Sad, what people do to their lives.

The hot rush of tears assailed her again. She hugged the mare and pressed her face into the rough mane, then drew away. “Go back to sleep, love.”

Honestly, if weddings affected her this much, she was going to have to swear off attending them. She smiled, but the odd tumult inside didn’t let up.

A warm, furry body wrapped itself around Megan’s legs. Tabby dropped a mouse at Megan’s feet.

“Thanks,” she said wryly, bending down to pat the cat. “I think I’ll let you keep the mouse. I hope this was the only one.”

Satisfied that all was well here, she flicked out the light and headed for the house. On the deserted patio, she paused, feeling the rush of overwhelming emotion again.

Her father had wept here, alone in the night, for the wife he’d lost.

Megan sensed, if not his presence, then his grief, terrifying to the child she’d been at the time, utterly sad to the adult she was now. The soul of Sean Windom had died that night, although his body hadn’t gone until five years later, when he’d had an automobile accident.

Drunk again, people had whispered. Driving too fast.

A sixteen-year-old at the time, she had vehemently denied he’d wanted to die. Now…now she wasn’t so sure.

The thought seemed a betrayal of her father’s memory. Pushing it out of her consciousness, she wondered why the past weighed so heavily of late. Since her grandfather’s death in March, it had preyed on her mind and emotions.

The specter of cleaning out drawers and closets loomed over her. It was something she should do, but she dreaded it. Kate and Shannon would help, but she wasn’t ready to face that task just yet.

Another shiver chased down her spine. Glancing once more around the patio, she slowly entered the house and felt its haunting emptiness. She walked upstairs, but instead of going to her bedroom, she went to the suite that had belonged to her parents.

She hadn’t been back in here since she and her cousins had gone through and disposed of the clothing and personal items. Jess had searched the room last summer, sure he would find a clue to his sister’s death. They had found only the usual things—photo albums, mementos from anniversary dinners, birthdays and the few vacations they’d had.

Gazing at the portrait of her mother, Megan was overwhelmed with love and despair and questions.

“Why?” she whispered, staring into green eyes that were so like her own. “Why were you out on that lake? Why were you with a man hated by our family? Why?”

The woman in the portrait returned her stare, the rose-petal lips caught forever in a soft, dreamy smile of perfect happiness, her belly flagrantly rounded with child.

The painting had been commissioned by her father for the couple’s first anniversary. The unborn child was a girl. Herself. Megan Rose Windom, her parents’ only child.

Closing her eyes, she tried to recall those early years. The happy times, she termed them. She had dozens of pictures of picnics, horseback rides and birthday parties to prove it. Her mother had been radiant in each of the early snapshots. When had their lives changed?

The past haunted her like a ghost at a banquet, demanding attention but refusing to show itself fully. Sometimes she got flickers of memories, but not enough…never enough to put the pieces together….

Turning abruptly, she fled down the hall to her room.

Dressed for bed, instead of climbing in the four-poster, she lingered with one knee on the window seat as she observed the moonstruck landscape sweeping down the pasture to the lake. Its surface was unnaturally still, splashed with pewter by the brilliant moon, reflecting the scattered clouds that drifted over the peaks to the west of the ranch.

The lake.

It looked beautiful, lying in a glacier-carved bowl, mysterious…treacherous.

The lake.

The place where a sailing yacht had crashed upon the rocks, and her mother, unconscious from a blow on the head, had drowned. An accident? The police report said so.

The lake.

It pulled at her as if the deep, cool water was a magnet of liquid metal, calling to her in nightmares that made her wake with cries of despair, fear eating her soul.

She blinked the sting of unwelcome tears from her eyes, her body tensed as if to run for her life.

The silvery surface of the water winked back at her, ruffled by a sudden wind blowing down from the mountain. From the cottonwoods by the creek, she heard the harsh caw of the ravens.

The ravens. Once they’d frightened her, too. The birds had cawed the night before her mother’s death, or so it was rumored. She didn’t remember.