THIRTY-ONE.

Anna's sleeping mind conjured up a wasp. The insect was stinging her bicep. Instantly she was awake, but, for a moment, she couldn't remember where she was. Not Rocky. Acadia. No Paul, no roommates, yet a shadow, as wide as it was tall, clotted the vague light between her eyes and the ceiling.

"Hey!" Anna barked. Squeaking like a colony of bats, the shadow changed shape and squeezed toward the door. Not a shadow-this invader was corporeal in nature. Shadows were the stuff of silence. This apparition was making a hell of a racket.

"Who are you?" Anna yelled as she threw off her covers. There was a brief scuffle as the night creature tried to shove itself through an opening half its size.

Leaping free of the bedclothes, Anna yelled: "Stop!"

The black shape wrestled with itself for a moment, then popped through the bedroom door into the living room. Anna scrambled for the light switch. In the unfamiliar room, she was slow. By the time she'd flicked the light on, she could hear the sound of feet pounding down wooden stairs. More than one person, two, maybe three. A wave of dizziness overtook her; sound was behaving oddly; the light seemed to shimmer. She brushed her wrist over her eyes.

Hers was one of four apartments in the building used for employee housing on Schoodic Peninsula. The structure was divided in half, two floors on each side, an apartment on each floor, the two halves connected by an open-air breezeway and stairs. Though it often happened in cookie-cutter dwellings, these weren't drunken neighbors wandering in the wrong door. Drunken neighbors wouldn't run; besides, at present, Anna's was the only apartment occupied.

It could be park visitors. As far as vacationers were concerned, rangers were always on duty, always there to stanch the bleeding or lend a cup of sugar. Since Anna-like a lot of the old guard-still refused to lock her doors, a couple might have wandered in and been scared into running when she awakened.

"Hey!" she shouted again. "Hold up."

In three strides she'd crossed the small living room. As she reached the head of the stairs, two humanoid shapes careened through the downstairs breezeway, running out into the parking lot with more speed than grace.

Not tourists with bad manners. Sinister miscreants. "Damn!" Anna muttered. She staggered, caught herself on the railing, then turned and ran back into her apartment. For an instant, she stood beside her bed, trying to remember why she'd come back. "Intruders," she said, and she pulled on her cordovan boots, grabbed her SIG Sauer from the drawer in the nightstand, and, stark naked but for boots and gun, hurtled out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the night.

In the middle of the employee-housing parking lot, she stopped, eyes wide, ears open. Without warning a blackness as heavy and dark as igneous rock rolled over her brain, crushed her vision, and clogged her ears. Anna's joints turned to water. She fell hard on her knees.

Pain cleared her mind. She could hear sneakered feet scratching on pavement; the intruders were headed across the access road toward the renovated Rockefeller building used as the Schoodic Education and Research Center. Beyond the Rockefeller building were the crumbling ruins of an old navy base's housing wings.

Currently the research center was home to granite sculptors doing a summer workshop. Possibly her wee-hours visitation was from feral artists, but Anna was more worried about the artists as victims or hostages than as perpetrators. Though one or two of the huge, labor-intensive granite monoliths did look like the work of troubled minds.

As her vision cleared, she saw the two figures running hard toward the plaza where the sculptures were being carved. She heaved herself to her feet and, boots ringing on the asphalt, sprinted after them.

"Stop or I'll shoot!" she yelled. She wouldn't shoot. Rangers didn't shoot fleeing suspects even if they had slithered up to one's bedside in the dead of night.

The dreamlike sensation of running ever slower through air viscous as mud dragged at her legs. Distance-or her perception of it-underwent a sea change. The ruined barracks wavered, retreating in an undulating wreck of roof lines. The Rockefeller building, no more than two hundred yards from her apartment, refused to move closer as she ran; then, suddenly, the immense granite sculptures were looming over her.

Anna didn't so much stop with intent as simply cease to move because her body chose stagnation regardless of what her mind ordered it to do. The retreating human-shaped fragments of darkness had run past the sculptures. Immobile, she watched as they reached the barracks where the wings of the ruined building came together. Her eyes told her they vanished like smoke; her mind suggested they'd probably run down one of the stairwells that let into the basement level.

Even if her legs had not ceased to function properly, and the night had not broken all the laws of physics to become a nauseating, undulating mess, Anna would not have given chase. Nothing short of a shrieking child or a mewling kitten could induce her to pursue bad guys into that haunted hulk in the dark.

The abandoned barracks was two stories of smashed desks, shattered walls, mirror shards, falling staircases, and other sharp-edged detritus. In that place, if fleeing felons didn't kill you, tumbling down stairs or broken glass would.

