he hard chair in her motel room put Hope’s behind to sleep. She stood, stretched her arms over her head, and yawned. Her eyes, fixed on the blank screen of her laptop, blurred and she rubbed them with the heels of her hands. Nothing. For three hours she’d sat in that chair, straining her gritty eyes, racking her tired brain for something to fill up the screen. Anything. Yet the screen remained empty. She didn’t have one idea. She hadn’t written one sentence. Not even one bad sentence she could expand into something better.

Hope dropped her hands and turned from the laptop. She flopped on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. If she were at home, she was sure she’d be scrubbing her spotless bathroom, ironing her T-shirts, or flipping her mattress. If she had her nail kit, she’d be giving herself a manicure. She’d gotten so good at it, she sometimes wondered if she should just give up writing and do nails for a living.

Giving herself manicures was only one of the many time-wasting contrivances she performed to avoid the reality of an empty screen.

One of the many time-consuming tricks she used to avoid the reality of her life. The painful reality that she had no one. No one to talk to when the nights got lonely. No one to hold her hand and tell her she was okay.

Her mother had died in the fall, and her father had remarried by spring. He’d moved to Sun City, Arizona, with his new wife to be near her family. He called. Hope called. It wasn’t the same. Her only sibling, Evan, was stationed in Germany. She wrote. He wrote. That wasn’t the same, either.

She’d had a husband once. For seven years she’d lived a beautiful life in a beautiful house in Brentwood, gone to lavish parties, and played a mean game of tennis. Her husband, Blaine, had been a brilliant plastic surgeon, handsome and funny, and she’d loved him desperately. She’d been secure and happy, and the last night they’d spent together, he’d made love to her as if she were the wife of his heart.

The next day, he’d had her served with divorce papers. He’d told her he was awfully sorry, but he’d fallen in love with her best friend, Jill Ellis. The two hadn’t wanted to hurt Hope, but what could they do? They were in love, and, of course, Jill was five months pregnant, giving him the one thing Hope could not.

Hope no longer had a husband; had no friends, no children.

She had her career, though, and while that wasn’t how she’d necessarily envisioned her life, it hadn’t been so bad. At least until she’d hit the wall blocking her.

For three years she’d turned her back on her past, refusing to acknowledge the depth of her pain even to herself. She’d ignored the ruins of her life and buried herself in her work. First as a freelance writer for magazines such as Woman’s World and Cosmopolitan, and she’d also done some freelance reporting for the Star and The National Enquirer. She’d done that for a year, but she hadn’t really enjoyed sneaking around prying into the lives of celebrities, and besides, she’d done it for the wrong reasons anyway.

She’d quit gossip completely to take a job as a staff writer for The Weekly News of the Universe, one of those black-and-white tabloids that claimed Elvis was alive and well and living on Mars. No more rumor or scandal. Now she made up fictional stories. Under the pen name Madilyn Wright, she was the most popular writer at the paper, and she loved it.

That is, until two months ago, when it seemed she’d hit an invisible wall. She couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t go through it, and couldn’t see to go around it. She was stuck. She couldn’t seem to hide from it or get lost in the bizarre stories she made up in her head. She hadn’t been able to write a decent sentence for a while now. Hope figured a psychiatrist could tell her what was wrong with her, but she also figured she already knew.

Her editor had become extremely anxious and had suggested Hope take a break. Not because he was a hell of a guy, but because she made him look good. She also made the paper a lot of money, and they wanted their most popular reporter back, churning out the strange and unusual.

Walter had even gone so far as to choose her vacation destiny, and the paper had paid the six months’ lease on the house. Walter told her he’d picked Gospel, Idaho, because of the fresh air. That was what he’d said, but he hadn’t been fooling anyone. He’d picked Gospel because it looked like the sort of place where Bigfoot hung out. Where people were routinely abducted by aliens, and where weird cults danced naked beneath a full moon.

Hope sat up on the edge of the bed and sighed. She’d agreed to Walter’s plan because she recognized that her life had become stagnant, a rut she no longer enjoyed living in. She needed a new routine. She’d needed to get out of L.A. for a while. Take a break and, of course, put the entire Micky the Magical Leprechaun fiasco behind her. She needed to clear her head of that whole trial.

