He couldn’t turn Josie loose.

Lost in that darkness with her, he knew she was his anchor. Her hand brushed against his forehead willingly, even as she heard his terrible cry. Her fingers were warm in the zero cold of his agony, even while she trembled against him.

Her touch kept him from disappearing into that wild, whirling darkness. But her touch had also focused those images. Sharpened them into crystal pieces of pain that sliced through her, too. And while he sought rest in her green eyes, peace in her sturdy refusal to bend under the weight of her loss, he’d brought his darkness to her.

He’d thought to protect her, to find out the truth of what hovered around them, but he’d endangered her.With the last remnant of strength he had, he shoved her away.

Lindsay Longford, like most writers, is a reader. She even reads toothpaste labels in desperation! A former high school English teacher with an M.A. in literature, she began writing romances because she wanted to create stories that touched readers’ emotions by transporting them to a world where good things happened to good people and happily-ever-after was possible with a little work.

Her first book, Jake’s Child, was nominated for Best New Series Author, Best Silhouette Romance and received a Special Achievement Award from Romantic Times for Best First Series Book. It was also a finalist in the Romance Writers of America RITA Award contest for Best First Book. Her Silhouette Romance novel Annie and the Wise Men won the RITA Award for the Best Traditional Romance of 1993.

Dark Moon
Lindsay Longford

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

It was the sudden silence that made her look up.

Struck by the stillness, Josie paused. Pebbles of dirt spattered from her trowel to the ground as she raised her chin. Dust spiraled up, gritty against her mouth.

She tilted her head, listening.

And heard nothing.

Her fingers tightened against the leaf of the tomato seedling. Uneasy, she rested her trowel on the ground.

All morning she’d been distantly aware of the occasional trill of a mockingbird or the squawks of a blue jay in the pines at the edge of her property, the bird noise a numbing background sound in the July heat.

But now, this silence.

Abrupt and absolute.

Only the stifling darkness of the woods in front of her. Darkness and stillness and the heavy drumming of her pulse in her ears.

Over the pungent scent of the bruised leaf in her hand came a musky scent mixing with the smell of dry soil.

Heat pressed in on her, trickled down her spine.

Something there, just at the edge of her vision. A shape, a form, unmoving in the shadows of the woods.

She blinked, clearing the haze of perspiration from her eyes. Shades of darkness slid into focus, and her heart stuttered and skipped a beat as she saw him.

Ears folded over and stub of a tail jutting out, the dog paused at the edge of the woods and stared at her. Heavy bodied and blunt nosed, he watched her, an intimidating intelligence in his unblinking yellow gaze.

Predator eyes.

Kneeling in front of the straggling tomato plants, Josie gripped the trowel stuck in the sandy soil of her garden and didn’t move.

The dog fixed her with his murky yellow eyes as he slowly lowered his muzzle.

Understanding pierced her heat-stunned brain. Rabid, heat-mad, whatever—the animal was readying himself for attack. Josie swallowed, the sound loud in her ears.

Balancing herself, she flattened her free hand in the dirt, dropping the seedling uprooted by the force of her grip. One broken leaf lay like a green arrowhead against the clumps of earth.

With her barely perceptible movement, the animal, a good two feet or more at the shoulder, stepped forward, his long, sloping shoulders moving with massive power.

Fear sharpening her senses, Josie studied him. He was almost 130 pounds of tight, hard muscle from shoulder to flank. But his eyes—Josie shivered.

His stubby tail, upright now, wagged once.

She might have thought it was a sign of friendly greeting.

She knew better.

Friendliness was not in those eyes.

Not friendliness at all. Something else entirely.

Threat glowed deep in their muddy depths.

An instinct she hesitated to trust whispered, Evil, evil. Another voice, one she knew damned good and well not to trust, murmured seductively, Run!

Sweat dripped down into her eyes as she edged back slowly on her heels, unthinking, reacting at a primal level. Keeping her gaze on the ground, avoiding direct eye contact, she kept the animal in peripheral view.

He lifted his snout, sniffing, and cocked his head, watchful, waiting. His front paws alternated in place, a curious, prancing dance, before he drifted out of view. She carefully turned her head, and through a blur saw the dog pace three steps east along her yard toward the clothesline where her sheets hung limp and still, and then three steps west, observing some boundary invisible to her, a boundary only yards away as he guarded her. His mouth was partially open, his tongue lolling to the side.

Her knees ached with the effort she made not to leap to her feet and run. Behind her, the house might as well have been miles away, light-years from where she knelt shaking and sweating in the dirt.

Smells rose to her nostrils, the salty smell of sweat on her arm, the dry tickle of dirt, the fetor of animal excitement heavy in the still air.

The only moving thing in her universe, the dog stalked slowly in front of her.

Emerging from the darkness of the woods like a shadow, another dog eased to his left. Then a third, both dogs staying slightly behind the lead dog, and all three fixing her with that stare that sent a slide of ice bone-deep.

The trowel was greasy with sweat—slick in her bare hand. Her vision hazy, she saw the first dog stop. Watching her steadily, intently, he closed his rust-colored muzzle.

In all that thick silence, Josie could have sworn she heard his powerful jaws snap. He was thinking, reaching a decision. That, too, she would swear.

If she could wipe the sweat from her eyes, she could—run! Deep in her brain Josie heard the treacherous voice growl.

She thought about it. Her muscles tensed, needing the release of action.

No.

She didn’t dare take off in a race for her house. At gut level, she knew the pack would be on her before she could reach the safety of the porch.

For seven days, the male and four companion animals, all with distinctive rust circles over their eyes, had appeared in the woods, each day moving closer to her yard, her house. Closer to her.

She’d seen them at night, too, their shadows slipping silently through the trees bordering her property, merging in and out of the deeper darkness of the woods before disappearing.

Roaming through her house during the quiet hours as heat and night sounds seeped in through her open windows, she’d had an odd empathy for the animals, longing herself for the cool darkness of the woods, desiring an end, whatever it was, to the waiting that filled her days and kept her wandering through her heat-blasted house at nights. In those unending hours, she’d envied the pack’s oneness with the dark.

She hadn’t seen their eyes at night, though—only the heavy bulk of their bodies loping smoothly and silently before disappearing. She hadn’t been prepared for the brute intelligence that held her captive now.

Across the span of arid yard, the lead animal lifted its lip in a silent snarl. Like sentinels, two more dogs appeared noiselessly, fanning out behind the triumvirate. Sweat trickled into her mouth.

Knowing better than to move in any way that would seem a challenge, she edged backward, still on her knees, inching her way to the house. Passive, she let her body language acknowledge their dominance.

It wasn’t enough.

Again, the alpha dog lowered his head. The animals behind him shifted, restlessly pawing the ground.

In that instant, Josie knew she had no choice.

They were going to attack her if she stayed.

They would attack if she ran.

She had no possibility of reaching her house. Aroused by the chase, the animals would close on her in a frenzy of bloodlust.

In spite of the heat, terror struck her with utter, immobilizing cold.

And in that tick of time when the world hung motionless, everything suspended, even the drop of sweat poised at the tip of her eyelash, she wondered if this cold stillness was how it had been for her daughter. For the other children who’d vanished.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. From the hidden spaces of her fears, that unguarded thought slipped fully formed into her mind. Had Mellie been this cold, this terrified? Unbearable, that sly thought. Oh, Mellie, she thought, the ever present grief stone-heavy in her chest. Mellie.

Thinking of her daughter, Josie blinked, and her vision cleared. The earth turned, slowly, with an almost audible hum, and she heard the chambers of her heart open, close, heard the swoosh of her blood through her veins.

And with the roaring of her pulse in her ears, she knew she wasn’t going to be one more victim. She had too many questions she wanted answered.

She owed Mellie those answers.

The first dog lifted one paw and bowed his massive back.

The hot, dusty air carried his low growl to her, the rumble coming from deep within his massive chest, the vibration palpable in the earth under her palm. With one hand Josie gripped the slippery trowel, and with the hand pressed against the earth, she scooped up a fistful of dirt and crouched, her legs shaky as she prepared to leap to her feet and run the sixty yards to her porch.

Incisors showing in a fierce snarl, the huge dog flexed his haunches and laid his ears back. As his powerful neck stretched forward and he lifted his forequarters, Josie saw a darker shadow glide from behind a clump of moss-hung trees, shadow separating from shadow.

The coarse hair on the dogs’ backs stood upright. All five animals growled, a low rumble that raised the hairs at the back of her own neck. Primitive, that response, electric.

Now or never, she thought. Rising jerkily to her feet, she flung the handful of dirt and the trowel toward the dogs now in midleap. In that instant of furious motion, she saw a long arm lift, a hand held palm out, unspoken command in the thin, outstretched fingers. Control in the index finger pointing to the ground.

And faster than she could think, everything happened, changed, in a burst of sound and images. A buzzing loud as a swarm of drought-ravaged hornets in her ears, the yellow-eyed dog twisting in midleap, stopping and then hunching low to the ground, his stub tail between his legs. A drawn-out whine as he slunk off, disappearing as quietly as he’d first appeared, the other animals vanishing behind him.

Sweat streaming down her back, into her eyes, her heart pounding so hard she thought she’d throw up, Josie had an impression of a lean form dressed in jeans and a faded, dark shirt, had an impression, too, in that charged moment of dark, haunted eyes.

Clearing her vision, she blinked, and the tall shape vanished as silently as the animals.

From far away came the beginning chatter of a blue jay, and then, the melody hastily cut off, the woods were quiet once more in the heat, a silent, waiting presence in front of her.

Josie pressed a hand between her breasts. Her chest hurt. She’d been holding her breath and hadn’t known it. Gulping, she inhaled. The air was so hot and heavy with dust that she could feel it coating her lungs, her throat, as she took rasping breaths. The muscles of her legs quivered and shook, straining as if she’d run ten miles.

But remembering those moments when she’d kneeled and seen the dogs coming toward her, been their prey, Josie forced herself to stand upright, anger bubbling sludgy-thick in her throat and stomach as she surveyed the hushed woods in front of her. Secrets there in the thick pines, the undergrowth.

Danger.

Secrets.

Grit clung to her damp hands, and she wiped them down the sides of her shorts. Mixed with her perspiration, dirt smeared the frayed denim.

“Damn!” Shaken and frightened, Josie glared toward the pines. She’d had enough of secrets and unanswered questions to last her the rest of her life.

Stuffing her trembling hands into her pockets, she considered the situation. Man and dogs had all disappeared in the same direction.

