t nine o’clock the next morning, Hope finished the rough draft of her alien story. She thought the intro might be a bit vague, and she’d waited until the third ‘graph to make her transition, but she thought the article was shaping up nicely.

She’d created a wilderness town populated by shipwrecked aliens who disguised themselves to pass for normal, everyday, small-town weirdies. In reality they passed the time while waiting for their mother ship by tricking tourists and profiting off them in their betting pool.

She’d been working on the article since dawn, when she woke with the outline already written in her aching head. She’d downed several Tylenol with a coffee chaser and hadn’t bathed yet. Her hair was wound on top of her head and held in place with two Bic pens. She still wore her cow pajamas and a pair of slouch socks. She figured she smelled bad, but she knew better than to stop when she was on a roll. While she worked, she never answered the telephone, and only a raging house fire could have forced her to open the front door.

She’d e-mailed Walter the idea for her new article. He’d loved it, but wanted pictures to accompany the story. Believable pictures. Which meant Hope would have to drag out her Minolta and snap a few photos of the wilderness area. Later, she would scan them into her computer and superimpose the likenesses of aliens dressed up as local townspeople. It would take time, but it wasn’t impossible. And certainly not as hard as when she’d morphed Micky the Magical Leprechaun into a reasonable likeness of Prince Charles.

At around nine-thirty, Hope finally took a break. When the phone rang, she picked up the receiver. The call was from Hazel Avery, of the sheriff’s office, wanting to know when she planned to come in and fill out a victim’s report. Hope looked down at herself and told the woman to give her an hour.

It wasn’t that she’d forgotten she needed to go to the sheriff’s office. It was more in the neighborhood of something she wished to forget. She wished she could forget the entire night, starting from the moment she’d stepped foot inside the Buckhorn to the moment Dylan Taber had walked out her door.

Hope hit save on her keyboard and made a backup copy of the alien story. Well, maybe not forget the entire evening, but she definitely should have left the bar after she’d heard about the Flatlander Pool and before Emmett Barnes had plopped his sorry behind in her booth. Her troubles had started as soon as she’d looked up from the napkins she’d been scribbling on and seen his I-know-you-want-me grin.

No, she amended to herself, they’d started the minute she’d began ordering twofers. If it hadn’t been for her excitement over the alien story, she would have paid more attention to how the alcohol was affecting her. If it hadn’t been for the beer buzz, she probably could have handled Emmett. She certainly would have kept her comment about small men and small penises to herself.

Hope peeled off her clothes and stepped into the shower. If it hadn’t been for the boozy glow, she definitely would have kept her hands and mouth off the sheriff.

She let the hot water run over her and didn’t know which encounter had been worse, the one with Emmett or Dylan. One had been scary. The other, humiliating. She’d been wrong about Dylan. He hadn’t wanted her the way she’d wanted him. He hadn’t wanted to crawl all over her. He’d wanted to walk away, and that was exactly what he’d done. With the taste of him still on her lips, she’d watched him walk out the door.

Stay out of the Buckhorn, he’d said. No words of regret. No “Gee, I hate to leave.” No lame excuse. Nothing.

Hope washed her hair, then stepped out of the shower. It had been a long time since a man had made her skin tingle. A long time since she’d let a man close enough for her to feel the warm pull of him low in the pit of her stomach. A long time since she’d wanted to feel a big, warm body next to hers.

Hope didn’t believe in sex without love. She’d been there and done that in college. She was thirty-five now and knew there was no such thing as meaningless sex. If sex were meaningless, it wouldn’t leave you hurt and hollow in the morning. And there was nothing more sad or more lonely than the morning after a one-night stand. Nothing more delusional than a woman telling herself it didn’t matter.

But sex with love required a relationship. A relationship took effort. It took trust, and while she could tell herself it was time to try again, she could never quite place herself in the position to let anyone close. Intellectually, she knew that most men didn’t cheat and create children with their wives’ best friends but knowing it in her head and knowing it in her heart were two totally different things.

