by Terence Faherty

“Jackson Hole is the name of the valley. Jackson is the town. Never call the town Jackson Hole, or people will think you’re a flatlander.”

To Anne Abbott’s ear, the person offering this advice sounded like a flatlander himself—from Iowa, perhaps, or Kansas—but she didn’t call him on it. She needed the job he’d offered her too badly. And she liked this real estate manager, Wayne Sedam. True, he spent more time on his hair and clothes than the men she’d grown up around, though in keeping with the local convention his current outfit—sheepskin coat, jeans, and cowboy boots—was elaborately casual. But he hadn’t balked at the idea of hiring a female caretaker for one of the properties under his charge, Osprey House. The previous caretaker had left without notice to join a cowboy band, so Sedam was well motivated if not desperate. Still, Anne was grateful.

They were standing on the flagstone patio behind the house as they spoke. Anne was admiring the log home’s many windows and gables. In one of the French doors, she caught her own reflection and appraised it: tall, broad shouldered, and plain. The sketch made her sigh, and she glanced quickly at Sedam to see if he’d noticed. He was examining the neighboring mansion.

“This part of the valley was all little ranches not many years ago,” he said. “Now it’s half ranches and half estates. Ten years from now, you’ll have to drive down to Hoback Junction if you want to see a cow.”

Anne, who’d lived all her life around cows, doubted she’d put forth the effort, but she nodded as though carefully making a mental note as Sedam went on.

“Neither Osprey House or that place over there is rented out when the owners are away, which is most of the year. In fact, I doubt the owners of Osprey House will ever be back. It was built by a dot-com millionaire named Zollman as a vacation home for the skiing season. His wife took one look around Jackson and lit out for the Coast. Wyoming was too far from Malibu for her. She’d like her husband to sell the place, but he’s run off to sulk somewhere in the South Pacific and no one can get hold of him.”

Thank God for that, Anne thought, or I’d be waiting tables somewhere. She’d come to Wyoming to work as a guide on the Snake River, but the short summer season wouldn’t feed her all year. The caretaker’s job was ideal, giving her a place to live as well as a steady income. Mrs. Zollman might not have cared for Jackson Hole, but to Anne it was close to heaven, even if it did snow in late May.

It was flurrying now. Sedam was holding the lapels of his beautiful coat tightly together with one hand, his attention still absorbed by the large house across the meadow. It was cedar sided with chimneys and front porch pillars of stacked stone.

“What’s that place called?” Anne asked.

“Millikan House, after the owners, a husband and wife team of New York cardiologists. They should have called the place Heart Disease House, after what they paid for it. The Millikans come out for two weeks in the winter and five weeks in the summer. Those years we have a summer. Let’s go inside.”

Sedam showed her from room to room, starting in a large television and game room with fireplace and cathedral ceiling. The gourmet kitchen was open to a farmhouse style dining room, the long table of which could seat twelve. Anne pictured the Zollmans sitting at opposite ends of that table, glowering at each other. The master suite, its bathroom larger than any apartment Anne had ever rented, and a mechanical room completed the ground floor. The latter held duplicate hot water tanks and furnaces.

Sedam explained the redundancy. “Because of the log construction, there are no ducts in the house. Heating is by hot water. One system supplies the radiators, the other the sinks and showers. All running continuously, per the owner’s last orders. You should see the bills. By the way, you will see the cleaning people. They come once a week, also according to orders. I don’t know what they find to clean.”

Upstairs there were four more bedrooms, each with its own bath. Throughout the house, the gray daylight was warmed by the honey color of the walls. The logs were so perfectly smooth that Anne ran her fingers along them to convince herself that they were really wood. Nowhere in the house did she see a personal touch, a family photograph or a book.

Her own quarters were in a small ranch house behind the four-car garage. Compared with Osprey House, it was spartan, but Anne fell in love with it at first sight. She had to fight the temptation to seize its keys from Sedam when, at the end of their tour, he displayed his first reservations.

