Dallas, Texas
Tuesday, December 20, 1997

If Dahlia Montgomery Jarrett ignored the fact that it was her husband she was burying five days before Christmas, it was as good a day as any for a funeral. Sky overcast but no rain, temperature not too hot for her black Ellen Tracy suit. Typical for December in North Texas.

As the obligatory graveside ritual ground to an end, she made a silent prayer of thanks. She had shaken enough hands, said “thank you for coming,” enough times, been the dutiful spouse. Through it all, she hadn’t shed a tear and was proud of herself. Because she hadn’t screamed either.

The service had been short and uncrowded. Kenneth Jarrett’s family was small. He’d had few friends. Some of her friends from work had come, but most only sent flowers. Poinsettias. A touch of the bizarre. Fitting, Dahlia thought.

She moved toward a waiting black limousine, flanked by her father and her lifelong friend, Pegine Murphy. If someone asked her to define her feelings, she could not. How could she find words a mere four days after learning her husband, the man who had vowed to forsake all but her, had died in a violent car collision at four o’clock in the morning with another woman in his car.

Thursday morning’s surreal events had flashed through her mind in snatches a hundred times--the pre-dawn call from the Denton County sheriff’s office, weeping and driving against morning traffic to Denton where she had never been, nearly colliding with a van loaded with Santas who flipped her off in unison when she ran a stop sign.

The morgue scene followed--Kenneth playing on closed-circuit TV like a bad movie. Her knees barely held her through it. Afterward, a young deputy scanning a form on a clipboard asked her if she knew her husband’s passenger.

“Passenger?”

“Yes, ma’am. Female, approximately 30, blond hair, blue eyes, weight one-twenty-seven.”

Dahlia shook her head. On Wednesday morning, he had left their North Dallas home for a two-day meeting in Austin. South. No, she didn’t know a female rode with him. No, she didn’t know why he had been driving a narrow, rural road on the opposite end of Texas from where he should have been.

Female passenger . . . river bottom . . . no ID . . . Would she attempt an identification?

In her mind, Dahlia refused, but her head nodded assent.

Then, came the blow that nearly felled her. The woman who had departed life with Kenneth was her co-worker, Bonnie Gibson. For four years, Dahlia had considered her a friend. They lunched together several times a week, prowled the shopping malls. Three evenings a week, they worked out at a gym, commiserated during breaks at the juice bar about married life and men. And sex. They had shared the most intimate of secrets. She knew the bedroom deficiencies of the deceased woman’s husband almost as well as she knew Kenneth’s.

Staring at Bonnie’s lifeless face, at a visceral level, Dahlia resisted the truth. It slunk in anyway.

Grief, confusion, humiliation, anger--all bunched into a tight knot and lodged behind her breastbone. She hyperventilated, had to be guided to a chair by the deputy. She left the morgue groping for mooring.

She hadn’t cried since that day, holding herself together with brittle control.

Thus far, the sheriff’s department investigation had been typical, she assumed. A 10-50F she heard them say, an accident with fatalities. It appeared Kenneth’s Corvette crashed head-on into a bridge abutment, then plunged into the North Fork of the Trinity River below. Both victims pulled from the murky water were pronounced dead at the scene.

High speed the cops said, DUI they suspected. Toxicology results were pending. Dahlia hadn’t let herself think of the probable outcome or its consequences.

Since breaking the news the morning of the accident to her husband’s family, her only contact with them had been to make funeral arrangements. With her consent, his parents selected the funeral home, the chapel and a grave site in the Jarrett family plot in an old Dallas cemetery. When the awkward question of her own burial arose, she assured them she didn’t expect a spot to be reserved for her beside her husband. His mother’s relief came as an audible sigh. No surprise there. Just as Kenneth’s WASPy parents hadn’t wanted a Catholic, half-Filipino daughter-in-law, they wouldn’t want her corpse tainting the family plot someday in the future.

She didn’t care, Dahlia told herself. She had her own supporters--her dad and Piggy. They arrived a few hours after being called, having driven from the small West Texas town of Loretta where she and Piggy grew up.

Now, back at the funeral home, they transferred from the somber black Cadillac to Piggy’s fire-engine-red Blazer. Kenneth’s friends would be meeting the family at his parents’ home for a short reception.

