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Chapter 1

1985

Anne had returned to Allegro to heal, and sometimes she almost felt that she had. Her body had, of course. Even before she closed up her apartment and practice and ran from Chicago, she knew there would be no problem with that. It was the other, the emotional and mental wounds, that seemed in no hurry to close or scar over. But on that crisp, clear Saturday morning in late November, with the forest and the hills of southeastern Oklahoma spread out around her, surrounding her, enclosing her, protecting her, she felt almost whole again.

It was strange, but lying there in that hospital bed in Chicago, something within her had said, It's time to go home, and she had known she had to return to Allegro, even though she had never truly considered this tired little town as home, even though she had not been here but a few times in her life, and those with her mother as a child or as a very young adult, before medical school.

The people of Allegro had needed a doctor for too long not to accept her back into the fold, even if she wasn't sure just how long she could stay in medicine. Besides, Great Uncle Ralph had once owned more than half the town, and she still had family, numerous though not close, living here. But she wasn't really welcomed back like the prodigal son, although some seemed to think she was a "prodigal." And, to quote Bobby Preston, an eight-year-old with a penchant for broken arms, split lips, and black eyes, she "talked funny."

She wasn't thinking of any of those things, though, when David Huerra came, literally, crashing into her life. She was sitting in Agnes, her brown Ford pickup, at the end of the lane leaving Johnson's sawmill, thinking about the vagaries of one-by-sixes, how all lumber is not created equal, or even the same size, and about the ongoing objections Willie Johnson kept voicing about her renovations to the house that had been a landmark in Allegro since before statehood.

She was mildly miffed that she had to have the trim lumber for her hundred-year-old house specially sawed because modern techniques had reduced what she'd always thought to be the actual measure. A one-by-six ought to be an inch wide, not three-quarters, not five-eighths. And she was more than mildly pleased that Willie Johnson was willing and able to custom-saw the lumber she needed even though he never failed to lecture her.

"Ah, Anne, my girl, you should have let your cousin Joe take the house," he'd said today, as he had already said a dozen times since she bought the house from Aunt Ellie and Uncle Ralph's estate. "He would have done good. He would have torn it down and built those apartment houses like he's been wanting to for years."

So that was what he had wanted with it, she thought, as a troubling puzzle piece tumbled into place.

"You wouldn't have been bothered with it," Willie said, drawing her attention back to him and the present. "You wouldn't have been worried about hurting your fine hands."

Willie worried about her hands. Not because she needed them in the practice of medicine, but because he was one of the few people who had actually looked at the jewelry she used to make before she became consumed with medicine and success, had in fact bought a piece of it from her when she was just a fumbling adolescent who thought she knew where her life was going.

"Why'd you want to go and buy a big old place like that, anyway?" he'd asked her.

She'd had to laugh, and she'd had to be honest; that was the only thing you could be with Willie Johnson. Although she didn't tell him that buying the house hadn't truly been her decision. At least not at first.

"I don't know," she told him. "I just felt it was something I had to do."

"Well, you ought to hire somebody to do that work for you," he said, not willing to back off completely from his subject. "Just move out, turn it over to a contractor, and don't go back till the work is finished. You got better things to do than worry about power tools and hammers and lugging this lumber up and down the stairs."

She'd laughed again, thanked Willie for the week's worth of materials he'd loaded into Agnes, and left. In retrospect, though, she sometimes wondered if he had been right. Not about letting Joe have the house—that would only have made things worse—but about hiring someone. If she had been able to, and if after doing so she had been able to keep any of those she had hired working long enough to finish the job, if she hadn't personally been so involved in cutting and trimming and measuring, would she have noticed the discrepancies?

And there she was, sitting at the end of the lane, waiting for a log truck to turn into the narrow road from the highway when her life changed once again. She had fought back an irrational moment of urban impatience at the truck for taking so long to turn, and at herself for being too timid to turn onto the road when she'd probably had the chance, accepting that she wasn't in so much of a hurry that a few more minutes of her time were really going to be of any earth-shattering importance.