“I feel a little guilty about leaving you out here by yourself,” he said, as he twirled the key ring maddeningly on one finger. “You’re only a few miles from town, I know, but this is a lonely spot. Feel free to call my cell if you’re ever uncomfortable.”

Anne asked herself if this manicured man might be interested in her. But before she’d more than worded the thought, Sedam added, “Or you could call Gitry.”

“Gitry?”

“He’s the Millikans’ caretaker.” Sedam waved the keys in the direction of the cedar house. “It’s not one of my properties—it’s managed out of Cheyenne, a stupid arrangement—so I don’t really know the man, except by his reputation. He’s become a little bit of a recluse, from what I hear. And a man of mystery. Still, if some emergency comes up, I’m sure he’ll help out. You caretakers have to stand by one another.

“It’s part of your code,” he added, laughing.

He handed Anne the keys, pressing them into her hand. “Good luck.”

* * * *

One week later, Anne paused on her morning run to admire the beauty of her valley. To the north, beyond Jackson, the snow-covered and jagged Grand Tetons stood out against a deep blue, cloudless sky. To the east and nearer to hand were the foothills of the Wyoming Range, already clear of snow and very green. They’d be covered in wildflowers in a week or two if the weather would only hold. Anne resumed her run, climbing high enough into those hills to gain a panoramic view of the spur valley in which Osprey House stood.

That morning there was a low fog in the valley, so low that the taller trees and rooftops pierced it. Anne heard the cattle calling to one another on a nearby ranch and felt a delicious guilt. Those cows were someone else’s responsibility, not hers. Then a pair of trumpeter swans flew past her just above the fog bank, honking to each other as they went, as though arguing about directions.

“The Zollmans,” she thought, “reincarnated.”

The swans’ noisy flight took them directly over Millikan House.

“That’ll wake you up, Mr. Gitry.”

She’d yet to glimpse her fellow caretaker, though she’d spent most of her first week in the valley watching for him. There’d been little else for her to do. No snow had fallen, so she couldn’t plow, and the grass wasn’t growing yet, so she couldn’t mow. She’d started the tractor and the ATV and changed the oil in each. She’d set out family photos and well-worn novels around the little ranch house, giving it something the log mansion lacked. And she’d watched for Gitry.

His failure to appear was intriguing to her, more intriguing even than Wayne Sedam’s description of Gitry: a man of mystery. Her practical side told her to be patient, as it often did. Gitry was simply holed up like she was, waiting for the seasons to sort themselves out.

She lost what little warmth the recently risen sun was providing when she descended again into the valley proper. The fog that was holding off that sun reflected and amplified the very regular sound of her footfalls and the complaints of the magpies she disturbed as she followed an overgrown fence row.

It also shrouded Millikan House. Its doctor builders had flaunted their wealth with an overabundance of gables and dormers and chimneys. Seeing it now, almost in silhouette, Anne was reminded of an English manor from one of her favorite books. At least, she was reminded of her mental picture of such a place.

She was about to turn for the last sprint to breakfast when she saw a figure come around one corner of Millikan House. The form was no more distinct than the building, but Anne could tell it was a man of medium height and slight build who was walking with a limp. The elusive Mr. Gitry.

Without breaking stride, Anne raised an arm in greeting. The other turned abruptly and hobbled away.

* * * *

III

The next morning, Anne sat in a small, storefront coffee shop, the Elk Horn Cafe, a block from Jackson’s town square. Across from her was the woman Anne considered her real boss, Mattie Koval, owner and head river guide of Snake River Explorers.

“We’re starting to get some serious snow melt,” Koval said. “From now until the Fourth of July, the Snake will be running so fast we’ll be doing our four-hour float trip in two and a half. If you were on the river right now, you’d hear the rocks on the bottom clacking together like billiard balls. It’s the worst time to train you or the best time, depending on how game you are.”

“Bring it on,” Anne said.

She’d been trying to guess Koval’s age, without success. The weathered skin of the guide’s face and neck suggested that she was in her forties. But the long blonde hair, secured in a loose ponytail, and toned body belonged to a much younger woman. Working the long sweeps of a raft loaded down with tourists kept you in shape, Anne decided.

