KRISTY BARELY HEARD the sound on the stairs, over the thud-thud-thud of her heart, but it didn’t raise her hopes of being rescued before Freida Turlow shot her to death. She was sure it was only Winston, and what could he do?
“Why?” Kristy asked. “Why did you kill Ellie?”
Freida’s face contorted with some horrible emotion. Or was it a horrible memory? Both, most likely.
“You’d think she was a saint, the way everybody carried on when she went missing,” Freida sputtered, checked-out again. Or still. “Well, let me tell you, she wasn’t. She took my boyfriend—got him to sleep with her and made sure I knew about it. Rubbed my face in it. He liked her better, she said—”
Kristy swallowed. “Sheriff Book?” she asked stupidly. Rather than being a one-man-woman, Freida was generally considered the any-man type. It was just that Floyd was the only one of Freida’s lovers Kristy could recall, stressed as she was.
Freida gave an ugly, contemptuous snort. “That fat old man? He didn’t even have the guts to stand up to his wife and get a divorce!”
The sound came again, nearer now, a slight creak in the hallway.
Freida frowned, listening hard.
Run away, Winston, Kristy thought desperately. Run away.
She wouldn’t have put it past Freida to shoot the cat, if he startled her or simply because he’d decided to live with Kristy instead of moving on with his original mistress.
“Who’s there?” Freida demanded, turning aside from Kristy and raising the gun, gripping it in two hands, like someone on TV. Someone used to guns, and proficient with them.
Kristy lunged at her, but even in her madness, or perhaps because of it, Freida had the instincts of a wild creature, cornered and prepared to kill to escape.
She swung her clasped hands, still holding the pistol and striking Kristy in the face, sending her hurtling backward onto the floor. She landed hard on her backside, blood streaming from her nose; she was dazed and coldly, calmly certain that this was it.
She was going to die.
But suddenly Floyd Book loomed in the doorway to the hall, a blurry shape. A blurry shape with a service revolver in one hand. “Put the gun down, Freida,” he said evenly. “This is all over.”
Freida didn’t put the gun down. She didn’t even lower it. “You know who my boyfriend was, Floyd?” she taunted. “Don’t pretend you didn’t hear, because I know you did. It was Mike Danvers. The man who wants your job.”
“Put the gun down,” Floyd repeated wearily. “I don’t want to have to shoot you, Freida, but I will.”
“Oh God, Freida,” Kristy pleaded, unable—and afraid—to get up from her sitting position on the floor, “do what he says. Please—”
And that was when Freida whirled on Kristy, gun raised. “You took Mike. You took my house. You even took my damn cat—”
She pulled the trigger.
Simultaneously, Floyd fired from the doorway, a flame flashing briefly from the end of his gun barrel.
Kristy screamed as Freida whirled to one side, like someone performing a ludicrous and graceful dance in slow motion, and then fell to the floor, still gripping the little pistol in her right hand. The pistol that had clicked, but not actually gone off.
There was blood—her own and Freida’s. And with it came the memories, vivid, crimson ones. Her dad, loading the body of that drifter into a wheelbarrow, in the sultry darkness of a summer night.
With the help of Floyd Book.
Floyd was staring down at Freida, as though he couldn’t believe he’d actually shot her, but he was still holding the service revolver.
Kristy couldn’t have spoken if it would have saved her life.
Floyd had been there, on the ranch, the night of the killing.
Slowly, as if unaware that Kristy was in the room at all, Floyd crossed to Freida, knelt beside her. She stirred, groaning, on the floor. The sheriff set his revolver down, activated the radio on his belt.
“We need an ambulance at Kristy Madison’s place,” he said to the dispatcher in his office. “Someone’s been shot, and it looks pretty bad.”
Kristy simply stared at her father’s old friend, waiting for him to realize that she’d remembered. That she’d seen him clearly, a part of that traumatic scene so long ago. She tried to gather her scattered wits, make a plan, get out of there before he shot her dead to keep her from telling what she knew, what she’d been suppressing all this time, but she couldn’t think.
She didn’t want to die.
She wanted to marry Dylan, and love him with all her heart, even if he didn’t love her in return. She wanted to see Bonnie grow up. She wanted to train and ride Sundance—
Dear God, there were so many things she wanted to do.
“You’ll be okay, Freida,” Floyd said, in a strange, gentle voice. “You’ll be okay. Just try to lie still.”
Until then, it hadn’t registered with Kristy that Freida was alive, though very badly injured.