She had taken those moments to look again over the magnificent view spread out in front of her and was letting the beauty of that view calm her, as it always did when she surrendered to it. Fall had come late to this isolated area. There hadn't yet been a killing frost or even a harsh wind or heavy rain to complete the job of denuding the trees. Yellows, pale greens, oranges, and shades of red marched up the mountains before her in step with the dark greens of pine and cedar, crowned in the distance by a veil of rising fog from the meandering river.

Granted, surrendering to the calming influence of nature was a little difficult, because the log truck was groaning and creaking under its load of pines loudly enough, almost, to drown out the sound of its straining, belching diesel engine, and definitely loudly enough to disrupt her amateur attempts at meditation, but she was working on it.

That's when she saw the approaching car and abandoned all attempts at meditation. And that's when the driver of that car saw that the log truck was all but stopped in the middle of its turn in the road in front of him. He hit his brakes. There wasn't anything for him to do but try to stop; a hundred-foot sheer drop marked the other side of the road, and although Anne shoved Agnes into reverse gear and was frantically trying to back out of his one alternate path, there was no way she could do so fast enough to help him. He stopped, with a controlled skid and a more responsive car than she had seen in a long time, just inches from the back of the protruding logs. She saw him slump over the steering wheel in relief. And then she saw Hank Foresman's souped-up red one-ton truck come around the curve so fast he hadn't a prayer of stopping in time, even if his brakes had been in order. And the driver of the car saw him, too.

 

How long had the lights behind those mud-encrusted reflectors been glowing? David Huerra swore swiftly and violently when he realized that the heavily laden log truck on the grade below him was stopping and beginning a tortured left turn. He hit the brakes while scanning for an escape route. Not to the right; that meant at least a hundred-foot drop off the side of the mountain to the first rock outcropping, with nothing to break the fall but a few scrubby pines and winter-dead oak trees. And not to the left; the truck was already into its turn. Even if he could beat it to the side road he couldn't squeeze between it and the brown pickup truck waiting to turn onto the highway.

He heard the borrowed fishing tackle and gear he had stacked so carefully on the backseat crash to the floor as the car shuddered to a stop barely a foot from the end of the logs protruding from the back of the truck. He let out a long breath and slumped against the seat.

Swearing, he thought as he felt the effects of adrenaline racing through his system and remembered the oath that had spewed so naturally from him. He swallowed once and began taking deep, even breaths. That was something else he could work on this month. Swearing was becoming a matter of routine, a thoughtless response to almost any situation. Like this one, he told himself, seeing the slight tremor in his hand when he released his death grip on the steering wheel. If he were going to swear over this, he ought to be swearing at himself for not paying more attention to the unfamiliar road, not at the truck driver for making a left turn.

Swearing. Yes, he definitely would work on that. Clean up his language while he cleaned up his life.

He glanced again at the drop to his right, then into the rearview mirror. His jaw clenched when he saw the oncoming truck, a bright red one, nose down as it approached, coming around the curve too fast to be able to stop in time.

All thoughts of cleaning up his language fled, chased out of his mind by a swift, certain knowledge: that idiot is going to kill me!

And then, as had happened to him too many times for comfort, as if he were considering it from the safety of his office or his living room or in some secluded spot well away from all danger, everything slowed down. Slow motion with occasional stop-action. With him completely unable to act in any way to prevent what was happening. The truck still came toward him, the knowledge of his impending death still danced around the edges of his consciousness. He felt a moment of sadness for his brother, for his niece, for those whose lives had touched his, for the words he had often spoken heedlessly, for the words he had left unsaid in spite of all his good intentions.

There was no time for fear. That had come earlier, when there had been a prayer of his saving himself. Now there was nothing to do but accept the inevitable. But his hands still gripped the wheel, twisting it in an effort to turn away from the protruding logs, his feet slammed onto the brake pedal, shoving down, without his knowledge but with all of his strength, in an effort to stop the unstoppable, and his body twisted sideways in an effort to avoid the unavoidable.

"Son of a bitch," David whispered in what only he would recognize as a convoluted prayer before the windshield shattered, his head slammed forward, then back, and the slow-motion action stopped. Silenced. Darkened.

