July Thunder. Rachel Lee

Earl’s smile suggested doubt, but he wasn’t going to say so. “I wanted to ask you…. Didn’t you say your dad was a minister?”

      Sam wondered which of his drunken binges had caused those words to tumble out of his mouth. He never talked about his family, made a policy of pretending he had none. Which he didn’t, not really. But more than once in the last few years he’d gotten in a mood and drowned his sorrows in beer, and he had probably babbled unwisely.

      He didn’t drink like that anymore. A sign of healing, maybe, or a sign of despair. He didn’t know which. Something inside him had begun a painful dying when Beth was killed, and maybe it had finally given up the ghost, leaving him dead inside. Which was fine with him. Feelings weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

      “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “Why?”

      Earl shrugged, but the sharpness of his gaze belied his seeming indifference. “There’s a new minister over at The Little Church in the Woods. He arrived in town yesterday. I wondered, because his name is Elijah Canfield.”

      Elijah Canfield. Recognition hit Sam like an explosion in his head, and for an instant he couldn’t even see. And he had thought he was dead?

      Life poured into him, painful life, with an anger so pure it burned in him like a white flame, with a hurt so deep it filled his gut with molten lead. Holding himself in became a nearly impossible act of will.

      He could barely see Earl’s face. Between clenched teeth, he said, “He’s my father.”

      Then he turned and walked out of the station, his limbs as stiff as ice.

      In his patrol car, he sat for long minutes trying to calm himself. Nothing had changed, he told himself. The old bastard was just closer than he had been before. It didn’t make any difference. Elijah would still treat his son as dead, and Sam would continue to ignore the existence of his father. They might see each other on the street or in a store from time to time, but what would that change?

      Walls of ice could be opaque. Elijah had built those walls block by block, and finally, when the anguish surpassed bearing, Sam had sprayed water over them, sealing even the tiniest chink. The anger that burned in him now was dangerous because it might melt that wall.

      He couldn’t allow that. By sheer force of will, he tamped it down. Ice. He had to maintain the ice. It was the only protection he had.

      Mary McKinney was driving to the store for her week’s groceries, puttering along Main Street, thinking about nothing in particular. She was good at that when she didn’t have something to occupy both her hands and her mind. Often she wasn’t quite sure where she drifted to, but things popped in and out of her head. Safe things. Simple things. Like whether she should drive down to Denver to visit her aunt this weekend.

      The cat darted out from between two cars, directly into her path. It was as if time slowed down and her entire universe suddenly focused on that cat. Orange, tiger-striped. Big. Ratty looking. And right behind it there would be a little boy. She could almost see the dark top of his head as he ran after the cat.

      She jammed on her brakes, tires squealing. An instant later there was a loud crunch and she was slammed back in her seat, her head banging against the headrest.

      The cat paused to look at her, then darted away across the street. The little boy—oh, God, there was no little boy. She started to shake, her hands so tight on the steering wheel that it shook with her.

      Deputy Sam Canfield was suddenly beside her, looking in the passenger window. “Mary? Mary, are you okay?”

      Still shaking, she turned her head, speaking through stiff, bloodless lips. “The little boy…”

      “What little boy?”

      “Did I hit him?”

      His rugged face changed. At once he straightened and walked around to the front of her car. There were some passersby standing there, and they spoke with Sam, but Mary couldn’t hear what they said. Her mind was spiraling downward into a dark, terrible place, a place she couldn’t let herself go again.

      “Mary?” Sam was back, leaning down to her, his face now concerned. “Mary, there’s no little boy. You didn’t hit anything. Nobody saw a little boy. Just a cat.”

      “Oh, God…” Tremors shook her so hard that her teeth chattered. No little boy. No little boy. The words whirled around in her head, almost incomprehensible. She’d seen…no, she hadn’t seen. She hadn’t really. She’d just expected to see.

      “Mary, are you okay?”

      Licking her dry lips, she made herself look at him again. “I’m fine,” she managed to say. “Just shaken.”

      “You got rear-ended pretty hard. Can you put the car in neutral? I want to push you over to the curb.”

      She nodded and reached for the stick shift. The car had stalled when she jammed on the brakes, and she didn’t try to start it. Sam opened the driver’s door and leaned against the post, pushing the car with deceptive ease to the curb just ahead. Mary managed to steer, even though her hands felt welded to the wheel.

      “There,” he said, when the car bumped gently against the curb. “Set the brake and take it easy.”

      But her tremors were easing somewhat, and she couldn’t just sit in the car and think. She needed to be active. Immediately. Before the pit swallowed her again. Climbing out, she stood on rubbery knees and looked at the vehicle that had hit her.

      It was a pickup truck that had probably been young about the time Elvis had been in the Army. It was driven by an eighteen-year-old boy who was claiming the Subaru had stopped too soon.

      Mary recognized him. He’d been one of her students last year in senior English class. He was a good student and pretty much a good kid, she thought. Just careless, the way many of his age group were.

      “It wasn’t my fault,” Jim Wysocki said. “Honest it wasn’t, Deputy Canfield. She shouldn’t have stopped there.”

      Sam wasn’t looking too forgiving, Mary noticed. That surprised her, and she clung to the surprise, because it kept her from thinking about anything else. Still feeling wobbly, she walked to where they were standing between the vehicles. Cars eased past them, people craning their necks to look.

      Oh, God. The pit of memory yawned, opened by the familiarity of the scene. Mary leaned against the side of her car, looking down at her crumpled rear fender without seeing it. No sirens, she told herself. There were no sirens. Nobody was hurt. Nobody.

      But nightmare images hovered at the edges of her mind like the fluttering black wings of bats, waiting to pounce. She closed her eyes and bit her lip until it hurt, then tasted blood. “It was my fault,” she heard herself say hoarsely. She didn’t know whether she spoke to the memories or to the present.

      “Like hell it was,” Sam snapped.

      It was such a shock to hear the mild-mannered Sam Canfield bark that Mary was shocked out of her memories. “Sam?” she said questioningly. She didn’t know him that well; he liked to keep to himself. But she’d come to think of him as a gentle, kind man, albeit withdrawn and sorrowful.

      But Sam didn’t seem to hear her. He jabbed his finger at Jim Wysocki. “You’ve had two speeding tickets just this year. You’re hell-bent on getting yourself or somebody else killed.”

      Mary’s instinct was to protect Jim, her student, barely more than a child. “Sam, please. I did stop suddenly.”

      Sam shook his head, his gray eyes as frigid as the tundra. “If he hadn’t been following too close, he wouldn’t have rammed you. Careless driving, that’s what it was. At a higher speed, he could have killed you.”

      His gaze swung back to Jim, who had stopped protesting. The young man’s head drooped. “I’m sorry.”

      “Sorry ain’t good enough,” Sam snapped again.