Shutting off the dark commentator in her soul was next to impossible. The critic that looked out from her eyes and saw the flaws hidden deep within her body.

Since the onset of puberty, Hope had suffered from endometriosis, and in the spring of her junior year in college, the symptoms became so severe she was left with little choice but surgery. At the age of twenty-one, Hope had a total hysterectomy, which left her free of debilitating pain. Free to enjoy her life. Free to enjoy relationships with men. It also left her unable to have children of her own, but the loss of her ability to procreate hadn’t devastated her. She’d always figured that when the time was right, she’d adopt a child who needed her. The absence of a uterus hadn’t ever made her feel as if she were less female than any other woman.

Until the day her husband had served her with divorce papers and she’d learned that he’d fathered a child with someone else. That news had knocked her flat and leveled her self-confidence. Now she wasn’t sure of anything, least of all where she fit in the world.

Hope dried her body and brushed the tangles from her hair. Three years ago she’d thought she’d handled her life so well. She’d thought she’d picked herself up. She’d restarted her career, taken half of Blaine’s money and his beloved Porsche. But she hadn’t handled anything. She’d just avoided looking at it. She hadn’t picked herself up, she’d just been operating from a flat position so no one could knock her on her ass again.

Last night she’d let herself feel passion again. Let it heat her blood and tease her skin.

She walked into her bedroom and opened her closet doors. Well, maybe “let” was the wrong word. Much too passive. Once he’d kissed her, there had been no letting. No thought of letting, just doing. Once she’d felt the press of his lips and the feel of his hard chest beneath her hands, desire had taken control. For the first time in years, she hadn’t run from it. She’d stood within the warmth of it, feeling it heat her up with the subtlety of a blowtorch. At some point she would have stopped. She would have. Of course she would have, but he’d stopped her, making it seem like the easiest thing he’d ever done. Then, without a backward glance, he’d walked out of her house, and right now, Dylan was the last person in the world she wanted to see. Maybe she’d be ready to face him tomorrow. Or next week.

In such a small town, the only way to avoid him would be to lock herself in her house, but she wasn’t going to do that for two very good reasons. First, she wanted his help in getting old police files, and second, she wasn’t about to give him a reason to think that she gave last night a second thought.

As Hope searched her closet, she told herself she wasn’t looking for the perfect outfit to make the sheriff eat his heart out. She settled on what she would describe as a collision of city girl meets country girl. She dressed in a short turquoise sarong skirt, a turquoise silk halter, and her Tony Lama peacock-blue boots.

By the time she left for the sheriff’s office, her makeup looked perfectly natural, her hair volumized and the ends flipped slightly as if she hadn’t had to curl and spray them into submission.

The Pearl County sheriff’s office sat on the corner of Mercy and Main, and except for the shop advertising “click and shoot—Photos In An Hour,” the building took up the entire city block. The outside of the sandstone building was pocked with age, and metal bars covered the windows in back. A new parking lot had been poured on the east side of the structure and the inside was thoroughly modernized. It smelled of new paint and carpet, and sunshine spilled through the wide windows.

A female deputy, wearing a beige blouse with a gold-star patch sewn above her left breast, looked up from her computer terminal as Hope approached the information desk. She directed Hope through a set of double glass doors with a huge gold star in the middle and the words “Sheriff Dylan Taber” beneath. Inside the office was yet another woman, dressed like the first one. Her salt-and-pepper perm was too tight, and the nameplate proclaiming her to be Hazel Avery rested beside a plastic Jesus. Her desk sat in the middle of the room and squarely in front of a hallway. Hope wondered if, like Saint Peter, she was protecting the hall from heathen passage.

“You must be Hope Spencer,” Hazel said matter-of-factly as Hope moved toward her. “Ada told me about your boots.”

Hoped looked down at her feet. “I picked them up in a Western-wear store in Malibu.”

“Uh-huh.” Hazel clipped a ballpoint pen to a manila folder, then stood. “Come with me, please.”

