anyone here, not even the bank. How could you know?”
“Magic, then, I reckon,” he drawled, a flavor of grits and redeye gravy turning his smooth voice rough. Before she could stop him, he stuck one long arm in through the open window and turned the key.
The engine purred like a tiger under his touch.
“Magic, Mr. Hayes?” Josie said, not hiding her derision.
“Luck.” He shrugged. “Or skill. But everything has an explanation. If you look for it.” He ran his flat palm along the frame of the car window. “And that brings us full circle, Mrs. Conrad. When can we meet to talk?”
“I’m not going to meet you. Not here. Not anywhere,” she insisted.
“Yes, you will.” He bent his knees and his face came into view. There was absolute certainty in his eyes. “You’ll see me. And we’ll talk. Tonight, probably.” He shut her car door very gently and she barely glimpsed the rapid flick of his fingers through the window.
The rose and a handful of copper coins dropped into her lap, a waterfall of pink petals and golden red pennies, and that fast, he was inside his car, his sneaker lifting from the concrete, disappearing into the chilled interior as he pivoted and shut his door.
Josie turned to watch his car. Its silver vanished into the white dazzle of noon heat. She picked up one of the pennies and turned it over. Like the one lying on the parking lot and the one that had rolled under the car, this, too, shone as if newly minted. She examined a second, and a third. A fourth. Curious, she opened her door and peered underneath the car, retrieving the penny there and looking at its date. All were 1962 mints. The year of her birth.
As he’d said, everything had a gimmick.
Tucking the pennies into the space in the armrest, she lifted the rose. Merely touching it released its wild, sweet scent into the car. Its pink petals were warm and supple against her palm, like fingers brushing over her skin, growing warmer as she held them against her.
All the way home, Josie smelled the rose. With no air-conditioning in her car, the heat intensified the fragrance until she couldn’t smell anything else.
When she arrived, she took the rose and put it into a clear glass bottle and placed it in her bedroom. Instantly the room filled with its subtle sweetness and she changed her clothes with the scent filling her lungs. The copper coins glowed next to the bottle.
Josie had no intention of talking with Ryder Hayes about anything. She didn’t know anything about him. She didn’t want to know anything more about him than she already did. What she already knew was disturbing enough.
She touched the rose and one petal curled, drifted to the dresser top.
Could he be involved in the children’s murders?
He’d known her mother’s name. Somehow he knew about Josie’s Seminole background, that she was a remote descendant of Josie Billie, one of the old medicine men, a heritage so distant that Josie rarely thought of it herself. Didn’t want to, if she were honest with herself. But that door opening on the past was one of the reasons she’d been so startled when he’d used her maiden name.
“Magic,” Ryder Hayes had said.
“The wind,” her mother had said when Josie was little. “The wind whispers everything.”
Josie pulled on faded shorts and headed outdoors, away from the tender fragrance of Ryder’s magic rose.
It might be real, but its hope was an illusion.
Later in the afternoon, the phone rang.
Rushing in from the garden, her hands grimy with dirt, she picked up the phone in time to hear the soft click as someone hung up.
A nuisance, but she couldn’t change her number.
Not while there was a hope that Mellie would phone her. No real hope, an illusion she couldn’t shatter. Not yet. Sometimes hope was a necessary illusion that kept the heart beating.
In a lingering flare of orange and neon pink, the sun paused at dusk before finally surrendering to a velvet black night.
Ryder had said he would see her at night.
He was wrong. She had no intention of wending her way to his decaying house. Not in the daylight. Certainly not at nighttime.
By candlelight Josie sat at her kitchen table and lifted a spoonful of mango and yogurt, put it down. The yogurt gleamed faintly in the candle glow.
She wasn’t hungry. She didn’t want to turn on the television. Didn’t want to hear about the missing boy. Eric. “Eric Ames,” she whispered fiercely. The child had a name. Eric. She didn’t want to sit on her porch.
She wanted—
Something.
Restless, the weight of her loneliness and grief pushing her into aimless motion, Josie prowled like a jungle cat through the four rooms of her house, from rose-scented bedroom to the living room where the lock she’d snapped in the morning was still in its slot. She took a quick shower and turned on a fan to circulate the muggy air as she pulled on thin cotton underpants and a loose cotton blouse over her damp skin, skin that hummed with electricity, as if there were a storm on the horizon. She peered out her window, hoping for a storm. For rain. For an end to her waiting.
The trees in the woods were motionless.
There were no yellow-eyed dogs hiding in the darkness watching her.
No storm in that clear, dark sky.
Only the occasional warble of a mockingbird, the dry croak of a frog carrying from the edge of the river where it curved away from her house.
She found herself in her bedroom, lifting the flower, stroking it across her neck, down to her breasts, over the skin of her wrists.
He’d said he would see her tonight.
Finally, sighing, she went to her porch. As she lit the candles there, she wondered if Ryder had planted a suggestion in her brain that was making her so fidgety.
Maybe he had.
She swept her hair off her face, the heavy weight too much in the heat.
And still her skin hummed, as if answering something that whispered to her on a windless night.
When she unlatched the screen door of the porch so that she could take the evening garbage out, she turned on the floodlights all around the house. She went outside toward the garage. She wanted to put the bucket with the snake in the metal garbage can that clamped shut, safe from marauding dogs and raccoons. All day she’d avoided that final cleanup, but she didn’t want to wake up in the morning and find pieces of the reptile scattered about her yard.
As she approached the garage, she saw the empty, overturned bucket.
There was no trace of the snake she’d killed, no bits of paper, no trampled bits of earth where a ransacking animal had feasted. Alarmed, Josie paused and looked around, the light hairs on her arm rising with her uneasiness. Nothing. It was as if the snake had ever
