Читать книгу When You Call My Name - Sharon Sala - Страница 6

Clouds moved in wild, scattered patterns above the Hatfield homestead, giving way to the swift air current blasting through the upper atmosphere. The clouds looked as unsettled as Wyatt felt. In his mind, it had taken forever to get back his health, and then even longer to gain strength. But now, except for a scar on his cheek and a leg that would probably ache for the rest of his life every time it rained, he was fine.

Problem was, he’d been here too long. He leaned forward, bracing his hands upon the windowsill and gazing out at the yard that spilled toward the banks of Chaney Creek, while his blood stirred to be on the move.

“The grass is beginning to green.”

The longing in Wyatt’s voice was obvious, but for what, Toni didn’t know. Was he missing the companionship of his ex-wife, or was there something missing from his own inner self that he didn’t know how to find?

“I know,” Toni said, and shifted Joy to her other hip, trying not to mind that Wyatt was restless. He was her brother, and this was his home, but he was no longer the boy who’d chased her through the woods. He’d been a man alone for a long, long time.

She could hear the longing in his voice, and sensed his need to be on the move, but she feared that once gone, he would fall back into the depression in which they’d brought him home. Her mind whirled as she tried to think of something to cheer him up. Her daughter fidgeted in her arms, reaching for anything she could lay her hands on. Toni smiled, and kissed Joy on her cheek, thinking what they’d been doing this time last year, and the telegram that Wyatt had sent.

“Remember last year…when you sent the telegram? It came on Easter. Did you know that?”

Wyatt nodded, then grinned, also remembering how mad Toni had been at him when he’d interfered in her personal life.

“In a few weeks, it will be Easter again. Last year, someone gave us a little jumpsuit for Joy, complete with long pink ears on the outside of the hood. It made her look like a baby rabbit. The kids carried her around all day, fussing over who was going to have their picture taken next with the Easter Bunny.”

Wyatt smiled, and when Joy leaned over, trying to stick her hand in the pot on the stove, he took the toddler from his sister’s arms, freeing her to finish the pudding she was stirring.

Joy instantly grabbed a fistful of his hair in each hand and began to pull. Wyatt winced, then laughed, as he started to unwind her tiny hands from the grip they had on his head.

“Hey, puddin’ face. Don’t pull all of Uncle Wyatt’s hair out. He’s going to need it for when he’s an old man.”

Joy chortled gleefully as it quickly became a game, and for a time, Wyatt’s restlessness was forgotten in his delight with the child.

It was long into the night when the old, uneasy feelings began to return. Wyatt paced the floor beside his bed until he was sick of the room, then slipped out of the house to stand on the porch. The moonless night was so thick and dark that it seemed airless. Absorbing the quiet, he let it surround him. As a kind of peace began to settle, he sat down on the steps, listening to the night life that abounded in their woods.

He kept telling himself that it was the memories of the wreck, and the lost days in between, that kept him out of bed. If he lay down, he would sleep. If he slept, he would dream. Nightmares of snow and blood, of pain and confusion. But that wasn’t exactly true. It was the memory of a woman’s voice that wouldn’t let go of his mind.

You will always fight for those you love.

Eliminating the obvious, which he took to mean his own family, exactly what did that mean? Even more important, how the hell had that…that thing…happened between them?

Toni had told him more than once that he’d survived the wreck for a reason, and that one day he’d know why. But Wyatt wanted answers to questions he didn’t even know how to ask. In effect, he felt as though he were living in a vacuum, waiting for someone to break the seal.

Yet Wyatt Hatfield wasn’t the only man that night at a breaking point. Back in Larner’s Mill, Kentucky, a man named Carter Foster was at the point of no return, trying to hold on to his sanity and his wife, and doing a poor job of both.

Carter paced the space in front of their bed, watching with growing dismay as Betty Jo began to put on another layer of makeup. As if the dress she was wearing wasn’t revealing enough, she was making herself look like a whore. Her actions of late seemed to dare him to complain.

“Now, sweetheart, I’m not trying to control you, but I think I have a right to know where you’re going. How is it going to look to the townspeople if you keep going out at night without me?”