“I dread this.” Dahlia said, settling into the Blazer’s back seat. “I don’t know how I can face them.”

Her dad reached back between the bucket seats and squeezed her hand. “Not much longer, sweetheart.”

Piggy’s fierce gaze reflected in the rear view mirror. Her anger had been snapping and crackling for days. “More to the point, how can they face you? Just be glad this little soiree is taking place at their house instead of yours. At least we can bail out when you’ve had enough of the Jarrett charm.”

They were silent as Piggy drove. Dahlia stared out, seeing but not registering, stumbling through a labyrinth of memories and warring emotions. Her husband had been a man of many facets--ambitious, not lazy, sophisticated and suave, handsome enough to have stepped off the pages of GQ.

And he had been unfaithful, calculating and mendacious. Countless times she had dismissed how manipulative he was, of others as well as her, or closed her eyes to his selfishness.

Just a few months ago, she had been close to leaving him. He’d had an affair with a different woman from the one who died with him. Even as Dahlia knew a lie rolled off his tongue as readily as the truth, instead of kicking him out or packing her bags, she had let herself believe him when he said it wouldn’t happen again.

And why had she done that? Because to her, belonging to some One and some Thing as time-honored as marriage had been more important than a few glitches in probity.

But as diabolic as she knew he could be, nothing had prepared her for both his and a friend’s betrayal in one stroke.

They entered the upscale sub-division where Kenneth’s parents lived. Large brick homes glided past, their grassy lawns turned to winter’s beige and festooned with Christmas decorations. It all looked so normal.

Everyone arrived at the Jarrett home at the same time. As Dahlia entered the two-story foyer, she saw nothing had changed from when Kenneth had brought her here five nights ago for dinner with his parents and several other guests.

The stairway banister was still draped with thick ropes of green garland and red poinsettias beribboned in gold. A tall, lavishly decorated Christmas tree, unlit, still filled a corner of the living room. Beside this very tree, Kenneth had given her an early gift, a diamond tennis bracelet that brought a gasp from his mother. The presentation, Dahlia saw now, had been nothing more than a performance to make himself appear as a loving husband in the presence of his parents and their friends.

In the formal dining room to the right of the foyer, she could see the Ethan Allen cherrywood table extended to its full length and food, obviously from a caterer, laid out. The subdued guests formed a line and filed past.

Piggy went ahead of her, picking up a plate and silverware and surveying the array of fancy food. “Well, this ain’t exactly the family dinner in the church basement, is it.” She added some raw vegetables to her plate. “Hmm. I don’t see any rice.”

“Shh. Don’t start.” Dahlia glanced around to see who had heard. Rice was a private joke. It went back five years to the rehearsal dinner before her wedding. Kenneth’s mother had asked her if she preferred rice to potatoes, the first of many thinly-veiled racial slurs.

I didn’t know if you could buy make-up in your color, dear. . . Did your mother read and write English? . . . If you and Kenneth have children, I suppose they’ll be dark . . .

Dahlia, her father and Piggy ate standing near the fireplace, apart from the group. Piggy assessed the small crowd. “Just goes to show you I’m not the only one who thought he was a jerk. Only a handful of people even care he’s gone and I question their sincerity.”

Dahlia’s dad spoke up. Pegine, remember where you are. Show some respect.”

“I can’t help it, Elton. The whole thing makes me so mad--”

Dahlia stopped her. “Don’t, Piggy. I know it wasn’t perfect, but I shared my life with him.”

“You were too generous, girlfriend. You’d have been better off with a large dog.”

“I wanted it to work out. I wanted us to be a family.”

Piggy sighed and shook her head. “Let’s face it, Dal. You’re too nice a person. No match for a scheming sonofabitch.”

Another hard truth Dahlia couldn’t deny or excuse away.

One by one, Kenneth's friends, for the second and third times, offered their condolences and left.

“Hypocrites,” Piggy hissed. “Those bastards knew he screwed around. And you’ll never make me believe his hoity-toity mom and dad didn’t know it either. They helped him lie to you, you know.”

Piggy ripped into Kenneth and his mother so often, Dahlia frequently tuned her out. Today, of all days, she was too weary to listen. She had been running on adrenaline since Thursday and as for emotions, she was numb. “I know all that, Piggy. Please don’t say any more. It’s over.”

