When You Call My Name
Sharon Sala

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Chapter 1

It’s all your fault. You let me down…let me down.

Wyatt Hatfield shifted in his seat and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, trying to see through the falling snow to the road ahead, doing everything he could to ignore the memories of his ex-wife’s accusations. Shirley and his years with the military were things of the past.

This soul-searching journey he’d embarked upon months earlier was for the sole purpose of finding a new direction for himself. He’d fixed what was wrong with Antonette’s life with little more than a phone call. Why, he wondered, couldn’t he find a way to fix his own? And then he grinned, remembering how mad his sister had been when he’d interfered.

“At least I’m in her good graces now,” he muttered, then cursed beneath his breath when his car suddenly fishtailed.

His heartbeat was still on high as he reminded himself to concentrate on the more pressing issues at hand, namely, the blizzard into which he’d driven. The windshield wipers scratched across the icy film covering the glass, scattering the snow in their paths like a dry, whirling flurry, while the heater and defroster did what they could to keep the interior of his car warm.

But as hard as he tried to concentrate on driving, her voice kept ringing in his ear, complaining that when she’d needed him, he was never there.

“Damn it, Shirley, give me a break,” Wyatt muttered. “I was wrong. You were right. That should be enough satisfaction for you to let go of my mind.”

The car skidded sideways on a patch of ice and Wyatt eased off on the gas, riding with the skid and sighing in relief as the car finally righted itself.

He’d made the wrong decision when he hadn’t stopped back in the last town, and he knew it. Then the weather hadn’t been this bad, and getting to Lexington, Kentucky, tonight had seemed more important then than it did now. To make things worse, because of the severity of the snowstorm, he wasn’t even sure he was on the right road anymore. The weak yellow beam of the headlights did little to illuminate what was left of the road, leaving Wyatt with nothing more than instinct to keep him from driving off the side of the mountain.

And then out of nowhere, the dark, hulking shape of a truck came barreling around a curve and into the beam of light, slipping and sliding as Wyatt had done only moments before, and there was no more time to dwell upon past mistakes. It was too late to do anything but react.

Wyatt gripped the steering wheel, trying desperately to turn away from the truck gone out of control, but he knew before impact that they were going to crash.

“God help us all,” Wyatt murmured, knowing there was no earthly way to prevent what was about to happen.

And then the truck’s bumper and fender connected with the side of Wyatt’s car. Bulk and weight superseded driving skill. Impact sent Wyatt and his car careening across the road and then down the side of the snowpacked mountain.

The last thing he saw was the picture-perfect beauty of lofty pines, heavy with snow and glistening in the headlights of his car. Blessedly, he never felt the car’s impact into the first stand of trees…or the next…or the next, or knew when it rolled sideways, then end over end, coming to a steaming, hissing halt against a fifty-foot pine.

He didn’t hear the frantic cries of the truck driver, standing at the edge of the road, calling down the mountain and praying for an answer that never came.

The wind from the blizzard whistled beneath the crack in the windowsill across the room. Even in her sleep, Glory heard the high-pitched moan and unconsciously pulled the covers a little higher around her neck. She could hear the warm, familiar grumble of her father, Rafe, snoring. It signified home, protection and family. Directly across from Glory’s room, her brother, J.C., slept to the accompaniment of an all-night music station. Mixing with the wail of the wind and the low rumble of an old man’s sleep, the melodies seemed somehow appropriate. Glory’s long flannel gown added to the cocoon of warmth beneath the mound of covers under which she slept. She shifted, then sighed, and just as her subconscious slipped into dream sleep, she jerked. There was no escape for what came next, even in sleep.

Eyes! Wide, dark, shocked! Red shirt! No…white shirt covered in blood! Blood was everywhere. Pain sifted, filtering through unconsciousness, too terrible to be borne!

Glory’s eyelids fluttered and then flew open as suddenly as if someone had thrown open shutters to the world. She sat straight up in bed, unaware of the familiarity of her room, or the snow splattering against the windowpanes. Her gaze was wide, fixed, frozen to the picture inside her mind, seeing…but not seeing…someone else’s horror.

White. Cold, so cold! Snow everywhere…in everything. Can’t breathe! Can’t see! Can’t feel! Oh, God, don’t let me die!

Glory shuddered as her body went limp. She leaned forward and, covering her face with her hands, she began to sob. Suddenly the warmth of her room and the comfort of knowing she was safe seemed obscene in the face of what she’d just witnessed. And then as suddenly as the vision had come upon her, the knowledge followed of what she must do next.

She threw back the covers, stumbling on the tail of her nightgown as she crawled out of bed. As she flipped the switch, her bedroom was instantly bathed in the glow of a pale yellow light that gave off a false warmth.

The floor was cold beneath her bare feet as she ran down the hall to the room where her father lay sleeping. For a moment, she stood in his doorway in the dark, listening to the soft, even sound of his snore, and regretted what she was about to do. Yet ignoring her instinct was as impossible for Glory to do as denying the fact that she was a woman.

“Daddy…”

Rafe Dixon woke with a start. He’d heard that sound in his daughter’s voice a thousand times before. He rolled over in bed like a hibernating bear coming out of a sleep, and dug at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“Glory girl, what’s wrong?”

“We’ve got to go, Daddy. He’s dying…and I’ve got to help.”

Rafe groaned. He knew better than to deny what Glory was telling him, but he also knew that there was a near blizzard in force, and getting down off this mountain and into Larner’s Mill might prove deadly for them all.

“But honey…the storm.”

“We’ll make it, Daddy, but he won’t.”

The certainty in her voice was all Rafe Dixon needed to hear. He rolled out of bed with a thump and started reaching for his clothes.

“Go wake your brother,” he said.

“I’m here, Daddy. I heard.”

J.C. slipped a comforting arm across his baby sister’s shoulders and hugged her. “Was it bad, Sis?”

The look on her face was all he needed to know. He headed back down the hall to his room, calling over his shoulder as he went. “I’ll go start the truck.”

“Dress warm, girl,” Rafe growled. “It’s a bitch outside.”

Glory nodded, and flew back to her room, pulling on clothes with wild abandon. The urgency within her made her shake, but her resolve was firm.

Minutes later, they walked out of the house into a blast of snow that stung their faces, but Glory didn’t falter. As she was about to step off the porch, J.C. appeared out of nowhere and lifted her off her feet, carrying her through the snow to the waiting vehicle. She shuddered as she clung to his broad shoulders, still locked into the vision before her. And as she saw…she prayed.

“We’re not gonna make it,” the ambulance driver groaned, as he fought the steering wheel and the vehicle’s urge to slide.

“Damn it, Farley, just quit talking and drive. We have to make it! If we don’t, this fellow sure won’t.”

Luke Dennis, the emergency medical technician whose fortune it had been to be on duty this night, was up to his elbows in blood. His clothes were soaking wet, and his boots were filled to the tops with melting snow. The last thing he wanted to hear was another negative. They’d worked too long and too hard just getting this victim out of his car and up the side of the mountain to give up now.

