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her.
    They stopped when they saw Stan at her knee, then Glen came on with Gillian Farmer following cautiously. Ten feet away Glen stopped and spoke to the dog. “Hello there, Stan. It is Stan, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right,” Anne said.
    “C’mere, boy.” McCarthy dropped to his heels and held out a hand. “You remember me. I’m a friend, right?”
    The dog shot his mistress a glance, and at her gesturewent forward to snuffle with his flat nose at the man’s hand. Something tickled his memory, because his tail wagged briefly before he turned his attention to Gillian. With dignity he walked up to her and examined her feet and the hand she ventured out; then, without expressing an opinion, he returned to Anne.
    The incident with the dog confirmed Gillian’s suspicions that McCarthy knew Anne Waverly as something more than just an occasional colleague. His intimate acquaintance with the road had been obvious from the time they left the blacktop, for one thing. He knew the dog, knew that the door they would enter was not the one behind Anne Waverly but the kitchen door around the side of the house. He seemed unsurprised by the sharp difference between the dusty, rustic log exterior and the rich simplicity inside, and when he sniffed the air, it was more with the welcome of homecoming than puzzlement at the peculiar combination of the rich, yeasty odor emanating from two pans on the sideboard underlaid with the raw bite of cordite. The cap was put on her confirmation by his first words to Anne.
    “Target practice?”
    “I thought it might be a good idea,” she said. “I was getting rusty.” She walked past them and pulled shut a narrow door to what looked like a pantry.
    “You shoot indoors?” Gillian asked in disbelief.
    McCarthy laughed—actually laughed. She hadn’t thought him capable of anything beyond a rueful chuckle. “Like Sherlock Holmes picking out the Queen’s initials on the wall?” he asked, which reference meant nothing to Gillian. He looked at Anne and asked, “May I show her?” When she nodded, he went to another door and started down the open wooden stairs heading into a basement.
    The bare bulb lit only the immediate area, but McCarthy reached over and flipped a series of switches, andto her amazement Gillian found herself at one end of what could only be called an indoor shooting range, complete with a man-shaped paper target hanging at the far end.
    It was also, incongruously, a farmhouse cellar lined with cupboards and shelves, bearing canned goods, economy-sized packages of toilet paper and soap powder, odd shapes wrapped in black plastic garbage bags, and an array of hand tools and power saws—all the necessities of life in the woods. McCarthy called her over to a low table on which lay a pair of ear protectors, an automatic pistol, and the equipment for cleaning it. Standing next to him, she surveyed the panorama of bottled foodstuffs, the fruit on the top shelf, red tomato sauce below, a neat display of jams and preserves and shelled nuts that ended three-quarters of the way down the room at an arrangement of hay bales, tightly laid up to the ceiling. They were tired and dusty-looking, and no longer gave out enough odor to stand up to the gunpowder; they had been in place for years.
    Bemused, Gillian studied the odd juxtaposition of home canning and the hanging target with the cluster of shots in its center until she realized that the FBI man seemed to expect a reaction.
    “Wouldn’t want a ricochet to smash your peaches, I suppose,” she commented.
    He looked a little disappointed at her lack of amusement, but personally she thought it a bit crazy. The woman lived in the middle of nowhere; why not shoot outside, where she could practice at distances of more than twenty yards? Or at a proper shooting range?
    “Bring up a bottle of tomatoes when you come, would you, Glen?” the voice at the top of the stairs asked prosaically. “And don’t forget to shut off the