might be something as insignificant as the unfamiliar silence. Even after two weeks she hadn’t yet adjusted to the move—or rather, the escape—from bustling Kansas City to her brother’s rural log cabin six miles south of Branson in the Missouri Ozarks. Major change.
She had never lived this far out in the country. Although the eight-unit apartment lodge her brother managed meant they weren’t exactly isolated from civilization, it was nothing like city life. Living in the cabin, situated on the shore of Table Rock Lake, was more like being on permanent vacation. Willow still struggled to come to grips with the comparative solitude.
As she stared into darkness, the square of sliding glass door at the far end of her room seemed to emit a pulsing glow. She blinked to clear her vision, but the glow increased. Headlights from a boat on the lake, perhaps? Except she heard no sound of a boat motor.
She turned her back to the light and plumped her pillow. “None of my business anyway,” she whispered into the darkness.
Her brother, Preston, certainly didn’t want her help keeping track of the renters. As he’d told her several times in the past two weeks, she needed to take a break and heal.
After a little more than twenty-three months, she’d almost given up hope of that. True, she no longer relived the night she’d received the visit from the police chief to tell her that her husband had been killed in the line of duty. At least, she didn’t relive it every single night. Maybe more like once a week now.
And she no longer had the nightly awakenings to cries of her forever unborn child. Only a couple of times a week did she cringe when someone invaded her personal space.
People did that all the time now, because her personal space had extended, in the past twenty-three months, to include whatever room she was in. She usually allowed people she knew into her personal space, but there were still those times when she could do nothing but withdraw from the world.
Since two attempts had been made on her own life after Travis was killed, she’d found herself suspecting practically everyone. She had known when she married Travis that he had one of the most dangerous jobs imaginable—not only was he a cop, but he was an undercover narcotics agent.
Here in Missouri, the Bible Belt, the heart of the nation, a war raged against illegal drugs, particularly methamphetamines. She had never dreamed the danger would extend to the cop’s family. But with Travis’s death, it most certainly had.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, exhaled, tempting sleep with as much entreaty as she could muster, willing her body to relax. The art of relaxing had become a lost skill for her.
Since arriving here in the middle of March, she’d assured herself daily that the only things she had to fear in this place were her memories. If she died, it would be a side effect of the grief that had imprisoned her since the day she lost Travis.
There’s nothing out there. It’s your imagination. Again.
Wasn’t that what everybody kept telling her? Even Preston. They hadn’t exactly told her they thought she was imagining the attempts on her life, but after the investigations turned up no evidence of foul play, she had felt her friends and her brother looking at her differently.
Try as she might, her eyes refused to remain closed. A faint flash of light greeted her again from the wall. She sighed and rolled from the bed, irritated by her exaggerated sense of responsibility. Maybe one of the renters was wandering around the yard with a flashlight, or maybe there was a party going on.
She slipped noiselessly to the glass door and unlatched it. All she needed was to prove to herself that no one hovered in the shadows watching her, waiting for her to go back to sleep so they could pounce.
And yet, what if someone was there this time?
She slid the door open and frowned. She caught a faint whiff of smoke, with an underlying scent of something else, pungent and strong.
What was it? Turpentine? Like the bottle of stuff Preston had been using in the shed a couple of days ago? No. Not turpentine…kerosene?
No.
Her frown deepened. Had Preston left the door open to the utility shed in the back? He’d spilled some gasoline on his clothes yesterday when he was working on the boat motor, preparing it for the coming warm days of spring.
She sniffed again. Smoke. Fuel.
She caught her breath. Smoke? “Preston!” she cried over her shoulder. “Fire!”
She shoved the door wide and dashed onto the cold deck. The wood chilled her bare feet. The odor of smoke blasted her. She scrambled down the steps and around the west side of the cabin, racing between it and the east wall of the apartment lodge.
Light flared as she reached the front corner of the cabin. To her horror, she saw several jagged lines of flame streaking across the yard—snakes of fire, winding through the darkness.
She blinked and stared, stumbling in the grass, fighting confusion. What was going on? The flames pitched in headlong flight directly toward the cabin.
“Preston!” she screamed. “Oh, Lord, help us!” Please, let this be another dream.
She raced toward the front door. She couldn’t shake the impression that she’d stepped into one of those B movies where a long, glowing fuse raced toward a bomb. Fuses. That was what those ribbons of flame looked like.
Before she reached the front steps, she saw her brother’s dark form stumbling out the door onto the porch.
“Get away!” he called. “Willow, get—”
A curtain of flames suddenly blasted across the wooden porch with all the force of an explosion. Preston leaped free of the fire and caught Willow in a tackle that rocked her backward. They crashed into the privacy hedge separating the cabin’s yard from the wider lawn encircling the entire complex.
He shoved her forward, through the hedge. She cried out as roots and stones bruised her bare feet. Preston kept pushing her farther from the danger.
They collapsed into the grass.
“Willow, you okay?” Preston asked, his deep voice harsh with alarm, breathing as if he’d run for miles.
“Yes. What’s happening?” She stumbled to her feet and drew back the hedge branches to stare at the fire, nearly deafened by the roar.
He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her around to face him. “Listen, Willow, help me get the others out. I’ll call 9-1-1 as soon as I get to a phone, so don’t worry about that, just get the people out of here! Take the top level, I’ll take the bottom, but keep a close watch on the fire.”
She swallowed hard, her attention returning to the holocaust as if she were a human moth.
He took her by the shoulders, his fingers digging into her flesh with urgency. “Willow, go now. Hurry!”
Slipping on the damp grass, she scrambled toward the first unit. The lodge was built into a hillside, so both floors were at ground level, and both had scenic views of the lake below.
She reached unit One A and pounded on the door as she rang the doorbell, remembering the two little girls