Koval noticed Anne examining her arm. She held it up and flexed the biceps.

“Not much now, after a winter of flipping through catalogs, but nobody wants to arm wrestle me come Labor Day. You won’t have any trouble handling a raft, either, not a big girl like you.”

Anne unconsciously stooped in her chair, and Koval laughed. “Never be ashamed of being tall,” she said. “You can’t be too tall or too rich.”

“You can so be too rich,” the waitress busing the table behind Koval said.

“How’s that Rachel?” Koval asked. As she did, she winked at Anne, as though to say, “Watch this.”

The woman threw her rag down on the table she’d been cleaning and crossed to them. She was olive skinned and as solid as Koval was spare. Anne was sure she wouldn’t want to arm wrestle the waitress before or after Labor Day.

“I said you can so be too rich,” Rachel repeated. “It isn’t the rich who are ruining this valley. It’s the too-damned rich. The people so rich they don’t need to rent their houses out when they’re not in them. It’s bad enough to lose the ranch land, but if we don’t pick up tourists in exchange, we’re sunk. We need rental properties turning over every week or two, new people buying groceries and T-shirts, eating out, booking raft trips. We don’t need big places sitting empty, giving work to one layabout caretaker apiece. Present company excepted,” she added to Anne.

Before Anne could ask how Rachel knew about her other job, Koval said, “I mentioned that you were looking after a house.”

“Osprey House,” Anne volunteered.

“Oh,” Rachel said. “So you’re out there in the boonies with Chaz Gitry.”

She and Koval exchanged significant looks.

“Chaz is our local lothario,” Koval explained. “Snowboard instructor in the winter, mountain guide in the summer, hound dog all year long.”

“I’ve heard he’s mysterious,” Anne said.

“Heard that from a man, I’ll bet,” Koval said. “There isn’t a man around here who can understand Chaz’s success with the ladies. Shaggy and homely he may be, but the boy’s got something.”

“She’s talking about the ex-wife,” Rachel said to Koval. “She’s what’s so mysterious.” Her attitude had softened somewhat at the mention of Gitry. Now it hardened all over again. “She sneaks in to see him about once a month. Chaz got plenty cagey after that started happening.”

“It’s a good story, though,” Koval said. “Kind of romantic.”

Again, Anne leaned unconsciously, this time forward in her seat.

“Nobody even knew Chaz had been married until she started showing up six months back,” Koval said, “wearing dark glasses and a scarf over her hair. She lives in Idaho somewhere. Idaho Falls, maybe, right across the state line. Drives in through the pass at Victor. Wimp Dragoo saw her up there once buying gas.”

“Can’t get away with anything around here,” Rachel said, her look so pointed that Anne felt she was being warned.

To cover an incipient blush, Anne said, “There’s an airport in Idaho Falls. Maybe she flies in from somewhere.”

Rachel waved a dismissive hand. “There’s a better airport right here in Jackson.”

Koval said, “After she’d snuck in three months in a row, Chaz admitted the truth. Seems years back he married his childhood sweetheart, Laura. They were happy for a few years skiing and bumming around. Then Laura decided she wanted more. Chaz wouldn’t change, so they parted ways. Laura must have found the success she was after. The one time I saw her, she was all in fur.”

“But she couldn’t get Chaz out of her system,” Rachel cut in. “So she keeps coming back.”

“He must not have gotten over her, either,” Koval countered. “He hasn’t been the same old Chaz since she started visiting. No more chasing around after every loose ski bunny. Comes into town less and less.”

“Hasn’t come at all in the last two weeks,” Rachel said, as though it was a personal affront.

“He’s become a recluse,” Anne said, quoting Wayne Sedam again.

The waitress nodded. “I heard that last week he quit his mountain guide job. Left Bill Granger flat just when the season’s about to start. Sent him an e-mail about hurting his leg.”

“He was limping when I saw him this morning,” Anne said.