“If you believe that, let me tell you about a bridge in Brooklyn. Personally, I think the fun’s just beginning. I’d bet my CPA certificate the IRS was hot on his heels. As underhanded as he was? . . . You may be dead broke and don’t even know it.”

“I do know it. I’ve been worried about it.”

Chapter One

Two Years, Four Months Later

Dahlia Montgomery’s patience drew its next-to-the-last breath on a cold sunlit morning in a god-forsaken place named Callister, Idaho, population 635. There in the reception room of a U.S. Forest Service complex, she and her best friend, Piggy Murphy, waited for their summer employer, Piggy’s cousin Jerry. It was the second time in twenty-four hours he had stood them up.

Another snafu. A plague that had become a too-familiar part of Dahlia’s once well-planned existence. This latest one, though tiny in comparison to the calamities that had befallen her in the past two and a half years, just might be that infamous straw that collapsed her. Why hadn’t she resisted longer and harder when Piggy and Dad nagged her into this hare-brained scheme?

Piggy zipped her coat all the way to her chin. “Wonder why they don’t turn up the heat.”

Dahlia pointed to a sign on the wall. THIS FACILITY IS HEATED BY SOLAR ENERGY, it proclaimed.

“Hunh. Could have fooled me. Feels like they’re burning candles.”

Yeah, Dahlia thought and cast a skeptical eye at the golden shafts of sunshine pouring through giant skylights. She pulled her jacket--her lightweight jacket--tighter about her and hunched forward. “Jerry should have told us it’s still winter up here. We didn’t even bring warm coats.”

Mumbling a string of swear words, Piggy stuffed her hands into her coat pockets and scooted down to rest her neck on the chairback. Her eyelids fluttered shut.

“It’s ten o’clock,” Dahlia snapped, tired of hiding her annoyance. They had arrived at eight. She had read two magazines on forestry from front to back and all the brochures on the gray steel sidetables circling the room. Two dozen people uniformed in khaki and green had passed through the front entrance and disappeared up a long hall. A dozen more civilians. No Jerry Murphy. “If the furnace worked, we could go back to the house.”

“Lean back and take a nap,” Piggy mumbled. “He’ll show.”

“Surveyor helpers. That’s a joke. Grunts is more like it. I should have stayed in Loretta and helped Dad.”

“Shh.”

Dahlia’s gaze swept their surroundings. Until now, she hadn’t known there were so many shades of gray. Everything--walls, floor, furniture--was tinted to match her mood.

Across the room, in front of a wall of windows, trapezoids of sunlight hop-scotched over the salt & pepper carpet. She pushed up from her chair and moved to bask in the warmth of one of the sunny patches, her reflection showing in the window glass. Long curly hair fanned out from her head like a tom turkey’s tail in full ruff. She loved her rebellious hair-do, but un-shampooed and un-moussed, it looked like the frizz that ate New York. And that she didn’t love. She turned her jacket pockets inside out, looking for a barrette, a rubber band, something. “I don’t suppose you’d have a hair clip,” she said to Piggy.

Piggy’s eyes opened to half-mast. She pulled a yellow claw-clip out of her pocket. “Sha-zam.”

As Dahlia gathered the sides of her black hair into a knot at her crown, she viewed the world outside. Little mounds of thawing snow glistened in brilliant morning sunshine. Water trickled everywhere. Across the street, a brick bank building’s digital marquee pegged the temperature at thirty-three degrees.

They had inched into town in a snowstorm yesterday, roads slick, visibility three feet, but today, under clear, blue skies, she could see the entire metropolis. The main street was a highway. Boise south, who knew what to the north. Three blocks of buildings, some brick, some log, huddled on either side of the two-lane road. Though sunlight glinted off their metal roofs, the structures themselves looked even older and dustier than the ones she had left behind in Loretta, Texas.

A pair of un-collared dogs trotted past, busy marking tires. No leash law in this town, she mused. No different from Loretta.

