Anna flung the Murphy bed, unmade, up into its niche. While the water heated for coffee, she sat down at her desk. Her naked thighs stuck to the wooden chair. Already the day was heating up.

Opening the bottom drawer, Anna pulled out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope from under an untidy pile of bills- paid and unpaid.

"Don't do it," she said aloud. "Just don't do it." But she folded back the flap and pulled the pictures out anyway.

A tall, skinny man with fine eyes and clear pale skin looked out at her from a bridge over a little lake in Central Park. Behind him was the top of the Plaza Hotel. Terribly earnest, he stood with his hands folded on the bridge's ornate metal railing, his sensual mouth composed in solemn lines. Except for the glittering purple insect feelers hobbing on his head, he might have been a stockbroker or a young senator.

But Zach was an actor. A classical actor. He was good. He might have made it. Then again, Anna thought wearily, maybe not. During their years in New York they'd watched an awful lot of good actors give up, go home and join the family business. Or worse, stick it out waiting tables and driving cabs, keeping their courage up with alcohol and boasts.

Anna looked at the next photo. Zach's head shot. So intense. A beautiful man in that sensitive, dying-of-tuberculosis, turn-of-the-century mold. Born too tall to play Hamlet.

"God, I miss you, Zach. It's beautiful here. But you'd've hated West Texas." Anna might have laughed but her throat was too tight. It was going to be one of those days. She put the pictures away and closed the drawer gently, as if they slept.

The water for her coffee had all but boiled away. Refilling the pan, she started the morning over.

On her way into Carlsbad, Anna saw the blue six-pac pickup the Roads and Trails foreman drove parked along the fence just inside the park boundary. He and Manny were standing near the fenceline with binoculars. There wasn't a dead fawn in the bed of the truck, so she pulled over.