"Tiffany? Tiffany's your best friend," Heath said. Not a friend of Heath's choosing. The girl's parents were Christian fundamentalists, or at least her mother was. Heath figured Elizabeth had suffered enough at the hands of religious fanatics for several lifetimes, but Tiffany seemed like a nice girl.

In Heath's opinion the friendship was more one of opportunity than genuine attraction. Tiffany, her folks, and her two-year-old brother, Brady, moved into the house next door; she and Elizabeth were the same age and starting their freshman year together; both settled at the same level in the high school pecking order. Admittedly, Elizabeth seemed to enjoy Tiffany's company. Most days either she was at Tiffany's or Tiff was over here. It suddenly occurred to Heath she'd not seen the girls together for a while, a week or more.

Rotten mother, she scolded herself. Blind as a bat.

"I don't think we're friends anymore," Elizabeth said.

"Did you guys get in a fight?" Heath asked. She should have asked this a week ago. She should have been paying better attention.

"Not exactly. Momma, could I have some more tea? It really helps." When Elizabeth called Heath "Momma," either they were having a moment or Heath was being conned. Obviously Elizabeth really, really did not want to talk about this. All three adults homed in on the vibe like hounds on a scent.

The only thing missing was the baying.

FOUR.

Bad idea to be doing this drunk, Denise thought, but continued dragging the straps of her scuba tank up over her wetsuit. Cold water would sober her up quick enough, she rationalized. If it didn't, and she drowned, that was all right, too. Since all of her children had been murdered, and Peter had thrown her away like so much damaged goods, death didn't seem like such a bad option.

Except that Peter would be glad she was dead.

Except that the son of a bitch would go right on living his spiffy little life. With his precious Lily and the baby. They would watch the baby that should have been hers grow up without caring that Denise was fish food.

Mouthpiece adjusted, gear hooked to her harness, she made a final check of the gauges with her flashlight. How drunk could she be if she remembered to check gauges? It wasn't as if she was planning on going deep or staying down long, half an hour max. Hell, I dive drunk better than I do sober, she thought. Drunk diver. The phrase amused her, and as she went over backwards into the ocean, she forgot to hold on to her mask. Cursing and sputtering, she managed to catch it before it sank and get it back on. So much for the "better drunk" theory of diving.

Mask adjusted, she got her bearings. The night was perfect. Warm, overcast, and as dark as the inside of Jonah's whale. Her navy blue runabout on a midnight sea in a great big ocean was as close to invisible as a corporeal body was likely to get.

She upended.

Following the anchor line toward the bottom, she thought about Will Whitman, the lobsterman who got shot for robbing that old guy's traps. Whitman might have been rustling lobsters, but the traps he got shot over were in her territory. The murder had renewed hostilities in the long-running feud.

Not that she cared. People shot people. People did a lot of awful things to other people. Nobody gave a damn. Her own mother had dumped her. She'd been adopted by borderline assholes. Cry me a river; nobody cares about anybody other than themselves.

Enough! she told herself and quieted her mind. Stopping thoughts from spinning was hard. It was like her mind had developed a mind of its own, and maybe neither one was her friend.

No! she shouted silently. The dueling minds couldn't have this place. Clenching her jaw, she forced herself to look outward.

She loved that only the circle of her lamp and the anchor line existed. Under the Atlantic at night was the only time she felt anywhere near free or whole anymore. Contained in apparatus and silence, held in weightlessness and peace, she savored the balm to her soul. Above, in the light, in the world of men, she devoured herself, ripped the flesh from her bones with her teeth, like a coyote chewing off its own leg to free itself from the jaws of the trap.

Watching the line play through her gloved hand as she descended, she let herself think about the woman she'd just met in the bar of the old Acadian Lodge.

Neither one of them had said anything for the longest time after the blonde slid into the booth and made her cryptic announcement. "I'd begun to think I'd made you up."

They sat and stared at each other in the dim light of the bar. Denise was struck dumb. She'd never quite known what was meant when people said that. She did now. There were no more words in her head at that moment. Had there been, she wouldn't have been able to move her tongue or push out the breath to say them. Words had become futile pathetic little things, not fit to bring into the immensity of the idea that had slipped in with the blonde.

"Takes some getting used to, doesn't it? I've been thinking on it for months now, so I'll talk while you get your mind around it, how's that?" the woman said. Her voice sounded creepy, the way Denise's always did when she heard herself on a tape recorder, familiar but alien. Not right.