Floyd reached for the bedspread, still lying where Kristy had dropped it when Freida ordered her to get dressed, and tucked it around the woman, careful not to cause her pain.
A moment later, his gaze swung to Kristy. “I wondered when it would come back to you,” he said quietly. “That I helped your dad bury that damn worthless piece of—”
Kristy swallowed hard, struggled to get to her feet, still unsure whether Sheriff Floyd Book would gun her down if she made any sudden moves. Now that some of the shock-fog was clearing, she thought she might actually survive this confrontation—would the man have called for an ambulance for Freida if he meant to kill her?
He might, Kristy decided. Because he could use Freida’s gun, wipe it clean of his fingerprints, and then put it back in Freida’s grip, so only hers would be on the handle and trigger. All he’d have to do was say Freida had fired the fatal shot—he’d tried to stop her, but just hadn’t been quick enough.
If that was his intention, though, he was taking his time about it.
Was it because Freida was conscious, and therefore conceivably a witness? Or because he’d already summoned an ambulance, and some neighbor might hear the second shot and check the clock?
Kristy felt the blood drain from her brain, causing a dangerous dip toward unconsciousness. She gripped the edge of her bureau, somehow managed to stay on her feet. The front of her shirt was soaked red, but the bleeding had stopped. She was pretty sure it had, anyway.
“What really happened that night, Floyd?” she asked. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere far away, instead of inside her, where there was only numbness and the bleak hope that she would walk out of that room on her own two feet.
Floyd sighed heavily, smoothing Freida’s hair back from her forehead, murmuring to her to hold on, the ambulance was coming. “Tim called me, after the shooting, and he was in a real panic. Afraid he’d go to prison, or even be executed, and you and your mother would be on your own. In those days, Kristy, it was even harder for a single woman to support a child than it is now, and they were in debt up to their ears, as you know. I came right out to the ranch, and I tried to calm Tim down, tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He begged me to help him bury the body, so I did. You have to understand, Kristy—we were in the army together, your dad and me. Saved each other’s lives half a dozen times, over in Vietnam. I couldn’t turn my back on him and besides, I’d have killed that drifter, too, if I’d found him in my little girl’s bedroom.”
Kristy heard a siren in the distance. Eased herself onto the edge of her bed, too shaky to stand. “He wouldn’t have been convicted—would he?”
Floyd sighed. “Probably not,” he said. “But don’t you see, Kristy? He and Louise were barely holding on as it was. A long court case, and all the legal fees—how was he supposed to pull the family through something like that?”
Kristy bit her lower lip, absorbing that. “You’re not going to kill me?”
Floyd gave a raw chuckle. “Now, why would I do that?”
“To shut me up?”
He shook his head. “You read too many thrillers, kiddo. Branch out a little.”
“Then I guess you—saved my life.”
“Not much gets by you,” Floyd said. This was the Floyd she knew and trusted, the one who’d sat at her parents’ kitchen table all those times, drinking coffee and eating apple pie and talking about Vietnam until Kristy’s mother insisted that he and Tim change the subject.
“How did you know? That I needed help, I mean?”
“Like I told you before, I make a habit of cruising by here every so often. Hell, this town is so small, I cruise by every house in it, half a dozen times a day. I was about a block away, and old Mrs. Beckings, across the street, popped out of one of those lilac bushes of hers and flagged me down—said she’d just seen a burglar pry open your cellar door and slip inside. Sure enough, that old padlock had nearly rusted through—Freida probably sprung it with a stick or something. I came in the same way, figuring you were probably at work, and would have locked all the doors, and I was about to call out when I heard a scream from up here, so—”
“That was me,” Kristy said. A shudder went through her as she recalled opening her eyes and seeing a ski-masked figure lying on the bed beside her. She looked at Freida, lying there on the floor. “Did you hear what she said, Floyd?”
“About me being a fat old fool who wouldn’t leave his wife?” He seemed grimly amused. “Hell, it’s the truth.”
“Not that,” Kristy said. “She told me she killed Ellie Clarkston. Over Mike Danvers.”
“Yes, I heard her say that.”
The siren gave another shrill bleep and, moments later, someone hammered at the front door.
The paramedics, of course.
“I’d better let them in,” Kristy said, forcing herself to stand.
“I’ll do it,” Floyd offered. “You stay here with Freida.”
Kristy shook her head. Being alone in a room with Freida Turlow, incapacitated or not, was more than she could manage.
