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matters to you, Caroline saw her think, and despised herself for her question. For a time, Betty seemed to study her. “You’re a famous woman, Caroline. You did that alone—without him, or any of us. Is that what you wanted?”
    You know what I wanted, Caroline thought with sudden bitterness. With a restraint that took all her effort, she said, “How can you even ask that?”
    Betty looked away. After a moment, she said, “Brett’s upstairs, Caroline.”
    Caroline shook her head. “I’m not ready yet. Not for that.”
    Betty turned to her in surprise. “Then why are you here.”? Don’t you understand that they may charge her with murder … ?”
    Caroline did not bother to explain herself.
    “Where is he?” she asked.
CHAPTER TWO
    In a jacket borrowed from Betty, Caroline climbed the twisting trail up the side of Masters Hill.
    It was where, Caroline remembered, he always climbed to think.
    “He wasn’t expecting you this soon,” Betty had told her. “And I couldn’t stop him.”
    It took Caroline a moment to recall that he was well past seventy, another moment to raise her eyebrows.
    “Heart trouble,” Betty said, as if to a stranger. “An attack last year—mild, but a warning. He won’t give up hiking, though, or even talk about it.”
    Traversing the steep hillside, Caroline remembered when he would take her with him to the top: the child then, and the woman now, could not imagine him as vulnerable.
    But she could tell that he hiked seldom now. The trail—once well trod by the Masters family as they followed his tall, lean frame—kept disappearing in underbrush or beneath a carpet of needles: only the thread of Caroline’s memory helped her find it again. It rose between thick pine trees at a steep angle, causing her to walk sideways, sometimes slipping or pausing for breath.
    She was out of practice, Caroline thought to her disgust. But that was not the reason her temples pounded. Part of it was Betty; a greater part the unseen girl. But the other part lay moments ahead.
    She reached a clearing: a granite-face bare cliff weathered by wind and rain. When she was a child, too young to
    reach the top, she would stop here with her father. Now she
    paused, half expecting to find him.
    No one.
    Caroline sat on the rock, resting. From here, the view went on for miles. There were only a few clearings now; nature had reclaimed the land, shrouding abandoned farms and old stone walls as the energy of man moved west, out of sight and mind. As land turned fallow, the Masters family had bought it, with a fortune made first in lumber, then by selling their private railroad line—which once serviced their mills—to the Boston and Maine Railroad. This was not an investment, in the ordinary sense. It was a statement, tinged with unspoken hubris: The Masterses were here to stay, as timeless as the land.
    But they were not. Years later, they had sold what land they could; Caroline suspected that the prideful look of the Masters home had cost her father dearly and that, in his heart, Channing Masters feared that he would be the last generation to live and die in that same house. So that Caroline, leaving, had abandoned more than a family.
    But he would go with pride, and no one outside the family would read its decline on the face of his home. The place was too much part of him, and he part of it.
    This hill remained his property. The entire town could be seen from here, a toy New England village in a clearing. Caroline still recalled when they once sat here and she asked how Resolve had been named. She had imagined some stirring piece of history, a stand against Indians or for independence. But when her father turned, his eyes had the light of humor.
    “Resolve,” he said, with mock solemnity, “earned its name by seceding from Connaughton Falls. In the storied conflict over total versus partial immersion baptism. Back then, Caroline, New Englanders took their religion to heart.”
    She saw that he was not