Prologue

 The man walked quietly down the dark barn aisle. Inside their stalls, horses rustled, snorted, sighed, and munched hay. Each small sound registered automatically in the man’s ears—the normal, gentle noises of a barn at night.
 Without hesitation, the human figure reached out for the latch of a stall halfway down the aisle. As he slid the bolt open, he peered into the dim interior, seeing the dark equine shape resting in one corner, a hind leg cocked.
 Raising the halter he held, the man spoke in a low, calm voice. “Wake up, son.”
 The horse was already awake; his pricked ears were visible in the dusky light as he regarded the newcomer.
 Moving with the natural assurance of a horseman, the man stepped toward the animal, patted his shoulder, pulled the halter over his nose and buckled it behind the ears, all without fuss. Stroking the beast’s shoulder again, the man reached into his jacket pocket and produced a syringe.
 In a moment, the cap was off the needle, and the needle itself was removed from the syringe. Quickly and confidently, the man plinked the needle into the side of the horse’s neck, with a motion much like throwing a dart. The horse started slightly, but the thing was expertly done, and the animal settled immediately as the man spoke to him and patted his shoulder again.
 With the ease of long familiarity the syringe was reattached to the needle, and the medication injected into the muscle. The man pulled the needle out smoothly, recapped it, and put the syringe back in his pocket. In another moment, the horse was free again, and the man was latching the stall door behind him, the halter casually draped over one arm.
 The whole thing had taken maybe sixty seconds. But even as the man’s footfalls receded down the dirt aisle, the reverberations were beginning. It would be years before they would die.
 

Chapter One

 The phone rang at eleven o’clock on Sunday night; I opened my eyes with a start. I wasn’t on call, my sleepy brain protested, I wasn’t even working days as a veterinarian, due to the seven month’s pregnant belly rising like a mountain from my abdomen.
 Grabbing the phone before it could ring again and wake my still-snoring husband, I whispered, “Hello?”
 “Gail?” Jenny’s voice.
 “What’s wrong?” I hissed.
 “I can barely hear you.”
 Still holding the receiver, I heaved myself out of bed and waddled into the other room. “What’s going on?” I asked, all my antennae on the alert for trouble. Jenny knew better than to call me this late. These days, I was asleep by nine.
 Nothing for a second, and then “Boomer’s dead.”
 I could feel my mind roving frantically. “Jenny, I’m sorry, but who’s Boomer?”
“My dog. He’s been poisoned. They killed him.”
“Who killed him?” I demanded. “How do you know he was poisoned?”
I remembered Boomer now; a big yellow dog with a fierce bark and an easy wag, he’d been of no particular breed. Perhaps a Lab or shepherd cross, just generic dog.  Jenny had gotten him from the pound about a month ago. He wasn’t really a pet; he’d lived down at her barn as a watch dog, and was kept in a box stall at night.
Jenny was talking again. “I can’t really explain. Something is going on. I found Boomer down at the barn—stone cold. He was poisoned.” Suddenly she stopped. “What was that?”
Striving for a calm tone, I asked her, “What was what?”
More silence. Finally, “I keep hearing noises, like footsteps outside.”
I stared at my own windows. It was February; a typical coastal California storm rocked the branches of the trees and spattered rain against the glass. Jenny lived a couple of miles away from me. Things were going bump in the night around here with monotonous regularity; what kind of odd noises could Jenny possibly hear over the storm?
“What kind of noises do you hear?” I asked.
“Boards creaking. Thumping, like someone’s walking on the porch.”
“Is this why you think the dog was poisoned?”
“Gail, he’s dead. I just found him. Not a mark on him. He was poisoned,” Jenny snapped, sounding more like her old self.
“I’m sorry,” I said, abashed. “But what makes you think it was done on purpose? Maybe he ate some gopher grain.”
Since Jenny had allowed the dog to run loose, and the neighbors were known to put out poisoned grain for gophers, I guessed this to be a more likely scenario.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Jenny said, as if she could read my mind.
 Now this was strange. My cousin Jenny had never been one for histrionics of any kind; she was perhaps the most reliably levelheaded person I knew, with the possible exception of my husband, Blue. Her continued insistence that her dog had been purposefully poisoned was odd, and even odder coming from someone as sensible as Jenny. Surely the logical explanation for Boomer’s death, if in fact he was poisoned, was an accident, not a canine murder.
“Jenny,” I said, I hoped soothingly, “dogs do get poisoned that way. I never worked as a small-animal vet, but I’ve certainly heard lots of stories. And during my nine years as a horse vet, I ran into several cases of horses that were killed by eating gopher grain. Nobody meant for it to happen. I’m sure Boomer’s death was an accident.”