Something that was different was a distant hum of an engine and the screek and scrape of metal against metal. Though muted at present by the Forest Service building’s thick windows, the monotonous noise had gone non-stop all night. And how did she know? Because if she had closed her eyes in sleep at all, it had been for no more than a few minutes. “What is that?” she asked an obese receptionist at a gray desk.

“That sound?” The receptionist--her name plate said GRETCHEN and she had on a mammoth ski sweater that filled Dahlia with envy--plunked a hammy elbow on an open drawer. “The sawmill. Jobs. Money. They’re working three shifts now.”

“Sawmill? Is this a mill town?” Another fact Jerry had neglected to tell them.

“I dunno. The sawmill’s the biggest thing we got. When it ain’t running, things get real grim around here. Most of our folks work over there. Either that or log.”

“Log? You mean, as in, cut down trees?” Dahlia knew little of logging. No sawmills and few trees existed in West Texas.

Gretchen grunted and slammed the filing cabinet drawer. “That’s generally what happens when they log. You a tree-hugger?”

“Well, no--”

“Good. We got enough of them already.” She turned her back and lumbered up the hallway.

Soon she returned, waddling toward them, carrying a steaming mug in each hand. On her feet were untied, all-weather boots the size of shoe boxes. Her steps scuffed against the tight-napped carpet. She stopped and shoved a mug at Piggy. “We don’t usually serve coffee around here, but you two look like you could use it. We had some doughnuts earlier, but they’re all gone.”

Piggy roused and reached for the mug. “Doughnuts?”

With a meek thank you, Dahlia took the other cup. She supposed she and Piggy did look as if they didn’t know where their next meal might come from. They had been wearing the same clothes since yesterday morning when they put them on in a cheap motel outside Salt Lake. “I hope you don’t mind if we wait here,” she said. “We’re meeting someone.”

Gretchen turned on a Miss America smile. “Hey, you can wait as long as you want to. You're taxpayers, ain’tcha? This building belongs to you.”

Considering what had been taken by the IRS after her husband’s death, Dahlia felt that could be true. “If you only knew,” she mumbled.

One sip of the strong coffee and her stomach rolled and growled. Oh well, she didn’t like coffee in the first place, but the mug felt warm against her chilled hands.

A few feet to her right, from behind a closed door, she could hear muffled male voices in discussion. A meeting, she surmised.

Vignettes of her former life flashed in her mind. A surge of longing, unexpected and bittersweet, welled up. A year and a half had crawled by since she had gone home to Dad in Loretta, Texas. Simply picked up and walked away from a fast-track job with a top advertising and PR firm in Dallas. She didn’t miss Dallas so much, but sometimes she missed the hubbub, the cutting edge excitement, the exchange of ideas with her former peers, young Turks with MBAs and BMWs who pursued their goals with the zeal of hungry sharks.

It wasn’t too late to go back and she intended to. Twenty-nine wasn’t too old to start over. She had some catching-up to do, maybe some classes to take, but just as soon as she got her feet on the ground again . . .

A male voice, suddenly loud, came from behind the closed door. “Now Luke, the government’s policy--”

“No! No way, Ted.” It was a louder, angry voice. “I’m not listening to that policy crap. It’s one thing to cut back my allotment, but damned if you’re gonna tell me what to do on my own land. I’m not building no damn fence between my cows and a drink of water. I’ll call every sonofabitch in Washington if I have to.”

The door burst open. Dahlia jumped sideways a second too late. A tall, scowling man plowed headlong into her. She reeled backward, crashing across a table. Her mug flew from her hand and coffee drenched the image of SMU’s galloping mustang on the front of her T-shirt. Pain ripped through her hip and elbow as she hit the floor.

The next thing she knew, she was lying supine and Piggy, Gretchen and the stranger were hovering over her. Piggy’s voice filtered through. “You okay, Dal?”

She forced herself up, bracing on the uninjured elbow. Several other men and women came out of offices, ogling.

The stranger squatted, slid one arm around her waist and grasped her upper arm with his opposite hand. His knuckles nudged into her left breast. “Lord, lady. I’m sorry.”

As if she were weightless, he lifted her and set her on her feet. She limped toward a chair and leaned on its back for support. He brushed at her clothing and petted her hair. “You alright, ma'am? You hurt anywhere?”