 

The sickening sounds of metal on metal and green-pine log on metal and glass released Anne from the paralysis that had held her immobile through the slow-motion video. The driver of the log truck had stopped in the middle of the road. He slammed out of the cab of his truck, and she, even knowing what she must find, jumped from hers.

Hank Foresman wasn't hurt; he had the advantage of the weight of his truck and the slack-muscled responses of the slightly drunk. The driver of the brown Chevy was a different story. One of the protruding logs had gone through his windshield, missing his head by no more than a thickness of skin; he had a nasty knot already rising on his forehead; and he was out cold.

She slapped Hank's hands away as he tried to release the man's seat belt. "Get my bag out of my truck," she told him, knowing she'd have to distract him or he'd yank the man out of his car without respect for any possible injuries.

"What can I do, Doc?" the driver of the log truck asked from behind her. Anne hadn't recognized him, but she breathed a sigh of relief that he wasn't one of those locals who felt the need to take charge.

"Give me a minute," she told him.

Her examination was perfunctory at best but, given the decided smell of gasoline, as adequate as she could make it. Only when she had finished did she realize that her recently too-familiar sense of panic hadn't overwhelmed her. But then, there hadn't been any blood. Thank God.

"Help me get him out of here and across the road."

They stretched him out on the grassy slope beside her truck. Hank shoved her bag at her, and she quickly checked for vital signs. When assured that the man wasn't in imminent danger of dying on her, she began checking for other injuries. He was a slender man, a little under six feet tall, with muscle tone that spoke of a strength not evident from his size. His features were slightly Hispanic, his eyes a dark brown, she discovered, and showing no signs of a serious head injury. Altogether, he wasn't bad looking. And he was definitely a stranger to the area, with a smashed car and a whale of a headache coming on.

"Damn!" he muttered, thick tongued and groggy but quite succinctly. He raised a hand to his head and opened his eyes. Giving up the effort to focus, he closed one eye and peered at her with the other. Apparently deciding she was no threat to him, he relaxed again. "I'm going to quit swearing," he said experimentally, as though not sure his voice would work. "That's what I promised myself just before that—Son of a bitch!"

His open eye widened; his other popped open.

"Move away from him, Doc."

She twisted around at the menace in Hank's voice and came eyeball to gaping black barrel with the rifle he held one-handed and trained on her semiconscious patient.

"What?" she choked out as involuntary fear sank its claws into her. Yep. There was the panic. But she didn't have time for it now.

"Put the gun down, Hank," she ordered quietly.

"No, ma'am," he said. "You move away from him."

"Put the damned gun down, Hank, before you get into more trouble than you're already in."

"It's not me that's in trouble," Hank said. "And it's not my gun you ought to be worried about. It's his." He held up his left hand, brandishing a deadly looking blue revolver.

"Found it in the front floorboard of his car. No telling what all's in those bags in the back."

"Fishing tackle," she heard from behind her.

Hank snorted. "With Texas tags on your car? Likely story," he said, ignoring the fact that the entire area around Allegro and the man-made lake with which it shared its name derived most of its meager income from catering to fishermen.

"No." He took a shaky step closer. "With the way you look, you shouldn't have any trouble coming back and forth across from Mexico. I think maybe you're one of them drug runners. Or maybe one of them folks that brings in illegal aliens. I think old Hank's just caught him a wanted criminal."

Most of the people Anne dealt with were decent, hard working, and too concerned with their own survival to worry too much about who or what other people were. But occasionally prejudice reared its head. She didn't like it here any better than she had in Chicago. Less, because it seemed so out of character with the history of this area and the natural beauty that ought to have seeped into the pores of every living being.

"Hank Foresman," she said as indignation overcame the residue of her fear. He wasn't a threat to her, only to her patient, and perhaps, to himself. She could stop him. Yes. She could do this. "If you don't put that gun down, I'm going to stick you with a megadose of tranquilizers that will have you singing lullabies for three days."

"I can explain," her patient said, reaching for his pocket.

"Don't move."

The man sighed and looked over her shoulder. "You look sane," he said to the truck driver beside her. "Will you see if you can find a blue windbreaker in the backseat of my car? My wallet is in the pocket."

