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  It seemed that Raleigh had gotten away with murder, not to mention a large heap of money. The notion rankled Faye to her very core.

  Miss Dovey reappeared with a tray of tea things. “Now,” she said, “what was it you ladies wanted to talk to me about?”

  Faye dragged her mind back to the reason for her visit. Why was she here? Oh, yeah—to talk to Miss Dovey about whether there was any possibility that DeWayne had acquired the mound property legally.

  But she was no longer certain that DeWayne had anything to do with the murders. After all, he wasn’t actually seeing any of the lease money. It was all going to buy Kiki’s medicines. Whereas Raleigh had probably been making a fortune. Nevertheless, she still needed to find out the truth about the property lines. “Remember the old story about the feud between the branches of the Lester family?” she began.

  “We think there may be a problem with the property line between Amanda-Lynne and DeWayne,” cut in Ronya. “Do you know if it’s been changed in any way since the days of the feud?”

  Miss Dovey looked bewildered. “Why, no, not to my knowledge. Why would it be?”

  “Are you sure—” began Ronya, then stopped as the telephone rang.

  Miss Dovey answered the phone. She listened for a moment, a look of concern growing on her face. Looking at the two women, she held the receiver out to Ronya. “It’s Kiki. I think you’d better talk to her.”

  Ronya took the phone. She listened for a moment, then spoke. “Stay right where you are. Yes, I know I’ll need help. Faye’s here with me, and you’re not that big. We can manage.“ She paused to listen to Kiki. “Okay. Lock the doors and windows if you can. We’ll be right there.” She hung up.

  Faye and Miss Dovey looked at her expectantly.

  “DeWayne’s just beat the crap out of Kiki—I’m guessing he’s drunk—then he busted up the TV and left in his truck. She wants to get out of there before he comes back and does it again, but she can’t even get up off the floor.”

  “Let’s go,” said Faye, rising.

  Ronya held up a hand. “DeWayne is out there, drunk. Are you sure?”

  “Joe will be on his tail soon, if he isn’t already. We’ll be all right. You can’t count on everybody, but you can always count on Joe.”

  “Okay,” Ronya said, grabbing her coat and throwing Faye’s at her. “I hope you don’t mind watching Zack, Miss Dovey.”

  The old woman pulled the boy to her so that he could rest comfortably against her hip. “Of course not. But Ronya—”

  Miss Dovey might as well not have spoken, for all the notice Ronya took. Once she was assured that Zack would be looked after, her attention shifted to the task at hand: helping Kiki.

  Miss Dovey hobbled along behind them, trying to say something, but they were in too much of a hurry to stop and listen to an old woman.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Ronya and Faye took a narrow footpath back through woods to the north of Miss Dovey’s house, coming out on the trail about half a mile from the Montrose place. As they hurried along the final leg, Faye wished for home. A cold mist, not quite a rain, hung in the air. On her island, the temperature never plummeted in mid-day, turning puddles to slush. She couldn’t remember the last time her teeth had chattered or her breath had condensed like a white ghost in front of her mouth.

  The Montrose house came into view about two hundred yards ahead. Faye could see the fence that kept DeWayne’s dogs and their fangs contained. She couldn’t see the dogs themselves, but she imagined she could hear their bays echoing in the frigid air. The thought made her shiver even harder than the weather did.

  “Can you imagine what it was like for Kiki, living with DeWayne all these years?” she asked.

  “Marriage ain’t always fun and games,” Ronya said. “We’ll find somebody willing to take Kiki in until…well, for as long as she’s got. Irene, too. They’ll be okay, and DeWayne can rot out here with nobody to beat. Nobody to put food on his table, either.”

  Faye could hear the dogs for real, now.

  “Do you hear—”

  Ronya stood straight up and bellowed, “Sweet Jesus! DeWayne’s set the dogs on us.” Wrapping a big hand around Faye’s forearm, she yanked her practically off her feet. “Don’t look back,” she said, and veered off the path and into the woods at a dead run.

  Faye, struggling simply to keep up, couldn’t have looked back if she’d tried.