“Come on, buddy, hang with me,” Dennis muttered, as he traded a fresh container of D5W for the one going empty on the other end of the IV.

An unceasing flow of blood ran out of the victim’s dark hair and across his face, mapping his once-handsome features with a crazy quilt of red. It was impossible to guess how many bones this man had broken, and to be honest, those were the least of Dennis’s worries. If they couldn’t get him back to the hospital in time, it was the internal injuries that would kill him.

“I see lights!” Farley shouted.

Thank God, Dennis thought, and then grabbed his patient and the stretcher, holding on to it, and to him, as the ambulance took the street corner sideways. Moments later they were at the hospital, unloading a man whose chance of a future depended upon the skills of the people awaiting him inside.

Before he was a doctor, Amos Steading had been a medic in Vietnam. When he saw Wyatt Hatfield being wheeled into his E.R., he realized he might have been practicing medicine longer than this patient had been alive. It hurt to lose a patient, but the younger ones were much harder to accept.

“What have we got?” Amos growled, lowering his bushy eyebrows as his attention instantly focused upon the injuries.

“Trouble, Doc,” Dennis said. “Thirty-four-year-old male. Recently discharged from the Marines. He’s still wearing his ID tags. He got sideswiped by a truck and went over the side of Tulley’s Mountain. Didn’t think we’d ever get him up and out. He’s got head injuries, and from the feel of his belly, internal bleeding as well. From external exam, I’d guess at least four broken ribs, and, his right leg has quite a bit of damage, although it’s hard to tell what, if anything, is broken. We had to saw a tree and move it off him to get him out of the car.” He took a deep breath as the stretcher slid to a halt. As they transferred the victim to the gurney, he added, “This is his third bag of D5W.”

Steading’s eyebrows arched as he yanked his stethoscope from around his neck and slipped it into place. This man was bleeding to death before their eyes. Moments later, he began firing orders to the nurse and the other doctor on call.

“Get me a blood type,” Steading shouted, and a nurse ran to do his bidding.

It was then that EMT Luke Dennis added the last bit of information about the victim, which made them all pause.

“According to his dog tags, he’s AB negative,” Dennis said.

A low curse slid out of Amos’s mouth as he continued to work. Rare blood types didn’t belong in this backwater town of eighteen hundred people. There was no way their blood bank was going to have anything like that, and the plasma they had on hand was sparse.

“Type it anyway,” Steading ordered. “And get me some plasma, goddamn it! This man’s going to die before I can get him stable enough for surgery.”

The once quiet hospital instantly became a flurry of shouts, curses and noise. Luke Dennis stepped out of the way, aware that he’d done his job. The rest was up to the doc and his staff…and God.

He started back toward the door to restock the ambulance, aware that the night was far from over. It was entirely possible that more than one fool might decide to venture out in a storm like this. He just hoped that if they plowed themselves into the snow—or into someone else—they were nowhere near a mountain when it happened. But before he could leave, the outside door burst open right before him, and three people blew in, along with a blinding gust of snow.

Glory breathed a shaky sigh of relief. One hurdle crossed. Another yet to come. She burst free of her father’s grasp and ran toward the EMT who’d stepped aside to let them pass.

“Mister! Please! Take me to the soldier’s doctor.”

Dennis couldn’t quit staring at the young woman clutching his coat. Her voice was frantic, her behavior strange, but it was her request that startled him. How could she know that the man they’d just brought in was—or at least had been—a soldier?

“Are you a relative?” Dennis asked.

“No! Who I am doesn’t matter, but he does,” Glory cried, gripping his coat a little tighter. And then she felt her father’s hand move across her shoulder.

“Ease up, Glory. You got to explain yourself a little, honey.”

She blinked, and Dennis watched focus returning to her expression, thinking as he did that he’d never seen eyes quite that shade of blue. In a certain light, they almost looked silver…as silver as her hair, which clung to her face and coat like strands of wet taffy.

She took a deep breath and started over.

“Please,” she said softly. “I came to give blood.”

Dennis shook his head. “I don’t know how you heard about the accident, but I’m afraid coming out in this storm was a waste of time for you. He’s got a rare—”

Glory dug through her purse, her fingers shaking as she searched the contents of her wallet.

“Here,” she said, thrusting a card into the man’s hands. “Show the doctor. Tell him I can help—that it’s urgent that he wait no longer. The man won’t live through the night without me.”

As Dennis looked down at the card, the hair crawled on the back of his neck. He glanced back up at the woman, then at the card again, and suddenly grabbed her by the arm, pulling her down the hall toward the room where Steading was working.

“Doc, we just got ourselves a miracle,” Dennis shouted as he ran into the room.

Amos Steading frowned at the woman Dennis was dragging into their midst.

“Get her out of here, Dennis! You know better than to bring—”

“She’s AB negative, Doc, and she’s come to give blood.”

Steading’s hands froze above the tear in the flesh on Wyatt Hatfield’s leg.

“You’re full of bull,” he growled.

Dennis shook his head. “No, I swear to God, Doc. Here’s her donor card.”

Steading’s eyes narrowed and then he barked at a nurse on the other side of the room. “Get her typed and cross-matched. Now!”

She flew to do his bidding.

“And get me some more saline, damn it! This man’s losing more fluids than I can pump in him.” He cursed softly, then added beneath his breath, fully expecting someone to hear and obey, “And call down to X-ray and find out why his films aren’t back!” As he leaned back over the patient, he began to mumble again, more to himself than to anyone else. “Now where the hell is that bleeder?”

There was a moment, in the midst of all the doctor’s orders, when Glory looked upon the injured man’s face. It wasn’t often that she had a physical connection to the people in her mind.

“What’s his name?” she whispered, as a nurse grabbed her by the arm and all but dragged her down the hall to the lab.

“Who, Dr. Steading?”

“No,” Glory said. “The man who was hurt.”

“Oh…uh…Hatfield. William…no, uh…Wyatt. Yes, that’s right. Wyatt Hatfield. It’s a shame, too,” the nurse muttered, more to herself than to Glory. “He looks like he was real handsome…and so young. Just got out of the service. From his identification, some sort of special forces. It’s sort of ironic, isn’t it?”

“What’s ironic?” Glory asked, and then they entered the lab, and the scents that assailed her threatened to overwhelm. She swayed on her feet, and the nurse quickly seated her in a chair.

The nurse grimaced. “Why, the fact that he could survive God knows what during his stint in the military, and then come to this, and all because of a snowstorm on a mountain road.” Suddenly she was all business. “Stuart, type and cross-match this woman’s blood, stat! If she comes up AB negative, and a match to the man in E.R., then draw blood. She’s a donor.”

As the lab tech began, Glory relaxed. At least they were on the right track.

Three o’clock in the morning had come and gone, and the waiting room in E.R. was quiet. Rafe Dixon glanced at his son, then at his daughter, who seemed to be dozing beside him. How he’d fathered two such different children was beyond him, but his pride in each was unbounded. It just took more effort to keep up with Glory than it did J.C.

