“Dylan’s not company.”

“I’m not talking about Dylan. Hope Spencer from across the street is here.”

Dylan shot a glance over his shoulder and slowly turned to look at her. His brows rose up his forehead, and the kitchen light above his head picked out the gold in his brown hair.

“So,” Paul Aberdeen began as he and Wally entered the house, “you’re our new neighbor. Welcome to Gospel. I’d shake your hand, but I’ve been gutting fish.”

Hope offered him a smile. “Thank you.”

Paul was big and blond and his fair complexion had been burned red except for a white strip at his hairline. He gave Hope a quick up-and-down with his eyes before turning to Dylan and shaking his head. “I’ll see your five and raise you ten.” He opened the refrigerator and stuck his head inside. “Would you like a beer, Hope?”

“No, thank you.” Although she couldn’t imagine why, she had a feeling that they were betting on her.

“Dylan?”

“Yep.” The word was barely out of his mouth before a Budweiser was lobbed at him. He caught it in midair and popped the top.

“Remember me?” Wally asked as he came to stand before her. Like his father, he’d been burned by the sun, but that was where the resemblance ended. He was clearly his mother’s child.

“Of course,” she said. “You rescued my purse.”

“Yep.” He nodded and looked at his mother. “Where’s Adam?”

Shelly pointed in the direction of the bathroom and Wally went out of the kitchen. “Hope’s writing an article for a Northwest magazine,” she informed the men.

“What kinda article?” Paul closed the refrigerator door and hung one arm around his wife’s neck.

“Hope is into flora and fauna.”

Dylan raised the Bud to his mouth and watched her over the top of the can.

“I’m working on a nature article. I want to get some pictures of native wildlife and indigenous vegetation.”

Dylan lowered the beer as one brow lifted slightly. “At first glance, I’d never take you for a nature lover.”

“You don’t know me.”

“True.” He moved to the sink and set the can on the counter, next to her elbow.

“If you want to see nature,” Paul said, “you might want to camp out at the falls. Now that’s some beautiful country.”

Dylan stood so close his arm bumped hers as he turned the water on. Her pulse picked up a beat or two, but she stood perfectly still and refused to let him know he made her nervous. “I might do that,” she said.

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “Have you ever camped out somewhere other than a motel room?”

Well, there had been that one summer at Girl Scout camp. “Sure, I camp all the time. I love to commune with nature.”

He chuckled and reached for the lemon dish soap. His T-shirt brushed her bare shoulder. “Careful,” he whispered next to her ear, “your nose is growing.”

Heat radiated from his big body and she slid a few steps down the counter and walked around him. Okay, so he did make her a little nervous. He was just too big, too masculine, and too good-looking, and he probably knew it, too. And she suspected he was trying to make her nervous.

“Remember that writer last summer?” Shelly asked. “What was he writing about? I can’t remember.”

“He said he was a survivalist,” Dylan answered.

Paul scoffed. “Yeah, but he had his pack filled with ready-to-eat army rations.”

“You should write something like that, Hope,” Shelly suggested. “All kinds of stuff is written by men, mostly Grizzly Adams he-man stuff. You could go on one of those survivalist treks. It might be interesting to read something like that from the point of view of a woman like you.”

He-man stuff? Survivalist trek? “Like me?”

Shelly made a palms-up gesture as if nothing needed to be said.

Paul said it anyway. “An indoor woman. If you went on one of those survivalist treks, you could write about eating wild onion and snakes.”

Her disgust must have shown on her face, because Paul quickly added, “Hell, it tastes just like chicken.”

“That’s true,” Shelly interjected.

“Maybe catch yourself a fat lizard,” the comedian at the sink added.

They were all crazy. All of them, and it was on the tip of her tongue to confess, It’s a lie, people. Get real. I write Bigfoot and alien-baby stories. I don’t eat reptiles!

The water from the faucet shut off and Dylan moved behind her. She felt him slide the thick towel from her bare shoulder. “I think I’ll just stick with writing about what I see around here.” She turned and glanced up at him. “I don’t think I can eat wild flora and poor, helpless fauna, anyway.”

He dried his hands and the leather band of his wristwatch. “Now, that is a shame.” He looked up from his watch and added, “There’s nothing quite like shooting helpless fauna and cooking it up with some wild flora.”

Shelly and Paul thought he was a real hoot, but Hope really didn’t see what was so funny. She got that twilight-zone feeling again. Like she’d been dropped onto an alien planet. Like she was living one of her own stories.