Without much enthusiasm, she rose, changed into a pair of flannel shorts and a Planet Hollywood T-shirt, then returned to her seat in front of the laptop. With her fingers poised above the keyboard, she stared at the blinking cursor. Silence surrounded her, heavy and complete, and before she knew it, she’d lowered her gaze to the ugly sculpted carpet beneath her feet. It was without a doubt the grossest carpet she’d ever seen, and she spent fifteen minutes trying to determine if the colors were supposed to run like that, or if a previous guest had dropped some pizza.

Just when she concluded that the carpeting was supposed to look splotched with deep red, she caught herself procrastinating and forced her attention back to the screen.

She stared like a hypnotized cobra, counting each blink of the cursor. She counted two hundred and forty-seven flashes when a shriek split the still night and propelled Hope to her feet.

“For the love of God,” she gasped, her heart lodging in her throat. Then she realized it was her Viper alarm and dug into the bottom of her purse for the transmitter hooked to her key ring. She shoved her feet into her sandals, then ran outside and wove her way through the small parking lot filled with pickups, minivans, and dusty SUVs with kayaks strapped to the tops.

The manager of the Sandman stood by the hood of Hope’s Porsche. The sponge rollers were still in her hair, and a deep scowl narrowed her eyes as she watched Hope approach. Fellow guests looked out their windows or stood in the doorways of their rooms. Dusk had settled over Gospel, painting deep shadows across the rugged landscape. The town appeared laid-back and relaxed, except for the six tones of the Viper piercing the calm. Hope pointed the transmitter at her car and disengaged the alarm.

“Did you see anyone trying to break into my car?” she asked as she came to stand in front of Ada Dover.

“I didn’t see anything.” Ada placed her hands on her hips and tipped her head back to look up at Hope. “But I about choked on a chicken bone when that thing went off.”

“Someone probably touched the door handle or the windows.”

“I thought it was the alarm going off down at the M and S Market, so I called Stanley and told him someone was breakin‘ into his store and to get down there huckuty buck.”

“Oh, great,” Hope groaned.

“But he says he doesn’t have an alarm. Just the signs and such so people think he does.”

Hope didn’t know Stanley, but she doubted his lack of security was something he wanted spread around town.

“I was just about to call the sheriff’s Dispatch,” Ada continued, “but decided to find out where all the racket was coming from first.”

The last thing Hope needed was to have the sheriff dragged to the Sandman, not after she’d assured him he wouldn’t even know she was in town. “But you didn’t call, right?” In L.A., no one called the police for a car alarm. On any given day, chances were good one was going off in a parking lot somewhere. Chances were just as good the police were driving by and not even bothering to stop. Didn’t these people know anything?

“No, and I’m glad I didn’t. I’d have felt real stupid. As it is, I just about died on that chicken bone.”

Hope stared at the shorter woman in front of her; night was rapidly falling and she couldn’t see much more than the outline of rollers on her head. The cool air raised the hairs on Hope’s arms, and she knew she should feel a little bit bad that her Viper had caused Ada Dover to choke, but honestly, what kind of idiot chewed on a chicken bone? “I’m sorry you almost died,” she said, even though she sincerely doubted the woman had been close to death. She glanced over her shoulder and was relieved to find that the motel guests had gone back inside and had shut their curtains.

“That thing isn’t going to go off again, is it?”

“No,” Hope answered and returned her attention to the motel manager.

“Good, ‘cause I can’t have that thing screeching and waking up the other guests all night. These people pay good money for a quiet night’s rest, and we just can’t have that sort of ruckus.”

“I promise it won’t go off,” Hope said, her thumb itching to engage the Viper. She turned to leave, with Ada Dover’s parting shot trailing after her:

“If it does, you’ll have to leave, huckuty buck.”

The woman had Hope over a barrel and she knew it. She would have loved to tell her to kiss her huckuty buck, whatever the hell that meant, but there was only one other hotel in town and Hope was sure it was as full as the Sandman. So she kept her mouth shut as she walked to her room and shut the door behind her. She tossed her keys into her purse and returned to her seat in front of her laptop.