“He’d better heal fast, then,” Koval said. “Laura is overdue for a visit. There’s been snow up in the passes until this week.”

“Here’s hoping for an avalanche,” Rachel said and stomped away.

* * * *

That night, Anne settled in with a book in the living room of the little ranch. The book was a dog-eared romance novel, Love’s Forbidden Memory. She’d selected it from her cache of similar titles because its plot—lovers separated by fortune and class but unable to forget one another—was similar to the tale she’d been told about Chaz Gitry and his Laura.

All the books Anne had brought with her were a legacy from her mother, who had died when Anne was very young. When Anne had turned sixteen, her father, the honest, practical man who’d raised her, had given her a box of her mother’s things. In the bottom of the box, Anne had found a dozen yellowed paperbacks, all romance novels. She’d come to think of the books as a message in a bottle from her dead mother, a glimpse into an alien world of excitement and feeling totally unlike the workaday ranch where she’d grown up.

Anne dozed over the novel’s familiar pages and awoke to the sound of an alarm coming from one corner of the small front room. The source was the computer that monitored the security cameras and systems in Osprey House. Anne had used it to spy on the cleaning crew as they’d watched a soap opera in the log home’s great room. Now the computer’s screen was alternately flashing red and yellow.

Anne clicked on the single message being displayed: heating alert. A second message came up, informing her that the temperature in the main house had dropped to fifty-seven degrees. It should have been seventy-two. Anne knew that because Wayne Sedam had mentioned the setting as yet another example of the Zollmans’ disregard for money.

As Anne struggled to shake off the last of her sleep, the displayed temperature dropped to fifty-six. She checked the outside temperature. Thirty-one.

Without bothering to get her coat off its peg, she grabbed the keys to Osprey House and followed the asphalt path to the back door. She’d entered the house and begun to switch on lights before it occurred to her that the temperature drop might have been caused by a burglar who’d defeated the security system and left a window or door open. She’d also forgotten to put down the book she’d been reading. She placed it on the ornate hallway table, whose carved legs were rearing dragons.

The inside of the furnace room was the warmest place in the house. One of the two duplicate systems was humming away, the one that provided hot water to the showers and the taps. The other made only the odd ticking noise, like a cooling car engine. Anne could see no leaking water and smell no escaping gas. She turned to the system’s control panel, feeling like a character in a movie who has to select the right button from dozens to prevent a meltdown or an explosion. A single instruction blinked at her from the panel’s LCD screen: stand by. Anne weighed the advice, decided it was worth following, and retreated to the kitchen.

Once there, she debated with herself over whether to call Sedam, hesitating because of the hour, one o’clock, and because she hated to ruin her record of independence. As she debated, she happened to look out the window. A light was burning in the upper story of Millikan House, over the garage, she thought. Chaz Gitry’s room, she was willing to bet.

She went back to the ranch house long enough to grab her down jacket and the keys to the ATV. She could have walked the distance easily, but she’d remembered Gitry’s hurt leg. And the four-wheeler’s barely muffled engine would announce her better than any doorbell.

Nevertheless, she rang the doorbell when she arrived at Millikan House. The porch light snapped on immediately, and Anne stepped back so Gitry could look her over though the front door’s peephole. When the door opened a crack, Anne was surprised to see that the room beyond it was dark.

“What do you want?” a man’s voice asked.

“Mr. Gitry, I’m the new caretaker at—”

“I’ve seen you.” The curt response was a restatement of the original question.

“Something’s gone wrong with the heat over there,” Anne said. “I’m afraid the pipes might freeze.”

“Not that cold tonight,” the other said. “You should make it through to morning. Call the manager then.”

“He said I should ask you if I needed help. Said it was part of the caretaker’s code.”

She’d hoped for a laugh from Gitry but got a grunt instead. And an excuse: “I hurt my leg.”

“I know. I’ll drive you over and bring you back.”

This time Gitry sighed. “Wait a minute.”

* * * *

Anne was seated on the idling ATV when he came out, pulling on a coat that seemed too big for him. Koval had called him a boy, and Anne wondered now whether a boyish quality was part of Gitry’s mysterious appeal.