"My name is Paulette Duffy. I'm forty-one." She smiled. Denise drank down the last of her beer, then waved at the bartender for another. Paulette's teeth weren't the same. Denise had gotten her front incisors busted in a schoolyard fight and had neat straight caps. Paulette's leaned in as if they needed each other for support.

"I think I'm forty-two," Denise managed. "But that could be off a year either way."

"Forty-two on March sixth of next year," Paulette Duffy said. Her hand shot out for no reason Denise could see and banged the metal napkin holder. "Sorry," she laughed. "I guess I'm turning into a klutz in my old age."

"Nerves," Denise said to be saying something. "Happens to me more and more." Her head was swimming. Too much beer. Too much everything. Sitting back, she let her head fall against the cracked leather of the booth. "Forty-one," she whispered. "Forty-two on the sixth of March. That kind of makes a person real, doesn't it? Knowing when you were born, knowing somebody cared enough to write it down."

"You never knew?" Paulette asked softly. Denise hated being pitied for her rotten childhood, hated talking about it, wouldn't talk about it. Peter was the only one to whom she'd told all the grit and grime, and now, every time he looked at her through the scrim of his new clean wife and spotless baby, she could see every bit of shit she'd ever been through clinging to her in his eyes.

Now she wanted to spew it all out like vomited beer here in this booth for Paulette Duffy. "Never knew," she said. "I'm not ready for any of this." She pulled the man's wallet she favored out of the hip pocket of her pants, then dumped the contents on the table. It was probably enough to pay for her drinks three times over. She didn't care. "I'll never be ready for any of this." Standing unsteadily, she waited a second for the room to stop spinning.

"Here," Paulette said. She scribbled on a bar napkin. When Denise didn't hold out her hand to take it, Paulette shoved it in Denise's pants pocket. "This is my address and the number of my cell phone. I got one of those prepaid ones at Walmart. I have lots of minutes left. Call me. Promise. Promise you'll call me."

Denise didn't promise. She made it to the Miata. Then to the runabout. Then to the sanctity of lobster rustling under the sea.

The ocean floor coalesced out of the gray-green circle of gloom at the farthest reach of Denise's light. Turning herself so her feet pointed earthward, she came to a gentle landing on the sand. Froglike, iridescent green in the glow of the lamp, her swim fins squeezed small swirls of liquid dust puffed from beneath her.

The depth gauge read twenty-six feet. Habit was all that made her check it. This stretch of Davy Jones's locker was, metaphorically speaking, the back of her hand.

Moving with the slow grace of a hippopotamus on the bed of the Nile she turned, letting her light drift in a circle until she saw the yellow line snaking down from the buoy she'd anchored near, the marker of a line of lobster traps. With a lazy kick she rotated to the horizontal and swam toward it.

Traps were on the end of lines connected to Styrofoam buoys on the surface. Lobstermen checked their traps every day, putting fresh bait in if they needed it. The buoys were marked with the license number of whichever fisherman owned the trap.

The traps on the ocean floor out from Somes were the old variety, wooden crates covered in rope mesh, with a circular opening just big enough for a lobster to crawl in. Occasionally, Denise mused, surely a lobster, smarter than her fellows, after having consumed the bait, would crawl back out to live and reproduce. Maybe man had created the ultimate evolution facility, and one day the giant spiders would take over Silicon Valley.

The first trap had two lobsters in it, but they were small. She passed them by. The next had one enormous old fellow. Lobsters could live a hundred years, though most didn't make it more than ten or fifteen. This guy looked to weigh close to two pounds. He had been around a while.

Careful to avoid the claws, Denise reached in and dragged him out. Her hand twitched as if she'd been hit by an electric shock, much the way Paulette Duffy's had. Her knuckles rapped on the side of the trap, and her fingers opened. With a flick of his tail, the lobster shot into the darkness.

Nerves.

Over forty and falling apart, Denise thought. The big spider would have been a good addition to the canvas sack trailing from a tether attached to her dive harness, but, in a way, she was glad it had escaped. Sad to end one's life in a tourist's stomach.