  The sound of baying dogs echoing through the frigid air had left Faye’s imagination and become her reality. Faye followed Ronya blindly, with no idea where they were headed—until they burst out onto a footpath. Autumn’s final leaves had dropped, obscuring the ground and covering the slick patches of mud that had knocked Faye off her feet on her first trip down this trail. She ran on faith, trusting that each footfall would land on solid ground.

  The blood throbbed in her almost-healed scalp wound. Ronya’s speed put the lie to any notion she might have had that heavy people were slow-moving. Ronya must be built of nothing but skin, bones, and muscles, with every fiber of those muscles pulling toward a single goal: getting them out of danger. They plunged deeper into the colorless winter forest, each step taking them further away from civilization.

  DeWayne and his pet monsters remained out of sight behind them, but their sounds told Faye that they were still there. Strange echoes of barking dogs bounced through the swells and hollows of the wooded countryside until Faye couldn’t have pointed in any one direction and known, with certainty, that their pursuers were there. There was no question in her mind that the dogs would catch them, sooner or later. She couldn’t think about what they would do to her flesh, and Ronya’s, so she found herself dwelling on one particularly maddening thing: DeWayne might get away with this.

  A jury drawn from this county, where dogs were seen as working beasts necessary for hunting and security, might well believe a story that his dogs had escaped their pen and run two defenseless women to ground. They might believe his remorseful tears over their grisly deaths. Perhaps he would serve some time for negligent homicide, perhaps not, but it would be nothing compared to his rightful punishment for two counts of first-degree murder. No, make that four.

  The erosion channel came into view, and Faye began again to harbor hope.

  “The dogs?”

  “I ain’t never seen a dog outside the circus that could get across this,” Ronya said, leading the way across the rope bridge that Faye had crossed on her first trip to Great Tiger Bluff. Ronya was right; the slats were too narrow and too far apart for any dog to cross. Faye prayed that the gap was too wide for them to jump.

  Faye grasped the supporting cables and stepped onto the bridge. The misty rain was crystallizing into ice, and falling pieces of sleet, dagger-cold, pelted her scalp. She felt suddenly lost and frightened. She was too high up—too high. Her step faltered and she swayed; her cold fingers clutched at the icy ropes.

  Ronya’s face appeared in the mist. “Come on!”

  Faye felt Ronya’s strong hand on her shoulder, and she staggered forward onto solid ground.

  “That should take care of the dogs. DeWayne’s not man enough to come after us on his own,” said Ronya. “We’ll be all right now.”

  Then the sound of a rifle being fired echoed through the misty hills, and a white scar appeared in the trunk of the tree from which the rope bridge extended.

  Ronya looked at Faye and started running again. Faye had no choice but to follow, but her thoughts turned to Joe. She’d sent him to trail a violent man. Alone.

  ***

  Miss Dovey wished young people could be made to be quiet and listen to their elders. She’d tried to tell Ronya and Faye to wait while she fetched something that would help them, but they’d been too busy to listen to what she had to say. Little Zack probably felt the same way sometimes.

  It had almost been too much for her, slithering on her belly up under the bed and hauling out Taylor’s old hunting rifle.
When he was first dead, this gun had been her security. On dark nights when her imagination insisted that criminals and wild beasts waited outside in the darkness, aware that she was alone, she’d whiled away the hours by cleaning it. On dark days when she wasn’t sure she had the money to feed herself, it had represented her last bastion against starvation. If need be, she had told herself, she could always learn to hunt.

  Taylor’s rifle was useless to her now; she could hardly lift it. Old age had robbed her of the muscles that had once roped her forearms. Her body wasn’t strong enough to defend her friends against DeWayne and his temper, but her mind and her will were still under her control.

  A gunshot echoed through the woods north of her house, way too close to the settlement for her to be able to explain it away as the work of a hunter. Her hands played over the barrel of Taylor’s rifle. She wished she could give it to someone who knew how to use it, someone who would do what had to be done. Now she could just wait and pray that things turned out as they should.

  Miss Dovey barred her door, then picked up the phone to call for help for Kiki, and maybe for Faye and Ronya, too. Zack sat at her feet. He couldn’t comprehend what was happening around him, but his company was comforting, all the same.

