the housekeeper, Luke had arrived at his father’s house to find Shelly lying on the polished marble floor, her face bruised and the smell of fear in the air. His stepmother had merely watched the distasteful scene play out with cool detachment. But then, Miss Camille, as she liked to be called despite her age and marital status, had never made any secret of his father’s affairs. On the contrary, she wore them like a badge of honor. Proof of what she was forced to endure.
His father had made himself conveniently absent by then, leaving Luke to see to the nasty details.
Luke had brought Shelly back to his place, then valiantly tried to wipe the scene out of his head with a bottle of booze. It hadn’t worked. Not that night or any night since.
Why Shelly Henson would feel the need to make amends at all was beyond him. The theft was nothing compared to his own behavior that night. He rotated his stiff right shoulder. His shoulder had never failed to predict a storm, not in twenty-two years. Not since his sixteenth birthday, when his father had broken it.
Luke wadded up the note and threw it into the trash can.
Lucas Daniel Sutherlin, Sr., was the financial nucleus of Sweetwater and, therefore, a necessary evil. Sutherlin factories still employed most of the townspeople despite their tragic past. Too bad his father’s character hadn’t grown along with his stock holdings.
Why was it some men seemed born with absolution while others couldn’t be forgiven for simply having the wrong last name?
Luke walked across the station’s gritty tile floor and retrieved his coffee. He took a long sip, wishing for the comforting sting of Jack Daniels instead. He examined the faces of his men over the rim of the mug. Their condemnation wasn’t visible, but it was there. He was a Sutherlin. The badge he wore would never make amends for that fact. He glanced at the trashcan where the note lay crumpled. Shelly should keep the money.
It was the least the Sutherlin men could do.
“Chief!” someone called.
A few officers had gathered around a small television set, intermittently twisting its antennae to try and capture the reception that bounced elusively off the mountains. Luke joined them. Through the snowy picture, he could see the smiling face of the meteorologist as he pointed to the fickle storm front on the map.
The man looked immensely relieved. Too relieved, Luke thought.
“Looks like we’re out of danger.” Ben offered a grin along with the comment.
Luke rotated his shoulder again, and scowled at the television. He had a feeling otherwise.
Chapter 1
Snow was falling, covering the ground like a fuzzy white blanket. Wet, fat snowflakes covered the windshield as fast as the wipers slid them to one side. Dana Langston had never considered being a Southerner a liability, but it certainly felt that way now. Accustomed to Atlanta’s mild winters, she had no idea how to drive in snow, much less on a sheet of ice. She gripped the Acura’s steering wheel, too terrified to blink as the terrain of the North Georgia Mountains turned to rock-faced cliffs.
It was almost dark, the storm clouds stealing what was left of the twilight at an alarming rate. The temperature would drop even further soon, freezing the slush to solid ice. Clyde Jenkins, the news station’s midday producer and her boss, had given Dana the keys to his vacation cabin, along with a box of tissues, a fatherly lecture on professionalism and three weeks’ mandatory leave. Whether or not her job waited on her when she returned depended on how thoroughly she could get her personal life in order.
Your job as a midday news anchor is to inform our viewers without destroying the rest of their day. Let’s face it—your career simply won’t survive another on-air breakdown like you had today.
Dana bit her lip as her tires skidded against the shoulder of the lonely road, their traction lost in the gathering slush. The drive became more treacherous as the mountain’s incline grew steeper, but it was far too late to turn back. Clyde’s last instruction had been that, under no circumstances was she to leave for the mountains before she was certain the storm would miss Georgia entirely.
She’d tried. She honestly had. But the walls of her apartment had closed in on her as surely as the storm had closed in on the South. Dana knew that phone calls from sympathetic friends and family who’d seen her tearful on-air meltdown were inevitable.
But they were also avoidable.
Though the plan was looking seriously flawed, she’d left before she’d had to face the ringing phone. And, if she were honest with herself, she’d been genuinely frightened to spend another night alone in her apartment. The murder trial of Paul Gonzalez had been postponed. Again. She would testify against the monster if it was the last thing she did. But if the court system insisted on making her Gonzalez’s target for a little longer, she would at least become a moving target.
Dana concentrated on the twisting ribbon of road. If she’d thought for a minute that the storm could change course, she wouldn’t have been so rash. She’d heard a weather report about an hour outside of Atlanta, assuring listeners again that the storm would miss the state. Dana had popped a CD in the stereo right after that and hadn’t given it any more thought until the snow started to fall.
She stifled a hysterical laugh. Maybe she should have hung around her apartment a little longer, at least long enough to watch the weather on the evening news. She gripped the steering wheel tighter. That would have been a lot of fun. She could have sized up potential replacements for her job while she was at it.
Glancing in her rearview mirror, she looked for the lone set of headlights that had appeared and disappeared behind her during the past twenty minutes as her car had hugged the inside curve of the winding mountain road. Part of her welcomed the idea of another living soul on the road, but part of her wondered if the headlights could belong to Gonzalez.
Paranoid, she scolded herself. The whole day was making her crazy.
Dana switched on the dome light and pinpointed her progress on the map with quick glances. By her calculations she should be only ten minutes from the cabin.
Without warning her car lurched sideways. Dana threw the map aside and gripped the steering wheel with both hands, her worst nightmare realized. The barely passable road had become a solid sheet of black ice. Terror seized her. She hit the brakes but the action only caused her to slide. She was spinning, the interior of the car becoming a sickening blur of light, darkness and fear. Desperate, she turned the wheel in the opposite direction and her car straightened, eventually finding the shoulder of the road in a violent spray of ice and rock.
Then all was still.
For a full minute she just sat there, breathing in gulps of air and willing her fingers to loosen their death grip from the steering wheel. She blinked, her vision clearing as the panic subsided. Her car had gone off the shoulder of the road, coming to rest in an area of tangled underbrush mere feet from the mountain’s unguarded ledge.
Dana covered her face with her hands, stifling a sob. It had been foolish to take her eyes from the road. It had almost proved suicidal.
Ignoring the tangle of vines and scrub trees that curled over her windshield, she took a deep breath and pressed the gas. The car lurched forward once before its tires spun, digging ruts into the freezing slush.
No.
Panic
