oney, it's raining!" Chantal shouted. "You stop working right now."

From Honey's perch high atop Black Thunder's lift hill, she looked down at the miniature figure of her cousin gazing up at her from beneath the small red dot of an umbrella.

"I'll be down in a few minutes," she shouted back. "Where's Gordon? I told him to come right back."

"He's not feelin' good," Chantal yelled. "He's taking a little rest."

"I don't care if he's dying. You tell him to get back up here."

"It's the Lord's day! You shouldn't be workin' on the Lord's day."

"Since when did either of you ever care about the Lord's day? Neither of you likes to work on any day."

Chantal walked away in a huff, but Honey didn't care. Gordon and Chantal's free ride was over. She drove another nail into the catwalk she was building at the top of the lift hill. She hated rain and she hated Sundays because the restoration work on the coaster ground to a halt. If she had her way, the construction crew would be on the job seven days a week. They weren't union members, so they could work longer hours.

Ignoring the rain, she continued to nail together pieces of the catwalk. It frustrated her that she wasn't strong enough to do the harder jobs, such as repairing the track. The crew, under the supervision of the roller-coaster restoration expert she had hired to oversee the job, had spent the first two months removing the old track and repairing the frame wherever it was damaged. Luckily, much of it was still sound. The concrete footings had been installed in the sixties, so they didn't have to be replaced. AH of them had been worried about cracks in the ledgers, the giant boards the track rested on, but there hadn't been as many as they'd feared.

Still, rebuilding the entire track was a massive and expensive project, and Honey was rapidly running out of money. She had no idea how she would finish financing the new lift chain and engine that still had to be installed, not to mention the electrical system, as well as air-compressor brakes to replace the old hand-operated ones. The rain was falling more steadily and her footing had grown precarious. Reluctantly, she lowered herself over the side and began the long climb down the frame that they were using like a ladder until the catwalk was complete. Her body no longer screamed in protest as she made the arduous descent. She was thin, hard-muscled, and weary from two months of backbreaking work, seven days a week, as many as fourteen hours a day. Her hands bore a ridge of calluses across the palms as well as a network of small wounds and scars from mishaps with the tools she had gradually learned to use with some degree of competence.

When she reached the ground, she pulled off her yellow hard hat. Instead of heading to her makeshift home, she walked through the dripping trees toward the other end of the park. Any fleeting thoughts she'd had about living in Sophie's trailer had vanished upon her first inspection. The roof had collapsed, the robin's-egg-blue shell had caved in on one side, and vagrants had long ago stripped it of everything useful. After having the wreckage removed, she'd installed a small silver trailer on the same site.

Now, however, her destination wasn't her own temporary home but the Bullpen, the ramshackle building that had once housed the unmarried men who worked in the park. Currently Gordon and Chantal lived there. She was glad the Bullpen sat at the opposite end of the park from her trailer. It was bad enough being around people all day. At night, she needed to be alone. Only when she was alone could she feel the possibility of some connection with Dash. Not that she really thought it would happen. Not until she could ride Black Thunder.

She'd snared her hair in a rubber band at the back of her neck, but wet strands stuck to her cheeks and her sweatshirt was soaked through to her skin. If Liz could see her now, she'd be wringing her hands. But Liz and California were part of another universe.

"Who is it?" Chantal said in response to Honey's knock.

Honey set her teeth in frustration and jerked open the door. "Who do you think it is? We're the only people here."

Chantal jumped up nervously from an old orange Nauga-hyde couch where she'd been reading a magazine and sprang to attention like an employee whose boss had caught her loafing. The interior of the Bullpen was made up of four rooms: a crude living area that Gordon and Chantal had furnished with odds and ends bought from Good Will; the sleeping area that used to hold wooden bunk beds but now contained an old iron-framed double bed; a kitchen; and a bathroom. Although the interior of the house was shabby, Chantal was keeping it neater than she'd kept any of their houses.

"Where's Gordon? You told me he was sick."

