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dangerously close to dusk. The stream had turned metallic black. The sky was gray—as though they indeed might see more rain tonight. He decided he’d better get out of there.
    It was a fact that people got lost on this mountain every year.
    This time it was definitely going to be the other guy.

CHAPTER THREE
    The morning after the murder she dreamed that she had shut both her cats up inadvertently in the oven. She had seen them crawl in there, had simply forgotten and turned the oven on and closed the oven door and left the kitchen.
    It wasn’t until she heard the yowling, the hideous hissing scratching sounds that she remembered and hurried in from her bedroom.
    She opened it and there was Beastie covered with Vinni’s blood, her black coat glistening, shaking Vinni by the neck, tearing wide the open gash from ear to shoulder with her two front paws and glaring out at Carole as though to say, You did this. You made us crazy. You see what you did? Vinni was dead, her poor head lolling, tongue longer than she had ever seen it in life protruding through bloody teeth.
    She woke up crying, aching, to Sunday morning and the first thing she did was look past Lee’s shoulder out the window.
    It had rained overnight as they’d hoped.
    The grass on her long sloping lawn was wet and green and there were puddles on the fieldstone porch.
    She guessed that they were lucky.
    She didn’t feel lucky.
    She felt frightened.
    Lee was still sleeping, the sheet bunched up beneathhim. She looked at the clock. The clock read eight fifteen. Three and a half hours of sleep. They’d both had more than their share to drink last night—more than they were used to. Adrenaline ran high in each of them until well into the morning. She supposed that fear would do that to you. The bed stank of sweat and exhaustion.
    She looked at him. He looked like a stranger. A stranger she’d known for a good two years now. She didn’t want to wake him.
    She needed some time alone before she could face anybody. Even him.
    Maybe a lot of time.
    She got up and pulled on a robe and walked to the kitchen. There was coffee in the pot left over from the night before. She poured some and put it in the microwave and set the timer for seventy seconds. The cats were circling her, brushing against her ankles, so she fed them, pulled the tab on the can of Friskies and spooned it out onto two plates and watched them attack in their accustomed spirit of happy near-starvation. She leaned back against the counter and watched them.
    Beast was all black except for a paintbrush stroke of white down along her bib. Vinni was a golden-gray-and-white tabby. Howard had picked them both up for her at the ASPCA a year apart from one another. The nicest thing he’d ever done for her.
    That was years ago. Beast was six and Vinni was five.
    And there was the goddamn trembling again.
    Last night it had seemed it would never go away—her whole body shaking, coming at her in spasms. A drink would fix it for a moment but last night even the drinking was strange. The scotch would wear off in no time,leaving her vividly sober and remembering what they’d done and right back where she started again. Shaking.
    She’d been afraid of Howard when he was alive.
    She was afraid of him now that he was dead.
    What had changed?
    She’d thought that once he was gone at least that sense of inhabiting these all-too-frequent moments of desperation would finally go away. That sense of possession. He’d created it, after all. He’d put it there.
    But it hadn’t. Not at all.
    It had woken up with her this morning.
    It was here with her now making coffee.
    You’ve got to give it time, that was what Lee said and he was probably right. But it was also all too possible that the only thing they’d managed to do here was to make a horrible situation immeasurably worse than they’d imagined.
    What in god’s name had they been thinking?
    What had ever made them think they could kill a man and make things