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headed back toward Somes Sound. Bear Island loomed to her port side, dark and forbidding, its mysterious, reclusive owners seldom in evidence, then Boar Island, smaller and virtually treeless. Boar had a jagged silhouette that reminded Denise of a ruined castle, the turrets half crumbling. The lady who owned it had a bad heart and was currently in a convalescent home in Bangor.
    That’s what happens to women who have no children to care for them, Denise thought. In old age they become orphans and are thrown on the state for their keep. Denise did not want to end her life the way it had begun, an unwanted orphan beholden to the state of Maine for a meal and a roof over her head.
    That brought her back to the battered blonde, Paulette Duffy.
    And all the new possibilities.

 
    FIVE
    Elizabeth knew she’d stepped in it, Heath could tell. As three adult stares bored into her, she groaned and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. This show of sass did more to cheer up Heath than a thousand clowns in a barrel full of monkeys. “You said you ‘didn’t exactly’ have a fight. What is ‘not exactly’ having a fight?” Heath asked.
    Regardless of the incidents that should have aged Elizabeth before her time, she retained that magnificent innocence of face one seldom sees in anyone over the age of ten. When she was with people she trusted, or too tired to keep her guard up, her emotions could be as easily read as those of a two-year-old. Heath watched in loving fascination as Elizabeth decided to lie, thought better of it, decided to cry, changed her mind, and, finally, began.
    “You know Mr. and Mrs. Edleson, Tiff’s mom and dad?” Elizabeth asked. The question was meant for Gwen and Anna. Of course Heath knew them. Sam was around forty, thick sandy hair, nice build. If he hadn’t been cursed with a seriously weak chin he would have been a handsome man. A chin implant probably would have changed his life. As it was, Heath noticed, Sam vacillated between arrogance and obsequiousness. Terry, his wife, said he worked as an apartment and condo manager for a company that rented real estate to vacationers by the week or month. Ostensibly this job was what brought the family from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Boulder, Colorado. Terry was a part-time bookkeeper for an auto-body company. In her mid-to-late thirties, she ran to fat, twenty pounds or so overweight, no longer particularly obese by American standards. Her hair was the same color as Sam’s, but hers was from a bottle. Overall she seemed pleasant: pleasant face, pleasant voice. Heath couldn’t think of any serious drawbacks to her as a neighbor—or even as the mother of Elizabeth’s best friend—except that Terry talked too much in general, and too much about her God and her husband in particular.
    The moment she’d spot Heath outside, words would begin to flow, a river with no end in sight. Heath wasn’t as quick at escaping as she’d been in her salad days. There was a long trek from the mailbox to the ramp beside the kitchen steps with nothing but a low hedge between her property and the Edlesons’. During these rolling social events, Heath had been informed in far more detail than she cared for that Sam was cut out for bigger things, Sam was unhappy in his job, Sam had always thought … God had a plan for Sam, but …
    “I vaguely remember the Edlesons,” Anna said, cutting into Heath’s thoughts. “You had Paul and me over as backup when you invited them for dinner last summer.”
    Last summer. Heath was surprised. She’d thought she’d made it a point to socialize with her neighbors, and especially the parents of her daughter’s best friend, at least two or three times in the past year. Evidently not. There’d always been an excuse not to set herself up for an evening of Sam’s seesaw personality and Terry’s mouth.
    “I say hi whenever I see them,” Gwen said. “Though if it’s Mrs. Edleson, ‘hi’ can take a chunk out of one’s