Chantal tried to slide the magazine under an ugly brown velour pillow. "He is. But he still went out back to change the oil on the truck."

"I'll bet he didn't go out until after you told him I was looking for him."

Chantal quickly changed the subject. "You want some soup? I made some nice soup a little while ago."

Honey threw off her wet sweatshirt and followed Chantal into the kitchen. Old metal cupboards covered with bile-green paint lined two of the walls, one of which held the park's only working telephone. The gold Formica counter-tops were dull and stained with use, and the linoleum floor had cracked like drought-stricken earth.

Because Honey and Gordon were working on the coaster all the time, Chantal was the only one free to take care of their meals, and she had learned that if she didn't cook, none of them ate. Surprisingly, the work seemed to have been good for Chantal. She'd lost a lot of the weight she had gained over the years and had begun to iook like a more mature version of the eighteen-year-old who had won the Miss Paxawatchie County beauty contest.

"Opening a can and heating up the contents doesn't constitute making soup," Honey snapped as she took a seat at one end of an old picnic table they had moved inside. She knew she should encourage her cousin instead of criticizing her, but she told herself she simply didn't care about Chantal's feelings anymore.

Chantal's mouth tightened with resentment. "I'm not as good a cook as you, Honey. I'm still learning."

"You're twenty-eight years old. You should have learned a long time ago instead of spending the past nine years heating up frozen dinners in the microwave."

Chantal reached into the cupboard for a bowl, then took it over to the old gas stove and began filling it with chicken noodle soup. "I'm doing my best. It hurts my feelings when you're so critical."

"That's too bad. If you don't like the way I'm running things around here, you can leave any time." She hated her surliness and bad temper, but she couldn't seem to stop. It was like those early days on the Coogan show when any sign of weakness would have broken her.

Chantal's hand tightened around the ladle. "Me and Gordon don't have any place to go."

Honey set her mouth in an unforgiving line. "Then I guess you're stuck with me."

Chantal regarded her sadly, her voice quiet. "You've changed, Honey. You've gotten so hard.

Sometimes I barely recognize you."

Honey took a spoonful of soup, refusing to let Chantal see that her words hurt. She knew that she was hostile. The men on the crew never joked around with her like they joked with each other, but she told herself she wasn't trying to win any popularity contest. All she cared about was finishing Black Thunder so that she could ride it again and maybe find her husband.

"You used to be so sweet." Chantal stood by the sink with her arms hanging at her side, her face full of regret. "And then after Dash died, I think something twisted inside you."

"I just decided to stop letting you and Gordon freeload off me, that's all."

Chantal bit down on her bottom lip. "You sold our house right out from under us, Honey. We loved that house."

"I needed the money. And I sold the ranch, too, so it wasn't like I was singling you out for persecution." Selling the ranch was the most difficult decision she'd ever had to make, but she'd ended up liquidating almost everything to finance the restoration of the coaster. All she had left was her car, some clothes,

and this park. Even so, she still didn't have enough money, and she would be lucky to make it to January before what she had left ran out.

She refused to think about it. She wouldn't let anything sway her from the determination that had been born in her the day she had returned to the park and had seen Black Thunder again. Sometimes she thought her decision to rebuild the coaster was all that was keeping her alive, and she couldn't let sentiment weaken her.

"This whole thing's crazy," Chantal cried. "Sooner or later, you're going to run out of money. And then what'll you have? A half-finished roller coaster that no one will be able to ride sitting in the middle of a place where nobody ever comes."

"I'm going to find a way to raise more money. There are some historical groups interested in restoring wooden coasters." Honey avoided meeting Chantal's eyes. None of those groups had the resources to come up with the large amount of money she needed, but she wasn't going to admit as much to Chantal. Her cousin already thought she was crazy. And maybe she was.

"Just suppose a miracle happens and you finish Black Thunder," Chantal said. "What good will it do you? Nobody's going to come to ride it because there isn't a park here anymore." Her eyes grew dark with urgency. "Let's go back to California. All you'd have to do is pick up the phone and somebody'd hire you to be in a TV show. You could make lots of money."