Hope followed Hazel down the hall to the first room on the left. Directly across the hall was the sheriff’s office. The solid wooden door stood half open, and Dylan’s name was painted in black and etched in gold. A surprising flutter settled in the pit of Hope’s stomach, and she kept her gaze pinned on the two creases sewn into the back of Hazel’s starched shirt.

Once inside the room, the woman gave Hope instructions on how to fill out the victim’s complaint, and told her to describe the events as best as she could. Hope sat at a cleared desk and studied the form before her. There were certain “events” of the previous night that were a bit hazy. Others that she wished she could forget.

“If you have any questions, I’ll answer them for you.” Then Hazel added just before she left, “So don’t bother the sheriff with any more of your flirty skirt.”

Flirty skirt? Hope wondered if flirty skirt was related to huckuty buck, or if her clothing had just been insulted. She shook her head and took a seat. What exactly did Hazel think she was going to do anyway?

She filled out her name, address, and the date, and with her head bent over the folder in front of her, she raised her gaze to the half-open door across the hall and was provided with a view of half a chrome-and-black desk, half a telephone, and half a computer terminal. Her attention focused on the big hands with long fingers pecking at the keyboard. The same big hands that had wrapped around her wrists and pinned them on either side of her head. She glimpsed beige cuffs and just a sliver of his black leather watch-band. He reached for a pen, rested his forearm on the desk, and, in a cramped, awkward fashion, scribbled something down.

Dylan was left-handed. He picked up the telephone receiver and tap-tap-tapped the desk with the pen. She could hear the muffled timber of his voice and the pleasure in his deep chuckle.

Hope turned her attention to the form in front of her and concentrated on everything that had happened inside the Buckhorn. She remembered walking in, ordering beer, and eavesdropping. She’d been so excited about the idea for a new article that the time had flown. Emmett Barnes had insisted on buying her drinks and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He got obnoxious. She got mouthy. Then the fight broke out, and she’d jumped on top of the table to get out of the way. The next thing she remembered was Dylan storming into the bar like the wrath of God and getting punched in the face. She remembered him hitting Emmett with a quick one-two and dropping him to the ground. Then he’d walked to her and helped her down from the table.

Her gaze returned to the room across the hall and the tapping pen. He’d touched her bare stomach with those fingers. He’d touched her and asked if she was okay, and for the first time in a long time, she’d remembered what it was like to feel protected by a man. But it hadn’t been real. She’d been drunk, and he’d been doing his job.

With a flourish, Hope signed the bottom of her statement and left the room. She handed Hazel the folder and watched her skim it.

“Lord help us,” Hazel said and flipped it close. “If the prosecutor needs anything else, he’ll be in touch.”

Hope glanced at the empty hallway one last time before leaving. Without looking back, she walked past the information desk and out the front door. But as she moved down the sidewalk and around to the parking lot, she felt somehow let down. She’d anticipated... what? Friendly conversation? A repeat of last night? Something.

A door on the side of the building opened and she glanced over her shoulder. Dylan stood at the top of the steps, his gaze directed at the duty belt he buckled at his waist. Without taking her eyes from him, Hope shoved her car key into the lock and watched Dylan walk down the concrete steps, his long legs closing the distance between them. He clipped some sort of microphone to the epaulet on his right shoulder. His full attention returned to adjusting his belt and he didn’t notice her. She couldn’t see his face for the shadow created by his black Stetson, but he appeared much as he had the first time she’d seen him. His tan dress shirt with the permanent creases sewn up his flat abdomen and chest. Star on one pocket, name badge on the other. Those tan trousers with the brown stripes up the sides. Hope had never been a sucker for a man in uniform, but she had to admit, Dylan made it look good. Then again, he made Levi’s look good, too.

Her stomach did that weird little flutter thing again, and she reminded herself that she’d forgotten to eat. She’d been working and hadn’t eaten breakfast. Plus, she’d drunk about a pot of coffee. Hope opened the car door and he must have heard that, because he finally glanced up.