He hated the whine in his voice, but couldn’t find another way to approach his wife of eleven years about her latest affair. That she was having them was no secret. That the people of Larner’s Mill must never find out was of the utmost importance to him. In his profession, appearances were everything.

Betty Jo arched her perfectly painted eyebrows and then stabbed a hair pick into her hair, lifting the back-combed nest she’d made of her dark red tresses to add necessary inches to her height. Ignoring Carter’s complaint, she stepped back from the full-length mirror, running her hands lightly down her buxom figure in silent appreciation. That white knit dress she’d bought yesterday looked even better on than it had on the hanger.

“Betty Jo, you didn’t answer me,” Carter said, unaware that his voice had risen a couple of notes.

Silence prevailed as she ran her little finger across her upper, then lower lip, smoothing out the Dixie Red lipstick she’d applied with a flourish. When she rubbed her lips together to even out the color, Carter shuddered, hating himself for still wanting her. He couldn’t remember the last time she put those lips anywhere on him.

“Carter, honey, you know a woman like me needs her space. With you stuck in that stuffy old courtroom all day, and in your office here at home all night, what am I to do?”

The pout on her lips made him furious. At this stage of their marriage, that baby-faced attitude would get her nowhere.

“But you’re my wife,” Carter argued. “It just isn’t right that you…that men…” He took a deep breath and then puffed out his cheeks in frustration, unaware that it made him look like a bullfrog.

Betty Jo pivoted toward him, then stepped into her shoes, relishing the power that the added height of the three-inch heels gave her. She knew that if she had had college to do over again, she would have married the jock, not the brain. This poor excuse for a man was losing his hair and sporting a belly that disgusted her. When he walked, it swayed lightly from side to side like the big breasts of a woman who wore no support. She liked tight, firm bellies and hard muscles. There was nothing hard on Carter Foster. Not even periodically. To put it bluntly, Betty Jo Foster was an unsatisfied woman in the prime of her life.

Ignoring his petulant complaints as nothing but more of the same, she picked up her purse. To her surprise, he grabbed her by the forearm and all but shook her. The purse fell between them, lost in the unexpected shuffle of feet.

“Damn it, Betty Jo! You heard me! This just isn’t right!”

“Hey!” she said, then frowned. She couldn’t remember the last time Carter had raised his voice to her. She yanked, trying to pull herself free from his grasp, but to her dismay, his fingers tightened.

“Carter! You’re hurting me!”

“So what?” he snarled, and shoved her backward onto their bed. “You’re hurting me.”

A slight panic began to surface. He never got angry. At least he never used to. Without thinking, she rolled over on her stomach to keep from messing up her hair, and started to crawl off of the bed. But turning her back on him was her first and last mistake. Before she could get up, Carter came down on top of her, pushing her into the mattress, calling her names she didn’t even know he knew.

Betty Jo screamed, but the sound had nowhere to go. The weight of his body kept pushing her deeper and deeper into the mattress, and when the bulk of him settled across her hips, and his shoes began snagging runs in her panty hose, she realized that he was sitting on her. In shock, she began to fight.

Flailing helplessly, her hands clenched in the bedspread as she tried unsuccessfully to maneuver herself out from under him. Panic became horror as his hands suddenly circled her neck. The more she kicked and bounced, the tighter he squeezed.

A wayward thought crossed her mind that he’d messed up her hair and that Dixie Red lipstick would not wash out of the bedspread. It was the last of her worries as tiny bursts of lights began to go off behind her eyelids. Bright, bright, brighter, they burned until they shattered into one great, blinding-white explosion.

As suddenly as it had come, the rage that had taken him into another dimension began to subside. Carter shuddered and shuddered as his hands slowly loosened, and when he went limp atop her body, guilt at his unexpected burst of temper began to surface. He’d never been a physical sort of man, and didn’t quite know how to explain this side of himself.

“Damn it, Betty Jo, I’m real sorry this happened, but you’ve been driving me to it for years.”

Oddly enough, Betty Jo had nothing to say about his emotional outburst, and he wondered, as he crawled off her butt, why he hadn’t done this years earlier? Maybe if he’d asserted himself when all of her misbehaving began, brute force would never have been necessary.

He smoothed down his hair, then wiped his sweaty palms against the legs of his slacks. Even from here, he could still smell the scent of her perfume upon his skin.

