She blinked at him. "I should have thrown up on your shoes."

"Yeah, probably."

"The idea was for me to think twice before I attack you again?"

"No, the idea was for me to feel your abs."

"You felt my abs the other day."

"I wasn't paying attention. I was more interested in other parts of your body."

"Ty." She put her hands on her hips, breathing hard. "Damn, you're not cutting me any slack, are you?"

He shrugged. "Who just plowed into who?"

"I'm standing here having this wonderful fantasy of hanging you upside down by your toes. But it'll probably never happen, will it?"

"Not literally. Figuratively-" Something changed in his eyes. "One way or another, babe, you've got me hanging by my toes every damn day."

His comment, his delivery, unsettled her enough to give her the spurt of energy she needed to sprint the rest of the way to her back deck.

"I'll have to remember that," he said, walking to the deck."Nice way to get you moving. You showering here?"

"Damn straight," she muttered, scooting inside before he could get to her even more.

She skipped her post-run stretches and climbed up the ladder to her loft, and when she opened a dresser drawer, she heard a distinctive squeaking inside the slanted ceiling. Damn. More bats. And mice droppings in her underwear drawer.

She had visions of scurrying rodents and bats swooping up in the rafters while she slept. Her loft-her bedroom-was in the rafters.

Not a good development.

Ty wandered into the great room below her, and she leaned over the rail. "I'm going to have to sleep up here with a baseball bat."

"Hey-"

"Not because of you. I've got bats and mice. Your house has been empty even longer than mine. Why don't you have rodents?"

"I pay people to take care of the place. You've got Gus." He smiled up at her. "I also have ultrasonic pest-chasers. I think I have a few extra if you'd like me to fetch them."

"Sure. Run there and back so you can work up a sweat. By the way," she said, rising up off the rail, "your abs aren't so bad, either. I could feel them when you had me upside down."

"Watch it, toots. If you think I can run fast, you should see how fast I can climb a ladder."

It felt good to laugh, but after she got out fresh clothes and slipped back down the ladder to shower and change, she found herself making a detour into her studio. She wiped her palm over her dusty filing cabinet and opened the bottom drawer, squatting down to flip through the files, until she came to one labeled simply Hunting Shack, because she needed no further prompting to remember what was inside.

She laid the photos one by one on the floor, on the rug Saskia North had designed and hooked for her one winter.

The police had the memory disk. She'd printed out copies of the photos before it had occurred to anyone to ask her for it. She hadn't touched them in a year. In hindsight now, as she looked at the pictures, she realized the photo of the shack never would have worked as a Christmas card or anything else. The lighting was off, the building itself more an eyesore than a quaint relic of rural New England. There were no vehicles, no people, no snow or footprints-yet minutes after taking the pictures, someone shot at her. Then blew up the shack and let it burn to the ground before the police could get there.

One of the best shots was of the front porch. She'd had to get down low for it. A pair of antique cross-country skis was tacked above the door, and she'd captured about a dozen old-fashioned signs mounted on the outside wall. She took the photograph to her worktable and turned her lamp on it, then got out her magnifying glass for a closer look.

Was someone in the window?

No. And surely the police would have noticed if there were.

She smiled at the moose-crossing sign. There were also cow-crossing signs, but most of the signs were of stores and dairies long out of business-including the Sanborn Dairy. It had gone out of business in the early 1960s. Its old glass bottles were a collectors' item. Carine thought she had a couple in the cellar. They had black lettering, with a line drawing of the heads of two happy-looking cows. The last of the Sanborns had sold off their acreage to the local paper mill that owned the land on which the shack was located. But they owned hundreds of acres, and Sanborn wasn't an uncommon name.

When Ty returned with the pest-chasers, Carine brought him back to her studio and showed him what she'd been up to. "Kind of an odd coincidence, huh?" She handed him her magnifying glass, noticing he'd showered and changed into jeans and a sweater, the ends of his hair still damp. "You've heard of the San-born Dairy."

"They delivered pint bottles of milk to school when Gus was a kid."

"Suppose that's where Louis got his alias? He could have grown up in the valley and picked Sanborn because it was convenient, or maybe he's a distant Sanborn cousin or something."

"That doesn't make him one of the smugglers."

She shrugged. "It doesn't not make him one of the smugglers."

Ty peered through the magnifying glass. "Did you ever steal a deer-crossing sign?"

"That's not a deer, that's a cow and a moose-"

He glanced at her. "I know it's a cow and a moose. Jesus."

"You stole a deer-crossing sign? Ty, that's low."

"Nate helped."

"How come I never knew?"

"You and Antonia would've ratted us out."

"We were not tattletales!"

He rolled his eyes and handed her back her magnifying glass. "I think I used a Sanborn Dairy bottle for target practice once. How's that for a coincidence?"

"All right, so it's a weak theory, but it's something, anyway. A nibble. Maybe Louis was one of the smugglers and saw the sign, and when it came to pick an alias, he chose Sanborn, not realizing where he got it. Manny was looking for a connection between the smugglers and Louis."

"Good. You can tell him it's a defunct dairy."

"If Louis and Jodie met up here-" She sighed, knowing she wasn't going to get anywhere with him. "Oh, never mind. We're just chasing our tails. The police are probably way ahead of us."

"We? Us?"

She smiled. "Go install your pest-chasers. How many did you scare up?"

"Three. They should help."

Carine quickly put the pictures away and headed for the shower, not wasting any time rinsing off, toweling herself dry and jumping into fresh clothes. Ty had her on edge, no question about it. Val Carrera's call and Manny's computer log didn't help, but they weren't the main cause. The teasing, the sexy comments and looks, the easy manner he had with her all reminded her of their first days together last fall, before they'd tried to commit to something deeper. Marriage. A life together.

Don't think.

Yes. Much better that way. She'd learned her lesson. She wasn't going to get ahead of herself with him again.

She combed her damp hair, not bothering to pull it back, and returned to the kitchen. Gus had called before her run to say he was bringing dinner. She slipped out onto the back deck, shivering, the air chilly against her shower-warmed skin. She noticed Gary Turner's midnight blue car in her driveway. He waved to her over its roof and joined her on the deck, his all-black attire and the fading light emphasizing the whiteness of his hair, the blandness of his eyes and skin.

"Sorry to bother you," he said.

"You're not bothering me. I'm just getting a breath of air."

"Your hair's wet-don't catch cold." He cocked his head, smiling at her. "Have I ever seen you with your hair down?" But he didn't wait for an answer, straightening, his manner becoming more formal. "I assume you've heard the latest."

"That Louis Sanborn is an alias?" Carine nodded. "I heard yesterday. After my last visit with the Rancourts, I didn't think it appropriate to go up there and chat with them about it."