LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      LUCIA OSBORNE was the principal of the middle school in Crystal Creek, a small central Texas community where everybody knew everybody else’s business, and gossip whirled around with the destructive speed of a brushfire whipped by the wind.

      Lucia was divorced, thirty-seven years old, and had not had a man in her life during the seven years she’d lived and worked in Crystal Creek.

      So, early in October when she needed to buy a pregnancy test kit, Lucia could hardly walk down the street and make her purchase at Wall’s Drugstore, which had been serving the locals in the same capacity for more than sixty years. Ralph Wall, the pharmacist, was one of the most garrulous men in the county, and also happened to be married to Gloria Wall, chairwoman of the school board.

      As a result, Lucia had to wait the whole of an agonizing week until she could get away long enough to make the sixty-minute drive to Austin, buy a testing kit and bring it home to the privacy of her little apartment.

      She lived on the third floor of a gracious old house owned by June Pollock, who worked as a cook at one of the local motels. The big house had fallen on some hard times during the hundred-odd years it had stood in Crystal Creek’s downtown area, but June had come into a tidy sum of money a few years earlier and done a lot of renovating. Now she rented a few suites to carefully chosen residents.

      Lucia had lived for five years in this apartment where flowered paper covered the slanted walls, and live oaks and pecans rustled against the dormers. Though it was vastly different from the palatial estate she and her brother and their younger half sister had grown up in, Lucia loved her cozy little home. These high airy rooms were her sanctuary and retreat, a place where she could let down her guard and relax, away from the measuring eyes and sharp tongues of the community.

      But on this mellow Sunday afternoon, her silent rooms felt more like a prison, and the air seemed heavy with menace.

      She stood in the candy-striped bathroom with its antique claw-footed bathtub and pedestal sink, holding the little plastic wand in her hand and studying the instructions.

      Two lines in the window indicated a positive test. One line meant you weren’t pregnant.

      Lucia took a deep breath and looked at the wand. Her eyes blurred for a moment, then focused in horror on the two red lines.

      She moaned aloud and leaned her forehead against the cool surface of the mirror. Then, with the careful precision that was an integral part of her nature, she took a second wand from the package and went through the whole test again.

      Again the two red lines appeared clearly in the little window.

      “Oh, God,” she murmured aloud.

      After a moment she wrapped all the testing equipment in a plastic sack and stuffed it in the trash can under the sink.

      A warm breeze was blowing from the south, off the gulf

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