“Ryder Hayes,” she murmured, misgivings underscoring her words. Her neighbor. If neighbor was the right term for someone she’d never met. Their two houses were the only ones on either side of the woods, and they were miles from town. No one ever casually strolled near her place.

Josie rubbed her eyes. The man must be Hayes. His property lay to the west of the woods and north of Angel Bay, the town. The dogs had to be his. No one else’s. She scuffed her toes in the dirt as she sorted through her confused memories of the past few months.

Seven or eight months ago, she didn’t know exactly when, he’d returned to the old house that backed onto the Angel River where it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. She hadn’t seen him.

Until now. She was dead certain that intense, solitary figure was Ryder Hayes, those terrifying dogs his. Keeping her gaze on the woods, she backed up. She wouldn’t let him get away with letting his pets—pets! she thought, outraged—roam uncollared and uncontrolled.

God knew what those beasts were capable of.

What if she’d been a child?

Sweaty and shaky, Josie shivered as the memory of those yellow eyes glazed her burning skin with ice. “You and your damned dogs can all go to hell, Ryder Hayes.” Alarm still whipping through her, she clasped her arms around her waist and swore, the words shocking her with their violence.

She hadn’t imagined the feral calculation in the dogs’ gaze. No. Despite everything she’d been through in the past seven months, she was firmly in command of her imagination. She jammed her hands deeper into her pockets, closing her fingers around the fragment of rippled green glass.

Unlike her emotions, the touch of the weathered-smooth glass caused no pain. Christmas Eve, Mellie had handed her the lumpy package wrapped in a piece of the Sunday comics. “Magic, Mommy,” her six-year-old had said, blue eyes solemn but still not hiding her excitement. “From the woods.” She’d waved her arm vaguely toward the trees and then stuck her thumb into her mouth, her eyes growing wide, her bowed pink mouth becoming an upside-down U.

Mellie wasn’t supposed to go into the woods by herself. Ever.

Christmas.

January.

And now this hellish July.

The shard of glass was cool against her palm, as cool as the translucent watery green of its tint.

A blue jay chattered angrily. In that instant when sounds rushed in, anger battered at her, anger at a world that no longer made sense, anger at the animals that had reduced her to a quivering heap in her garden.

That image of herself wasn’t one she liked at all. She’d be damned if she’d stay cowering inside because of a pack of animals. She didn’t like being helpless. Being a victim.

Damn Ryder Hayes. His animals could—

Fury gave her the strength to turn her back on the trees and shadows and tear into her house, the screen door of the porch slamming behind her. She’d rip a piece off Hayes’s hide, she would. She wasn’t going to let him get away with that kind of carelessness.

But she wouldn’t face Ryder Hayes’s dogs without some kind of protection. Wild, spooky as hell, they were only animals, after all. Nothing more. She could deal with them.

Yanking open the drawer in the kitchen, she pulled out a key chain with a silver cylinder of capsaicin attached to it. She needed something else. Staring wildly at her kitchen cabinets, she threw open a door and whirled the carousel of spices so hard that a bottle of cinnamon flew off. She snatched the can of black pepper and stuffed it into her shorts pocket with the silver capsule. On her way down the sagging back steps, she grabbed her garden hoe. Silt from her morning weeding still caked its metal edges.

The whang of the slamming door echoed in her ears as she left her yard.

Skirting the southern edge of the woods, she went up the west approach, following the faint path in the low brush. Even with her arsenal, she lacked the nerve to take the shortcut through the woods.

In January, though, she’d run screaming like a mad-woman through the moss-shrouded pine trees, the palmetto bushes, and wax myrtle. She hadn’t gone into the woods since.

January.

Mellie.

And the six other missing children, the latest a nine-year-old boy.

And only five bodies.

Oh, Mellie, Josie thought, and her throat closed tight. She scrubbed her face hard with her fists, a desolation beyond words cramping her breathing.

Looking down at the dirt path, she realized for the first time that she’d left her house barefoot. She was so used to going without shoes, she hadn’t even thought of them in the flush of anger. Stupid. Anger had propelled her down this path. Driven by the hot rage that boiled through her as hard as fear had earlier, she hadn’t thought clearly.

She’d had only one idea in her mind. Hayes’s beasts might be responsible for—

Off to her right, the woods had grown silent again as she neared Hayes’s mansion. Eerie, that sense of a gathering intelligence. Half expecting to see one of the animals, Josie raised the hoe and looked behind her. Whirling, she stumbled as she looked up into one of the live-oak trees a few feet into the woods.

Narrowing her eyes, she realized the tree was dead, leafless. What she’d taken for leaves was a thick colony of birds. Every branch of the tree was covered with silent, watching grackles, their black plumage blending into the shadows, their bluish purple heads turned in her direction.

Her heart fluttered against her ribs as she squinted at the tree. She was close enough to see the bronze necks and throats, the yellow irises of their eyes.

Not a wing fluttered. Not one bird made a sound as she took another step down the path, but their yellow eyes followed her every movement.

“Scat, you stupid birds! Leave me alone, you devils!” Spinning in a huge circle, she waved the hoe in their direction, her voice shrill. In a huge, dark cloud, the birds rose, silent as ever, their wings beating as one. Wheeling left, they spread out, their shapes black Vs against the bleached white sky.

Then, as if directed by one mind, they hovered over the treetops, above her.

Josie shuddered. “Go away!” she shouted, waving the hoe toward the sky. “Shoo!”

And still they floated over her shoulder, their presence up there in the sky following her, the silent sweep of their wings drifting across the white-hot sun.

There was something chilling about the sight of the heavy clump of birds moving as one. Unnerved by their silent passage but not understanding why, she broke into a run. Even Ryder Hayes was preferable to this storm cloud of grackles. Gasping for breath in the heat, she came to the turn in the path that led either to Angel Bay or to the Hayes property.

The sickly-sweet branches of a drought-pinched oleander whipped against her shoulder as she pushed them aside and came to the shell drive leading to the Hayes house. Her breath rasping deep in her lungs, she paused. The edges of the crushed shells were sharp against the sole of her foot as she hesitated.

Tilted closed, the louvers of the wooden shutters gave the house a hostile, secretive appearance. In the smothering heat, the house seemed to shimmer in front of her, illusive.

Someone was watching her.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

She spun around.

The grackles had flown away.

Nothing behind her but the path.

No dogs there.

No one, in fact, merely that sense of being observed. She looked around and saw nothing, no one.

To her left, the distant curve of Angel River.

And in front of her, the house.

She hadn’t seen it in years. The paint on the tall white columns flaked to gray underneath, and dead vines crawled like spiderwebs against the blank wall of the right side. Decay, rank and ripe, lay heavily over the house.

Walking slowly up the driveway, Josie kept one hand in her pocket tight around the pepper can. With her other hand, she clutched the hoe like a weapon. Shells popped and cracked under her feet. She kept her eyes moving from left to right, half expecting the pack of dogs to come around the corner of the house, to leap at her from the bushes massed at the edge of the porch that circled the front and sides of the house.

As she made her way up the center of the steps, she thumped each one with her hoe, announcing her presence. The smell of rotting wood and insects filled her nose as the wide steps squeaked and splintered. She watched carefully where she placed her feet and tried not to think of what might have taken root or made its home in the recesses under the raised porch. Once more she wished she’d taken the time to slip into a pair of shoes.

Clutching the hoe like a walking stick, she cursed the stubbornness that kept her moving toward the front door of Ryder Hayes’s house when what she wanted was to turn and run as fast as she could away from the oppressive gloom of this house. Her lungs were constricted, leaving her dizzyingly short of oxygen as she trudged across the warped expanse of porch.

Her stubbornness would be the death of her someday. Anybody with half a brain would know when to quit. But she hadn’t had a choice, not really. Not with those dogs running wild—

She shut off her brain. She wouldn’t think of the children.

A prickling awareness made goose bumps on her skin, stayed with her.

Taking one final step, she swallowed as she paused in front of the huge, heavily carved front door and raised her fist, pounding on the grinning faces, the grimy wreaths and grapes chiseled into the wood, unleashing her frustration and terror and grief against the unyielding mahogany.

The door should have creaked. It should have groaned. There should have been cobwebs hanging from the frame and a humped Igor to open the portal a crack.

Instead, the door swung inward, and a gaunt figure appeared in the dim foyer, shading his eyes against the sunlight. A draft of air coiled around her ankles and up her thighs like the brush of an unseen, cold hand.

The door had been opened so silently that she hadn’t heard it, and her fist, still raised to pound against the door, slid against the cool cotton shirt of the man who leaned against the doorjamb. Her knuckles brushed against the thin black T-shirt, against the cords of his stomach, and she heard his swift intake of breath. His head snapped up and his dark gaze met hers.

Ice and heat burned her fingertips.

Josie jerked back, one heel scraping against a splinter. She couldn’t help her reaction. Power rising toward her, threatening to swamp her and suck her under, sweeping her out beyond safety. Coming from him.

Slumped against the door with his aloof burning gaze meeting hers, he looked too weary to speak, too weary to live, and yet waves of energy came from him, battering against her, and she took another step back, stunned by the force of his presence.

“What do you want?” Exhaustion made his low voice gravelly and he shaded his eyes again, taking a step back.

Josie gripped the hoe and stepped forward. The man looked ill. “Ryder Hayes?”

“Most of the time. Usually.” He sank more heavily against the frame as he glanced at her hoe. Slurred in a rough drawl, his words sounded as if he’d dragged them up from some dark cavern within himself. “Unless that’s a weapon?”

“What?” Josie frowned.

With a barely perceptible movement of a long index finger, he pointed to the hoe she held in a death grip. “Have you come, lady of the moss green eyes, like some medieval villager with torch and hoe, to burn me out?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Confused, Josie reached into her pocket for the cylinder of capsaicin.

“I see. Not a weapon, then.” He shook his head and pulled himself upright, almost disappearing behind the shield of the door. “Sorry, but I’m not interested in buying farm tools.”

“Good. Because I’m not selling anything.”

“Of course you are. Everyone’s selling something.” Cynicism curled the edges of his words.

“I’m not. I’m here to see Mr. Hayes.” Josie thumped the hoe emphatically. “Are you Ryder Hayes?”

“I’m afraid I am.” Slavic cheekbones sloped down to a full, sharply delineated mouth that curved down at the corners. “Not that I seem to have any choice about the matter.”

“Then I’ve come about your dogs, Mr. Hayes.”

“My dogs?” Straight white teeth flashed under the hood of his hand as his mouth stretched in a yawn. “I can’t help you.” He edged the door shut.