They waited, with only the sounds of Hank's heavy breathing and distant fumbling noises from the car until the driver returned. "You caught yourself a bad one all right, Hank," he said, and she saw that he was trying not to laugh. "David Huerra, Dallas P.D. Detective."

"Oh, shit," Hank said, lowering the rifle just before his knees gave out and he sank into a loose-jointed pile on the road. The truck driver walked over and relieved him of both the rifle and the revolver.

She heard the squeal of brakes, followed by Willie Johnson's shout. "Sheriff's on his way. I've got him on the CB. Do we need an ambulance?"

"Yes," she shouted back, only to be overruled.

"No," David Huerra said quietly.

Anne could have insisted. Maybe she should have. Instead, she heard herself saying. "Tell him we'll let him know."

By that time quite a crowd had gathered. With Hank collapsed at her feet, her conscience prickled until she gave him a cursory examination to make sure that nothing other than alcohol contributed to his blackout. As she finished, she heard the scream of the sheriff's siren approaching.

The tableau in the highway made what happened obvious, and any answers that might be needed seemed to her to be supplied by Hank snoring, blissfully ignorant of the stories that were passing through the growing crowd of spectators from those who had witnessed his big arrest.

David Huerra, the Dallas cop, was trying to get to his feet when she put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back to the ground. "Unless you want to pass out like your buddy Hank, maybe you'd better sit still for a minute or two," she told him quietly. He grimaced but apparently decided she might know what she was talking about, because he didn't struggle against her restraining hand.

Sheriff Blake Foresman pushed his way through the crowd toward them, and knelt beside his brother Hank, looking up at her with concern written in every weathered line of his face. When Hank snored and belched in his sleep, Blake backed away from him. "Oh, hell," he muttered and turned to survey the wreckage on the road. "I don't suppose that brown Chevy ran into the truck and then backed into my brother," he asked wryly.

The driver of the log truck chuckled. "Don't think so, Sheriff."

Blake looked at him, trying to place him. "Sam Wilson?"

"Yep," the driver said.

"You saw what happened?"

"Yep," the driver—Sam—said again. "Me and the doc, and of course Detective Huerra, here."

"Oh, hell," Blake said again, raking his hand across his forehead. He looked at her with weary resignation. "You want to draw me a blood sample?"

"I'm sorry, Blake," she told him, meaning she was sorry for him and for Hank's wife Ida. "He's really done it this time."

"I'm sorry, too," he said, looking at her patient. "Are you going to be okay?"

Huerra nodded, then winced. "It could have been worse. It could have been a car full of kids he ran into."

Anne cringed at still another unwanted reminder of something she had managed to put out of her mind for almost half a day.

Blake sighed. "I know. He promised he was dry. I told him I'd lock him up if I caught him driving drunk. I guess he didn't believe me. Detective?" he asked. "What jurisdiction?" And Anne knew she heard in his voice his almost futile hope that Sam had been wrong.

"Dallas P.D."

"Great. Just great," Blake muttered. "Thank God I just got reelected. The county paper's going to have a field day with this. Are you sure you're okay?"

"No, he isn't sure, Blake," Anne said, needing this diversion from the ugly track her thoughts had taken. Once again, she put her hand on his shoulder to push Huerra back down into a semblance of sitting. "And neither am I. A log came within less than an inch of taking his head off." She saw Huerra wince when she said that, and once again he stopped struggling to rise. "He's got a whale of a headache, assorted cuts and bruises, maybe a cracked rib or two, and possibly a concussion, not to mention a wiped-out car and a ruined fishing trip."

"Oh, hell," Blake said still again, dragging the word hell into more syllables than she had ever thought possible.

She softened toward him. Blake was a good man. And it was only moderately his fault that Hank was still driving around the country. "Get the consent form," she said gently. "Shake Hank awake enough to sign it, and I'll draw the blood sample for the blood-alcohol analysis."

"Right," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. He looked toward the road, where a deputy was taking pictures and measurements of the accident. "I'll need a statement from you, Huerra."