 “He was killed,” Jenny said flatly. “As a warning.”
 This was even more alarming. Jenny was simply not the type to imagine vendettas and/or stalkers.
 “As a warning?” I repeated blankly. “Why?”
 A long silence greeted this question. “There are some reasons,” Jenny said finally, “that I can’t tell you.”
 I took that in. “You’re saying your dog was killed as a warning and you can’t tell me why. That doesn’t make much sense to me.”
“Gail, you just don’t understand.” Jenny sounded pathetic now, which was so unlike my normally hardheaded cousin that I sat up a little straighter in my chair and pressed the phone firmly to my ear.
“What don’t I understand?” I asked.
“There are reasons,” she said slowly, “why someone might be stalking me. You don’t know.”
“So tell me. How can I understand if you don’t explain?”
A long, long silence. I listened to the storm lash at my little house and waited.
Jenny’s voice, when it came, sounded very small. “I’d better not tell you. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone. If I do, I just don’t know what will happen.”
Something in the tearful quality of the words caught my attention. “Jenny, have you been drinking?”
Instantly she turned defensive. “Just a few drinks. Not much. After I found Boomer.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
I said nothing. Three meant four or five, if I knew Jenny. As I was now, in my current interesting condition, a non-drinker, I was quick to recognize the gentle slurring and easy emotionalism of the tipsy. No question in my mind but that Jenny was just the slightest bit drunk.
“Jenny, I am so sorry about your dog. No matter how it happened, I know how terrible it must have been to find him dead. Is there anything I can do?”
Another long silence. Then, again, the very small Jenny voice. “I’m just scared.”
I took this in. My usually intrepid cousin, between shock and booze, sounded like a frightened four-year-old. I tried for a matter-of-fact tone. “Do you need help?”
Staring down at my pregnant belly, I hoped fiercely that Jenny would not ask me to come over. Not at almost midnight on a stormy night in my current condition. Hard-hearted as it sounded, I couldn’t imagine dragging myself out at this moment in order to be a comforting hand-holder.
 “It’s all right,” Jenny said at last. “I’ll be fine. You stay home.”
 “Okay,” I said firmly. “Turn the outside lights on, and have a look out at the porch. If you can’t see anyone, then go to bed and try to sleep. If you see anything wrong, call nine-one-one and then call me back. And I’ll come over in the morning first thing.”
 “Gail.” Now Jenny sounded forlorn. “You’re my cousin, my only family. I just moved out here six months ago; I don’t have any friends. If you don’t believe me, who am I supposed to turn to?”
“Jenny, I can't help you if you won’t tell me the problem. You say someone’s stalking you, but most of what you describe sounds pretty innocuous. The noises you hear are probably just the storm. And sad as it is about Boomer, I don’t understand why you think someone’s poisoned him on purpose. If you really feel threatened you should call the cops.”
 “If you don’t believe me, why would they believe me?”
 I was quite sure that, in fact, they wouldn’t believe her.
 “Jenny,” I said again, “You need to tell me, or someone, why you think you’re being stalked.”
 A lot of silence followed this comment. An elderberry branch tapped on my window; I hoped Jenny didn’t have a similar bush near her house; she’d no doubt be convinced someone was right outside.
 “Gail, when I was training racehorses back in Michigan, I knew some really scary people. People who were crooks. People who made other people disappear. Honest. The racetrack is a funny place. Really rich people, really poor people, scumbags and solid citizens, all rubbing shoulders. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve seen. And some of it, well, some of it could come back to haunt me.”
 This gave me pause. Jenny, along with her ex-husband, Charley Parker, had been training racehorses near Detroit for over twenty years. In the last six months, she and Charley had divorced, and Jenny had relocated near my home on the Monterey Bay in northern California. She’d purchased an old ranch with the money she’d gotten in the divorce and was running a lay-up facility for racehorses, doing quite well at it, by her own account.
 I had been dismissing Jenny’s fears as post-divorce and relocation stress, but suddenly I wondered. Thoroughbred racing was a foreign world to me, but I believed Jenny when she described it as an odd mix. An odd mix with a lot of money to be made. It was entirely possible that Jenny had witnessed some strange deals involving scary people.
 “I really can’t tell you any more. I’d be putting myself in danger, and you, too.”
 I took this in and thought about it. “Well, if you won’t tell me, I don’t see what I can do. At least not tonight. I’ll come over tomorrow morning first thing and we can talk about it. Try to go to sleep. Call nine-one-one if you really think there’s someone out there.”