Broken glass would what?

With sudden alarm, Anna wondered why she was naked, why she was standing in the shadow of lowering chunks of granite with her gun in her hand. She had no recollection of kneeling, yet she was on her knees on the stone.

Stinging in her upper arm claimed her attention.

Clumsily, she brushed at it. Something clinked to the paving stones of the sculpture yard. Stupidly, Anna stared down at it, eyes and mind disconnected. Part of her brain knew she should recognize the shape. Most of her brain was atomized, loose dust blowing in a windy night.

A syringe. The item that fell from her arm was a syringe. There was quarter of an inch of liquid in it.

Evidence of something.

She picked it up, holding it like a dagger. Forget evidence. Two weapons were better than one. Weapons against what?

People were hiding in the old barracks; she'd been chasing them. They had stuck the needle in her arm while she was sleeping.

Light. She needed light if she was going to go into the garbage- and rat-infested derelict building. Light and backup; she had to get a flashlight and a radio and a pair of underpants.

First she had to get up off of her knees. At one time she knew how human legs bent and flexed to execute this intricate maneuver. No more. She wasn't even sure where her feet were. She could neither see nor feel them.

A clunk startled her in a vague way. Rolling her head carefully to the side, she looked down. Somebody had dropped a gun-a SIG Sauer-beside her right knee. Careless bastard. What kind of idiot dropped a gun?

Me, she thought. My gun. Bending at the waist to pick it up, she fell face-first onto the granite paving. A cracking jarred the interior of her skull. Nothing hurt. Her skull felt as if it had been hurled against a wall, but nothing hurt. Or if it did, she couldn't feel it.

Straightening her arms, she forced her head and shoulders up from the ground. Sculpted works in progress, high as houses and cut into fantastic shapes, moved slowly around her, waving and leaning like grasses in a breeze. The brick and stone facade of the beautiful old building beyond rose as high as Half Dome, its many windows blank and lifeless.

"Help," she creaked. The noise she made was so thin and tiny she thought of the Woozy in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the creature whose roar was supposed to bring down mountains but in reality was a teeny squeak. It didn't matter. Sculptors were artists. Artists didn't go around rescuing people. When the shit hit the proverbial, nobody ever yelled, "Is there an artist in the house!"

Anna pulled her knees under her to sit on her heels. In an attempt to scrape off the toxic fog devouring her brain, she scrubbed at her face. Pain that should have come when she fell blindsided her. She cried out feebly. One hand came away black and wet. Blood was pouring down over her left eye, blinding her.

Paul will still love me, even if the corner of my head is smashed, she thought. The image of her husband, Paul, in all his strength and calm, centered her. She was able to find her feet and push to a standing position. Her pistol was still on the ground, an infinite distance from her eyes. Teetering sickeningly back and forth in her boots, she tried to decide if it would be worse to leave her gun and go find a radio or stay with her gun and ... what?

Just stay with her gun.

Besides, she was naked. She'd been reminded of that when she looked way, way down at the gun. No clothes. Naked outside in the weird with no clothes. This had to be a dream. That was a relief. Peculiar dreams were not strangers to Anna. There was a foolproof test to see whether one was dreaming or not. It wasn't pinching. That was silly. It was flying. If she could fly, that was proof positive she was dreaming.

Anna tried to lift her arms. They did not reach Superman-in-flight position, only zombie-seeking-edible-brain position.

No flying.

Not a dream.

Again she looked toward the ruins. The stairwell was disgorging its recent meal, bipedal shapes bulging forth to be delineated by the faint light of the stars. The creatures who'd put a wasp in her dream, a drug in her veins.

Anna raised her gun hand. "No further," she said. "Move and I soowt." She'd meant to say "shoot." The bonk on the head, or the chemical they'd injected, turned her lips to rubber. The figures halted, murmured, then came toward her.

Anna pulled the trigger. Nothing. Her hand was empty, the gun ever so far away on the ground by her foot.

The figures separated, moving slowly in her direction. Ninjas, black clothes and hoods and faces, with four white hands, fake as plastic mannequins' hands, floating along beside them. They were wearing surgical gloves.

Coming to butcher the kill, Anna thought as she tipped into nothingness.

THIRTY-TWO.

Denise couldn't take her eyes off the fallen woman. In the starlight, Anna Pigeon was faintly luminescent, as if she'd been swimming in phosphorescent plankton. The boots, incongruously dark, made it appear as if her legs had been lopped off just below the knee, leaving white stumps. Anna's hair, always in a single fat braid, was spread out around her in a dark fan shot with silver, a protective cape that reached to her waist.

