the woods above Lake Winnipesaukee weren’t his problem. His only problem was scrounging up enough energy and interest to get to work for nine o’clock.

By nine-fifteen Jack Dunning was standing in front of Wyatt’s office window high above New York harbor. Jack was a tall, rangy, sandy-haired man dressed in cowboy boots and jeans. Wyatt regarded him without comment. A Brooklyn native gone Texan. He’d worked as a private investigator in Dallas for years, apparently wore out his welcome and was back in New York. His chief client was Brandon Sinclair, a man not only very rich but also very suspicious, determined to protect himself, his wife, his two ex-wives, his son and his two young daughters from scoundrels, kidnappers, con men and lunatics. Jack seemed perfectly willing to oblige. As soon as he made enough money, he always said, he planned to buy a ranch in west Texas and retire. New York made him itch, and the women wore too damned much black.

He glanced at Wyatt. “Nice view.”

Wyatt smiled. “The Statue of Liberty reminds me of the virtues of tolerance.”

“Reminds me of the dangers of being a sucker.”

Wyatt couldn’t tell if he was serious. In his eighteen months back in New York, he’d come to believe Jack Dunning was a man not nearly as uncomplicated as he liked to pretend. His angular features and dead gray eyes made him difficult to read. He could be fifty—he could be sixty. It was impossible to tell. And Wyatt had no real desire to know. Jack worked for his father. If he was here, it was because Brandon Sinclair wanted him to be here.

“You heard about your uncle’s plane?” Jack asked.

“I caught it on the morning news.” Wyatt didn’t say how early that morning. Dunning would regard a sleepless night as a weakness and file it away as something he had on his employer’s eldest child.

“Then you haven’t heard the latest. The woman who said she found the plane—this Penelope Chestnut—she’s changed her mind. Says it was a mistake. She was hypoglycemic and on edge because she was lost.”

“Lost?”

“That’s how she found the site in the first place—she was out hiking on Sunday afternoon and got lost. Her folks were organizing a search party when she found her way out on her own. Claims she went back yesterday afternoon and saw it wasn’t a plane but just an old dump site, probably from the turn of the century.”

Wyatt rolled that one around in his mind. A mistake. Not what he’d expected from Penelope Chestnut, although he had no reason to expect anything. “So no Colt and Frannie, after all.”

“That’s what she says. Here’s the thing.” Jack turned from the window. There was no indication he felt out of place in the elegant wood-paneled Wall Street office, which Wyatt had leased furnished, down to the brass lamps and slate blotter. If he were to play the venture capitalist, he needed a robber baron office.

Dunning stayed focused on his reason for being there—Penelope Chestnut. “Now she’s also claiming she can’t find the dump site again,” he said.

That tweaked Wyatt’s interest. “How’s that possible?”

“She says she was able to follow her tracks in the snow yesterday, but it was tough even then because of all the daytime melting. Says she planned to take people up today to prove it, but it snowed last night and covered what was left of her tracks. She got up at the crack of dawn this morning and says she can’t find the site. Says she wandered around and just can’t find her trail or figure out how to get back there. Maybe she can find it in the spring.”

Wyatt tilted in his buttery leather chair and considered this twist. At first blush it sounded like bullshit. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s hogwash. This girl’s lived her whole life in those woods. She can find her way back, snow or no snow. I’d bet my molars on it.”

“What does my father say?”

Jack gave a small grin. He was a striking man, but not handsome. Wyatt sensed he liked his employer, despite the vast difference in their manner and sensibilities. “Your daddy’s more diplomatic than I am. He asked me to go up there and check out this girl’s story. New Hampshire in March. Just where I want to be. But I’ll do it and see what’s what.”

“And why tell me?” Wyatt asked.

The grin turned to a smirk. “Because your daddy asked me to.”

As Wyatt had expected. “Okay. Thanks for the report. If you need my help for anything, let me know. You have my number.”

Jack winked. “I have all your numbers, Sinclair. See you around.”

Thirty minutes later, Wyatt was still staring at the same printout. He’d had his secretary hold his calls. He got up from his desk and walked to the window, the Statue of Liberty shrouded in a sudden fog. He agreed with Jack. Penelope Chestnut’s story didn’t wash.

He called his father, knowing already he was making a futile effort. His father would tell him nothing, possibly less than he’d told his personal private detective. Jack was a professional. He could be controlled.

“Wyatt—good to hear from you. How’s the weather in New York?”

“Foggy. Jack Dunning was just here. He told me you’ve sent him to New Hampshire to check out this woman’s story about Colt’s plane. Anything I need to know?”

“It’s just a precaution. If she made a mistake and is doing what she can to save face, so be it. But if she’s lying, I want to know why. And, of course, if she’s lying, I want to find my brother’s plane.” He paused, no chink in his self-control. They might still have been discussing the weather. “After all these years, I’d like to know what happened to him.”

