woman who’d abandoned her only child the way she had? “Just tell me why.”
She blew out a cloud of smoke. “Why? That’s it? That’s all you want to know?” She gave a drunken nod of her head. “Because I knew you were going to turn out just like your father. And—you know what?—I was right. I should have gotten rid of you like he wanted me to before you were even born.”
He’d wanted to make her suffer, but in the end it had all gone too quickly. Still, he’d thought that once she was dead he would feel some release, some measure of peace. Instead he felt empty and angry, just as he had for years.
He’d just finished her when he heard someone coming in the front door of the house. The husband coming home early.
It often amazed him the way things happened—as if they were meant to be. He waited until the husband came down the hall. Killing him was too easy.
Taking the credit cards and checkbooks, along with what cash he found in the house, proved a little more satisfying.
As he climbed out her bathroom window after smashing the shell-framed mirror to sand, he walked to his pickup parked down the block and told himself he wouldn’t find the peace he’d spent his life searching for until everyone who’d hurt him was dead.
He didn’t need to check the map. He knew the way to Whitehorse, Montana. Unlike his mother, he’d spent more time there than what it took to put five dollars worth of gas into the tank and drive away.
He’d spent the worst years of his life just outside of that town. And now he was going back for the first and last reunion of Harper House. It would end where it started.
But first there were a couple of stops he needed to make along the way. There couldn’t be any loose ends.
He checked to make sure he had the switchblade he’d cleaned on her tropical-print sheets and told himself it had been destined to end this way.
Still, as he drove away it nagged at him. What kind of mother just drove off and left her son beside the road? He eased his pain with the thought that the babies must have been switched at the hospital. His real mother was out there somewhere. She’d spent her life looking for him, feeling that something was missing.
He felt a little better as he drove west toward Montana. By the time he reached the border he’d convinced himself that he’d been stolen from his real parents—a mother who loved him and a father who would never have run out on him.
He had to believe that. He couldn’t accept that he’d killed his own mother. Otherwise, it might be true what she’d said about him being like his father.
Chapter Two
McKenna Bailey rode her horse out across the rolling prairie, leaving behind Old Town Whitehorse. The grass was tall and green, the sky a crystalline blue with small white clouds floating along on the afternoon breeze.
She breathed in the warm air, wondering how she could have stayed away from here as long as she had.
The ride south toward the Missouri Breaks was one she knew well. Even before she was able to sit alone in a saddle she’d ridden hugging the saddle horn, in front of her older sister Eve.
Lately she’d felt antsy and unsure about what she wanted to do with her life. So she’d come home to the one place that always filled her with a sense of peace. But since she’d been home she’d realized this was where she belonged—not opening her own veterinarian clinic as she’d planned since she was twelve because she loved animals. Especially horses.
On impulse, she angled her horse to the east and watched the structures rise up out of the horizon ahead, an idea taking shape.
The barn came into sight first, a large weathered building with a cupola on top and a rusted weather vane in the shape of a horse. As she drew closer she heard the eerie moaning sound of the weather vane as it rotated restlessly in the breeze. It was a sound she remembered from when she used to sneak over here as a young girl.
As she rode closer, the house came into view. The old Harper place. She felt a rush of adrenaline she’d never been able to explain. Something about the house had always drawn her—even against her father’s strict orders that she and her sisters stay far away from the place.
Chester Bailey had said the property was dangerous. Something about it being in disrepair, old septic tanks and uncovered abandoned wells. Things horses and kids could get hurt in.
McKenna had never gone too close, stopping at the weathered jack fence to look at the house. The structure was three stories, a large old ranch house with a dormer window at each end. An old wooden staircase angled down from the third floor at the back. A wide screened-in porch ran the width of the house in the front.
Her gaze just naturally went to the third-floor window where she’d seen the boy. She’d been six. He’d looked a couple years older. She had never forgotten him. He’d disappeared almost at once, and an old woman had come out and run her off.
As she stared up at the window now, sunlight glinting off the dirty glass, she wondered what had happened to that sad-looking boy.
Whoever had lived there moved shortly after that, and the house had been occupied by Ellis Harper, an ornery old man who threatened anyone who came near. He kept a shotgun loaded with buckshot by the backdoor.
McKenna had heard stories about the house. Some of the kids at the one-room school she’d attended in Old Town Whitehorse had whispered that Ellis Harper stole young children and kept them locked up in the house. Why else wouldn’t he let anyone come around? For years there’d been stories of ghosts and strange noises coming from the house.
McKenna didn’t believe in ghosts. Even if she had, she doubted it would have changed the way she felt about this place. She’d ridden over here even when Ellis Harper had been alive, but she’d never gone farther than the fence. Too many times she’d seen his dark silhouette through the screen door, the shotgun in his hands.
As she sat on her horse at the fence as she’d done as a child, she realized she’d always been so captivated by the house and its occupants that she’d never noticed the land around it.
The breeze rustled the new leaves on the copse of cottonwoods that snaked along the sides of the creek and through the rolling grasslands. Good pastureland and, unless she was mistaken, about forty acres worth. There were several old outbuildings a good ways from the house, and then the big old barn and a half dozen old pieces of farm machinery rusting in the tall weeds.
While the idea had come to her in a flash, she knew it had been in the back of her mind for years. She had always been meant to buy Harper House and the land around it.
She just hadn’t known until that moment what she planned to do with it.
NATE DEMPSEY SENSED someone watching the house and looked out in surprise to see a woman astride a paint horse just on the other side of the fence. He quickly stepped back from the filthy second-floor window, although he doubted she could have seen him. Only a little of the June sun pierced the dirty glass to glow on the dust-coated floor at his feet as he waited a few heartbeats before he looked out again.
The place was so isolated he hadn’t expected to see another soul. Like the front yard, the dirt road in was waist-high with weeds. When he’d broken the lock on the back