He paused by the left front fender of her car and looked at her from beneath the brim his hat. The corner of one eye was swollen and black-and-blue. “Hey, there, how are you feeling today?” he asked.

“I’m fine, but you don’t look so good.”

“You should see Emmett.”

“Pretty bad?”

“He got what he deserved.” Dylan walked toward her, moving close until only the car door separated them. The man didn’t seem to know the rules of personal space. “I’m surprised to see you before noon,” he said.

Hope looked into his green eyes staring at her. Being the focus of his intent gaze was a little disconcerting, and she wrapped her hands around the top of the doorframe. “Why, because I’m working?”

“No, because of your hangover.”

“I wasn’t that drunk.” When he simply kept staring at her, she confessed with a shrug, “Well, maybe a little, but I have to be worshiping at the porcelain shrine before I get a hangover.”

“Lucky you.” With the tip of his index finger, he pushed back his Stetson. “What are you busy working on today? Your flora-and-fauna article for that Northwest magazine?”

“Actually, this afternoon I’m going to take pictures of the area.”

His gaze slid to the front of her shirt, framed in the car window. “Dressed like that?”

“I thought I’d change.”

He placed his hands beside hers on the doorframe and slowly raised his eyes back up to her face. “Where are you going to take your pictures?”

“I’m not real sure. Why?”

“ ‘Cause I don’t want to get another call like last night.”

“Are you saying last night was my fault?”

“No. I’m saying you have a talent for trouble, and maybe you should just stay close to home for a while.” His hands brushed the outsides of hers and she felt his touch clear to her elbows.

She stood a little straighter and tried to ignore the sensation. “Maybe you shouldn’t think you can tell me what to do.”

“And maybe you should do something about that smart mouth.” He leaned closer. “I’ve never said this to a woman, and it’s just an opinion.” He paused, and she thought he might kiss her, but he didn’t. “Maybe you should consider becoming an alcoholic. You’re a lot nicer when you’re loaded.”

“Thank you, Sheriff. But in the future, when I want your opinion, I’ll ask you for it.”

“Really?” A slow, evil smile curved his mouth. “Honey, are you going to ask me on the bone phone, or should I make other plans?”

Hope felt her brows pinch together. That phrase was not only offensive but juvenile. She hadn’t heard it since college, when she and her friends used it to refer to oral sex. She opened her mouth to tell him to grow up, to tell him real men didn’t talk to women like that; then she recalled in perfect detail their conversation last night about the busty blonde in the Buckhorn.

She made a long, mental groan and quickly climbed into her car. “You should make other plans,” she said and tried to shut the car door.

Dylan easily held it open. “Just in case, do you want my number?”

She gave one hard tug and he finally let go. Without a word, she fired up the Porsche and shoved it into reverse. She already had his number and it was 666.

Hope pulled the Porsche into the parking lot behind the Gospel Public Library. She hadn’t written anything nonfiction in a while, but the first place she always liked to start was with old newspaper articles. It wouldn’t hurt to check and see what the library had stored on the late Sheriff Donnelly. Shelly had seemed hesitant to talk about Hiram, and Hope didn’t know anyone else in town—except Dylan. There was no way she’d ask him for anything. Not now. She didn’t want to be within a mile, let alone speaking distance, of him. Not after he’d told her she should become an alcoholic. And especially not after the way she’d humiliated herself the night before. Her cheeks still burned when she remembered what she’d said, which had always been her biggest problem with booze and why she rarely got tanked. She thought she was funny when she wasn’t.

If she wanted information, she would have to rely mostly on FBI files. It could take a while for them to comply, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to write an unsolicited article. That was a lot of work for no guarantee, and even if she did decide to write it, she didn’t know what angle she would use—if she would slant it more toward a publication like Time or People. But the more she discovered about the old sheriff, the more intrigued she became. How had he gotten caught? And exactly how much money had he embezzled? Last night Dylan had mentioned something about videos. Had they been circulated through town? What was on them, and who’d seen them?