He climbed on behind Anne, grasping her shoulder with one hand. “Okay.”

At the house, Gitry headed for the mechanical room without waiting to be shown the way.

Anne said, “You know the place.”

She got her first good look at him then, in the light of the front hall. As Koval had said, he was shaggy, his ginger hair unkempt and his razor stubble approaching a beard. But the river guide had also called Gitry homely, and Anne considered that a slight if not a slur. She thought Gitry’s narrow face and sharp features would have been handsome but for his eyes. They were so dark-rimmed they almost looked bruised. And they were haunted. By thoughts of the lost Laura, Anne told herself. The unworthy Laura, who had turned her back on love.

“I should know my way around,” Gitry was saying. “Your predecessor could never figure out the boilers, either. What happened to him?”

“Joined a band,” Anne said.

Gitry grunted again. “I noticed the guitar playing had stopped. Thought the coyotes had complained.”

Once inside the mechanical room, he glanced briefly at the control panel of the dormant unit and then began pressing buttons. “Happen to know the date?” he asked over his shoulder.

“It’s the last day of May.”

“Before midnight it was. Now it’s the first day of June. That’s why the thing went to standby mode. The genius who set it back in January told it to expect new instructions in June. Guess he didn’t know anything about the weather up here. Thought it’d be balmy by now. Serves them right for putting in a system that has more brains than it needs to do a simple job.”

By then, the furnace was humming. Gitry showed Anne what he had done, had her repeat the instructions, and led her back into the hallway. There he noticed the paperback she’d left on the Chinese table.

“Love’s Forbidden Memory,” he read. “All memories of that poison should be forbidden. Yours?”

Anne plucked the book from his hand.

Gitry considered her curiously. “This mausoleum have a coffeepot?”

“There’s one in my place,” Anne said. Before Gitry could jump to the wrong conclusion, she added, “We shouldn’t use the Zollmans’ stuff.”

“Why not? They won’t be using it again. And I’m pretty sure that caretaker’s code of yours has a clause about grabbing whatever you can. Kitchen this way?”

He went off without waiting for an answer, limping more than ever. Following along, Anne asked, “How did you hurt your leg? Snow-boarding?”

“Chopping wood. Hell of a thing for a caretaker to admit.”

“Your mind must have been somewhere else,” Anne almost said, biting it off at the last second. Instead she asked how he knew the Zollmans. “I heard they were only here once.”

Gitry had located the coffeemaker. He concentrated for a moment on filling the pot at the island sink. Then he said, “She was only here once. He came out regularly while this place was being built. It was his baby. Presented it to the missus like a proud cat presenting a dead mouse. Went over like a dead mouse too. There’s a moral there somewhere.”

“Let your wife pick the house?” Anne asked.

“More like, if you’ve got to make payments on a wife, make damn sure your checks don’t bounce.”

He wasn’t really speaking of the Zollmans now, Anne decided. He was speaking of Laura, the woman who had tired of Gitry’s hand-to-mouth life.

Anne realized with a start that the caretaker was addressing her. “You awake? I asked where the coffee was. Never mind. I found it.”

While it brewed, Gitry limped to the windows that faced the lights he’d left burning. He stared out for a long time without speaking.

Forget her, Anne thought, She’s no good. Aloud, she said, “She won’t come tonight. It’s too late.”

Gitry turned on her, his bruised eyes flashing. Then his gaze widened to take in the dark timbers around them, the steaming coffeemaker, the neon-bordered clock that glowed above the sinks.

“It is late,” he said. “Sorry. I haven’t talked to anyone in a while. Didn’t realize you could miss it so much. I’ll drive myself back. You can pick up the ATV in the morning when you finish your run.”

* * * *

Anne spent the next morning replacing a fence post on one corner of the Zollman property. It was the corner closest to Millikan House, but that was only a coincidence, as Anne told herself repeatedly. The fence post was certainly rotten or at least showing a tendency that way. The project took hours of what turned out to be her first warm day in Jackson, but Gitry never appeared.

