Dark Paradise Read online

  BANTAM BOOKS

  NEW YORK TORONTO

  LONDON SYDNEY

  AUCKLAND

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  BANTAM BOOKS BY TAMI HOAG

  Praise for the bestsellers of TAMI HOAG

  PREVIEW

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  INSPIRATION comes from everywhere and from no-where, from life and from dreams and from places that have no names. It comes most often in small pieces as tiny and bright as diamonds. I catch them when I can and hold them tight. I wish on them like stars and from them come the seeds of stories.

  This book is the result of many small inspirations that came to me over the course of time. I have a number of people to thank for those diamond lights. Mary W., for striking a spark half a decade ago. Mary-Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin, songwriters whose gift for touching the soul with words continually leaves me in awe. Philip Aaberg, Montana-born pianist who can transport me west with a handful of tender notes and the exquisite silences between them. John Lyons, cowboy and teacher of wisdom and patience. Sarge, old friend long gone from all but my memory and my heart.

  Also, thank you to fellow Bantam author and agency sister Fran Baker for your generous donation of information on the life of a court reporter. Thanks, Don Weisberg, for the Feed and Read. Thanks to C.B. and M.E.F. for your spirited bidding in support of MFW and my ego.

  Readers, I hope you enjoy this trip to Montana. It is a place of unique and spectacular beauty, at once tough and fragile, timeless and threatened, as is the American West itself. It is a place where the incredible, boisterous spirit of the frontier can still be felt, and where it can be felt slipping away like sand through grasping fingers. To all who would fight to save that spirit—natives and outsiders alike—I wish you success.

  PROLOGUE

  SHE COULD hear the dogs in the distance, baying relentlessly. Pursuing relentlessly, as death pursues life.

  Death.

  Christ, she was going to die. The thought made her incredulous. Somehow, she had never really believed this moment would come. The idea had always loitered in the back of her mind that she would somehow be able to cheat the grim reaper, that she would be able to deal her way out of the inevitable. She had always been a gambler. Somehow, she had always managed to beat the odds. Her heart fluttered and her throat clenched at the idea that she would not beat them this time.

  The whole notion of her own mortality stunned her, and she wanted to stop and stare at herself, as if she were having an out-of-body experience, as if this person running were someone she knew only in passing. But she couldn't stop. The sounds of the dogs drove her on. The instinct of self-preservation spurred her to keep her feet moving.

  She lunged up the steady grade of the mountain, tripping over exposed roots and fallen branches. Brush grabbed her clothing and clawed her bloodied face like gnarled, bony fingers. The carpet of decay on the forest floor gave way in spots as she scrambled, yanking her back precious inches instead of giving her purchase to propel herself forward. Pain seared through her as her elbow cracked against a stone half buried in the soft loam. She picked herself up, cradling the arm against her body, and ran on.

  Sobs of frustration and fear caught in her throat and choked her. Tears blurred what sight she had in the moon-silvered night. Her nose was broken and throbbing, forcing her to breathe through her mouth alone, and she tried to swallow the cool night air in great gulps. Her lungs were burning, as if every breath brought in a rush of acid instead of oxygen. The fire spread down her arms and legs, limbs that felt like leaden clubs as she pushed them to perform far beyond their capabilities.

  I should have quit smoking. A ludicrous thought. It wasn't cigarettes that was going to kill her. In an isolated corner of her mind, where a strange calm resided, she saw herself stopping and sitting down on a fallen log for a final smoke. It would have been like those nights after aerobics class, when the first thing she had done outside the gym was light up. Nothing like that first smoke after a workout. She laughed, on the verge of hysteria, then sobbed, stumbled on.

  The dogs were getting closer. They could smell the blood that ran from the deep cut the knife had made across her face.

  There was no one to run to, no one to rescue her. She knew that. Ahead of her, the terrain only turned more rugged, steeper, wilder. There were no people, no roads. There was no hope.

  Her heart broke with the certainty of that. No hope. Without hope, there was nothing. All the other systems began shutting down.

  She broke from the woods and stumbled into a clearing. She couldn't run another step. Her head swam and pounded. Her legs wobbled beneath her, sending her lurching drunkenly into the open meadow. The commands her brain sent shorted out en route, then stopped firing altogether as her will crumbled.

  Strangling on despair, on the taste of her own blood, she sank to her knees in the deep, soft grass and stared up at the huge, brilliant disk of the moon, realizing for the first time in her life how insignificant she was. She would die in this wilderness, with the scent of wildflowers in the air, and the world would go on without a pause. She was nothing, just another victim of another hunt. No one would even miss her. The sense of stark loneliness that thought sent through her numbed her to the bone.

  No one would miss her.

  No one would mourn her.

  Her life meant nothing.

  She could hear the crashing in the woods behind her. The sound of hoofbeats. The snorting of a horse. The dogs baying. Her heart pounding, ready to explode.

  She never heard the shot.

  CHAPTER

  1

  IT STARTED out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there,” Marilee Jennings said aloud as her Honda crossed the border into Montana. She took a last drag on her cigarette and crushed out the stub amid a dozen others in the ashtray.