  ***

  Faye teetered on the edge of Great Tiger Bluff for a second, then followed Ronya over the edge. The steep path lay at the bottom of a gully that was flanked on both sides by thick buttresses of clay—ideal protection against gunfire. As slick, cold slopes of mud go, the path looked incredibly appealing.

  Ronya took the moment of relative safety as an opportunity to share her plan. “We’re gonna get to the bottom of the bluff. Then we’re gonna run for the trees at the source of the creek—you remember it?”

  Faye thought of the lovely afternoon she and Ronya and Zack had spent digging clay along its banks. “Yeah. I do.”

  “Okay. We follow it to the river, walk downriver—in the water, so we don’t leave tracks—”

  Faye cringed. The temperature was well below thirty degrees Fahrenheit, and dropping fast. Slogging through the river was going to be brutal.

  “Then,” Ronya continued, panting as she continued toward the bottom of the bluff, “we take the back way home, like I showed you. There’s no trail. DeWayne doesn’t know the woods. If we stay at least this far ahead of him, where he can’t see us, we can lose him.”

  “Sounds good,” said Faye.

  The two women kept moving.

  ***

  Ice rained into the deep brown creek, and circular ripples expanded from each point of impact. White mist rose from the surface of water that was still the temperature of the groundwater it had been mere minutes ago, before it poured out of the ground. Standing on the damp sand at the water’s edge, the creek looked to Faye as if it were boiling. There was no bank here, just sheer bluffs rising up higher than their heads, so she and Ronya waded in, jogging as fast as the water would let them. Trying not to think of the ever-warm waters of her Gulf island home, Faye slogged downstream toward the river.

  She was wet from the thighs down. She hoped that the exertion of running through the resisting water was forcing her heart to pump warm blood to her cold-numbed hands and feet and legs and arms. From the time they had stepped into the water, Ronya hadn’t spoken. Faye just kept following her. What choice did she have, so deep into an unfamiliar and hostile country?

  They rounded a curve in the creek and Faye found herself in a familiar place, where the creek banks on both sides were wet and clay-slick and pocked with holes. There was room to run here, so Ronya left the creekbed, traveling as fast as her heart would let her through the clay pits dug by her mother and Miss Dovey’s mother and all the Sujosa potters in all the years since their people came to Alabama. Once through this obstacle course, they would be damn close to the river and, maybe, to escape or rescue.

  Ronya was breathing hard. Faye had been pushing the limits of her own endurance for so long that she’d begun to believe that Ronya’s body had no limits.

  People watching accidents over which they have no control often report that the world seems to shift into slow-motion. Faye saw her friend lose her footing with complete clarity. She lengthened her own strides to try to reach Ronya in time to break her fall, but she herself had shifted into slow-motion, too. When Ronya’s right foot slipped on the wet clay, Faye watched, impotent, as the larger woman’s ankle twisted and her knee buckled and she pitched over into a five-foot-deep clay pit.

  “Are you okay?” Faye hollered over her pounding footsteps, heedless of the possibility that their pursuer might be near. “Are you okay?”

  After a long silent moment, a soft voice rose out of the depths. “I’m okay, but my leg isn’t.”

  Faye flung herself onto her belly in the mud and reached a hand down to help Ronya up. Her friend shook her head. “Nobody your size is going to be able to get me back to town.”

  A livid lump was rising on Ronya’s temple. Her leg, twisted in the mud beneath her, was bent in several places, as if she had more than one knee.

  “Go ahead, Faye. I’ll wait here for you. Bring somebody big to haul me, okay?”

  “I can’t leave you here. You left a string of big muddy footprints behind you. He’d have to be blind to miss the mudslide you rode to the bottom of this pit. Maybe I could go back upstream and leave a false trail that’ll draw him away from here…”

  But she knew that wouldn’t work. She’d have to scale a fifteen-foot bluff to get out of the creekbed, then she’d have to find her way out of the woods without Ronya’s help. Even if she abandoned Ronya to DeWayne, she’d still have to make her way down the creek to the river, then strike out overland. How many landmarks did she remember from that faraway afternoon with Ronya and Zack? There had been a tree with a lightning scar and a copse of magnolias and a whole lot of land that looked a whole lot alike.