He understood his son and his love for their land. He didn’t understand one thing about his daughter’s gift, but he believed in it, and he believed in her. What worried him most was, who would take care of Glory when he was gone? J.C. was nearly thirty and he couldn’t be expected to watch over his sister for the rest of his life. Besides, if he were to marry, a wife might resent the attention J.C. unstintingly gave his baby sister. Although Glory was twenty-five, she looked little more than eighteen. Her delicate features and her fragile build often gave her the appearance of a child…until one looked into her eyes and saw the ancient soul looking back.

Glory child…who will take care of you when I am gone?

Suddenly Glory stood and looked down the hall. Rafe stirred, expecting to see someone open and walk through the doors at the far end. But nothing happened, and no one came.

She slipped her fingers in the palm of her brother’s hand and then stood. “We can go home now.”

J.C. yawned, and looked up at his father. Their eyes met in a moment of instant understanding. For whatever her reasons, Glory seemed satisfied within herself, and for them, that was all that mattered.

“Are you sure, girl?” Rafe asked, as he helped Glory on with her coat.

She nodded, her head bobbing wearily upon her shoulders. “I’m sure, Daddy.”

“You don’t want to wait and talk to the doctor?”

She smiled. “There’s no need.”

As suddenly as they’d arrived, they were gone.

Within the hour, Amos Steading came out of surgery, tossing surgical gloves and blood-splattered clothing in their respective hampers. Later, when he went to look for the unexpected blood donor, to his surprise, she was nowhere to be found. And while he thought it strange that she’d not stayed to hear the results of the surgery, he was too tired and too elated to worry about her odd exodus. Tonight he’d fought the Grim Reaper and won. And while he knew his skill as a surgeon was nothing at which to scoff, his patient still lived because of a girl who’d come out of the storm.

Steading dropped into a chair at his desk and began working up Hatfield’s chart, adding notes of the surgery to what had been done in E.R. A nurse entered, then gave him a cup of hot coffee and an understanding smile. As the heat from the cup warmed his hand, he sighed in satisfaction.

“Did you locate his next of kin?” Steading asked.

The nurse nodded. “Yes, sir, a sister. Her name is Antonette Monday. She said that she and her husband will come as soon as weather permits.”

Steading nodded, and sipped the steaming brew. “It’s good to have family.”

High up on the mountain above Larner’s Mill, Glory Dixon would have agreed with him. When they finally pulled into the yard of their home, it was only a few hours before daybreak, and yet she knew a sense of satisfaction for a job well done. It wasn’t always that good came of what she saw, but tonight, she’d been able to make a difference.

She reached over and patted her father’s knee. “Thank you, Daddy,” she said quietly.

“For what?” he asked.

“For believing me.”

He slid a long arm across her shoulder, giving her a hug. There was nothing more that needed to be said.

“Looks like the snow’s about stopped,” he said, gauging the sparse spit of snowflakes dancing before the headlights of their truck.

“Who’s hungry?” Glory asked.

J.C. grinned. “Wanna guess?”

She laughed. It was a perfect ending to a very bad beginning.

Back in recovery, Wyatt Hatfield wasn’t laughing, but if he’d been conscious, he would have been counting his blessings. He had a cut on his cheek that would probably scar, and had survived a lung that had collapsed, a concussion that should have put him into a coma and hadn’t, five broken ribs and two cracked ones, more stitches in his left leg than he would be able to count and, had he been able to feel them, bruises in every joint.

He could thank a seat belt, a trucker who hadn’t kept going after causing the wreck, a rescue crew that went above and beyond the call of duty to get him off of the mountain and an EMT who didn’t know the meaning of the word quit. And it was extremely good luck on Wyatt’s part that, after all that, he wound up in the skilled hands of Amos Steading.

Yet it was fate that had delivered him to Glory Dixon. And had she not given of the blood from her body, the cold and simple fact was that he would have died. But Wyatt didn’t know his good fortune. It would be days before he would know his own name.

All day long, the sun kept trying to shine. Wyatt paced the floor of his hospital room, ignoring the muscle twinges in his injured leg, and the pull of sore muscles across his belly.

He didn’t give a damn about pain. Today he was going home, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. While he didn’t have a home of his own, he still had roots in the land on which he’d been raised. If he had refused to accompany his sister, Toni, back to Tennessee, he suspected that her husband, Lane Monday, would have slung him over his shoulder and taken him anyway. Few but Toni dared argue with Lane Monday. At six feet, seven inches, he was a powerful, imposing man. As a United States marshal, he was formidable. In Wyatt’s eyes, he’d come through for Toni like a real man should. There was little else to be said.

Outside his door, he could hear his sister’s voice at the nurses’ station while she signed the papers that would check him out. He leaned his forehead against the window, surprised that in spite of the sun’s rays it felt cold, and then remembered that winter sun, at its best, was rarely warm.

“Are you ready, Wyatt?”

Wyatt turned. Lane filled the doorway with his size and his presence.

He shrugged. “I guess.” He turned back to the window as Lane crossed the room.

For a while, both men were silent, and then Lane gave Wyatt a quick pat on the back before he spoke. “I think maybe I know how you feel,” Lane said.

Wyatt shrugged. “Then I wish to hell you’d tell me, because I don’t understand. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to be alive.” He tried to grin. “Hell, and if truth be told, a little surprised. When I went over the mountain, in the space of time it took to hit the first stand of trees, I more or less made my peace with God. I never expected to wake up.”

Lane listened without commenting, knowing that something was bothering Wyatt that he needed to get said.

“As for my family, I consider myself lucky to have people who are willing to take me in, but I feel so…so…”

“Rootless?”

For a moment Wyatt was silent, and then he nodded.

“Exactly. I feel rootless. And…I feel like leaving here will be taking a step backward in what I was searching for. I know it’s weird, but I keep thinking that I was this close to the end of a journey, and now—”

Toni broke the moment of confiding as she came into the room.

“You’re all checked out!” When Wyatt started toward the door, she held up her hand. “Don’t get in too big a hurry. They’re bringing a wheelchair. Lane, honey, why don’t you pull the car up to the curb? Wyatt, are you all packed?”

Both men looked at each other and then grinned. “She was your sister before she was my wife,” Lane warned him. “So you can’t be surprised by all this.”

Toni ignored them. It was her nature to organize. She’d spent too long on her own, running a farm and caring for aging parents, to wait for someone else to make a decision.

“Why don’t I go get the car?” Lane said, and stole a kiss from his Toni as he passed.

“I’m packed,” Wyatt said.

“I brought one of Justin’s coats for you to wear. The clothes you had on were ruined,” Toni said, her eyes tearing as she remembered his condition upon their arrival right after the accident. She held out the coat for him to put on. Wyatt slipped one arm in his brother’s coat, and then the other, then turned and hugged her, letting himself absorb the care…and the love.

