“You do that.” With his free hand, he took his sunglasses from the top of his head and slid them in place, covering the anger in his blue eyes. “But you stay away from me,” he said and dropped his hand from the door. “And you stay the hell away from my family.”

Maddie slammed the door and pushed her hair from her face. Damn. That hadn’t gone well. He’d been angry. She’d gotten angry. Heck, she was still angry.

She heard him start his truck, and out of habit, she locked her front door. She didn’t need him or his family in order to write the book, but realistically, it’d be nice if she had their cooperation. Especially since she needed to get into the lives of Loch and Rose.

“Well, that sucked,” she said and walked into the living room. She would have to write the book without their input. Her mother’s photograph sat on the coffee table. She’d been so young and filled with so many dreams. Maddie picked up the photo and touched the glass above her mother’s lips. It had been sitting on the table the whole time while Mick had been there, and he hadn’t noticed.

She’d planned to tell him that she was more than just an author interested in writing a book. That his mother had left her an orphan too. Now he wanted nothing to do with her, and who she really was just didn’t seem to matter anymore.


Mick pulled his truck to a stop in front of the Shore View Diner where Meg worked five days a week waiting tables and pulling in tips. He was still so angry he felt like hitting something or someone. Like picking Maddie Dupree up by her shoulders and shaking her until she agreed to pack up and go away. Like forgetting she’d ever heard of the Hennessys and their messed-up lives. But she’d made it really clear she wasn’t going anywhere, and now he had to tell Meg before she heard it from someone else.

He turned off the truck and leaned his head back. His mother had watched his father die? He hadn’t known that. Wished he didn’t know it now. How could he possibly reconcile the woman who’d killed two people with the mother who’d made him peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwiches, cut the crusts off, and sliced the bread at an angle just as he’d liked it? The loving mother who bathed him and washed his hair and tucked him in at night, with the woman who’d left footprints in her husband’s blood all over his bar? How could that even be the same woman?

He rubbed his face with his hands and slid his fingers beneath his sunglasses to rub his eyes. He was so damn tired. After Jewel had given him Maddie’s business card, he’d gone to his office in Hennessy’s and locked himself in. He’d searched the Internet for information about Maddie, and there’d been a lot. She’d published five books, and he’d discovered head shots of her and photos of her at book signings. There was no mistaking that the Maddie Dupree whom he’d been planning to get to know better was the woman who wrote about psychotic killers. The Madeline Dupree who was in town to write about the night his mother had killed his father. He opened the door to his truck and stepped outside. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop her.

From as far back as he could remember, the Shore View Diner had smelled the same. Like grease and eggs and tobacco. The diner was one of the last places in America where a person could have a cup of coffee and a Camel or Lucky Strike, depending on his or her poison. As a result, it was always filled with smokers. Mick had tried to talk Meg into working someplace where she wasn’t likely to get lung cancer from secondhand smoke, but she insisted that the tips were too good to work anyplace else.

It was around two in the afternoon and the diner was half empty when Mick entered. Meg stood behind the front counter, filling Lloyd Brunner’s cup of coffee and laughing at something he’d said. Her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a bright pink blouse beneath a white apron. She looked up and waved at him.

“Hey, there. Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No.” He took a seat at the counter and pushed his Revos to the top of his head. “I was hoping you could get off early.”

“Why?” Her smile fell and she set the coffee carafe on the counter. “Has something happened? Is it Travis?”

“Travis is fine. I just wanted to talk to you about something.”

She looked into his eyes as if she could read his mind. “I’ll be right back,” she said and walked into the kitchen. When she returned, she had her purse.

Mick rose and followed her outside. As soon as the door to the diner swung shut behind them,

she asked, “What is it?”

“There’s a woman in town. She’s a true crime writer.”

Meg squinted against the bright sun as they walked across the gravel lot to his truck. “What’s her name?”

“Madeline Dupree.”