Denise didn't know what she had expected to happen when they'd set out on this venture, but this wasn't it. Despite the fact that three of her bullets were in him, Kurt Duffy had roared and fought. That made it self-defense in a way. Killing should be a positive or negative choice, not made in hot blood, necessarily-cold blood was fine-but with a real sense of commitment. One committed murder; murder didn't just happen. The gun didn't just go off; the victim didn't just run into the knife seven times.

Since she wasn't murdering Anna Pigeon, just removing an obstacle for a while, she'd pictured it happening in a prosaic, workaday kind of way. Or peacefully, like taking out the garbage on a Sunday afternoon. The unconscious body would lie in its own snug little bed, drifting quietly into deeper and deeper sleep. Then Denise and Paulette would wrap her tidily in one of her blankets and haul her to the runabout.

Not this blood-and-snot-filled gun-toting drama.

Also, in her mental picture, Anna Pigeon would wear a pair of pajamas, for Christ's sake, or a T-shirt and panties. What kind of lunatic leaps up and gives chase wearing nothing but a pair of cordovan NPS boots, even if she is drugged?

Naked was bad in an unsettling way. Naked was vulnerable and very female. Naked gave a body a gender and an age. "She should wear fucking pajamas," Denise hissed. "Rangers get called out at night."

Paulette said nothing.

The shushing sibilance of the sea washed between Denise and her sister. Usually the sounds of the ocean soothed Denise. These rasped. The clacking of rocks as they were rolled by the receding waves clattered like a plague of demented cicadas.

Anna Pigeon's hand twitched. Passed out on major drugs, the woman seemed to still be reaching for her gun.

"Oh God," Paulette whispered. "What do we do now?"

Trained to the call of "Gun!" Denise ran forward quickly and kicked the SIG out of the reach of the weak and groping hand. At a safe distance from the moribund ranger, she retrieved the weapon and shoved it into the waistband of her pants at the small of her back. Unlike Paulette, Denise had opted for black Levi's instead of sweatpants. The denim waistband held the gun firmly.

"We get her to the boat," Denise said.

"Shouldn't we get her some clothes first?" Paulette asked plaintively.

The toe of Denise's sneaker twitched out and struck the downed woman in the shoulder.

"Don't kick her!" Paulette exclaimed.

Like that was worse than drugging and snatching her.

Denise made no reply. She hadn't meant to kick her. Her foot had jerked out of its own accord. Nerves.

"We can lend her some of our clothes," Denise said. "She won't need much. She won't be there for long. Help me pick her up."

Paulette didn't move. She was looking past the naked ranger toward the housing area. "Maybe we should go back to her room. She's going to need some things. Maybe she takes medication ... and toothpaste ... that kind of thing," Paulette said.

Denise thought about that for an instant-not the meds or the toiletries, a blanket to cover her up. Anna had made it fifty or sixty yards from her apartment. There was nothing but open road and parking lot between where she lay and her bed. A sculptor up late smoking dope, or doing whatever sculptors did in the dead of night, might see them. "Too risky," she decided. "I'll take her arms, you take her legs. Put a hand under each knee; it'll be easier that way."

Paulette tiptoed gingerly around the crumpled form on the paving stones. Leaning down, she lifted one of the booted feet and pulled the leg. With the leverage, the senseless woman rolled to lie upon her back, hair veiling her breasts. Half of her face was covered in a black mask. Denise stared until she realized that it was not a mask; it was blood.

"She's bleeding!" Paulette exclaimed. "Why is she bleeding?"

To Denise, it sounded as if her sister blamed her, suggested she'd kicked Anna Pigeon in the face. Her toe had only just tapped the woman's shoulder. "She must have cut her head when she fell," Denise said curtly. "Get her legs." Moving briskly to give herself more courage and authority than she felt, Denise grabbed a limp wrist in each hand and lifted the upper body.

The used syringe fell from Anna's lax fingers. Denise dropped the hands. Flesh thudded against the ground.

"Careful," Paulette whispered. "We don't want to hurt her."

Denise grunted. Stepping on the needle, she pried the plastic up until the needle snapped off. She put the syringe in the front pocket of her jacket. Both she and Paulette had worn surgical gloves when they filled it; still, forensics would be able to tell what drugs were used, maybe match them to the rufies missing from the park's evidence locker. If anybody even thought to check there. The syringe itself might be a special kind Mount Desert used exclusively. One never knew what mattered and what didn't until it was too late.

The bit of evidence secured, Denise grabbed Anna's wrists again and whispered, "Grab her legs."

Paulette grabbed the top of the boots and pulled Anna's naked legs up and apart. A whimper escaped her as she slowly lowered them again, boot heels carefully together. "I can't!" she wailed softly. "It's like rape. Please, let's get her some clothes. Or put her back in her bed and leave. She won't remember us. You said she won't remember anything."

