“Really? They let you do that?” She didn’t bother to curb her sarcasm, as if she lumped him in with Ty and he deserved for her to give him a hard time was the best she could get. “Do you have a limo waiting? I’ll bet your people keep a tight leash on you—”

Hank unclenched his jaw and tried to smile. “I’m just a guy doing his best.”

“Yeah, right. That’s what all the ex-rescue pilots turned senate candidates say.” But her sarcasm let up, her tone lightening slightly as she sighed, then motioned at him. “Okay, okay. You might as well come in.”

He followed her down a poorly lit hall to her first-floor apartment. The place was the polar opposite of her little log cabin in New Hampshire, just down the road from the sprawling center-chimney house Tyler North had inherited from his wacky mother.

“I see you’ve been painting,” Hank said, noting the bright colors of all the walls and furnishings in the apartment’s adjoining three rooms. He couldn’t see the bathroom, but expected it, too, was bright. The kitchen cabinets were a citrus-green, the walls mango-colored.

“My landlord said I could.”

“You don’t think he meant white?”

She gave him a quick, unexpected smile and sat at her kitchen table, painted a cheerful lavender-blue. Somehow, all the colors worked together. “I didn’t ask.”

A photograph of a red-tailed hawk hung above the flea-market table. It gave Hank a start, as most of Carine’s photographs did. She had a gift, one she couldn’t be using to its fullest in Boston. He’d avoided asking Antonia too many questions about her younger sister, but the last he’d heard, Carine had taken a commercial assignment with a Newbury Street shop.

But he stayed focused on his mission. “I’m wondering if you’ve talked to Antonia recently.”

“Why?”

Hank didn’t respond to her reflexive suspicion. “We had dinner together on Saturday.” That was three days ago, he thought. Three days and not a word from her. “She’d just come off shift and was tired, maybe a little on edge. She seemed to have a lot on her mind. She said she planned to go out of town for a few days to work on a journal article she’d been putting off. I assume that’s where she is?”

Carine was the youngest of the three Winter siblings, orphaned when they were three, five and seven, and she wasn’t one to easily give up what she knew—even on a good day. “She didn’t tell you?”

He shook his head. “I might not have been clear on the dates, or just missed it when she said where she was going. I left several messages on her cell phone. She hasn’t returned my calls.”

Carine lifted her blue eyes to him. “Maybe you should take the hint.”

“Carine, for God’s sake—”