  The gray sky had begun to look even darker, and Faye realized that night was coming. The odds of Faye finding her way back before dark were vanishingly small and, all that time, Ronya would be vulnerable to a killer and to the growing cold.

  She was going to have to make a stand.

  “I’m going back,” Faye said, gesturing toward the creek they had just left. “I have to stop him before he gets this far.”

  “He’s got a—” Ronya swallowed. “He’s armed.”

  “So am I,” Faye said, fishing her pocketknife out of her pocket. “Don’t worry. And stay warm.” She loped back down the creek bank toward the bluff.

  ***

  Faye was a warrior. She was under attack by an enemy who wanted her dead. She’d had no quarrel with him before he started this battle, but she was willing to kill to save her own life, and she was more than willing to kill to preserve the life of her friend. She intended to bring Zack’s mother home. It was her duty.

  She ran to the confrontation, dressed in olive drab pants and heavy boots and an Army surplus field jacket. She’d always pretended that she chose her routine field garb for the simple reason that she looked good in green. Like hell. Her military clothing bound her to the hazy image of her father, who had died wearing clothing issued to him by the Department of Defense.

  Her father had died in Vietnam, where the oppressive heat and stifling humidity might actually have felt like home to a Florida boy, but he’d had a whole army shooting at him. Dripping wet with creek water and melted sleet, she faced only two enemies—DeWayne Montrose and hypothermia—and she had her father on her side. His open pocketknife was warm in her hand.

  Ahead, a venerable laurel oak reached a long branch over the creek and the clay pits that lined its banks. With a running leap, Faye grabbed the branch and hauled herself up onto it. She pushed her hood back, exposing her bare head to the icy water dripping from the branches above her, because she needed her peripheral vision. From her cantilevered perch, Faye could see the pit that sheltered Ronya, and she’d be able to see DeWayne long before he reached h
er. The footprints she and Ronya had made went right past the tree, and, with any luck, he would pass directly beneath her. Dressed in mossy green and nestled in the limbs of a laurel oak, which would keep its leaves all winter just like live oaks did in more southerly climes, she was well-camouflaged from a pursuer who had no reason to look up.

  Faye watched for her adversary to approach. She tested the pocketknife’s edge, running a finger over its blade while she listened for the sound of her pursuer’s footsteps.

  She heard DeWayne before she saw him. Over the faint noises of the flowing creek, she could pick up the quiet but unmistakable sound of boots on muddy ground. She readied herself, knowing she would only have one chance. Her eyes searched the woods, until she caught her first glimpse of him, bundled in his great gray coat. She caught a glimpse of red, the only spot of color in the winter wood, like the last autumn leaf clinging to a bare branch.

  Her heart froze in her chest: DeWayne didn’t have red hair.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Joe, perched in a sycamore tree just off the Alcaskaki-Gadsden road to the east of the settlement, rubbed his eyes. He had been watching for signs of movement around the old pickup truck among the trees for the better part of an hour. All had been quiet. No cars had passed. Nobody had walked down the footpath that crossed the road a few yards from Joe’s tree. The only evidence of human life had been the sound of a hunter’s gun, just a single sharp blast. Joe respected anyone who could bag his prey with a single shot.

  It was getting to be time to do something. Joe was a patient man, but he drew the line at sitting in a tree in an icy rain for no good reason.

  After Faye and Ronya had hurried off to Miss Dovey’s, he’d set out to find DeWayne Montrose, as Faye had asked. He’d checked Hanahan’s first, then, being a practical soul, headed for DeWayne’s house. His practicality had been rewarded, for as he had approached by the footpath in back, DeWayne had slammed out the front door, an open bottle sloshing in one hand and a white rag in the other, and stumbled to his truck. Joe watched through the shrubbery as DeWayne fairly threw himself into the driver’s seat, burying his head in his hands. Joe raised his eyebrows when he saw his chest shudder, again and again. The man was weeping.