 “All right.” Jenny sounded subdued. “Please don’t repeat what I told you to anyone, Gail. Not anyone.”
 “You didn’t say much of anything,” I pointed out. “See you tomorrow.”
 “All right.” And I heard the click of her phone hanging up.
 “Whew,” I said out loud.
 Now I was thoroughly awake—not much point in toddling right back to bed. I pushed my reluctant stomach up off the couch, walked across the room to the kitchen, and put the kettle on. Taking a box of peppermint tea out of the cupboard, I patted my belly gently as I felt the baby kick.
 “Hey there,” I said softly.
 It was such an amazing thing. Here I was, thirty-nine years old, and pregnant for the first time in my life. Blue and I had married last June and two short months later, voila. I had never imagined that it could be so easy at my advanced age.
 Oh sure, we’d wanted a child, we’d hoped to get pregnant, we’d agreed to start trying. But neither one of us had dared to think it would happen this quickly.
 It was definitely a shock. Having our dream turn so instantaneously to reality had left us both with cold feet, wondering if we’d made the right choice. But now, seven months later, my attachment to our unborn child had grown as steadily as my belly swelled.
 I talked to him, both out loud and in my mind, and I felt he answered me, as unreasonable as that might sound. Knowing that he was a boy, we’d named him already: McCarthy Winter, a combination of my last name and Blue’s.
 “So, Mac,” I said out loud, as I poured hot water into my blue willow mug and sniffed the peppermint aroma, “what do you think? Is Jenny in trouble?”
 The baby made no answer to this; perhaps such issues were not of interest to him. I settled myself on the couch and rested the mug gently on my belly. Immediately the baby kicked it.
 I laughed. I knew this game. Moving the mug to a different spot, I waited a moment; he kicked it again.
 “You like this, don’t you?” I murmured as I took a sip of tea.
 Giving Mac a new target to aim for, I gazed around the room in contentment. My home was endlessly satisfying to me, at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes I thought it looked its best, when, as now, it was illuminated only by lamplight and firelight.
 This room, the main living space of the house, measured twenty feet by twenty feet, with another vertical twenty feet stretching up to the peak of the open-beam ceiling. The walls and ceiling were paneled with rough-sawn knotty pine, the floor was mahogany hardwood, and the little black woodstove chugged away on a gray stone hearth in the corner. Big windows ran across the south side of the room and glass doors led out to the porch that overlooked the garden. All these panes were shiny black blanks at the moment, spattered with blowing raindrops.
 The lack of external light only served to make the room seem cozier than usual. Orangey firelight flickered through the glass doors of the stove, and several freestanding and wall-mounted lamps made gentle pools of incandescent gold where they shone. I had resisted the urge to install overhead lighting, so instead of seeming harshly saturated, the room moved mysteriously from light to shadow, depending on where one looked.
 Firelight glowed on the primitive wool rug that lay in the center of the room, a collage of old rose, amethyst, sand, and chocolate brown. A lamp shed a waterfall of brilliance on the dark green Navajo-patterned couch where I sat and illuminated the moss-colored armchair where Blue liked to read. Wall sconces lit up the round table in one corner and the desk and computer in the other. The long wall that formed the kitchen, with its terra-cotta tile counters and stainless steel appliances, was bright with track lighting that lit the working areas, but left the rest of the room dim and quiet.
 I liked it this way. Most houses seemed to me to be jarringly brilliant at night, as though their residents wanted to deny the reality of the blackness outside the windows. My preference was for acknowledging darkness, sharing space with it, enjoying the intricate subtleties of its interplay with light.
 Mac kicked accurately at my mug once again and I smiled, wondering what he would make of this little house that would be his home, too. Many people referred to it as my cabin, which in some ways seemed apt, as the entire house measured roughly seven hundred square feet. Besides the room where I sat, there was a bedroom and a bathroom/laundry room—that was it. “You’ll be raising your kid in a one-room log cabin,” Jenny had said with a grin.
 “Not exactly,” I protested. “It’s shingled, and it has three whole rooms.” But I knew what she meant. Was there really enough space here for three of us? Given that Blue and I firmly intended to let our baby sleep with us, as any right-minded mammal would do, the first year or so would probably work out, but then what?
 “Guess we’ll find out,” I said out loud, whether to Mac or myself I wasn’t sure.
 Swallowing the last of my tea, I leveraged myself awkwardly out of the depths of the couch and lumbered across the room. “Time to get some sleep,” I murmured.
 But as I climbed back into bed with a still slumbering Blue, my mind drifted steadily back to Jenny. Jenny, my calm, competent cousin, and the oddly panicky tone in her voice. What in the hell was going on with Jenny?