  The line was a joke she and Lucy had shared time and again during their friendship. Whenever either of them began a conversation with that line, it meant the other was to provide the Miller Lite, the pizza, and the shoulder to cry on. Usually, they ended up laughing. Always they ended up commiserating.

  They had met in a stress management course for court reporters. After two hours of being counseled not to attempt to resolve stress with cigarettes, liquor, and shop talk, they walked out of the meeting room and Lucy turned to her with a wry smile and a pack of Salem Light 100's in her hand and said, “So you want to go get a beer?”

  The bond had been instant and strong. Not a cloying friendship, but a relationship based on common ground and a sense of humor. They both worked on their own, hustling for government contracts and working for a string of attorneys, taking depositions and doing the usual grunt work of transcripts and subpoenas and fending off amorous advances of legal beagles in heat. Th
ey both saw the kinds of ugliness people could resort to in labor-management disputes, and took down in the secret code of their profession first-person accounts of everything from the absurdities of divorce battles to the atrocities of murder. They shared the common problems of their profession—the stress of a job that demanded perfection, the headaches of dealing with arrogant attorneys who wanted everything but the bill in twenty-four hours, then went for months without bothering to pay them. And yet, in many ways, they were as different as night and day.

  Lucy liked the glamour attached to the people she worked for. She thrived on intrigue and dyed her hair a different shade of blond every six months because sameness bored her. She looked at the world with the narrow eyes of an amused cynic. Her insights were as sharp as a stiletto and so was her tongue. She was ambitious and ruthless and wry. She adored the limelight and coveted the lush life.

  Mari still harbored the weary hope that people were essentially good, even though she had seen that many were not. Appearances seldom impressed her because she had grown up in a neighborhood where the phrase “all style and no substance” was the battle cry of most of the women as they ran to their BMWs, charge cards in hand, to race to the latest sale at Nordstrom's. She had no aspirations to fame or fortune and dreamed mostly of a quiet place where she could fit in unnoticed.

  Their differences had only served to balance their relationship. They had shared a lot in those late-night beer and bullshit sessions. Then Lucy had come into some money, chucked her job, and moved to Montana, and while the bond between them hadn't broken, it had been stretched awfully thin.

  The intervening year had been a long one. Mari had missed her friend. Neither of them was good about writing letters, and time slipped by between phone calls. But she knew the friendship would still be there. Lucy would welcome her with that same kind of casual amusement she turned on every other aspect of her life. All Mari would have to do would be to step out of her car, shrug her shoulders, and say, “It started out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there.”

  Her eyes darted to the rearview mirror, betraying her as the tide of depression tried to rise again inside her. She frowned at the state of her wild, streaky blond mane. Who was she kidding? Her whole life had been a series of bad hair days.

  While her two sisters had inherited their mother's champagne-and-satin locks, Mari had been given a tangle of rumpled raw silk with dark roots that turned nearly platinum at the ends. It was an unmanageable mess, and she wore it sheared off just above her shoulders in a bob that somehow never lived up to the description of “classic” or “stylish.” Long ago she had decided her hair was a metaphor for her life: she was wilder than she ought to be; she didn't match the rest of her family; she never quite lived up to expectations.

  “It doesn't matter, Marilee,” she declared, leaning over to shove a cassette into the tape deck and crank the volume. “You're in Montana now.”

  Sacramento was just a dot on the map behind her. The life she had led there was in the past. She was officially on hiatus with no plans, no prospects, no thoughts for the future beyond spending a week or three with her old friend. A vacation to clear the mind and soothe a bruised heart. A pause in the flow of life to take stock, reflect, and burn the pile of business suits that covered the backseat of her Honda.

  She buzzed down the car's windows and breathed deep of the sweet, cool air that rushed in. A wondrous sense of liberation and anticipation filled her as the wind whipped her hair and Mary-Chapin Carpenter proclaimed to feel lucky in spite of the odds. Life began anew right now, this instant. Glancing down, she fished the pack of Salems out from among the mountain of travel guides on the seat beside her, but she paused as she started to shake one out. Life began anew. Right now. Grinning, she chucked the pack out the window, stepped on the gas, and started singing along in a strong, warm alto voice.

  The mountains to the west had turned purple as the sun slid down behind their massive shoulders. The sky above them was still the color of flame—vibrant, glowing. To the east, another range rose up in ragged splendor, snow-capped, the slopes blanketed in the deep green of pine forests. And before her stretched a valley that was vast and verdant. Off to her right, a small herd of elk grazed peacefully beside a stream.

  The sight, the setting, shot another burst of adrenaline and enthusiasm through her. The trip to euphoria from near depression left her feeling giddy. She imagined she was shedding her unhappiness like an old skin and coming to this new place naked and clean.

  This was paradise. Eden. A place for new beginnings.