Entwining her fingers on top of her head, she scooted down in her chair. The night before, she’d stayed at the Doubletree in Salt Lake City. She clearly remembered waking that morning in the nice, normal hotel, but at some point she must have driven into the twilight zone where women ate chicken bones.

A slow smile curved her mouth, her hands dropped to the keyboard, and she wrote:

INSANE WOMAN CHOKES TO DEATH

ON CHICKEN BONE

During a ritualistic ceremony, bizarre chicken worshiper Dodie Adams...

The next morning, Hope rose early, took a quick shower, and dressed in jeans and a black tank top.

While her hair dried, she pulled on her boots, then plugged the telephone line into the side of her laptop and fired off her chicken bone story. It wasn’t Bigfoot, but it was good enough to print in next week’s edition. Most important, she was writing again. That she had Ada Dover to thank didn’t escape her, and the irony made her smile.

After she pulled her hair back in a ponytail, she drove three blocks to the M & S Market. She’d slept a total of four hours but felt better than she had in a long time. She was working again, and it felt good. She didn’t even want to contemplate the possibility that it might have been a fluke, and tonight she might again face hours of a blank computer screen.

The first thing she noticed when she entered the M & S was the antlers behind the front counter. They were huge and mounted on a lacquered plaque. The second thing was the mingling scent of raw meat and cardboard. From somewhere in the back, she heard a radio tuned to a country station and the heavy whacks of what sounded like a cleaver hitting a butcher’s block. Other than herself and the unseen person in back, the store appeared empty.

Hope found a blue plastic basket next to the cash register and hung it from her arm. She made a quick scan of the newspaper-and-magazine rack. The National Enquirer, the Globe, and Hope’s biggest competition, the Weekly World News, were all stuck beside The Weekly News of the Universe. She would have no byline this issue, but her chicken bone story would appear next week. Before leaving the hotel, she’d received an e-mail from her editor, and he was rushing to put it into production.

The hardwood floor creaked beneath her feet as she made her way through the cereal and crackers aisles toward the refrigeration section.

She opened the door to the glass case and placed a pint of low-fat milk in her basket. Next, she read the sugar content on the back of an orange juice bottle. It contained more corn syrup than actual fruit juice, and she put it back. She reached for a bottle of grape-kiwi, decided at the last moment she wasn’t in the mood, and grabbed cran-apple instead.

“I’d have gone with the grape-kiwi,” drawled a now familiar voice from behind her.

Startled, Hope turned and the glass door slammed. Her basket swung and bumped her hip.

“Of course, grape-kiwi might be a bit wild for this time of morning,” the sheriff said. He wasn’t wearing his black Stetson today. He’d replaced it with a battered straw cowboy hat that had a band made of snakeskin. A shadow from the brim fell across his face. “You’re up pretty early.”

“I’ve got a lot to do today, Sheriff Taber.”

He opened the glass door and forced her to take a few steps back. “Dylan,” he said as he grabbed two pint-size cartons of chocolate milk and shoved them beneath one arm. He looked very little like the lawman of the previous day. His blue T-shirt was old and slightly wrinkled and tucked into a pair of Levi’s so faded that only the seams gave a hint of the original color.

The glass door fogged except where it pressed against the back of his broad shoulders and his behind. His back pocket was torn and an edge of his wallet poked out. He bent and picked up what looked like two small Styrofoam containers of ice cream. “Did you find someone to help you today?” he asked as he straightened.

“Not yet. I thought I’d call my neighbors like you suggested, but I wanted to wait in case they are still in bed.”

“They’re up.” He moved aside and the glass door closed behind him. “Here.” With his free hand, he held out a bottle of passion fruit. “This is my favorite.”

She reached for it, but he didn’t let go. Instead, he stepped closer until he stood just a few inches from her. “Do you like passion fruit, Ms. Spencer?”

Her finger brushed his thumb, and she looked up from their hands to his deep green eyes gazing at her from beneath the brim of his battered straw hat. She wasn’t a silly country girl who got all flattered and tongue-tied over a sexy-as-hell cowboy in a pair of jeans worn thin in interesting places. “It might be a bit early in the day for passion fruit, Sheriff.”

