Which it hadn’t been, of course; hers or anyone else’s. The therapeutic-psychodrama group at Esalen had helped her get that unwholesome idea out of her mind, and the marathon encounter weekend with its follow-up week of transformational body-mind work had put things in their true perspective: Albert Evan Jasper had been “driven” to nothing; he had made his own decisions, followed his own course, and marched-decisively and arrogantly as always-to his own violent end.

And now, even in death, even ten years later, even after she’d gotten it out of her system-or so she’d believed-here he was, still blighting her life. And no doubt doing the same to Nellie Hobert, and poor old Harlow, and the rest of them.

Damn him, she thought.

In his smaller, dustier office two floors below Callie’s, Harlow Pollard stared hollowly at Miranda’s letter. He was filled with a sense of impending doom, of a fateful circle coming closed. Whitebark Lodge. When he’d first read those words a few hours ago, his immediate reaction had been an instinctive aversion. He wouldn’t go. How could he? How could Callie, how could any of them? But then a sort of desperate, horrible resignation had come over him. Oh, yes, he would go back. A part of him had always known that one day he would, that his long ordeal would be resolved there.

He frowned, probing with his middle finger at the spot below his sternum where the familiar pain was focused, where he was sure he could feel the acid eating through his stomach lining. He took a couple of chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets from the family-sized box in his lower desk drawer and forced them down a dry throat with a gulp of herbal tea that had been on his desk since yesterday.

My God, my God, Whitebark Lodge.

Not that he bore the responsibility for what had happened there. No one could say that. Of all of them, he was probably the least to blame. Whose fault was it, then? Well, that depended on how you looked at it. On the one hand, you might say it was everyone’s, in an indirect sort of way, of course. On the other, wasn’t it really Jasper himself…