LITMIR.BIZ

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replied with a sigh of contentment, feeling grateful that her new career fulfilled both her creative and her financial needs. She was making plans to buy additional tools and to hire someone with woodworking experience to cut the wooden pieces for her crafts so she could concentrate on the finishing and painting. Unfortunately the business loan she’d applied for at the bank to allow her to move her business out of the lakeside cottage she rented and into a larger place of her own had been denied, but Shannon was sure that had more to do with her short residency and lack of employment history. Her income was steadily improving. She just had to prove to the bank she was a good risk.

      Promising Glorie she’d be back in a few days with her order, Shannon pushed Samantha’s stroller out onto the sidewalk. July sunshine bathed her face and bare arms with ovenlike warmth. The newspaper office was two doors down. She entered and made arrangements for her Help Wanted ad for a woodworker to be inserted in the upcoming Weekly Gazette. Now all she had to do was make a quick trip to the lumberyard for supplies, then head home to put Samantha down for her afternoon nap. Shannon did all her cutting while her daughter napped, looked after business details and sketched designs during the mornings, then painted at night after Samantha was in bed.

      Her step quickened and she felt like singing with happiness as she pushed Samantha’s stroller toward the beat-up green pickup truck she’d embellished with decorative artwork advertising her Garden Patch collection. A billboard on wheels.

      She’d fastened Samantha into her car seat and was climbing behind the steering wheel when she noticed the toy rattle tucked beneath the windshield wiper. What on earth?

      Shannon climbed out of the truck and removed the pastel-pink bear-shaped rattle. She’d never seen it before in her life. It looked brand-new. Had someone found it on the sidewalk and assumed it belonged to her because they’d seen a car seat in the truck?

      Shannon glanced up and down the street. There wasn’t a person in sight. So why, then, did she feel vaguely uneasy as she climbed back into the truck?

      FROM A DISTANCE the woman leaving the newspaper office bore a striking resemblance to Mary—bare shoulders tanned a golden brown, the sun glinting off flaxen hair carelessly sweeping sculpted cheekbones. The exuberant bounce in her step as she pushed the stroller down the sidewalk seemed so bitingly familiar that Luke’s heart twisted with an impossible wish that the past sixteen months of his life had been some cruel hoax. But reason told him that Mary’s death was real. He’d identified her battered body.

      Still, from the moment he’d spotted her double leaving the cottage at nine-fifteen this morning, the back of her truck loaded with boxes, this woman with the baby—whoever she was—affected him like a channel surfer punching the remote control of his emotions. Luke experienced flashes of white-hot rage, stomach-knotting confusion and sharp pangs of unsettled longing as he tracked her movements to three different gift shops in the area. Was it mere coincidence that she shared his wife’s name and likeness? Had the credit bureau made a bureaucratic error? Or was something else going on? How many Mary Tatiana Calders with the same birth date could there be in one country?

      He was going to call Ottawa on his cell phone and have her license plate run when he got back to the motel. He dropped a tip on the coffee-shop table where he’d sat the past half hour conducting his surveillance and hustled outside to his rental car. The woman in faded jeans and a white sleeveless cotton blouse was just starting the engine of a brightly painted pickup that made following her child’s play.

      Before he’d been granted emergency leave and hopped the first flight he could to Penticton, the Okanagan city nearest Blossom Valley with an airport, Luke had called Detective Sergeant Zach Vaughn, the lead investigator in Mary’s murder, to inform him what was up. Vaughn had tried to dissuade him from checking out the lead. Department policy discouraged officers from investigating cases involving family members. But since they both knew Luke had a right as a citizen to investigate his own case, Vaughn had agreed, with certain conditions. Luke was an informant traveling on his own time, with his own funds—though he still had a badge that could grant him certain privileges with the local police. Luke was to keep in constant touch with Vaughn. The minute Luke found any evidence linking this woman to Mary Calder’s murder Vaughn would call in the local police to take over the investigation.

      After Luke had agreed to the conditions, Vaughn had checked the police computer and found out the woman had a British Columbia driver’s license, which gave Luke the street address the credit bureau hadn’t been able to provide.

      Luke eased into the traffic behind a dusty black coupe with a dented right fender. This Mary Tatiana Calder didn’t go far, just to the hardware store on the west end of town. Luke pulled into the parking lot a good two minutes behind her, then sauntered into the store while she was wrestling the stroller out of the bed of the truck.

      He planted himself near the book display just inside the entrance, fanned open the pages of a how-to book on wiring and waited. Suddenly the automatic doors swung inward and Luke heard the woman’s muted voice talking to the infant. But he lost track of the words as his gaze took in the baby girl propped up in the stroller and wearing a pink sundress that reminded Luke of cotton candy and all things feminine. Her full round cheeks, dark silken hair and wide gooey smile caught him like an arrow to the heart.

      Once upon a time he and Mary had dreamed about having children. Planned for it. They’d even had names picked out. Nothing too fanciful like Tatiana, which Mary had hated as a child. Simple solid names like Ryan and Laura.

      Pain Luke thought he’d banished clawed at his throat as his gaze trailed upward toward the baby’s mother. The shape of her oval face enhanced her startling resemblance to Mary, but only superficially. Even as his body registered the woman’s beauty, his brain logically picked out subtle differences—the nose that was longer and delicately pointed, the smattering of freckles across her cheeks, the smile that was wider. Eyes that were more hazel than blue. And from his vantage point he could see the telltale traces of natural-brown roots in her dyed blond hair.

      He ducked his head behind the pages of the wiring book as the woman’s gaze swiveled past him. Instead of moving directly into the maze of plumbing and electrical-parts aisles, she turned toward the customer-service desk. Luke watched as she stopped in front of a bulletin board mounted on the wall near the desk and removed from her denim purse a piece of paper, which she posted on the board.

      She seemed to be scanning the board with interest, then with a sigh, turned and headed right past him into the store, close enough for him to become acquainted with the exotic scent of her perfume, which made him think of hot summer nights and jasmine. Luke hid his face behind the book until he was certain she’d passed, then casually moved over to the bulletin board.

      The Help Wanted notice she’d posted gave him all the excuse he needed to make the woman’s acquaintance.

      AWARE OF THE TIME, Shannon hurriedly buckled her daughter into her car seat as the yard clerk loaded her lumber order into the back of her truck. It had taken longer than she’d anticipated to select and purchase the knot-free planks she needed; now she was worried Samantha might fall asleep before they got home. Taking a nap in the car, even a short nap, usually screwed up her daughter’s sleeping schedule, and Shannon needed to start cutting the pieces for the signs and the letter boxes today if she was going to fill Glorie’s order as promised.

      Shannon climbed into the cab, slamming the door behind her. The engine ground for a second, then sputtered into life. She breathed a sigh of relief and popped a children’s cassette into the tape player, hoping a sing-along would keep her daughter awake and entertained for the next twenty minutes.

      Cheerfully warbling a silly ditty about lost little ducks, Shannon turned onto the highway. Blossom Valley, located in close proximity to Canada’s arid desert region of Osoyoos, was framed by rugged hills covered with sagebrush and antelope-bush and the occasional stand of ponderosa pine and cottonwood. Orchards of ripening peach, apricot, apple and cherry trees lined the highway, and vineyards crept up the hills, irrigated by the many crystal-blue lakes that abounded in the Okanagan.

      Shannon had picked this area because her aunt Jayne, who lived in Halifax and knew the bleak cold rain of the Maritimes,

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