“You trust Dunning?”

“I’m paying him well enough.”

Wyatt didn’t comment. As far as he was concerned, money and trust had nothing to do with each other. “I guess that’s your call. Anything else?”

His father was silent for half a beat. “What else would there be?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just always had the feeling there’s more to Colt and Frannie’s disappearance than you’ve said.”

“There’s nothing more, Wyatt. If you can, come down this weekend. Ann and I would love to have you, and you know the girls would be thrilled to see you.” Ann was his third wife; they had two daughters together, Ellen, nine, and Beatrix, eleven. “March isn’t my favorite month in New York.”

“Thanks for the invitation. I’ll let you know if I can wiggle loose.”

“It’s best I sent Jack up to Cold Spring, Wyatt. The people there tend to blame Colt for what happened. Frannie Beaudine was one of their own.”

“No problem.”

When they disconnected, Wyatt didn’t hesitate. He told his secretary he needed to go out of town and asked her to keep her finger in the dike for a few days, possibly longer. He caught an elevator to the lobby of the 1920s building and hailed a cab to take him to his apartment. He fed the cat and called Madge. “I’m going to be out of town for a few days. Can you tend to Pill?”

“You know I’m allergic.”

“Wear gloves and a mask.”

“You’re a heartless bastard, Wyatt. Just because you can climb a rock wall with your bare hands doesn’t mean the rest of us are weaklings. My allergies are serious.”

“If you can’t take care of Pill, say so and I’ll get someone else.”

“Can I stay at your place while you’re gone?”

His apartment was bigger and in a better location than hers. “Sure.”

“I’ll take medication for my allergies,” she added quickly.

Within the hour, he was on the Major Deegan Express-way heading toward New England.

No Sinclair had ventured to Cold Spring, New Hampshire, since Colt and Frannie had disappeared—unless his father had lied about that, too. Because something—maybe a lot, maybe not a lot—was missing in Brandon Sinclair’s rendition of the events of forty-five years ago. Wyatt had believed that for years, but hadn’t pushed, hadn’t confronted his father out of respect for the loss he’d suffered. Some things, he’d decided, just weren’t a son’s business.

But as he drove north against a hard wind, he wondered if he and his father could ever make their peace if he didn’t learn, finally, the truth about the night Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine took off into the darkness.

Two

Penelope tried to ignore the clicking of a camera three yards behind her. Another reporter. Most of the swarm of reporters—print, television, radio, tabloid, mainstream—that had flocked to Cold Spring had gone home after hearing the discovery of Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine’s plane was a mistake. A few lingered, angling for whatever news and gossip they could find while they were there. Penelope didn’t know what good a picture of her preflighting her Beechcraft would do anyone.

It was a breezy, chilly morning, and she couldn’t wait to get into the air. She’d pulled her hair into a sort of braid, put on a functional flight suit that always, rather ridiculously, made her feel like the Red Baron and packed herself some cheddar cheese a friend had made on her own farm, an apple and a bit of this season’s maple sugar. Decadent. In twenty minutes she was saved. No more questions, no more doubting eyes.

“You know, Penelope,” the reporter called, using her first name as if they were pals, “I drove all the way up here from New York to cover this story. Colt and Frannie are, like, icons on the upper east side. Rich, good-looking, adventurous, intellectual, fucking doomed. Now, here I am, and what do I have? A dump. A fucking dump.”

Penelope ignored him. A turn-of-the-century dump was the best she could do. It was lame, and it wasn’t sexy at all, but it explained the metal. She had decided pegging the whole thing on a mirage was just too much to swallow.

The reporter didn’t quit. He was lanky, bearded and obnoxious. “You should get your facts straight before you go to the media.”

She turned from her plane. She was at the tail, trying to concentrate on her checklist. “I didn’t go to the media. They came to me. Look, stop at Jeannie’s Diner on Main Street for pie, or if you want to hang around until three o’clock, wait and stop at the Sunrise Inn for tea and scones. My mother and my cousin Harriet make the best scones in New Hampshire. The inn’s on the lake. Just take a left off Main.”

“I didn’t come to fucking New Hampshire for pie and scones. Jesus. This weather. You know, we have daffodils in New York.”

“Send me some when you get back.”

He let go of his camera and let it hang from his neck. It was a small, cheap camera on a thin black cord. He was probably freelance. He certainly wasn’t from Newsday or the Times. “You’re not very contrite,” he said.

“I made a mistake. You guys jumped all over this thing before anyone could verify what I’d found. It’s not my fault you got the cart before the horse.”

