Evidence of Life. Barbara Sissel Taylor

be back on Sunday.” Lindsey settled into the front seat. “Unless we’ve starved to death from Daddy’s cooking.”

      “I’ll make a big dinner, barbequed chicken and corn on the cob. Chocolate cake for dessert. How’s that sound?”

      “I just hope I’m not too weak to eat it.”

      “I think you’ll survive,” Abby said. She looked at Nick over the hood. “Don’t be mad because of what I said about Lindsey driving, okay? I didn’t mean anything.”

      “She has to learn, Abby, and it’s best if one of us is with her.”

      “I’m glad it’s you.” Abby meant it. Nick’s nerves were steadier. She went around to him. “I hope you can relax and have some fun.”

      “Yeah, me, too.”

      She wanted his gaze and touched his wrist. “Nick?”

      “We should probably talk when I get home.”

      “About?”

      “Things. Us. You know. Isn’t that what you’re always saying, that I should be more open with you?”

      “Yes, but—” What’s wrong? She bit her lip to stop herself from asking.

      “Thanks for making the French toast.” His eyes on hers were somber.

      “Sure, of course. I was glad to. You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

      Instead of answering, he cradled her face in his hands and kissed her, and his kiss was so gentle and tender, and so filled with something she couldn’t define. Later she would think it was regret she felt coming from him, maybe even remorse. But then she’d wonder if she’d read too much into it, if her sense of that had been created in hindsight.

      He touched her temple, brushed the loose wisps of hair from her forehead. “I don’t want you to worry. We’ll be fine, okay?” His look was complicated, searching.

      “Okay,” she said, and she might have questioned him then, but he left her and got into the car too quickly. They reached the end of the driveway, Lindsey waved, and they were gone.

      Chapter 2

      The first time Abby had visited the Texas Hill Country was during the summer after third grade when she went to camp, the year she turned nine. Her mother got the idea from a magazine article that said a summer camp experience could boost a child’s self-confidence and help them feel more independent. But the psychology behind it wasn’t how she convinced Abby to go. No. What Abby’s mother did was to invite Kate Connelly, Abby’s best friend, to join her. The girls didn’t know it—Kate still didn’t—but Abby’s mother paid Kate’s way.

      Camp Many Waters—Many Manures, the girls had dubbed it that first year screaming with laughter—was on the Guadalupe River, near Kerrville. Kate loved it from the first day. Abby struggled with homesickness but not after their first year. Camp was where they learned to swim and ride horses and do the Cotton-Eyed Joe. Camp was where they napped together in a salt-sweat tangle of limbs in a hammock strung between a couple of ancient live oaks.

      The rest of the year they lived a block apart in the same Houston neighborhood and shared almost the same birthday. Kate was older and never minded saying so until they hit thirty. They’d been in most of each other’s classes through school and went on to start college together. Mr. Tuttle at Tuttle’s Rexall Drugs two streets over from theirs, where they’d bought Jujubes and Superwoman comic books and then their first lipsticks together, had labeled them the Stardust Twins. But where Abby’s childhood had been predictable and sure, Kate’s had been uneasy; it had wounded her in an unreachable way, like a too-deeply buried splinter. Camp in the Hill Country had been her escape, the one place where every hour was wholly welcome.

      So it didn’t surprise Abby that when they were grown and married, Kate went there to live. She said there was just something about that part of Texas. She could never define it. Neither could Abby. But then people had been flocking to the Hill Country since pioneer days, and most came away at a loss to describe what set it apart, what made it so special.

      But there was one thing everyone did agree on, one thing for sure: It was dry.

      Unlike Houston, where Kate and Abby had grown up, where the land began a flattened, flood-prone slide into Galveston Bay, the Hill Country region, near the center of the state, encompassed miles and miles of rumpled, rough-dried terrain. It had been submerged once, eons ago, beneath a shallow, urchin-filled, inland sea, but then the sea leaked out and left behind the skeletal remains of countless marine animals in layers like cake.

      That’s when the soil became stony and dry.

      So dry you could scarcely scratch it with your fingernails.

      There were the rare exceptions, the record-making torrential downpours, like the one Nick was driving Lindsey straight into at that very moment. Of course he wouldn’t know that for a while yet. He was still in the vicinity of home, having just cleared the outskirts of Hardys Walk, where he and Abby had lived since Jake was a toddler. He was a shade over an hour’s drive north of Houston, and the clouds drifting here in this piece of Texas sky were small and as white and innocent as dandelion fluff. Abby noticed them, but only subliminally, as she made her way into the barn to freshen the stalls.

      Her mind was still on Nick, her sense of his unhappiness. She was thinking how he used to help care for the horses. He used to ride nearly every day after work, too. Often he and Lindsey had ridden together. Now Abby couldn’t remember the last time he’d done anything with the horses other than complain about the feed and vet bills—which were enormous, Abby had to admit. He was always ranting about expenses, though. The way they lived wasn’t extravagant, but it wasn’t cheap either, what with taxes and upkeep on the house and property, never mind the kids and cars and college. Abby leaned on her rake. It had been her idea to move out here, to the Land of Nod, as her mother called it, and she’d never regretted it. But maybe Nick had. More than she realized. The commute alone was a nightmare, and traffic got heavier every year. On the occasions when she made the drive herself, she always wondered how he stood it.

      Abby led Miss Havisham and their other mare Delilah back into their stalls, filled their feed and water troughs and walked back to the house. At the foot of the porch stairs, she slipped out of her wellies, grabbing the porch rail to balance herself. She’d forgotten it was loose and sat down hard when it gave underneath her. Sat looking at nothing, thinking how Nick had once tended to every little chore on the place, but now his mind was elsewhere. She pushed herself up off the ground. Where was elsewhere?

      Later on, she switched on the television to the Weather Channel, but there was only a string of commercials and she cut the set off. She wouldn’t go near the TV again until Saturday when the flooding in the Hill Country would be approaching near-epic proportions. It would seem unbelievable to her that she hadn’t paid the slightest attention. She would wonder what she’d been thinking, doing...with her delightful alone time. She was sitting at the kitchen table poring over a seed catalogue when Lindsey called Saturday evening on her cell phone to say they were in Boerne.

      “Boerne?” Abby repeated. She went out the front door onto the wide porch and sat on the swing, nudging it into motion with her toe. Boerne was northwest of San Antonio. The campground, on the Guadalupe River, where they ordinarily went when they didn’t stay with Kate and George, was farther west.

      “What are you doing in Boerne?” Abby asked. “Is the weather bad?”

      “We spent last night in San Antonio. Dad says we’re taking the scenic route.”

      “The scenic route? What does that mean?” There was a pause, one so long that Abby had time to think: How weird. To think: Nick never takes the scenic route.

      “Mommy? I have to tell you—” Now Lindsey’s voice broke with tears or static. In all the awful months that followed, Abby would never be able to decide.

      “It’s