LITMIR.BIZ

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he’d marry her on the spot.

      Tom had laughed—that familiar too-many-cigarettes rasp—as he was supposed to. What the talk-show host had no way of knowing was that Gavin wasn’t joking.

      THE LETTER ARRIVED in the morning mail. Tara Delaney did not have to open the cream linen envelope to know what the letter inside would say. The return address—from an Arizona attorney—told her all she needed to know.

      Why wouldn’t they leave her alone?

      She tossed the letter unopened into the wastebasket beside her desk, went into her bedroom and tried to resume packing for her long overdue vacation. With her usual attention to detail, she’d planned the trip to Kauai months ago. A beachfront condo was booked for the next two weeks, her airline tickets had been purchased weeks ago and she’d even bought two new bikinis and a sheer white cover-up. Tomorrow she’d be lying on the beach, soaking up the tropical sun and beginning to make her way through the stack of novels she was always buying but never had time to read.

      “You deserve this vacation,” she reminded herself as she packed her toiletries. “You’ve earned it.” She tossed the sunblock into a plastic-lined zipper bag. “You can’t let anything—or anyone—stand in your way.”

      It was a dandy little pep talk, and it should have worked. Would have worked had it not been for the siren call of that discarded letter.

      “Oh, hell.” She stomped back into the living room, pulled the envelope out of the wastebasket and opened it with the sterling-silver opener fashioned in the shape of a Celtic cross she’d received as a Midsummer Day gift from her artist father. The paragraph of legalese repeated what the other letters had told her: that she was now the proud owner of a one-hundred-year-old Victorian house in Whiskey River, Arizona.

      Sighing, she put the letter down, picked up the phone and dialed a number she knew by heart.

      “Hello, Tara dear,” the smoothly modulated voice answered after the first ring. “I was just thinking of you.”

      Tara stifled a sigh. “It figures.”

      “A mother always knows when her child is upset,” Lina Delaney said. “As you’ll discover yourself someday.”

      Tara was suddenly reminded of all the times while she was growing up she’d tried to put something over on her mother. And failed.

      “It would be nice,” she said crankily, “if just once I could keep something to myself.”

      “Your thoughts are your own, Tara.” Her mother’s tone remained steadfastly calm, as always. “I would certainly never pry.”

      Tara decided this was not the time to mention that little episode during her seventeenth summer when she’d lied about a slumber party at Mary Bretton’s house in order to spend the night with Jeff Townsend, whose parents were out of town for the weekend. Her mother had phoned the Townsend house before Jeff had managed to get her blouse entirely unbuttoned. A pregnant little pause settled over the long-distance telephone lines.

      “Is this about your grandmother’s house?” Lina finally asked.

      “No.” Tara shook her head firmly. “Definitely not.”

      “Oh.” A disappointed tone crept into her mother’s voice. “I was hoping you’d changed your mind about keeping your inheritance.”

      Tara figured she’d already inherited enough problems from her grandmother, Brigid Delaney. “I told you, Mom, I don’t want the house.”

      “Then why don’t you sell it?”

      Good question. And one Tara had asked herself at least once a day during the six months since her grandmother’s sudden death.

      “Are you going to be home this afternoon?” she asked suddenly.

      “For my only daughter? Of course,” Lina said without hesitation. “I’ll make that marigold custard you like so well.”

      “That sounds wonderful.”

      Despite her uncharacteristic moodiness, Tara was smiling as she hung up the phone. Her mother might not resemble a typical American mom, and she definitely didn’t bear the faintest resemblance to those early television mothers that showed up on late-night cable television, but the one thing Lina Delaney and Mrs. Cleaver had in common was the notion that there was no problem a home-baked dessert couldn’t solve.

      Five minutes later, as she pulled out of her driveway, Tara found herself wondering how Wally and the Beav would have handled having a white witch for a mother.

      GAVIN CURSED as he passed Brigid Delaney’s house on the way to the post office and saw that another window had been broken. Although he told himself that he should be grateful that breaking the windows of what was known as “the witch’s haunted house” was as bad as juvenile crime got in Whiskey River, it still irritated him that the kids couldn’t just go out to the dump and shoot at tin cans with BB guns like kids in other rural towns.

      Over breakfast at the Branding Iron Café, Trace Callahan, Whiskey River’s sheriff, suggested the logical solution. “I’ll have J.D. board the windows up,” he said as he dug into his Rustler’s Special—steak, eggs and cottage fries.

      “It shouldn’t be the county’s responsibility,” Gavin said grumpily. “If Brigid’s damn granddaughter would just do something with the house—move into it, sell it, burn it down, even—we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

      “Are you sure she’s been notified?”

      “I know Brigid’s attorney sent official notification, then followed up with a bunch of letters. Hell, I wrote a couple myself. But there hasn’t been any response.”

      “Maybe she’s moved.”

      “Then the letters should come back.”

      “True.” Trace considered that for a moment. “Maybe the county will take the house over when she falls behind in her taxes. In the meantime, it’s becoming a public nuisance. The closer we get to Halloween, the more likely it is that one of those kids is going to burn the place down. Since I want to avoid that, it only makes sense to have J.D. board up the windows. And bolt the doors.”

      “Bolts and boards aren’t free. Last I heard the Mogollon County bookmobile was having to cut back on hours because of a lack of funds.” He didn’t mention sending in a sizable anonymous donation to keep that from happening.

      Trace shrugged. “We’ve got some spare pieces of plywood hanging around after replacing the damage last month’s storm did to the jail roof. No point in it going to waste. As for J.D., I don’t think he’d mind doing the job off the books.”

      This was another thing Gavin liked about small towns. In the city, such a suggestion would call for innumerable oversight committees, public hearings, newspaper editorials and Lord knows what else. Here in Whiskey River, things were definitely more laid-back. The live-and-let-live attitude was one of the reasons he’d chosen to settle here.

      “Thanks for the offer, but I don’t mind replacing the windows. Mostly I was just blowing off steam.”

      Trace eyed him over the rim of the coffee mug. “You know, Brigid Delaney’s windows aren’t your responsibility, either.”

      “That’s what I keep telling myself,” Gavin said.

      “And?”

      “And for some reason I can’t make myself believe it.”

      “Maybe she cast a spell on you,” Trace joked.

      “That’s one answer. Of course to believe it, I’d have to also believe that the old lady was a witch.”

      “So are you saying she was a fraud? Or a liar?”

      “Neither. Not exactly.” Gavin frowned into the thick black depths of his coffee as he framed his response. “I think she honestly believed

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