The guy went red. Penelope thought he might throw his camera at her, but then she saw her father marching toward them. He had on his work pants and wool work shirt, and he didn’t look as if he knew as much about airplanes and flying as he did. People underestimated Lyman Chestnut all the time. He was the quintessential hardheaded Yankee, a gray-haired, craggy-faced man of sixty who was the law at Cold Spring Airport. It was a small, uncontrolled airport with three hangars, one runway and three full-time year-round employees: Lyman, his sister Mary and Penelope. What they couldn’t do they hired part-time help to do or contracted out. Winter and early spring were their slow seasons. Come summer and autumn, the place hummed.

Lyman jerked a thumb toward the parking lot. “Out. Let Penelope do her job.”

“I was just—”

“You’re compromising safety.”

The reporter sputtered, then gave up and retreated.

Penelope grinned at her father. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You’ve done enough thinking for this week, I expect.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Finish your walk around.”

He about-faced and returned to the office in a corner of one of the hangars. Penelope watched him in frustration, then resumed her preflight. She knew what he meant. He meant he didn’t believe her dump story, either. No one believed her dump story.

But this morning when she woke before dawn, she realized she had no choice. She had to undo what she’d done. Brandon Sinclair, contacted in St. Croix, was sending his own investigator to represent his family’s interests. It was a Sinclair plane found on Sinclair land, and it had been a Sinclair in the cockpit. As Penelope had said yesterday afternoon to Andy McNally, the local police chief, “Who’s looking after Frannie’s interests? What if Colt killed her before the plane crashed? Then we have an unsolved murder. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, you know.”

Andy had calmly told her, yes, he knew, and she should mind her own business. The story was out, reporters were on the way. That was when Penelope realized she had no control. She’d been booted to the back of the raft, and someone else was negotiating the rapids.

Except for one thing. She knew where the wreckage was. No one else did, besides Bubba Johns, who presumably wasn’t about to talk.

Late yesterday, when she’d found reporters skulking around on her land discussing getting shots of her sap buckets and hunting up “that hermit,” Penelope had realized the extent of her folly. If she didn’t do something fast, dozens of reporters, the police and Brandon Sinclair’s investigator would descend on poor Bubba Johns. Even if by some miracle he had never noticed the plane wreckage, he was a colorful addition to the story. A wild-haired hermit living on Sinclair land. It was a nice contrast to the scandal and tragedy of the missing daredevil heir and his beautiful, intelligent, adventurous lover.

And then there was Harriet. Only humiliation and embarrassment waited for her.

So Penelope had made up her mind. The wreckage became a small, turn-of-the-century dump, and she couldn’t find it again. She pretended she’d made her way to it late yesterday and tried to thrash her way back first thing this morning. The light covering of snow gave her a touch more credibility, although apparently not enough for her father.

“Well,” she said to herself, “first things first. The heat’s off Bubba for now.”

She climbed into the cockpit and took a breath, focusing on the task at hand. She was transporting a time-sensitive package to Plattsburgh, New York, from a management consultant who worked out of his home on Lake Winnipesaukee. It had to be there this afternoon, not tomorrow morning. Her father had canceled her passenger charter yesterday. He didn’t like the way she was flying, hadn’t for weeks, and getting herself lost in the woods on Sunday proved she was distracted and bored. She’d had a few semi-close calls in a row, and he’d decided she wasn’t taking her job seriously enough. He couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong, but he wasn’t happy. And finding a forty-five-year-old plane wreck that turned out to be an old dump hadn’t done a damned thing to get her with the program.

She hoped by the time she returned, Brandon Sinclair’s investigator and the last of the reporters would all have turned around and gone home. Then she could take her time and figure out what, if anything, to do about the downed Piper Cub J-3 in the hills above town.

There were no bolts of lightning and no men with tar and feathers to greet Wyatt when he crossed into Cold Spring, New Hampshire. It was late afternoon, and the landscape was bleak. Pretty, but bleak. The White Mountains looming in the distance, rolling fields, winding roads, stark, leafless trees, lots of pine and fresh, clean, white snow clinging to everything. The snow was melting rapidly in the above-freezing temperatures, and the roads were clear. The only signs of spring he could see were the potholes and frost heaves.

The sun was out intermittently, and a persistent breeze made the temperature seem colder than it was. Wyatt had pulled over once to consult his map. Damned if he’d give the locals the satisfaction of seeing him get lost his first day in town. He had climbed the White Mountains, including the infamous Mount Washington, during his four years at Dartmouth, but at his father’s request, he’d avoided Lake Winnipesaukee. He’d had other things on his mind at twenty besides the fate of an uncle he’d never known. He’d never seen his family’s land in New Hampshire and couldn’t understand why they hadn’t sold it or donated it as a nature preserve.

A two-lane road led into the village of Cold Spring, a few picturesque streets nestled along the western shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Twenty-seven miles long, Winnipesaukee was the largest lake in the state, formed by glaciers and famous for its crystal-clear water and three hundred islands. At this time of year, it was still an expanse of snow and ice, although only a few ice-fishing shanties dotted inlets close to shore. Winnipesaukee, Wyatt had learned from his map, was Abenaki for “beautiful water in high places.”