“Dylan,” he corrected her as a slow, easy smile curved his lips. “And, honey, it’s never too early for passion fruit.”

It was the word “honey” that got to her. It just slid inside and warmed the pit of her stomach before she could do a thing about it. She’d heard him use the same endearment with the waitress, too, and she’d thought she was immune. She wasn’t. She tried to think up a witty comeback and couldn’t. He’d invaded her personal space, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She was saved by the approach of his son.

“Dad, did ya get the night crawlers?” Adam asked.

Dylan dropped his hand from the bottle and took a step back. His gaze lingered on Hope for a moment longer; then he directed his attention to his son. “Right here, buddy,” he said and held up the two Styrofoam cups.

“Those are worms?” Hope glanced from what she’d assumed were little ice-cream cups to his face.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But they were”—she pointed to the glass case— “next to the milk.”

“Not right next,” he assured her. He took the chocolate milk from beneath his arm and gestured toward Hope. “Adam, say hello to Ms. Spencer.”

“Hi. Do you need me to scare any more bats?”

She shook her head as she gazed from one to the other.

“What kind of doughnuts did you get for breakfast?” Dylan asked his son. “Powdered sugar?”

“Nope, chocolate.”

“Well, I guess I can choke down a few chocolate.”

“We’re going fishing for Dolly Varden,” Adam informed her.

Obviously they thought worms in the milk-and-juice case was perfectly normal. “Dolly who?”

Deep laughter rumbled within Dylan’s chest as if he were extremely amused. “Trout,” he answered. “Come on, son. Let’s go catch some Dolly who.”

Adam laughed, a younger, childlike version of his father.

“City girls,” Dylan scoffed as he walked away.

“Yeah,” Adam added, the squeak of his rubber-soled sneakers keeping perfect time with the heavier tread of his father’s worn boots.

Really, who were they to laugh at her? Hope wondered as she watched them move toward the front counter. She wasn’t the crazy one who thought worms belonged next to milk. She was normal. She set the bottle of juice in her basket and made her way to the housewares aisle. Across rows of Comet and boxes of dog food, she watched a large man with a potbelly, a handlebar mustache, and a blood-smeared apron approach from the back. As he rang up Dylan’s purchases, Hope moved up and down the aisles and dumped two pairs of pink rubber gloves, half a gallon of pine cleaner, and a can of Raid into her basket. In the small produce department, she smelled the peaches for freshness.

“See you around, Ms. Spencer.”

She glanced up from her peaches to where Dylan stood holding the door open for Adam. He looked over at her, one corner of his mouth curved up, and then he was gone.

“Are you ready to be rung up?” the big man behind the counter asked. “ ‘Cause if you’re gonna be a while yet, I’ve got some meat to wrap in the back.”

“I’m ready.” She placed the peaches in a produce baggie and walked to the counter.

“Are you the woman with the car alarm?”

Hope set the basket on the counter, next to a display of cigarettes and lighters. “Yes,” she answered warily.

“Ada called me last night when that thing went off,” he said, his big fingers pecking out the keys on the cash register.

“I’m sorry she disturbed you.”

“She nearly choked to death on a chicken bone, you know.”

Apparently Hope was the only one who found that odd.

He checked the price sticker on the Raid, then rang it up. “Are you going to be in town long?”

“Six months.”

“Oh, yeah?” He looked up. “Are you a tree hugger?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He reached beneath the counter and pulled out a paper sack. “You don’t look like no tree hugger.”

Hope didn’t know if he was complimenting her or not, so she kept quiet.

“I hear you’re staying at the Donnelly place.”

“Yes, I am.”

“What are you going to do out there?”

That was the second time in two days she’d been asked that question. “Spend a relaxing summer.”

“My wife, Melba, was over at Dixie’s getting her hair kinked when Ada called from the Sandman saying you need some available men.”

“To clean the bats out of the house I leased,” she clarified. He subtotaled her purchases and she pulled a twenty from her wallet.

He looked at her closely and must have decided she was harmless, because he shook his head and smiled. “Yeah, that’s what Ada said.” He took her money, then counted out the change to her. “Too bad. I have a nephew working the mine up near Challis, and he sure could use an available woman. ‘Course, you don’t look like the kind of woman who’d be interested in Alvin.”

