" Laurel, help us! Laurel, please! Please! Please… please…"

She'd had the dream a hundred times. It played through her mind like a videotape over and over, wearing on her, tearing at her conscience, ripping at her heart. Always the voices were the worst part of it. The voices of the children, frantic, begging, pleading. The qualities in those voices touched nerves, set off automatic physiological reactions. Her pulse jumped, her breath came in short, shallow, unsatisfying gasps. Adrenaline and frustration pumped through her in equal amounts.

Dr. Pritchard had attempted to teach her to recognize those signals and defuse them. Theoretically, she should have been able to stop the dream and all the horrible feelings it unleashed, but she never could. She just lay there feeling enraged and panic-stricken and helpless, watching the drama unfold in her subconscious to play out to its inevitable end, unable to awaken, unable to stop it, unable to change the course of events that caused it. Weak, impotent, inadequate, incapable.

"The charges are being dropped, Ms. Chandler, for lack of sufficient evidence."

Here she always tried to swallow and couldn't. A Freudian thing, she supposed. She couldn't choke down the attorney general's decision any more than she could have chewed up and swallowed the Congressional Record. Or perhaps it was the burden of guilt that tightened around her throat, threatening to choke her. She had failed to prove her case. She had failed, and the children would pay the consequences.

"Help us, Laurel! Please! Please… please…"

She thrashed against the bed, against the imagined bonds of her own incompetence. She could see the three key children behind the attorney general, their faces pale ovals dominated by dark eyes filled with torment and dying hope. They had depended on her, trusted her. She had promised help, guaranteed justice.

"… lack of sufficient evidence, Ms. Chandler…"

Quentin Parker loomed larger in her mind's eye, turning dark and menacing, metamorphosing into a hideous monster as the children's faces drifted further and further away. Paler and paler they grew as they floated back, their eyes growing wider and wider with fear.

"Help us, Laurel! Please… please… please…"

"… will be returned to their parents…"

"No," she whimpered, tossing, turning, kicking at the bedclothes.

"Help us, Laurel!"

"… returned to the custody of…"

"No!" She thumped her fists against the mattress over and over, pounding in time with her denial. "No! No!"

"… a formal apology will be issued…"

"NO!!"

Laurel pitched herself upright as the door slammed shut on her subconscious. The air heaved in and out of her lungs in tremendous hot, ragged gasps. Her nightgown was plastered to her skin with cold sweat. She opened her eyes wide and forced herself to take in her surroundings, busying her brain by cataloging every item she saw-the foot of the half-tester bed, the enormous French Colonial armoire looming darkly against the wall, the marble-topped walnut commode with porcelain pitcher and bowl displaying an arrangement of spring blooms. Normal things, familiar things illuminated by the pale, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't moon shining in through the French doors. She wasn't in Georgia any longer. This wasn't Scott County. This was Belle Rivière, Aunt Caroline's house in Bayou Breaux. The place she had run to.

Coward.

She ground her teeth against the word and rubbed her hands hard over her face, then plowed her fingers back through her disheveled mess of sweat-damp hair.

" Laurel?"

The bedroom door opened, and Savannah stuck her head in. Just like old times, Laurel thought, when they were girls and Savannah had assumed the role of mother Vivian Chandler had been loath to play unless she had an audience. They were thirty and thirty-two now, she and Savannah, but they had fallen back into that pattern as easily as slipping on comfortable old shoes.

It seemed odd, considering it was Laurel who had grown up to take charge of her life, she who had struck out and made a career and a name for herself. Savannah had stayed behind, never quite breaking away from the past or the place, never able to rise above the events that had shaped them.

"Hey, Baby," Savannah murmured as she crossed the room. The moon ducked behind a cloud, casting her in shadow, giving Laurel only impressions of a rumpled cloud of long dark hair, a pale silk robe carelessly belted, long shapely legs and bare feet. "You okay?"

Laurel wrapped her arms around her knees, sniffed, and forced a smile as her sister settled on the edge of the bed. "I'm fine."

Savannah flipped on the bedside lamp, and they both blinked against the light. "Liar," she grumbled, frowning as she looked her over. "I heard you tossing and turning. Another nightmare?"

"I didn't think you were coming home tonight," Laurel said, railroading the conversation onto other tracks. She tossed and turned every night, had nightmares every night. That had become the norm for her, nothing worth talking about.

Savannah 's lush mouth settled into a pout. "Never mind about that," she said flatly. "Things got over quicker than I thought."