“You know good and well what I’m talking about.”

“Do I?” His voice became only a drift of sound.

“The dogs that almost attacked me this morning. Those beasts. Your pack of dogs.”

White lines scored his beautiful mouth, nothing more than a minute pull of muscle. He lowered his hand and his dark eyes met hers again, eyes so tortured that Josie dropped the hoe and stretched her hand to him. Clattering to the porch, the hoe fell between them and she bent down to pick it up as he said, “I have no dogs.”

“I saw you with them,” she insisted, stubborn in the face of his denial and confused by the torment she’d glimpsed.

“Did you?”

“Near my house. In the woods,” Josie said.

“Perhaps you imagined you did.” His voice was remote, disinterested, but underneath the polite dismissal she heard a disturbing note that kept her standing on his porch.

“I don’t imagine things. I know what I saw.” She gripped the hoe until her hand hurt.

“Unlike the rest of us, then? How fortunate for you. To know what’s real. What’s not.”

“I saw you. You stopped the dogs from attacking me.”

“Did I? Fascinating.”

Wanting to shake him out of his indifference, needing to make him admit the truth, Josie reached out and grasped his arm. With her movement, the capsaicin cylinder flew out of her pocket and racketed across the porch into the grass. His forearm was all muscle and bone under her fingers.

“Hell.” He doubled over and groaned, yanking his arm free and brushing his hand across his eyes. His hand trembled. “Damn.”

“Are you all right?”

“I suppose it depends on your definition.” He straightened and stepped away from her, putting the edge of the door between them before she could help him.

“Do you want me to call a doctor? Are you sick?” she repeated, concerned about the pallor that swept over his face.

“Sick?” His laugh was humorless and sent a ripple of shivers along her spine. “Spirit-sick, ‘sick almost to dooms-day,’ as the poet put it, but, no, lady green eyes, I don’t believe I need the services of a physician. Thank you for your concern.” Preparing to shut the door, his narrow, long fingers gripped the edge.

Glimpsing the strained white knuckles that tightened as she watched, Josie had the strangest impression that he was falling over the edge of a chasm and holding on with the last of his strength, but she couldn’t let him escape without settling the issue of his animals. “Wait!”

“I thought we were through. Wasn’t that all you wanted to know? About the dogs?” he drawled, his voice bored.

“They’re dangerous. You were there. You saw them start to come after me.”

“So you said.” A flicker of pain stirred in the depths of his eyes. “And I’ve said, they’re not my animals.”

“You controlled them,” she said flatly. “They obeyed you.”

“Ah.” The sound was long, drawn out, a whisper of something disturbing in the heat. “There is that, isn’t there?”

Josie frowned. Standing in front of him, holding her ground against his clear if unexpressed wish that she leave, she had the sense that she was leaning forward into the winds of a hurricane. Pale and gaunt faced, he was like the swirling winds of those storms, the power sweeping out around him, bending everything in its path. “I haven’t seen them since then, but you have to keep them locked up. It’s not safe to let them roam around.” Uneasily she looked over her shoulder and off to the woods behind her and to the left.

“They’re not here,” he said, and his voice was gentle. “I don’t have…pets.”

Odd, Josie thought, the way he echoed her earlier thoughts. Stubbornly she persisted. “I want an explanation.” She tapped the edge of the hoe against the porch boards.

“So do we all.” He smiled at her, a faint stretching of facial muscles that moved like clouds across the gulf. “Want explanations. For something or other, don’t we?” His gaze locked with hers.

“I want your dogs to stay away from me,” she insisted. “Sooner or later, they’re going to hurt someone. I don’t want them anywhere near my property.” As she glared into his hooded eyes, cold waves rolled over her, sapping her strength and dragging her down to darkness. Dismayed by the lethargy sliding through her bones, Josie struggled against the waves of passivity. She banged the hoe again. “Those creatures are as dangerous as a loaded gun. And you know it, Mr. Hayes.”

“I never said they weren’t…dangerous. But I can’t control them.”

“You did earlier.”

“Yes, well, miracles do occur.” His words were ironic and fraught with a meaning she couldn’t interpret.

Josie fought the apathy, fought against the rush of sounds and darkness that enervated her. “Then find another way to make a miracle.”

“I wish I could.” Low and filled with suffering, his drawl wrapped around her, and she felt the beat of his anguish with each beat of her heart. “Believe me, I wish I could.”

His words turned to vapor in front of her, a cool mist surrounding him and brushing against her flushed skin as he continued, his words growing fainter with each syllable. “You need to be careful, Josie Birdsong.” His image blurred.

“Conrad,” she whispered. “Josie Conrad.” He knew her middle name. Her mother’s name. He couldn’t know. But he did. Josie was drowning in cold and darkness and she was terrified, reaching out for his hand. “What’s happening?” she moaned and gripped his fingers, their strength solid in the rolling darkness.

And in that moment as her hand curled around his, from somewhere deep in his house, she heard the cry of a child. Sharp, distinct.

And then gone. Silence.

All rational thought vanished with the sound of that child. Josie yanked her hand free and shoved against the door. Down the dark corridor where she sank, she saw a white flutter, a hand, a face. A shape in the dim hallway of the house. Mellie. Oh, God. “Mellie,” she cried and pushed against the force of Ryder Hayes closing his door in her face. “My daughter’s in there! You have my daughter in your house!”

“No!” he muttered. The hard planes of his face contorted, the angles sharp as a knife, the lines around his mouth white and deep with torment. “No one’s here. No one.”

“Mellie!” she screamed and slapped both fists against the door panels.

His face twisted, and he threw up one hand to shade his eyes, his expression hidden. “For God’s sake, go away!”

In that brief glimpse of his expression as he slammed the door, Josie saw the horror in his eyes. She didn’t understand it, but she knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that his horror was real.

With the slam of his door, cold and darkness vanished. All around her was heat and silence, thick and heavy against the ice that encased her shaking body.

She heard the metallic click, the rattle of a chain, as he shot the bolt.

Motionless on a current of air, a solitary grackle hung in the pale sky.

The house with its shuttered windows and locked door loomed in front of her. Hostile.

“Mellie,” Josie whispered, tears mixing with the dirt on her face.

Bracing his back against the door, Ryder ground his fists against his eyelids and sank to the floor, facing the narrow hallway that led from the front of the house.

He should have stayed away from the woman. Should have stayed away from Josie Conrad. Birdsong came the whisper. Birdsong.

But he’d been drawn to her by a power stronger than his intelligence, stronger than his will. He’d gone that first night and watched her small, strained face float above candle flames through the darkened rooms of her house.

And he’d returned the next night.

The night after that.

“Damn, damn, damn.” Banging his fists against his face, he swore, the stream of curses no relief to the grinding agony inside him.

He should have been able to resist.

But he hadn’t.

No, he should never have gone to Josie Conrad’s house.

Not that first time when he’d watched her from the woods and seen her pacing hour after hour in the candlelit rooms of her house. And especially not today.

It was growing worse.

Something had happened while she stood in the doorway. She’d seen something. She believed she’d seen a child.

He groaned, a raw, animal sound of pain.

He was losing control.

Rising in one jerky motion, Ryder stood and turned around, facing the direction she’d taken. Through one of the louvers in the small window next to the door, he watched her slender figure as she vanished down the path. Her moss green eyes had been unbearably sad. Lost. Underneath her reckless courage, she’d been lost.

As he watched, a long braid of shiny black hair swung like a metronome against the pink of her blouse. The end curl of the braid hung like a comma past the waistband of her baggy shorts. A strip of smooth, tanned skin showed above the waistband and pink blouse edge.

He wanted to run the back of his finger along that small strip of satin skin, wanted to touch his tongue to the tiny dimple at the back of her knee and see if it truly tasted of honey and flowers. He wanted—God in heaven, he wanted—

The wooden louver cracked between his fingers, the sound like a gunshot.

A bead of blood appeared along the side of his palm as he stared down the empty driveway. Ryder leaned his forehead against the shattered strip, pressing hard, reminding himself.

He had to stay away from Josie Conrad. He would make himself leave her alone.

If he could.

Like an echo to the tattoo beat of his heart came that whispering thread of sound.

Birdsong. Birdsong.

CHAPTER TWO

Josie never knew how she returned home. She knew only that she was there, the desperate green line of her garden an oasis in the brown of dead and dying grass. She couldn’t remember walking back down the path at all.

But she remembered very, very clearly the sound of the bolt slamming shut against her. Remembered, too, the suffering in Ryder Hayes’s face, the sense of power that came from him and pulled her beyond resistance. Step by step, she tried to analyze what had happened and couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried. She struggled to make sense from an incident that made no sense. She’d been frightened. Oh, yes, Ryder Hayes had definitely frightened her.

But not until that darkness had come from him, a cold, chilling shadow that swept over her like huge, enveloping wings.

And in those moments she’d heard a child’s cry. She’d glimpsed, vaguely, indistinctly, a hazy shape drifting away from her down the long hallway.

Or had she?

Putting her hoe back on the porch, she frowned. She must have been in shock over the incident with the dogs. Or dizzy with hunger. Low blood sugar could account for that enveloping darkness that had claimed her.

Odd, but it had seemed like a claiming. A moment utterly beyond her experience.

Remembering the texture of Ryder Hayes’s arm against her hand, she shivered. The hard muscle of his forearm had flexed, tightened at her touch.

But his skin had been so cold.

She’d had the most surprising urge to rub her hand over his arm, to warm him.

In the closet she’d turned into a bathroom, Josie splashed tepid faucet water against her face as she tried to recall if she’d eaten that day and couldn’t remember eating anything since the bowl of cereal the evening before.

The water spotted the white sink, sending iridescent reflections against the white, the shimmering drops like the flash of colors in the black feathers of the grackles.

Josie stared at her startled eyes in the spotted mirror above the sink and then passed her wet hand over the image in the mirror. Water splintered across her reflection. For a second she’d seen Mellie there, Mellie who lifted herself up to the mirror to see if she was “bootiful” today.

Memories. The unending heat.

Sighing, Josie pressed her palms to her burning eyes. Maybe she was fooling herself. Maybe she wasn’t coping as well as she thought she was. She’d been in the sun all morning and then stormed along the path in the heat of high noon. Heat could make a person do strange things. Imagine things.

Her fingers rested against her closed eyes.

She hadn’t seen the colony of birds on her return. It was as if the curious massing of birds had been a dream.

They had been real, though.

The slow pursuit of the birds had been as real as the feral dogs. But like her conviction that the dogs were watching her with an evil intelligence, her panicked flight from the birds made no sense to her, either.

