desert.
With the car idling, Kim shifted in her seat and pulled her purse back onto the passenger seat. Her purse had lunged onto the floor when she’d pulled over a bit too suddenly, spilling, she now saw, its entire contents onto the floor of the car. Everything was in a jumbled heap.
Swallowing a curse, she pulled it all together and deposited it back into her purse—all except for her cell phone. That she took and opened. She swiped past a couple of screens until she found the GPS app that had come preinstalled on her phone.
Despite the fact that she’d lived her entire life in San Francisco, she still managed to get lost on a fairly regular basis and she had come to rely rather heavily on her phone’s GPS feature.
A feature which wasn’t pulling up, Kim noticed angrily as she stabbed over and over again at the small square image on her phone. When the image finally did enlarge, the words below it irritatingly informed her that it couldn’t find a data connection and thus, the very sophisticated feature on her phone containing all the latest bells and whistles wasn’t about to ring any of its bells or blow any of its whistles, at least not now. Not until its lost signal was suddenly restored.
“Damn it, I really am in hell,” Kim declared, looking around.
There were absolutely no signs posted anywhere to tell her if she was going in the right direction or even if she was going around in circles. For all she knew, she wasn’t even in Texas anymore.
The dirt road was too dry and hard to have registered her tire tracks, so she had no idea if she had traveled this way before.
“I could be going around in circles until I die from dehydration out here, and nobody’d know the difference—not even me,” she lamented.
Why had she ever said yes to this horrible assignment?
For two cents, she’d turn around and go back—except that she had no idea if turning around actually meant that she was going back. Maybe if she turned around, she would eventually wind up driving into this town she didn’t want to go to?
Damn it, she was confusing herself.
Feeling panicky, Kim looked around the interior of the pristine vehicle to see if there was anything packed in one of the side pockets that could help her.
After foraging around, she discovered an old folded map tucked into the side of the rear passenger door, but when she opened it, she found that the map did her no good. A product of the digital age, she had absolutely no idea how to actually read a map.
She was going to die out here, Kim thought, tossing the map aside. She was going to die out here and most likely, no one would ever even find her body.
She still stubbornly didn’t regret not going to her parents for money. If she had to die, she would die rebellious and proud.
What did it feel like, she wondered, baking to death inside a low-end economy car? Maybe she should have rented something more high-end, like a Mercedes or a Jaguar. If it was going to wind up being her casket, then maybe—
A flash of something on the hill in the distance caught her eye.
Kim sat up, trying to focus as a glimmer of hope surfaced.
Was that a hallucination, or—?
Damn but it was hot. This had to be the hottest December day to hit the area as far back as he could remember.
Taking off his tan Stetson, Garrett wiped his brow with the back of his hand, then put his hat back on. For what it was worth, the hat helped keep the sun out of his eyes.
He’d come up on this hill because it afforded him a better view of the surrounding terrain. The road below was flatter than his uncle’s voice had been when Sam had sung in the occasional choir, back in the day. To his and Jackson’s surprise, the man had been a big believer in going to church and he had made sure to usher the two of them in with him every Sunday.
Even now, he wasn’t sure if Sam had exactly been a man of faith, or just someone who believed in the healing power of having a place to go where you were forced to think outside of yourself. Church had perhaps been that place for Sam.
Maybe that wouldn’t have been good for some, but it certainly turned out to be good for Jackson and for him, Garrett thought now, still carefully scanning the road below. He would have hated to think where he and his brother would have wound up if it hadn’t been for Sam and his rather strict way of doing things.
One thing was for sure, if it hadn’t been for Sam, he wouldn’t be here right now, looking for a long-overdue magazine writer.
According to the phone call he’d taken from the main editor of the bimonthly magazine doing that story on the Healing Ranch, the writer he’d sent, a woman named Kimberly Lee, should have gotten to them by now. The man who’d called an hour ago said he’d tried to reach her cell phone and received the message that it was out of range—something that was all too familiar around here. The editor had decided to call the ranch.
“She might have gotten lost,” the man, a Stan Saunders, had told him. “I told her to get a car with a GPS, but even if she did, it’s still possible that she’s gotten lost. I called the airport rental agency and they said she rented a tan compact Toyota,” he’d added as an afterthought.
The editor had started to recite the license plate to him, but he’d stopped the man, saying it was enough that he had a description of the car. There weren’t exactly an abundance of compact Toyotas of any color in this part of Texas.
“People tend to drive Jeeps and trucks out here,” he’d told the man. “But to be on the safe side, maybe you could describe your writer to me.”
Saunders had immediately rattled off the pertinent details as if he was staring at a picture of the writer. “Kim’s five-two, twenty-eight years old, has really dark brown eyes, blue-black hair, straight, chin length, oh, and she’s Eurasian, if that helps any,” he said as if he’d just remembered the last detail.
“I’ll find her,” he’d promised the man, more than a little intrigued now by the mental picture he’d formed from Saunders’s description.
Before he left, he’d stopped to tell Jackson where he was going because this was the morning he was supposed to be overseeing some of the recent arrivals’ progress. Now, because of the missing writer, Jackson was going to have to double up and take his boys, as well as his own.
Not that his brother minded extra work when it came to the teens on the ranch. That was, after all, the entire point of the ranch’s existence. But he could see that Jackson minded the reason for his being unavailable for a while.
Ordinarily easygoing and unflappable, Jackson had frowned at the prospect of his going out to hunt for the supposedly missing writer.
“If you hadn’t said yes to the story in the first place,” Jackson had pointed out, “you wouldn’t have to go running around, trying to track down the whereabouts of some displaced big-city tenderfoot who could just have gotten herself really lost out there.”
“It’ll all
