LITMIR.BIZ

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he used to scare the hell out of us,” Meredith said after the waitress had returned to serve their orders. “He lived all alone out there in the middle of nowhere and looked like Grizzly Adams on a bad day. There was a rumor that his root cellar was filled with children who had disobeyed their parents.”

      Savannah laughed. “I wonder who started that particular rumor?”

      “Probably some parent with disobedient children.”

      Meredith paused to take a sip of her iced tea, then continued. “Actually, Joshua became good friends with him when Joshua was about fifteen years old. You know that weather vane that Charlie has stuck in the ground next to his house?”

      “You mean that copper monstrosity with the rooster?”

      Meredith nodded. “One night a bunch of Joshua’s friends dared him to steal it. Joshua sneaked up and Charlie was waiting for him with a shotgun in hand.”

      “So, what happened?”

      “Charlie made Joshua go inside the house and call my father. As punishment Joshua had to go over to Charlie’s twice a week after school and work. I think he’s kept in touch with Charlie even while he’s been in New York.”

      “If your brother is his friend, that makes two friends for Charlie. I’m hoping my article on him will humanize him and make people look beyond the scruffy beard and gruff exterior.”

      “Oh, I almost forgot.” Meredith opened her purse and pulled out a cream-colored envelope and handed it across the table to Savannah.

      “What’s this?”

      “A wedding invitation. Clay and Libby are getting married a week from next Saturday.”

      “Wow, that’s kind of fast, isn’t it?” Savannah knew a little about the romance between Meredith’s brother Clay and the beautiful blonde from Hollywood.

      Clay had been sent to Hollywood to play bodyguard to Libby’s daughter, Gracie, who was a little movie star and had been receiving threatening notes in the mail. Clay and Libby had fallen in love, and Libby and her daughter had moved to Cotter Creek a couple of weeks ago.

      Meredith smiled, a touch of wistfulness in her eyes. “Yes, it’s fast, but, according to Clay and Libby, when you know something is right you don’t waste any time.”

      The two women continued to visit as they ate their lunch, then all too quickly it was time for Savannah to head to her interview with Charlie.

      It was almost one o’clock as Savannah drove down Main Street, headed to the outskirts of town and the small ranch house where Charlie Summit lived.

      Every morning for the past three months she had awakened and been vaguely surprised to discover herself for the most part content with her new life. And content was something she couldn’t ever remember feeling in her twenty-four years of life.

      Savannah had awakened one morning in her beautiful bedroom in her parents’ beautiful house and had realized if she didn’t get away from the criticism and unrealistic expectations she’d never know who she was and what she was capable of being.

      And so she’d headed for the biggest adventure of her life…finding her life.

      It had been that faulty transmission that had brought her to Cotter Creek and a further stroke of luck that Raymond Buchannan, the owner of the local newspaper, was getting old and tired. When she’d approached him with her journalism degree in one hand and an idea for profiling the locals in a column each week in the other, he’d hired her.

      In the time she’d been here, she’d grown to love Cotter Creek, but she’d begun to think something bad was happening here. There had been too many accidental deaths of local ranchers lately. On a whim she’d done some research and the results were troubling, to say the least.

      She shoved away thoughts of those deaths and rolled down her window to allow in the crisp early-October air, so different from the desert heat in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she’d grown up.

      She was looking forward to the interview with Charlie. All her teachers in her journalism classes had told her that she was particularly good at the art of interviewing.

      She always managed to glean one little nugget of information that exposed the very center of a person. It was one of her strengths. Her mother had spent her lifetime cataloging Savannah’s weaknesses.

      Charlie Summit lived, as most of the ranchers in the area did, in the middle of nowhere. But, unlike most of the flat pastures of his neighbors, Charlie’s little two-bedroom ranch house was surrounded by woods and a yard that hadn’t seen the blade of a lawnmower in the past twenty years.

      A rusted-out pickup truck body sat on cinder blocks on the east side of the house, surrounded by old scraps of tin and the infamous, huge, elaborate copper weather vane.

      The junkyard collection, coupled with his hermitlike tendencies, certainly helped add to Charlie’s reputation as an odd duck.

      What was definitely odd was that, as Savannah pulled her car to a halt in front of the overgrown path that led to Charlie’s front door, his two dogs, Judd and Jessie, were pacing the porch, obviously agitated.

      Charlie never let the dogs stay out on their own. He’d always told her the two mutts were too dumb to know to scratch an itch unless he was sitting beside them telling them how to do it.

      As she got out of her car, the two came running to her. They raced around her feet, releasing sharp whines. “What’s the matter, boys?” she asked and knelt down to pet first the tall, mostly golden retriever then the smaller, mostly fox terrier. Savannah loved dogs, one of her many character flaws where her parents were concerned.

      She stood and looked toward the house, where the front door was open, but no sound drifted outward. Odd. Charlie never left his door open. He’d always told her that an open door invited in trouble.

      The curly red hairs on the nape of her neck sprang to attention as a sense of apprehension slithered through her,

      “Charlie?” she called as she stepped closer to the porch. Judd and Jessie whined at her feet. “Charlie, it’s me, Savannah.”

      She climbed the steps and paused at the front door as she caught a whiff of a scent that didn’t belong. It smelled like a firecracker seconds after explosion. She rapped her knuckles on the screen door, then stepped inside.

      “Charlie? Are you home?” She walked the short distance through the foyer, then took a single step into the living room.

      Charlie was home. He sat in his favorite recliner in the cluttered living room, a handgun on the floor beside him and the pieces of his head decorating the wall in bloody splatters behind him.

      Savannah froze, for a moment her mind refused to make sense of the scene before her. In that instant of immobility she was acutely conscious of the pitiful yowls of the dogs coming from the porch, the laughter of a live audience drifting from the television and a mewling noise that she suddenly realized was coming from her.

      That moment of blessed denial passed, and the horror struck her like a fist to the stomach. Charlie’s sightless blue eyes stared at her as she stumbled backward, fighting the need to be sick, swallowing against the scream that begged to be released.

      Tears blurred her vision as she backed out the screen door. She turned blindly, intent on getting to her car, where her cell phone was in her purse on the front seat.

      The scream that had been trapped in the back of her throat released itself as a pair of strong hands grabbed her shoulders.

      The red-haired, pink-clad woman nearly barreled over Joshua West as he stepped up on the porch of Charlie’s house. The shriek she emitted as he caught her by the shoulders nearly shattered his eardrums, but the kick she delivered to his shin sent him backward with a stream of cuss words that would have daunted the devil.

      “What in the hell is wrong with you, lady?” he exclaimed as he grabbed the porch rail to steady

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