Her jaw dropped. “Madeline Dupree? She wrote In Her Place, the story of Patrick Wayne Dobbs. The serial killer who killed women and then wore their clothes under his business suit. That book scared me so much I couldn’t sleep for a week.” Meg shook her head. “What is she doing in Truly?”

He slid his sunglasses down to cover his eyes. “Apparently, she’s going to write about what happened with Mom and Dad.”

Meg stopped. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Why?”

“God, I don’t know.” He raised a hand, then dropped it to his side. “If she writes about serial killers, I don’t know what she finds so damn interesting about Mom and Dad.”

Meg folded her arms across the front of her apron and they continued to walk. “What does she know about what happened?”

“I don’t know, Meg.” They stopped by his truck and he leaned a hip into the front fender. “She knows Mom shot that waitress in the head.” His sister didn’t bat an eye. “Did you know that?”

Meg shrugged and bit her thumbnail. “Yeah. I heard the sheriff tell Grandma Loraine.”

He looked into his sister’s eyes and wondered what else she knew that he didn’t. He wondered if she knew that their mother hadn’t killed herself right away. He supposed it didn’t matter. She was taking the news better than he’d expected. “Are you going to be okay?”

She nodded. “Is there anything we can do to stop her?”

“I doubt it.”

She leaned back into the driver’s-side door and sighed. “Maybe you can go talk to her.”

“I did. She’s going to write it, and she doesn’t care what we have to say about it.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Everyone is going to start talking about it again.”

“Yep.”

“She’ll say bad stuff about Mom.”

“Probably about all three of them. But what can she say? The only people who know what really happened that night are dead.”

Meg glanced away.

“Do you know something that happened that night?”

She dropped her hand. “Just that Mom had been pushed too far and she killed Dad and that waitress.”

He wasn’t so sure he believed her, but what difference did it make twenty-nine years later? Meg hadn’t been there. She’d been home with him when the sheriff had arrived at their house that night.

He looked up at the clear blue sky. “I’d forgotten that the waitress had a little girl.”

“Yeah, I can’t remember her name, though.” Meg returned her gaze to Mick. “Not that I care. Her mother was a whore.”

“That wasn’t the girl’s fault, Meg. She was left without a mother.”

“She was probably better off. Alice Jones was cheating with our father and didn’t care who knew. She flaunted their relationship in front of the whole town, so don’t expect me to feel sorry for some nameless, faceless orphan girl.”

Mick didn’t know if there’d been any flaunting, and if there had been, he figured their dad had to take the majority of the blame, since he’d been the married one.

“Are you going to be okay with this?”

“No, but what can I do about it?” She adjusted her purse on her shoulder. “I’ll survive, just like I did before.”

“I told her to stay away from you and Travis, so I don’t think she’ll be bothering you with questions.”

Meg raised a brow. “Is she going to be bothering you with questions?”

There was more than one way a woman could bother a man.

And don’t come here and think you can tell me what to do. I really don’t give a damn if you like it or not. I’m going to write the book. She’d been mad and obstinate and sexy as hell. Her big brown eyes had gotten kind of squinted at the corners just before she’d slammed the door in his face. “No,” he answered. “She won’t be bothering me with questions.”


Meg waited until Mick’s truck pulled out of the parking lot before she let out a breath and raised her hands to the sides of her face. She pressed her fingers into her temples and closed her eyes against the pressure building in her head. Madeline Dupree was in town to write a book about her parents. There had to be something someone could do to stop her. A person shouldn’t be allowed to just…just ruin lives. There should be a law against snooping around and…digging into someone’s past.

Meg opened her eyes and stared down at her white Reeboks. It wouldn’t be long before everyone in town knew about it. Before they started talking and gossiping and looking at her as if she were liable to go off at any time. Even her brother sometimes looked at her as if she were crazy. Mick thought he was so good at forgetting the past, but there were some things even he’d never been able to forget. Tears clouded her vision and dropped on the gravel by the instep of her shoe. Mick also mistook emotion for mental illness. Not that she really blamed him. Growing up with their parents had been an emotional tug-of-war ending in their death.