Cornered In Conard County. Rachel Lee

heard Dory behind him telling Flash to stay. The dog needed to learn his new home. He figured Dory was going to make it easy on him.

      As he climbed into his vehicle with Dasher in the cage behind him, he realized something. Betty unintentionally had painted Dory unfairly. She might not be prepared to trust people and allow them within her circle; she might be scared to death of her brother’s imminent release from prison; she might be haunted by terrible nightmares.

      But Dory had grit. Real inner strength.

      He liked her. He respected her. And he needed to watch his step, because he sure as hell didn’t ever want to make another woman miserable.

      * * *

      DORY AND FLASH regarded each other in the kitchen. She’d removed his leash, but he sat there staring up at her as if he were pleading.

      She tapped the piece of paper Cadell had given her. “It says here you don’t get supper for another two hours.”

      Flash lowered his head a bit.

      Feeling like the wicked witch, Dory scanned the paper again. “But you can have your dental chew. What the heck is that?”

      She looked at the heap of supplies in one corner of her kitchen, then rose to look through it. She discovered a plastic bag behind the huge bag of food. In it was a nubby nylon or plastic bone of some kind. Unzipping the bag, she pulled it out and turned to hold it out to Flash. “Is this what you want?”

      He stared at it and licked his lips.

      There could be a minor problem with a dog so well trained, she thought. Was he just going to sit there like a statue or let her know what he wanted? “Take it, Flash,” she said finally in desperation.

      He apparently understood that. In one leap he reached the bone and took it from her hand with amazing delicacy before settling down to gnaw on it.

      “Well, cool,” she said. “We have communication!”

      Flash barely glanced at her. Almost grinning, she sat down at the table to read the directions from Cadell more carefully. From the other room she heard her email dinging, but she ignored it. Flash was more important.

      She nearly giggled when she read what Cadell had typed at the top of the page: The care and feeding of your personal K-9. She wondered if he gave that to all his trainees.

      Flash looked up at her, forgetting his bone for a few seconds as he wagged his tail at her. He seemed so happy right now, it was impossible not to feel the same.

      * * *

      LATER, AFTER SHE had caught up on email and reopened her participation in the project, she felt a nose gently prod her thigh. A glance at the clock told her it was after eleven...and she hadn’t walked Flash since he arrived.

      She put her conference on hold, explaining she needed to walk her dog. Hoping she didn’t get the slew of jokes she half expected, she found Flash’s leash. The dog gave one joyful bark, then stood perfectly still while she hooked it to his collar.

      That was when it struck her how late it was. Ordinarily she worked well into the night, but before she hadn’t been afraid of anything. Now she was afraid. Her brother might already be out of prison. They’d given her the exact date, but she’d run the letter through the shredder as soon as the shock had passed. She wanted nothing with his name on it.

      So today. Maybe tomorrow, but most probably today. Betty knew for sure because Dory had told her, but it was too late to call and verify it.

      Point was...she was suddenly frightened of the night and its secrets, a fear she hadn’t felt in a long time.

      She looked at Flash and saw him watching her, not a muscle twitching. He must have felt her abrupt burst of dread.

      “I shouldn’t be silly about this,” she said aloud, not entirely believing herself. “I have you, after all.”

      The slightest wag of Flash’s tail. God, the dog seemed to be reading her like an open book. Could he do that?

      “I promised to take good care of you. I’m sorry I didn’t walk you sooner, but do you think you could manage with just a short trip to the backyard?”

      He looked agreeable, but he probably didn’t understand a word of her prattle. God, she had grown so completely unnerved for no good reason. George, even if he wanted to find her, couldn’t have located her yet. She hadn’t even needed to leave a forwarding address, because she paid all her bills online and the rest was junk. She’d established no real connections here yet except the broadband and that didn’t have her full name on it. She was truly off the grid as far as the world was concerned.

      She would be very hard to find, she assured herself as she began to walk toward the back door. “Flash, heel,” she said quietly, and he walked right beside her.

      Besides, she had a guard dog. Flash would make George’s life hell. So she was safe, yeah?

      She just wished she could believe it.

      The night beyond the door felt pregnant with threat. But it was the same backyard that had been there when she rented the place. With a locked six-foot wooden privacy fence around it. She’d know if anybody tried to get past that.

      And there was Flash, of course. Oddly, however, as impressed as she was by the dog, she didn’t know if she was prepared to put her life in his paws.

      God, she was losing it. Stiffening her back, she pulled the door open and let herself out with the dog. Should she unleash him?

      But Flash seemed to be reading the situation well. As soon as they reached grass near a shrub, he did his business, then turned around to face the house again. He sensed she wanted to get back behind locked doors.

      Tonight she was in no mood to disagree, or to even try to reason through her probably unreasonable fear. Just get back inside and give Flash a treat. Tomorrow in the daylight she could give him a longer walk, even work with him.

      But not tonight. She felt as if evil lurked out there, and she didn’t want to find out if she was right.

      * * *

      GEORGE NEEDED MONEY to travel. Everything else was on hold until he had more than the pittance he’d received at his release late that afternoon, fourteen hours earlier than he’d expected. But then, he’d been a model prisoner, and he noticed they’d dated the paperwork for the next morning.

      But he didn’t have enough money to travel on or eat while he figured out exactly how he was going to deal with Dory. The bus ticket they’d given him was nonrefundable, meant only to take him back to the place where he’d originally lived—a small suburb of Saint Louis.

      He’d been given the address of a halfway house, so he went there, arriving late at night, and resigned himself to spending some time figuring out how to get his hands on some money quickly. He sure as hell didn’t intend to work any of the low-paying menial jobs they probably would point him to. He had bigger things to hunt.

      Even though it was late, with his release papers he got inside the door. They showed him to a bedroom and didn’t seem particularly worried that he asked to use a computer. The residents had one in a public room downstairs. Help himself.

      So he did. He was too keyed up to just go to sleep. He’d dozed on the bus anyway. The only thing about this that shocked him was his surprising discomfort at not being surrounded by walls when he’d walked from the bus to this place. Not having his every movement watched or directed.

      He’d never imagined the world could feel so big, and he suspected that once tomorrow began and life resumed out there, it was going to overwhelm him with chaos. He wasn’t used to chaos anymore. The order of his days had become deeply embedded over twenty-five years.

      But so had sitting at a computer and hunting for information about his sister. She had vanished from the town where she had grown up. She was reputed to be a partner in a graphics business that had no address other than a web URL and email. The godparents who had raised her