He’d piqued her curiosity and she asked, “What kind of woman is that?”

“A woman not in her right mind.” The ends of his mustache curled on his cheeks beneath his eyes.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. My name’s Stanley Caldwell. Me and my wife, Melba own this store, and if there’s something you need in the way of a special order, just let me know.”

“I will.” She took the paper sack. “Do you know where I can get a cappuccino?”

“Yep. Sun Valley.”

She’d never wanted a cappuccino bad enough to drive an hour for it. She thanked him anyway and left the market. Her Porsche was parked by the front doors and she dropped the sack on the passenger seat. As she pulled from the parking lot, she slipped a CD in the player, pumped up the volume, and sang along with Sheryl Crow. “Run baby run baby run,” she sang as she drove down the main street of Gospel and continued around the lake to Timberline Road. It was just after eight when she pulled into the driveway of the house she’d leased. It looked just as bad as it had the day before.

She wasn’t about to step foot inside until it was bat-free. Instead, she walked across the road and knocked on her neighbor’s door. A woman with red, curly hair and freckles, and wearing a blue chintz robe, answered. Hope introduced herself through the screen.

“Dylan said you might be coming by.” She held the door open and Hope entered a living room decorated with a profusion of tole painting. It was everywhere, on pieces of driftwood, old saw blades, and metal milk jugs. “I’m Shelly Aberdeen.” She wore big bunny slippers and could not have stood much over five feet.

“Did Sheriff Taber mention my problem with bats?”

“Yeah, he did. I was just about to wake up the boys. Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll tell them what you need.”

She disappeared down a hall and Hope sat in a swivel chair next to the stone fireplace. From the rear of the house she heard a door open.

“Are you the one driving a Porsche?” Shelly called out.

“Yes.”

Silence and then, “Do you know Pamela Anderson or Carmen Electra?”

“Ahh, no.”

More silence and then Shelly reappeared. “Well, that’s a real disappointment to the boys, but they’ll help you out anyway.”

Hope rose. “How much do they usually make an hour? I don’t even know what the minimum wage is anymore.”

“Just pay them what you think is fair, then come back by around noon and I’ll make you lunch.”

Hope didn’t know what to think of the offer, other than it made her uncomfortable.

“I’ll make crab-stuffed pitas and we’ll get to know each other.”

That was the part that made Hope uncomfortable. Shelly would naturally ask what Hope did for a living, and Hope didn’t talk about it with people she didn’t know. She didn’t want to talk about her personal life, either. Yet deep in a buried part of her soul, she wanted it so much she could feel it like a bubble working to get free. And that scared her. “I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble,” she said.

“No trouble. Unless you say no and hurt my feelings.”

Hope looked into Shelly’s big brown eyes, and what could she say except, “Okay, I’ll be here.”

The Aberdeen twins, Andrew and Thomas, were tall and blond, and, except for the color of their eyes and the slight difference in the shape of their foreheads, looked exactly alike. A wad of tobacco bulged out their bottom lips in identical spots, and they both stood with their left shoulders higher than the right. They were quiet and well mannered and looked at each other first before they answered a question.

Hope had them search the house for bats while she sat on her front porch. She heard thumping and yelling from the second floor, and about forty minutes later, Thomas came out with the news that they’d found five bats altogether. Two in one bedroom and three in the attic. He spit a stream of tobacco into a Coke can he held in his hand and assured her the bats were no longer a problem. She didn’t ask how. She didn’t care to know.

Once the problem of the bats was solved, she put the boys to work cleaning and vacuuming the upstairs while she started in the kitchen. She cleaned the stove, tossed out the dead mouse, then washed out the oven and refrigerator. The pantry was empty except for a layer of dust, and she cleaned the dishes and pots and pans with soap she found beneath the sink. The windows could wait for another day.

By eleven-thirty, the first floor of the house was close to finished. There was a dark brown stain on the hardwood floor in front of the hearth, and no amount of scrubbing got it up. At noon, she gave the twins the task of taking down the wall of antlers and storing them in a shed out back. Then she headed across the street.

Shelly Aberdeen saw her coming and opened the front door before she had a chance to knock. “Let’s eat before the twins decide to come home for lunch. They eat like every meal is their last.”