Dylan tore into the driveway, wheels flinging gravel every which way, just as Kristy opened the front door for the paramedics and both of Floyd’s deputies. He left the engine running and jumped out of the truck, vaulting over the fence and darting across the lawn.
Kristy met him at the bottom of the porch steps.
One of the paramedics asked if she was all right.
Kristy looked down at her bloody shirt and nodded that she was.
Dylan had taken note of the blood, too, of course. Gripping her shoulders, he closed his eyes tightly for a moment, breathing hard. When he looked at her again, he said, “I saw the ambulance—I thought—”
Kristy dropped to sit on one of the steps.
Dylan sat beside her, wrapped an arm around her as she began to tremble.
The story poured out of her: waking up to find she wasn’t alone in the bed, Freida raving and brandishing the gun after she’d pulled off the ski mask, confessing to the Clarkston girl’s murder, Floyd appearing in the literal nick of time.
If it hadn’t been for footsteps clattering on the stairs just inside, they might have sat there, the two them, for hours, Dylan holding Kristy tightly, Kristy glad to be held. But the paramedics had already loaded Freida onto a gurney, and they were in a hurry to get her into the ambulance and race away.
Dylan got up first, pulled Kristy off the steps so the EMTs could pass. Floyd walked slowly in their wake, like a man in a stupor.
Kristy remembered the tender way he’d spoken to Freida, after shooting her, and how he’d covered her with the bedspread in an effort to keep her warm until she could be moved.
Maybe he had loved Freida Turlow.
And maybe he was simply the good man Kristy had known for so long.
“You going to be all right, Floyd?” Dylan asked him huskily.
“God damn this job,” Floyd muttered, as though no one had spoken to him at all. “God damn it.”
Kristy touched the sheriff’s arm. She wanted to promise that she’d never tell anyone—besides Dylan—that he’d helped her father bury a body, then cover up the truth about what had happened. She owed him that much, she figured, because if not for Floyd Book, she’d be dead by now. The trouble was, she couldn’t get the words out—they were all snarled up in her throat.
“It’s all right, Kristy,” Floyd said, turning to look down into her face. “Soon as I get back to my office, I’ll call the state police and turn myself in.”
Dylan’s jaw dropped. For once, he was the speechless one.
“Freida’s been blackmailing me all these years—though I didn’t figure out who was behind it until today. It’ll be worth whatever comes now just to be free of that.”
Kristy nodded.
One of the deputies had gone with Freida in the ambulance. The other circumspectly took his boss by the arm and ushered him toward a waiting squad car.
Kristy hurried to catch up. “Freida said there was a diary,” she told Floyd quickly. “She was sure I had it, sure I knew what she’d done.”
Floyd stopped again, there on the sidewalk, while the deputy stood holding the front passenger door of the squad car open for him. “I have the diary,” he said. “Brett Turlow gave it to me, before he went into treatment. Said he’d been holding it over Freida’s head for years, and now he’d get back at her for signing off on him the way she did.”
“Then you did know?” Kristy marveled.
“Hell, no,” Floyd said gruffly, and she believed him. “I figured it was stuff about Freida and me, when we were together. Came close to burning the thing a couple of different times. Now, I’m real glad I didn’t.”
“Do you think you’ll be arrested?” Kristy asked, as the sheriff stooped to get into the squad car.
“Maybe,” Floyd said. “Maybe not. I’ll have to resign right away, that’s for sure, and I guess I could lose my pension. Once word gets around that Freida killed a girl over him, Mike Danvers won’t have a chance in hell of getting elected, even though I’ll eat my hat if he had anything to do with the murder. And that means Jim Huntinghorse will be the new sheriff.” The lawman sighed heavily, plunked himself down on the car seat. “I don’t imagine he’s got the first idea what he’s getting into.”
Kristy reached into the car to lay one hand on Floyd’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saving my life.”
Floyd leaned forward a little way, to look around Kristy at Dylan, who was standing close by, watching and listening in silence. “You take care of this lady, young Mr. Creed,” he said. “She’s a keeper.”
“I’ll do it,” Dylan vowed, putting an arm around Kristy and pulling her close against his side.
As soon as the squad car pulled away from the curb, Dylan hustled Kristy into his truck, and they headed for the clinic, even though she swore up and down she wasn’t hurt.
X-rays and a thorough examination confirmed what Kristy had known all along—she was going to have some bruises and maybe even a black eye, but she’d suffered no serious injuries.
