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Chapter 1

She screamed, screamed bloody murder.

No.

She screamed, her hands flying to her mouth to try to

No!

She screamed, unable to stop the

NO!

She screamed.

Maybe.

She screamed. Jeff’s face turned a shade of red thatohbullshitbullshitbullshit

Lee stood up, stretching. Enough for today. It just couldn’t be forced. It was like sex that way, it either worked or it didn’t, and if it didn’t, no amount of pretending would make it right. Time to do something physical, work the kinks out. She decided to pull some weeds. At least it would get her out into the spring sunshine and fresh air before the rain they’d been calling for all week started. She’d made her preparations for the rain and waited for it for four days; it was beginning to appear that the weathermen had all graduated from the same lousy correspondence school of weather prognostication.

She looked down at her denim cutoffs and green tank and figured the president wouldn’t be stopping by, and if he did, it wasn’t like he was anyone she’d be wanting to impress anyway, since he hadn’t impressed her. She wrapped her hair into a ponytail, poured an iced tea, and took it with her out the back door to her little garden.

Mr. Tibbs, her black tomcat, turned up from nowhere, as cats are want to do, and paced her, regaling her with a very animated story about the morning’s exploits. She made interested noises and threw in an occasional line like, “Really? And what did she say?” Tibbs told her, in great detail. Together, they reached the garden and stopped at the edge. Lee decided to do the tomatoes first. Their raw green smell would encourage her, and she needed encouraging lately to do much of anything beyond plinking at the computer or slumping in front of the TV. She had elevated laziness to a virtue, sloth to an art form.

She made her way through the new shoots of corn and peas and cucumbers to the other side of the garden where the woods began, looking around for the terrapin she’d relocated yesterday. Didn’t want him around when the tomatoes made. She remembered last year, the morning she’d looked out to see some red among the green, and hurried down the back steps to the garden, already tasting the salad she’d make for lunch, only to find each of her tomatoes with a big juicy hunk missing. A terrapin, maybe even this same one, had been sitting smugly beside the last tomato, and she had only just resisted picking it up and flinging it as hard as she could into the nearest tree.

“Safer for you elsewhere, fella,” she’d advised yesterday’s terrapin, taking it at least half a mile into the woods to where a stream wended its way through a bunch of huge, flat rocks. She didn’t see it today. Either it wasn’t back yet or had, hopefully, turned the other way before starting its latest terrapin walkabout.

She turned and fell to her knees, grabbing her little spade and a handful of grass. She rarely wore gloves to weed, liking the feel of dirt on her hands. Tibbs lay down nearby and began the long, involved process of washing his face. The sun felt good on her back and arms. She lost herself in the chore, in the quiet. But it hadn’t been that quiet a moment ago. Why had all the birds shut up at once?

She turned her head toward the woods and leaped to her feet, whirling. A tall, thin man stood there, right behind her. He’d apparently come out of the woods, which, she knew, stretched for miles behind him. He showed the wear and tear of his long passage, carrying a tangle of leaves in his tousled, dark-brown hair, a rip in the sleeve of his black tee shirt (the front of which read STOP LOOKING AT MY SHIRT), and tears and stains in the knees of his jeans, as though he’d fallen more than once. His features were even and fine, his complexion lightly tanned, as though he’d come from somewhere it had been summer for the past few months instead of winter. He was looking at her with eyes so brown they were almost muddy, and there was an air of quiet menace about him that reminded her just how far her little house was set back from the road and how far it was up the road to the nearest neighbor. Tibbs, surprisingly, strolled over to the stranger and rubbed against his leg. The man didn’t take his eyes off Lee. He started toward her.

She backed up fast, wondering whether to turn her back and run or face him and hope for the best. He saw her fear and stopped, pointing. “Forgive me, but you have cut your hand.” He spoke with a Southern accent that was just a little closer to the movie-cliché version than her own, but not too close. For some reason, the only people she’d ever heard actually speak like the “southerners” in the movies were people from Virginia.