“Now all I need is my ride,” Wyatt teased, and pulled at a loose curl hanging across Toni’s forehead.

On cue, a nurse came in pushing a wheelchair, and within minutes, Wyatt was on his way.

The air outside was a welcome respite from the recirculated air inside his room. And the cold, fresh scent of snow was infinitely better than the aroma of antiseptic. Wyatt gripped the arms of the wheelchair in anticipation of going home.

Just outside the doors, Toni turned away to speak to the nurse, and Lane had yet to arrive. For a brief moment, Wyatt was left to his own devices. He braced himself, angling his sore leg until he was able to stand, and then lifted his face and inhaled, letting the brisk draft of air circling the corner of the hospital have its way with the cobwebs in his mind. He’d been inside far too long.

A pharmacy across the street was doing a booming business, and Wyatt watched absently as customers came and went. As a van loaded with senior citizens backed up and drove away, a dark blue pickup truck pulled into the recently vacated parking space. He tried not to stare at the three people who got out, but they were such a range of sizes, he couldn’t quit looking.

The older man was tall and broad beneath the heavy winter coat he wore. A red sock cap covered a thatch of thick graying hair, and a brush of mustache across his upper lip was several shades darker than the gray. The younger man was just as tall, and in spite of his own heavy clothing, obviously fit. His face was creased with laugh lines, and he moved with the grace and assurance of youth and good health.

It was the girl between them who caught Wyatt’s eye. At first he thought she was little more than a child, and then the wind caught the front of her unbuttoned coat, and he got a glimpse of womanly breast and shapely hips before she pulled it together.

Her hair was the color of spun honey. Almost gold. Not quite white. Her lips were full and tilted in a grin at something one of the men just said, and Wyatt had a sudden wish that he’d been the one to make her smile.

No sooner had he thought it than she paused at the door, then stopped completely. He held his breath as she began to turn. When she caught his gaze, he imagined he felt her gasp, although he knew it was a foolish thing to consider. His mind wandered as he let himself feast upon her face.

So beautiful, Wyatt thought.

Why, thank you.

Wyatt was so locked into her gaze that he felt no surprise at the thoughts that suddenly drifted through his mind, or that he was answering them back in an unusual fashion.

You are welcome.

So, Wyatt Hatfield, you’re going home?

Yes.

God be with you, soldier.

I’m no longer a soldier.

You will always fight for those you love.

“Here comes Lane!”

At the sound of Toni’s voice, Wyatt blinked, then turned and stepped back as Lane pulled up to the curb. When he remembered to look up, the trio had disappeared into the store. He felt an odd sense of loss, as if he’d been disconnected from something he needed to know.

Bowing to the demands of his family’s concerns, he let himself be plied with pillows and blankets. By the time they had him comfortable in the roomy backseat of their car, he was more than ready for the long journey home to begin.

They were past the boundary of Larner’s Mill, heading out of Kentucky and toward Tennessee, when Wyatt’s thoughts wandered back to the girl he’d seen on the street. And as suddenly as he remembered her, he froze. His heart began to hammer inside his chest as he slowly sat up and stared out the back window at the small mountain town that was swiftly disappearing from sight.

“Dear God,” he whispered, and wiped a shaky hand across his face.

“Wyatt, darling, are you all right?”

His sister’s tone of voice was worried, the touch of her hand upon his shoulder gentle and concerned. Lane began to ease off the accelerator, thinking that Wyatt might be getting sick.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” he muttered, and dropped back onto the bed they’d made for him in the backseat.

There was no way he could tell them what he’d suddenly realized. There wasn’t even any way he could explain it to himself. But he knew, as well as he knew his own name, that the conversation he’d had with that girl had been real. And yet understanding how it had happened was another thing altogether. He’d heard of silent communication, but this…this…thing that just happened…it was impossible.

“Then how did she know my name?” he murmured.

“What did you say?” Toni asked.

Wyatt turned his head into the pillow and closed his eyes.

“Nothing, Sis. Nothing at all.”

Chapter 2

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

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

“The grass is beginning to green.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You will always fight for those you love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Carter! You’re hurting me!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Betty, honey…”

She didn’t move.

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

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

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

“No! God, no!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was over!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guilty expression on her face was answer enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What woman?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was fueled with gas.

He began to smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Groceries are gonna melt,” Rafe warned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terror. Horror. Despair.

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

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

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

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

Oh, my God! This wasn’t an accident!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except…

She took a deep breath. “Granny.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 3

The scream came without warning. Right in the middle of a dream he could no longer remember. Wyatt sat straight up in bed, his instinct for survival working overtime as he imagined Toni or the baby in dire need of help. In seconds, he was pulling on a pair of jeans and running in an all-out sprint as he flew out of the door.

He slid to a stop in the hallway outside the baby’s room and then looked inside. Nothing was amiss. He sighed with relief at the sight of the toddler asleep on her tummy with her blanket clutched tightly in one fist. She was fine, so Toni hadn’t screamed about her. That meant…

Fearing the worst, he crept farther down the hall, praying that he wouldn’t surprise a burglar in the act of murder, and wondering why on earth Lane Monday wasn’t raising all kinds of hell in response to his wife’s screams.

More than a year ago, Lane had taken down a man the size of a mountain to save his sister’s life. He couldn’t imagine Lane letting someone sneak up on them and do his family harm. Yet in Wyatt’s mind, he knew that whatever had made Toni scream couldn’t have been good.

The door was ajar so Lane or Toni could hear the baby if she cried. Wyatt pushed it aside and looked in. Lane was flat on his back and sound asleep, with Toni held gently, but firmly, within the shelter of one arm. Even from here, Wyatt could hear the soft, even sounds of their breathing.

“Thank God,” he muttered, and eased out of their room the same way he’d come in, trying to convince himself that he’d been dreaming. But it sounded so real.

He made his way through the house, careful not to step on the boards that creaked, and headed for the kitchen to get a drink. He wasn’t particularly thirsty, but at the moment, crawling back in that bed did not hold much interest. His heart was still pounding as he took a glass from the cabinet and ran water in the sink, letting it cool in the pipes before filling a glass.

The water tasted good going down, and panic was subsiding. If he stretched the facts, he could convince himself that his heart rate was almost back to normal. It was just a bad dream. That was all. Just a bad dream.

Wyatt.

“What?”

He spun toward the doorway, expecting Toni to be standing there with a worried expression on her face. There was nothing but a reflection of the outside security light glancing off the living room window and onto the floor.

Wyatt…Wyatt Hatfield.

His stomach muscles clenched, and he took a deep breath. “Jesus Christ.”

Help me.

He started to shake. “This isn’t happening.”

God…Oh, God…help. I need help.

He slammed the glass onto the cabinet and stalked out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, inhaling one after the other of deep, lung-chilling breaths of cool night air. When he could think without wanting to throw up, he sat down on the steps with a thump and buried his face in his hands, then instantly yanked them off his face, unable to believe what he’d felt.

