You could almost believe that you found peace.

Maxwell Baldwine knew by the gathering darkness that it had to be about eight thirty, but he didn’t care about the time. He was going to stay out all night. Find a bar, find a woman or two, get drunk, and wake up somewhere he didn’t recognize.

In the three years since he’d been gone from Kentucky, he had seen more of the country than he had learned about at that fancy private school he and his brothers and sister had gone to in town. More even than from his four years at Yale. On his travels, he had been through the high and dry of Colorado, the low and humid of Louisiana, the flat and monotonous of Kansas, the salted humidity of California, and the drenching gray of Washington State.

He couldn’t say he had found a home anywhere in his explorations. But that didn’t mean he had one here in Charlemont.

Easterly was precisely that which he had been, and was still, trying to get rid of. And as he had traveled, with no goals or itinerary, he had been hoping that with each mile on the road, with every rootless week spent somewhere new and different, through all the odd jobs and strange people he’d done and met, he could somehow shed his ties to that mansion and all the people under its roof.

And yes, in his bid for personal peace, he had been prepared to let his relationships with his siblings go, leaving Edward, Lane, and Gin as collateral damage in the war to reclaim himself.

Or maybe it was more like to find himself in the first place.

In the end, however, he had been forced to recognize that everywhere he went, there he was—and the reality was that he could no more change what he had learned before he had left than he could alter his own flesh.

Destiny was a bitch with a bad sense of humor—

The sudden sound of a siren behind him was harmonized by a pair of screeching tires that he heard even over the din of his bike.

With a curse, he straightened and looked behind himself.

The Ogden County cop car was jumping out from behind a stand of trees, its joe-blow suspension causing it to lurch like a drunk as the officer at the wheel punched the accelerator.

“Motherfucker.”

Max doubled down on his tuck and cranked his grip on the accelerator, sending the Harley to light-speed. The fact that the sunset’s glow was draining from the sky helped as most cars and trucks were going to have their headlights on—so he was likely to see them.

Hopefully see them.

Like all adrenaline junkies, he entered a strange zone of calmness as he pushed the bike to the very edge of its function and structural integrity. The air rushing at him streaked his hair back flat as the helmet that he might have put on had he been required to by law, and the vibration veining its way through his tight palms into the locks of his forearms was like the rush of a drug. Soon, his crouch became not just desirable but necessary, the force of the speed he was going sufficient to peel him off the motorcycle if he tried to sit up.

Faster, and faster still, until the world became a video game with no consequences, the cop and the reality of him getting caught and losing his license, if not more, disappearing, left in his wake.

He wasn’t scared of being apprehended. He didn’t care if he crashed.

Nothing mattered at all.

The old rural road twisted and curved, dodging thick trees that had been preserved not out of a respect for their arboreal splendor, but because it was cheaper and easier to run the road around them. Farm pastures with buffalo in them and cropland that would have soybeans and corn on it soon provided the straightaways. And then there were more hairpins. And another straight section.

Max duck-checked under his arm. Well, well, it appeared that he had the Jeff Gordon of local cops on his ass, the guy right on his tail and closing in—

As Max refocused in front, he cursed, cranked the brake and leaned hard to the left.

It was either that or he mounted the back end of a horse trailer that was going about four miles an hour.

The bike heaved in the direction he asked it to go in and he went nearly parallel with the pavement, the tires just barely hanging on to purchase.

At the very moment, a car came around the corner in the opposite lane.

Horns. Tires. An indelible vision of the two people in the front seat of the Honda screaming as they braced themselves for impact.

In that moment, Max’s life did not pass in front of his eyes. He didn’t think of anyone or God or himself, even.

It was only emptiness, just like his soul.

And yet his body reacted instinctually, his heavy shoulders yanking the bike out of a free fall, his thick thighs grabbing on to the sides of the engine, every molecule in him staying in the saddle. If he fell off? He was going to end up with scrambled eggs for brains and maybe only half his arms and legs still attached.

Except, even as he confronted death and dismemberment, even as the motorcycle inched by the front bumper of the sedan and popped back in front of the truck and trailer, he felt nothing within himself. He was a void with a heartbeat, and shouldn’t he find that depressing?

Max screeched around another turn and glanced over his shoulder. The cop had gone off the road, the squad car embedded in the brambles at the shoulder. No one was hurt, the truck rolling to a stop, the Honda pulling over, the policeman getting out . . . the near-miss and almost-awful slowing everyone but him down.

As the last of the light left the sky, Max roared off into the night.

Regrets stung his eyes with tears . . . but he blamed his wet cheeks on the wind.

Back at Easterly, Lane was in the front parlor pouring some Family Reserve into a rocks glass. “Are you sure I can’t tempt you?”

When his invited guest didn’t answer, he looked across the formal room. Homicide Detective Merrimack from the Charlemont Metro Police Department was over on an antique silk sofa, his lanky body bent toward a laptop that had been put on the coffee table. During the course of the murder investigation, Lane had learned to dislike the guy, not because the detective was evil, but more because of his annoying habit of smiling like a kid who had just put the cat in a mud puddle and was attempting to reassure Mom and Dad that there were no problems, none whatsoever, to report.

“Well?” Lane said as he sat down in a bergère chair. “I mean, clearly my brother was at the Red and Black all night. So he couldn’t have done it.”

More waiting as the detective moved a finger over the mouse pad like he was reversing the footage.

After Lane had called, the detective had come right over, even though it was dinnertime. Or past it, actually. And Merrimack was dressed in what was clearly his standard work uniform of a white polo with the CMPD crest on the chest, dark slacks, and a loose windbreaker. With his military haircut, his dark skin, and his black eyes, he looked like the by-the-book operator he acted as, and Lane decided that that smile thing was a technique the guy had maybe been trained to do in a course entitled “How to Put Suspects at Ease.”

Lane focused hard on that face, as if he could read what was going through the man’s head as those eyes bounced around the screen. When that didn’t work, Lane distracted himself by thinking about the dynamics in his family. Max was the only person who hated their father as much as, or maybe more than, Edward did. Yes, Edward’s motive might have been a little more clear, but his personality had never been violent or explosive: Edward was more a tactician—and then there was the reality that he lacked the physical strength and coordination to move his own body around, much less anyone else’s.

Max, on the other hand? Fights at Charlemont Country Day, in college, afterward. It was as if their father’s temper had skipped all of the other kids and focused on Max exclusively. And Max truly didn’t care about offending people, which if you extrapolated, could be generalized into something sociopathic.

Like the kind of distemper that could make somebody kill their own father.

“Well?” Lane prompted again.

Merrimack took his damn time before sitting back and looking up, and—yup, oh, there it was, that condescending smile.

“I’m not sure what you think you’re seeing here, Mr. Baldwine.”

Lane resisted the urge to speak slowly, as if the guy was a moron. “No one took the truck. Left the property. Drove off.”

“And you take this to mean what?”

Are you fricking kidding me, Lane thought. “That my brother Edward could not have killed our father.”