The Ranch She Left Behind. Kathleen O'Brien

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      CHAPTER ONE

      PENNY WRIGHT JERKED awake, her heart pounding so hard it seemed to beat against her eardrums. What had happened? What was wrong? There’d been a sound...something big....

      Oh, no... She sat up, tossing aside the covers, and swung her bare legs toward the floor. “Coming, Ruth!” She fumbled for the lamp switch. Had her aunt fallen again? “Don’t move, Ruth. I’ll be right th—”

      But the act of sitting up was enough to start clearing the cobwebs out of her mind, and she knew there was no point in finishing the sentence. Ruth hadn’t fallen. Ruth couldn’t hear her.

      Ruth had died two months ago.

      The town house was silent around her. So silent she could hear the gears of the banjo clock move, preparing to sound the hour in the downstairs parlor...

      So what noise had she heard just now?

      It must have been something major, to wake her up like that, to make her heart hammer so hard. Or had it been just a dream noise? She dreamed a lot these days—dreams of flying, of dancing, of climbing mountains and riding wild palominos. Freedom dreams. It was as if her subconscious was trying to tell her to get out of this town house and do something.

      But she just kept on staying. She was comfortable here. She was used to the quiet, the shadows, the isolation. Even if she sometimes felt like Sleeping Beauty inside her castle tower, at least she always felt safe.

      The clock began to bong. One. Two. Three. Four. Then it fell silent again, leaving nothing but the eerie after-vibrations that pulsed invisibly up the stairs and made the air in Penny’s bedroom hum.

      Instinctively, she glanced at her cell phone. More like four-thirty, really. The clock had kept perfect time while Ruth had been alive, but ever since her death it had fallen further and further behind, as if time had begun to slow and stretch, like warm molasses. Just a minute here, a minute there... But it added up.

      Soon, the clock would perpetually be living in yesterday.

      Oh, well. Too tired to worry, Penny fell back against her pillow. The larger noise she had imagined, it must have been a dream.

      But then, with a cold shiver, she registered the sound of another noise—registered it more with her nerve endings than her eardrums.

      A much smaller noise this time. A sneaky sound, a muffled creak... She gasped softly, recognizing it. The fifth stair from the top, the one that couldn’t be fixed. She’d always had to step over it on her way to bed at night, so she wouldn’t wake Ruth.

      Someone who didn’t know about that little creak was, even now, tiptoeing up the stairs.

      Her heart began to pound again. Someone was in the house.

      Without hesitation, she slid open the nightstand drawer. Ruth, a practical woman to the core, had insisted that Penny keep protection beside her at all times, especially once the neighborhood began to deteriorate. A gun would have been out of the question—neither Ruth nor Penny liked weapons, or had any confidence that they could prevent a bad guy from getting hold of it.

      Therefore, Penny kept a can of wasp spray beside her. Effective from a safe distance, nonlethal, and carrying the added benefit of surprise. Penny had found the idea almost funny and had bought it more for Ruth’s peace of mind than her own.

      But now, as she saw the shadowy figure appear in her doorway, she sent a fervent thank-you to her practical aunt, who apparently was going to save her one more time—even from the grave.

      Ben Hackney, their next door neighbor and a retired policeman, had warned them that, if they ever had to use the can, they shouldn’t holler out a warning, but should spray first and ask questions later. So Penny inhaled quickly, put her finger on the trigger, aimed and shot.

      A man’s voice cried out. “What the fu—?”

      She could see the figure a little better now—a man, definitely, dressed in black, his face covered. Her breath hitched. Covered! His eyes, too? If his eyes were covered, would the wasp spray have any effect?

      But then the man’s hands shot to his face. A guttural growl burst out of him, a sound of both pain and rage. With every fraction of a second, the growl grew louder.

      “Goddamn it—”

      The voice was deep, middle-aged, furious. She didn’t recognize it.

      Absurdly, even as she shot the spray again, she felt a shimmer of relief. What if it had been someone she knew? Someone like...

      It could have been poor Ben. The man was eighty and had spent a quarter of a century nursing an unrequited love for Aunt Ruth. He’d been good to Penny, too, through the years.

      Thank God she hadn’t attacked some well-meaning friend like that.

      But the relief was brief. The calculations flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second, and then she was left with one awful truth—this was a real intruder. She was left with a stranger, who had, without question, come to harm her.

      And a can of wasp spray that wasn’t bottomless.

      For one horrible second, the man lurched forward, and Penny backed up instinctively, though she had nowhere to go. Her spine hit the headboard with an electric bang that exploded every nerve ending in her brain. Somehow, she kept her finger on the trigger and held her numb arm steady enough to keep the spray aimed toward his face.

      “You bitch!” He dropped to his knees, shaking his head violently. With a cold determination she hadn’t known she possessed, she lowered her aim and found him where he had hit the floor.

      The spray connected again. Crying out, he roiled backward, a crablike monster, and the sight of his confusion gave her courage. She stood. She was about to follow him, still spraying, when she realized he was trying to reach the stairs.

      “No! Wait!” she called out, though warning him made no sense. As long as he was leaving, what did she care what happened to him? But...the staircase!

      An irrational panic seized her, freezing all logical thought. He might be a thief, or a rapist, or a murderer. And yet, she couldn’t let him just fall backward, helplessly, down that steep, uncarpeted walnut spiral of stairs.

      A picture of her mother’s body flashed into her mind. The green eyes staring blindly at the ceiling. The black hair glistening as a red pool spread on the floor around her...

      “No!” Penny cried out again, СКАЧАТЬ