Megan turned haunted eyes to Jake as a sense of betrayal almost overwhelmed her. "You did this to me?"
Jake rose gracefully from his seat on the steps, but his actions were less than graceful as he paced a few steps back and forth before stopping beside Patrick and looking down at her. Now two men she barely knew loomed over her. "What was I supposed to do about such a flagrant abuse of power, ignore it? Read the article, Megan."
"I came here for privacy, not to have my name spread all over the local paper, not to invite the media to swoop down on me again, not—"
"Read the article, Megan, " Jake insisted quietly.
"I trusted you!"
"Read it."
Megan looked down at the paper in her lap and forced her eyes to focus on it, forced back the fist of terror that seemed to grip her heart, forced herself to make sense of the words she saw on the page:
According to a report filed June 4, the Pitchlyn County Sheriff's Office, acting on an informant's sworn affidavit, led a raid against a purported planned narcotics transaction at what they believed to be the home of a suspected offender with a lengthy arrest record and three convictions for possession of a controlled substance.
Leading a force of twelve men from four state and local agencies, First Deputy Mark Henderson served the warrant at 12:15 A.M. in what is known as a "no-knock" search. Made legal by what was seriously claimed in the last state legislative session to be an infringement of constitutional rights, a no-knock search operates on the presumption that, with warning, a suspect will dispose of narcotics evidence before admitting the officers bearing the warrant.
No narcotics were found. The known suspect was not found. The new resident, who acquired ownership six weeks earlier, as documented by court records and substantiated by tradespeople hired to assist in renovation of the former rental property, was home alone. A neighbor who became suspicious of the late-night activity interrupted the search and affirmed the new owner's lack of involvement with the previous tenant.
Sheriff Rolley Pierson states that the name of the alleged offender is being withheld pending results of an ongoing investigation.
Information received at the Pitchlyn County Banner from a reliable source reveals that the victim of this search was not physically harmed but was treated by a doctor for shock following the midnight invasion of twelve armed men.
This surprise raid follows three official complaints during the preceding month against Sheriff Pierson or members of his staff, and a number of protests voiced in official court proceedings by defendants claiming that improper force was used in effecting the arrest.
Megan looked up from the paper, from Jake to Patrick and back to Jake. "You didn't use my name," she said.
"Why would I want to do that to a nice person like you?" Patrick asked.
She looked back at him and grinned. "You didn't use my name!"
Jake took the paper from her, folded it, and handed it to Patrick. "It may come out anyway. Gossip spreads in this county faster than a pasture fire in August. The owner of the lumberyard and his cronies already knew about the raid by the time I got to town this morning. But something had to be done. You see, as long as Pierson's victims were criminals, very few people in this county were willing to say anything."
"And we were in luck," Patrick added. "It was a big news day in both Fort Smith and Tulsa, the two most likely outside places to have picked up the story, and by the time they get around to it, if they do, it will be just another in a long line of offenses laid at the door of our dear sheriff. Unless you want to push it, I have a feeling Rolley P is going to play this real low key."
"Which suits me just fine," Jake said. "Until we have enough evidence to take him before a grand jury."
Caught by what seemed to be an alien hardness in Jake's voice, Megan glanced quickly at him, only to find him staring into the distance, his eyes and expression as hard as his voice had been, his features, accented by the slash of the scar, dark and forbidding. For the first time, she knew Jake was a man to be feared. But by her?
She threw herself against him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek to his hard chest. "He's sending me away," she cried, "back to Fort Smith. Please don't let him make me go. Please let me stay here with you!"
She felt the tension tightening his body and felt his hands grip on her arms. She dared to look up and found his eyes glittering darkly with an emotion she had no way of understanding.
For the first time she saw vagrant strands of gray in his black hair and harsh lines that time had etched in his face. It didn't matter. The life that had marked him so had made him the man she loved. "Please let me stay with you!"
His hands tightened even more on her arms as he bent toward her, and she thought for one glorious moment he would kiss her. But he held her still while he separated them by the distance of one step.
"You're so young, child," he said harshly and—because she wanted so much to hear it, hear it she did—wistfully, "and so innocent. I wonder: Could you survive me?"