By the middle of that afternoon, the reporters were back in town, some posted in front of the sheriff’s office, others practically at Kristy’s front door. A team of evidence technicians, accompanied by high-ranking members of the Montana State Police, had cordoned off her bedroom, in order to take photographs and pluck up fibers with tweezers, she supposed.
Kristy sat with Dylan at her kitchen table, Winston curled on her lap. Now that the immediate danger had passed, she was calm enough to be scared out of her mind. Dylan had put a call through to Logan, while she was being poked and prodded at the clinic, and Logan was already geared up to defend Floyd, if things came to that.
At that point, no one knew exactly what would happen.
“I don’t think I can sleep in that room again,” Kristy confessed.
“I’ll be with you when you do,” Dylan said.
She gave a completely humorless little laugh. “This is like getting back on a horse right after you’re thrown, isn’t it?”
“Same principle,” Dylan agreed, with a ghost of a grin. “It won’t be that long until the new place is done. In the meantime, we’ll deal. Get on with our lives.”
Kristy sucked in a sudden, gasping breath. “I completely forgot about the library!”
Dylan smiled. “Folks will cope,” he told her. “As soon as the police are done upstairs, we’ll go out to the ranch and get Bonnie. Or I could call Briana and ask her to bring her by.”
Kristy merely nodded, still distracted. She’d failed to open the library before, once when she had the flu, and couldn’t get out of bed or even grab the phone on her nightstand to call Susan or Peggy for backup, and another time when she’d had a bad case of cramps in the night and thought her appendix was rupturing. But she’d never forgotten.
Then again, she’d never been held at gunpoint, in her own home, by a woman who had once been her babysitter, either.
Babysitter.
Gravesitter.
Kristy’s shock-addled mind made the leap. Was Freida Gravesitter? Had she been the one to send that scary IM?
She might never know. And that was a hard thing to accept.
“What?” Dylan asked, evidently reading her expression.
Kristy told him her theory.
He didn’t offer an opinion, one way or another.
When his cell phone rang, Kristy jumped. He frowned, checked the caller ID panel and then answered.
“Hello, Logan.”
Kristy let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. It wasn’t Sharlene, then, calling to make some threat about taking Bonnie back. The relief was almost as great as when she’d known for sure that Floyd Book wasn’t going to shoot her.
“Okay,” Dylan said. “Yeah—right. Thanks.”
Kristy leaned forward in her chair, waiting for him to click the phone shut and say something.
When he did, the room seemed to tilt crazily to one side, then the other.
“Freida Turlow died in the ambulance,” he said.
Tears sprang to Kristy’s eyes. Even with all that had gone on, she hadn’t wanted this to happen.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, then gulped back a rush of bile. “And Floyd?”
“There’s an investigation pending,” Dylan answered. “According to Logan, that’s routine, whenever a police officer has to shoot someone.”
Kristy doubled over, arms wrapped around her middle, and let her forehead rest on the tabletop. Dylan rubbed her back.
“It’s pretty obvious that Floyd shot Freida in the line of duty,” he told her quietly. “He isn’t under arrest or anything like that. But he’s got a lot of questions to answer.”
Kristy straightened. Looked him in the eye. “He’s told them that he helped my dad bury that body, and then kept the secret. Won’t he be in trouble for that?”
Dylan considered. “Probably. But I don’t think he’ll go to jail, Kristy. Neither does Logan.”
“What will happen to him, then?”
“I don’t know,” Dylan answered. “Logan should be able to shed a little more light on that, once he gets here. He’ll stick close to Floyd until the state police are through questioning him, though.”
Floyd Book, being questioned by the state police.
It was incomprehensible.
Floyd was an Eagle Scout leader. He was a member of the Rotary and Lions clubs. He taught Sunday-school classes, and he’d been a good husband to Dorothy, at least since her accident.
What would become of Dorothy, if the state decided to prosecute Floyd for the cover-up? She and Floyd had no children, no immediate family, as far as Kristy knew.
“This is awful,” Kristy said, starting to get out of her chair. “Floyd’s wife—she’s in a wheelchair and—”
Dylan eased her back down. “Word’s out by now,” he said gravely. “The neighbors will look after Dorothy. This is Stillwater Springs, remember?”
