he room was stifling, but she lay on the bed wrapped in Dash's old sheepskin coat. Beneath it her nylons stuck to her legs and the black dress she had worn to the funeral was soaked with perspiration. She kept her face buried in the collar of the coat. It held his scent.

Sweaty tendrils of hair clung to the back of her neck, but she didn't notice. Liz had come and gone, bringing a plate of food that Honey couldn't eat and trying to talk her into staying at the beach house for a few weeks so she wouldn't be alone. But Honey wanted to be alone so she could find Dash.

She curled tighter into the coat, her eyes pressed closed. Talk to me, Dash. Let me feel you. Please, please let me feel you so I know you 're not gone. She tried to make her mind go blank so Dash could reach her, but a terror so black she wanted to scream swept through her. Her mouth opened against the soft collar.

She wasn't aware that someone had come into the bedroom until she felt the mattress sag next to her. She wanted to strike out at all of them and make them leave her alone. They had no right to intrude on her privacy like this.

"Honey?" Meredith spoke her name and then began to cry. "I—I want to ask you to forgive me. I've been hateful and jealous and vindictive. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't stop myself. All I—All I ever wanted was for Daddy to love me, but he loved you instead."

Honey didn't want Meredith's confidences, and she had no comfort to give. She pushed herself up on the bed and sat on the edge with her back to Meredith. She clutched the lapels of Dash's sheepskin jacket around her. "He loved you, too." She spoke woodenly, knowing she had to say the words. "You were his daughter, and he never forgot that."

"I—I was so hateful to you. So jealous."

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters."

"I know Daddy is at peace and we should be giving praise instead of grieving, but I can't help it."

Honey said nothing. What did Meredith know of a love so strong that it was as fundamental as oxygen? All of Meredith's emotions were directed safely toward heaven. Honey willed herself to disappear inside Dash's jacket until Meredith left.

"Could you—Could you forgive me, Honey?"

"Yes," Honey replied automatically. "I forgive you."

The door opened and she heard Wanda's voice. "Meredith, your brother's leaving. You need to come and say good-bye."

The mattress moved as Meredith rose. "Good-bye, Honey. I'm—I'm sorry."

"Good-bye, Meredith."

The door shut. Honey rose from the side of the bed, but as she turned toward the window, she saw that she still wasn't alone. Wanda stood watching her. Her eyes were red with weeping, her sprayed blond bubble flattened on one side. At the funeral she had carried on as if she were the widow instead of Honey.

She dabbed at her eyes and sniffed. "Meredith's been jealous of you from the first time she saw you and Randy on TV. He wasn't much of a father to her—I guess you know about that—and watching the two of you being so close was like an open wound to her."

"It doesn't matter now."

Wanda's perfume bore the heavy scent of carnations. Or maybe it wasn't her perfume. Maybe Honey was smelling the overpowering scent of all the funeral floral arrangements.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" Wanda asked.

"Make everybody go away," Honey replied dully. "That's all I want."

Wanda nodded and moved to the door where she blew her nose, then spoke briskly. "I wish you well, Honey. I admit I didn't think Randy should have married you. But all of his ex-wives were at that funeral today, and the three of us together never gave him as much happiness as you did in a single day."

Dimly, Honey realized that it had taken a generosity of spirit for Wanda to make that statement, but she only wanted to be rid of her so she could lie down on the bed again and close her eyes and try to reach Dash. She had to find him. If she couldn't find him, she would die herself.

Wanda left, and within an hour, the rest of the guests were gone, too. As night fell, Honey walked aimlessly through the house in her stockinged feet. His coat hung so long on her that when she slipped her hands into the pockets, her fingers couldn't touch bottom. Eventually, she curled up in the big green leather chair where he used to sit watching television.

The man who had murdered Dash was an addict out on parole. He'd been killed in a gun battle with the police several hours after Dash had died. Everybody seemed to think she should feel better because Dash's murderer was dead, but revenge meant nothing to her. It couldn't bring Dash back.

She must have dozed because when she awakened it was past two in the morning. She went into the kitchen and began aimlessly opening cupboard doors. His favorite coffee mug sat on the shelf; an open pack of his spearmint LifeSavers lay by the sugar bowl waiting for him. She walked into their bathroom and saw his toothbrush in a blue china holder on the counter. She rubbed her thumb over the bone-dry bristles and then slipped it into her pocket. On her way out of the bedroom, she extracted a pair of his socks from the laundry hamper and put them in the other pocket.

