course, dear.” Her aunt breezed by without offering any comfort. “We’ll talk in a few days.” Angela noticed her parents’ cat rubbing against Crystal’s black pant leg.
Her aunt quickly stepped away and glared down at it. “Now that your parents are gone, you’ll be getting rid of that ugly cat, I assume. I told your father that the thing could damage the furniture, but he didn’t seem to care.”
“Of course,” Angela answered. “I’ll pack Doc Holliday off to the pound tomorrow.”
Her aunt nodded once as if having won the first of many arguments. “Dumb name for a cat, Angela, but then I’ve never understood your side of the Harold family. Your father and Anthony were ten years apart, but I swear it always seemed like the only thing they ever had in common was a last name.”
“It’s not a side of the family anymore. It’s me,” she said. “Just me.”
As soon as Crystal walked out, Angela closed the door on what had been her life.
It crossed her mind that Anthony and Crystal knew her father worked late at night. They’d known about his bad heart. They’d even known he never took his cell phone with him when he worked late after his wife died.
Angela shook her head. She was being ridiculous. Maybe her father had left the note simply to save her sanity, knowing Crystal and Anthony would drive her mad.
Only in hindsight, she knew she’d seen other signs of his preparing to leave. Empty boxes stacked in the pantry. A dozen hundred-dollar bills tucked in the bathroom cabinet behind her mother’s medicine bottles.
She began sorting through the mail scattered across the dining table when a map buried among the mess of papers caught her eye. A route heading west from Florida had been outlined with a red pen, and a town in West Texas circled. She understood then what her father had been planning. It was the same town that was looking to hire a curator for their local museum.
Closing her eyes, she could almost hear him talking to her. Might be just the place for you, Angie. You know how you’ve always loved Texas history. Looks like the perfect place to start over.
Clutching the map, she drove out to the cemetery. Her father’s grave still covered with flowers.
If she could talk to him one more time... If he would answer why to what he’d said and written on the note... If he’d just hold her once more so she could feel safe...
But the world was silent, making her feel more alone than she had been in her entire life. A shy girl, an only child, a solitary person who liked to work by herself. And now she was utterly and probably forever alone.
She looked down at her father’s grave. “Good night, dear one. May the angels watch over you. Goodbye, Dad.”
Walking away, she knew she’d never return to this garden of stone and dying flowers. Her father wasn’t here. He was with her mother now.
* * *
THE SUN WAS LOW when she finally drove back to her parents’ little house near the water. All the lights were on and for a second she thought her father was home.
Slowly, she walked to the front door. Maybe her aunt had come back?
Glass crunched beneath Angela’s shoes. The door’s small window had been shattered.
Her heart hammering in her chest, she pulled out her cell phone, dialed 911, then backed away to her car and locked the doors until the police arrived. Room by room they searched the small house. Drawers were open. Contents scattered on the floor. Cabinets were all swept clean, the floor a mess of broken dishes.
The search revealed nothing had been taken, not even the cash hidden in the bathroom cabinet or her laptop.
The police told her it was likely just kids, but Angela knew it was something more.
She locked the house up and tried to relax enough to sleep, but the words from the note and the events of recent days haunted her. Her father’s office vandalized...a break-in at her home, so soon after her father’s mugging...it couldn’t be a coincidence. Somehow, her father had been in danger. Angela knew then what she had to do. She had to run.
* * *
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, she made a trip to the bank and cashed out her account, bought cat food and plastic boxes. By midnight, she was packed. Her mother’s quilts, her father’s fishing equipment, her grandmother’s pots and one very ugly cat named Doc Holliday.
Run. Vanish. Disappear. The words kept beating through her brain in a steady rhythm.
She still had far more questions than answers, but the break-in had convinced her that her father was right. Something was wrong. Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her to think that her father’s death might not have been simply a heart attack brought on by a random mugging, but she believed in her core that she was in danger, and that she had to take action.
With a letter describing a job at a small museum in Texas tucked away in her black raincoat and fifty thousand dollars in cash, Angela Harold walked away from what she’d always thought of as her home.
It was time to take her father’s advice. She would disappear.
Crossroads, Texas
October
Angela
DRIED WEEDS SCRATCHED against Angela Harold’s bare legs as she walked the neglected grounds behind the Ransom Canyon Museum near Crossroads, Texas. Rumbling gray clouds spotted the sky above. Wind raged as though trying to push her back to the East Coast. She decided any rain might blow all the way to Oklahoma before it could land on Texas soil. But the weather didn’t matter. She had made it here. She’d done exactly what her father told her. She’d vanished.
Angela had meant to stop long enough to clean up before she took her first look at the museum, but she could not wait. So, in sandals, shorts and a tank top, she explored the land behind the boarded-up building on the edge of Ransom Canyon.
When she’d talked to the board president, Staten Kirkland, five days ago, he’d sounded excited. They’d had to close the museum when the last curator left and in six months she’d been the only one to call about the job opening. Before the phone call ended Kirkland offered her a three-month trial if she could answer one question.
Angela thought it would be about her experience or her education, but it was pure Texas folk history.
“What or who was the Yellow Rose of Texas?” the man on the phone asked in his pure Texas twang.
She laughed. “The woman who entertained Santa Anna before the Battle of San Jacinto. The battle that won Texas independence.” She’d always loved that story, which often got left out of history books.
“We’ll be waiting for you, Mrs. Jones.”
He hung up before she had time to tell him that her name wasn’t Jones. In a moment of paranoia, she’d used a false name when she’d bought a laptop and
