Montana Creeds: Dylan. Linda Miller Lael

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      Kristy summoned up a smile, straightened her shoulders, looked her father’s old friend straight in the eye. “Nonsense,” she said. “We’ve already postponed it once. I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”

      Floyd didn’t seem entirely convinced, but a few of the AA regulars were straggling in, so he finally turned to go and greet them, the way he had every Tuesday night for years—ever since Dorothy’s car accident, and that scandal about him running around with Freida Turlow behind Dorothy’s back. He’d wept, sitting at the kitchen table with Kristy’s dad, out on the ranch, over the pain Dorothy had suffered, not only because of the wreck on an icy road, but because he’d betrayed her with another woman.

      It was the first and only time Kristy, watching and listening unnoticed from the hallway, had ever seen a grown man cry.

      Her kindly dad had put a hand to Floyd’s shoulder and said, “It’s the drinking, old buddy. That’s what’s messing up your life. You think I don’t know you carry a flask everywhere you go? You’ve got to do something.”

      And Floyd had done something. He’d joined AA, gotten sober and, as far as Kristy knew, been a faithful husband to Dorothy from then on.

      Kristy left the kitchenette for the reading group’s meeting room, and by some cosmic irony, Freida Turlow was the first to arrive.

      An athletic type, attractive in a hardened sort of way, Freida, like Kristy, was a lifelong resident of Stillwater Springs. Except for college, neither one of them had been away from home for any significant length of time.

      Kristy was a hometown girl—she’d never wanted to live anywhere else, even after her parents both died during her junior year at the University of Montana. By contrast, Freida, who was at least a decade older, had indeed been Kristy’s babysitter on the rare nights when her mom and dad went out dancing, or to play cards with friends, seemed out of place in Stillwater Springs. She was ambitious and well-educated, and virtually ran the local real estate office. Her brother, Brett, was a classic jerk, sleeping on her couch and famous for stealing money from her every chance he got.

      Tonight, her dark chin-length hair pinned up at the back of her head, Freida wore a running suit and sneakers and carried that month’s reading selection under one arm. Like Kristy, Freida had lost her family home—the gingerbread-laced minimansion Kristy now owned—and she was touchy about it. She’d offered to buy back the old house several times, at higher and higher prices, and had gotten progressively more annoyed at every polite refusal.

      Kristy understood Freida’s desire to reclaim the venerable Victorian, even sympathized. But that house, except for Winston and her job at the library, which she’d held ever since she got her degree, was all she had.

      Where would she go, if she sold it back to Freida?

      “News on the real estate front,” Freida told her, with no little satisfaction. “I’ve got an offer on Madison Ranch—or at least, the promise of one.”

      Kristy froze. The old place was run-down, but it was big—totaling some thirty thousand acres. Prime pickings for the movie stars and Learjet executive crowd who’d been snatching up properties in Montana over the past couple of decades.

      Only the probate tangle had kept it off the market this long.

      Technically, the local bank owned Madison Ranch now, though the name had stuck, because there had been Madisons living on that land since that part of the state was settled. They’d foreclosed two months after Kristy’s dad died.

      Freida allowed herself a smug little smile.

      Then Briana Grant came in. There were rumors that she and Logan Creed were secretly married or would be soon, and sleeping together either way. Briana, a pretty woman who always wore her strawberry-blond hair in a tidy French braid, certainly hadn’t confided the nature of the relationship to Kristy, though the two of them were friendly.

      Seeing Freida seated at one of the chairs surrounding the conference table, her book open before her, Briana stopped on the threshold, looked as though she might turn on one heel and bolt.

      “Come in,” Kristy urged her, smiling. Inside, though, she was still shaken by Freida’s smug announcement that she had a promising prospect to buy Madison Ranch, and no amount of telling herself it didn’t matter anyway seemed to help.

      Briana hesitated, then met Freida’s gaze, lifted her chin a little, and took a place at the table.

      “You’ve got your nerve, showing up here, after all the trouble you’ve caused my poor brother,” Freida told her flatly.

      Briana flushed, but didn’t give any ground. Sheriff Book had picked Brett Turlow up for questioning a couple of times, after a break-in at Briana’s, but that was all Kristy knew. She wasn’t much for gossip.

      “Everybody’s welcome here, Freida,” Kristy said staunchly. While the Stillwater Springs Public Library wasn’t exactly a hotbed of violent controversy, she’d had some experience keeping order. A lot of townspeople used the place as if it were a free day-care center, and once in a while, there was a little dust-up when two voracious readers wanted to check out the only copy of some recent bestseller.

      Freida stood, her movements stiff and precise. She grabbed her purse and her book and sniffed, “I don’t know why I stay in this town, with all the riffraff coming in these days.” With that, she swept grandly out.

      Tears stood in Briana’s eyes.

      Kristy sat down beside her friend, took her hand. “She’s the one with nerve, calling anybody riffraff, with that brother of hers,” she said gently.

      Briana sniffled, managed a smile and then a nod. She hugged her library book to her chest like some sort of treasure.

      After that, the other members of the book club began trailing in, by chatty twos and threes. Those who wanted to helped themselves to the coffee in the kitchenette, and though they watched Briana with interest, surely speculating about her and Logan Creed, they included her in the discussion.

      All in all, Kristy thought, as she locked up an hour later, when both meetings were over, it had been a worthwhile evening, though Winston probably wouldn’t agree.

      Back in the Blazer, and alone in the library parking lot, Kristy gripped the wheel with both hands and laid her forehead against her knuckles for a long moment.

      She felt strangely on edge, hyperalert, as though something big were about to happen, but big things simply didn’t happen in Stillwater Springs, Montana. Not often, anyway.

      She rallied, made herself sit up straight, start the motor, head for home. Winston was waiting, and so was her claw-foot bathtub, along with the page-turner she’d been trying to finish for a week.

      Maybe Sheriff Book had been right.

      She might be coming down with something.

      And maybe that monster-memory she’d been fighting to keep submerged was about to break the surface, finally, and ruin her carefully constructed life.

      CHAPTER TWO

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