There was no moon overhead when she went outside, only the faint glow from the light bulb above the door of the stables. As she crossed the yard toward the paddock, the stones tore holes in the feet of her nylons, but she paid no attention. She made her way to the fence where they had stood together so many times.

She waited and waited.

Finally, her legs gave out and she sank down into the dirt. She pulled his toothbrush from one pocket and his socks from the other. They formed a warm damp ball in her hand. Tears wet her cheeks as the silence suffocated her.

She slipped his toothbrush into her mouth and sucked on it.

As the weeks passed she grew thin and frail. Occasionally she remembered to eat, more frequently she didn't. She slept at odd times and in short snatches, sometimes in his chair, sometimes in their bed with an article of his clothing pressed to her cheek. She felt as if she had been tipped over and emptied of every emotion except despair.

The newspapers had relentlessly chronicled Dash's death, and helicopters hired by the paparazzi buzzed the ranch for a photograph of the grieving widow, so she spent most of her time inside the house. Ironically, Dash's death had given their marriage a posthumous respectability, and instead of being the butt of everyone's jokes Dash was a martyred hero, while her name was spoken with respect.

Newspaper articles described her as brave and courageous. Arthur Lockwood drove to the ranch to tell her he was being plagued with requests to interview her and that several important producers wanted to cast her in their next pictures. She stared at him blankly, unable to understand.

Liz began tormenting her with healthy casseroles, vitamins, and unwanted advice. Chantal and Gordon appeared to plea for money. Her hair began to fall out, but she barely noticed.

One afternoon early in August, three months after Dash's death, she was maneuvering the narrow canyon road coming back from a visit with Dash's attorney when she realized how easy it would be to take one of the bends too wide. With a quick press on the accelerator, she could fly through the guardrail and crash into the canyon. The car would roll, then become a blazing fireball incinerating all her pain.

Her hands trembled as they clutched the steering wheel. The burden of pain had grown too crushing, and she simply couldn't bear it any longer. No one would care very much if she died. Liz would be upset, but she had a full, busy life and she would soon forget. Chantal would cry at her funeral, but Chantal's tears were cheap; she wouldn't cry much harder than she did when one of her soap opera characters died. When people didn't have a real family, they could pretty much die unmourned.

Family.

It was all she had ever wanted. A person who would love her without condition. A person she could love back with all her heart.

A sob racked her body. She missed him so much. He had been her lover, her father, her child, the center of everything good in her life. She missed his touch and scent. She missed the way he swore, the sound of his footsteps crossing the floor, the scrape of his whiskers against her cheek. She missed the way he turned the newspaper inside out so that she could never find the front page, the sounds of Sooners games blaring from the television. She missed his daily rituals of shaving and showering, the abandoned towels and underwear that never quite hit the hamper. She missed all the flotsam and jetsam that had been part of Dash Coogan.

Through the blur of tears, she watched as the needle on the speedometer edged upward. The tires squealed as she careened around a curve. A push on the accelerator, a twist of her hands, and all the pain would be gone.

Unbidden, the memory of a young girl with chewed hair and worn-down flip-flops came back to her from another lifetime. As the speedometer inched higher, she wondered what had happened to that fierce little sixteen-year-old who had believed anything was possible. Where was the child who had taken off across America in a battered pickup truck with only guts to keep her going? She could no longer remember what that kind of courage felt like. She could no longer remember the child she had been.

Find her, a voice inside her head whispered. Find that little girl.

Gradually, her foot eased on the accelerator, not from any renewed desire to live, but simply because she was too tired to maintain the pressure.

Find her, the voice repeated.

Why not? she thought dully. The only thing she had better to do was die.

Ten days later the humid South Carolina heat consumed her as she stepped out of her air-conditioned Blazer onto the crumbling asphalt parking lot of the Silver Lake Amusement Park. Knee-high weeds grew through the gaping holes in the pavement and rust-streaked concrete obelisks showed where light posts had once been mounted. Her legs were rubbery. She had been on the road for several days, stopping at odd times to check into a motel and sleep for a few hours before she drove on. Now she was exhausted to the very marrow of her bones.

She squinted dispiritedly into the blazing sun and gazed at the boarded-up park entrance. She had owned the park for years, but she had never done anything with it. At first she simply hadn't had enough time to manage both her career and the park. After she'd married Dash, she'd had time, but not the money.

The roof on the ticket booth had collapsed and the flamingo-pink paint on the six stucco gate pillars was peeled and dirty. Over the entrance the letters on the sign that dangled crookedly were barely visible.