Denise wanted to lash out at Paulette, but a part of her felt as her sister did. Not about putting Ranger Pigeon back and pretending it never happened, but about one woman prying apart another woman's legs and stepping between them when that woman was naked. It was icky. The worst kind of icky, the kind that stuck to the inside of your skull for years.

"Right," she said to herself; then, to her sister, "But we can't go back. We're way beyond that. We can't leave her. Let's do this. Come take an arm. We'll drag her so her feet stay together and we're not ... you know, looking at her that way. We don't have to drag her far. Jumping out of bed and chasing us, she did half our work for us. Another couple hundred yards and we're good to go. All the hard part over."

Paulette came up beside Denise but made no move to help. Denise shoved one of Pigeon's arms into her hands.

"Ranger Pigeon was nice to me the morning Kurt was found," Paulette said, looking into the bloody mask of a face.

Denise heard faint accusation in her sister's tone and bit back a harsh response. Paulette was her gentler self; she had to respect the Paulette half of her personality even when it was a huge pain in the butt. "Everything is going to be fine," she said calmly. "We've come so far. We do this and we're almost free. Think of our house in the pines somewhere warm. Think of being a family and never being cold or alone again."

Paulette took in a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "You're right."

Denise exhaled in relief. "Here we go," she whispered.

Both of them pulling moved the body at a snail's pace. Anna Pigeon couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, a hundred and fifteen at most, yet she apparently had made a deal with gravity; the earth seemed to hold her fast. Agonizing minutes passed as they dragged her from the granite apron in front of the Education Center onto the road to Schoodic Point, where the boat was stashed.

"Shit," Denise muttered as one of Anna's boots came off. Half a yard more and her heel was red with blood. Or, in the moonlight, black with blood. Denise was imagining the red color.

"We have to stop," Paulette said. "We're scratching her bottom and her legs all up."

"We're making a ton of noise," Denise said. Dumb and Dumber move a body, she thought. Murder wasn't glamorous; she knew that from killing Kurt. Neither was kidnapping, but it shouldn't be stupid. This was stupid, like a bad movie.

For an awful moment, Denise flew free of her body. From twenty feet up in the air she looked down at herself and her sister dragging the drugged ranger. They were ludicrous, absurd. Minuscule black ants, intent on abduction, hauling along a naked human. Insane. The picture whirled, and Denise crashed back into her own skull.

Not absurd, necessary.

Okay, absurd, but necessary, Denise admitted to herself. They had to do this to get what was owed them. She was sorry about Anna Pigeon, but Anna would have sided with the Peter Barneses and the Kurt Duffys and stripped Denise and her twin of everything. Again. Thrown them out to rot with the garbage. Again.

On second thought, she wasn't that sorry about Anna Pigeon. She should have kept her nosy little pigeon beak out of things that were none of her business, kept her beady little birdy eyes off of other people's things.

"Let's get her up," Denise said as she dragged the ranger's limp arm around her neck, hoisting her half of the inert form. "Like this, like we're walking a drunk. Then we won't be scratching her. It'll be okay. Put her arm around your neck." After more fumbling clown antics, they had the unconscious woman between them and were moving forward. Denise cursed herself. Anybody with half a brain would have worked all this bullshit out before doing the deed. The pigeon was to blame. If she hadn't nosed around they wouldn't be in such a rush, moving too fast to think things through properly.

With Anna draped around their necks, they traveled at a fairly good pace. Pigeon's toes dragged, but there was nothing Denise could do about that.

Within minutes they had trundled their catch over the rough cobble-sized stones of the point to the wash where they'd hidden the runabout. Unseen. Unheard. Like they'd never been to Schoodic. Like none of it had ever happened.

"We're good, we're good," Denise gasped, breathing in gusts as much from fear as exercise. Together they lowered the body, laying it out on the stones. "Catch your breath," Denise told her sister. "Almost done." Leaving Paulette standing over their captive, Denise went to turn the runabout right side up. The boat and outboard motor were heavy, but, unlike handling dead humans, Denise was accustomed to handling the runabout. She pried it up onto her knees, then flipped it easily over onto its keel.

Looking back over the gunwales, she expected to see Paulette getting the pigeon ready to drag over the side and into the boat. Instead, Paulette was sitting on the ground, in the rocks, her palms held to her cheeks and her feet in front of her like a little kid.

"We can't do it," Paulette said, eyes fixed on the prone naked ranger. "The shed won't be a good prison. She'll get out. Everybody will be swarming the island looking for her. Kidnapping is a serious crime. We could get the death sentence."