"Where were you?" Somewhere with smoke and liquor. Laurel could smell the combination over and above a generous application of Obsession. Smoke and liquor and something wilder, earthier, like sex or the swamp.

"It doesn't matter." Savannah shook off the topic with a toss of her head. "Lord Almighty, look at you. You've sweat that gown clean through. I'll get you another."

Laurel stayed where she was as her sister went to the cherry highboy and began pulling open drawers in search of lingerie. She probably should have insisted on taking care of herself, but the truth of the matter was she didn't feel up to it. She was exhausted from lack of sleep and from her encounter with Jack Boudreaux. Besides, wasn't this part of what she had come home for? To be comforted and cared for by familiar faces?

Much as she hated to admit it, she was still feeling physically weak, as well as emotionally battered. Coming unhinged was hard on a person, she reflected with a grimace. But as Dr. Pritchard had been so fond of pointing out, her physical decline had begun long before her breakdown. All during what the press had labeled simply "The Scott County Case" she had been too focused, too obsessed to think of trivial things like food, sleep, exercise. Her mind had been consumed with charges of sexual abuse, the pursuit of evidence, the protection of children, the upholding of justice.

Savannah 's disgruntled voice pulled her back from the edge of the memory. "Crimeny, Baby, don't you own a nightgown that doesn't look like something Mama Pearl made for the poor out of flour sacks?"

She came back to the bed holding an oversize white cotton T-shirt at arm's length, as if she were afraid its plainness might rub off on her. Savannah 's taste in sleepwear ran to Frederick 's of Hollywood. Beneath the gaping front of her short, champagne silk robe, Laurel caught a glimpse of full breasts straining the confines of a scrap of coffee-colored lace. With a body that was all lush curves, a body that fairly shouted its sexuality, Savannah was made for silk and lace. Laurel 's femininity was subtle, understated-a fact she had no desire to change.

"Nobody sees it but me," she said. She stripped her damp gown off over her head and slipped the new one on, enjoying the feel of the cool, dry fabric as it settled against her sticky skin.

An indignant sniff was Savannah 's reply. She settled herself on the edge of the bed once again, legs crossed, her expression fierce. "If I ever cross paths with Wesley Brooks, I swear I'll kill him. Imagine him leaving you-"

"Don't." Laurel softened the order with a tentative smile and reached out to touch the hand Savannah had knotted into a tight fist on the white coverlet. "I don't want to imagine it; I lived it. Besides, it wasn't Wes's fault our marriage didn't work out."

"Wasn't his-!"

Laurel cut off what was sure to be another tirade defaming her ex-husband. Wesley claimed he hadn't left her, but that she had driven him away, that she had crushed their young marriage with the weight of her obsession for The Case. That was probably true. Laurel didn't try to deny it. Savannah automatically took her side, ever ready to battle for her baby sister, but Laurel knew she wasn't deserving of support in this argument. She didn't have a case against Wes, despite Savannah 's vehemence. All she had was a solid chunk of remorse and guilt, but that can of worms didn't need to be opened tonight.

"Hush," she said, squeezing Savannah 's fingers. "I appreciate the support, Sister. Really, I do. But don't let's fight about it tonight. It's late."

Savannah 's expression softened, and she opened her hand and twined her fingers with Laurel 's. "You need to get some sleep." She reached up with her other hand and with a forefinger traced one of the dark crescents stress and extreme fatigue had painted beneath Laurel 's eyes.

"What about you?" Laurel asked. "Don't you need sleep, too?"

"Me?" She made an attempt at a wry smile, but it came nowhere near her eyes, where old ghosts haunted the cool blue depths. "I'm a creature of the night. Didn't you know that?"

Laurel said nothing as old pain surfaced like oil inside her to mingle with the new.

With a sigh Savannah rose, tugged down the hem of her robe with one hand and with the other pushed a lock of wild long hair behind her ear.

"I mean it, you know," she murmured. "If Wesley Brooks showed up here now, I'd cut his fucking balls off and stuff 'em in his ears." She cocked her fingers like pistols and pointed them at Laurel. "And then I'd get mean."

Laurel managed a weak chuckle. God, how Vivian would blanch to hear language like that from one of her daughters. Daughters she had raised to be debutantes. Sparkling, soft-spoken belles who never cursed and nearly swooned in the face of vulgarity. Vivian had expected sorority princesses, but God knew Savannah would eat dirt and die before she pledged to Chi-O, and she doubtless lay awake nights dreaming up ways to shock the Junior League. Laurel had been too busy to pledge, consumed by her need to get her law degree and throw herself into the task of seeing justice done.