She wasn’t a woman given to wild imaginings. She’d coped with the reality of blood and bones in the operating room and dealt with prima donna orthopedic surgeons. She was faced with reality every moment of her life. She liked reality.

Or she had until the reality of Mellie’s disappearance and what it meant.

Had she heard a child’s voice, though? Really? Had she actually seen a small form in that chilled, silent hallway?

Yes?

No?

But something had happened.

Cooling her feverish skin, Josie slicked water down her arms. She couldn’t begin doubting her own perceptions. She was a trained observer in the operating room, competent in emergencies. Grounded. As she’d told Hayes, she wasn’t a woman given to hysterical imaginings.

Before he’d strolled out of her life and Mellie’s with a charmingly regretful smile on his face, Bart had always mockingly teased her about her sense of responsibility, but she’d sensed the knife-edge of truth in his teasing, the stab of hostility behind the charm.

“No imagination, no sense of fun, Josie,” he’d said, shrugging. “How can I be tied down to a woman who lives by schedules and lists all the time? I’m a restless kind of guy, Josie,” he’d said, throwing his duffel bag over one very broad, very restless shoulder, “and you’re, well, doll, you’re so predictable. And I like spontaneity, know what I mean, sugarbabe?”

Oh, yes, she knew. But someone had to worry about schedules and bills, and babies needed order, routine, and—

Josie breathed deeply, stopping the bitterness welling inside. No, she wasn’t a woman given to fancies.

She could’ve been mistaken about—

Flipping water at her throat, she paused and considered possibilities. It made more sense to her that thrown off-balance by the power of Ryder’s presence, she probably had seen nothing more than the flutter of a curtain in the shutter-induced twilight of that house, the yowl of a cat becoming a childish cry, the product of her own need.

But with one more child missing, she had to tell Jeb Stoner what she’d seen, no matter how flimsy the evidence. He was the detective investigating the disappearance and deaths of the children. He was the one who’d taken all the information about Mellie. He should know. It was his call.

The police could add Ryder Hayes to their list of suspects. They could search his house. If they found nothing…

She let her face dry in the air, welcoming the illusion of coolness as she scooped out the water from the sink into a can. She would pour the water on her garden tomorrow at daybreak.

Sooner or later, someone would slip up. She would find out what had happened to Mellie.

That was the day she lived for now. That fierce determination to look into the face of the person—

Josie smacked her hand against the sink.

No, she hadn’t seen her daughter in that long, shadowy hallway. She’d given up hope that Mellie was out there, somewhere, desperate and frightened.

Now, all she hoped for was that someday she would know.

The drought would end.

The killings would end.

She would find out what had happened to Mellie.

In the meantime, she put out raisins for the mockingbirds that sang at night and pans of water for the drought-stricken animals that staggered and crawled to her yard.

While she endured the slow passage of heat-heavy days, she planted seeds in her scrap of garden, saving water to dribble on the parched earth that rolled up around the drops of water and coated them with dust.

And, always, she waited.

But a child was missing again.

The shrill ringing of the phone shattered her thoughts.

She went into her kitchen. “Hello?”

Humming silence. “Who is it? Hello? Who’s there?” she repeated, her heart speeding up a little. A click. Static. Josie replaced the mouthpiece of her squatty black rotary phone, the old-fashioned relic of a phone Bart had hated, gently onto the base. A bad connection. A storm somewhere buzzing along the electrical wires.

She always hoped, somehow, though, that the phone would ring and it would be Mellie.

Facing the woods in back of her house, Josie lifted the phone again and dialed the number of the police station. The line was clear.

Five years he’d been gone, and she hadn’t missed him, not after the first year, anyway, and then only because she wanted him there for Mellie, for Mellie to have a father’s hand to cling to as she took her first step. Josie couldn’t help the sliver of resentment over the intrusion of those old memories into her chaotic thoughts today. One more thing that made no sense, she thought as she waited for someone to pick up the receiver at the other end.

Something moved in the woods.

Holding the phone, Josie leaned forward, straining. Only a wisp of cloud passing over the sun.

No one there.

Ryder Hayes. That was why she was remembering Bart. Two very different men, but in those few moments with Ryder, she had been edgily aware of him. Uncomfortable, but caught in the spell of that disturbing, heated awareness, she’d been at a pitch of awareness she’d never experienced.

She bent down to pick up a white dust ball.

The voice rasped in her ear. “Stoner here. Whaddaya want?”

“Josie Conrad here, Detective,” she mocked. “And what I want is to see you. Today, please.”

Listening to the faint drone that translated into words, into meaning, she waited. “I know, but—It’s about my neighbor, Ryder Hayes. Please,” she said, her voice rising and sinking in the late-afternoon quiet. She twined the cord in large loops around her elbow and hand as she listened. “All right. If you can’t, you can’t. Tomorrow afternoon will have to do.” Carefully she placed the dumbbell-shaped receiver back on its hooks.

Tomorrow.

But there was another night to endure.

Just before supper, the phone rang.

Again the click and then staticky squawks.

“Hello?” Josie said irritably, thinking she heard someone say her name. “Hello? I can’t hear you. Can you speak louder, please. We have a bad connection.”

The static grew louder, hurting her ears until she dropped the phone. She’d been getting a lot of interference on her phone line lately.

Maybe she needed a new phone.

When the long summer twilight ended, plunging the earth into dark, she lit the candles and opened a can of tuna, breaking it up into chunks with her fork as she chopped up celery and stirred in yogurt. Sitting down at her empty kitchen table, she made herself eat, but she turned on the television.

Under the intensity of the surge-dimming studio lights, the weatherman wore rolled-up sleeves, a gleam of sweat and an apologetic smile as he slogged manfully through the news that one more hundred-degree day had made it into the record books.

“Sorry, folks, looks like there’s no rain in the forecast for this week. We’ve had reports of brush fires in some outlying areas, so keep an eye open for smoke, hear now?” he admonished as he concluded and turned to the anchor.

“Joel, thanks for that report!” The brunette with the stiffly sprayed hair beamed at him. The tiny line of perspiration along her upper lip caught the light as she spoke. “But at least it will be another record day for the beaches, right?”

Joel nodded as the camera closed in on his sweating face.

“It’s been an interesting weather year, hasn’t it? The January freeze and now this drought?” The anchor’s expression was professionally concerned, her eyes drifting to an offscreen TelePrompTer.

“None of our computer projections suggested this kind of summer, that’s for sure, Janet.” Joel patted his shining face. “And, no, we don’t have an explanation for it. Not yet. Maybe it’s a sign that the world is ending.” His laugh was too hearty. “No, but really, folks, we think it’s probably related to the volcano eruption or to those huge gamma ray explosions reported by the NASA observatory and—”

“Fascinating, Joel! I know our listeners will stay tuned for more background.” The anchorwoman’s chuckle was feeble. Joel had had too much airtime. Her voice dropped to a really, really serious register as she interrupted, “On to local news, Joel. Young Eric Ames is still missing. The search has been expanded to Manatee and Sarasota Counties—”

Josie got up and silenced the perky voice with a flick of her wrist.

Later, she lit the candles lined up along the screened-in porch one by one, a ceremony of remembrance and sorrow, their light a token in all the darkness.

Once, sometime after midnight, an animal shrieked, caught by unseen talons. For an unsettling instant, she had the fancy that she could hear the frantic beating of that distant small heart, feel its fear pumping through her veins.

Standing and pacing on her porch, back and forth, back and forth through the night, she watched the candles and their flickering reflections in the panes of the open windows, until the last candle sputtered out, leaving her alone in darkness.

In the teasing cruelty of the cool that came shortly before dawn, she had the dream again.

Even dreaming, she knew she slept, knew she wandered in some limbo of the soul.

And in her dream she heard the ringing of the phone and knew if she answered it she would hear Mellie’s voice.

“Mommy!” Ahead of her, Mellie danced from one foot to the other. “Hurryhurryhurry! You’ll be too late, Mommy!” Her short, sturdy legs were covered with bits of moss and leaves. Behind her and to her right, a tall shape hovered, its edges blurred and unrecognizable at first. Twisting on her bed, Josie moaned. This time, she recognized the form.

Ryder Hayes, stalking through her dreams, his face turned away from her, only his lean shape betraying him.

“Mommy!” Impatiently, Mellie waved Josie to her. The bangle bracelet, nothing but imitation gold, glittered with her movement. “Now, Mommy. Now!” She stamped one yellow-sneakered foot on the ground and turned to run.

The shape drifted with Mellie, tracking her.

Hayes? Or someone else?

Her blood quickening, Josie twisted in her sleep.

“Mellie, wait!” she called out. From the corner of her eye, Josie saw the shadowy figure stalking beside her now, moving with the easy fluidity with which Ryder Hayes had disappeared into the woods, and she wanted to turn and look, really look, see if its eyes were the haunted dark of Ryder Hayes’s, so that, waking, she would know.

But Mellie was vanishing ahead of her and Josie couldn’t take time to linger. She couldn’t lose sight of her daughter. If she did—“Wait for me, sweetie!” she called. Changing, swelling to an enormous shadow, the form brushed against her, closed her in its darkness as she screamed, “Mellie!”

She knew she screamed. Her throat was raw with the effort. But the words never came out. Strangled in her throat, they woke her every time. “Wait,” she whispered now, the early-morning sunlight a pallid yellow that hinted of the heat to come.

The phone was still ringing.

With a shaking hand, Josie reached for it.

She expected static.

“Mrs. Conrad?” Low, the voice slid over her skin like the tickle of a feather.

She thought he hesitated momentarily over her name. “Yes, Mr. Hayes?”

“You shouldn’t go to the police.”

“What?” she whispered, stricken.

“Don’t go to the police with your story about what you think you saw in my house. You’ll look foolish if you do. Your daughter’s not here. As far as I know, I’ve never seen her.”

Josie couldn’t speak.

“Nor are those dogs my pets. Don’t make a fool of yourself, Mrs. Conrad. Take my advice.”

The click as he hung up sounded like a threat.

Leaning her head on her hands, Josie sat at the edge of her bed.

He’d known she was going to the police.

He’d told her she would make a fool of herself if she did.

She pulled on clean shorts and a long T-shirt that she clipped into a wad on one side. Purple, orange and red, the ring made the shape of an exotic flower when she pulled the fabric through it. A gift, too, from Mellie.

Josie didn’t like feeling threatened by Ryder Hayes.