His hands were cold…and they were wet. He lifted his fingers to his cheeks and traced the tracks of his tears.

“I’m crying? For God’s sake, I’m crying? What’s wrong with me? I don’t cry, and when I do, I will sure as hell need a reason.”

But anger could not replace the overwhelming sense of despair that was seeping into his system. He felt weak and drained, hopeless and helpless. The last time he’d felt this down had been the day he’d regained consciousness in a Kentucky hospital and seen the vague image of his sister’s face hovering somewhere above his bed.

He remembered thinking that he’d known his sister was an angel to have put up with so many brothers all of her life, but he’d never imagined that all angels in heaven looked like her. It was the next day before he realized that he hadn’t died, and by that time, worrying about the faces of angels had become secondary to the mind-bending pain that had come to stay.

Out of the silence of the night, a dog suddenly bugled in a hollow somewhere below Chaney Creek. The sound was familiar. He shuddered, trying to relax as his nerves began to settle. This was something to which he could relate. Someone was running hounds. Whether it was raccoon, bobcat or something else that they hunted, it rarely mattered. To the hunters, the dogs and the hunt were what counted.

He listened, remembering days far in his past when he and his brothers had done the same, nights when they’d sat around a campfire swapping lies that sounded good in the dark, drinking coffee made in a pot that they wouldn’t have fed the pigs out of in the light of day and listening to their hounds running far and wide across the hills and in the deep valleys.

He sighed, then dropped his head in his hands, wishing for simpler times, saner times. He wondered where he’d gone wrong. He’d married Shirley full of good intent, then screwed up her life, as well as his own.

And now this!

He didn’t know what to think. He’d survived a wreck that should have killed him. But if it had messed with his head in a way they hadn’t expected, then making a new life for himself had suddenly become more complicated than he’d planned.

Help. I need help.

He lifted his head, like an animal sniffing the air. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed to dark, gleaming slits. This time, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was wide-awake and barefoot on his sister’s back porch. And he knew what he heard. The voice was inside his head. He shivered, then shifted his gaze, looking out at the darkness, listening…waiting.

When the first weak rays of sunlight changed the sky from black to baby blue, Wyatt got to his feet and walked into the house. It had taken all night, and more soul-searching than he’d realized he had in him, but he knew what he had to do.

Somewhere down the hall, Joy babbled, and Toni laughed. Lane smiled to himself at the sound, buttoning his shirt on his way to the kitchen to start the coffee. He walked in just in time to see Wyatt closing the back door.

“Up kinda early, aren’t you, buddy?” Lane asked, and then froze at the expression on Wyatt’s face, grabbing him by the arm. “What’s wrong?”

Wyatt tried to explain, but it just wouldn’t come. “I need to borrow one of your cars.”

Lane headed for the coffeepot, giving himself time to absorb the unexpected request, and wondering about the intensity of Wyatt’s voice. Yet refusing him was not a consideration.

“It’s yours,” he said.

Measuring his words, along with coffee and water, Lane turned on the coffeemaker before taking Wyatt to task. “Mind telling me where you’re going so early in the morning? This isn’t exactly Memphis, and to my knowledge there’s no McDonald’s on the next corner cooking up sausage biscuits.”

“I’ve got to go,” Wyatt repeated. “Someone needs me.”

Lane’s posture went from easy to erect. “Why didn’t you say so? I’ll help.”

Wyatt shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. Hell, for that matter, I don’t understand. All I know is, last night while I was wide-awake and watching dark turn to day, someone kept calling my name.”

The oddity of the remark was not lost on Lane, but trespassing on another man’s business was not his way.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Lane asked.

Wyatt eyed his brother-in-law, wondering if he would understand what he was about to say.

“I think, back to where it all started,” Wyatt said quietly, remembering the woman outside of the hospital and the way he’d heard her voice…and she, his. He’d ignored it then. He couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“Back to Kentucky?” Lane asked, unable to keep surprise out of his voice.

Wyatt nodded.

Wisely, Lane stifled the rest of his concerns. While he didn’t understand what Wyatt was trying to say, he trusted the man implicitly. He swung a wide hand across his shoulder and thumped him lightly on the back.

“Then let’s get you packed,” Lane said. “It’s an all-day drive.”

Wyatt had been on this road before. Last winter. And with no destination in mind. This time, he knew where he was going. He even knew why. What he didn’t understand was the pull that drew him down the road. The closer he came to the great Pine Mountain, the more certain he became that he was on the right track. He drove relentlessly, stopping only when necessary, compelled to reach Larner’s Mill before nightfall. He couldn’t get past the increasing panic he felt, or the fact that he was listening for a voice that had suddenly gone silent.

The sun was halfway between zenith and horizon when he pulled into Larner’s Mill, but the relief he imagined he would feel was not there. In fact, the urgency of his quest seemed to have taken on darker overtones. An unsettled feeling had taken root in his belly, and try as he might, there was no rational explanation for the emotion, other than the uncertainty of his quest.

When he pulled into the parking lot of the small community hospital and got out, he found himself wanting to run. But to where? Instead, he took a deep breath and entered through the emergency room doors.

A nurse glanced up from a desk near the door. “May I help you, sir?”

“I want to talk to one of your doctors,” Wyatt said.

She slipped a fresh page on a clipboard and held a pen poised above the lines.

“Your name?” she asked.

“Wyatt Hatfield,” he said.

“And what are your symptoms?”

“I’m not sick. But I was here before. Last winter, in fact. I had a car wreck during a blizzard. I was…”

“I remember you,” she cried, and jumped to her feet. “Dr. Steading was your doctor. You were the talk of the hospital for some time.”

“Why was that?” Wyatt asked.

“You know,” she said. “About how lucky you were to have had that donor show up when she did. With such a rare blood type, and the blizzard and all, there was no way we could access the blood banks in the bigger cities as we normally might have done.”

The expression on Wyatt’s face stilled as he absorbed the nurse’s unwitting revelation.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. I am one lucky man.” He gave her a smile he didn’t feel. “So, could I talk to Dr. Steading? There are some things about the accident that I don’t remember. I thought maybe he could give me some help.”

“I’ll see,” she said, and shortly thereafter, Wyatt found himself on the way through the corridors to an office in the other wing. When he saw the name on the door, his pulse accelerated. He knocked and then entered.

“Dr. Steading?”

Amos Steading arched one bushy eyebrow, and then stood and reached over his desk, his hand outstretched.

“You, sir, look a damn sight healthier than the last time I saw you,” he said, his gravelly voice booming within the small confines of the office.

Wyatt caught the handshake and grinned. “I suppose I feel better, too,” he said.

Steading frowned. “Suppose?”

Wyatt took the chair offered him, and tried not to show his uneasiness, but it seemed it was impossible to hide anything, including an emotion, from the grizzled veteran.

Steading persisted. “So, did you come all this way just to shake my hand, or are you going to spit it out?”

Wyatt took a deep breath, and then started talking.

