When I’d first met the Dows, they were a clan of drug dealers, blackmailers, camp burglars, extortionists, and insurance cheats who lived in a heavily guarded compound outside the North Woods town of Monson. I was in the area searching for two hikers who’d disappeared from the Appalachian Trail. In the process I’d stumbled on a criminal dynasty.

To the world at large, two brothers had seemed to head up the outlaw gang. Troy and Trevor Dow had bullied and menaced the communities around Lake Hebron for decades until the Maine Warden Service ended their reign of terror.

Both were dead now. Because of me.

Troy Dow, fleeing the raid in which I’d taken part, had crashed his ATV into a moose. He had been Tori and Tiff’s father.

Trevor Dow, I’d arrested. Less than three years later, he lay dead on the floor of the Maine State Prison laundry room. Tina, his daughter, had said she’d visited him the week before he was stabbed through the neck.

We’d thought the Dows were finished. But we had forgotten the rumors that surrounded the family before their fall.

Troy and Trevor were never the ones calling the shots. It had always been their mother, a little old lady who looked like anyone’s grandma. Her name wasn’t Lynda Lynch. It was Tempest Dow.

I should have recognized the danger she posed, but after Troy died and most of the male Dows went to jail, I hadn’t considered the females a threat. I hadn’t even encountered most of them the day I’d been in their compound. Meanwhile the matriarch had begun plotting her revenge.

When chance brought me to Pill Hill, she had seized her opportunity. She had sent out her granddaughters—none of whom were known to me—to string me along. And then used her friend Lynda as a mouthpiece, all the while staying out of my sight.

That morning Rivard had asked me, “How much time do you spend looking over your shoulder?… You’ve made a lot of enemies over your career.… And even the dead ones have brothers and sons eager for payback.… I always said your cockiness was going to get you killed.”

And how had I responded? “It hasn’t yet.”

“Just wait,” he’d said, as if he knew what was coming.

I wandered into their hyenas’ den without a clue. Fortune had delivered one of their most-hated enemies onto their doorsteps. I’m surprised Tori didn’t shoot me the moment she read my name on the ID card.

I know now why Lynda Lynch had been so attentive to her phone during our conversation. She’d been receiving texts the whole time. Tempest must’ve had fun sending out her dim-witted friend in her place. She was probably in the next room, barely suppressing a cackle while she listened through the wall to her ventriloquist’s dummy.