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you? Do you know him from before?”
    “Randall Carter means absolutely nothing to me. Less thannothing,” Maggie said in a flat voice. “And yes, I know him from before.”
    “Aha!”
    “Aha, what?” she snapped. “I can’t stand the man. He’s a sleazoid, he’s a worthless piece of garbage, he’s—”
    Kate giggled. “I can’t imagine someone as elegant as Randall Carter being called garbage.”
    A reluctant smile played around the corners of Maggie’s generous mouth. “You’re right. The man reserves all his emotion for his wardrobe.”
    “How would you know that?” Kate asked. “Were you in a position to ask for his emotions?”
    “I’ll tell you what, Kate,” she said in a friendly voice. “I won’t pester you about your convoluted feelings for Caleb, and you won’t interfere in my past relationship with Randall. Believe me, it’s very past, very old, and very dead. The only thing I feel for him is contempt.”
    “It’s a deal—if you answer one question.”
    Here we go again
, she thought with a shudder. At least it couldn’t be as horrifying as Randall’s unanswerable question. “All right.”
    “Was it six years ago that you knew him?”
    Maggie looked at her sleepy younger sister with surprise. “Why do you ask that?”
    “Because the whole family knows that Maggie the Indestructible self-destructed six years ago. And no one ever knew what or who caused it. Was it Randall?”
    That was almost as horrifying as Randall’s question, she thought grimly. She considered denying it. She considered getting up and walking out of the room. But Kate was right—they were in too much trouble as it was. Kate didn’t need to know just how much Randall suspected. Maggie herself didn’t even know—Kate had walked into the room immediately after that bombshell of the grapefruit marmalade, and he’d been polite, charming, and distant and had left a courteous half-hour afterward without another word about Francis’s demise. But his silence wouldn’t last forever.
    Maggie looked over at Kate’s sleepy face. “It was Randall,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
    Kate’s muffled sound of protest deteriorated into a quiet little snore. Maggie sat watching her sister and took another sip of whiskey. It had been Randall, indeed, she thought, and gave her weary mind over to the memories that the alcohol couldn’t keep at bay.
    She’d been so damned young six years ago, younger than her twenty-eight years at the time, and she still had an extraordinary faith in human beings that was downright stupid, when she looked back on it. She’d gone through a disrupted childhood that had included a mother who was feckless and charming and never there when you needed her, a father who was cold and distant, three stepfathers, and innumerable honorable “uncles.” She’d been forcibly introduced to sex by one of her drunken stepfathers, and if the psychologists that her outraged and suddenly maternal mother had provided had managed to convince her that it wasn’t her fault, she had had yet to prove to herself that she could do more than just manage a physical relationship.
    But still and all, she had somehow expected the best from people, despite their lapses. Maybe Granny Bennett had taught her that before she died; maybe Queenie had managed to instill it in her. She’d learned to look past her mother’s selfish irresponsibility to the very real love beneath it, and she’d learned to accept her father’s distance. She’d learned to be strong and loving to her younger sisters, generous with her mother, and accepting of human frailty—until she made the mistake of falling in love with a man who didn’t deserve her.
    Why she’d ever been fool enough to work for the CIA was another matter. She’d been restless and bored and had needed a better outlet than law school for her razor-sharp intelligence and her longing for excitement. All her life she’d been torn between her need for security and her need