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  Elijah was a beautiful child, curious, affable, even-tempered, and, it seemed to Lucy, better coordinated than most of the children his age. He loved being read to, which Lucy did when she felt up to it. He watched more TV than he should—something Lucy had always sworn that her children would never do. But it was just easier to let the TV babysit. Some days, after Walter died, even little Elijah seemed too heavy a weight for her to lift.

  Lucy rubbed her eyes and considered watching a late-night talk show.

  Night, after Eli was asleep, was when she missed Walter the most. Sleeping alone was a problem because she had grown accustomed to having his warm, familiar body beside her. She missed having him to hold on to as the darkness closed in—to press her back against, or to spoon with, or to nudge when his snoring awakened her. She missed playing with him before they went to sleep and waking up to his fingertips tracing the line of her leg, stomach, and her breasts. Familiar lips nibbling on her shoulder, kissing her neck, her nose . . .

  Lucy wasn’t suicidal, but she fantasized often about waking up in paradise wrapped in Walter’s embrace. Together for eternity . . . But that would mean that Elijah would be an orphan, a young man raised by his grandfather. Sometimes Lucy thought that might be best for him.

  If a sitter was spending the night, Lucy could take a tablet to put her to sleep. Otherwise she lay in bed all night thinking, berating herself, longing for something she’d never have again. What if she took a pill to sleep and Elijah woke up and she didn’t hear him cry out for her?

  Life was fragile.

  People could die.

  It happened all the time.

  Throwing back the covers, Lucy left her bed to look in on her son, to reassure herself that he was breathing. Since Walter’s passing, she’d had a terror that she might go into the boy’s room to find his little body wrapped in cold blue death.

  The carpeting silenced Lucy’s approach as she opened his door wider and slipped inside. At the side of the crib she reached down and rested the backs of her fingers on his forehead. The night-light allowed her to study his chubby pink cheeks, his perfect lips, and the chin with the beginnings of Walter’s cleft. His little fingers were curled tightly into his palms. His chest rose and sank slowly with the precision of a Swiss watch. Eli’s fat little feet would grow narrower as they lengthened. His squat frame would stretch to six feet or better. His curly locks would straighten. Imagining him as an adult was easy since she was familiar with the genetic models he was constructed from.

  She leaned over and kissed him gently, whereupon he shifted his legs and opened and closed his hands. She was tempted to pick him up and carry him to her bed, but she resisted, remembering Walter’s admonition that such an action was to be avoided for the child’s sake. It had something to do with building a healthy self-image, a solid foundation for later independence. Walter had been raised in a large family of fierce competitors. Her husband had been the youngest of seven overachievers. Walter was the best of the brood, and he’d achieved without seeming to try very hard, or allowing a drive to succeed to consume him in the way it had his siblings and parents.

  Lucy went to her bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. When she turned off the water, she heard the sound of a floorboard or a ceiling beam creaking. The house, built in 1880, made plenty of odd noises as it settled, or from changes in the weather. She heard Elijah fussing, and wondered if she had wakened him after all. She would have to stand beside the crib and rub his back to get him back to sleep.

  She left the bathroom and went through her bedroom into the hallway. The night-light seemed to have burned out again. She walked into Elijah’s bedroom and looked down into the crib. To her shock, his crumpled blanket was there, but he wasn’t. She heard him say “Momou” behind her and was wondering how he had climbed out of his bed, when she turned to see that her son was in the arms of a giant of a man who stood there in the doorway.

  Lucy cried out in horror.

  The huge man rushed from the room and Lucy raced after him.

  “No!” she yelled out. “Stop! Give him back!”

  She ran through the doorway. The man carrying her son was thundering down the stairs.

  As Lucy passed the guest room there was a bang of the door hitting the wall as it was flung open, and a powerful arm grabbed her around the chest and constricted her lungs. She was aware of Elijah screaming downstairs and the fetid breath of her captor on her neck. She screamed, clawed, and writhed until a powerful hand holding a cold cloth covered her mouth and nose.

  Chloroform!

  Within seconds, Lucy Dockery fell into a silent darkness.