Shelly had dressed for the day in a Garth Brooks T-shirt, tight Wranglers with a belt buckle the size of a saucer, and snakeskin boots. Hope had been in town only a day, but she’d already noticed that snakeskin was a fashion must-have in Gospel.

“How are the boys working out?” Shelly asked over her shoulder as Hope followed her into a small dining room off the kitchen.

“They’re doing a good job. They’re very polite and didn’t even complain when I asked them to clean up the bat droppings.”

“Shoot, why would they complain about that? Those two have been tossing cow patties at each other since they could walk. Last summer they worked slaughtering cows over at Wilson Packing.” She poured Hope a glass of iced tea. “I’m glad to hear they’re minding themselves. They’re going to be eighteen in about a week and think they know it all.” She handed the glass to Hope. “How’s the inside of the house look?”

Hope took a drink and let the cool tea wash the dust from her throat. “Better than the outside. Lots of cobwebs and there was a dead mouse in the oven. The good news is that the electricity and the plumbing work.”

“They should,” Shelly said as she set two plates loaded with pita sandwiches on the table covered in a white-and-blue checked cloth. “The realtor who bought the place this past fall had the whole place plumbed and wired. Couldn’t get the bloodstain up, though.”

“Bloodstain?”

“Hiram Donnelly killed himself with his hunting rifle right in front of the fireplace. Blood went everywhere. You might have noticed the stain on the floor.”

Yes, she’d noticed that stain, but she’d assumed someone had skinned some unfortunate animal in the front room. The fact that it was a human bloodstain was kind of freaky. “Why’d he kill himself?”

Shelly shrugged as she sat across from Hope. “He was caught embezzling money from the county to pay for kinky sex.”

“Was he a judge?”

“No, he was our sheriff.”

Hope placed her napkin on her lap, then reached for her pita. Her curiosity piqued more than she wanted her neighbor to know, she asked as if she were inquiring about the weather, “How kinky?”

“Bondage and domination, mostly, but he was into a lot of other weird stuff, too. A year after his wife died, he started getting hooked up with women through the Internet. I think it started out innocent enough. Just a lonely guy looking for some female company. But toward the end, he got real kinky and didn’t care if the women were single or married, their age, or how much it cost him. He was out of control and got careless.”

Hope bit into her pita and tried to recall if she’d read anything about a sheriff embezzling money to pay for his sexual addiction. She didn’t think so, because if she had, she would have remembered. “When did all this happen?”

“He killed himself about five years ago, but like I said, it started about a year before that. No one in town knew it, either, not until the FBI was about to arrest him and he shot himself.”

“How out of control did he get?”

Shelly glanced away, clearly uncomfortable talking about the details. “Use your imagination,” she said, then changed the subject. “What brings you to Gospel?”

Hope knew when to push and when to back off. She tucked away the information and let it go for now. “It seemed like a nice area,” she answered, then, just as neatly as Shelly, turned the subject away from herself. “How long have you lived here?”

“My family moved here when I was about six. My husband, Paul, was born in this house. I graduated from Gospel High School with most of the people around here.” Shelly counted them off as if Hope naturally knew whom she was talking about. “Paul and me, Lon Wilson and Angie Bright, Bart and Annie Turner, Paris Fernwood, Jenny Richards. Kim Howe and Dylan, but that was back when Dylan still lived at the Double T with his folks. His mom, sister, and brother-in-law still run the place. And, of course, Kim ran off with a trucker right after graduation and lives somewhere in the Midwest. I can’t remember what happened to Jenny.” Shelly took a bite of her sandwich, then asked, “You married?”

“No.” Hope’s neighbor looked at her as if she thought Hope might elaborate. She didn’t. If she mentioned the word “divorce,” other questions would follow, and there was no way Hope would share that ugly and clichéd part of her life with anyone. Especially not a stranger. She reached for her tea and as she took a long drink, she tried to remember the last time she’d had lunch with someone, other than for business. She wasn’t positive, but thought it probably had been right after her divorce. As was usual for a lot of married couples, her friends had been their friends, and whether they’d stopped calling or she stopped calling them didn’t matter. The end result was the same. Their lives had changed and they’d drifted apart. “Where did you live before you moved to Gospel?” she asked.

