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your heart.
    Love, Katherine.
    P.S. If your fingers aren’t stained with paint when you read this, perhaps then it was simply a dream, although one I will always recall with the fondest thoughts.
    Stranahan had set aside the letter and examined his hands. He smiled at the umber stains under the fingernails of his brush hand. He taped the letter to the back of the sketch he’d made in the hotel room and framed it in a simple walnut frame. Within three months of meeting Katherine O’Reilly, he had cleared his pending cases and sublet his office, moved to Vermont, and begun to paint full time. He had already had some success in Boston, but it seemed only appropriate that the first painting he sold at a local gallery was derived from the sketch. It was titled
Awakening
, done with broad brushstrokes in pastel flesh tones and dove grays, and fetched him the grand sum of $400. Its subject bore no resemblance to his eventual métier in landscape and angling watercolors, but it was a start, and had led to everything else, including, he thought ruefully, his marriage and divorce and the long drive to Montana.
    Tonight, listening to the voice of a stranger, he felt a stirring of intimacy that scared him a little. It was easier to bask in the sad reflections of a lost love, to imagine even that there was still something to go home to after he and Beth had exhausted all the avenues of their escape from each other. But the words of Katherine O’Reilly hauntedhim, for, long before the end, most of the words were gone from his own marriage.
    Stranahan picked up his beer bottle and carried it back to the bar. It was after one. The bartender was wiping the counter and the only patron left was the logger Phil Halverson.
    He looked at Stranahan down his whiskey purpled nose. “That was a helluva woman, voice like a fuggin’ angel. I don’t see the shadder come morning, you just might find me on the second floor, ten toes up, and ten toes down. Yeah,” he said, nodding to himself, “ten toes up, ten toes down! What do you think a that?”
    “It’s a starry night. I think you’re going to see the shadow,” Stranahan said.
    The logger wiped a finger under the filthy brim of his cap as Stranahan left, then stuck it in his mouth. He chased the taste of salt sweat with another swig of beer.
    “Helluva woman,” he said to himself.

CHAPTER SIX
The Scream
    M artha Ettinger groped for the phone.
    “Ettinger.”
    “Sheriff, it’s Doc Hanson. Sorry to call so early, but something’s been nagging me about the autopsy.”
    “What is it, Bob? He drowned, right?” She glanced at the bed stand clock radio. Five a.m.
    “Yeah, he drowned. But, well, there’s a couple a things…. I could explain, but it’d be easier if you came down to the morgue.”
    “That where you are now?”
    “Yeah, I woke up and got to thinking, so I came on down. He’s on the table in front of me as we speak, the poor fella.”
    “Give me forty minutes. I gotta feed the horse and the chickens, or else I’ll have to drive back out here later on.”
    “Take your time. He isn’t going anywhere.”
    Martha hung up the phone and sat up in bed. Her cats, Elsa and Sheba, which slept intertwined at the foot of the bed, arched their backs, yawned, and walked up and began to rub their heads against Martha’s shoulders.
    “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
    She padded on bare feet to the bathroom and opened the hot water spigot in the shower. While she waited for the water to warm, she pulled her flannel nightgown over her head and looked critically at herself in the mirror. Thirty-seven years old, she thought, and wearingevery day for the world to see. Martha Ettinger had a round face that was saved from ordinariness by blue eyes that seemed lit from within; when she smiled, which she didn’t when looking in the mirror, her face took on a glow.
    “She’ll have boys flying to her like moths to a flame,” her father had been fond of saying, and that