“Get up, Betty Jo. There’s no need to pout. You always get your way, whether I like it or not.”

Again, she remained silent. Carter’s gaze ran up, then down her body, noting as it did, that he’d ruined her hose and smudged her dress. When she saw what he’d done to the back of her skirt, she would be furious.

“Okay, fine,” Carter said, and started to walk away.

As he passed the foot of the bed, one of her shoes suddenly popped off the end of her heel and stabbed itself into the spread. He paused, starting to make an ugly comment about the fact that she was undressing for the wrong man, when something about her position struck him as odd. He leaned over the bed frame and tentatively ran his forefinger across the bottom of her foot. Her immobility scared the hell out of him. Betty Jo was as ticklish as they came.

“Oh, God,” Carter muttered, and ran around to the edge of the bed, grabbing her by the shoulder. “Betty Jo, this isn’t funny!”

He rolled her onto her back, and when he got a firsthand look at the dark, red smear of lipstick across her face and her wide, sightless eyes staring up at him, he began to shake.

“Betty, honey…”

She didn’t move.

He thumped her in the middle of the chest, noting absently that she was not wearing a bra, and then started to sweat.

“Betty Jo, wake up!” he screamed, and pushed up and down between her breasts, trying to emulate CPR techniques he didn’t actually know.

The only motion he got out of her was a lilt and a sway from her buxom bosom as he hammered about her chest, trying to make her breathe.

“No! God, no!”

Suddenly he jerked his hands to his stomach, as if he’d been burned by the touch of her skin. To his utter dismay, he felt bile rising, and barely made it to the bathroom before it spewed.

Several hours later, he heard the hall clock strike two times, and realized that, in four hours, it would be time to get up. He giggled at the thought, then buried his face in his hands. That was silly. How could one get up, when one had never been down? Betty Jo’s body lay right where he’d left it, half-on, half-off the bed, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.

And therein lay Carter’s problem. He didn’t know what to do next. Twice since the deed, he’d reached for the phone to call the police, and each time he’d paused, remembering what would happen when they came. There was no way he could explain that it was really all her fault. That she’d ruined him and his reputation by tarnishing her own.

And that was when it struck him. It was her fault. And by God, he shouldn’t have to pay!

Suddenly, a way out presented itself, and he bolted from the chair and began rolling her up in the stained bedspread, then fastening it in place with two of his belts. One he buckled just above her head, the other at her ankles. He stepped back to survey his work, and had an absent thought that Betty Jo would hate knowing that she was going to her Maker looking like a tamale. Without giving himself time to reconsider, he threw her over his shoulder and carried her, fireman style, out of the kitchen and into the attached garage, dumping her into the trunk of his car.

Grabbing a suitcase from the back of a closet, he raced to their bedroom and began throwing items of her clothing haphazardly into the bag, before returning to the car. As he tossed the suitcase in the trunk with her body, he took great satisfaction in the fact that he had to lie on the trunk to get it closed.

As he backed from the garage and headed uptown toward an all-night money machine, the deviousness of his own thoughts surprised him. He would never have imagined himself being able to carry off something like this, yet it was happening just the same. If he was going to make this work, it had to look like Betty Jo took money with her when she ran. With this in mind, he continued toward the town’s only ATM.

As he pulled up, the spotlight above the money machine glared in his eyes. He jumped out of the car, and with a sharp blow of his fist, knocked out the Plexiglas and the bulb, leaving himself in the bank drive-through in sudden darkness. Minutes later, with the cash in his pocket, he was back in the car and heading out of town toward the city dump.

Ever thankful that Larner’s Mill was too small-town in its thinking to ever put up a gate or a lock, Carter drove right through and up to the pit without having to brake for anything more than a possum ambling across the road in the dark.

When he got out, he was shaking with a mixture of exertion and excitement. As he threw the suitcase over the edge, he took a deep breath, watching it bounce end over end, down the steep embankment. When he lifted his wife from the trunk and sent her after it, he started to grin. But the white bedspread in which she was wrapped stood out like a beacon in the night. He could just imagine what would hit the fan if Betty Jo turned up in this condition. He had to cover up the spread.

