A bumpy dirt road brought her to the house. It was a strange and whimsical structure, rooms added haphazardly, corners jutting out in unexpected places.

Rising above it all, like the tip of a crystal breaking through the roof, was a glassed-in belfry, An eccentric woman would have an eccentric house, and Rachel Sorkin was one of Tranquility's odd birds, a striking, black-haired woman who strode once a week into town, swathed in a purple hooded cape. This looked like a house in which a caped woman might reside.

By the front steps, next to a neatly tended herb garden, lay the dead deer.

Claire climbed out of her truck. At once two dogs bounded out of the woods and barred her way, barking and growling. Guarding the kill, she realized.

Rachel came out of the house and yelled at the dogs: “Get out of here, you bloody animals! Go home!” She grabbed a broom from the porch and came tearing down the steps, long black hair flying, the broom thrust forward like a lance.

The dogs backed away “Ha! Cowards,” said Rachel, lunging at them with the broom. They retreated toward the woods.

“Hey you leave my dogs alone!” shouted Elwyn Clyde, who had limped out onto the porch. Elwyn was a prime example of an evolutionary dead end: a fifty-year-old lump bundled in flannel, and doomed to eternal bachelorhood. “They’re not hurtin’ nothin’. They’re just watchin’ after my deer.”

“Elwyn, I got news for you. You killed this poor creature on my property. So she’s mine.”

“What you gonna do with a deer? Blasted vegetarian!”

Claire cut in: “How’s the foot, Elwyn?”

He looked at Claire and blinked, as though surprised to see her. “I tripped,” he said. “No big deal.”

“A bullet wound is always a big deal. May I take a look at it?”

“Can’t pay you He paused, one scraggly eyebrow lifting as a sly thought occurred. “ ‘Less you want some venison.”