But that was a hope too lovely even to whisper in the most secret part of her mind.

Saturday, which was to be the big kick-off for Boomtown Days, dawned warm and clear, with not a cloud in the sky and for once neither rain nor wind in the forecast. Chamber of Commerce weather, Tom Daggett, the deputy who drove Mary to her shop that morning, called it. Tom was one of Mary’s favorite deputies, a very sweet boy, though it was hard to think of him as an officer of the law. To her, he looked barely old enough to drive.

Since pretty much everybody in town would be attending the parade and accompanying concerts, carnivals and food and artisan fairs, Mary had decided not to open the hair salon that day. Like many of the other shop owners up and down Main and the streets that crossed it, she planned to put some of her boutique items out on racks on the sidewalk, hoping to catch the eyes of browsing out-of-towners with extra money to spend.

She spent the morning deciding which items to put out, setting prices and hand-lettering signs, and by eleven or so had what she considered to be a rather nice display set up in front of the salon. There was a rack of clearance items from last winter marked down to fifty percent off, and another with some of her newer, flashier stuff, particularly some things with a Western motif she thought might go well with the theme of the day’s celebration. She enjoyed a brisk business-mostly lookers, but a few nice sales as well-before the strolling crowds drifted off toward Main Street to watch the parade.

Mary was taking advantage of the respite to restore some order to the racks when Betty, from the art gallery next door, came wandering over to compare notes on the morning’s business-like Mary, she’d enjoyed a whole lot of looky-lous and a handful of sales, but was satisfied by the day’s take, overall. Betty was a grandmotherly but elegant woman who favored tunics and broom-stick skirts in bright peacock colors, and wore her thick salt-and-pepper hair in a Navajo twist which she had a habit of sticking writing utensils into.

She stayed to chat, making cozy small talk about her garden and her grandkids, and when they heard the thump of a marching band start up in the distance, happened to mention, with a sigh, that she hated having to miss the parade, since her grandson Cody would be riding on the Future Farmers of America float, and her granddaughters, Jennifer and Ashley, were both in the high school band. One played saxophone, the other, clarinet.

“Why don’t you go?” Mary said. “I can keep an eye on your stuff for you.”

Betty’s face brightened. “Oh-that’s nice of you. Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Of course not,” Mary assured her. “Everyone’s watching the parade anyway. Go on-hurry. You don’t want to miss it.”

“Thank you so much-I won’t be long…” Betty was already hurrying down the sidewalk. She turned once to smile and wave.

Mary smiled and waved back, a lovely warmth spreading through her. This is what it’s like…belonging.

She turned back to the racks, and as she did, bumped it just slightly. When she did that, a rather gaudy beaded suede jacket-one of the clearance items-slithered off its hanger and fell to the sidewalk. She muttered, “Oops,” and bent over to pick it up.

At precisely the same moment, the window behind her, bearing in gilt letters the words, Queenie’s Salon & Boutique-We Pamper You Like Royalty, disintegrated.

As the crystalline cubes of safety glass rained down around her, Mary’s natural impulse was to rise and stare in utter bewilderment at the hole where her shop window had been. She never knew what it was that made her, after that first instant, drop like a stone and flatten herself on the concrete sidewalk underneath the rack of clothes.

Out on Main Street the parade was going by. She could hear the thump of a marching band, people clapping…cheering. Directly above her head, she could hear something hitting the clothes on the rack with sharp little thumps. Each thump made the rack jerk and twitch and rattle on its castors. She heard other sounds, like angry mosquitos, and felt the sting of something hitting her cheek. Her body was shaking violently; her chest and throat felt raw, as if she’d been screaming and screaming, the way people do in nightmares.

It seemed like a nightmare. Half a block away there were crowds of people, laughing, happy people…people waving flags, throwing confetti, calling out to their friends, children and neighbors riding on the floats, or on horses or marching in the band. There was no one to notice a woman huddled under a rack of clothes, no one to hear her terrified cries for help. All alone and caught in a killer’s gunsights, Mary covered her head with her arms and waited to die.

It might have been seconds later, or minutes or an eternity…She heard the roar of an engine, the screech of brakes, the slam of a door. Pounding footsteps. But her shocked mind heard only more danger. Her body curled itself into a tight, trembling ball, and Deputy Daggett had to almost lift her bodily up off the sidewalk, repeatedly shouting her name, before she was able to comprehend that salvation truly was at hand.