It was while he was turning in a circle, looking for something with which to shovel, that he saw the bulldozer off to the side.

That’s it, he thought. All he needed to do was shove some dirt down on top. Tomorrow was trash day. By the time the trash trucks made the rounds and dumped the loads, she’d be right where she belonged, buried with the rest of the garbage.

It took a bit for him to figure out how to work the bulldozer’s controls, but desperation was a shrewd taskmaster, and Carter Foster was as desperate as they came. Within the hour, a goodly portion of dirt had been pushed in on top of the latest addition to the city dump, and Betty Jo Foster’s burial was slightly less dignified than she would have hoped.

Minutes later, Carter was on his way home to shower and change. As he pulled into his garage, he pressed the remote control and breathed a great sigh of satisfaction as the door dropped shut behind him.

It was over!

His feet were dragging as he went inside, but his lawyer mind was already preparing the case he would present to his coworkers. Exactly how much he would be willing to humble himself was still in the planning stage. If they made fun of him behind his back because he’d been dumped, he didn’t think he would care. The last laugh would be his.

Days later, while Betty Jo rotted along with the rest of the garbage in Larner’s Mill, Glory Dixon was making her second sweep through the house, looking behind chairs and under cushions, trying to find her keys. But the harder she looked the more certain she was that someone else and not her carelessness was to blame.

Her brother came into the kitchen just as she dumped the trash onto the floor and began sorting through the papers.

“J.C., have you seen my keys? I can’t find them anywhere.”

“Nope.” He pulled the long braid she’d made of her hair. “Why don’t you just psych them out?”

Glory ignored the casual slander he made of her psychic ability and removed her braid from his hand. “You know it doesn’t work like that. I never know what I’m going to see. If I did, I would have told on you years ago for filching Granny’s blackberry pies.”

He was still laughing as their father entered the house by the back door.

“Honey, are you ready to go?” Rafe asked. “We’ve got a full morning and then some before we’re through in town.”

She threw up her hands in frustration. “I can’t find my keys.”

Her father shrugged, then had a thought. “Did you let that pup in the house last night?”

The guilty expression on her face was answer enough.

“Then there’s your answer,” he muttered. “What that blamed pooch hasn’t already chewed up, he’s buried. You’ll be lucky if you ever see them again.”

“Shoot,” Glory muttered, and started out the door in search of the dog.

“Let it wait until we come home,” Rafe said. “I’ve got keys galore. If you don’t find yours, we’ll get copies made of mine. Now grab your grocery list. Time’s a’wastin’.”

“Don’t forget my Twinkies,” J.C. said, and slammed the kitchen door behind him as he exited the house.

Glory grinned at her brother’s request, then did as her father asked. As she and Rafe drove out of the yard, they could see the back end of the John Deere tractor turning the corner in the lane. J.C. was on his way to the south forty. It was time to work ground for spring planting.

Carter was playing the abandoned husband to the hilt, and oddly enough, enjoying the unexpected sympathy he was receiving from the townspeople. It seemed that they’d known about Betty Jo’s high jinks for years, and were not the least surprised by this latest stunt.

As he stood in line at the teller’s window at the bank, he was congratulating himself on the brilliance of his latest plan. This would be the icing on the cake.

“I need to withdraw some money from my savings account and deposit it into checking,” he told the teller. “Betty Jo nearly cleaned me out.”

The teller clucked sympathetically. “I’ll need your account numbers,” she said.

Carter looked slightly appalled. “I forgot to bring them.”

“Don’t you worry,” the teller said. “I can look them up on the computer. It won’t take but a minute.”

As the teller hurried away, Carter relaxed, gazing absently around the room, taking note of who was begging and who was borrowing, when he saw a woman across the lobby staring at him as if he’d suddenly grown horns and warts. So intent was her interest, that he instinctively glanced down to see if his fly was unzipped, and then covertly brushed at his face, then his tie, checking for something that didn’t belong. Except for her interest, all was as it should be.

Twice he looked away, thinking that when he would turn back, she’d surely be doing something else. To his dismay, her expression never wavered. By the time the teller came back, his impatience had turned to curiosity.

He leaned toward the teller, whispering in a low, urgent tone. “Who is that woman?”

