LITMIR.BIZ

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attacked Megan. She didn’t have the strength to explain yet. “I’ll do all I can to help you and Kirstie through it.”

      “You mean help Dr. Kelsey convince us she really is losing her mind?” There was a plaintive sadness in Lynley’s words.

      Megan closed her eyes. “I didn’t say that. I’m here as your friend.”

      There was a quiet sigh. “Okay. Thanks. I’m glad you’re back in Jolly Mill even if we don’t agree about everything.”

      “We’ve never agreed about everything.”

      “This is different.”

      “Can’t you just trust me for once? I am a doctor now.”

      “And I’m a nurse. So is Mom.”

      “So you’re saying two nurses trump a doctor?” Megan forced a smile so it would bleed into her voice. Anything to lighten the moment.

      “Something like that. Megan, are you…” She paused, sighed. “Be honest with me. Why did you come back here?”

      Megan closed her eyes. There it was. The question.

      “Your family’s all in Cape Girardeau now,” Lynley continued. “Why didn’t you go there? Not that I didn’t want you to come here, because I did, but—”

      “You should know why. This is still home to me.” Unlike being with her family. If she heard Mom tell her one more time how wonderful it was to have grandchildren, and that she wanted more, Megan would pledge lifelong celibacy. Let her big brother provide all the descendants for the Bradley family. Randy seemed happy to do it.

      “Megan,” Lynley said, “did Mom ask you to come here and convince me to let her check into a nursing facility?”

      Megan hesitated a second too long. “That’s not why I came.”

      “But she did ask you.”

      “She’s afraid you’ll waste the rest of your life taking care of—”

      “Waste? Did you say waste?”

      “She’s the one who said it, Lynley, not me.”

      “Careful, or you’ll begin to sound like Dad.”

      “Notice I actually came to Jolly Mill. I didn’t leave,” Megan snapped. Unlike your father, she wanted to say, but Lynley knew what she meant. Barry Marshal was a self-centered egotist who had split soon after Kirstie’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. For everyone’s sake, he should have split long before that. Megan knew too many of that man’s secrets. Too many Jolly Mill secrets.

      “Sorry,” Lynley said. “You’re right. I know.”

      “Just bring Kirstie to the office when you find her,” Megan said.

      “I will. Thanks.”

      “I can come help you search.”

      “No. You just be there for us when I find her.” That slender edge of tension lingered after Lynley disconnected. Megan knew her friend’s resentment wasn’t directed totally at her. She was just the punching bag for all Lynley was going through, for all Barry’s failures as a father. Megan wasn’t taking punches very well right now. Lynley didn’t know about Joni’s murder. No one here did.

      Kirstie would be found again—or she would return herself home when she regained her senses, as she had done every time she’d gone missing. Everyone in the Jolly Mill community knew her and watched out for her.

      Megan pushed her cell phone back into her deep purse and was turning back toward bed when a flash of light struck one of the panes. Brief. Barely there.

      She frowned, staring out into the darkness. Had she actually seen that, or was it a side effect of her sleeping pill? The drug could do strange things to some people. She’d considered more than once the possibility that the drugs were causing the dreams, but she’d so craved sleep after the weeks of sleeplessness following Joni’s murder that she took them anyway.

      A whisper of a different kind reached her from outside—not wind or frogs or the sound of the electric water pump. There was another flash. A newly familiar strum of panic restricted Megan’s feet to the woven mat by the front door.

      She clenched her fists. Don’t allow the panic to control you. This wasn’t the mean streets of the city. This was tiny Jolly Mill, safe, quiet, secluded. She didn’t need a weapon here to protect herself.

      Another sound reached her—tires crunching on rock?

      Her fear quickened. When she entered her drive, her tires always met the gravel on the quarter-mile track that led to this cottage. What she’d just heard might be that gravel pop-snap in the distance. Maybe someone had turned around at the mailbox and was driving away. That had to be it.

      The only sounds she typically heard here at night were the occasional bark of a farm dog, the lowing of a cow separated from her calf or the spine-tingling call of an owl that sounded more like mocking laughter at her plight. None of the wildlife in this area sounded like a car.

      As she wavered, the soft rumble grew louder, followed by a flicker of shadows through the trees. A vehicle. An aura of stealth seemed to fill and then illuminate the darkness like a hunter stalking its prey.

      The drive to this cottage was private. No one else around here had reason to be on it at this time of morning—except maybe a patient in trouble? She’d decided not to have a landline, despite the spotty cell coverage in Jolly Mill. If there was an urgent medical need, it was feasible someone could be coming for help, though there was a hospital in Monett less than twenty minutes away and in Cassville only a little farther in the other direction.

      She checked the dead bolt lock on the front door. Of course she’d locked it. The past few years had taught her that. No one had ever locked the doors when she was growing up in Jolly Mill. Something else people seldom did was close the curtains, but right now lowering the Roman shades over all the windows seemed like a good idea.

      The tight cords bit into her hands as she jerked them down, one by one. Her movements double-timed as lights crested the hill and shot through the tiny cracks in the woven material. The sharp, quick sound of her breath was harsh as it hit the matted shades. This was no dream. One set of cords tangled together, the shades tilting drunkenly as she worked a knot free and straightened the bottom edge. She rushed to the next window and then the next until she had a pseudo-barrier from the onslaught of light.

      Megan’s suddenly overactive imagination transformed her little patch of wooded paradise into a battleground. Even as she castigated herself for her fear, she could do nothing to ease it.

      Calm. Stay calm. Joni’s killer is dead. There’s no one after you. She wouldn’t call for help just because of a car approaching the house. She didn’t need anyone in town to think the doctor at the new clinic was unhinged. But who was coming here? Mom and Dad would have called if they were planning a trip across the state, and they wouldn’t have driven all night to get here.

      Megan retreated into the shadows of the far corner of the sitting area. She curled into the love seat, clutching the throw pillow to her chest as she waited.

      The holy scent reached her from the homemade sachet her former Sunday school teacher had sewn into the pillow. Martha Irene called it one of her “prayer pillows,” but Megan couldn’t pray. Who would hear her? She just squeezed the cushion hard against her chest and tried to slow her panicked imagination while the rhythm of her heart encroached on the chambers of her lungs.

      She should definitely have sought treatment for PTSD.

      The vehicle lights went off and the engine died, plunging her into dark silence for another few seconds before she heard a door opening and then footsteps brushing through unmown grass and last year’s leaves. There was a soft sound of someone stepping onto her wooden front porch and then a pause while she tried to still her panicked breathing, fingernails digging

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