  3

  Across the expanse of bright green meadow, two men in a Ford 250 pickup watched three riders on horseback. The passenger, Hank Trammel, took off his Lyndon Johnson–style Stetson, set it on his lap, and ran his hand over the stubble that covered his head like the bristles of a hog’s-hair brush. Taking a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, he removed his wire-rimmed glasses and, after fogging the round lenses with his breath, cleaned them. Once he put the glasses back on, he twisted the ends of his gray handlebar mustache.

  The Rhodesian Ridgeback in the center of the rear bench stared out through the windshield, intently watching the riders. Seated beside the dog, an infant dressed in a one-piece pajama suit waved her chubby little arms in the air.

  “Red Man’s a nice piece of horseflesh,” Hank Trammel observed. “Faith Ann’s done a hell of a job with him. She’s a Porter all right.”

  Winter Massey, the driver, lifted a pair of Steiner field glasses and focused them to better see the horse and rider in the trio’s center, noting the smile on the blond boy’s face. His son, Rush, had never looked happier. Shifting the glasses slightly, Winter watched his wife, Sean, who rode alongside her fourteen-year-old stepson. The rider on Rush Massey’s left side was Hank’s fourteen-year-old niece, Faith Ann Porter. All three were smiling. Faith Ann’s red-blond hair was growing back from the trim she had given herself a year earlier to make herself look like a boy—an intelligent, lifesaving measure.

  “Now that’s a sight I’d never get tired of,” Hank said.

  “Agreed. Getting hungry yet?” Winter asked.

  “Anytime you see me, I’m ready to eat,” Hank replied.

  “Well, let’s get this party started.” Winter flipped the truck’s headlights on and off several times and stuck his arm out of the window to signal.

  Sean waved to acknowledge that she saw him, pointing at the grove of twelve pecan trees growing on a gentle rise ahead.

  Winter slipped the truck into gear and aimed it toward the grove, leaving parallel depressions in the pasture grass.

  Sean had purchased the three-hundred-acre parcel as a long-term investment, but one that she knew they would all enjoy. There was no question that the land would increase in value, because the area, just twenty miles from Charlotte, had been growing for years, and large tracts of land like this one were increasingly rare and expensive.

  The farmland was surrounded by a whitewashed rail fence on the front and an electric fence on the other three sides. The one-hundred-year-old main house, where Winter, Sean, Rush, and their new daughter spent weekends, contained two thousand square feet of hardwood floors, tall ceilings, and pine board paneling. They could have lived there full-time, but Winter couldn’t bring himself to vacate the house he and his first wife had lovingly renovated before she was killed in the flying accident that had blinded their son. Eleanor had crashed in the craft she had learned in as a child, on a clear day when she was giving her son Rush lessons in touch-and-goes. A descending Beechcraft Baron had swatted her Cessna from the sky.

  Rush didn’t remember the accident, but there wasn’t a day that passed, no matter how wonderful and full it was, that Winter didn’t see Eleanor still and motionless in a hospital bed in the hours before they pulled the plug on the battered and broken shell of his perfect wife. He mourned her daily.

  For the past six months, Hank
Trammel and his niece Faith Ann had lived in the farm manager’s house on the property. Hank, newly widowed, had sold his home outside Charlotte and, with his newly orphaned niece and his horses, moved to the Massey farm. Hank had been Winter’s superior officer when they had been U.S. marshals, but the two men were as close as a father and son, and Faith Ann Porter had quickly become family to Winter and Sean. So far, the livestock included six horses, an unknown number of feral cats, and one Seeing-Eye dog, the Rhodesian Ridgeback that Rush had named Nemo.

  After the truck came to a stop, Winter turned and looked back at the infant seat. Olivia Moment, Sean’s and his three-month-old daughter, was sound asleep.

  Winter let the dog out, unclipped the baby seat, and set it on the warm hood. That done, he grabbed Hank’s crutches from the truck’s bed and handed them to him. When the three riders entered the grove, Nemo barked ecstatically.

  “Sit and stay, Nemo,” Winter commanded.

