LITMIR.BIZ

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Jeremiah’s voice trailed away as he sagged back into his pillows. “I thought that once I got you back here, you’d see it’s where you belong. Where all of you belong.”

      Pain rippled through Sam in tiny waves, one after the other. There was a time once, when he was a kid, that he would have done anything to live here forever. To be a part of the little town that had once seemed so perfect to him. To know that this house would always be his.

      But those dreams died one bright summer day fifteen years ago.

      Now he didn’t belong anywhere.

      “I’m sorry, Pop,” he said, knowing it wasn’t enough but that it was all he had to offer.

      The old man looked at him for a long time before finally closing his eyes on a tired sigh. “It’s a long summer, boy. Anything might happen.”

      “Don’t make plans for me, Jeremiah,” Sam warned, though it cost him to hurt the man again. “I won’t stay. I can’t. And you know why.”

      “I know why you think that,” he said, his voice a weary sigh. “And I know you’re wrong. All of you are. But a man’s got to find his own way.” He slipped down farther beneath the quilt. “I’m feeling tired now, so why don’t you come see me tomorrow and we’ll talk some more.”

      “Jeremiah…”

      “Go on now,” he whispered. “Go down and get yourself something to eat. I’ll still be here in the morning.”

      When his grandfather closed his eyes, effectively ending any more tries at talking, Sam had no choice. He turned and headed for the door, let himself out and quietly closed the door behind him. He’d been in the house less than fifteen minutes and already he’d upset an old man with a bad heart.

      Good job.

      But he couldn’t let his grandfather count on him staying. Couldn’t give Jeremiah the promise of a future when the past was so thick around Sam he could hardly see the present.

      He’d long since become accustomed to living with memories that haunted him. But he’d never be able to live here again—where he’d see a ghost around every corner.

      Three

      Maggie sat in her living room and stared across the yard at the main ranch house. No more than twenty feet of ground separated the two buildings, but at the moment it felt like twenty miles.

      In the two years she’d lived at the Lonergan ranch she’d never felt more of an outsider. Never felt as alone as she had that first day when her car had finally gasped its last and died right outside the main gate.

       Tears were close. Maggie was out of money and now out of transportation. Though she had nowhere in particular to go, up until five minutes ago she’d have been able to get there.

       Staring up and down the long, empty road, edged on both sides by open fields, she fought a rising tide of despair that threatened to choke her. The afternoon sun was hot and reflected back off the narrow highway until she felt as though she were standing in an oven. No trees shaded the road, and the last sign she’d passed had promised that the town of Coleville was still twenty-five miles away.

       Just thinking about the long walk ahead of her made her tired. But sitting down and having a good long cry wouldn’t get her any closer to town. And feeling sorry for herself would only get her a stuffed-up nose and red eyes. Nope. Maggie Collins didn’t waste time on self-pity. Instead she kept trying. Kept searching. Knowing that someday, somewhere, she’d find the place where she belonged. Where she could plant herself and grow some roots. The kind of roots she’d always wanted as a child.

       But to earn those roots she had to get off her duff. Resigned, she opened up the car door and grabbed her navy-blue backpack off the floor of the passenger seat.

       “Looks like that car’s about had it.”

       She hit her head on the roof of the old car as she backed out and straightened up all in one motion. The old man who’d spoken stood just a few feet from her, leaning against one of the whitewashed posts holding up a sign that proclaimed Lonergan. She hadn’t even heard him approach, which told her that either he was more spry than he looked or she was even more tired than she felt.

       Probably the latter.

       He wasn’t very tall. He wore a battered hat that shaded his lined, leathery face and his watchful dark eyes. His blue jeans were faded and worn, and his boots looked as if they were older than him.

       “It just die on you?” he asked with a wave of one tanned hand at the car.

       “Yeah,” she said after seeing the quiet glint of kindness in his dark brown eyes. “Not surprising, really. It’s been on borrowed time for the last few hundred miles.”

       He looked her up and down—not in a threatening way, she thought later, but as a man might look at a lost child while he thought about how to help her.

       Finally he said, “Can’t do anything about that car of yours, but if you’d care to come up to the house, maybe we can rustle up some lunch.”

       She glanced back down the road at the emptiness stretching out in either direction, then back at the man waiting quietly for her to make up her mind. Maggie’d learned at an early age to trust her instincts, and every one she had was telling her to take a chance. What did she have to lose? Besides, if he turned out to be a weirdo, she was pretty sure she could outrun him.

       “I can’t pay you for the food,” she said, lifting her chin and meeting his gaze with the only thing she had left—her pride. “But I’d be happy to do some chores for you in exchange.”

       One corner of his mouth lifted and his face fell into familiar laugh lines that crinkled at the edges of his eyes. “I think we can work something out.”

      Maggie sighed at the memory and leaned her head back against the overstuffed cushion of the big chair. Curling her legs up beneath her, she looked around the small cottage that had been her sanctuary for the last two years. A guesthouse, Jeremiah had offered it to her that first day. By the end of the lunch she’d prepared for them, he’d given her a job and this little house to call her own. And for two years they’d done well together.

      She turned her head and for the first time saw a light other than the one in Jeremiah’s bedroom burning in the darkness. And she wondered what Sam Lonergan’s arrival was going to do to her world.

      The scent of coffee woke him up.

      Sam rolled over in the big bed and stared blankly at the ceiling. For a minute or two he couldn’t place where he was. Nothing new for him, though. A man who traveled as much as he did got used to waking up in strange places.

      Then familiarity sneaked in and twisted at his heart, his guts. The room hadn’t changed much from when he was a kid. Whitewashed oak-plank walls, dotted with posters of sports heroes and one impossibly endowed swimsuit beauty, surrounded him. A desk on the far wall still held a plastic model of the inner workings of the human body, and the twin bookcases were stuffed with paperback mysteries and thrillers sharing space alongside medical dictionaries and old textbooks.

      He threw one arm across his eyes and winced at the sharp jab of pain as memories prodded and poked inside him. A part of him was listening, half expecting to hear long-silent voices. His cousins, shouting to him from their rooms along the hall. It had always been like that during the summers they spent together.

      The four Lonergan boys—as close as brothers. Born during a three-year clump, they’d grown up seeing each other every summer on the Lonergan ranch. Their fathers were brothers, and though none of them felt the pull for the ranch where they’d grown up, their sons had.

      This was a world apart from everyday

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