Would Stoner have called Hayes? Would Stoner have had any reason to warn Ryder Hayes? Complications. Puzzles within a puzzle, but she hadn’t changed her mind about talking with Stoner.

As she poured a glass of milk and snagged the piece of toast that popped up, she heard the heavy thump of the weekend paper landing at her front step. Carrying the milk in one hand, she walked barefoot over the wood floor to the front door. She would read the comics, the sports pages, the editorial.

She couldn’t read the front-page headlines anymore.

Opening the inside front door, she reached for the latch on the screen door.

Even without his implied threat, Ryder Hayes made her uneasy in ways she couldn’t identify.

He had been in her dream, an unsettling darkness moving through the mist toward her. He’d become the haunting shape in her dream. The figure was always there, just out of sight, and each time she had the dream, she was left frustrated, feeling that if she could only once remember to turn and look straight at that shadowy shape, she would know—

She flicked the latch up as she glanced down at her stoop.

Through the glare of sunlight coming through the mesh of the screen, she saw the rattlesnake coiled on top of the thick mat made by the folded-over newspaper.

Stretching toward her and following the movement of her arm behind the screen, its head was flat and triangular. The ropy body was thicker than her arm, its diamond shapes iridescent in the sun. Underneath those gleaming coils, showing in patches, the headline caught and held her gaze. Her eyes fixed on the words and she read them in a blink as the snake’s body thrust forward: ‘Angel Bay Child Remains Missing.’

With both hands, Josie slammed the wooden door. Glass shattered on the floor, and milk splashed up her legs.

The force of the snake’s strike thudded against the screen, his fangs breaking through it, catching on it, scraping the inside door. Trapped high off the ground in the mesh of the screen, his heavy body thrashed against screen and wooden door.

Covering her mouth with a shaking hand, Josie stretched out a leg and dragged a chair to her, bracing it under the doorknob. Shuddering, she snapped the lock and retreated to her kitchen, gagging as the rattlesnake battered at her door, its thrashing smacks shaking the doorframe.

She sank into an aluminum-and-plastic chair at the table. The door shuddered with the heaviness of the snake’s body smashing into it. She couldn’t think what to do.

A plan. She needed a plan. She couldn’t deal with that reptilian body only a cheap wooden door away. She couldn’t cope with it. Not now. Not with her dream waking her with its sense of evil pervading her world, not with Ryder Hayes’s phone call.

No, she couldn’t face that enormous creature thumping with intent against her house.

On the other side of her front door, the snake’s body made a hissing sound as screen and wood slid against one another with the heavy flailing.

Pulling her feet up beneath her, Josie locked her arms around her knees. “Enough, oh, please, enough,” she moaned, rocking back and forth, the clunking sound of aluminum against her floor riding under the agitated whacks of the snake’s body. “I can’t do this. I can’t.” She gagged, dry mouthed, nausea growing with each bump and whack against the door.

But of course she could, and so she stayed curled into herself for long moments, gathering her strength, preparing one more time to do what she had to do. Reaching deep into herself she disciplined herself to ignore the nausea and weakness dissolving her bones.

Finally, unlocking her arms, she stood up and went to get her knee-high boots, thick leather gloves and hoe.

If she’d had a gun, she would have used it.

But she didn’t. She had the sharpened hoe, and, tears streaming down her face, she used it finally, after long minutes of walking from side to side, nerving herself to approach the thrashing snake, not recognizing herself in the woman who, screaming and cursing, slashed and sliced at the reptile until the huge body lay in pieces, separated from the head hooked into the screen.

Tasting bile, Josie got a bucket and scooped up the remains of the snake. She had to use the hoe to knock the head off, ripping the mesh as she gouged at it. Gagging again, she looped the hoe edge under the curved fangs and lifted the head into the bucket. Sliding the metal end of the hoe under the metal handle of the bucket, she carried it to the steel garbage can at the back of her lot. Metal hoe clicked against bucket handle, clicked with each shaking step she took.

She left the bucket beside the garbage can. She’d done as much as she was able to for the moment. She slipped the hoe free, and the bucket tilted, wobbled. Nausea rolled up as she saw the bloodied heap mixed with chunks of newsprint.

She ran. Dropping the hoe, she ran for her garden, but she didn’t make it. Three feet away, she doubled over, retching, the harsh sounds tearing through her until she was spent and empty.

But she stayed upright.

Later she would remember that she wasn’t driven to her knees.

She coped.

Reminding herself of that truth over and over, she summoned the strength to retrieve her abandoned hoe, to hook up the hose to the outside spigot and waste precious water flooding down the concrete stoop and screen door until no trace of the snake’s presence remained except the gaping mesh flaps hanging like pennants from the edge of the screen door.

She felt as if the snake had exuded evil, its poisonous molecules oozing from it to her, lodging in her clothes, her hair. If she could have, she would have stripped naked and bathed outside.

Instead, methodically, systematically, squandering water with a vengeance, she sprayed herself with the hose first and then went inside, cleaned up and changed into a cotton dress. Keeping out the clip that had been Mellie’s present, she first washed it and then threw her shorts and shirt into a garbage bag.

Her hands never stopped shaking.

Bart would have been surprised.

Shuddering, she knotted the bag with one vicious twist and dropped it into the trash. She wasn’t overreacting one little bit, she told herself firmly and marched out her front door.

A tiny clink as the toe of her shoe nudged a small cylinder wedged into the crack between two of the walkway bricks.

The red-pepper capsule.

Stooping, she picked it up. Drops of water glistened against its shiny surface. The force of the water from the hose had forced it into the space where two bricks hadn’t quite met.

It must have been on her stoop. Under her newspaper. With the rattlesnake on top? She recalled distinctly the clattering sound the cylinder had made as it rolled off the edge of Hayes’s porch.

Driving into Angel Bay over the bridge that crossed Angel River, she could see the roof of Ryder Hayes’s house to the north.

At the Hayes property, the river swung in before taking a wide curve out toward the gulf and the bridge from the mainland to the offshore islands.

Devil’s Island was visible from the Hayes property, then Santa Ana and finally Madre Mia, which, over the years, had become Madder Me for Angel Bay natives.

He had come to her house this morning, and she hadn’t heard him.

She’d heard the newspaper delivery boy.

But not Ryder Hayes.

Every self-serve newspaper stand she passed on the way to the police station had black headlines that leapt out at her, and she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. Just before she walked up the steps into the station, she felt a tickle of awareness at the back of her neck, and, frowning she stopped and turned to look behind her.

A shadow vanished behind the corner of the dry cleaners.

An effect of the hazy heat?

Or someone hiding from her? Ryder Hayes?

The deep tolling of the bell from the Baptist church down near the river rang out, the sound long and sonorous, throbbing in the air around her.

She squinted toward the corner and saw nothing except the blaze of sun and the haze of heat rising from the sidewalk.

The door to the police station opened and Jeb Stoner poked his head out.

“Hey, Miz Conrad, come on in out of the heat. I’ve been watching for you.”

“Thanks.” Josie cast one quick look at the empty street behind her and followed the sandy-haired detective inside. She wanted to ask him why he’d been waiting for her, but thinking about that uneasy awareness she’d had, she allowed the moment to pass. Maybe she’d ask him later.

Inside he motioned her to his desk, letting her precede him. Like a rag doll, he flopped into a cracked vinyl swivel chair behind his desk. The chair creaked and groaned under his slight weight. “Can I get you some station-house gunk?”

“No. Thank you.” She folded her hand over the clasp of her purse hanging from its shoulder strap.

He always offered her coffee, and she never accepted. He never suggested a Coke or a glass of water. Josie wasn’t sure whether he didn’t remember or whether it was his way of making an awkward joke. Either way, she had grown tired some months ago of the pro forma offer.

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“Yeah, right.” Everything he said to her came out sounding as if he didn’t believe her. It had been that way from the first.

Conveying the impression that he had all the time in the world, he fanned himself with a sheaf of papers as he waited for her to begin. She’d discovered it was one of his techniques. Most people found it hard to sit in silence. She wasn’t one, but she had business and she wanted to get on with it, not play head games.

“Detective Stoner, something strange happened yesterday.”

He leaned forward and slipped into a cracker drawl. “Miz Conrad, if you only knew, sumpin’ strange happens in this town every day.” He tapped his fingers on his desk. “We haven’t found that boy. Eric.” He looked away from her.

“Yes. I know.”

“I’m sorry. I know you hope we’ll find him alive. We sure as hell want to.” Continuing to avoid her gaze, he sighed.

“Detective—” she paused, not quite sure how to say what she wanted to “—Ryder Hayes is a sort of neighbor of mine.”

“What kind of neighbor is that? A ‘sort of’ one?” The chair creaked and squeaked. “Do you know him?”

“No. I met him yesterday for the first time.” She lifted the flap of her purse and her fingers brushed the edge of the capsaicin cylinder. “Look, I think I heard a child in his house. Crying.” She stared at the floor, at the black pattern of scuff marks against the linoleum, the coffee stains on the side of Stoner’s desk. “I know it sounds unbelievable, but…”

There was a long pause.

“And when would that have been, Miz Conrad?” he asked gently. He picked up a pen, put it down carefully. “Yesterday?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, puzzled.

“You were pis—ticked off with him, weren’t you? About the dogs you thought were his?”

“What?” Josie spoke very carefully, not ready to uncork her temper but well and truly pis—ticked off now. “What are you talking about?”

“Um,” he said, stretching out his short legs and watching her from half-closed eyes. He was a man who sat tall and stood short, a disproportionately long torso giving the illusion that he was taller than his five foot nine. As he pivoted under his desk, his feet brushed against the sides of her shoes. Josie tucked her toes under the rung of the metal folding chair as he pa-dum-dumped in a negligent rhythm on the arms of his chair. “Well, it’s like this, Miz Conrad. Hayes came in earlier today.”

“What?” Josie’s fingers tightened on her purse.

That was why Stoner had been watching for her, to “handle” her with official soothing.

“He said we might expect a call from you. He wanted to touch base with us first.”

“He’s been a busy man, Detective.” The red-pepper spray at her house. The visit to the police. Oh, yes, Hayes had been very busy. She wished she knew what else he’d been doing during the long hours of the night after she left his house. She shut her eyes for a moment, collecting herself. “What did he have to say?”

Stoner’s voice was pleasant. “He thought you might be…upset, is how I think he put it.”

Josie leaned forward and gripped the edge of the scarred desk. Ryder Hayes had been one jump ahead of her. He’d been busily creating a picture of her for the police. A picture she didn’t care one damned bit for. “Listen, ‘upset’ doesn’t begin to describe how I felt about his dogs—”

“They’re not his dogs, Miz Conrad.”