She looked down at her right hand and saw blood dripping from the ends of her fingers. She’d apparently cut it somehow on her little spade when she’d glanced up and seen him. She had nothing with which to wrap it, and was about to sacrifice the bottom of her tank top when she realized the man was now standing about a foot in front of her. She started, about to retreat again, and he held out his hand and said, “Please...” in a soft voice that stayed her feet, at least for the moment.

He reached for her hand and she saw a white silk handkerchief in his. Surprised again, she let him take her hand. He cradled it in his own long brown fingers, handling it so gently that she wondered if he suspected it was broken as well as cut. He wrapped the handkerchief around it, tied it off. and stepped back, as though doing his best not to frighten her again.

She decided to try to act as though strangers stepped out of the woods every day. She’d read somewhere that acting like a victim made one more inclined to become one, so she took a breath and said, “Thank you,” in a pretty good voice. It didn’t sound nearly as weak and frail as she felt when she looked at this man’s height and muscles; his thinness was deceptive, she now saw, and only served to better delineate the ample musculature of his upper arms and shoulders.

“It was nothing.” His voice was soft, bordering on faint. “I wonder if I might bother you for a drink of water.”

Something wasn’t quite right about him. His eyes were a little glassy, or vague. His soft voice was hesitant, uncertain. He sounded almost as frail as she felt. “Sure,” she said. “Just stay here, okay? I’ll get you a drink.”

She turned and hurried to the house, relieved to look back from the porch and find he wasn’t following her. He had sat down on a stump at the edge of the garden and was rubbing the side of his head tentatively. Tibbs still rubbed against his legs, back and forth, back and forth. Strange. The cat didn’t usually take to strangers.

She returned quickly with a tall glass of iced water and another of tea. “Thought you might like some tea, too.” Wouldn’t hurt to make friends. Might make him reconsider if he was debating rape and murder. She noticed that, while she’d been inside, the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Maybe they’d been right about the rain after all.

“Thank you kindly. Water will do.” He took the glass and drank thirstily, then stopped suddenly, putting a hand to his forehead.

“Ice-pick head?” She asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

What kind of guy stepped out of the woods wearing a torn tee and torn jeans, carried a silk handkerchief, and said I beg your pardon?

“Ice-pick head. You know, when you eat something cold too fast and you get that terrible pain, like an ice pick stabbing you in the forehead.”

“Oh. Yes. But it’s gone now.” He drank some more, looked around. “Can you tell me where I am, please?”

“You’ve been lost in the woods, haven’t you? You must’ve gone in somewhere on the Uwharrie side. Now you’re in Pisgah, about twenty miles from the teeming metropolis of Asheboro. You must’ve had a hell of a walk.”

He drained his glass. “I’ve been walking for...I do not recall how long.”

“You must be bushed. Is there someone I can call for you?”

“No...I mean, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

He just looked at her. She noticed blood on his neck and more on the shoulder of his tee shirt. “You’re hurt! What happened?”

He touched the side of his head, winced. “I don’t know. From the large hematoma I’m feeling, I would assume I was hit in the head.”

“But you don’t remember?”

He shook his head, eyeing the glass of tea. She handed it to him and he sipped, grimaced a little, sipped again.

“If you don’t like that, I can get you more water, or some Coke or orange juice.”

“Some more water would be splendid.”

Splendid? He certainly didn’t talk like a serial killer. Then again, how would she know? She decided to base her decisions about him on the only piece of incontrovertible evidence of his good nature that she possessed—Tibbs liked him.

“I’ll get you a wet wash cloth so you can clean up a little, and an ice pack for your head, okay? Why don’t you wait on the porch steps.”

“Thank you.” He rose from the stump and almost toppled over, only just catching himself on a nearby maple.

“I think I should call you an ambulance,” she told him. “You might have a bad head injury there.”