“I know I was in serious condition when I was brought in here,” he said.

“No,” Steading interrupted. “You were dying, boy.”

Wyatt paled, but persisted. “The reason I came is…I need to know if, in your opinion, I could have suffered any residual brain damage.”

Steading frowned. That was the last thing he expected to hear this man say. His eyes were clear and bright, his manner straightforward, and he’d walked into his office like a man with a purpose. None of this hinted at any sort of mental disability.

“Why?” Steading asked. “Are you suffering memory loss, or…”

Wyatt shook his head. “No, nothing like that.”

“So…?”

“So, I want to know what exactly happened to my head,” Wyatt growled.

“You had one hell of a concussion. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d gone into a coma.”

Wyatt started to relax. Maybe this would explain what he thought he’d heard. Maybe his head was still lost in some sort of fugue.

“But you didn’t,” Steading added. “After surgery, you pretty much sailed through recovery. There’s a lot to be said for a young, healthy body.”

“Damn,” Wyatt muttered beneath his breath. One theory shot to hell.

This time, both of Steading’s eyebrows arched. “You’re disappointed?”

Wyatt shrugged. “It would have explained a lot.”

“Like what?” Steading persisted.

The last thing he intended to admit, especially to a doctor, was that he was hearing voices. They’d lock him up in a New York minute. He changed the subject.

“I understand that I was given transfusions.”

“Transfusion,” Steading corrected. “And damned lucky to have that one. Whole blood made the difference. I’m good, but I don’t think I could have pulled you through surgery without it, and that’s the gospel truth.”

“I’d like to thank the person who cared enough to come out in such a storm. If it wouldn’t be against hospital policy, could you give me a name?”

Amos Steading’s face fell. He rocked backward in his chair, and gazed at a corner of the ceiling, trying to find the right way to say the words.

“If that’s a problem,” Wyatt said, “I’ll understand. It’s just that I’m trying to make sense of some things in my life, and I thought that retracing my steps through that night might help.”

“It isn’t that,” Steading finally said. “It’s just that you’re about a day too late.”

Wyatt straightened. An inner warning was going off that told him he wasn’t going to like this.

“That young woman…the one who gave you blood…she, along with her family, died sometime last night. I heard about it when I came in to work this morning.”

Oh, God! Oh, no! Was that what I heard…the sound of someone crying out for help?

Wyatt’s voice broke, and he had to clear his throat to get out the words. “How did it happen? Was it a car accident?”

“No, a fire at the home.”

Wyatt shuddered, trying not to think of the horror of burning alive.

“Yes, and a real shame, too, what with her and her brother so young and all. That night when the EMT dragged her into the room where I was working on you, I remember thinking she was just a kid. Wasn’t any bigger than a minute, and all that white blond hair and those big blue eyes, it’s no wonder I misjudged her age.”

It was the description that caught Wyatt’s attention. He’d seen a woman who looked like that. A woman with hair like angel’s wings, whom he’d mistaken for a girl until an errant wind had moved her coat, revealing a womanly figure.

He blanched, and covered his face in his hands. There was something else about that woman that had been unique, and only Wyatt was privy to the fact.

Somehow, when his guard had been down and his defenses weak, she’d insinuated herself within his thoughts. He didn’t know how it had happened, but after what he’d just heard, he was firmly convinced that she’d done it again last night, presumably at the point of her death.

“My God,” he muttered. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows upon his knees and stared at a pattern on the carpet until the colors all ran together.

“Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news,” Steading said. “Are you all right?”

Wyatt shrugged. “I didn’t really know her. It was her kindness that I wanted to acknowledge. It’s a damn shame I came too late.” And then he had a thought. “I’d like to see. Where she lived, I mean. Do you know?”

“Nope, I can’t say that I do. But you could ask at the police department. Anders Conway could tell you.”

Wyatt stood. “I’ve taken up enough of your time, Dr. Steading. Thanks for your help.”

Steading shrugged.

Wyatt was at the door, when he paused and then turned. “Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“What was her name?”

“Dixon. Glory Dixon.”

A twist of pain spiked, and then centered in the region of Wyatt’s heart. “Glory,” he repeated, more to himself than to the doctor, then closed the door behind him.

“Damn,” Amos muttered. “In fact…damn it all to hell.”

Wyatt navigated the winding road with absentminded skill. He’d gone over the side of one Kentucky mountain. It was enough. Remembering the directions he’d been given, he kept a sharp watch for a twisted pine, aware that he was to turn left just beyond it. As he rounded a bend, the last rays of the setting sun suddenly spiked through a cloud and the waning light hit the top of a tree. Wyatt eased off the gas. It was the pine. He began looking for the road, and sure enough, a few yards beyond, a narrow, one-laned dirt road took a sharp turn to the left. Wyatt followed it to its destination.

The clearing came without warning. One minute the road was shadowed and treelined, and then suddenly he was braking to a sliding halt as his fingers tightened upon the steering wheel, and his breath came in short, painful gasps.

“Dear God.”

There was little else to say as he got out of the car and walked toward the blackened timbers. Yellow police tape was tied from tree to tree and then from fence post to the bumper of what was left of a pickup truck—a vivid reminder that death had occurred here.

The fact that the shell of a washing machine and dryer still stood, while a house was gone, seemed obscene, too vivid a reminder of how frail human life truly was. Smoke continued to rise from several locations as cross beams and a stack of something no longer identifiable smoldered. An unnatural heat lingered in the cooler evening air.

Wyatt stuffed his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders against the weight of despair that hung over the area. Last night he’d heard a cry for help and had been unable to respond, and yet when he’d needed help most, she had come. The burden of his guilt was almost more than he could bear.

“Ah, God, Glory Dixon. It was you, wasn’t it? I am so, so sorry. If I had known, I would have helped.”

“Do you swear?”

Wyatt spun. This time the voice he just heard had been behind him, not in his head. And when a young woman walked out of the trees, he thought he was seeing a ghost. It was her! The woman from the street!

He looked over his shoulder at the ruins, and then back at her, unable to believe his own eyes. Suddenly, a puppy darted out of the woods behind her and began pouncing around her feet. Wyatt stared. He’d never heard of a ghost with a dog.

He stood his ground, fighting the urge to run. “Are you real?”

Glory sighed, and Wyatt imagined he felt the air stir from her breath. And then she was standing before him, and he looked down and got lost in a silver-blue gaze. An errant breeze lifted the hair from her neck and shoulders, and for a moment, it seemed to float on the air like wings. Once again, Wyatt was reminded of angels.

“Why did you come?” Glory whispered. “How did you know?”

The sound of her voice broke the spell, and Wyatt blinked, trying to regain a true focus on the world around him. Unable to believe his eyes, he grasped a portion of her hair between his fingers. Although it was silken in texture, there was nothing unearthly about it.

“I heard you call my name,” he muttered, as he watched the hair curl around his finger.

Glory gasped, startled by what he’d revealed, and stepped back. Dear God, did I give him more than my blood? Have I given away part of myself?