“So he says.” She stood up, angry with Stoner, with Ryder Hayes, with herself. “But the dogs were on my property. For all I know, they might be responsible for what’s happened to the children. They’re dangerous. They went toward his house, and I believe they’re his. And when I went to his house to—” she paused, wondering what word was best to use “—to talk with him about the situation, I think I saw a child crying in the hallway of his house.”

“A child?” Stoner brushed his hand against the edge of an envelope.

Leaning toward him, both hands flat on the desk on either side of her purse, Josie added, “You should consider adding him to your list of people to investigate.” She whirled away, whirled back in anger. “Why did he come here, anyway? What did he give as his reason for making a Sunday-morning visit to the police station? Don’t you think it’s a little peculiar? Just a tiny bit suspicious, Detective?” Josie was so angry she thought her eardrums would burst with the force of her blood pounding in her head.

She wanted to scream at the stolid-looking detective, shake him, make him get up and go immediately to the Hayes house, and yet Stoner sat there rocking and watching her with that bland expression that told her nothing.

“Calm down, Miz Conrad,” he said, rocking forward and leaning his elbows on the desk.

“Calm down?” She wanted to screech at him, pull her hair out by the roots. Instead, she controlled her voice.

He motioned toward the chair. “Yeah. Take it easy and set a spell longer, hear?” Light blond hair grew thickly along the length of his fair, sun-spotted arms.

Like fur, Josie thought irritably. “Why should I? You’re wasting my time, Detective. And telling me nothing. Nothing.”

“Sit down, Miz Conrad.” The casual tone disappeared. Command deepened his easy, light voice into something else. “Please.”

Josie recognized an order. She sat.

Stoner templed his fingers, pad to pad. He avoided her eyes. “I know you think we haven’t done enough to find your daughter.”

Not answering, Josie sat there, tension pounding in her head. He was right. She didn’t believe they’d done everything they could have. If they’d looked harder, spent more hours, searched—She wound her fingers into the braided strap of her purse.

“However,” Stoner said, letting his hands fall to the desk, “we’ve done everything we can. We’ve sent out APBs, we’ve distributed pictures to the restaurants along the highway, we’ve followed up every lead we’ve been given.” His voice was weary. “You know that. You’ve been in here twice a week, checking.”

Josie nodded, her throat spasming against the words threatening to spill forth. She couldn’t afford to alienate Stoner. He was her only link to the search for Mellie. Stoner was willing at least to talk with her. Over the months, the other detectives had passed her along to him, tired of her calls and visits. “Yes,” she managed to say at last. Clearing her throat, she continued, her voice rising with frustration, “But why won’t you follow up on Ryder Hayes? How can you know he’s in the clear unless you’ve searched his house?”

“We searched his house earlier today.”

“What?” Josie sank bonelessly against the chair.

Now Stoner looked at her. She thought it was sympathy that darkened his eyes, but astonished by what he’d said, she couldn’t tell. “This morning. After he came in and volunteered that you might call or swear out a complaint. He invited us out to search his house.”

“But—”

“If he’d had anything to hide, he would have taken care of it before he showed up here, but, Miz Conrad, I swear on my mother’s grave, there’s been no kid at this house. And there aren’t any dogs anywhere around. No sign of dogs on his property. We checked. Nothing that would signal that a pack of dogs had been there at all. No sign of a kid. There’s nothing in that whole blamed house except dust and his magic stuff, a slick kitchen, and one room he sleeps in. We looked. Top to bottom. Everywhere.”

“Everywhere?” she whispered, stunned. “What if you’d looked last night?” She should have insisted that they initiate a search earlier. Why hadn’t she?

Because she’d been disoriented by the strange experience in those last moments with him. So bewildered that she’d felt as if her whole world had flipped crazily upside down.

“If we’d looked last night, we might have found indications that animals had been there, that a kid had been on the premises. We might have found something. But we didn’t go out there last night.” He turned his head from side to side and Josie heard a pop of vertebrae. “Wished to God we had. We didn’t, though. One more dead end.” The thick hair on his wrist sparkled in the sunlight as he reached toward her and she jerked away.

The heavy glass ashtray was too near her elbow. Spraying ashes and matches, it fell to the linoleum floor. “Sorry,” she muttered and made no move to clean up the mess.

Neither did Stoner. “Look, I know you’re distraught—”

“No, Detective, I’m not distraught. I’m angry. You can’t even begin to believe how angry,” Josie said, clipping her words out. She wasn’t about to allow him to label her and dismiss her. She knew how the bureaucratic mind worked. If Stoner could stick a label on her, he would be able to get rid of her more easily. She wanted him to take the memory of her face home with him every night. She wanted him to think about Mellie’s small face in the dark of the night. “I want my daughter found. I don’t know anything about Ryder Hayes. But I saw the dogs. They were going to attack me. Maybe he had nothing to do with them, as he says. I don’t know. But I’m not so distraught—” she made the word into a blasphemy “—that I’m losing my grip on reality. I’m the last person in the world who would do that, believe me.” She spoke fiercely, willing him to understand. “I’m not going off the deep end. I want my daughter back. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. So I want to know what happened to her, that’s all!”

“We’re doing the best we can.” Stoner’s face was obdurate.

“Right,” she said and stood up so abruptly that the chair skidded away. “Fine. Ryder Hayes is as innocent as a newborn babe. He doesn’t have a pack of killer dogs hanging out at his house. Splendid. I’ll sleep much better tonight, Detective. Thanks.” When he grimaced, she knew her irony had been too heavy-handed, but she didn’t give a damn. She only wanted out of the stifling atmosphere created by Stoner and his bureaucratic mentality.

She was glad Stoner didn’t follow her to the door. She might have said something she would have regretted. She was ready to pick a fight, ready to vent the rage and frustration and grief that pooled in her and grew deeper and stronger by the day.

Outside the station, she blinked in the brilliant sunlight. Everything was glazed with white-hot light and Sunday-morning still. In half an hour, the churches would empty and the streets would be filled.

Head down, she walked to the parking lot. She’d lied to Stoner. She was losing her grip. Exhaustion and the constant drain of not knowing about Mellie were taking a bigger toll than she wanted to admit. That, and her refusal to go anywhere, see anyone except the detectives on the case.

She had to organize her life. If she didn’t, she’d never make it through whatever was going to happen. She had to keep strong for Mellie’s sake.

The car was idling next to hers, a low purring that she didn’t even register until she reached into her purse for her car keys, and then she looked over.

The silvery car was backed in so that its driver’s side faced forward. Her car faced the chain links at the edge of the parking lot.

Breaking the glittery silver expanse, a darkened window slid down.

Blinded by the blaze of sunlight in front of her, Josie couldn’t see the face inside the shadowed interior. But she recognized the voice and the lazy grace of his movements as he leaned forward, dipping his head.

“May I have a word with you, Josie Conrad? A moment of your time?” Ryder Hayes said politely, the cool smoothness of his words spreading over her suddenly flushed skin like melting ice cream.

CHAPTER THREE

The sidewalks down both sides of the street in front of the parking lot were empty. Heat shimmered over the surfaces.

The concrete seared the soles of Josie’s flats.

Washing into the noon heat, the chill from Ryder Hayes’s expensive car eddied around her ankles. His house had been cold, too.

She was fenced in between the wire chain in front of the hood of her car and the partially open door on the driver’s side of the ghostly silver sports car.

It glittered in the heat.

Josie didn’t back away, but her pulse swung wildly for those few seconds as she looked into the car and couldn’t see his face.

“A moment of your time, Mrs. Conrad?” he repeated, shifting toward her. “No more than that. A small request it seems to me. Between neighbors, at any rate.” His head angled in her direction. His hair absorbed the light, turned the glare into shades of darkness.

Josie could see the square of his chin, the harsh bones of his cheeks.

But not his eyes.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Hayes,” she answered in the same vein, her voice as exquisitely polite as his, denying the frantic pumping of her heart. She turned her head, looking back toward the police station. Where was Stoner? He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot when she’d arrived. Where was he now?

“You and I need to discuss some things.”

She extended her key. “Unfortunately, I’m on my way home.” She wanted to inhale the words, take them back, as he shifted again. “I mean,” she added, spacing the words, “that I have errands to do.” She hoped the words didn’t sound as contrived to him as they did to her. She stuck the key into her car door and opened it. “People are expecting me.”

“Yes, I thought so.” He shoved his door farther open, completely blocking her. “That people were expecting you, that is,” he added, irony shivering along his dark voice.

His exquisite politeness exposed her lie as the pathetic thing she’d feared it was, but doggedly Josie stuck to it. “Friends who are stopping in for dinner.”

“I’m sure your friends won’t mind waiting a few moments. Since I’m sure they’re such close friends.” The smile that curved long furrows into his lean cheeks mocked her. He glanced at the police station. “You decided to swear out a complaint, after all.”

She edged closer to her car. “Of course I did,” she said. “What did you expect?”

There was a long pause, and then he smiled. “I expect you’re lying, you see.”

She must have blanched because he nodded.

“But you intended to swear out a complaint. If I hadn’t already entertained the gentlemen in blue. And in suits. I wasn’t sure, but I thought you would, in spite of my call. It seemed the most logical action for you to take. That’s why I approached the police first. It seemed…easier. A preemptive strike, if you will. I like to avoid trouble when I can. You should have taken my advice. You would have avoided complications for yourself.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Her knuckles hurt with the strength of her grip on the car. The edges of her consciousness were darkening, thickening, closing in. She had to get away from him. Josie inhaled slowly, pushing back that terrifying darkness.

She should never have pulled her car in right to the edge of the chain-link fence. “Would you mind shutting your door, Mr. Hayes? I’d hate to scratch the finish. I’m sure it’s expensive.”

“Yes, in fact, it is.” His teeth flashed in the dim interior. “Very.”

No matter how she tried, Josie couldn’t see inside his car. Her eyes couldn’t adjust quickly enough between the blinding light bouncing up from the concrete and the cool shadows of his car. She examined the side of the police station. In this new building all the windows were shut and sealed against the heat and humidity, thanks to the central air. The old police station had made do with tall windows, taller ceilings and lots of fans.

This was supposed to be an improvement.

Unless you were in the parking lot wondering if anyone would hear you if you screamed.

Josie studied the ground, trying to decide what to do. A chameleon on the raised concrete next to the fence lifted one translucent green leg. She could always hop into her car and back out, ripping his door off in the process.