Honey wanted to put her hands over her ears. Chantal was right, but she couldn't do it. As soon as audiences saw her trying to play a part other than Janie Jones, they'd realize what a fraud she had been as an actress. The record of those performances was the only thing that she had left in which she could take pride, the only thing she couldn't sacrifice.

"This is crazy, Honey!" Chantal exclaimed. "You're throwing away everything. Are you trying to put all three of us in a grave right along with Dash Coogan?"

Honey slammed down her spoon, splashing soup everywhere, and jumped up from the table. "Don't you talk about him! I don't even want to hear you mention his name. I don't care about houses or California or anybody coming to the park. I don't care about you and Gordon. I'm restoring this coaster for me and not for anybody else."

The back door had opened, but she didn't notice until Gordon spoke. "You shouldn't yell at Chantal like that," he said quietly.

She spun around, her teeth barred. "I'll yell at her any way I want. You're both worthless. The two most worthless people I've ever met in my life."

Gordon studied a point just above her right eyebrow. "I've been working right by your side, Honey, ever since we came out here. Ten, twelve hours a day. Just like you."

It was the truth. Today's absence was rare. Gordon worked with her on Sundays and in the evenings after the men had left. She had been surprised to see that hard work even seemed to agree with him. Now as she noticed how pale he was, she realized he had probably been telling the truth when he had said he wasn't feeling well, but she didn't have any sympathy left to waste on anyone, not even herself.

"The two of you had better not push me. I'm in charge, and you need to decide right now how it's going to be." Her mouth twisted bitterly. "The old days are gone when you could get anything out of me you wanted just by threatening to leave. I don't care anymore if you go. If you don't think you can live with my decisions, then pack your bags and be out of here by tomorrow."

Brushing past him, she stalked out the back door and down the crumbling concrete steps. Why did she let them stay? They cared about her money, but not about her. And she didn't care about them anymore. She didn't care about anyone.

A chilly, wet blast of wind hit her, and she remembered that she'd left her sweatshirt behind. Off to her left she could see Silver Lake, its rain-cratered surface slate gray and fetid under the December sky. A vulture swooped over the ruins of the Dodgem Hall. The land of the dead. The park was a perfect place for her.

She slowed her steps as she entered the trees and the emptiness enveloped her. Wet brown needles stuck to her work boots and the bottoms of her jeans. She wished she could rebuild the coaster by herself so she could get rid of everyone else. Maybe in the solitude Dash would talk to her. She sagged against the scaly bark of a longleaf pine, her breath forming a frosty cloud in the air, grief and loneliness overwhelming her. Why didn't you take me with you? Why did you die without me?

Only gradually did she grow aware of the fact that a man was standing in the far end of the clearing near her trailer. Chantal had said it wasn't safe for her to live so far away from them, but she had paid no attention. Now the hair at the back of her neck prickled.

He lifted his head and spotted her. There was something ominous about the still way he held himself. She'd encountered several vagrants since she'd returned to the park, but they'd run away when they saw her. This man didn't look as if he intended to run anywhere.

Until that moment she hadn't thought she cared enough about her personal safety to experience fear again, but even from sixty feet away, she could feel the man's menace. He was much larger than she, broad-shouldered and strong, with long, wild hair and a frightening black eye patch. Rain glistened on his leather jacket, and his jeans were muddy and soiled.

When he didn't come any nearer, she experienced a flicker of hope that he would turn away. But he began to move toward her instead, taking slow, threatening steps.

"You're trespassing." She barked out the words, hoping to intimidate him in the same way she'd intimidated so many others.

He said nothing as he came closer, then stopped in the shadows less than twelve feet away.

"What do you want?" she demanded.

"I'm not certain." His words were colored by a faint foreign accent she couldn't quite identify.

An icy finger of dread trickled down her spine. She was alarmingly aware of the emptiness of the clearing, the fact that even if she screamed, Gordon and Chantal wouldn't hear her.