“No, no ambulance. Please. I’m all right.”

She hesitated. “Okay.”

He drained the glass and handed it to her. “Thank you very much for the water. I’ll be on my way now.”

“Asheboro is about twenty miles north.” She pointed down her driveway, which ran a straight half-mile or so to the dead-end road on which hers was the last house. “When you reach the end of this road, make a right. You should be able to catch a ride.”

“Thank you. You have been most kind.” He bowed (bowed?) and began walking toward the driveway. For some reason, she felt bad about just letting him go. He looked pretty worn out, and she wondered when he’d last eaten.

“Sir?” He stopped and turned. “Would you like some water to take with you? Or a sandwich?”

He smiled. “That is very kind of you.”

“Wait here.” She entered the house and found a thermos, filled it with iced water from the jug in the refrigerator. Got out the bread and deli ham and cheese. She wondered if he liked mayonnaise. No, mayonnaise didn’t keep well. She’d just use the ham and cheese.

She glanced out the window and saw him kneeling, stroking Mr. Tibbs, who marched back and forth, sometimes rising onto his back feet to better get his head into easy rubbing range, in an ecstasy of appreciation. The stranger’s lips were moving, and she saw Tibbs answering him. That sure wasn’t like Tibbs, who, when anyone except her friend Cuba stopped by, usually became a black streak that quickly disappeared under the bed or up a tree.

She took the sandwich and water out the back door and he met her at the steps. “Do you want more than one sandwich? An apple or something?”

He looked down at her, a smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “No, thank you. You have done too much already.”

For some reason, the less he asked of her the more she wanted to give. “How about a ride? Where are you going, anyway?”

He looked at the ground, then back into her eyes, his own eyes troubled. That slightly dazed looked was back. “My exact destination seems to have...slipped my mind.”

Something about his expression, the bewildered tone of his voice, was familiar. “Can you tell me your name?”

“I’m afraid that seems to have slipped my mind, as well.” His voice remained calm, his face did not change expression, but his eyes betrayed his fear. At that moment, he looked anything but dangerous. More like a child lost in a huge parking lot or shopping mall, with no idea which way to turn or if there was even any safe territory to be found.

She tried to imagine what it would be like to suddenly not know who she was or where she belonged and couldn’t quite do it. She wondered how long he’d been wondering aimlessly in a state of apparent amnesia. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital. You must have a head injury, and even worse symptoms could be on the way.”

“No, no hospital. I cannot.”

“But why? You do realize—”

“I don’t know why not. I just know it is not something I dare do. The consequences would be...most severe.”

He had lucked upon one of the few people who understood a little of what he was feeling. Things in her past had rendered her incapable of rational thought, and she had lived on her instincts. She had learned that listening to one’s gut often paid off better than thinking.

There was such a lost look in his eyes, such a woebegone expression on his face, that she could not let him go. He had shown no indication of being dangerous, only confused and possibly in terrible danger from the unknown seriousness of his injury. She couldn’t help thinking that maybe there was a reason he’d shown up at her house. Years ago, before it had all happened, she had been a neurology nurse, and she now realized that his tone of voice seemed familiar because she'd heard it so many times before from other lost souls with head injuries. It made the current situation seem less like a coincidence and more like an order from God. Take care of this man, or spend the rest of your life wondering what happened to him and if you could’ve helped.

Some choice.

“Listen...come in the house. We’ll get you cleaned up and checked out and then decide where to go from there, okay?”

“I cannot impose on you further, and you should not be inviting a strange man into your home. I could be any sort of deviant, with any sort of plans for you.”

“You refuse to go to a hospital because your instincts tell you not to, right? Well, mine are telling me that you’re a safe person. Now come in the house.”

Her old charge nurse voice came back with hardly any effort. A few drops of rain pattered down. The stranger glanced at the lowering sky and made his decision. He mounted the steps, Tibbs at his heels, and followed her into the house.

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