If she had the chance, she thought as one sneaker-clad foot came into view. She looked up and saw only the edge of dark slacks that tightened across a muscular thigh.

“A penny for your thoughts.” A copper coin spun into the air and she looked skyward. The coin gleamed as it tumbled to the ground, clinking as it landed.

“You can’t afford them. They’re worth more than a penny.”

“Of course they are. I should have known.” Still in the car and facing her, but with one foot on the concrete not far from her own, he dipped slightly forward in a seated half bow and his long fingers flashed in front of her eyes. A shower of copper pennies whirled and fell around her. One coin bounced off her shoe and rolled on its edge across the concrete. “So, lady green eyes, many pennies for your thoughts.”

“You wouldn’t be interested,” Josie said, staring at the bright copper as it vanished under her car. The coin looked newly minted.

“I assure you I am.” A second leg joined the first. His feet were slightly apart, his arm resting casually across the top of his open door, masking his eyes still. “I’m exceedingly interested in your thoughts, you know.” And he came out of the car, his lean body moving in one flowing motion.

And this time, she did step back, as far as she could, slam bang into the side of her car. She was better off not seeing his eyes, she realized. She wanted to look away and couldn’t. Caught by the dark blaze of their intensity, she stared and tried to swallow, the air growing thin and cold as she fought for breath while the rumble of his car’s idling engine became the thrumming pulse in her veins.

As if from a distance, she felt the stir of air as he stepped to the side, heard from afar the soft snick as he closed his car door, his gaze never leaving hers.

She was free.

And still she couldn’t look away from the tormented dark eyes of Ryder Hayes. More disturbing, much worse, was her realization that she didn’t want to look away. Wanted, instead, to step into that darkness and linger there, offer solace where none was asked for or wanted.

Ryder Hayes wanted something, all right, but it wasn’t consolation. Shaking free of the spell, she gasped as air flooded her lungs and she pressed back against the blistering metal of her car.

“What’s the matter, Josie Birdsong?” he said, still several feet away from her, although she felt as if he were enveloping her in darkness and cold.

Or heat. Held by the intensity of his dark eyes, she could no longer distinguish between heat and cold. In his presence, ice burned hot.

He took a step forward, stopped, slid his narrow hands carefully into his pockets as he scowled. “Am I frightening you?”

His question released her. “Yes, Mr. Hayes, you are. And I don’t like men who try to push me around, so step back. I want to go home, and you’re in my way.”

“Is that how it seems? That I’m bullying you?” he asked with only the slightest interest. But he stepped back.

“Yes.” Josie slid onto the hot seat of her car and grasped the door handle, ready to slam it at the first opportunity. “Maybe you’re even trying to terrorize me. I don’t know for sure. I can’t quite decide, but, yes, you’re definitely bullying me.”

He frowned. “Possibly I am. I’m not really sure myself what my intent is.” He leaned forward, touching the roof of her car. His arm blocked her exit as surely as had his car door. More so, she realized, since she didn’t think she was capable of running her car over his lean body. “What I do know is that I need to talk with you.”

“What you need is your business, Mr. Hayes. Not mine. And I don’t need or want to talk to you. Especially not right now,” Josie said through dry lips. She wasn’t frightened anymore. Disturbed, oh yes. But not afraid. At least not when he wasn’t holding her captive with his dark gaze. She half turned in her seat. The angle of her view hid his neck and face from her, but her eyes were on a level with the narrow silver buckle of his snakeskin belt. Remembering, she shuddered.

“What’s the matter?”

Above the gleam of his leather belt, the dazzling white of his cotton shirt moved back, away from her, and she grabbed the door. His narrow fingers closed around the rim, stopping her. “Let go,” she said. “Now.”

His fingernails were clean, square cut. “One minute. Sixty seconds. Here. At your house. Or in the police station if it makes you more comfortable. Your choice, but it’s important, Josie Birdsong. To both of us.” Soft, implacable, his voice made it impossible for her to leave. It held a knowledge that he had no right to. In its way, it was as much of a threat as his hand holding her door, preventing her departure. “Your choice,” he repeated. “Not mine, not what I want at all.”

Josie didn’t understand. He was asking her to meet with him.

“But we have to talk. As soon as possible.”

Not responding to his demand, Josie lifted her head. “How do you know my mother’s name?” He’d used it earlier, at his house. Even Bart hadn’t known.

He shrugged, one powerful shoulder scarcely moving. “Magic.”

Her heart stopped. Literally. And then it lurched forward. “Magic?” she whispered. Mellie’s word.

Not touching her, he waved his fingers in front of her and a pale pink tea rose appeared. “Illusions, that’s all. Nothing more. It’s only magic until you know the trick. The gimmick. And everything has a gimmick, Josie Bird-song,” he said, his voice taunting her. “Everything has an explanation.”

“Nobody knows my mother’s maiden name,” she said, more jolted by his knowledge than she wanted him to know.

“No?”

“No,” she insisted, tearing her gaze away from his and switching on the temperamental ignition of her car. It sputtered and died. “No one in Angel Bay knows. It’s never come up. I’ve never told anyone here, not even the bank. How could you know?”

“Magic, then, I reckon,” he drawled, a flavor of grits and redeye gravy turning his smooth voice rough. Before she could stop him, he stuck one long arm in through the open window and turned the key.

The engine purred like a tiger under his touch.

“Magic, Mr. Hayes?” Josie said, not hiding her derision.

“Luck.” He shrugged. “Or skill. But everything has an explanation. If you look for it.” He ran his flat palm along the frame of the car window. “And that brings us full circle, Mrs. Conrad. When can we meet to talk?”

“I’m not going to meet you. Not here. Not anywhere,” she insisted.

“Yes, you will.” He bent his knees and his face came into view. There was absolute certainty in his eyes. “You’ll see me. And we’ll talk. Tonight, probably.” He shut her car door very gently and she barely glimpsed the rapid flick of his fingers through the window.

The rose and a handful of copper coins dropped into her lap, a waterfall of pink petals and golden red pennies, and that fast, he was inside his car, his sneaker lifting from the concrete, disappearing into the chilled interior as he pivoted and shut his door.

Josie turned to watch his car. Its silver vanished into the white dazzle of noon heat. She picked up one of the pennies and turned it over. Like the one lying on the parking lot and the one that had rolled under the car, this, too, shone as if newly minted. She examined a second, and a third. A fourth. Curious, she opened her door and peered underneath the car, retrieving the penny there and looking at its date. All were 1962 mints. The year of her birth.

As he’d said, everything had a gimmick.

Tucking the pennies into the space in the armrest, she lifted the rose. Merely touching it released its wild, sweet scent into the car. Its pink petals were warm and supple against her palm, like fingers brushing over her skin, growing warmer as she held them against her.

All the way home, Josie smelled the rose. With no air-conditioning in her car, the heat intensified the fragrance until she couldn’t smell anything else.

When she arrived, she took the rose and put it into a clear glass bottle and placed it in her bedroom. Instantly the room filled with its subtle sweetness and she changed her clothes with the scent filling her lungs. The copper coins glowed next to the bottle.

Josie had no intention of talking with Ryder Hayes about anything. She didn’t know anything about him. She didn’t want to know anything more about him than she already did. What she already knew was disturbing enough.

She touched the rose and one petal curled, drifted to the dresser top.

Could he be involved in the children’s murders?

He’d known her mother’s name. Somehow he knew about Josie’s Seminole background, that she was a remote descendant of Josie Billie, one of the old medicine men, a heritage so distant that Josie rarely thought of it herself. Didn’t want to, if she were honest with herself. But that door opening on the past was one of the reasons she’d been so startled when he’d used her maiden name.

“Magic,” Ryder Hayes had said.

“The wind,” her mother had said when Josie was little. “The wind whispers everything.”

Josie pulled on faded shorts and headed outdoors, away from the tender fragrance of Ryder’s magic rose.

It might be real, but its hope was an illusion.

Later in the afternoon, the phone rang.

Rushing in from the garden, her hands grimy with dirt, she picked up the phone in time to hear the soft click as someone hung up.

A nuisance, but she couldn’t change her number.

Not while there was a hope that Mellie would phone her. No real hope, an illusion she couldn’t shatter. Not yet. Sometimes hope was a necessary illusion that kept the heart beating.

In a lingering flare of orange and neon pink, the sun paused at dusk before finally surrendering to a velvet black night.

Ryder had said he would see her at night.

He was wrong. She had no intention of wending her way to his decaying house. Not in the daylight. Certainly not at nighttime.

By candlelight Josie sat at her kitchen table and lifted a spoonful of mango and yogurt, put it down. The yogurt gleamed faintly in the candle glow.

She wasn’t hungry. She didn’t want to turn on the television. Didn’t want to hear about the missing boy. Eric. “Eric Ames,” she whispered fiercely. The child had a name. Eric. She didn’t want to sit on her porch.

She wanted—

Something.

Restless, the weight of her loneliness and grief pushing her into aimless motion, Josie prowled like a jungle cat through the four rooms of her house, from rose-scented bedroom to the living room where the lock she’d snapped in the morning was still in its slot. She took a quick shower and turned on a fan to circulate the muggy air as she pulled on thin cotton underpants and a loose cotton blouse over her damp skin, skin that hummed with electricity, as if there were a storm on the horizon. She peered out her window, hoping for a storm. For rain. For an end to her waiting.

The trees in the woods were motionless.

There were no yellow-eyed dogs hiding in the darkness watching her.

No storm in that clear, dark sky.

Only the occasional warble of a mockingbird, the dry croak of a frog carrying from the edge of the river where it curved away from her house.

She found herself in her bedroom, lifting the flower, stroking it across her neck, down to her breasts, over the skin of her wrists.

He’d said he would see her tonight.

Finally, sighing, she went to her porch. As she lit the candles there, she wondered if Ryder had planted a suggestion in her brain that was making her so fidgety.

Maybe he had.

She swept her hair off her face, the heavy weight too much in the heat.

And still her skin hummed, as if answering something that whispered to her on a windless night.

When she unlatched the screen door of the porch so that she could take the evening garbage out, she turned on the floodlights all around the house. She went outside toward the garage. She wanted to put the bucket with the snake in the metal garbage can that clamped shut, safe from marauding dogs and raccoons. All day she’d avoided that final cleanup, but she didn’t want to wake up in the morning and find pieces of the reptile scattered about her yard.

As she approached the garage, she saw the empty, overturned bucket.

There was no trace of the snake she’d killed, no bits of paper, no trampled bits of earth where a ransacking animal had feasted. Alarmed, Josie paused and looked around, the light hairs on her arm rising with her uneasiness. Nothing. It was as if the snake had ever been.