“Go, go, go!” The deputy gave her a powerful shove in the general direction of the salon.

She lurched toward the door-there was no glass left in it, either-and managed to push it open…stumble through it on rubbery legs. From the relative safety inside the shop she looked back to see the impossibly young, downy-cheeked deputy in a half crouch behind the dubious shelter of the clothes rack, weapon in one hand, keying on his shoulder radio with the other and calmly shouting, “Shots fired, officer requesting backup at Queenie’s Hair Salon. Repeat-shots fired…”

Slowly, as if in a dream, Mary lifted a hand to touch her cheek. She pulled her fingers away…saw blood and wetness. And only then realized she was crying.

Roan was in the emergency services command post that had been set up in the back parking lot of the courthouse when he got the call. He and Paul Gunther, owner of Gunther’s Groceries, who also happened to be the deputy mayor and a member of the Boomtown Days planning committee for as long as Roan could remember, had just been congratulating one another on how smoothly everything was going this year. So far, the only arrests had been a handful of D and Ds last night, then the usual rowdiness this morning-including a couple of high-school kids who’d thought it might be fun to set off some firecrackers along the parade route just to see what the mounted units would do. Out-of-towners, Paul Gunther declared-city kids without a clue about the kind of havoc a spooked horse was capable of wreaking on a crowd of people, and what was the world coming to, anyway?

Roan’s radio beeped at him, and both men fell expectantly silent, listening.

And he heard the words he’d half expected and hoped never to hear. “Shots fired…Queenie’s Hair Salon…shots fired!” He was in his patrol car, tires spitting gravel, before the static died.

As the SUV bucked and jounced out of the parking lot and down the dirt alley he thumbed on the siren-something he rarely had cause to do-and spoke into his radio with a calm he couldn’t account for-some kind of protective numbness, maybe.

“SD Mobile One responding to shots fired…requesting all available units…”

When he was done with that and had shut off the radio mike, he began to swear fervently and out loud, repeating every bad word he knew, over and over, almost like a prayer.

As the SUV fishtailed around the corner and onto Second Street, Roan could see Tom Daggett’s patrol car parked cross-ways down in front of Queenie’s, lights on and flashing. At the far end of the street where the crowd had gathered to watch the parade go by, he could see a few people beginning to turn and look to see what all the excitement was about. He didn’t see Tom, and he didn’t see Mary.

He brought the SUV to a screeching halt alongside the curb next to some sidewalk displays of paintings and photographs in front of Betty’s frame shop. Now he saw Tom crouched down behind a rack of clothes in front of Mary’s place, his sidearm braced on the top crossbar, aimed in the general direction of the rooftops across the street. He saw the gaping hole where the store’s front window had been, and the glass all over the sidewalk. He still didn’t see Mary.

Tom looked over at him and straightened up a little, slowly and cautiously, darting glances back and forth between Roan and those buildings across the street. A couple of other units came screaming onto the street right then and skidded to a halt a half block back, effectively barricading it. Roan barked orders for the new arrivals into his radio, telling them to check out the buildings across the street, then grabbed his hat and exited his vehicle. He was pretty sure the shooter was long gone, but he kept his head down just in case.

He started over to where his deputy was, running bent over, dodging in and out among the art display easels, boots crunching on the broken glass with a sound that made his teeth grate and his skin shiver, like fingernails on slate.

Tom saw him coming and diverted him with a gesture, a sweep of his thumb toward the broken window. “She’s okay, Sheriff-she’s inside.”

His voice was hoarse and out-of-breath, but Roan took note of the fact that it looked like excitement, and not fear, that had the kid’s cheeks and eyes lit up like Christmas morning. His greenest deputy had come through his baptism of fire with flying colors, and Roan made a mental note to make sure he got commended for his bravery when all this was over.

Right now, he had other things on his mind. One thing.

Calling her name softly, he stepped through the broken-out window. The salon seemed dim to him after the bright midday sunshine, so he took off his sunglasses and tucked them in his pocket. He could smell some kind of perfume-hair products, he thought, from the different sizes and colors of plastic bottles that were scattered all over the place, oozing their contents onto the black-and-white vinyl tile floor. He walked over glass from a shattered display case, and shredded flowers from the blue-and-white vase that had sat on top of it. He saw a broken mirror, and a rack of magazines lying on its side. But he still didn’t see Mary.