When she had ten good-sized lobsters, she switched off her light. Her bag could easily hold as many as fifteen, but she made it a rule never to take every one she found. If a trap had a couple of lobsters in it, she'd take only one. Those she emptied, if there was any bait left inside, might lure in another crustacean before the licensee came to check his catch. This way she figured the lobsterman would be pretty sure his traps had been poached, but not a hundred percent sure.

Denise rotated her lobster rustling through four different patches. All they had in common was that they were shallow and easily accessible from Somes Sound, where she moored her little boat. Other than running into somebody night diving-and probably up to no good either-while she was in the act of robbing the traps, there was no way she could get caught.

Denise liked that the lobstermen knew they'd been had, liked that she was thumbing her nose at the holier-than-thous in the park service, the Peter Barneses. Liked the feeling that, at least in this, she was the one in control. It was she, Denise Castle, who was making fools of them all. That was as important as the money she got for her catch with the less than honest owner of the Big Fat Lobster Trap, a seafood restaurant on the outskirts of Bar Harbor.

Lobster rustling was petty payback for what had been done to her since she was old enough to remember. Pathetic, if she thought about it, but it was the best she could do.

Until now.

Paulette Duffy.

There were possibilities opening to her that hadn't existed before.

Kicking off the bottom, she let herself rise gently to the surface. She had not been deep enough, nor down long enough, to make any decompression stops necessary. At the surface, she bobbed, a black sea creature in a black sea. Finding her boat was the most challenging aspect of her midnight forays into the seafood aisle of the Atlantic.

Under the gunwale, on either side of the bow, she had mounted three small LED lights. They were green. She'd been careful not to put them in a line or evenly spaced-the telltale marks of a work of man, not nature. Glimpsed by anyone, they'd be taken for a reflection, a bit of phosphorescent sea vegetation, or a trick of the light. For her they were homing beacons.

After a minute or two she saw them winking as the boat rose and fell on a gentle swell. She swam toward it. Having tied her sack of squirming arachnids to the starboard cleat, Denise heaved herself over the gunwale. As always, her first action was to remove and stow her dive gear, then pull on Levi's, a sweatshirt, and a ball cap to cover her wet hair. She'd established her reputation as a woman who enjoyed night diving. Still, diving at night, alone, was considered dangerous enough to raise questions she'd rather not answer on the off chance she ran into anyone. The lobsters she could always cut loose back into the ocean if need be.

An innocent, if nocturnal, ranger once again, enjoying the resource and preserving it for blah, blah, blah, she started her motor and 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 day."

Elizabeth laughed. If the sound had been a dead fish, both Heath and Wily would have rolled in it. A child's laughter, particularly after tears, wasn't something Heath had ever fancied getting dewy-eyed over, but she was, and not for the first time, either.

"Well, me and Tiff-"

"Tiff and I," Gwen corrected, then looked abashed that she'd interrupted at such a time.

"You and Tiff," Heath said to get Elizabeth going again. She didn't want to give her time to reconsider that lie she'd seen sneaking across her face earlier.

"We were supposed to be looking after Brady, Tiff's little brother," she explained to Anna and Gwen, in case they'd forgotten about him. "He's a monster. A real monster-he bites and spits; he just never lets his mom see him doing it, so she thinks he's like this little angel and Tiff and I are the evil stepsisters or something. Anyway, we were supposed to be watching him because it was Wednesday night-remember, Mom? I wanted to go over even though we'd be babysitting so Tiff and I could decide what to wear on the last day of school? Not like it matters, but there's always stuff on the last day and, well, you know."

Heath nodded, though she didn't know, and didn't remember that particular Wednesday.

"Wednesday nights are big church nights. Usually Tiff and her brother both go, and sometimes her dad, but Brady had been pretending to have the flu all day, so Mrs. Edleson let him stay home if Tiff would watch him. Mr. Edleson stayed home, too, though I got the feeling Mrs. Edleson wasn't happy about that. Then, around eight or so, Brady disappeared to pull the wings off of flies or whatever-"

"Does the kid torture animals?" Anna asked darkly.

Elizabeth was untouched by the ice in her voice. "No," she said. "He's not like a little Hannibal Lecter in the making or anything. At least not that I've seen. He's mostly into torturing high school girls, as in Tiff and me.

"So Tiff went out to the backyard-you know what a big yard they have, part of it borders on the creek-because that's where the little monster likes to hide out in the dark and leap out and scare the bejesus out of us. I didn't want to deal, so I stayed in the living room, where we'd been watching boring kid movies to keep Brady happy.