Whining, Deacon bumped his head under her hand. Patrick was looking at her questioningly, and Jake—Jake stared at her with the same fierce intensity he had focused on that unseen distance just seconds—she hoped it was just seconds—ago.
Megan shuddered and pushed up from her seat on the stairs, finding that the men still towered over her. Familiarity with these—whatever they were—did not lessen the fear she felt when she came out of one. What was happening to her?
Seeing questions of another kind building in Jake's eyes, she shook her head, a quick negative answer to anything he wanted to ask.
"Excuse me," she said, but it seemed her voice had as little courage as she did; it had reverted to the hoarse croak of earlier that day. "It's too much, " she said. From somewhere she found a tiny bit of strength. "I'm sorry. I suppose I've overdone it. I'm just tired that's all. I think I'll rest awhile."
"Megan?"
This time it was Patrick who spoke her name, with a wealth of questions in the one word; Patrick who reached as though to touch her; and Jake who stopped him by placing his dark, scarred hand on his friend's arm.
"I think that's a good idea," Jake said. "Patrick and I will be working on the gate near the county road turnoff. I'll leave Deacon with you. If you need us, tell him to get me and bring me back."
"Do you really think this is going to keep anyone out?"
Jake turned from studying the massive pipe gate that still rested in its nest of weeds and briars in the ditch beside the post he had installed months ago.
"Only the mildly curious," he said. "The sightseers, the uninvited hunters who would just as soon find an easier way back to the mountains, and the type of thief who needs a truck to carry away his booty. But at least with this up, I won't have many doubts about the intentions of anyone wandering around on my place or Megan's."
"Interesting," Patrick muttered.
"What is?" Jake asked, as he took a gasoline-powered weed cutter from the back of his truck.
"You never seemed to worry much about the Hudson place before."
"I never had the right before."
"And what suddenly gave you that right?"
Jake paused with his hand on the starter cable. "Hell."
Patrick flashed the grin that had infuriated Jake since the day they started first grade together and nodded toward the ditch. "If you'd just kind of stomp around down there and scare off the snakes, and maybe use that thing like a stick to poke around, I think we can get that big Tinkertoy out of there without contributing to the noise pollution."
Recognizing reprieve, Jake returned Patrick's grin and stepped down into the ditch. "Tinkertoy? I'll have you know that's a product of some expert welding."
"Yeah. Yours and mine—and then didn't you wind up hiring the entire vo-tech welding class to finish it?"
Jake shot his friend a sharp but friendly glare for knowing and remembering too much. Then, working together silently except for muffled groans of effort, the two men wrestled the massive gate from the tangle of briars and tugged and lifted until they had it balanced in place across the pipes of the cattle guard.
Looking across the top rail of the gate at Patrick, who wiped his arm across his sweat-drenched forehead, Jake was reminded of why the gate was still in the ditch after all these months. His body protested even now but at last was beginning to respond as it once had—before he'd either been suckered into an ambush or had stumbled onto something much bigger than his informant had known.
"You okay?" Patrick asked, on a wheezing breath.
"Yeah," Jake said, lying only a little. Eight inches more. That's all they had to lift the damn thing. Then they could release it onto the welded hooks that would serve as hinge pins and be finished with all the heavy work.
Jake flexed his knees and settled his grip on the gate. "On the count of three, city boy. One . . . two . . . three!"
They made it. With a scrape of metal and a satisfying thunk! the gate settled into place and the two men collapsed against it.
"I don't suppose . . . you brought . . . any of that cold beer . . . with us," Patrick panted.
Jake chuckled weakly and pushed himself away from the gate.
"So. Where does she go?"
Wishing he had indeed brought some of the beer, or at least a cooler of water, Jake didn't at first realize that Patrick was now wearing his reporter's hat. "What?"
"Megan. When she takes those little mini-vacations. Wasn't that one of those gaps you were telling Barbara about last night? Is this something new since the raid, or a result of whatever the hell really happened at Villa Castellano, or has she always just gone off somewhere in her mind in the middle of a conversation while looking straight at you?"
Jake wiped his sleeve across his forehead and automatically started to unbutton his shirt, but stopped. His upper body was no longer something to expose, not even in a natural reaction against the heat of physical labor, not even when—or perhaps because—the only audience was his oldest friend. "How the hell should I know?"
