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are out of business. I don’t know … even as pretty as it is, maybe this burg is dying. As far as I can see, we aren’t losing population but … dammit, we’re losing something .” He snatched up the bar rag again and began to polish the oak.
    “Anyway, try Cove Lodge on Cypress Lane. That’s the last cross street on Ocean Avenue; it runs along the bluff, so you’ll probably have a room with an ocean view. Clean, quiet place.”

5
    At the end of the downstairs hall, Chrissie Foster threw open the front door. She raced across the wide porch and down the steps, stumbled, regained her balance, turned right, and fled across the yard, past a blue Honda that evidently belonged to Tucker, heading for the stables. The hard slap of her tennis shoes seemed to boom like cannon fire through the swiftly fading twilight. She wished that she could run silently—and faster. Even if her parents and Tucker didn’t reach the front porch until she was swallowed by shadows, they would still be able to hear where she was going.
    Most of the sky was a burnt-out black, though a deep red glow marked the western horizon, as if all the light of the October day had been boiled down to that intense crimson essence, which had settled at the bottom of the celestial cauldron. Wispy fog crept in from the nearby sea, and Chrissie hoped it would swiftly thicken, dense as pudding, because she was going to need more cover.
    She reached the first of the two long stables and rolled aside the big door. The familiar and not unpleasant aroma—straw, hay, feed grain, horseflesh, liniment, saddle leather, and dry manure—wafted over her.
    She snapped the night-light switch, and three low-wattage bulbs winked on, bright enough to dimly illuminate the building without disturbing the occupants. Ten generously proportioned stalls flanked each side of the dirt-floored main aisle, and curious horses peered out at her above several of the half-size doors. A few belonged to Chrissie’s parents, but most were being boarded for people who lived in and around Moonlight Cove. The horses snuffled and snorted, and one whinnied softly, as Chrissie ran past them to the last box on the left, where a dapple-gray mare named Godiva was in residence.
    Access to the stalls also could he had from outside the building, although in this cool season the exterior Dutch-style doors were kept bolted both top and bottom to prevent heat escaping from the barn. Godiva was a gentle mare and particularly amicable with Chrissie, but she was skittish about being approached in the dark; she might rear or bolt if surprised by the opening of her exterior stall door at this hour. Because Chrissie could not afford to lose even a few seconds in calming her mount, she had to reach the mare from inside the stable.
    Godiva was ready for her. The mare shook her head, tossing the thick and lustrous white mane for which she had been named, and blew air through her nostrils in greeting.
    Glancing back toward the stable entrance, expecting to see Tucker and her parents storm in at any moment, Chrissie unlatched the half-door. Godiva came out into the aisle between the rows of stalls.
    “Be a lady, Godiva. Oh, please be sweet for me.”
    She could not take time to saddle the mare or slip a bit between her teeth. With a hand against Godiva’s flank, she guided her mount past the tack room and feed shed that occupied the last quarter of the barn, startling a mouse that scurried across her path into a shadowy corner. She rolled open the door at that end, and cool air swept in.
    Without a stirrup to give her a leg up, Chrissie was too small to mount Godiva.
    A blacksmith’s shoeing stool stood in the corner by the tack room. Keeping a hand against Godiva to gentle her, Chrissie hooked the stool with one foot and pulled it to the horse’s side.
    Behind her, from the other end of the barn, Tucker shouted, “Here she is! The stable!” He ran toward her.
    The stool did not give her much height and was no