  Nemo whined impatiently, eager to join his young master, but because he was trained to obey, he remained seated on the ground beside Winter.

  Charger was Rush’s eight-year-old mare. They had bought the animal after looking at a dozen horses in three states. A blind child who is going to ride a horse needs a special one. Ideally, they had wanted an animal that would sense it was serving as his rider’s eyes and at least be intelligent about its own safety. They had to find a horse that had a gentle disposition and that responded to its rider’s commands, as well as having a noncompetitive nature that would allow it to ride alongside or behind other horses without feeling insulted. Charger met their criteria and now, although Rush never rode without companions, he was always in the saddle alone.

  Winter’s instincts were to be overprotective, to build a wall around his impaired son to keep him safe. Sean and Faith Ann refused to allow that, and as a result his son was doing things—like riding a horse and climbing trees with Faith Ann—that Winter would otherwise never have permitted.

  Faith Ann reached over and took hold of Charger’s bridle, while Sean slipped from her horse, a chestnut gelding named Rattler, tied his reins to a tree limb, secured Charger’s reins to a fallen limb, and helped her stepson down from the saddle. After Rush was aground, Faith Ann slipped off Red Man and hitched him to another branch.

  As the riders walked away from them, the horses lowered their heads to the lush grass.

  “Where’s my little angel?” Sean demanded as she came over to the truck. “Hello, Miss Olivia,” she crooned, as her daughter opened her eyes and smiled up from the infant seat. “I hope these rough old men didn’t teach my sweet-cheeks any naughty words.”

  “You know better than that,” Winter said.

  “Won’t require lessons,” Hank added. “If she never hears a single one uttered, Olivia will still be able to cuss a purple streak. That’s because Winter’s from Mississippi . . .” He winked. “So cussin’s in her DNA.”

  Sean laughed, unhooked the belts, and lifted the child into her arms.

  “Does Olivia need changing?” she asked. “Is that why you flagged me down?”

  “I smell fried chicken,” Rush said. He reached down and rubbed Nemo’s head, which was pressing against his leg.

  “Me too,” Faith Ann said.

  Winter said, “I thought we’d eat a picnic lunch under the trees.” He reached into the truck’s bed and lifted out a basket and a pair of blankets. “Time to eat.”

  “A picnic!” Faith Ann exclaimed. “I’m practically starving to death.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t outweigh your horse,” Hank teased the girl. “You eat twice as much as Red Man does. Maybe I better get you checked for tapeworms.”

  “She might have one,” Rush said, laughing.

  “I don’t think so,” Faith Ann said, frowning. “Tapeworms get transmitted by fleas who eat the eggs, and you have to ingest a flea to get them.”

  “You’d get them if cooties ate flea eggs,” Rush shot back, giggling.

  Faith Ann leaned over and mussed Rush’s blond hair, which erased the smile from his face. He used his fingers as a comb to repair the damage.

  Winter and Faith Ann unfolded two blankets on the grass so they overlapped and formed a large rectangle. He opened the basket and took out a bucket of chicken.

  “Winter, you went to so much trouble,” Sean joked. “Hours in the kitchen slaving over a stove.”

  “If you’re pleased, the intense manual labor was worth it.” He dropped ice from a small cooler into two plastic cups, opened a large cola, and poured them full. “For Faith Ann and Rush—the brown stuff.” Using the corkscrew on his Swiss Army knife, he uncorked a bottle of chardonnay and poured some in three plastic glasses.

  “And you even packed the good china.” Hank handed around paper plates from the basket. Winter saw his friend wince in pain from the movement, but said nothing.

  Sean lifted a shawl, placed it over both her shoulder and the baby, then opened her blouse and positioned the baby to suckle. Winter smiled when her eyes met his.

  “Girl’s gotta eat,” Sean said.

  “That poor child is going to be a teenager and every time she gets hungry she’ll start hunting for something to cover her head with and not have the slightest idea why,” Hank said.

  Sean laughed. “I seriously doubt that, Hank.”

  “That’s silly, Uncle Hank,” Faith Ann said.