David Huerra managed a wry grin of his own. "I don't think I'm going very far in the near future, and it looks like you've got plenty on your plate right now. Why don't I come by your office in the next day or so?"

Blake nodded. "Yeah. Sam? It looks like you can move that log truck now." He looked toward her. "Do you need an ambulance?"

Anne glanced at Huerra and shook her head. "No. But I'm going to take him into the clinic for a checkup. Would you ask someone to unload his luggage from the car and put it in the back of my truck?"

"That isn't necessary," Huerra said.

She shook her head. "It's either that or a thirty-mile code-three ride to the county hospital in Fairview with an ambulance driver who thinks he's training for the Indy 500."

He raised an eyebrow as though questioning her truthfulness.

"Trust me," she said, then smiled at him. "Do you have reservations for someplace around here?"

"Yeah. The Tompkins fish camp."

Anne nodded. She knew where the Tompkins place was. "That's not too far from town," she told him. "I'll take you there after I get a good look at your skull and ribs."

She took hold of his arm to help him rise, but he glared at her as though she had just insulted his manhood instead of merely offering the help she would have given anyone.

"I'm all right," he said. "My head's hard."

Somehow that didn't surprise her. But she didn't say anything. She just gestured toward her truck and forced herself not to offend his pride by insisting on helping him as he struggled to his feet.

The last of the crowd remained until after the wreckers carried off the car and the pickup truck, the sheriff's car left with Hank once again snoring, and David Huerra reluctantly allowed Sam Wilson to help him into Agnes's cab after he discovered he wasn't quite as steady on his feet as he'd thought he would be.

A couple of the hardier gawkers began following Anne's truck toward town, but she knew how to handle that. She slowed Agnes down to about three miles an hour and after less than a mile the two voyeurs pulled out and passed them.

"You handled that well," Huerra said in the tight voice that told more about his pain than he would want her to know.

She grinned at him, using that excuse to take a quick look at his face. He was pale, but not more so than he had been.

"I meant it," he said, apparently recognizing her surreptitious examination for what it was. "My head is hard. I've had worse bumps in the past. I'm fine. All I need is a shower and a change of clothes to get rid of all of this glass grit, a meal, and a bed. I don't want, I don't need, and I won't sit still for any X-rays."

While she pondered her response to that, he used the closeness of the truck cab for an examination of his own—a long, detailed examination of her face, her hands, and the rest of her five feet four inches visible in jeans, sneakers, and the heavy fisherman's knit sweater and knit cap she wore. Without speaking, he reached over and tugged the cap from her head. Most of the hairpins had either already slithered out of their moorings or were caught in the cap, and her hair tumbled in a willy-nilly disarray of unruly auburn curls over her shoulders.

His lips quirked in a grin. "Doc?" he asked. "Do you have another name?"

She snatched the cap from him but realized there was no way she could stuff the mass of hair back into it without pulling off the road. She dropped the cap onto the seat. "Anne. Anne Locke."

His lips twitched again. "Annie?"

"Not if you want to live to catch another fish," she said tightly.

"Annie," he said, smirking only a little. "I bet you keep that hair of yours whipped into submission and pinned to within an inch of its life when there's any chance anyone's going to see it." Apparently he just couldn't let it rest. "Doesn't anybody call you Annie?"

She acknowledged defeat. She really didn't mind. Her need for maintaining a perfect image had been blasted out of her life along with her need for success at any cost. "Only one person," she said, "but he's only ten years old and lives half a world away."

He leaned back against the seat, mouth drawn tight against pain for a moment, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"I mean it," he said again. "All I need is a shower, a meal, and a bed."

"Yeah, right," she said. "But if you've had your hard head thumped before, you know there's no way I'm going to let you go to sleep until I'm sure you haven't cracked or scrambled something up there." However, his insistence that he needed food was a good sign. "Tell you what," she said, making a quick decision. "I'll feed you and lend you my shower. And if you're still doing okay after a couple of hours, I'll take you to Tompkins and let you out of the X-rays."

"Ah," he said. "A sensible woman."

And that was the last he said until they reached her house.