"Maybe because she's your sister-in-law," Patrick suggested. "You were married to Helen for five years, and Megan was married to Roger for—what—four?"
"Yeah, but I wasn't a part of the life Helen wanted to share with her Washington contacts, and I sure as hell wasn't part of the life good old Rog wanted to share with the Senator's pretty little girl."
"Pretty little girl? That doesn't sound like anything you'd say about a female over the age of eighteen, so it has to be a Roger Hudson quote."
"I believe his exact words were, 'She's a pretty little girl. It won't be any hardship being married to her.' Of course, I wasn't supposed to hear them. And from the pictures I'd seen of her—you know, society-page things with her dressed to the nines and acting the role of Lady Bountiful—I assumed she had been around the Washington scene long enough to know what she was getting by marrying Roger Hudson and was agreeable to the bargain."
"You didn't go to the wedding?"
Jake glared at him—he found himself doing a lot more of that this afternoon than usual—and walked to the back of his truck, where he began digging through a box of hardware. "I was on assignment."
"And thank God for small favors." Patrick joined him at the back of the truck and unerringly picked up the gate's locking assembly. "How fortunate that you had something pleasant to do—like deep undercover in some sleazy border town?—rather than endure a Washington society wedding."
"Patrick—"
"I know," Patrick said, sighing. "I'm out of line and I'll back off. But it just makes me so damn mad when you drape your cynicism around you like a shield."
"It's my life," Jake reminded him, not bothering to contradict him, "my cynicism, and my shield."
"Too true. But you're my friend."
Jake gave a quick reluctant laugh and took the hardware from Patrick. "Come on," he said. "Let's get this put together and go find you that cold one you've been begging for."
Patrick nodded, grabbed up the toolbox, and carried it to the gate. "So," he asked. "Do you still think she's a pretty little girl?"
Jake looked at the lock he held, hefted it, and smiled ferally. "One of these days I'm going to stuff Webster's Unabridged down your throat."
"It won't shut me up. Barbara tried. Do you still think Megan is a—"
"I don't know what I think about Megan. I do know she's not what I expected. I'm relatively sure she wasn't playing Lady Bountiful in Villa Castellano, that her work there was real and serious. But I'm having a hard time reconciling the woman I've just met with the one who married Roger Hudson. And I'm having a hard time reconciling the way she looks now with the way she looked four years ago."
"Trauma and grief notwithstanding?"
Jake shook his head. "Trauma and grief notwithstanding. The woman I saw in those pictures is gone. Megan is—well, she has a vulnerability that can't be explained by the last four years."
"Or by living through what she survived?"
"I'm not sure it's really touched her yet. She told me what happened at the clinic. The words were there; they were even the right ones. But she told it like someone reporting something she'd read."
"Or can't bear to face."
"Damn it, Patrick. What I'm trying to say is that the Megan I thought I saw in those pictures might have survived, but she wouldn't look like a lost waif, she wouldn't have come to rural Oklahoma to live, and she wouldn't enjoy the hard, physical, dirty labor she's been involved in for the last few weeks."
"That vacation this afternoon wasn't the first one you've seen, was it?"
"No. That was the second one today"—Jake hesitated, remembering her strange reaction when he had come back into his house that morning—"maybe the third. It could be a reaction to the shock she had last night," he added, half hoping he was right, half afraid he was. "Or maybe something completely harmless, like being lost in thought. Barbara didn't seem too concerned."
"Yes, but did my esteemed wife see last night what we saw today?"
Deacon whined from the doorway, summoning Megan from her second effort at finishing the floor of the green bedroom. She'd scrubbed and sanded and painted over the ugly footprints, but now tiny white kitten prints tracked across the unpainted portion of the floor. She had captured the kittens, washed their paws so that they wouldn't get sick from licking off the paint, and closed them away in the utility room.
Now she knelt on the floor, determined to apply every ounce of concentration to spreading the gloss white enamel with no sign of a brush stroke, so her mind would be too occupied for any more uncharted side trips. Still, her back and neck were beginning to ache, and when she at last heard the dog she welcomed the distraction of his visit.