Kristy nodded. For all the town’s faults, collective and individual, people rallied around whenever trouble came. When she’d come home from college for her parents’ funerals—first her mother’s, then her dad’s—she’d barely been able to navigate the house for all the concerned friends who’d come to sit with her, and the casseroles and bakery goods they’d brought had crammed the freezer to capacity.
Dylan left his chair to make her a cup of tea.
Briana arrived, bringing Bonnie and Sam, and Logan got there soon after that.
Kristy, glad to have something to do, filled Bonnie’s sippy cup and put her into the playpen where, miracle of miracles, she sat quietly, drinking her milk and finally toppling over on one side to sleep.
Watching, Kristy wondered if she’d ever be able to sleep again, especially in that room upstairs, where she’d almost died.
Logan joined Briana and Dylan at the table, all of them drinking coffee and talking quietly.
“I know you’re probably pretty upset right now,” Logan said solemnly, as Kristy sat down at the table. “But I need you to tell me what happened here today, Kristy. Floyd’s answers were pretty jumbled—he was having chest pain, from the stress, so the police decided to hospitalize him overnight.”
This brief speech earned him a glare from Dylan, which he ignored.
Slowly, carefully, Kristy repeated the awful story, aware that it was one she’d have to tell again, and yet again, possibly under oath in a court of law or before some investigating committee.
Logan listened without interruption, his face revealing none of what he was thinking.
When Kristy finished, he nodded, as though she’d confirmed something he’d already deduced.
“He saved my life,” Kristy said. “Won’t that carry some weight with the judge or the grand jury or whoever decides things like this?”
“Most likely,” Logan replied.
“Why can’t they just let him go?”
Logan sighed. “He’s a cop, Kristy. Sworn to uphold the law. He helped dispose of a body and then covered up what happened. He did give me Freida’s diary—I haven’t had time to do more than scan a few pages, but there’s enough in there to convince anybody that he’s known, at least since that journal came into his possession, what happened to Ellie Clarkston. And it’s possible, if the prosecutor gets involved, that the state will claim he was covering up for Freida, the way he did for your dad, because they were involved.”
“He told me he hadn’t read the diary, Logan, and I believed him.”
“He also said,” Dylan put in, “that she’d been blackmailing him for years, anonymously, because she’d seen him helping Tim bury that drifter. What do you suppose she was doing out there in the dark, anyhow?”
“Kids used to roam all over the countryside at night,” Logan reminded his brother. “We did.” He reached over, took Briana’s hand, squeezed it lightly. “If she had a reason, it’ll be in the diary.”
Kristy nodded. “What about the statute of limitations?” she asked, clutching at straws. “Hasn’t it run out?”
“There is no statute of limitations on murder,” Logan told her.
“But Floyd didn’t—”
Just then, one of the evidence techs came down the rear stairway and announced that they were finished, and they’d be leaving now. The detectives stayed, however, and battered Kristy with quiet, pointed questions, and she was glad Logan and Dylan were there, and Briana, too.
Dylan and Briana offered silent moral support, and Logan made sure Kristy’s rights were respected.
Logan didn’t mention the diary to the police, Kristy noticed. Clearly, he wanted to read and perhaps photocopy it before turning it over to the authorities.
The detectives thanked Kristy politely and left.
Once they were gone, the house seemed to let out its breath.
Briana glanced at her watch. “Alec and Josh are at the pool,” she said. “I’d better pick them up.” She leaned over to kiss Logan, then stood. “See you at home.”
He nodded, his eyes shining as he looked at her.
At the door, Briana paused, swept Kristy, Dylan and Bonnie up in a glance. “You’re welcome to come and stay at our place, if you’ve got the heebie-jeebies or anything.”
“Thanks,” Dylan said, when Kristy didn’t speak. “But we’ll be okay.”
Briana hesitated, as though she’d like to argue, then went out.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come out to the ranch for a while?” Logan asked. “It’s still your home, too, you know.”
Logan stood to go.
“If you hear anything about—about Floyd, will you call?” Kristy asked.
“I’ll call,” Logan confirmed.
He’d barely stepped out the door before Kristy was on the kitchen phone, dialing the sheriff’s home number. She wouldn’t stop obsessing about Dorothy Book until she knew the woman wasn’t alone, stunned by the news that her husband was under investigation and in the hospital for chest pain. If indeed she’d heard the news at all. Poor Dorothy might be sitting there, waiting for Floyd to get off work, like any other day, with no idea what had happened.
Carla Adams, a neighbor of the Books’, answered on the second ring. “If you’re a reporter—” she began tersely.