S lver Lak Amusem Par Home of th Legendar Bl ck Thu der

Roll r Coast Thrillz 'n' Ch llz fo th Entir Fam ly

She lifted her head and took in the view she had crossed a continent to see—the ruins of Black Thunder. Above the decay of the park, the mighty wooden hills still soared into the scorched Carolina sky. Neither time nor abandonment had been able to destroy it. It was indomitable, the greatest wooden roller coaster in the South, and nothing could spoil its majesty—not the dilapidated buildings, the sagging signs, the tangled undergrowth. It hadn't been operable for eleven years, but it still waited patiently.

She lowered her eyes to escape the flood of painful emotion. In the old days she would have been able to see the top half of the Ferris wheel and the curving arms of the Octopus rising above the ticket booth, but the rides were gone and the parched sky held only a fireball sun and Black Thunder.

The humidity enshrouded her, thick and suffocating, making her perspire through the waistband of her khaki shorts. The sun beat down on her thin shoulders and bare legs as she began walking along the perimeter of the fence, but the pines and undergrowth prevented anything more than an occasional glimpse inside the park. Eventually she came to the old delivery entrance. It was fastened with a length of chain and a rusted padlock, both without purpose since the fence nearby had been slit long ago. The park must have been a popular place for scavengers when it still held the possibility of salvage. Now, even the vandals seemed to have abandoned it.

The chain-link prongs scratched her legs as she climbed over the fence. She made her way through the scrub and then slipped between two disintegrating wooden buildings that had once held heavy equipment. She walked on, passing beneath Black Thunder's colonnade of weathered southern-pine support columns but unwilling to look upward into the massive curving track for fear of the damage she would see. She moved out into the center of the park.

A chill gripped her as she saw the disintegration. The Dodgem Hall had collapsed and, farther on, the picnic pavilion was overgrown with scrub. Broken sidewalks led nowhere; circles of barren earth marked the spots where the Scrambler and Tilt-a-Whirl had once stood. Through the trees she could glimpse the murky surface of Silver Lake, but the Bobby Lee had long ago sunk to the bottom.

Dirt sifted through the open weave of her sandals as she made her way to the abandoned midway. Her footsteps padded the ground in the silence. A pile of rotted timbers lay in the weeds, and a tattered blue plastic pennant, dull with dirt, was snared on a nail head. The hanky-panks were gone, the scent of popcorn and candy apples replaced by the smell of decay.

She was the only person left on earth.

As she stood in the park's vacant heart, she finally lifted her eyes back to the sky so she could take in the entire skeleton of Black Thunder as it encompassed her abandoned universe. Her eyes stung as she followed the invincible lines of the mythic coaster: the great lift hill followed by the plunge toward the earth at an angle sharp enough to penetrate the very bowels of hell, all three hills with their glorious, thrice-delivered promises of death and resurrection, the heart-stopping spiral down to the water and the smooth, fast delivery into the station. Somewhere on that wild, racing ride she had once been able to touch eternity.

Or had she? She began to tremble. Was the certainty that she had been able to find her mother when she had ridden that coaster nothing more than the fancy of a child? Had the coaster really delivered her into the presence of God? She knew that her belief in God had been born on that coaster as surely as that same belief had been washed away by Dash Coogan's blood.

As she stared at the great ribs of Black Thunder etched against the parched sky, she cursed and begged God, both at the same time.!!! I want him back! You can't have him. He's mine, not yours! Give him back to me. Give him back!

The ferocious sun burned through her hair into her scalp. She started to sob and sank to her knees, not to pray but to curse.!!!You fucker. You awful fucker.

But even as she squeezed her eyes shut the silhouette of Black Thunder's three mighty hills stayed etched on her lids. The horrible obscenities continued to spill from her until they gradually assumed the cadence of ritual.

Exhausted, a stillness came over her. She opened her eyes and lifted them to the mountaintops as those in despair had done for centuries. Hope. Black Thunder had always given it to her. And as she stared at those three wooden peaks, she was filled with the absolute certainty that the coaster could transport her to some eternal place where she could find her husband, a place that existed beyond the temporal, a place where love could live forever.

But Black Thunder had no more life left in it than Dash Coogan's body, and it was incapable of transporting her anywhere. The massive skeleton stood crippled and impotent against the August sky, no longer bearing promises of hope and resurrection, no longer promising anything except dry rot and decay.

She stumbled back to her car, the weight of her weariness overwhelming. If only she could make Black Thunder run again. If only...

Climbing inside the suffocating interior of the car, she leaned back against the seat and fell into an exhausted sleep.