She rocked back on her heels, turned to look at him, and recognized a summons in his stance. She felt a moment of fear before she realized that nothing about this highly protective dog even hinted at danger and remembered that both Jake and Patrick were somewhere between her and the road over which any intruder would come.
"What is it, Deacon," she asked companionably, "a squirrel in the front yard?"
Whining again, he whirled and trotted toward the front of the house but paused to look back as though to insist that she follow. She rose to her feet, surprised by how stiff she had gotten in such a short time, stretched toward the ceiling and then toward the floor, and smiled. "I'm coming already."
Her smile faded when she reached the front door and saw a woman standing on the front porch. Did she know her? Or was this another of those weird episodes?
The woman was tiny, fine-boned with a delicate beauty that made Megan instantly aware of her own hospital-escapee appearance. She had smooth golden skin, enormous dark eyes, hair as rich and lustrous as mink caught back at her nape but hanging without a kink or frizz almost to her waist. She wore some sort of tailored khaki skirt and a peach-colored shirt made of the finest, softest cotton Megan had ever seen. And she was undeniably Choctaw.
"Megan?"
Well, Megan thought, at least the woman knew her.
"I'm Barbara Phillips. We met last night?"
"Oh, of course." Megan flipped the latch on the screen door and opened the door. "Dr. Phillips."
"Barbara, when I'm off duty," the visitor said, chuckling as she walked into the house and set her bag on a table by the door. "Patrick and Jake promised me you had soft drinks in the refrigerator and a nice breeze on the front porch. You were expecting me, weren't you?"
Was she? And then she remembered the food in her refrigerator. Jake was, but was she?
"You weren't." Barbara expelled a quick breath and a regretful laugh. "The rats. You might know my dear husband and his best buddy would leave it up to me to explain I'm here for dinner and a house call."
A house call? Megan's first reaction was yet another sense of betrayal, which was ridiculous. Jake had to be responsible for this, and he had been—almost—unfailingly considerate and thoughtful. Her second reaction was one of relief. She remembered this woman as kind and gentle. Maybe she could trust her enough to ask about what had been—or had not been—happening to her.
"Then you're not off duty yet, are you?" Megan asked softly.
Barbara Phillips cocked her head to one side, studying Megan for a moment before she smiled. "And you're not angry."
Megan shook her head. "Of course not. I'm a little unaccustomed to such kindness, but I'm certainly not going to complain about it. Come on back. The kitchen's through here."
"I know," Barbara told her, picking up her bag and following. "Patrick and I spent hours here with Jake when we were growing up."
Megan looked back over her shoulder in surprise. "With Jake? I thought this was Hudson property then."
"It was," Barbara said, plopping her bag onto the pine worktable. "Why don't you sit down," she suggest, "and we'll get this out of the way first?"
"When you were growing up," Megan reminded her as she pulled out one of the mismatched oak pattern-back chairs and sat down.
Barbara unsnapped the catch on her bag and dug out her stethoscope. "You know about Aunt Sally?"
"No."
"Oh. Aunt Sally Hudson. Roger and Helen's great-aunt."
Megan hadn't even known Roger had a great-aunt, let alone her name.
Listening with the stethoscope at Megan's chest, Barbara frowned slightly, but Megan knew it had to be from her lack of knowledge rather than anything physically wrong. Then Barbara smiled over an obviously well-loved memory.
"Aunt Sally had taught second grade at Prescott almost since before God. Anyway, we all thought she was older than God and had to know at least as much. What most of the kids didn't know was that she had just as much love to give—until Jake's parents died when he was twelve. She took him into her home and took him and all his friends into her heart."
Barbara repositioned the stethoscope. "Take another breath . . . deeper. Okay." She let the stethoscope dangle and raised one of Megan's eyelids, peering at her eye.
"I didn't realize you knew Roger."
Barbara checked the other eye. "Not well. He and Helen lived and went to school in Fairview. We didn't see much of them."
"But—"
"Let's check your reflexes." She tapped Megan's left knee and then her right one. "Okay. Stand up for me, please. Close your eyes, raise your arm out to your side, and then bring your hand around and touch your finger to your nose."