She could hear the murmurs of onlookers. Embarrassment heated her face and she refused to look up. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”

She pushed away the stranger’s hands and slipped her arm out of her jacket sleeve to examine her smarting elbow.

He was there, lifting her arm to look, too, moving long fingers up and down, palpating her forearm. “Don’t feel any broken bones. Don’t see any blood.” He turned her and looked behind her. “How’s that hip? Let’s--”

“It’s fine.” Her palm flew up like a shield. She took a step back and away from him. Finally, she looked him full in the face and the connection was as instant as the skip in her heartbeat.

He towered above her, an oak tree in a blue and white plaid shirt and a navy quilted vest. His eyes, sober and intense, were the color of the sky outside, deep-set beneath a ledge of brow and framed by thick, dark lashes. He smelled of masculinity and a hint of woodsy aftershave.

An odd awareness slithered through her, curled itself around her secret places and gave a hard squeeze. She felt weak in the knees yet she freed her arm from his grasp and skimmed her palm down her shirt front. “Really, I’m okay. Don’t worry about it.”

His gaze followed her hand and stopped. She looked down. Through the clinging wet T-shirt, she saw distinct impressions of her lacy bra and dark brown nipples. She may as well have been shirtless. Hoisting her chin, she roasted him with a glare and yanked one side of her jacket across her front. Jerk!

His gaze moved up to hers, his mouth tipped into a lazy, knowing grin. “I’m usually not so clumsy. I was just so damn mad there for a minute.”

He stooped and picked up the pale gray cowboy hat he had lost in the collision and dusted the crown with his fingertips. “Sure you’re alright? If you think you oughtta see a doctor . . .”

A cowboy! I might have known. She waggled a dismissive hand and eased down to the chair seat.

“Well, okay then.” He turned to the receptionist with a stern look and a pointing finger. “Remind Ted I’m waiting for his call. The minute he finishes that range report. Don’t forget.”

Gretchen gave him a two-fingered salute. He left in long strides through the front doorway, adjusting his hat as he went.

Piggy stared after him, slack jawed. “Who the hell is that? He got a posse waiting outside or something?”

Gretchen cackled and went to stand beside Piggy, placing her hands on elephantine hips and dwarfing Piggy’s hundred twenty pounds. “He’s enough to give a gal a heart attack, ain’t he? I usually don’t like the looks of a red-headed man, but sometimes it’s just all put together real good.”

“So who is he? Or who does he think he is?”

“Oh, he knows who he is alright and so does everybody else. Luke McRae. Rancher. I ain’t seen him so ticked-off in months. Him and the range manager must have had a fuss. They do that.”

“I think I’m in love,” Piggy said, staring at the door.

Not again. Dahlia rolled her eyes and flopped back in her chair.

The phone at the desk warbled. Gretchen shuffled toward it, fanning a plump hand behind her. “It better hadn’t be with him. He’s left a string of wishing women from Moscow to Winnemucca. I can think of a dozen who thought they could land him.”

Piggy frowned. “Mos-co? You don’t mean Russia.”

A geography moment flitted through Dahlia’s mind, making sense of Gretchen’s remark. She had to be speaking of Moscow, Idaho, spelled like the Russian capital. Dahlia had seen it on maps, but she couldn’t recall ever hearing it pronounced. To most Texas natives, the Idaho city just as distant as the one in Russia.

The receptionist’s brows raised in an arch. “Up north, by Lewiston.” She yanked up the receiver. “Forest Service. Callister District. . . . We ain’t got them here. Call Boise.” She clacked the receiver back into its cradle. “Pest,” she mumbled.

Undeterred by Gretchen’s are-you-for-real look, Piggy went to the midriff-high reception desk and found a rest for her forearms. “A dozen, you say?”

“At least. When it comes to women, that man’s a heartless hound.” Her gaze swerved to Dahlia. “You should go to the doctor. Make him pay for it. He’s worth a fortune. McRaes own the Double Deuce Ranches. The home place takes up a goodly part of this county. No telling what they own down in the Owyhee.”

The fortune of a clumsy cowboy was the farthest thing from Dahlia’s mind. His perfectly sculpted mouth had made a much more profound impression.

Piggy’s forehead crinkled into a frown. “You look a little green, Dal. Let’s go home. Jerry can find us there.”

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