Like most of the other villages on the lake, Cold Spring was busiest in the summer and fall, but from the mix of shops on its maple-lined Main Street, Wyatt guessed it had a strong year-round population. Signs were discreet, storefronts neat and pretty even on a dreary March afternoon. Wyatt noticed shops that sold antiques, vintage clothing, quilts, gifts and the like, which the tourists would enjoy, but he also saw a pharmacy, a diner, a photo and print shop, a clothing store—the sort of shops one needed when a mall wasn’t close at hand.

He pulled into a parking space in front of the diner, fed the meter and went in for a very late lunch and whatever local gossip he could pick up about one Penelope Chestnut. So far, no sign of Jack Dunning, not that Jack would willingly share his findings with his boss’s son.

The diner was crowded for four o’clock on a bleak Tuesday afternoon. A plump waitress with perfect mauve nails was moving down the counter with a pot of coffee. Five booths lined the opposite wall, three of them filled. Reporters, Wyatt guessed. They’d be up from Boston and New York and God knew where else to check out the sighting of Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair’s plane. The story had probably evaporated before they’d arrived, and now they were having a bite to eat in a country diner before heading back to the city.

Wyatt slid onto the one unoccupied stool at the counter and listened.

“Of course she’s lying,” a middle-aged man at the other end of the counter said. “The question is why.”

A skinny woman yawned. “No one gives a shit, ace. The people don’t care about Penelope Chestnut. The people care about the fate of Frannie and Colt.”

“One of these days I want to meet ‘the people,’” an older woman grumbled, “because I don’t give a rat’s ass about Frannie and Colt, either. I just care about that last piece of coconut pie sitting over in that case.” She raised her voice. “Miss, you earmark that pie for me, okay?”

Wyatt managed to get in an order of grilled ham and cheese on rye and coffee while listening to the reporters grouse and catching the locals—two men in flannel shirts at one of the booths—grinning at the wild-goose chase Penelope Chestnut had put them on. From what he gathered, she’d done this sort of thing before. Maybe not this precise thing—crying wolf about a famous long-missing plane—but stirring up trouble in her small lakeside village.

Then he got it. A scrap of conversation, a link between what was being said on one end of the diner and the other.

Miss Penelope was a pilot.

Wyatt smiled. Pilots he understood. He wasn’t one himself, but he’d hung out with them, used their services and appealed to their sense of adventure for most of his twenties and the first two years of his thirties. Now he was thirty-four, a suit behind a desk. He grimaced and drank his coffee and ate his sandwich. When he paid his tab, he got directions to the airport from the waitress.

“Penelope won’t be there,” she said. “She’s flying today. And she’s not talking to reporters.”

Wyatt didn’t disabuse her of her notion that he was a reporter. As instructed, he followed the main road the way he’d come, turned left at a flower shop, followed that road—its massive potholes and frost heaves required bright orange warning signs—until he came to a perfunctory green sign that said Airport. Bingo. He turned onto a barely paved country road, bounced over it until he came to a precious stretch of flat land. The Cold Spring Airport. It wasn’t much of an airport, but he hadn’t expected much. The one runway and three small hangars fit with his image of the woman who said she’d found Frannie and Colt’s plane, then said she didn’t.

He rocked and rolled over the undulating dirt parking lot and did his best to avoid the huge holes that had opened up with the warming temperatures. They’d filled with water that, presumably, would ice overnight and melt again tomorrow. Leaves on the trees, flowers and green grass all seemed a long, long way off.

Wyatt parked next to a mud-spattered hunter-green truck. It had four-wheel drive. So did the SUV next to it. His car did not. The air was damp and cold, the kind that got into the bones. He picked his way through water-filled holes to a small, squat building with a crude sign indicating Office. People did get to the point around here.

A sixtyish man stood out front, glaring at the gray tree line. Without even glancing at Wyatt, he said, “If you’re from the press, the story’s over. You can go home.”

“I’m not a reporter.”

He turned, but Wyatt sensed his mind was still on whatever he expected to find on the tree line. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for Penelope Chestnut. As I said, I’m not a reporter, but I would like to talk to her about what she found in the woods.”

The older man’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re a Sinclair.”

His tone hadn’t changed. He fit the stereotype of the naturally stoic, taciturn New Englander. Wyatt checked his surprise. “Yes, I’m Wyatt Sinclair. Colt was my uncle.”

“You’re Brandon’s boy.”

It wasn’t a question, but Wyatt said, “That’s right.”

A heavy, fatalistic sigh, as if he should have expected a Sinclair to wander into town. “Your father sent his own investigator, you know. Jack Dunning. He’s flying up—he’s taking a detour over your family’s land first. I suppose he’ll try to spot Penelope’s dump.”