  Night had fallen by the time Mari finally found her way to Lucy's place with the aid of the map Lucy had sent in her first letter. Her “hideout,” she'd called it. The huge sky was as black as velvet, dotted with the sequins of more stars than she had ever imagined. The world suddenly seemed a vast, empty wilderness, and she pulled into the yard of the small ranch, questioning for the first time the wisdom of a surprise arrival. There were no lights glowing a welcome in the windows of the handsome new log house. The garage doors were closed.

  She climbed out of her Honda and stretched, feeling exhausted and rumpled. The past two weeks had sapped her strength, the decisions she had made taking chunks of it at a time. The drive up from Sacramento had been accomplished in a twenty-four-hour marathon with breaks for nothing more than the bathroom and truck-stop burritos, and now the physical strain of that weighed her down like an anchor.

  It had seemed essential that she get here as quickly as possible, as if she had been afraid her nerve would give out and she would succumb to the endless dissatisfaction of her life in California if she didn't escape immediately. The wild pendulum her emotions had been riding had left her feeling drained and dizzy. She had counted on falling into Lucy's care the instant she got out of her car, but Lucy didn't appear to be home, and disappointment sent the pendulum swinging downward again.

  Foolish, really, she told herself, blinking back the threat of tears as she headed for the front porch. She couldn't have expected Lucy to know she was coming. She hadn't been able to bring herself to call ahead. A call would have meant an explanation of everything that had gone on in the past two weeks, and that was better made in person.

  A calico cat watched her approach from the porch rail, but jumped down and ran away as she climbed the steps, its claws scratching the wood floor as it darted around the corner of the porch and disappeared. The wind swept down off the mountain and howled around the weathered outbuildings, bringing with it a sense of isolation and a vague feeling of desertion that Mari tried to shrug off as she raised a hand and knocked on the door.

  No lights brightened the windows. No voice called out for her to keep her pants on.

  She swallowed at the combination of disappointment and uneasiness that crowded the back of her throat. Against her will her eyes did a quick scan of the moon-shadowed ranch yard and the hills beyond. The place was in the middle of nowhere. She had driven through the small town of New Eden and gone miles into the wilderness, seeing no more than two other houses on the way—and those from a great distance.

  She knocked again, but didn't wait for an answer before trying the door. Lucy had mentioned wildlife in her few letters. The four-legged, flea-scratching kind.

  “Bears. I remember something about bears,” she muttered, the nerves at the base of her neck wriggling at the possibility that there were a dozen watching her from the cover of darkness, sizing her up with their beady little eyes while their stomachs growled. “If it's all the same to you, Luce, I'd rather not meet one up close and personal while you're off doing the boot-scootin' boogie with some cowboy.”

  Stepping inside, she fumbled along the wall for a light switch, then blinked against the glare of a dozen small bulbs artfully arranged in a chandelier of antlers. Her first thought was that Lucy's abysmal housekeeping talents had deteriorated to a shocking new low. The place was a disaster area, strewn with books, newspapers, note paper, clothing.

  She drifted
away from the door and into the large room that encompassed most of the first floor of the house, her brain stumbling to make sense of the contradictory information it was getting. The house was barely a year old, a blend of western tradition and contemporary architectural touches. Lucy had hired a decorator to capture those intertwined feelings in the interior. But the western watercolor prints on the walls hung at drunken angles. The cushions had been torn from the heavy, overstuffed chairs. The seat of the red leather sofa had been slit from end to end. Stuffing rose up from the wound in ragged tufts. Broken lamps and shattered pottery littered the expensive Berber rug. An overgrown pothos had been ripped from its planter and shredded, and was strung across the carpet like strips of tattered green ribbon.

  Not even Lucy was this big a slob.

  Mari's pulse picked up the rhythm of fear. “Lucy?” she called, the tremor in her voice a vocal extension of the goose bumps that were pebbling her arms. The only answer was an ominous silence that pressed in on her eardrums until they were pounding.

  She stepped over a gutted throw pillow, picked her way around a smashed terra-cotta urn, and peered into the darkened kitchen area. The refrigerator door was ajar, the light within glowing like the promise of gold inside a treasure chest. The smell, however, promised something less pleasant.

  She wrinkled her nose and blinked against the sour fumes as she found the light switch on the wall and flicked it upward. Recessed lighting beamed down on a repulsive mess of spoiling food and spilled beer. Milk puddled on the Mexican tile in front of the refrigerator. The carton lay abandoned on its side. Flies hovered over the garbage like tiny vultures.

  “Jesus, Lucy,” she muttered, “what kind of party did you throw here?”

  And where the hell are you?

  The pine cupboard doors stood open, their contents spewed out of them. Stoneware and china and flatware lay broken and scattered, appropriately macabre place settings for the gruesome meal that had been laid out on the floor.

  Mari backed away slowly, her hand trembling as she reached out to steady herself with the one ladder-back chair that remained upright at the long pine harvest table. She caught her full lower lip between her teeth and stared through the sheen of tears. She had worked too many criminal cases not to see this for what it was. The house had been ransacked. The motive could have been robbery, or the destruction could have been the aftermath of something else, something uglier.