The teller looked up as he pointed across the room at Glory.

“What woman?” she asked.

“The blonde beside that old man. The one who keeps staring this way.”

The teller rolled her eyes and then snorted softly through her nostrils.

“Oh! Her! That’s that crazy Glory Dixon and her father.”

Dixon…I know that man. I hunted quail on his place last year with Tollet Faye and his boys.

The teller kept talking, unaware that Carter was turning pale. He was remembering the gossip he’d heard about the girl, and imagined she could see blood on him that wasn’t really there.

“She fancies herself some sort of psychic. Claims that she can see into the future, or some such nonsense. Personally, I don’t believe in that garbage. Now then…how much did you want to transfer?”

Carter was shaking. He told himself that he didn’t believe in such things, either, but his guilty conscience and Betty Jo’s rotting body were hard to get past. He had visions of Glory Dixon standing up from her chair, pointing an accusing finger toward him, and screaming “murderer” to all who cared to hear.

And no sooner had the thought come than Glory un-crossed her legs. Believing her to be on the verge of a revelation, he panicked.

“I just remembered an appointment,” he told the teller. “I’ll have to come back later.”

With that, he bolted out of the bank and across the street into an alley, leaving the teller to think what she chose. Moments later, the Dixons came out of the bank and drove away. He watched until he saw them turn into the parking lot of the diner on the corner, and then relaxed.

Okay, okay, maybe I made a big deal out of nothing, he told himself, and brushed at the front of his suit coat as he started back to his office. But the farther he walked, the more convinced he became that he was playing with fire if he didn’t tie up his loose ends. Before he gave himself time to reconsider, he got into his car and drove out of town. He had no plan in mind. Only a destination.

The small frame house was nestled against a backdrop of Pine Mountain. A black-and-white pup lay on the front porch, gnawing on a stick. Carter watched until the puppy ambled off toward the barn, and then he waited a while longer, just to make sure that there was no one in sight. Off in the distance, the sound of a tractor could be heard as it plowed up and down a field. As he started toward the house, a light breeze lifted the tail of his suit coat.

He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he told himself that something must be done, or all of his careful planning would be for nothing. If he was going to ignore the fact that Glory Dixon could reveal his secret, then he might as well have called the police the night of the crime, instead of going to all the trouble to conceal it.

Planks creaked upon the porch as it gave beneath his weight. He knocked, then waited, wondering what on earth he would say if someone actually answered. Then he knocked again and again, but no one came. He looked around the yard, assuring himself that he was still unobserved, and then threw his weight against the door. It popped like a cork out of a bottle, and before Carter could think to brace himself, he fell through the doorway and onto the floor before scrambling to his feet.

Now that he was inside, his thoughts scattered. Betty Jo’s death had been an accident. What he was thinking of doing was premeditated murder. Yet the problem remained, how to hide one without committing the other. He stood in place, letting himself absorb the thought of the deed. And as he gazed around the room, his attention caught and then focused on the small heating stove in the corner.

It was fueled with gas.

He began to smile.

An idea was forming as he headed for the kitchen. His hands were shaking as he began to investigate the inner workings of the Dixons’ cookstove. It didn’t take long to find and then blow out the pilot light. As he turned on all the jets, he held his breath. The unmistakable hiss of escaping gas filled the quiet room.

With a sharp turn of his wrist, he turned even harder until one of the controls broke off in his hands. Let them try to turn that baby off, he thought, and hurried out of the kitchen.

Carter wasn’t stupid. He knew that almost anything could ignite this—from a ringing telephone to the simple flick of a light switch when someone entered a room. And while he had no control over who came in the house first, he could at least make sure the house didn’t blow with no one in it.

With his thumb and forefinger, he carefully lifted the receiver from the cradle and set it to one side. The loud, intermittent buzz of a phone off the hook mingled with the deadly hiss behind him.

Now that it was done, an anxiety to escape was overwhelming. Carter ran through the house and out onto the porch. Careful to pull the front door shut behind him, he jumped into his car and drove away while death filtered slowly throughout the rooms.

It was dusk. Dew was already settling upon the grass, and the sun, like Humpty-Dumpty, was about to fall beyond the horizon as Rafe Dixon drove into the yard and parked beneath the tree near the back door.