He opened his eyes as she pulled into the driveway and downshifted for the climb. She glanced at him for his reaction and wasn't disappointed. Few could fail to react to the Victorian monstrosity perched near the top of the hill overlooking the town of Allegro.

He swallowed once and then looked at her as if to see if she had grown some additional appendage or sprouted some outward sign of instability. "Did I say sensible?" he asked. "My God woman, that house is purple."

She fought to keep from laughing. Purple was too kind a word for the colors her aunt had painted the house after Uncle Ralph's death. All shades of purple. As many shades of purple as there were in the hedge of crape myrtle, rose of Sharon, and weigela Great Aunt Ellie had planted along the back property line and which now tangled together in drooping, inseparable branches, effectively fencing her yard from the forest behind her.

"Yes," she said. "It is. At least in those places it still has paint.

"But it has running water," she reminded him. "And the kitchen is functional."

"Sorry," he muttered. "I have better manners than that. Maybe I did get thumped a little harder than I thought."

She let her laugh escape then.

"You're obviously working on it," he said. "That's why you've got a truck full of lumber, isn't it?"

She pulled to a stop in the back yard and turned to face him. "Your brain seems to be functioning again," she said. "We may not have to amputate after all. Sit still," she told him as he reached for the door handle. "I'll let you out."

"I can manage," he muttered.

"Right." She hopped out of the truck and walked around to the passenger side.

He hadn't managed—at least not to get the door open—as she had known he wouldn't.

"Agnes has character," she told him as she opened the door. "That means not all of her parts work, including the inside door handle on this side." She winked at him. "It comes in handy sometimes. Like today. Now, put your arm over my shoulder and lean on me until we get you into the house."

He hesitated, as she knew he would, and then leaned on her as he got out of the truck. She sensed his hesitation and looked up to see him studying the house.

She followed his glance, seeing it with the first shock as he must be—the turrets, the gingerbread, the outlandish clashing shades of purple in the walls, trim, and sash—and then with the familiarity she had grown into.

Her attention snagged then lingered at the second floor rear bedroom, at the solid wall of faded purple, a solid wall when all other walls were studded with windows—rectangular, square, round, arched, or diamond-shaped windows. This weekend, she had promised herself.

This weekend she was going to explore the reasons for that wall, the reasons why it, of all the walls, was not riddled with windows, when it was so perfectly positioned to overlook what must once have been a superb herb and perennial garden.

This weekend, she promised herself again, just as she felt David Huerra slump against her. "What's this," she asked. "Weakness, Detective? Do we need to go to the clinic after all?"

He grinned back. "Why, Annie, that was my best wounded warrior ploy. I'm disappointed in you for not succumbing."

"Fat chance," she told him, managing a lightness at odds with the dark emotions his innocent words triggered. "Warriors . . . Warriors aren't my style at all. Now come on." At last she felt herself back on steady ground and able to maintain an—almost—easy banter. "Let's get you into the house. I swear I've just about worn myself out lugging you all over the country."

He stiffened and started to withdraw his arm.

"I'm teasing," she said hurriedly. "My goodness, you are touchy, aren't you?"

"Not . . . usually," he answered tightly, and she didn't believe him for a minute. But after a quick, almost panicked look at the house, he relaxed his arm over her shoulder, and she took the first step up to the porch. A chill, as unexpected as it was unexplainable, shuddered through her, and she stopped there on the first step, for the moment unable to go any farther. He glanced at her with a wary question in his eyes.

"Uh—" she cleared her throat. What on earth was happening?

This was her house, for goodness sake. True, she'd heard the rumors that it was haunted, but only after she'd found herself committed to purchase it, and she suspected those rumors had been started by Joe to keep the place vacant, and to keep anyone other than him from even thinking about bidding on it. Hadn't she walked into it in the dark on countless occasions and not bothered to turn on a light? Hadn't she'd slept in it every night for almost six months and never even heard a board squeak after she got to sleep?

"You too, huh?" David asked.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she told him. Admittedly her words lacked conviction, but she tried.

"Sure," he said. "But if you don't know what I'm talking about, then why do you look as if someone just walked over your grave?"

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