"Turns out Tiff wasn't in the yard looking for Brady." Elizabeth faltered to a stop.

Heath, Anna, and Gwen waited in respectful silence. Heath wondered if they worked as hard as she did not to demand answers.

Elizabeth sighed deeply and resumed. "Her dad had intercepted her coming in and sent her and Brady out for something at the drugstore. So, anyway, I was sitting on this big couch they have in the living room playing solitaire on my phone, and Mr. Edleson comes down from upstairs and sits on the couch and starts asking me the usual lame questions. How do I like school and what do I want to be when I grow up. Then he asks if I have a boyfriend, and I say don't I wish, and he starts in this long thing about some tribe in darkest wherever, and how fabulous it is that the old guys, uncles even-gross-introduce the virgins into womanhood. Way gross."

She looked up from where her hands were picking at the edge of a fray on the hem of her pajama top, swept an inclusive glance over Heath and the others, then returned to her hands. "It reminded me of something Father Sheppard would say."

Father Sheppard-Dwayne Sheppard-was the leader of the pseudo-Mormon cult Heath and Anna had rescued Elizabeth from when she was nine years old. Sheppard believed in multiple wives, the younger the better. Heath could feel her blood pressure rising. Anna and Gwen were as stone.

"Then what happened?" Gwen asked softly.

"He like put his hand on my thigh and leaned in and kissed me. A wet sloppy kiss that Wily would be disgusted by. I was, you know, so totally freaked, for a second I didn't do anything. I mean, I didn't kiss him back, but I just froze. I guess he thought I was saying what he was doing was okay." Elizabeth's eyes filled again, and her hands came up to hide her face.

Gwen took hold of Elizabeth's wrists, prying her hands from her cheeks. "You didn't do anything wrong. Nothing. Nada. Zip," she said firmly.

"And he didn't think what he was doing was okay," Anna said. "He's nearly forty, he is your best friend's father, and he's married. He knew it was not okay. You did not bring this on yourself. Mr. Edleson is a scumbag."

Anna rose to her feet. Heath, tuned in to the finer details of human locomotion, noticed she didn't move with the effortless grace she once had; still, she rose fluidly. Only the faintest of grunts and the crack of a knee or ankle attested to the effort.

"What are you doing, Anna?" Heath asked warily.

"I'm going to pay a call on the neighbors," she replied.

"Noooo," Elizabeth wailed.

"I'll take care of that end of things," Heath said, a hint of territorial challenge in her tone.

For a moment Anna swayed like grass in a gentle breeze. Heath waited to see if she would respect the role of mother or if she would go tear Sam Edleson's house down. Heath wasn't sure which outcome she was hoping for. Anna settled, folded down, and took up her position on the floor beside the sofa.

"Was that the whole of it?" Heath asked, sensing it wasn't and dreading the rest of the story.

"No," Elizabeth admitted. "While he was slobbering on me, and grabbing, Tiff came in. She hadn't gotten all the way to the drugstore. He'd given her the keys and told her to take Brady with her in the car! Tiff has a learner's permit, but it's not a good idea for her to be driving at night, even if it's only to the Walgreens. And not with Brady screaming and bouncing around."

Maybe because of what she'd been through in Sheppard's house of wives, Elizabeth seemed to censure Sam Edleson more for endangering his children than for making a sexual assault on her. At that moment, Heath loved her daughter so fiercely she thought she might explode.

"How long was she gone?" Anna asked. Heath moved rapidly from angry and proud of Elizabeth to shaking inside and terribly cold. Had the cretin stopped at a slimy kiss and a grope?

"If she'd've gone to the store, it would have been maybe half an hour. I don't know exactly. We've kind of quit speaking to each other. I guess she came back for something, and she came into the room while her dad was grabbing at me. I'd got over myself and was shoving and hitting to get him off me, and he was sort of flopping around. I don't know if he was trying to stay on me or get off me without getting kneed in the balls, because that was what I was trying to do.

"Tiff started screaming, and Mr. Edleson fell onto the floor. Right then Mrs. Edleson walked in, back way early from her church thing. It usually goes till nine."

"My guess is both Tiff and Terry felt there was something fishy going on," Anna said. "It probably wasn't the first time good old Sam had tried to get time alone with the girl next door. He may have been run out of Idaho for all we know. I'll check it out."