J.C. came out of the barn just as Rafe crawled out of the cab. Glory swung her legs out and then slid out of the seat, stretching wearily from the long ride. It felt good to be home. She couldn’t wait to get in the house and trade her ropers for slippers, her blue jeans for shorts and the long-sleeved pink shirt she was wearing for one of J.C.’s old T-shirts. They went down past her knees, and felt soft as butter against her skin. They were her favorite items of clothing.

Their errands had taken longer than she’d expected, and she’d told herself more than once during the day that if she’d known all her father had planned to do, she wouldn’t have gone. She leaned over the side of the truck bed and lifted the nearest sack into her arms.

“Right on time,” Rafe shouted, and motioned his son to the sacks of groceries yet to be unloaded from the back of their truck. “Hey, boy, give us a hand.”

J.C. came running. “Daddy! Look! I found another arrowhead today.”

Both Rafe and Glory turned to admire his latest find. Collecting them had been J.C.’s passion since he’d found his first years ago. Now he was an avid collector and had more than one hundred of them mounted in frames and hanging on the walls of his room.

“That’s a good one,” Glory said, running her fingers over the hand-chipped edge, and marveling at the skill of the one who had made it. In spite of its obvious age, it was perfectly symmetrical in form.

“Groceries are gonna melt,” Rafe warned.

J.C. grinned and winked at his little sister, then dropped the arrowhead into his pocket. He obliged his father by picking up a sack and then stopping to dig through the one Glory was holding.

“Hey, Morning Glory, did you remember my Twinkies?”

The childhood nickname made her smile as she took the package from her sack and dropped it into the one he was holding. But the urge to laugh faded as quickly as the world that began to slip out of focus.

Common sense told her that she was standing in the yard surrounded by those who loved her best, but it wasn’t how she felt. She could barely hear her father’s voice above the sound of her own heart breaking. Every breath that she took was a struggle, and although she tried over and over to talk, the words wouldn’t come.

Struggling to come out of the fugue, she grabbed hold of the truck bed, desperate to regain her sense of self. Vaguely, she could hear her brother and father arguing over whose turn it was to do the dishes after supper. When sanity returned and she found the words to speak, they were at the back porch steps.

“Daddy! Wait,” Glory shouted, as her father slipped the key in the lock.

Even from where she stood, she knew it was going to be too late.

“Hey, look! I think I just found your keys!” J.C. shouted, laughing and pointing at the puppy, coming out of the barn behind them.

It was reflex that made Glory turn. Sure enough, keys dangled from the corner of the pup’s mouth as he chewed on the braided leather strap dangling from the ring.

And then it seemed as if everything happened in slow motion. She spun, her father’s name on her lips as she started toward the house. In a corner of her mind, she was vaguely aware of J.C.’s surprised shout, and then the back door flew off the hinges and into the bed of the truck. The impact of the explosion threw Glory across the yard where she lay, unconscious.

When reason returned, the first things she felt were heat on her back, and the puppy licking her face. She groaned, unable to remember how she’d come to this position, and crawled to her knees before staggering to her feet. Something wet slid down her cheek, and when she touched it, her fingers came away covered in blood. And then she remembered the blast and spun.

She kept telling herself that this was all a bad dream, and that her brother would come out of the door with one Twinkie in his mouth and another in his hand. But it was impossible to ignore the thick, black coils of smoke snaking up from the burning timbers, marking the spot that had once been home.

Still unable to believe her eyes, she took several shaky steps forward.

“Daddy?” He didn’t answer. Her voice rose and trembled as she repeated the cry. “Daaddee! No! No! God, no! Somebody help me!”

Something inside the inferno exploded. A fire within a fire. It was then that she began to scream.

Terror. Horror. Despair.

There were no words for what she felt. Only the devastating knowledge that she’d seen the end of those she loved most and had not been able to stop it.

She fell to her knees as gut-wrenching tears tore up her throat and out into the night. Heat seared her skin and scorched her hair as she considered walking into what was left of the pyre. All of her life she’d been separated from the crowd by the fact that she was different, and the only people who’d accepted and loved her for herself had been her father and brother. If they were gone, who would love her now?