Megan felt a small burst of accomplishment when she felt her finger connect with her nose instead of poking her in the eye, but she couldn't help wondering why Jake and Patrick and Barbara had known so much of Aunt Sally's love if Roger and Helen had wound up with her property.
Barbara walked to the refrigerator and stopped with her hand on the door. "Oops,' she said. "Old reflexes of my own. May I?"
"Of course."
Barbara opened the door and removed two cans of cola, which she held up questioningly.
"Yes, please."
Barbara carried both cans to the table, handed one to Megan, and opened the other as she leaned back against the table.
"Is that it, Doctor?" Megan asked.
Barbara grinned. "Almost. Are you having any problems? Any confusion?"
Oh. It was time to decide how much to reveal. "A little," Megan admitted.
Barbara nodded. "I talked to Dr. Kent last night. According to him, that's nothing to worry about unless it lingers or gets really bad. He was concerned about what he described as your inability to confront your memories of the attack. He seemed to think this latest insult might have deeper repercussions because of that." She took a deep drink from the cola and waited a heartbeat before continuing. "Any memory loss—that you know of?"
Megan liked this woman. She liked her smiling eyes, her gentle manner, and her quiet grace. Possibly they could be real friends. She shook her head.
"Any hallucinations?"
She didn't yet trust Barbara enough to answer that question honestly, especially after Dr. Kent's comments. The memory of her first weeks back in the States still loomed over her: weeks—first in the hospital, then at her father's house—while everyone she knew, everyone she should have trusted, who should have trusted her, tried to get her to admit she hadn't really experienced what she told them.
"No," she said, turning and walking to the sink, looking out the double windows above it toward a tree line that stretched across the weedy, overgrown pasture north to the county road, at the glimpse of encroaching hills to the south. She heard the click of the locks as Barbara closed her bag and the scrape of a chair as she sat at the table.
"Dr. Kent also told me he'd recommended you keep a journal."
"That's right."
"Have you recorded the events of the last several hours yet?"
Megan turned around, at last able to face Barbara without wearing a lie on her face. "Not yet."
"I'm not familiar with the procedure he has you using."
"Neither is he," Megan told her. When Barbara raised an eyebrow in silent question, Megan realized how sharply she must have spoken. "It's being developed by a colleague of his, someone he did his residency with. He's using a number of his patients as a kind of test market."
Barbara nodded. "That explains why I haven't heard of it, then. But keeping a journal has been proven to be effective in emotional and spiritual growth. Even if a person does no more than record the events of the day chronologically, there seems to be some benefit in being able to look at events analytically enough to do so. Dr. Kent did stress that he thought this new technique would be good for you. But he said to be sure to call him if you need him."
"Not you?"
Barbara smiled. "You may call me any time you want to, Megan. As a friend, I hope. I can help you find a local doctor too, but I work at the Choctaw Clinic, not in private practice."
"As a friend would be great," Megan said. "I'm sorry, but I've seen too many doctors in the last three months."
"Now you sound just like Jake. No matter how much I complain that he doesn't appreciate my fine education, my dedication, my years of training—"
Barbara was teasing again. Relieved that she didn't have to explain why she was quite literally sick of doctors, Megan opened the refrigerator and took out an ice tray. Jake was sick of them too, was he? Because in spite of Barbara's lightly spoken complaint, Megan knew that Jake held a great deal of respect for her.
The aversion to doctors had to stem from the time he had been wounded. But hadn't that been long enough ago that he had been on the way to recovery by the time Helen joined the junket to Villa Castellano? And if he had been, why wasn't he back at work now with the DEA? Wasn't that the agency Helen used to complain about? Why was Jake still here? And why was she so very glad he was?
"Jake—" Megan started to ask, but a shrill beep interrupted her.
"Damn," Barbara muttered. "I'm not on call tonight, but I guess I'd better remind them. Where's your phone?"
"In the hall," Megan told her. "You can't miss it."
"And your number? Do you mind if I leave it with the clinic?"
Megan shook her head. "No. I don't mind. It's written on the inside front cover of the phone book."
And as Barbara hurried toward the hallway, Megan realized it was just as well that their conversation had been interrupted.