"This is private property."

"I am not hurting anything." There was no intonation to his speech, just that soft, alien accent.

"You go on and get out of here," she ordered. "Don't make me call my watchman."

She wondered if he suspected there wasn't a watchman, because her empty threat didn't intimidate him.

"Why would you do that?" he asked.

She wanted to run, but she knew he would overtake her long before she could reach Chantal's trailer. As he stood staring at her, she had the frightening sense that he was trying to make up his mind about something. Her own brain quickly supplied a possibility. He was trying to decide whether he should kill her or just rape her. For a moment something about him seemed familiar. She thought of all those true-crime television shows Gordon and Chantal watched and wondered if she could have seen him on one of them. What if he was a fugitive?

"You don't know me, do you?" he finally said.

"Should I?" Her nerves were stretched so tautly she wanted to scream. One wrong word and he would be on her. She stood frozen until he took another step forward.

She instinctively moved back, holding out her arm as if that frail barrier could keep him away. "Don't come any closer!"

"Honey, it's me. Eric."

Only gradually did his words penetrate her fear, but even then it took a few moments before she realized who it was.

"I didn't mean to scare you," he said, in a flat, dead voice that no longer held any trace of accent.

"Eric?"

It had been years since she had seen him in person, and the many newspaper and magazine photographs of him bore no resemblance to this menacing-looking one-eyed stranger. Where was the sulky young heartthrob she had known so long ago?

"What are you doing here?" Her voice was harsh. He had no right to frighten her like that. And he had no right to intrude on her privacy. She didn't care if he was Mr. Big Shot in Hollywood. She was long past the point when she was impressed by movie stars.

"I noticed a sign about twenty miles from here and remembered how you used to talk about this place. I was just curious."

She took in the eye patch and his unkempt appearance. His clothes were muddy and wrinkled, his hands dirty, his jaw dark with stubble. It was no wonder she hadn't recognized him. She remembered his automobile accident, but she no longer felt pity for people who were lucky enough to emerge from accidents with their lives intact.

She didn't like the fact that she had to tilt her head to look him in the eye. "Why didn't you tell me who you were right away?"

He shrugged, his face blank of any expression. "Habit."

Uneasiness crept through her. He stood silently, making no attempt to explain either his presence in the park or his menacing appearance. He simply returned her gaze with one clear blue, unflinching eye. And the longer he looked at her, the more she had the disturbing sense that she was staring into a mirror image of her own face. Not that she saw a physical resemblance there. It was something more fundamental. She saw a bleakness of the soul she knew all too well.

"You're hiding out, aren't you?" she said. "The long hair. The phony accent. The eye patch." She shivered against the cold.

"The eye patch is for real. They wrote it into the script for my last film. As for the rest, I wasn't trying to scare you. The accent's automatic. I use it to keep the fans away. I don't even think about it anymore."

But he seemed to be trapped in something more fundamental than a ruse to avoid being recognized by his fans. As a runaway herself, it wasn't difficult to recognize another, although what he had to run from she couldn't imagine.

He stared off into the distance. "No neighbors. No satellite dish. You're lucky to have this place."

He hunched his shoulders against the damp wind, still not bothering to look at her. "I'm sorry about Dash. He never liked me much, but I genuinely admired him."

His condolences sounded begrudging, and she bristled. "Not as an actor, I bet."

"No. Not as an actor. He was more a personality than anything else."

"He always said he played Dash Coogan better than anybody." She clamped her teeth together so they wouldn't chatter. She didn't show her weaknesses to anybody.

"He was his own man. Not many people can say that." Turning his head, he looked past her toward the sliver of lake visible through the trees.

She remembered a newspaper photograph she'd seen of him the day before the Academy Awards: mousse-slicked hair, RayBan sunglasses, unstructured Armani suit. The photograph hadn't shown his feet, but they had probably been sockless and stuffed into a pair of Gucci loafers. It struck her that he was a man of a thousand faces, and his vagabond's guise was merely one of them.