  “They did a hundred-thousand-dollar study all over the world. Harvard sociologists found out that seventy-nine percent of women who were breast-fed as babies while under a blanket become nuns.”

  “What?” Faith Ann said.

  “It’s so they can wear those head rigs—veils.”

  Faith Ann laughed louder than anybody else at her uncle’s stupid jokes.

  “Winter, we could go to Charlotte tonight,” Sean suggested. “There’s a play you wanted to see.”

  “What play?” Winter said.

  “The one about the poets.”

  “Three acts of four actors playing e. e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost playing poker and discussing the modern world? Sean, I was being sarcastic when I said I wanted to see it,” Winter said, frowning.

  “I was pulling your chain,” she replied, mimicking his scowl. “You are far too young to be such a curmudgeon.”

  “Dad’s a cur-munchkin,” Rush crowed. “That’s like a small mongrel.”

  “A car monkey,” Faith Ann added. “A vehicular simian.”

  “There’s still a lot of work for Winter to do on the barn before cold weather sets in,” Hank said. “This warm spell won’t hold long.”

  “Work for Winter to do? You can help me, Hank,” Winter told him.

  “I reckon if sitting in a rocker, sipping liquor, and pointing out the shortcomings in your carpentry work product is any help, I’ll be a world-class assistant.”

  “Well, I can help. I know how to use a saw and a hammer,” Faith Ann told Winter. Winter and Faith Ann Porter shared a special bond. Winter had saved her life, had been there when it counted, and she would never forget it.

  “I’ll hammer,” Rush volunteered. “You can hold the nails for me.”

  “I got a big picture of that!” Laughing, Faith Ann reached over to muss Rush’s hair again, but he caught her wrist before she had done any real harm.

  The sight of a silver sedan barreling up the driveway ended their banter. The vehicle continued to the farmhouse, parked, and a woman wearing a business suit stepped out and strode rapidly to the porch. She carried a leather shoulder bag.

  “Salesman?” Hank wondered out loud.

  “Salesperson,” Faith Ann corrected.

  “Sign at the front gate says No Soliciting,” Hank said.

  “Maybe she’s selling eyeglasses,” Faith Ann said.

  Winter rose and got his field glasses from the truck. “It’s Alexa.”

  “Who is Alexa?” Faith Ann asked.

  “She’s an old friend of Winter’s,” Sean told her
.

  “Alexa’s cool. She always sends me a check for twenty bucks on my birthday and something neat for Christmas. Not just some dumb sweater either. She and my daddy have been friends forever, since they were in high school,” Rush said.

  “Did you know she was in town?” Sean asked Winter.

  “No,” he said.

  “Go down and get her,” Sean told him.

  “Whistle at her, Daddy,” Rush said.

  “Everybody cover your ears,” Faith Ann said.

  Winter put his fingers to the corners of his mouth and emitted an ear-piercing whistle. All three horses stopped eating and, ears erect, looked over at Winter.

  The woman in the business suit turned at the sound and waved.

  “So, I’m finally going to meet Special Agent Alexa Keen,” Sean said. “And here I sit dressed like a man who smells like a horse.”

  Alexa started toward them. Winter didn’t get in the truck to go get her; he just stood with his hands on his hips with a look of worry on his face, watching his dear friend stride purposefully up the long green slope.

  4

  “Hello, Massey!” Alexa Keen called as she approached him.

  He opened his arms to her and they hugged warmly. The crown of her head came to Winter’s chin.

  Sean was surprised. Based on Winter’s stories about Alexa, Sean had imagined she would be a tall tomboy—not nearly as attractive as this woman was. Winter had told her that Alexa’s anonymous father was white, her mother black. He hadn’t mentioned that her honey-colored hair was soft and straight, her eyes as green as emeralds.

  Sean and Rush were standing, smiling. Faith Ann remained on one knee, unsure. Sean had stopped feeding Olivia and had buttoned her blouse.

  “Don’t I get a hug?” Rush said, opening his arms.

  “Who are you?” Alexa asked. “Who is this tall, handsome young man who sort of resembles a beautiful woman name of Eleanor Massey?”

  Sean swallowed and tried to hold her smile in place.