“Do you want them to worry about you?” Chase demanded, the set of his face looking grim around his sunglasses. “Do you want them to lie awake nights thinking about how he’s only a few blocks away from you?”

“God, Uncle Chase, that’s so not fair.”

He shrugged. “Well?”

She gave in to her own concern for her grandparents’ feelings.

“All right. All right! But I’ll drive myself out there.”

“When?”

“When I’ve packed!”

“Six o’clock,” he told her in a tone that brooked no further argument. “Supper. Suitcase.”

Chase grabbed his cowboy hat off its peg and stalked out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind him. Within moments the smell of cigarette smoke wafted back inside.

Jody turned toward her other two uncles.

“Don’t you just want to kill him sometimes?”

“Frequently,” Meryl said with a brief grin as he grabbed his own hat, then gave her a passing hug. “Don’t you worry. He’ll screw up. He’ll end up back in a cell where he belongs.”

“Uncle Chase?” she managed to joke.

Meryl laughed. “I’ll see you tonight at the ranch.”

“I may still have questions.”

“Anything you want to know, honey. Just ask.”

He hurried out to his truck as if he had things to do and not enough time to do them.

When the other two were gone, Bobby surprised Jody by asking, “How are you?”

“Shocked,” she said, after taking a moment to consider it.

“Are you scared?”

That startled her. It was so unlike him to acknowledge that anybody might ever have a reason to be scared of anything. She lifted her chin. “Not in the least.” Then she admitted, “Okay, yes. It makes my heart pound just to think of ever seeing him around town.”

“Good,” he said, surprising her even more. “You should be scared of him.”

“Uncle Bobby! Why?”

“Because we have no idea what he’ll do.”

“He just got out of prison! He won’t want to get into trouble, will he?”

“You heard Meryl. He’s Billy Crosby. Don’t expect him to have gotten any smarter. And remember that he hates us, he hates your grandparents, he hates Chase, and Meryl, and me, and probably even Belle. And I’m guessing he hates you, too.”

“Me? But why?”

Bobby shrugged, looking like his brother Chase when he did it, because they both had the same dismissive lift of their big shoulders. “Billy Crosby has never needed a good reason for what he does.” He stepped closer to her. “But listen to me, Jody. If there’s anybody who should be scared, it’s him. Billy Crosby should be looking over his shoulder every second of the time he’s here in Rose, because we will be watching him.” Bobby put his hat on his head. “That’s why you need to go out to the ranch until he’s gone. We don’t want to have to keep an eye on you, too.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“He won’t stay.”

“How do you know?”

“It won’t be comfortable for him here.”

On his way out the door he said, “I’m sorry about your coffeepot.”

“It’s okay, Uncle Bobby.” She smiled shakily at him. “You can buy me a nicer one.”

“And teach you how to make a decent cup of coffee,” he said gruffly, and was gone.

AFTER THEY LEFT, Jody didn’t know what to do with herself.

At first she wandered from room to room downstairs, looking at all the labor she’d put into them and regretting the need to leave them even for a day, much less for however long it took to put Billy Crosby safely away again. “Shocked” didn’t even begin to describe how she felt. Things that she had assumed were settled suddenly weren’t, and none of the reasons made sense at their deepest level. So what if none of that physical evidence held up? So what, even if the county attorney had withheld evidence from the defense attorney? So what if the local defense attorney hadn’t tried very hard? If Crosby did it, and everybody knew he did-because of his low character and because of all the events leading up to that night-then he was still as guilty as ever and nothing about his sentencing should ever change.

Collin Crosby.

Furious at him all over again, Jody trudged upstairs to pack.

When she reached the second-floor landing, she stood for a moment looking up and down the long hallway with all of its rooms and doors. As if her cowboy boots were moving of their own volition, she turned left and started walking toward the small guest room at the far end. She kept its door open at all times so the sun could shine in during the day and so she could see lights coming from the room at night.

People wondered how she could live there, especially by herself.

This was my home. I want it back.

“But it’s so big,” people objected.

“I like big,” she replied.

She was used to it: big land and sky, big animals and cowboys, big plans for being a really good teacher and meeting a nice man and raising a family right here in this house with plenty of room for them. But first she had to tame it-both this house and her fears of it.

Jody stepped into the doorway of the little guest room.

She looked at the carpet without flinching.

Her father had lain there, shot through the abdomen, blood gushing from him. She’d seen photographs. She’d read the trial transcripts. She had insisted on hearing it all, seeing it all, and learning it all, even when it meant dragging facts out of her family that believed she’d be happier not knowing, even when it meant going behind their backs to ask other people, or going on the Internet, which wasn’t much help for a crime back then. It was the only way she could walk through life without always suspecting that people were keeping dark secrets from her. She didn’t like feeling as if people were staring at her and knew things about her life that she didn’t know, so she had set out to learn all of it, or as much as she could. She knew that her dad couldn’t have survived for long after he was shot, but nobody knew if he’d been conscious or how much pain he’d felt. She prayed that he hadn’t known what happened to him.

There was still so much that nobody knew, but at least she wasn’t the only one in ignorance. Why was her dad in the house that night? He was supposed to be in Colorado. There were unanswered questions about him, not to mention the huge gap of knowledge about her mom. Jody suspected that she had scrambled to get all the details she could about her father’s death to compensate for all she didn’t know about her mother’s fate.

It hadn’t helped much.

What she didn’t know about her mother ate at her, always.

She realized there were other important things she hadn’t known, like for instance that Billy Crosby might someday return to Rose, or that it could happen this soon.

A noise outside made Judy startle and whirl around to look down the hallway.

There was nothing there, but she was good and spooked.

She felt as if she had to get out of the house where his vile, contaminating presence seemed more real to her now than it ever had before. She forced herself to walk down the hall, down the stairs, to the front door, and then she ran for her truck.

SHE WAS ABOUT TO turn the key in the ignition when a man’s voice made her jump as if somebody had stuck a gun in her ribs.

“Hey.” Red Bosch grinned at how startled she was.

Jody leaned back against the seat and inhaled deep sucking breaths, trying to get her heart going in a normal rhythm again. “My God, Red, don’t sneak up on me like that. You nearly gave me a coronary.”

“Sorry.” He laughed again. “Where are you going?”

She tapped her fingertips on her steering wheel, resisting the question.

In the glare of midday, her lover’s face showed all thirteen of the years he had on her, but she didn’t mind that. It was merely evidence of hard work in the great outdoors, which she loved, too. Red just missed being good-looking, but he was appealing in a sexy, cowboy way. He wasn’t educated past twelfth grade and he talked with a country drawl that would have been laughed out of the movies for being excessive. But there was a sweetness about him-always had been, people said-that seemed to stem from his own easy acceptance of himself and of everybody else. He could gab with anybody and he laughed easily. Red had never had any trouble attracting women, except for the fact that there weren’t many available ones in his own county.