She regretted the soreness in her shoulders later when she reported to the headquarters of Snake River Explorers for a training session. Leaving her cats to mind the ramshackle building, Mattie Koval loaded her entire staff—two experienced guides, two trainee guides, and a grizzled driver—into one of her two white vans and headed north out of Jackson on 191.

The route took them past the National Elk Refuge, a huge expanse of bottom land drained by the Snake’s tributaries, where, according to Koval’s running commentary, thousands of elk gathered to shelter and feed in the winter. On the other side of the highway was the Jackson airport. Anne watched an airliner on final approach, its wings rocking in the winds off the Tetons, and thought of Rachel, the stout waitress. The connection escaped Anne for a moment. Then she remembered Rachel’s curt dismissal of the idea that Gitry’s Laura might be flying in from distant parts because she would never have chosen Idaho Falls’s airport over Jackson’s. Something about that reasoning had bothered Anne at the time and bothered her again now.

She was still thinking about it when they arrived at Moose Junction and unloaded one of the big red rafts from the trailer behind the van. Anne then watched as Koval prepared herself, donning first a compact life vest, then fingerless gloves, then a broad-brimmed hat with a chin strap. Finally, the guide put on mirrored sunglasses that completely hid her eyes. They reminded Anne of Koval’s description of Laura in dark glasses with a scarf over her hair. Anne felt she had the key to the airport mystery, but before she could work it out, Koval was calling them into the raft.

Jubal, the driver, pushed them down the slick ramp and into the swift brown current, then turned and walked away without a backward glance. Koval was at the sweeps, standing in the center of the raft between metal uprights that held the oarlocks at waist height. As she worked the long oars, she lectured on the best way to negotiate the Moose Junction Bridge, already looming above them. Once past it, she handed over the sweeps to Anne and the other trainee, Daniel, in alternating ten-minute shifts. Koval taught them to spin the raft and to move it left and right in the current, while the two experienced guides kept watch for “strainers,” Koval’s term for debris in the river.

Anne ended every session at the sweeps with aching shoulders and the conviction that the Snake was really the one in charge. During the last of her shifts, she was chased down the river by a monster strainer, a thirty-foot pine tree, stripped of its branches and bark but with a huge root ball that rose out of the water like a galleon’s high stern. Or so it seemed to Anne as she struggled to stay clear of the skeleton ship that paced them without masts or sails.

By the time the strainer finally grounded on a bar, the Teton Village Bridge, which marked the end of the run, was in sight. Even at a distance, Anne could see the water roiling at the base of the bridge’s midstream support like a continually crashing wave. Just short of the span was the landing area. Jubal stood there, hands in his pockets.

Anne extended the handles of the sweeps in Koval’s direction. The guide shook her head.

“You’re doing fine. You can take us in. Just don’t miss. The next chance is fourteen miles downstream. Start moving us over. Bow to the bank so you can see what you’re doing. Push on those oars, girl. Push!”

Jubal’s only sign of interest was the removal of his hands from his pockets when Koval tossed him a line. The raft was still moving downstream so fast that Anne was sure the little man would be pulled in after them. But he stood like a bollard, pivoting the raft shoreward when the line went taut.

“Ship your oars,” Koval ordered. “Fred, Bob, give Jubal a hand.”

The guides splashed into the shallows. By the time Anne had the sweeps secured, the raft was aground on the rocky bank.

“Good work, Anne. Good work, everybody. Jubal, show these newbies how to back the van down.”

* * * *

VII

Back at their base, Anne volunteered to hose off the raft for the chance of a private word with Koval. It came when the guide emerged from the office carrying two sodas, her cats trotting behind her.

Anne thought she might be in for a performance evaluation. She wanted to discuss something else, the insight that had been inspired back at Moose Junction by Koval’s sunglasses, so she spoke first.

“I think I know why Laura doesn’t use the Jackson Airport.”

“Gitry’s Laura?” Koval handed her one of the sodas. “Have you seen her?”