The Gospel Public Library building was about the size of two double-wide trailers stuck end to end, and the compact windows let in very little natural light. The inside was crammed with shelves and tables, and the front desk was piled with books. Regina Cladis stood behind the desk, her white hair a perfect dome on her round head. She studied several Goose Bumps books held close to her face, then shoved her Coke-bottle glasses down her nose and turned her head to study the covers out of the corner of one eye.

“Wash your hands before you open these,” she admonished three boys as she pushed her glasses back up her nose. “I don’t want any more black fingerprints on the pages.”

Hope waited until the boys had left with their books before she approached the desk. She looked into the librarian’s enormous, slightly out-of-focus brown eyes and noticed Regina’s irises were huge and cloudy.

Hope figured the woman had to be legally blind, at the very least. “Hello,” she began. “I need some information, and I was hoping you could help me.”

“Depends. I can’t check out library materials to anyone who hasn’t resided in Pearl County for less than six months.”

Hope had been expecting that. “I don’t want to check out library materials. I’m interested in reading local news reports from five years ago.”

“What specifically are you interested in reading?”

Hope wasn’t certain how the town would react to an outsider poking into its business, so she took a deep breath and just jumped right in. “Anything associated with the late Sheriff Donnelly.”

Regina blinked, shoved her glasses down her nose, then turned her head and looked at Hope out of the corner of her eye. “Are you the California woman living in Minnie’s old house?”

Such intense scrutiny was more than a little unnerving, and Hope had to force herself not to back away. “Minnie?”

“Minnie Donnelly. She was married to that no-good Hiram for twenty-five years before the good Lord called her home.”

“How did Mrs. Donnelly die?”

“The cancer. Uterine. Some say that’s what sent Hiram over the edge, but if you ask me, he was always a pervert. In the third grade he tried to touch my heinie.”

Hope guessed she no longer had to wonder if people would talk to her.

Regina pushed her glasses back up. “What do you want with the news reports?”

“I’m thinking of writing an article about the old sheriff.”

“Have you ever published anything?”

“Quite a few of my articles have appeared in magazines,” Hope answered, which was the truth, but it had been a long time since she’d had anything appear in more mainstream publications.

Regina smiled and her eyes got even bigger. “I’m a writer, too. Mostly poetry. Maybe you could look it over for me.”

Hope groaned inwardly. “I don’t know anything about poetry.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I also wrote a short story about my cat, Jinks. He can sing along with Tom Jones to ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’”

Hope’s silent groan turned into a throat cramp. “You don’t say.”

“It’s true, he really can.” Regina turned to a file cabinet behind her. She took a key from a rubber bungee cord around her wrist and, feeling for the lock, opened a file drawer. “Let’s see,” she said as she pushed her glasses to the top of her head. “That would have been August of ‘95.” She stuck her face into the drawer and studied several small white boxes at close range. Then she straightened and handed Hope two rolls of microfilm. “The projector is over there,” she said, pointing to a far wall. “Copies are ten cents apiece. Will you need help with the projector?”

Hope shook her head, then realized Regina probably couldn’t see her. “No, thank you. I’ve had lots of experience with these things.”

It took Hope a little under an hour to copy the newspaper articles. Because of the grainy projector screen, she didn’t take the time to read them. She skimmed mostly, and from what little she saw, it seemed the late sheriff had been involved in several fetish clubs he’d found via the Internet. Over the course of a few years, he’d embezzled seventy thousand dollars to meet with other members. He’d met with them in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and toward the end, his taste in girls had gotten younger and more expensive. In the last year of his life, he’d become so careless he’d paid for a few of them to come to his house. What Hope found most surprising was that for all his recklessness, no one in town knew a thing until his death. Or did they?

