Chance loosened his grip, although he still held Mara’s arm in a cop-like vise. Calliope wasn’t convinced the older woman was telling the truth, yet she was uncomfortable with a man steering a woman by the arm, especially an older woman whose fidgety, insecure demeanor could have been a sign of shock or exhaustion. Or she was hiding something. Calliope needed to see for herself whether Mara was being honest. She’d shielded Eunjoo once from seeing a dead man’s body, but she couldn’t leave the girl alone in the cabin. Calliope was still shaking, soaking from the waist down, but she grabbed Eunjoo’s hand and followed the others outside where the snow was accumulating atop the dead grass and dirt, covering the white moth wings with crisp white flakes. Their boots crunched the snow as Mara led them past a water tower and an empty pasture, toward a smaller cabin beside an outcropping of trees.

“Any animals on this ranch?” Chance asked.

“Gone,” Mara said.

“Run away?”

“Like everyone else,” she said. “Just gone.”

Chance murmured something indiscernible.

“There was a mountain lion on the property,” Mara said. “I think that’s what … killed Loren. I don’t know what else or who else could’ve done … what it did …”

Calliope shuddered, thinking of the coyotes. Eunjoo’s bite. It could have been worse.

As they approached the front porch, a rocking chair came into view, and Mara warned, “This isn’t going to be pretty. You may not want the little one to see.”

Glistening from the oak of the porch and rocking chair in fat streaks and globs, dark rust-colored splotches of blood. Copious amounts of blood, splattered across the wood. Calliope braced herself for the body, saw nothing but red stains. “Where is he?”

Mara nodded toward a patch of juniper fifty feet away, where a dark trail of blood led from the porch toward the ground then stopped, buried by snow. “I couldn’t just leave him carrion for the vultures, not Trudy’s dad. She wouldn’t have wanted that.” Mara let out a coarse laugh that gave way to a look of utter dejection. “Trudy wouldn’t have wanted any of this. I buried him over there. Not a proper burial, not deep enough. But better than nothing till I caught that son-a-bitch lion did this.”

They followed her to the junipers, where a mound of earth was raised higher than the rest, camouflaged by snow—Calliope wouldn’t have known it was a grave if she’d stumbled across it unaware. The thought made her shiver harder, imagining they were surrounded by graves, her family beneath the earth everywhere around them. She’d known Mara for years—eccentric, a free spirit, never vicious or violent. Calliope couldn’t really believe Mara had killed her aunt, or anyone else. Could she? Still, the blood was harrowing.