“No,” Anne said, “but I met him last night. Early this morning, I mean.” She watched Koval’s mouth draw down in the same lopsided grimace she’d used whenever Anne had dragged an oar. “Nothing happened.”

“Sure of that?” Koval asked. “What’s this about airports?”

“It’s something that’s been bothering me. Rachel thinks Laura must live in Idaho because she drives instead of flying into Jackson. It doesn’t make sense to Rachel that someone would fly into Idaho Falls and drive over the mountains.”

“To me either,” Koval said.

“But you said Laura wears dark glasses and a scarf over her hair. In other words, she’s wearing a disguise. A disguise wouldn’t work if she flew in. To fly back out, she’d have to show a photo ID. I think she’s remarried. That’s how she found her better life. She doesn’t want her new husband to know she can’t give up her old one. Gitry is wasting himself on a woman who’s cheating on two men at once.”

“When he could be doing what?” Koval asked.

Anne didn’t answer, and the two women stood side by side, Anne scattering the cats with the jerky movements of her hose, Koval waving occasionally to cars passing on the highway.

Finally, the guide said, “I hope I didn’t make a mistake by telling you about Chaz Gitry. He’s an interesting man, maybe even an exciting one, but he isn’t a man I’d wish on a friend of mine.

“I probably should keep my mouth shut now, but if you’re right about this airport thing, it opens up an even more sordid possibility. You should be ready for it. It’s easier to deal with things you see coming.”

“What is it?” Anne asked.

“That disguise business has always bothered me. I mean, why would Laura go to the trouble? It’s not like anyone around here knows what Gitry’s ex looks like. But you’ve got me thinking that maybe we’d know her after all.”

“How could you? You didn’t even know Chaz had been married until he told you.”

“Exactly. We only know because he told us. Suppose that was a cover story. Suppose there is no Laura. This valley is the two-months-a-year address of a lot of wealthy wives. Maybe one of them got a taste of Chaz Gitry and ended up hooked.

“Like I said, if you see a rock ahead you can pull away from it. Any reasonable person would.”

* * * *

VIII

Koval’s last words haunted Anne as the long day slipped into evening, both because she knew the warning was well meant and because she knew she wouldn’t heed it. Again and again she thought of the tree trunk that had chased her down the Snake that afternoon, sometimes grinding away at the bank, sometimes disappearing behind an island, but always coming back. The fascination of Chaz Gitry was exactly the same: nagging, powerful, and—Anne couldn’t quite say how—dangerous.

She was less bothered by Koval’s suggestion that Laura wasn’t Gitry’s ex at all, but only a trophy wife who wouldn’t stay in her case. She had to admit it was the logical conclusion of the chain of reasoning she’d started herself. But that only made her more certain that Gitry was wasting his time with the wrong woman. What was more, Anne was sure that Gitry knew it too. That was the only possible explanation for the desperation she’d seen in his eyes.

Or maybe not the only explanation. While she cooked a dinner she didn’t want, Anne wondered if Koval hadn’t been wrong in one particular at least. Maybe it was Gitry and not the straying wife who’d had a taste and gotten hooked. Maybe the local lothario had made the mistake of falling for a woman who only wanted a risky fling.

But who was this woman if she wasn’t Laura? At first, Anne considered that a question she’d never be able to answer, new to the valley as she was. She could see Gitry’s woman without sunglasses and scarf and never know her, unless she turned out to be Mattie Koval or Rachel. The only other Jackson women she knew were just names and last names at that: a Dr. Millikan and a Mrs. Zollman.

Anne, who had given up on dinner by then and was sitting with Love’s Forbidden Memory unopened on her lap, asked herself if it could be Dr. Millikan, the woman who owned the house Gitry watched. That relationship would certainly have thrown them together. She pictured the place as she’d seen it the morning of the fog, a spectral house, imagined Gitry alone, walking through rooms filled with the doctor’s things, week after week, waiting for her to slip back. That would more than account for those bruised, sleepless eyes.