“Outside Rock Springs, Wyoming. So it wasn’t much of a shock moving here. Not like I imagine it is for you.”

That was so true it made Hope chuckle. “Well, I don’t think I’m very popular at the Sandman.”

“Don’t worry about Ada Dover. She thinks she’s running the Ritz.” Without much of a pause, she asked, “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a freelance writer.” Which was partly true. In the past, she’d certainly done freelance under a lot of different pseudonyms, and if she wanted, she could again. For now, she liked writing bizarre fictional articles. Although she had to admit that she was intrigued by the bizarre history of Number Two Timberline and the sheriff who’d lived there.

“What do you write?”

Hope was asked that question a lot, and she usually fudged. Not that she was ashamed of what she did, but in her experience, people had one of three reactions.

One, they were condescending, which Hope didn’t appreciate but could handle. Two, they wanted to tell her about the time they’d been abducted and had an alien probe stuck up their anus. Or three, if they weren’t crazy themselves, they knew someone who was. And they always wanted her to do an article on their great-aunt so-and-so who was possessed by the spirit of her dead dog.

Hope never knew when she’d run into one of these crazy people, could never tell from appearances. They were like peanut M&M’s; they had a normal-looking shell but were hiding a nut inside. Hope wrote fiction and wasn’t interested in real nuts.

“I write whatever interests me.” Then she did what she did best: She added a lie into the mix of truths and half-truths. “Right now, I’m interested in flora and fauna of the Northwest, and I’m writing an article for a Northwest magazine.”

“Wow, a writer! That must be a really fun job.”

Fun? Hope took another bite of her sandwich and thought about Shelly’s remark for a moment. “Sometimes it is fun,” she said after she swallowed. “Sometimes it’s so cool I can’t believe I’m doing it.”

“A couple of summers ago, we had a guy who was here writing some sort of backpacking guide. Before that, a lady wrote about bicycling trails in the Northwest. Last summer, there was someone else in the area writing about something. I can’t remember what that was, though.” Shelly took a drink of her tea. “What have you written that I might have read?”

“Let’s see... about two years ago, I did a piece for Cosmo on hysterectomies.”

“I don’t read Cosmo.”

“Redbook?”

“No. Have you written anything for People?”

“I submitted an outline once.” Hope set down her sandwich and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “But I got a form rejection.”

“The Enquirer?”

Not recently, but at one time, not only had she written for them, she’d also been their “inside source” on who had had their faces lifted and their breasts enlarged. “No, I don’t like to write articles about real people,” she said. At least not anymore. She much preferred to make up stories about a fifty-pound locust.

“Hmm... Paul subscribes to Guns and Ammo. I don’t suppose you ever wrote an article about elk hunting?”

Hope looked across the table at her neighbor, at the laughter creasing the corners of Shelly’s eyes, and she relaxed a bit.

“No, I don’t really go in for the violent stuff, but when I was first starting out, I did write several articles for True Crime magazine. I needed publishing credits, so I wrote a few stories about a serial-killing hooker who got caught when traces of her victims’ blood were found on her stilettos.”

“Oh, yeah? My mother-in-law reads those like the Bible and swears they’re true.” Shelly leaned across the table and whispered, “She’s crazy. Last year for my birthday, she paid the first installment toward a Ronco food dehydrator, then had me billed for the rest.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. I had to pay over a hundred bucks for that thing, and I’ve never used it.” She did a one-shoulder shrug. “But I guess it wasn’t as bad as the pig cookie jar she got for my sister-in-law. You lift the lid and it squeals like Ned Beatty in Deliverance.”

Hope leaned back in her chair and chuckled.

“Do you have a man in your life?”

Oh, Shelly was good. Real good. Trying to get Hope to relax, soften her up before she sneaked in a few personal questions. But Hope was better.

“Not right now,” she answered.

“There are a few available men in town. Some of them still have their own teeth and most of them have a job. Stay away from anyone with the last name Gropp. They look normal, but none of them are right in the head.”

“That’s okay,” Hope assured her. “I’m not looking for a man.”