"You've got a lot of space here," he said.

"And not very many people," she replied. "Which is the way I want to keep it."

He didn't take the hint. Instead, he glanced toward the trailer. "You wouldn't happen to have a shower rigged up in there with some hot water?"

"I'm afraid I'm not in the mood for company."

"Neither am I. I'll be back as soon as I get some clean clothes from my van."

By the time she opened her mouth to tell him to go to hell, he had disappeared into the trees. She stalked into the trailer and momentarily considered locking the door. But an enormous weariness had settled over her, and she realized she simply didn't care. Let him take his shower. Then he would go away and she could be alone again.

She was shivering, and she wasn't about to wait around in wet clothes while Mr. Movie Star used up all her hot water. Let him take the leftovers. As she peeled out of her work clothes and stepped into the shower, she wondered what had happened to him. Other than his divorce and the automobile accident he had obviously survived, she had never heard of a single traumatic event in his life. He was one of God's chosen, given fame and fortune as if he'd been sprinkled with fairy dust at birth. What right did he have

to act as if he were living out a Greek tragedy?

After she had dried off, she slipped into a pair of worn gray sweats she kept on the back of the door, then left the bathroom for the tiny, utilitarian bedroom that occupied the back. She didn't bother to look toward the trailer's living area to see if he had returned, but a few moments later she heard the bathroom door click shut and then the sound of the shower running.

When she had finished combing the snags out of her wet hair, she went to the small kitchen that ran along one side of the living area. She thought about making a pot of coffee, but she didn't want Eric to stay that long, so she filled the sink with water and began washing the dirty cups and glasses that had accumulated over the last few days.

When he emerged from the bathroom, he was wearing clean jeans and a flannel shirt. His long hair was slicked back from his face, and he had shaved. She hadn't intended to ask any questions that would prolong his visit, but once again the eye patch caught her attention.

"Is your eye injury permanent or temporary?"

"Permanent. At least until I have surgery. Even then, who knows? It's not a sight for weak stomachs."

This time a stirring of pity disturbed the shell she had erected around herseif. The loss of an eye would be difficult for anyone, but it must be especially devastating for an actor who was being deprived of one of the most fundamental tools of his trade.

"I'm sorry," she said. The apology sounded resentful, and she thought how much she disliked this tough, hard person she had become.

He shrugged. "Shit happens."

Doesn't it just, she thought. So that was the reason he was running away. He had injured his eye in an accident, and he couldn't face up to it.

He wandered across the short-pile gray carpet to the back window and gazed through it. She began retrieving cups from the soapy dishwater.

"You don't have any TV here. That's good."

"Most of the time I don't even see a newspaper."

He nodded brusquely. And then, "What are you doing here?"

She'd been waiting for the question. Everyone was full of questions. The townspeople, the workmen, Liz. Everybody wanted to know why she had left L.A., and why she was spending a fortune trying to rebuild a roller coaster that sat in the middle of a dead amusement park. Since she could hardly tell people she was rebuilding it so she could find her husband, she generally explained that the country's great wooden coasters were endangered historical landmarks, and she was trying to save this one. But she didn't owe Eric any explanations, and so she said brusquely, "I needed to get out of L.A., so I'm restoring Black Thunder. The roller coaster."

She waited for him to prod her with more questions, but instead he turned to face her. "Look, it's obvious that you don't want company, but I'd like to hang around for a couple of days. I'll stay out of your way."

"You're right. I don't want company."

"That's fine. Neither do I. That's why this is a good place for me."

She pulled a mug out of the water and rinsed it. "There's nowhere for you to stay."

"I've been sleeping in my van."

She grabbed a dish towel and dried her hands. "I don't think so."

"Afraid?"

"Of you? Hardly."

"Rebuilding that coaster must be a lot of work. Maybe you could use another set of hands."

She gave a short laugh. "Constructiosn work isn't for movie stars. It plays hell with those hundred-dollar manicures."

