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of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
    Edwin had always reminded Rix of a character in a favorite tale—Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving's Headless Horseman story. No matter how precise the cut of his gray blazer, Edwin's wrists always jutted from the coatsleeves. He had a beak of a nose that Boone said a hat could be hung from. His softly seamed face was square-jawed and held luminous, kindly blue-gray eyes. Under the black chauffeur's cap that he wore was a lofty forehead topped by a fragile crown of white hair. His large ears—true masterpieces of sculptured flesh—again invited comparisons to Irving's poor schoolmaster. In his eyes was the dreamy expression of a boy who still longed to join the circus, though Edwin Bodane was in his late sixties. He'd been born into service to the Usher family, continuing the long tradition of the Bodanes who'd acted as confidants to the Usher patriarchs. Wearing his gray blazer with gleaming silver buttons and the Usher emblem of a silver lion's head on the jacket pocket, his dark trousers carefully pressed, his black bow tie in place and his oxfords spit-shined, Edwin looked every inch the chief of staff of Usherland.
    Behind that comical, unassuming face, Rix knew, was an intelligent mind that could organize anything from simple housekeeping duties to a banquet for two hundred people. Edwin and Cass had the responsibility of overseeing a small army of maids, laundry staff, groundskeepers, stable help, and cooks, though Cass preferred to do most of the cooking for the family herself. They were answerable only to Walen Usher.
    "Master Rix, Master Rix!" Edwin repeated, relishing the sound of those words. "It's so good to have you home again!" He frowned slightly, and immediately tempered his enthusiasm. "Of course . . . I'm sorry you have to return under these circumstances."
    "Atlanta's my home now." Rix realized he sounded too defensive. "This is a new limo, I see. Only three hundred miles on the odometer."
    "Mr. Usher ordered it a month ago. He could get around then. Now he can't leave his bed. He has a private nurse, of course. A Mrs. Paula Reynolds, from Asheville."
    The maroon limo glided through Asheville, passing tobacco warehouses, bank buildings, and shopping malls. Just beyond the city's northeastern boundary line stood a large gray concrete structure that resembled a bunker and covered almost twelve acres of prime commercial property. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The only windows were horizontal slits placed equidistantly from one another below the roof, like gunports in a fortress. The parking lot, full of cars, stretched another three acres. Set on the side of the building facing the highway were black metal letters that read USHER ARMAMENTS , and beneath that, in smaller letters. ESTABLISHED 1841 . It was the ugliest building Rix had ever seen, and it looked more repellent every time he passed it.
    Old Hudson would be proud, Rix thought. The gunpowder-and-bullets business begun by a Welshman in 1841 had culminated in four ammunition and weaponry plants that bore the Usher name: in Asheville, in Washington, D.C., in San Diego, and in Brussels, Belgium. "The business," as it was referred to in the family, had supplied gunpowder, firearms, dynamite, plastic explosives, and state-of-the-art weapons systems to the highest bidder for more than one hundred and fifty years. "The business" had built Usherland, had made the Usher name known and respected as creators of death. Rix wondered how many people had been killed by those weapons for every one of the thirty thousand acres in Usherland, how many had been blown to pieces for every dark stone in the Lodge.
    When he'd left Usherland almost seven years before, Rix had told himself he'd never return. To him, Usherland was awash with the gore of slaughter; even as a child, he'd felt the brooding presence of death in those tangled forests, in the ornate Gatehouse and the insane Lodge. Though his heritage