Silent Pledge. Hannah Alexander

sooner. Not that she got mad anymore when that happened, but ever since the arson and the hospital explosion last fall, Kendra was scared. Which was understandable—her fireman father had been killed a year and a half ago in the line of duty. Kendra said she knew that would happen to Buck someday, too.

      He went into the kitchen. Kendra wasn’t there, but the door to the back porch stood wide open. Icy January wind blew in, nipping at the bare skin of his chest and shoulders. He stepped to the screen door and looked out, curling his toes up from the cold linoleum.

      “Kendra?”

      Quiet. Had she gone out again? He fought back the memory of two months ago when he woke up at 1:00 a.m. to find her coming through this very back door, a sweater slung over her arm, her makeup smeared, and the sound of a car motor heading off down the street. She’d acted high on something—not booze, but something. And, man, did they ever have it out that night!

      Now he was hearing a car again…the sound of a motor, its chug-chug-chug reaching him through the dark. Music drifted faintly through the icy air. He felt the familiar pain rip through him.

      Was she doing it again? After all he’d done for her, didn’t she even love him enough to be true?

      He let out a deep breath and watched the white puff drift from his mouth. The air was as cold as he felt inside. How much was a man supposed to take?

      Kendra’s mood swings were getting worse. If she wasn’t hiding out at home crying, she was laughing too loudly and flirting with all the guys down at the fire station, going to shows in Branson with her girlfriends, and buying things he couldn’t afford on his fireman’s salary, like lots of jewelry and expensive clothes. There was no middle ground.

      He pushed the screen door open and stepped on the back porch, bracing himself in case she came walking in drunk, or maybe even with another guy.

      He still heard the car motor idling, but the sound didn’t come from the road. And he recognized that idle. With a deepening frown, he looked toward the small garage where Kendra kept her five-year-old Ford Taurus. The music was clearer now. Clint Black. Kendra’s favorite. The doors were all shut.

      But that was stupid. She knew better than to leave the motor running.

      “No,” he whispered, then more loudly, “Kendra, no!” He reached inside and flipped on the porch light, then turned and raced down the wooden back steps and across the grass to the side entrance to the garage. Through the windowpane he could see the glow of the car’s interior light, but he couldn’t see around the shelving by the door to tell where she was.

      He grasped the knob and tried to turn it, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kendra!” He banged on the pane. “Open up! What’re you doing in there?”

      No answer. And she had the only key to the garage—she’d lost the spare one last month.

      Buck bent over and grabbed a broken piece of amethyst crystal about the size of his fist from Kendra’s rock garden. He swung the chunk of rock against one of the windowpanes and shattered the glass, avoiding the shards that flew in every direction.

      He reached in and unlocked the door from the inside, then shoved his way into the garage. “Kendra!”

      His worst nightmare came true as he caught sight of her golden-brown hair splayed across the backseat, the car door open, her pale skin illumined by the overhead light in the car. The heavy fumes tried to drive him backward.

      Choking, eyes tearing, he rushed over and knelt beside her still body. He touched her face, her neck, felt for a pulse, and raised her eyelids to check her pupils. She groaned. She was still alive!

      Gagging from the filthy air, Buck reached between the bucket seats in front and switched off the motor, then gathered his wife in his arms. He had to get her to help fast.

      Delphi Bell peered out the small front window of the cluttered living room and saw her husband’s hunched, brooding form on the porch steps, silhouetted by the moon. All he had on was an old pair of holey jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the right sleeve. Like a fifties greaser—dirty, stringy hair falling down over his forehead and into his eyes.

      He might freeze to death. A girl could always hope….

      She saw the glowing tip of a cigarette, then saw his shadow move as he turned and looked at the window. She knew he saw her, and she stepped backward fast.

      He’d been like that all night, quiet and glaring. She got scared when he acted like this. Sometimes the air around him seemed dark, just like it got outside before a bad storm that tore trees up by their roots and blew the shutters off houses. And he didn’t even drink much anymore. He wasn’t drinking tonight, but that didn’t make much difference, not since he got out of the hospital. And that whole thing had been her fault. He kept reminding her of that.

      She thought of the duffel bag under her side of the bed. Inside were a jacket and sweater, and she’d been saving her tips from her job.

      A thump on the porch startled her just before the knob turned and the door swung around and crashed into the side of the coffee table. Delphi cried out and jumped backward.

      Abner loomed in the threshold. “What’s the matter with you?”

      She hunched forward with her arms over her chest, afraid to breathe. She shook her head.

      He looked around the front room, and his face twisted in disgust as he stepped in and allowed the cold air from outside to swirl around him. “Why don’t you get busy, then? What a pigsty. Get me some food.” He kicked a pile of dirty clothes out into the center of the floor and got his foot tangled in one of Delphi’s two pairs of jeans. “What’s this stuff doing in here? Can’t you do anything right?” He grabbed up a handful of clothes and slung them across the room, then turned on her again, arms out to his sides like a fullback getting ready to block a move.

      “I…I been working, Abner,” she sputtered, averting her gaze from those devil’s eyes she saw more and more often lately.

      “So’ve I!” He swung around and slammed the door shut, looked over his shoulder at her and gave her an evil leer, then deliberately snapped the door lock.

      Delphi’s thoughts scrambled. That was what he did the last time, just before she ran to her so-called friends from work and begged them to take her in. He’d smacked her a good one then, cut her lip and blackened her eye and nearly broke her arm before she could get away. And they’d turned her back over to him as if she were some annoying stray dog they didn’t want around.

      “Come ’ere,” he muttered, pointing to a spot on the floor in front of him.

      She took a step backward.

      His expression didn’t change. “I said come ’ere.”

      Delphi thought again about the duffel bag beneath her bed. She would take it after he went to bed—if he went to bed tonight; sometimes he didn’t when he got like this—and then she would head to another town and never come back.

      “You been talkin’ to that Richmond doctor, haven’t you?” His voice deepened and his words slurred, though there was no smell of booze. “Dr. Mercy,” he mocked in a singsong voice. “She been telling you to leave me again?”

      Delphi knew the surprise showed on her face before she could stop it. She’d run into Dr. Mercy at the store the other day, and they’d talked a few minutes.

      Abner snorted, his lips pulled back in a snarl, and his yellow-brown eyes gleamed with a crazy light. “She don’t know nothin’! She know you’re the one who banged my head into the garage floor last fall?”

      “Yes.” Delphi felt that rush of guilt she got every time he reminded her of what she’d done. He’d been drunk and yelling at her and hitting her. When he fell and passed out, she’d tried to make sure he’d passed out for good. She couldn’t help herself. But he was smart. Or at least tricky. Maybe he hadn’t really been passed out at first. Maybe he’d been