One name that drew her attention to the fuzzy screen every time it appeared was Dylan’s. He was always quoted as saying, “The FBI is investigating the case. I have no information at this time.” Luckily for the reporters, the other deputies hadn’t been so tight-lipped.

When Hope finished, she gathered her Xerox copies and returned the microfilm. It was just after noon by the time she drove to Timberline Road, but she hadn’t been home two minutes when the doorbell rang. It was her neighbor, Shelly, and she had something on her mind.

“You know,” Shelly began, “I haven’t had a neighbor for a long time now, and I guess I was hoping that we could be friends.”

Hope looked at Shelly standing there on the porch, her head cocked to one side, a few stray sunbeams turning her hair copper. She had no idea why her neighbor was so upset. “We are,” she said, although she didn’t think one lunch automatically made people friends.

“Then why did Dylan have to tell me about what happened to you at the Buckhorn?”

“I haven’t had time to tell you,” Hope answered, even as she wondered if Shelly was really seeking friendship or just wanted information about what had taken place the night before. “When did you talk to Dylan?”

“This morning when he dropped Adam off. He has quite a shiner. Emmett Barnes is a scary guy and you could have been really hurt.”

“I know, but a man named Hayden Dean stepped in. If it weren’t for him, Emmett would have hit me.”

“Probably, but those Deans aren’t much better, believe me.”

“Really? I was going to try and find out where Hayden lives so I could see how he’s feeling today.”

Shelly shook her head. “Stay away from those people. I think Hayden is his own first cousin.” One red brow lifted. “If you know what I mean.”

Hope smiled, no longer caring if Shelly wanted friendship or information. It had been so long since she’d stood around gossiping with another woman, she’d forgotten how much she missed it. “Do you want to come in? I think I might have a diet Pepsi.”

“Diet? Do I look like I need a diet?” asked the neighbor who looked like she’d had to lie down to get her Wranglers zipped up. “I don’t diet.”

“I might have some tea.”

“No, thanks. Wally and Adam and I were just headed down to the lake for a late picnic. Why don’t you join us?”

Hope had a million and one things to do. Finish her alien story, take photographs of the area, have them developed at the one-hour photo place in town, scan them into her computer, then transpose some aliens into pictures. She had to read over the articles she’d xeroxed at the library, and she had to decide if there was a story in there somewhere. One that hadn’t been told before.

Her eyes felt scratchy, her brain mushy. A few hours lying on the beach, emptying her head, and chatting about anything but work sounded like heaven. “Okay,” she said. “Give me ten minutes.” As soon as Shelly left, Hope ran upstairs and peeled out of her clothes. She washed her face and shaved her legs. Her blue-and-green tie-dyed one-piece was cut high on her hips, and she liked it because it made her legs look long. She grabbed an old picnic basket she found in the pantry and checked for petrified rodents. It was clean and she tossed in a few diet Pepsis, grapes, crackers, bleu cheese, and her Minolta camera and case. With a beach towel over one shoulder, a pair of Japanese flip-flops on her feet, and her sunglasses covering her eyes, she headed to the lake.

Adam and Wally were already in the water, while Shelly relaxed beneath the shade of ponderosa pines. She sat on the beach in a chaise longue, drinking a Shasta Cola and chowing on barbecued potato chips. She wore a Hawaiian print halter with a matching swimming skirt.

“We brought extra sandwiches if you’re hungry,”

Shelly offered as Hope sat in the chaise next to her neighbor.

“What kind of sandwiches?”

“Peanut butter and jelly, or ham and cheese.”

“Ham and cheese sounds good.” Hope sat, straddling the lounge chair. The metal frame warmed the insides of her thighs as she placed her picnic basket between her knees. “I brought some fruit and some cheese and crackers,” she added as she opened the basket.

“Is it squirt cheese?”

“No, bleu.” Hope spread the cheese on a cracker, plopped a grape on top, then bit into it.

“Ahh....no, thanks.”

Hope glanced at Shelly, who was watching her as if she were eating entrails. “It’s really good,” she said and popped the last of the cracker into her mouth.