And while she stared blindly at the orange and yellow tongues licking at what was left of her home, another image superimposed itself over the flames, and Glory found herself straining toward it, unable to believe what she saw.

A man! Walking through their house, running from room to room. She saw the backs of his hands as they hovered above the stove. Saw them twist…saw them turn…saw them kill. And then he ran, and all that she saw was the silhouette of his back as he moved out the door. The hair crawled on the back of her neck as a reality only Glory understood suddenly surfaced.

Oh, my God! This wasn’t an accident!

It was a gut reaction, but she spun in fear, searching for a place to hide. In the dark, she stumbled, falling to her knees. Still in a panic to hide, she crawled, then ran, aiming for the dark, yawning maw of the barn door. Only when she was inside did she turn to look behind her, imagining him still out there…somewhere.

Why would someone want us dead? And no sooner had the thought come, than her answer followed. It wasn’t them. It was me who was supposed to die.

She slipped even farther inside the barn, staring wide-eyed out into the night, unable to believe what her mind already knew. The guilt that came with the knowledge could have driven Glory over the edge of reason. But it didn’t. She couldn’t let her father and brother’s killer get away with this.

But who…and why? Who could possibly care if she lived or died?

Instinct told her that it wasn’t a stranger. But instinct was a poor substitute for facts, and Glory had none. The only thing she knew for sure was that she needed a plan, and she needed time.

There was no way of knowing how long she’d been unconscious, but neighbors were bound to see the fire and could be arriving any minute. A sense of self-preservation warned her that she must hide until she found someone she could trust. Within a day or so, the killer would know that two, not three people, had died in the fire, and then whoever had tried to hurt her would come looking again.

“Oh, God, I need help,” she moaned, and then jumped with fright as something furry rubbed up against her leg. She knelt, wrapping her arms around the puppy’s neck, and sobbed. “You’re not what I needed, but you’re all I’ve got, aren’t you, fella?”

A wet tongue slid across her cheek, and Glory moaned as the puppy instinctively licked at the blood on her face. She pushed him away, then stood. Her eyes narrowed above lashes spiked with tears, her lips firmed, her chin tilted as she stared at the fire.

Daddy…J.C…. I swear on Mother’s grave…and on yours, that I will find him. All I need is a little help.

No sooner had that thought come than an image followed. A man’s face centered within her mind. A man who had been a soldier. A man who understood killing. A stranger who, right now, Glory trusted more than friends.

If I knew where you were, Wyatt Hatfield, I would call in a debt.

But the fantasy of finding a stranger in a world full of people was more than she could cope with. Right now she had to hide, and there was no family left alive to help her.

Except…

She took a deep breath. “Granny.”

The puppy heard the tone of her voice, and whined softly from somewhere behind her, uncertain what it was that she wanted, yet aware that a word had been uttered it did not understand.

Granny Dixon’s house sat just across the hollow as it had for the past one hundred years, a small shelter carved out of a dense wilderness of trees and bush. As a child, Granny had been Glory’s only link with another female, and she had often spent the day in her lap, lulled by the sound of her voice and the stories she would tell.

Glory took a deep breath and closed her eyes, imagining she could hear her granny’s voice now.

When you tire of them menfolks, child, you just come to old Granny. We women hafta stick together, now, don’t we?

Her saving grace was that Granny Dixon’s cabin was just as she’d left it. Its presence could be the answer to her prayer. She was counting on the fact that few would remember its existence. Rafe had promised his mother that he wouldn’t touch or change a single thing in her home until they’d put her in the ground. In a way, Glory was thankful that Granny’s mind was almost gone. At least she would be spared the grief of knowing that her only son and grandson had beat her to heaven.

And while the cabin was there, food was not. Glory made a quick trip through the root cellar, using the light from the fire as a guide, she ran her fingers along the jars until she found what she wanted. She came up and out with a jar of peaches in one hand and a quart of soup in the other. It would be enough to keep her going until she figured out what to do.

And then she and the puppy vanished into the darkness of the tree line. Minutes later, the sounds of cars and trucks could be heard grinding up the hill. Someone had seen the fire. Someone else would rescue what was left of her loved ones. Glory had disappeared.