She punished the waitress for stopping to save a dying dog

The house didn't look like a boss’s house. It looked like an armory that had been remodeled by someone who really liked cedar shingles and old books.

It sat three miles up the winding road from Harrow Falls, past the old lumber mills where the fog stayed until noon even in July. There were no gates, no guards in black suits, just a gravel driveway half-choked with wild ferns and a porch that groaned under the weight of three generations of wet boots.

Molly carried her things in a canvas tote bag—two pairs of jeans, four cotton shirts she bought at the thrift store by the bus station, and a small silver locket that had belonged to her mother.

Vane was already in the kitchen, boiling beef broth on a stove that looked like it had been salvaged from a railway car.

"Put your bag in the small room off the mudroom," he called out over the hiss of the burner. "There's clean towels in the drawer. The water's hot, but don't waste it; the well runs low if you leave it running."

Molly did as she was told. The room was small—barely ten by ten—with a narrow cot under a high window that looked out over the dark spine of the pine trees. It smelled of cedar and lavender soap, clean in a way that made her nose prickle.

When she came back out, Vane was spooning lukewarm broth into a flat dish while Barnaby, bandaged around the chest with three rolls of veterinary gauze, tried to hoist his front quarters onto the braided rug.

"Easy," Vane muttered, sliding his hand under the dog’s chin. "Eat the soup, you old bastard."

Molly crouched on the opposite side of the dish. The mastiff’s tongue flicked twice against the metal, then stopped, his ribs heaving with a sound like a dry pump.

"He's not going to finish it," she said.

"He has to."

"He won't if you're standing over him like a drill sergeant," Molly said before she remembered who she was talking to.

Vane didn't yell. He didn't even look up. He just shifted back two feet, his leather boots scraping against the wide pine floorboards, and watched her with those pale, flat eyes.

"You've got a lot of mouth for a girl who was sweeping crumbs two hours ago," he said.

"I had a lot of mouth then, too. Miller just didn't pay me enough to use it." Molly picked up the spoon Vane had dropped and skimmed a layer of fat off the top of the broth. "Why did you leave him in the yard if Burroughs' people were looking for him?"

"I didn't leave him," Vane said, his voice dropping into that low, level rumble. "I was down at the pier checking the bulkhead. I told the boy—one of the cousins, seventeen years old, thinks he knows everything—to keep the gate bolted. The boy went to get a sandwich."

"And they took him right off the grass?"

"They had a van with three guys and a cattle prod," Vane said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, flat piece of metal—a brass tag with three numbers stamped into the center. "Found this in the alley behind the restaurant. Dropped it while they were loading him."

Molly took the tag. It was cold, heavy with the weight of something that didn't belong in a kitchen on a mountain. "What is this?"

"That’s the serial number for the hydraulic lift on the back of Burroughs' delivery trucks," Vane said. He stood up, walking to the window that looked down toward the valley where the lights of Harrow Falls were beginning to flicker through the gray mist like grease on water. "They thought they were sending a message about the warehouses. They thought it was about the zoning."

"And?"

"It’s not about the zoning anymore," Vane said. He turned around, his shoulders filling the narrow space between the pantry and the icebox. "Burroughs’ father built this town on sawdust and payoffs. Burroughs thinks he can buy the dirt under my feet because he wears a sixty-dollar tie. He doesn't know what happens when you kick an old dog in front of forty witnesses."

"What happens?" Molly asked, her hand closing around the brass tag until the edges bit into her palm.

Vane walked past her toward the back door, his hand resting briefly on the top of Barnaby’s head as he went out into the cold dark of the porch.

"The funeral is on Thursday," Vane’s voice drifted back through the screen door.

"Whose funeral?"

"Burroughs’ engagement party was the warm-up," Vane said from the dark. "Thursday is the groundbreaking for his new hotel downtown. All the big fish will be there. The mayor, the judges, the bank presidents."

Molly stood up, wiping her hands on her jeans. "What does that have to do with us?"