“I’ll just take your word for that.”

“No way. I ate your cooking, now you have to eat mine.” Hope fixed Shelly a cracker and handed it to her.

“This is your idea of cooking?” She looked doubtful, but she took it anyway.

“It is these days.”

Shelly bit into it, chewed carefully, then declared, “Hey, this is better than I thought.”

“Better than squirt cheese?”

“Yeah, except for bacon flavor.” Shelly motioned for Hope’s basket and they swapped.

“You can eat anything in there but the peanut butter and grape jelly,” Shelly told her as Hope pawed through the items. “It’s Adam’s and he’s real picky about his jelly. It has to be real smooth, no seeds or anything. Dylan has to make his sandwich special for him.”

Hope chose a ham and cheese made with the kind of soft white bread she hadn’t had since she was a kid, and greasy potato chips. “Where is Adam’s mother?” she asked as if she weren’t dying to know.

“Most of the time she lives in L.A.,” Shelly answered as she plopped a grape on top of a mound of bleu cheese. “But when she has a visitation with Adam, they stay somewhere in Montana.”

“That’s unusual.” Hope popped the top to a can of orange Shasta and raised it to her lips. “Usually it’s the father who has visitation.”

Shelly shrugged. “Dylan’s a good daddy, and when Adam needs female influence, he goes and stays with his grandma and aunt at the Double T. And, of course, a lot of the time he stays here with me and Wally when Dylan is working.” Shelly bit into the cracker, then asked, “Do you have children?”

“No. No children.” Hope waited for either the puzzled frown to wrinkle Shelly’s brow or the oh-you-poor-thing look to cross her face. Neither happened.

“This stuff is addicting,” Shelly said while fixing herself another cracker.

Hope relaxed in the chaise and ate her lunch. She watched Wally and Adam stare intently down, hands poised over the surface of the lake. The meal was greasy and fattening and she polished it off with three Oreo cookies and a piece of licorice. When they traded the baskets back, all that was left in Hope’s basket were a few pitiful grapes still on the vine, the two diet Pepsis, and her camera. She removed the Minolta from its case and pointed it at the two boys diving to catch minnows with their hands. Hope wasn’t a great photographer, but she knew enough to get the shots she needed. She focused the lens and snapped.

“Are you taking pictures for your flora-and-fauna article?”

Suddenly Hope didn’t feel so comfortable lying to Shelly. “Yeah,” she said, which wasn’t a real lie. She was taking pictures of the area for her alien article. She took several more photos; then the boys ran up the beach toward them and grabbed some towels.

Adam dug into the pocket of his swimming trunks and handed Shelly several small rocks. He told her she could have the most special one.

“Take a picture of me, Hope,” Wally urged as he flexed his pencil-thin arms.

“No, me.” Adam pushed Wally out of the way and posed like a bodybuilder.

“I’ll take a picture of each of you and give them to you when I get them developed.” She took several photos before the boys grabbed their peanut butter sandwiches and sodas and took off to find more “cool rocks” on the lake’s shore.

“When are you going to finish your article?” Shelly asked.

Hope opened her mouth to rattle off a fictitious deadline, but stopped. They’d shared picnic baskets. She’d drunk Shelly’s orange soda and eaten her Oreos, and she didn’t feel like lying anymore. Shelly hadn’t judged Hope when she’d discovered that Hope didn’t have any children. Maybe she wouldn’t judge her profession or want to relate Elvis sightings. “Well, if you won’t spread it around, I’ll tell you who I really write for.”

Shelly sat up a bit straighter and leaned toward Hope. “I can keep a secret.”

“I really write for The Weekly News of the Universe. I lied about the Northwest magazine article.”

“You did? Why?”

“Because people assume all sorts of things about tabloid writers. Like we’re sleazy and write gossip.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. I write stories about Bigfoot and aliens and people living beneath the ocean in the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Hmm... that black-and-white tabloid they always sell next to the Enquirer?”