The sun beat down on Dylan’s straw cowboy hat as he pulled the cord on his old lawn mower. The engine sputtered, then died. Sweat dampened his armpits and spine, and he reached for his hat and tossed it on the front steps.

Sundays in June were for fishing or napping in a hammock with a hat pulled down over a man’s eyes.

Not for pushing a lawn mower around. Unfortunately, his grass was up past his ankles and the shrubs by his front door were so out of control a person had to fight to find the doorbell. Which didn’t bother him much, since everyone always came to the back door anyway. But his mother and sister had been down the week before and had bitched so much about it he’d started to feel kind of trashy. Like Marty Wiggins across town, who parked his old truck in the front yard and let his kid run around with gunk stuck to his face.

Dylan pulled his T-shirt over his head and rubbed a trickle of sweat from his bare chest and belly. He thought about giving the mower a good kick, but he figured all he’d get out of it was a broken foot. He glanced from the mower to his son standing on the porch near the biggest shrub, a pair of small grass clippers in his hands. Adam’s puppy, Mandy, lay near his feet.

“Don’t cut more than I showed you.” Dylan ran his fingers though his damp hair, pushing it from his forehead.

“I won’t.”

Dylan would never let Adam out of the house without making sure he was clean, his hair and teeth were brushed, and his clothes matched. A few shrubs didn’t make a guy trashy, for God’s sake. “And don’t cut off your fingers. I’m not any good at sewing stuff back on.”

“I won’t.”

He tossed the T-shirt next to his hat and pulled the cord again. This time the engine sputtered to life. The sound cut through the lazy quiet and sent Mandy jumping off the porch and running around the side of the house.

The grass was so thick in patches he had to lower the handle and raise the front wheels off the ground to keep the engine from stalling. Lawn clippings sprayed from the side, and when he got close to his dirt driveway, clouds of dust filled the air and little rocks peppered the ground like buckshot.

On his fifth pass, he ran over something that felt an awful lot like a big stick. He glanced to the left as chunks of tan plastic flew across the deep green grass.

Dylan cut the engine and stared down at the dismembered body of an X-Men action figure. The closer he studied it, the more it reminded him of the time, about ten years ago, when he’d just made homicide detective for the Los Angeles Police Department. He’d responded to an A.M. call on Skid Row, expecting to see a murdered transient. Instead, a bunch of beat cops stood around scratching their heads and staring at a torso sitting on a bench at a bus stop, no head or arms or legs, just the torso wearing a blue shirt, a tie, and a Brooks Brothers jacket. But seeing a torso in an expensive jacket on Skid Row wasn’t even the strangest part of the murder. Whoever had killed the man had also cut off his private organs. Dylan could understand getting rid of identifiable parts, but a guy’s jewels? That was plain cold-blooded. In the three years he’d remained in L.A., the case had never been solved, but he’d always figured the perpetrator had to be a woman.

“What was that?” Adam asked as he pointed to the mangled figure on the grass.

“I think it was your Wolverine.”

“His head’s chopped off.”

“Yep. How many times have I told you not to leave your toys around?”

“I didn’t. Wally did.”

There was probably a fifty-fifty chance that what Adam said was the truth. “Doesn’t matter. You’re responsible for your own stuff. Now pick up the pieces and throw them away.”

“Oh, man!” Adam complained as he scooped up the bits of plastic. “He was my favorite.”

Dylan watched his son stomp off before he restarted the mower. There were a lot of images he carried in his head that he would prefer to forget. The images still haunted him from time to time, but at least he no longer lived them. The biggest crime to hit Gospel since he’d been sheriff was the murder of Jeanne Bond by husband Hank. And while it had been unfortunate, it was one case in the past five years. Not one in the past five hours.

Dylan pushed the mower to the backyard and cut the grass around Adam’s swing set. His decision to move back to Gospel had almost been as easy as leaving. He’d left at the age of nineteen and attended a year and a half at UCLA before quitting to join the police academy. He’d been a twenty-one-year-old kid with ideas of catching the bad guys. Making the world safer. He’d turned in his badge ten years later, tired of the bad guys winning. He’d left Gospel a naive country boy with cowshit on his boots. He’d returned a lot older and a whole lot wiser. He’d returned with a much better appreciation for small towns and small-town people. Sure, everyone in Gospel owned a gun, but they weren’t shooting each other over the color of a bandanna.