Blackberry Winter. Cheryl Reavis

boy and girl stepped apart, but not before he kissed her lovingly on the forehead. Watching, Loran could almost feel the pressure of the lips that must be firm and warm on her own forehead.

      She abruptly looked in the direction Meyer had gone, wondering if that was his first name or his last. Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t be here long enough to call him anything.

      The unwelcome memory of Kent’s irate voice slid into her mind.

      Don’t answer the phone!

      How was she supposed to get through this? Maddie was the only person she had in the world. She couldn’t rely on Kent now, couldn’t have relied on him even if Celia hadn’t answered the telephone.

      She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Maddie and Loran. Two orphans in the storm as much as mother and child. Loran had always felt that they were survivors somehow, but she didn’t quite know of what. Life, she supposed. And single-parent family-hood—except that that had been much less of a disadvantage than most people wanted to believe. From the time Loran was very young, she had understood that she and her mother were a formidable unit. Not much taken individually, perhaps, but together there was nothing they couldn’t accomplish.

      It occurred to her suddenly that Maddie may have simply settled for their life together. She sat there, as surprised by the sudden, unbidden thought as if it had come from someone else. It was something she didn’t want to consider—that, for her sake, her mother might have let go of her own dreams. Loran had never asked her about it, and she wasn’t astute enough to guess. Or perhaps she had been too self-involved to make the attempt.

      She frowned slightly. She had no idea why Maddie wanted her to come here, and the last thing she needed was to discover that Maddie considered her life wasted.

      She looked toward the woods. Meyer was back. She saw him walking through the trees, but he didn’t come in her direction. Instead, he left the graveled path and went down the landscaped hill to get to the parking area without having to pass by the gazebo. She sat openly watching his progress and the strong and assured way he carried himself. She had no trouble believing that he’d been deployed somewhere. He had the military bearing and attitude. There was nothing tentative about him.

      He went directly to a truck, the same one the green garbage can had tumbled into, got inside and drove away, never once looking toward her.

      Her mouth still tasted of peppermint.

      CHAPTER 3

       M eyer waited on the church steps. It was warmer in the sun, but the wind was too cutting for him to stand out in the open for long. He stepped back into the alcove and glanced toward the sound of a backhoe digging a new grave in the cemetery across the road, all too aware that he could easily have ended up over there—and a lot sooner than later.

      There had to be at least five generations of valley people buried in that patch of ground, friends and enemies, relatives claimed and unclaimed, but he had no idea who they were digging this grave for. There had been a time when everyone in the valley would have known, and friends and neighbors would have dug the grave themselves with a pick and shovel. He could remember when it had still been done, and when people had brought the best food they’d had to offer and sat up all night with the homemade wooden coffin placed on sawhorses in the living room. There was a lot to be said for the kinship of it, for neighbors coming together in times of trouble and sadness. It was the main reason he’d returned to the valley—that and the fact that he belonged here and whatever he needed to be—friendly or standoffish or something in between—he could be, and no one would hold it against him. Unfortunately, he had returned just in time to see that sense of community die away. He didn’t know half the people who lived around here anymore.

      It occurred to him that the two new guests at Lilac Hill might be friends or relatives of whoever had died—which would explain the younger woman crying after her phone call. It hadn’t looked like grief to him, though. It had looked more like “significant other” or husband trouble.

      Significant other, he decided, because she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

      It surprised him a little that he found her…interesting. He hadn’t been interested in much for a long time. And it wasn’t just that she was self-assured and attractive and drove an expensive vehicle. Caught crying, she’d still had the presence of mind to conclude that he was an idiot for bothering her and react accordingly—but she wasn’t rigid about it. She’d revised her initial opinion of him once she’d understood that he only meant to help. He liked women like that—feisty, but still reasonable. He also liked the fact that she didn’t seem to be all that aware that everything she had was working for her. Or maybe she just didn’t waste such an obvious advantage on the help unless she wanted something.

      In any event, she was obviously rich and she was definitely good-looking. She was also about as unhappy as he’d first thought, even before he’d seen her crying on the gazebo steps. He didn’t like having to witness a woman’s sadness. It reminded him too much of the things he was trying so hard to forget. He had seen enough sadness when he’d been in the army. All over the world. That relentless kind of sorrow that beat a woman down until she couldn’t hide it no matter how hard she tried. Hundreds of them. It lived inside them and looked out of their eyes.

      The image of an altogether different woman’s face suddenly rose in his mind, and he had to work hard to push it away and force his thoughts back to the present. Whatever was going on with the Lilac Hill guests had nothing to do with him, and he had too many things on the concerns list already. Things like not sleeping night after night and not being able to find enough work to make ends meet. He had told the younger woman that everything was going to be all right. He shouldn’t have done that. He certainly didn’t believe it. Whatever optimism he’d once had had desiccated in a foreign desert. Nobody knew any better than he did that good deeds never go unpunished.

      Which should have kept him from hanging around the church steps now.

      He walked to the double doors of the church, expecting them to be locked. They were, but he thought not for long. If there was a funeral on the church schedule, then Estelle Garth would be arriving soon for one of her white-glove inspections. If it was possible for any one human being to own a house of worship, then Estelle Garth owned this one. She lived halfway up the hill just beyond the church, where she could see everything. Nothing happened on the premises night or day that she didn’t know about, and he expected that sooner or later she’d see him down here.

      Estelle didn’t like him. As a boy, he’d spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to stay out of her crosshairs. At first, he’d thought it was because he’d lived in Chicago with his parents before they’d died, and those years had somehow canceled out the fact that he was a Conley and he’d been born here. Somehow, his brief absence had turned him into an outsider, and everybody knew how Estelle felt about them.

      By the time he was ten or eleven it had gotten so bad that he’d had no alternative but to ask his great-aunt Nelda about it—and she hadn’t been nearly as helpful as he’d hoped.

      “I reckon everybody’s got their cross to bear, Meyer, and she’s yourn,” she’d said.

      He owed Nelda a lot, and he wanted to accept her simple philosophy of life, but he couldn’t do it, regardless of the fact that he was the pitiful homeless orphan none of his other relatives wanted. He must have lived in a dozen foster homes before Nelda stepped up to claim him and bring him home to the mountains again. By the time he came to live with her, he’d already had plenty of crosses to bear and the last thing he needed was Estelle Garth throwing another one on the pile. So he kept after Nelda. He needed a real reason, so he could deal with it.

      “Maybe she thinks you done something,” Nelda said finally.

      “If she thought that, she’d come to you about it—or she’d make the preacher do it. I’ve not done anything, Nelda. I swear it!”

      “It…might not be you, Meyer.”

      “Well, who then? She’s after me all the time—accusing me