Then drawn by the horror she couldn’t ignore, her gaze shifted to the pile of blackened timbers, and without warning, tears pooled and then tracked down her cheeks in silent misery. Wyatt groaned and opened his arms, and to his surprise, she walked into his embrace with no hesitation.

In his mind, holding her was like trying to hold sunshine. She was light, fragile, and seemed to sway within his arms with every beat of his heart. Her shoulders shook with grief, and yet her sobs were silent, as if the agony just wouldn’t let go.

“I’m so sorry about your family,” Wyatt said softly, and closed the gap between his hands until she stood locked firmly within his grasp. “But everyone’s going to be so happy to learn that you survived. As soon as you’re able, I’ll take you back to town.”

She went limp, and for a moment, he thought she was going to faint. Instead, it seemed more of a physical retreat. Sensing her uneasiness, he immediately turned her loose.

“I can’t go back. Not yet,” Glory said quietly.

Wyatt couldn’t hide his surprise. “Why ever not?”

“Because this wasn’t an accident. Because someone tried to kill me, and my daddy and brother suffered for it.”

Before he thought, Wyatt had her by the arms. “What the hell do you mean, ‘someone tried to kill me’? Are you saying that this fire was set?”

“At first it wasn’t a fire, it was an explosion. The fire came afterward.”

Unable to look at him, she turned away. He was bound to doubt. Everyone always did.

“Well, hell,” Wyatt muttered. “Then you need to tell the police chief. He’ll know what to do.”

Glory spun, and for the first time since she’d walked out of the woods, Wyatt saw a light in her eyes and heard fire in her voice.

“No! You don’t understand! They’ll come tomorrow…or the next day…to go through the ruins. When they do, they’re only going to find two bodies, not three. And then whoever it was that did this will try again. I need time to try and figure out what to do.”

Wyatt frowned. “What do you mean, whoever did this? I thought you knew.”

She shook her head.

“Then how do you know it wasn’t an accident?”

Glory lifted her chin, silencing his argument with a piercing look he couldn’t ignore.

“I see things. Sometimes I know things before they happen, sometimes I see them happen. But however my knowledge comes…I know what I know.”

Wyatt took a deep breath. He knew for a fact that he’d been hearing some things of his own. Right now, it wasn’t in him to doubt that she might…just might…be able to do more than hear. What if she could see? What if she was for real?

“Are you telling me that you’re psychic?”

“Some people call it that.”

Wyatt went quiet as he considered the ramifications of her admission.

“Why did you come to the hospital to help me?”

Her chin trembled, but her words were sure. “I saw your accident as it happened. I heard your cry for help…and because I could come, I did.”

Daring the risk of rejection, Wyatt reached out and cupped her face with his hand. To his joy, she withstood his familiarity, in fact, even seemed to take strength from the comfort.

“How can I thank you, Glory Dixon?”

“By not giving me away. By helping me stay alive until I can figure out why…and who…and…”

“It’s done. Tell me what to do first.”

Again, she swayed on her feet. Wyatt reached out, but she pushed him away. Her gaze searched the boundary of trees around the rubble, constantly on the lookout for a hidden menace. Fear that she would be found before it was time was a constant companion.

“You need to hide your car. Maybe drive it around behind the barn, out in the pasture.”

“Where are you…uh…?”

“Hiding?”

He nodded.

“When you’ve parked your car, I’ll show you, but we need to hurry. There’ll be no moon tonight, and the woods are dense and dark.”

Wyatt headed for his car, and as he followed her directions through the narrow lanes, wondered what on earth he’d let himself in for. Yet as the beam of his headlights caught and then held on the beauty of her face and the pain he saw hidden in her eyes, he knew he didn’t give a damn. She’d helped him. The least he could do was repay the debt.

A few minutes later, they walked away from the site, following what was left of a road overgrown with bushes and weeds. The air was already damp. Dew was heavy on the grass, blotching the legs of their jeans and seeping into the soles of their shoes. The bag Wyatt was carrying kept getting caught on low-hanging limbs, but Glory seemed to pass through the brush without leaving a trace. It would seem that her fragile, delicate appearance was deceiving. He suspected that she moved through life as she did through these trees—with purpose.

The pup ran between their legs, barking once from the delight of just being alive. He ran with his nose to the ground and his long, puppy ears flopping, yet a single word from Glory and he hushed.

Something silent and dark came out of a tree overhead and sailed across their line of vision. Instinctively, Glory threw up her hands and gasped. Wyatt caught her as she started to run.

“I think it was an owl,” he said gently, and held her until she had calmed.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not usually so jumpy. It’s just that…” Tears were thick in her voice as she pushed herself out of his arms and resumed their trek.

Visibility was nearly zero, yet Glory moved with a sure sense of direction and Wyatt followed without question. Night creatures hid as the pair walked past, then scurried back into their holes, suddenly unsure of their world. Wyatt heard the rustling in the deep, thick grass, and even though he knew what it was that he heard, he couldn’t prevent a shiver of anxiety. This was a far cry from the safety and comfort of the Tennessee home where he’d been recuperating. It reminded him too much of secret maneuvers he’d been on in places he’d rather forget.

He clutched at the bag over his shoulder and caught himself wishing it was a gun in his hands, and not a duffel bag. Twice as they walked, Glory paused, listening carefully to the sounds of the woods through which they walked, judging what she heard against what she knew should be there. After a time, she would resume the trek without looking back, trusting that because Wyatt had come, he would still follow.

Just when he was wondering if they would walk all night, they entered a clearing. Again Glory paused, this time clutching the sleeve of his shirt as she stared through the darkness, searching for something that would feel out of place.

The instinct that had carried Wyatt safely through several tours of duty told him that all was well.

“It’s okay,” he said, and this time he took her by the hand and led the way toward the cabin on the other side of the yard.

The night could not disguise the humble quality of the tiny abode. It was no more than four walls and a slanted, shingle roof, a rock chimney that angled up from the corner of the roof, with two narrow windows at the front of the cabin that stared back at them like a pair of dark, accusing eyes.

Glory shivered apprehensively, then slipped the key from her jeans. As her fingers closed around it, she was thankful that her daddy had kept this one hidden at the cabin, or she would have been unable to get inside the night before.

Wyatt listened to the woods around them as she worked the lock, and when the door swung open with a slight, warning squeak, she took his hand and led him through with an odd little welcome.

“We’re home,” she said.

As he followed her inside, he had the oddest sensation that what she said was true.

Chapter 4

“Don’t turn on the light.”

Wyatt’s fingers paused on the edge of the switch. The panic in her voice was too real to ignore.

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

Glory nodded, then realized that in the dark, Wyatt Hatfield couldn’t see her face.

“Yes, I’m serious. Please wait here. I have a candle.”

