all the painful memories of L.A. as she could get.
Becca leaned low over Jasper’s shoulders and eased him into a gallop. The scruffy dog, despite the injuries he’d sustained in a losing battle with a raccoon, loped easily behind as they approached the hills. Becca and Barkley. Both broken souls, Maggie thought anxiously as she ignored the first mournful cry of a coyote hidden somewhere in the distance.
The moon, a smiling crescent that shimmered in opalescent tones, had already risen, though the sun was still undecided about settling into the western horizon where a jet’s wake sliced across the sky before disappearing into a thin veil of slowly gathering clouds. In the fields, cattle stirred, chewing their cuds, switching their tails, lumbering without much grace near a stream that sliced sharply through the fields.
Yes, it was peaceful here, she thought. And safe. The nearest neighbor was half a mile down the road, the closest town not much more than a stoplight, grocery store, post office, and gas station. Maggie considered Settler’s Ridge, Idaho, to be as close to heaven-on-earth as a person could find. Becca was sure the tiny town was the embodiment of hell.
Once Becca had disappeared from sight, Maggie checked the water in the troughs, then walked to the back porch to yank sheets she’d been drying off the line. She’d collected two pins in her mouth and was gathering the yards of percale when the phone jangled. “Great,” she mumbled around the pins.
A second, demanding ring.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming…I’m coming,” she grumbled, spitting out the pins and tossing the bedding into a wicker basket.
Brring!
She hauled the load into the old cabin, dumped it on the table, snagged the receiver, and heard the flat sound of a dial tone in her ear.
“Hello?” she said automatically, then started to hang up only to stare down at the instrument as she shrugged out of her jacket. Who had called? If only she lived in the city as before so that she could check caller ID. Or you could buy a new battery for the answering machine and plug it in. You don’t have to be a hermit.
That much was true. She eyed the mouthpiece of the receiver, then placed the handset into its cradle. So someone had called. Big deal. It could have been one of Becca’s friends. Though they didn’t get many calls here, there were a few, and just because she’d thought she’d heard Mary Theresa’s mental voice a little while ago was no reason to panic. Just calm down.
The truth was that Maggie had been hiding for nine months, turning her back on a world that had hurt her and her daughter one too many times.
Coward. Other people cope. Why can’t you?
Drumming her fingers on the checkered cloth that covered the table, she frowned at the telephone. Could the caller have been Mary Theresa? It had been so long since they’d spoken, too long…
She picked up the receiver again and dialed rapidly before she let her pride get the better of her. The long-distance connection was made and she waited. One ring. Two. Three. Click.
“Hi.” Mary Theresa’s breathy, upbeat voice brought a smile to Maggie’s lips as she nervously twisted the ring on her right hand. “This is Marquise. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. I promise.”
The recorder beeped and Maggie steeled herself. “Mary Theresa, this is Maggie. If you’re there please pick up…Mary Theresa?…Oh, okay, Marquise, are you there?” she asked impatiently, using her sister’s stage name, hoping that if Mary Theresa was within earshot she’d put aside her petulance and answer. A heartbeat. Two. Nothing. “Look, I, um, I got a message from you—you know the kind you used to send.” She glanced around the room and felt foolish. What if she’d dreamed up the whole thing? “Well, at least I think I did, and I need to talk to you, so please call me back. I’m still at the ranch in Idaho.” She rattled off the number, waited a second or two in the fleeting hope that her sister was listening, then, sighing, hung up. “Damn.”
The sun had finally set and the cabin felt cold and bereft, empty. Maggie checked the thermostat, then walked to a window and looked toward the mountains as if she could will her daughter’s image to appear from the shadows. All the while her sister’s cryptic message haunted her. What had Mary Theresa said? Only you can help me. It was Thane. He did this to me.
Did what?
Who knew? It was nothing. Had to be. She couldn’t let her wild imagination get the better of her. Just because Maggie wrote mysteries for a living and had delved into true-crime stories, didn’t mean she had to believe something horrible had happened to her sister.
With one eye on the clock, Maggie pulled out a serving bowl of stew she’d made earlier in the week, dumped the contents into a saucepan, and switched on the stove. She sliced bread, topped it with cheese, intending to broil the open-faced sandwiches as soon as Becca had put Jasper away for the night.
As the seconds ticked by, Maggie told herself not to worry, turned on a couple of lights, unloaded the dishwasher, and ignored her computer, which had been waiting for her all day, the monitor glowing with a screen saver of cartoon characters. The idea of working on any kind of story at the moment was about as appealing as day-old oatmeal.
She’d tackle chapter six after dinner.
No sign of Becca.
Don’t be a worrywart. She’ll be back. Sighing, she shut the door, snapped her hair into a ponytail and, as the cabin grew darker, flipped on a lamp near the front door.
Her thoughts crept down a forbidden path, a crooked trail that still led to Thane Walker. She hadn’t seen him in years but imagined he was just as sexy and irreverent as ever, a lone-cowboy type complete with a Wyoming swagger and enough lines in his face to add an edge of severity to already-harsh features. The kind of man to avoid. The kind of man who attracted trouble. The only man who had ever been able to make Maggie’s blood run hot with only one cynical glance.
“Forget it,” she told herself. She must’ve imagined the whole scene in the barn. She’d only thought she’d heard Mary Theresa’s “voice” because it had been so long, so many silent months without a word from her twin. She walked to the fireplace and plucked an old framed photo from the mantel. It had been taken nearly ten years earlier, when Mary Theresa, who had reinvented herself as simply Marquise, à la Cher or Madonna, was about to launch her own Denver-based talk show. The two sisters stood back to back, identical twins except that they were mirror images. Mary Theresa was left-handed, Maggie used her right; one side of Mary’s mouth lifted more than the other, the opposite was true of her sister. One of Mary Theresa’s pinkies turned inward—the right. On Maggie, it was the left.
Maggie felt a smile tease her lips as she ran a finger over the faded snapshot. She and Mary Theresa both had auburn hair that curled wildly, but Mary Theresa’s had been highlighted with gold and framed her face in soft layers while Maggie’s had been scraped back into her ever-functional ponytail. Mary Theresa had worn a short, shimmering black dress, a designer original, complemented with a strand of pearls, black hose and three-inch heels. She’d been on her way to a party with some once-upon-a-time celebrities.
At that same frozen moment in time Maggie had worn sneakers, jeans, and a flannel shirt with a tail that flapped in the wind and had balanced three-year-old Becca on one outthrust hip. With the snow-shrouded Rocky Mountains as a backdrop, the two sisters braced themselves on each other, then swiveled their heads to grin into the camera. Bright I-can-take-on-the-world smiles, rosy cheeks, a smattering
