EXCERPT (from Chapter One)

The Men in Her Life

The tiger lily bouquet on Spencer's grave could have been left by any one of a number of people. During his brief hospital stay, Lainie Clarke's four-year-old son had charmed every nurse, orderly, and janitor on the pediatric cardiac unit. Three years later, a few of them still sent Christmas cards, and from time to time Lainie received those little computerized notifications in the mail indicating that someone had made a donation in his name. But there was only one kind of individual on earth who would purposely abandon his 100X Resistol beaver-felt cowboy hat on her little boy's marker because he despised the brass angel.

That two-hundred -dollar hat, with its frayed brim and braided horsehair hat band, rested upside down next to her on the passenger seat of her 1982 Volvo sedan. At every stop light, Lainie flipped her wind-knotted long brown hair out of her face, nudged her sunglasses back up the bridge of her narrow Carpenter nose, and stared at the hat, getting madder.

Without examination, she knew it was a size eight, the satin lining worn dull and thin where her grandfather's forehead perspired against it, from years of riding horses in full sun and barking out orders. On his more benevolent days, Bop Carpenter was a man who sported a kindly, Robert Duvall smile. People - no - women would do just about anything he asked when he smiled that way. On his mean days, a chilly grimace told the real story. He was wealthy. He was about as powerful and as wealthy as a man could be in this Southern California beachside county. He could well afford to replace a hat. But eventually, because of its history, the memories connected with it, he'd miss this particular one. Maybe not today, but in a day or so, when he automatically grabbed for it from the moose antler coat rack near his custom-made redwood front doors and found it missing. She knew how it would go: Not finding it, he'd walk outside on his deck, gaze out over the sun-dappled harbor water he'd paid a fortune for, his old blue eyes squinting against the almost unbearable brightness. In his mind, he'd slowly retrace his steps from Whistler's stables to his great-grandson's grave and start to cry.