The empty, shiny interior of the bucket gleamed mockingly at her.

She couldn’t look away from that empty bucket.

Holding her bag of garbage out, a shield against the sight of that shiny metal, Josie backed away. Halfway to her porch she froze as she caught the minute change in the shades of darkness at the edge of the woods.

Bugs swarmed around the bright porch light, banged against the wide bulbs, clustered there until the swarm grew too thick, and heavy bodies fell to the ground.

And then he came out of the woods toward her.

She gasped and the handle of the garbage bag slipped through her fingers. Keeping his lean form in view, Josie took slow steps away from him, her breath rattling in her ears.

She’d misunderstood. She’d thought he meant she would come to his house. Stupid of her. But she’d had that sensation of being drawn, of being almost hypnotized, and so she’d misunderstood.

On one side of the screen door, her mouth going dry with something beyond fear, she faced him, the hook-andeye lock nothing more than the illusion of a barrier.

In a glance, Josie took in his appearance. Ruffled, his hair looked as if he’d dragged his hands through it repeatedly. He hadn’t shaved since she’d seen him that afternoon, and a faint beard shadowed his pale skin. His jeans rode low on his hips, and his black T-shirt was tucked into the waistband. A silver snap caught the light from the floods and sparkled momentarily as he stopped, one foot on the lowest porch step.

He nodded, as if he, too, felt that humming. “May I come in?”

“No.” Josie saw the pinpoints of the candle flames deep in his eyes. “Absolutely not. I’d be crazy to let you in.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Right now I’d have to agree with you. You’d be crazy to let me in.” He took one step more, his sneakers soundless against the wooden step. That must have been how he’d approached her house this morning, soundlessly leaving the capsaicin and disappearing back into the woods.

“Stop,” she said, her voice cracking. “Don’t come any farther. I mean it.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said mildly, and settled down on the steps, his form a shadow flowing over dark water. “I told you. I needed to talk to you. That’s all. And you’re right to be afraid,” he added, tilting his head to look up to her. “It’s a frightening world we live in,” he said, and his voice sighed away. “I’m afraid, too, Josie Birdsong, if you want to know the truth.”

“What do you mean? Why should you be afraid?” Her voice was too tight. Tight with fear and that humming that strung her tight as a violin waiting for the stroke of the bow to make music. “I don’t understand you, Ryder Hayes,” she said, and realized only as she spoke that she’d called him by his given name.

Some boundary had been crossed.

“I don’t understand myself, lady green eyes.”

The birds had ceased their music and there was a stillness, a waiting that made Josie’s knees tremble. She tugged at the tail of the blouse. “What do you want to tell me?”

“I’m not sure.” Ryder watched the futile twitch of her slim fingers against the edge of her blouse. Sitting on the porch below her, he saw the narrow edge of elastic on her panties. Each movement she made sent a faint drift of roses toward him.

Regardless of what he’d said in the police parking lot about meeting her, he’d tried to stay away from Josie Bird-song.

He’d failed. He should have known he would. Her long, tanned legs were behind him. If he leaned back, all the way back, his head would be against her knees. He wanted to rest against her. He shut his eyes. He was so tired he couldn’t think straight anymore. That was probably why he hadn’t been able to fight the pull that drew him through the woods to her candlelit porch.

Even her legs smelled of tea roses.

He leaned his head against the frame of the screen door.

He thought she’d be less skittish if he weren’t looking at her, but her sudden jump as he moved told him that she was as aware of him as he was of her.

And equally reluctant.

He wondered if she’d laugh at him if he told her she terrified him. He didn’t dare touch her.

Just being near her, even without touching, the feelings, the images were gathering, and he didn’t know what they meant, what was going to happen next. He’d been right. Josie Birdsong held the key.

But unlike her, he hadn’t lied. He was afraid.

Because he didn’t know what door the key would open.

“I didn’t have anything to do with the disappearance of that boy,” he said finally, not expecting her to believe him. “No matter what you think.”

“All right. Fine. You’ve told me. Now leave.”

“I can’t.” He’d been right about that, too. There was loneliness in Josie Birdsong Conrad. It lay underneath the breathiness, underneath the determination not to let him frighten her. He admired her courage, admired it while recognizing that her courage might not be enough to save her. “Can’t leave, Josie. Not yet.”

“Of course you can. It’s easy. You just stand up and walk away. Easiest thing in the world.” Her voice trembled.

The air around her rippled with her movements. He could feel those minute vibrations against his own skin. Even with his back to her, he knew what she was doing. He didn’t have to see her.

“You don’t need your hoe, Josie. I’m not going to breach the sanctity of your porch.” He shifted so that he could look at her now, could rest in the play of candlelight and shadows on her smooth, tanned skin.

She was a woman of sunlight and earth, rooted in the realities of life.

While he—

“I know you’re not. You’re going to leave. And then I’m calling the police.”

Steel in that magnolia voice. He liked that, too.

“Oh, Josie, if I wanted to, I could have already been in your house any night now for the past two months.” He flattened his hand against the screen. It bulged toward her. “You leave your windows open, your locks are a joke and you sit out here on this porch half the night.” He shook his head, and the effort to move was almost too much. “Your locks aren’t even worth my trouble.” He’d mastered locks and tumblers so superior to her pitiful pieces of steel and rusted metal that even if she’d shut her windows and locked them, too, he could have been in her house in the space of a breath.

“You’re a locksmith?”

Ryder almost laughed, but the need pouring through him left him without even the energy to smile. He felt as if he were dying of the need to touch her, to feel just once more that satin skin against his fingertips.

He wouldn’t, though. He didn’t dare. He thought he still had that much control.

But still he lifted his right hand and grasped the scratchy metal door handle. “No,” he said. “Not a locksmith. But I could be. Could have been,” he corrected himself. Too late now for that kind of life. “I’m an illusionist. I make my living with tricks.”

“A magician?” she asked in a thin, high voice.

“No. An illusionist. There’s a difference. But possibly only in my mind. At any rate, will you sit down? Please? It tires me to look up at you.”

She stiffened, ready to say something scathing, he was sure.

“Besides, the view from where I am is…well, I appreciate it, lady green eyes. I’m not sure you would, though,” he concluded and leaned against the thick wooden support of the door. “No, don’t go, not yet,” he said as she backed up toward her kitchen door. He knew it had a heavier wooden door, cheap stuff, really, like her front door. No real obstacle.

She stopped.

“Josie, come here, I want to show you something.”

“I’m fine where I am,” she said in a muffled voice. “No, stay there. Outside!” Her voice pitched higher as he rose.

But she needed to understand what was happening, needed to comprehend why he was afraid, and he didn’t know how to make it clear to her except by showing her. He’d told her he wouldn’t open her screen door. He wouldn’t.

But she would.

And so he looked at her, stared deep into her eyes that were the cool, restful gray-green of moss. He saw her eyelids droop, open, droop. “Josie,” he whispered, “open the door. Take a step closer and open the door. I won’t hurt you. I promise,” he whispered, his voice dropping lower and lower until it was only a drift in the air, a touch against her skin, her will.

Just as her movements, her breath, had been against him.

“Another step, Josie, one more. And then unlock your door. Lift the latch, Josie, slowly, sweetheart,” he breathed, coaxing in words that weren’t words, that he wasn’t even sure he spoke aloud, but he knew that she heard.

She lifted the latch and opened the door. Her silky hair swung forward, a curtain over her wide eyes and full mouth as she bent to the latch.

“One more step, Josie. One more,” he urged, luring her with sound and whispers onto the porch step, luring her outside her porch.

The screen door whispered shut behind her. She blinked and her eyes lost the dazed, unfocused look they’d had. He’d wanted only to give her a hint of the power that pulled at him, and now she was standing next to him, but he didn’t touch her.

He wanted to. Wanted to take that last, small step forward and touch her mouth, wanted to bend his mouth to the curve of her neck and savor the scent of roses that lingered there.

He didn’t, though. He reached down inside and dragged up enough control to stay those inches away from her.

“What happened?” Bewildered, she swayed and reached out for his arm.

He stepped back. Too quickly, perhaps, because she jumped and gasped, her eyes growing clearer by the second.

“I asked you to unlatch the door. You did,” Ryder told her. He wasn’t ready to tell her anything else. “I asked you to come off your porch. You did.” He let his voice fall into a lulling rhythm and watched her swaying slowly. “I told you I wouldn’t come onto your porch, Josie. I kept my promise. All right?”

“All right,” she echoed, but her eyes were enormous, focused on him. “You said you wanted to show me something?”

He jammed his hands into his back jeans pockets. “Josie, I heard a child crying when you were at my house yesterday. You heard that sobbing, too. But you saw something. I want to know what.”

“You heard the child?” Her face grew luminous, glowed like the warm candles lined up on her porch, dimmed. “But there was no one there. The police searched your house.”

“What did you see, Josie?” He flexed his fingers, lifted them free of his pockets. “Tell me exactly. What did you see?”

“Nothing.” Her voice was flat. She was lying again.

“Tell me,” he insisted. “I have to know. There was something there, wasn’t there? In back of me?” The last of his energy swirled through him, draining away with each second he stood in front of her.

Ryder hoped she would answer quickly, while he had control. “Please, Josie, tell me,” he said, and touched her, the tip of his hand brushing against her arm as she stepped away. There was heat and warmth in the slide of her skin against his, the texture of her skin like a warm nectarine, that silky smooth.

And with that skim of his hand against her, she was there with him in that fast-moving cloud, the images twisting around him, torturing him. Faces, faces, anguished, blurred.

But her face was distinct, the restful green of her eyes calling him, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding on for dear life, for sanity, for his soul’s sake. And, touching her, breathing in her scent, he lost control.

The images sharpened, piercing him. Children’s faces. One face, clear, bright, and he could see it while Josie was in his arms. A boy’s pug nose. Blue eyes wide and terrified. “Oh, God,” Ryder said, praying and swearing, the images ripping him apart. “God in heaven.” Or hell.

Sand. Muddy. Blood, a thin red line that turned to black against the sand.

Like a thousand razors raining down, the pain sliced him apart. He couldn’t bear the pain tearing at him.

And he couldn’t turn Josie loose.

Lost in that darkness with her, he knew somehow that she was his anchor, that she was safety, but he was afraid for her because she felt what he was feeling and didn’t understand anything that was happening to them.

And then, as the child screamed, Ryder felt Josie’s hand brush against his forehead, felt her touching him, willingly, even as she, too, heard the terrible cry.

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