Hope waited for a boat to speed past before she snapped a picture of the clear green lake. “Yes.”

“The one with Bat Boy on the cover?”

“Bat Boy,” Hope scoffed as she focused her camera on the distant shore. She made the trees the focal point and blurred the beach in the foreground. A perfect spot for fuzzy aliens to picnic. “That’s Weekly World News. They can’t write their way out of a paper sack. Those people have absolutely no imagination.” As far as she was concerned, Bat Boy was one of the stupider stories she’d read from the competition.

“Oh! Giant ants attack New York?”

“Bingo.”

“Oh, my God! Did you write that?”

Hope lowered the camera and looked at her neighbor. “No, but my stories are feature articles, and once in a while I write a sort of point-counterpoint advice column under the pseudonyms Lacy Harte and Frank Rhodes.”

“You’re Lacy Harte?”

“I’m both Lacy and Frank.”

“You’re kidding! I always thought those two were separate people. I mean, they’re just so rude to each other.”

“At first I kind of felt schizophrenic, but I like it now. I also write features under the name Madilyn Wright.”

“What have you written that I might have read?”

Hope put the camera back inside its case, then stretched out in her chair and lifted her face to the sun. “Last year, my series of Bermuda Triangle articles turned out to be real popular. I followed those up with the Micky the Magical Leprechaun features.”

“Oh, my God! I read some of those Micky the Magical Leprechaun stories. That was you?”

“Yep.”

“My mother-in-law buys those magazines and she gives them to me when she’s through.”

As far as Hope could tell, only “mothers-in-law” bought tabloids. Everyone read them, but she’d never met anyone who’d confessed to actually buying one. Kind of like trying to find anyone to admit they’d voted for Nixon.

Yet subscriptions alone to The Weekly News of the Universe were around ten million worldwide. There were a lot of closet readers, and they weren’t all mothers-in-law.

“I really liked it when Micky transformed himself into RuPaul.”

That story had been the last of the leprechaun features and the beginning of her trouble. “He hated that particular story.” When he’d read it, he threatened to sue Hope, her editor, and the president and CEO of the paper.

“Micky the Leprechaun is a real person?”

“He’s not a leprechaun, he’s a dwarf. His real name is Myron Lambardo, but he’s also known as Myron the Masher. I met him in Vegas while I was there researching an article on Elvis impersonators. At that time, he worked in a little dive of a bar, wrestling women in a plastic kiddie pool filled with mud.” She’d paid him to let her photograph him, and she’d made sure he’d signed a release for the photos. “At first he really liked the stories. He made the most of his fifteen minutes of fame and managed to get a few higher-profile wrestling matches as Micky. He used to call and leave messages on my business line, telling me how much he liked them. Then I did the RuPaul feature and he thought it made him look gay. He said I exploited and humiliated him, as if women pinning him in the mud was so much more dignified.

“When Myron discovered that he’d signed away his rights,” Hope continued, “he started calling and threatening me. He wanted me to morph him into someone macho like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When I didn’t respond to his threats, he found out where I lived and showed up at my door. He harassed me and wouldn’t leave me alone, and I had to take him to court and get a restraining order against him.”

Shelly swung her legs over the side of her chaise. “You’re being stalked by Micky the Leprechaun?”

“Myron Lambardo.”

“Has he hurt you?”

“No, he just threatens to ‘tombstone’ me.”

“But you’re bigger than him.”

“Yeah, but he’s one buff little dude. He wrestles for a living.”

Shelly’s eyes got big and she raised a hand to her mouth. Hope thought she might have shocked her neighbor speechless, until Shelly burst into hysterical laughter.

Wally and Adam turned and looked at Shelly as if she were nuts. “What’s so funny, Mom?” Wally called out.

Shelly shook her head and the boys switched their attention to Hope, as if she had the answer.

Hope shrugged. What could she say? Some people were just plain nuts. Sometimes she wondered if she was the only sane person in an insane world.