“It’s Kristy Madison,” Kristy said.
“Kristy,” Carla said. “Good heavens. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. The question is, how’s Dorothy?”
“Baffled,” Carla replied sadly. “I’ve tried to explain, but she doesn’t understand. She keeps asking if one of us will call Floyd and ask him to bring home hamburgers for supper, because she doesn’t feel like cooking.”
Kristy closed her eyes against the image of that poor, bewildered woman, but it stayed with her. “Someone will be staying with her?”
“One or another of us will be here for the duration.”
Kristy sighed with relief. “That’s good,” she said.
“It’s the only option, right about now.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“I’ll let you know if we need help,” Carla promised gently.
“You take care of yourself, Kristy. It’s no secret, what you’ve been going through, over what happened. I just want you to know that we’re on your side—the town, I mean. We all remember Tim and Louise, and they were good people.”
That time, Kristy couldn’t answer at all. She nodded and hung up.
And because she desperately needed something to do, she found an apron, tied it around her waist and began making supper.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Floyd Book was released, though the investigation would continue for months. He promptly returned to Stillwater Springs, announced his resignation and went home to look after his wife.
Logan had already handed the diary over to the state police, and he brought a copy by the library for Kristy to read. She immediately put Susan in charge and slipped into her office, alone, to devour every word.
She was desperate to understand what had happened, even though it was all in the past—so far in the past.
She read through a blur of tears how a teenage girl had seen two men she’d known all her life burying a body under a copse of trees on Madison Ranch. The handwriting was jerky and strange, the spelling that of someone much younger than a high school junior.
Freida had been spending the night by the creek, on a dare from some girls at school, by her account. And once she’d realized what it was Tim Madison and Floyd Book were actually doing, she’d been so terrified that she’d hidden in some bushes until the sun came up.
If she had ever blackmailed Kristy’s parents, she’d made no record of it in the diary, but she’d hit Floyd up for money, never revealing her identity of course, and he’d paid promptly. He’d probably never suspected a teenage girl to be behind the demands, but Kristy still wondered why he hadn’t used his resources as sheriff to run her down.
Guilt, she supposed. On some level, Floyd Book had believed he deserved to be blackmailed, maybe even that he was getting off easy.
Freida spent the initial loot on a prom dress. She didn’t say how the money was transferred.
Oddly, even as she continued to collect on what she’d seen, Freida had begun to develop a schoolgirl crush on Floyd. She wrote about how good he looked in his uniform, and how she’d like to have his children, and began to map out a plan of seduction long before he’d actually succumbed to her charms.
The most chilling entries, of course, concerned Ellie Clarkston. How she’d spoiled things by waltzing into town and stealing Mike Danvers right out from under Freida’s nose.
Freida’s description of the actual murder made the small hairs stand up on Kristy’s arms.
I shouldn’t be writing this down. But I can’t tell anybody, and I can’t hold it in, either. I killed Ellie Clarkston.
She’d underlined that last sentence, in bold strokes of her pen.
I told her Mike wanted to see her about something important, in that copse of trees between the Creed place and Madison Ranch. I was the go-between, that’s what I said. She was so smug, and spiteful. She called me “Message Girl.” Well, when she went to meet Mike, she found out she wasn’t so smart after all. I got there first, and I was waiting. I hit her in the back of the head with a rock, and when she was down, I hit her again and again, until she died. I had to take off all my clothes afterward, and wash them in the creek, and myself, too, and wait for everything to dry. She sat propped against a tree, all that time, looking at me with her dead, staring eyes. It took me three days to dig that hole, and I was scared to death the whole time that somebody would catch me, or the coyotes would drag her stupid slut carcass into plain sight and someone would find her and put it all together. I’m not sorry for what I did. I’m NOT SORRY. She brought it all on herself. Nobody—NOBODY—takes what’s mine.
“Nobody takes what’s mine,” Kristy repeated, cold to the marrow of her bones. You took Mike—you took my house—you even took my damn cat—
Sickened, Kristy stopped turning pages, pushed the stack of copy pages away, unable to read any more.
Somehow, she got through the rest of that day.
Dylan got her through the night. They didn’t make love—her emotions were too raw for that—but he held her, in the safe circle of his arms, and when she cried because terrible memories crowded around the bed like shadows, he stroked her hair and murmured that everything would be all right. They’d get through this, together.
But he still didn’t say the words that would have made all the difference in the world.
He didn’t say, “I love you.”