Putting her book aside, Anne crossed to the computer and signed on to the Internet. She searched on “Dr. Millikan,” adding “cardiologist” and “New York City” to narrow the field. She was hoping for a photograph but found instead a brief biography on a hospital’s website. The bio proved to be enough. Dr. Millikan, first name Edith, was sixty-six years old.

Almost as an afterthought, Anne entered “Zollman.” Wayne Sedam had mentioned only one other useable fact: Zollman’s husband was a dot com millionaire. Anne added “Internet” to the search parameters and hit the enter key. If she could first identify the husband, maybe she could backtrack to the wife, perhaps finding a photo of her at some charity event in Malibu. The search returned an entry for a Jonathan Zollman, inventor of an Internet security system called Osprey.

“Bingo,” Anne said aloud, clicking on the link for the site.

Its welcome page featured a color photograph of a smiling young man with ginger hair and sharp features, the man she’d met the night before when she’d shown up uninvited at Millikan House.

* * * *

Anne sat staring at the photograph for a long time. Then the humming of the computer made her realize that she was in danger. Its owner might be monitoring her searches at that moment, might even have tapped into Osprey House’s security cameras to watch her as she had watched the team of house cleaners.

She signed off and made a show of turning out all the lights in the little house before going into her bedroom. Once there, she bent down to look under her bed. She felt more than saw the box her mother’s books had traveled in and pushed it aside. Behind it was another box her father had given her, this one when she’d left his house for good. It contained a few tools, a favorite fishing reel, and, wrapped in a well oiled rag, a Colt single-action .44.

Anne retrieved the gun and a box of shells. She tested the pistol’s action and loaded it. Only then did she pause to listen for any sound of movement outside the ranch house. Hearing nothing, she opened a window and slipped out. She made a wide detour around the main house and its cameras, crossing the meadow that ran parallel to the road.

As she walked, she thought it all through. She understood now why Koval’s description of Gitry had fit him no better than his coat, why he knew his way around Osprey House, why he hadn’t been seen in town for weeks. Anne even knew why “Laura” had worn a disguise when she’d driven in from the airport at Idaho Falls. Mrs. Zollman had only been to Jackson once under her real name, when she’d somehow met Chaz Gitry, but that once might have been enough for some local to remember and place her.

When Anne arrived at Millikan House, she was thinking of the nickname Wayne Sedam had given it with uncanny insight: Heart Disease House. This time the front door opened wide to her ring. The man she’d known as Gitry wore the same clothes he’d had on the night before. Anne decided that if he hadn’t slept in them, it was only because he hadn’t slept at all.

“I can’t visit tonight,” he said. “She’s coming. I got an e-mail this afternoon.”

“We’ll wait for her together,” Anne said. She’d been holding the big Colt behind her leg. She raised it now. “Back inside, Mr. Zollman.”

“Mr. Zollman? I don’t—”

“I found your picture on the Internet. Back on in. I have to call the police.”

The man in the shadows licked his lips. “You haven’t called them yet?”

“I couldn’t risk your wife showing up while I was at it. You’d only need a minute to kill her.”

Anne followed Zollman into the house, turning on lights as they went. Under the florescent ceiling of the very modern kitchen, he looked to Anne like a corpse prepared by a careless undertaker.

When she picked up the phone, she saw Zollman eye a rack of knives. Then he turned his back on it, limped to a chrome and steel breakfast nook, and sat down.

After she’d finished her call, Anne asked, “How’d you really hurt your leg?”

“Gitry threw a hatchet at me when he saw my gun. I think I only meant to scare him until he did that.”

“Where’s the gun?”

“Upstairs.”

“And Gitry?”

“Under a pile of firewood. I didn’t think it would be weeks until my wife came. If only it hadn’t snowed up in the passes. If only that pothead caretaker at my place hadn’t quit, bringing you around.”

“If only you’d really gone to the South Pacific,” Anne wanted to say. “If only you’d found someone else.” She got as far as “if only.” Then a siren sounded in the distance.

“Do something for me,” Zollman said. “I really love that house. Would you look after it?”

“Always,” Anne said.