He didn't rise to her taunt; he barely seemed to have heard her. "Just do me a favor. Don't tell anybody who I am."

"I didn't say you could stay."

"You won't even know I'm here. And one more thing. Every couple of days I'll be taking some time off. Since I won't be on the payroll, it shouldn't be a problem."

"Need to get your hair done?"

"Something like that."

She didn't want him around, but she could use another set of hands—especially since she didn't have to pay him wages.

"Fine," she snapped, "but if you get on my nerves, you have to go."

"I won't be around long enough to get on your nerves."

"You're already just about there, so don't push it."

He shoved one hand in the back pocket of his jeans and studied her openly, taking in her damp hair, the worn gray sweats, her feet stuck in a pair of Dash's old wool socks. The only jewelry she wore was her wedding band, but in the past few months tools had deeply notched the gold in several places. She couldn't remember the last time she'd used makeup. Her twenty-sixth birthday wasn't for another few weeks, but her face was lined and tired, her eyes haunted. She knew from her infrequent glances in the mirror that nothing of the girl she had been remained.

He stared at her without apology and she began to experience a strange sense of commonality. For some reason that she didn't understand, nothing mattered to him. She could tell him everything or withhold it all. He was encapsulated in his indifference, and no matter what she revealed, he wouldn't offer either sympathy or condemnation. He simply didn't care.

The irony wasn't lost on her. For years she had regarded Eric Dillon with antipathy. Now, he was the first person she'd met since Dash's death whose presence she could tolerate.

The next morning Chantal came running to her as soon as she met Eric to launch a vehement protest against Honey hiring such a dangerous-looking stranger.

"That Dev is going to murder us in our beds, Honey! Just look at him."

Honey glanced over at Eric, who was stacking a pile of two-by-sixes in the frosty morning air. Dev? So that was the name he was using. Short for devil?

He was wearing a hard hat like everyone else, but he had snagged his hair into a ponytail that formed a blunt comma at the back of his neck. His flannel shirt was open at the throat, and she could see a T-shirt beneath. He had on a pair of scuffed work boots and jeans with a hole at the knee. His current outfit seemed just as much a part of him as the Armani suits. The curious thought flashed through her mind

that everything he wore was costume instead of clothing.

"He's all right, Chantal. Don't worry about it. He used to be a priest."

"He did?"

"That's what he said." Honey swallowed the last of her coffee and tossed aside her paper cup. She smiled cynically as she mounted the frame and began to climb the lift hill. The idea of Eric Dillon as a priest was the first thing that had struck her funny in a long time.

When she arrived at the top, she attached her safety line and gazed back down to the ground. Eric was reaching up to fasten a two-by-six to the rope that hauled up the lumber. Ponytails weren't normally a hairstyle she liked on men, but with his thin nose, sharp-bladed cheekbones, and dramatic eye patch, he definitely pulled it off. She could just imagine what Dash would have said about it, and she smiled to herself as she created a little dialogue between them, something she liked to do to give herself a sort of bittersweet comfort.!!!"Now why would anybody who calls himself a man want to wear something like that?" he would say.!!!She'd look dreamy-eyed in a way that would be guaranteed to aggravate him. "Because it's incredibly attractive."!!!"Makes him look like a pansy."!!!"You're wrong, cowboy. He looks all man to me."!!!"Well, then, if you think he's so damn good-looking, why don't you use him to satisfy that itch that's starting to wake you up at nights."

She nearly hit her thumb with her hammer, something she hadn't done in a month. Where had that thought come from? There wasn't any itch. None at all.

She took a vicious swing, but her imagination refused to be stifled, and she could hear Dash say,!!!"I don't see what's so wrong with having an itch. It's long past time. I didn 't raise you to be a nun, little girl."

"Stop talking to me like a father, dammit!"!!!"Part of me is your father, Honey. You know that."

She began frantically running numbers from her dwindling bank account in her head to block out any more imaginary conversations.