That drew a half smile from Collins. “You ever make it to the family home in Tennessee? Night’s Landing. Sounds like a nice place, doesn’t it?”

“No.” She gave the spider plant a final, hard spray. “Never made it.”

“Sore subject?”

Rob had invited her down for a weekend in March, a month before his vacation in Amsterdam. Said they could get a jump on spring. She’d worked instead. She could have gotten off-they both knew it.

End of romance.

“Not at all,” she told Collins. “Just didn’t work out.”

“Nate Winter’s down there with the sister. You get a feel for her when she was up here?”

“Nice. Smart. Pretty. Impulsive. Agent Collins-”

“She got an anonymous letter in the mail.”

Juliet grabbed another plant, an orchid she was surprised wasn’t dead yet. As much as she loved plants, they had to be hardy to survive her lifestyle and the tough conditions of her borrowed New York apartment.

Collins carefully returned his cigarette to his pack, but she noticed it was bent, bits of tobacco spilling out onto the table. She’d let him smoke. She didn’t care. But it broke house rules. For all she knew, her friend had little cigarette smoke alarms all through the place.

She set the orchid in the sink. She forgot what kind it was, but it wasn’t that pretty when it was blooming and was truly ugly when it wasn’t. She gave an audible sigh. “Okay, is this where I’m supposed to ask ‘what anonymous letter’?” But she immediately regretted her irritable remark. “Sorry. I guess I’m as nerved up about this whole business as anyone.”

“Feel like you’re next?”

“No, goddammit. What a thing to say.”

He shrugged, then told her about the letter. Sarah’s call. Nate’s flight to Tennessee. How she said she’d torn apart the phones looking for taps. Juliet smiled at that one-she had a feeling that, never mind the delicate gold rings and blond good looks, Sarah Dunnemore would do just about anything.

“You think this letter’s for real?” Juliet asked.

“Lab guys are checking it out. It was postmarked New York.”

“What, you think one of us sent it? Rob, Nate, me? The chief deputy?”

Collins didn’t answer.

Juliet groaned. Her and her mouth. “Any more questions?”

“Nah.” He got heavily to his feet. “Thanks for your time, Deputy.”

After he left, she banged her head on the door a couple of times just to see if she could knock some sense into herself. Jesus. How not to handle an FBI interrogation.

That was what it was, too. Collins had asked her if he could talk to her. She’d said yes.

It wasn’t a courtesy visit. He was an FBI agent in charge of a high-profile investigation. The man was just doing his job.

And he’d been very deliberate about it. No slipups. He’d told her only what he’d wanted her to know-what he wanted to see her reaction to.

He’d played her beautifully.

But who cared? She had nothing to hide. He had to work all the angles of the investigation at once. Crazy ones, even. Like maybe Rob or Nate had screwed up and done something that’d gotten them shot. Like maybe she had a vendetta against Rob and had hired someone to take him out.

Except he hadn’t died, and neither had Nate.

Maybe dead wasn’t the point. Maybe dead or wounded was the point.

Why?

The letter Sarah had received…what was that all about?

“Not your problem.”

Juliet flipped all the locks on the door and picked up an ivy plant with crispy leaves. She must have missed that one her last go-round with the spray faucet. But it still showed signs of life. Her brothers would tell her she was losing her touch-she’d always had a green thumb.

She noticed a little goldfish belly-up in one of the tanks. Damn. She set the ivy on the sink and found a slotted spoon, scooped out the dead fish and flushed it down the toilet, then flipped the lid and sat down.

“Oh, shit.”

But she couldn’t stop the tears. For the first time since she’d heard the news about the shooting, she sat and cried. She’d loved Rob. Totally. And it hadn’t worked out, just like all her other relationships. Then he’d almost died. He was still in rotten shape. Miserable, in pain. He had to be scared out of his mind for his sister.

Would he turn to her for help?

Hell, no.

She looked out the window at the brick wall and listened to the gurgle of her aquariums. This was it. She was going to spend the rest of her life with a bunch of plants and fish for company.

And her work. God knows she’d have her work.

Nineteen

Ethan lit his first cigarette in eight months. Charlene used to harp on him for smoking, but he’d always believed something would get him before smoking did.

Something got her, instead.

Someone.

It was dusk, the sky muted and purplish against the darkening landscape of trees as he walked up the path from the river and across the overgrown lawn of the Poe house. The mosquitoes were out. One buzzed around his head. He heard crickets chirping in the tall grass, boats puttering down on the river. He had his Smith & Wesson strapped to his right ankle and one of his Brownings tucked in a belt holster under his Titans shirt. No damn overalls tonight.

He didn’t plan on killing anyone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared.

There were rumors on the river that the Poe House Trust was considering selling off some of the acreage lots to country-western music stars, to raise money for a visitors’ center. But even understated development would change the isolated, rural character of Night’s Landing, make it harder to visualize the kind of lives the Poes had led there since the Civil War. The rumors weren’t true, but if they were, Ethan figured Sarah Dunnemore would have a fit. Yet locals also said she couldn’t stay steeped in the Poe house the way she had been for some years. She had to leave its future to other people, people who were more objective, who didn’t have such a personal involvement.

Leola and Violet Poe had died within two years of each other more than a decade ago. They’d lived to see the boy they’d raised move into the Tennessee governor’s mansion, but not the White House. People said they’d had mixed feelings about John Wesley-that was what the sisters had always called him-entering politics, even leaving Night’s Landing.

Ethan ducked past twin dogwoods in the front yard and headed up the back road that led to a down-on-its-luck fishing camp. After a hundred feet the pavement turned to gravel. He could hear his running shoes crunching, but stealth wasn’t an issue, not tonight. He didn’t care who the hell saw him, who heard him.

It was an old-fashioned camp with a row of a half-dozen, one-room cabins with shed roofs and no frills. Conroy Fontaine struck Ethan as a frills type. But maybe he was saving himself for when he hit it big with his book. Maybe he’d do damn near anything, including sleep on a moldy horsehair mattress, to get what dirt he could on President Poe.

Poe hadn’t lived in Night’s Landing in years. He and his wife had a place in Nashville. Nothing huge. A Victorian they’d fixed up. The Poe House wouldn’t be open to the public for another couple years, at least. By then, maybe someone would have torched the fishing camp up the road. Each cabin had its own rusted lawn chair and ancient charcoal grill. The smell of smoke and trout hung in the air, fishy, not anything Ethan would want to eat.

He stopped at the main office and asked a very overweight woman with a long, greasy gray braid which cabin Conroy Fontaine had rented. She didn’t hesitate. “Last one on the left.”

Ethan passed three empty cabins before he reached the last one on the left. A light was on. The front door was open. He could see Fontaine sitting at a table in the front window. Ethan threw down his cigarette, stamped it out and kicked in the screen door.