Wyatt did as he was told. He set down his duffel bag and then closed the door behind him, thinking that the dark in here was as thick as the woods through which they’d just walked. Moments later, he heard the rasp of a match to wood, focused on the swift flare of light and watched a wick catch and burn. And then she turned, bathed in the gentle glow of candlelight. Once again, Wyatt was struck by her fragile beauty.

“Will the pup be all right outside?”

“Yes,” Glory said. “Follow me.” Wyatt picked up his bag. “This is where you’ll sleep,” she said, and held the candle above her head, giving him a dim view of the tiny room and the single bed. “I’m just across the hall in Granny’s bed.”

“Granny?”

“My father’s mother. This was her cabin. She’s all the family I have left.” And then her face crumpled as tears shimmered in her eyes. “The only problem is, she’s ninety-one years old and in a nursing home. Half the time she doesn’t remember her name, let alone me.”

As she turned away, Wyatt set his bag inside the room and followed her across the hall, watching as she set the candle on a bedside table, then ran across the room to check the curtains, making sure that no light would be visible from outside.

“Glory?”

She stilled, then slowly turned. “What?”

“Talk to me.”

She understood his confusion, but wasn’t sure she could make him understand. With a defeated sigh, she dropped to the corner of the bed, running her fingers lightly across the stitching on the handmade quilt, drawing strength from the woman who’d sewn it, and then bent over to pull off her boots. She tugged once, then twice, and without warning, started to cry quiet tears of heartbreak.

Wyatt flinched as her misery filled the tiny space. Without thinking, he knelt at her feet. Grasping her foot, he pulled one boot off and then the other before turning back the bed upon which she sat.

“Lie down.”

The gentleness in his voice was her undoing. Glory rolled over, then into a ball, and when the weight of the covers fell upon her shoulders, she began to sob.

“He was laughing,” she whispered.

Wyatt frowned. “Who was laughing, honey?”

“My brother, J.C. One minute he was digging through the grocery sack for Twinkies and laughing at something the pup had done, and then everything exploded.” She took a deep, shaky breath, trying to talk past the sobs. “I should have been with them.”

Wyatt cursed beneath his breath. Her pain was more than he could bear. He wanted to hold her, yet the unfamiliarity of their odd connection held him back. Slowly, she rolled over, looking at him through those silver-blue eyes while the skin crawled on the back of his neck.

“I was the first female born to the Dixon family in more than five generations. They say that my eyes were open when I was born, and that when Granny laid me on my mother’s stomach, I lifted my head, looked at my mother’s face and smiled. An hour later, my mother suddenly hemorrhaged, then died, and although I was in another room, Granny says that the moment she took her last breath, I started to cry. Granny called it ‘the sight.’ I consider it more of a curse.”

Wyatt brushed the tangle of hair from her eyes, smoothing it from her forehead and off her shoulders. “It saved me,” he said quietly.

She closed her eyes. A tear slipped out of each corner and ran down her temples and into her hair.

“I know.” Her mouth twisted as she tried to talk around the pain. “But why couldn’t I save Daddy and J.C.? Why, Wyatt Hatfield? Tell me why.”

Unable to stay unattached from her pain, Wyatt slid his hands beneath her shoulders and lifted her from the covers, then into his lap. As he nestled his chin in her hair, he held her against him.

“I don’t know the whys of the world, Glory Dixon. I only know the hows. And I swear to you, I will keep you safe until they find the man responsible.”

It was the promise he made and the honesty with which it was said that gave her hope. Maybe together they could get it done.

I’m so glad he’s here, Glory thought.

“I’m glad I came, too,” Wyatt whispered.

Glory froze. Without realizing it, he’d read her thoughts and answered. And as she let herself draw from his strength, she faced the fact that she’d given more than just blood to this man. It seemed impossible, and it shouldn’t have happened, but it was the only explanation that made sense.

A dog ran across the street in front of the car as Wyatt turned a corner in Larner’s Mill, aiming for the local police department down the street. He knew where it was. He’d been there yesterday when asking directions to the Dixon home. The people were friendly enough, but he wasn’t sure if one small-town police chief and two part-time deputies were going to be up to finding a killer. When they’d driven out of the yard earlier that morning, no one had even bothered to stop them and ask why they were near the scene. On the surface, they seemed geared more toward drunks and traffic violations than tracking criminals. He hoped he was wrong. As he pulled to the curb and parked, Glory’s nervousness was impossible to ignore any longer.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said.

Her eyes were wide and on the verge of tears, her mouth set. He could tell she was hovering on the edge of panic.

“They’re not going to believe me,” she said, but when Wyatt slipped his hand over hers and squeezed, the fear receded.

“It doesn’t really matter whether they believe you or not, as long as they proceed with some kind of investigation. Besides, don’t forget Lane’s coming.”

Glory nodded, remembering their earlier phone call to Wyatt’s brother-in-law.

“Having a U.S. marshal on our side isn’t going to hurt,” Wyatt added, then glanced down at his watch. “In fact, I’d lay odds that he’ll be here before dark.”

Glory bit her lip and then looked away.

“You have to trust me, girl.”

She turned, and Wyatt found himself looking into her eyes and fighting the sensation of falling deeper and deeper into a place with no way out. And then she blinked, and he realized he’d been holding his breath. Muttering to himself, he helped her out of the car.

Glory took heart in the fact that as they walked through the door, he was right beside her all the way.

“God Almighty!”

Anders Conway jumped to his feet and stumbled backward as the couple came in the door. He’d been police chief of Larner’s Mill for twenty-nine years, but it was his first time seeing a ghost.

Wyatt felt Glory flinch, and instinctively slipped a hand across her shoulder, just to remind her that he was there.

“Chief Conway, I came to report a murder,” Glory said softly.

He was so shocked by her appearance that her remark went right over his head. “We thought you were dead,” he said. “Where on earth have you been, girl?”

“Hiding.”

“Whatever for? No one’s gonna hurt you.”

Glory looked to Wyatt for reassurance. The glint in his eye was enough to keep her going.

“The fire at my house was not an accident. Someone deliberately turned on the gas jets. I saw them. When Daddy and J.C. walked in the back door with our groceries, it was nearly dusk and the house must have been full of gas. Wyatt says that one of them probably turned on the light, and that was what sparked the explosion.”

Conway frowned. Apparently, none of this was making much sense. “If you saw someone turning on the gas, why didn’t you tell your family? Why would your father knowingly go into a house set to blow?”

This was where it got rough. Glory braced herself, readying for the derision that was bound to come.

“I didn’t actually see what had been done until the house was already burning, I just knew that something was wrong. I tried to stop them from going inside. I called out, but it was too late. They were already there.”

The look on Conway’s face was changing from shock to confusion. Afraid that he’d run her out before she got a chance to explain, she started talking faster, anxious to get it all said.

“I know it was a man who did it. I could see him in my mind. I saw the back of his hands as he turned on the jets on the stove. He even broke one of them so that it couldn’t be turned off. I saw the back of his pant legs as he ran through the other rooms, doing the same to our heat stoves. One in the living room…and one in the bathroom, too.”

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