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idiot.
    The fear for myself transformed immediately. The person in the doorway wasn’t someone to be afraid of. The person in the doorway, with blood on her hands and tears running down her cheeks, was someone I should be afraid for . I looked hard just to make sure I was seeing who I really thought I was seeing.
    “Mom?” I said weakly.
    “Becca,” she said softly.
    That was it, that was all I could take. My world went black as I fainted, realizing I just couldn’t handle any more bad news.

Four

    “Becca, come on, you’ve got to wake up,” Ian’s voice said.
    Had my morning at Bailey’s and then my afternoon at my own home been a horrible nightmare? Was I still in bed?
    “Mom,” I grumbled as my eyes shot open. I was on my porch with Ian on one side of me and Hobbit on the other.
    “I’m right here,” Mom said from somewhere behind us.
    I sat up and turned around. Mom was sitting on a bench that I used for holding plant starts. I tried to get up to go to her, but I was woozy and slow.
    “Becca, don’t. Stay there,” Mom said as she looked down at her hands, which were still covered with blood. “I don’t know . . . just stay there, okay?”
    Ian had his hand on my arm. “Becca, you fainted. Take it easy. Drink some of this.” He handed me a blue crushed-ice drink that he must have had in his truck. It was his favorite refreshment after a hot day full of installations.
    I took a sip of the blueberry cold and swallowed the icy eeriness of my current reality. We were quite the picture: my mom with her bloody hands, my dog with her bloody paws that had left imprints all over me, and Ian, grimy from working but at the ready with some blue crushed ice.
    “Ian pulled in right after you fainted,” Mom said as if that explained everything.
    “You all right?” Ian said as he looked hard at my eyes.
    I nodded. “I think so.” I looked toward the barn where, I assumed, Joan’s body still lay. I looked at my mom again. “What happened?”
    She sighed and huffed a strained laugh. “I’m not really sure. The last thing I remember clearly is your father dropping me off. After we left Bailey’s, we visited Mathis and Tom. Then we grabbed something to eat. I had Jason drop me off here so I could say hi to Hobbit and see what I could do about preparing dinner so you wouldn’t have to after working all day.” Her forehead wrinkled. “I have a recollection of walking toward the barn, but it isn’t clear, and I have no idea what happened after that, that is until I woke up on the other side of the barn, found my way back around it, and found you. The back of my head is tender.” She looked at her hands.
    “We’ve got to get you cleaned up,” I said. I knew what we should have done first: call the police. But protectiveness for my mother won out and I wanted all of that blood off her.
    “No, dear, we’re not going to do that,” she said.
    “Your mom had me call Sam—call the police already,” Ian said. “They’re on their way.”
    A surge of fear and anger shot through me. I was afraid for my mom and angry that Ian had done as she’d asked.
    “I tried to get Ian to take you and Hobbit out of here, but he thought that might make you angrier than you are at the moment,” Mom said. She knew me so well. “I don’t think I did anything wrong, Becca, but we need to know for sure.”
    “We could have cleaned up first,” I said.
    “No, you know that would have been the wrong thing to do,” Mom said.
    There was no more time to argue. Sam’s police cruiser pulled into the driveway and stopped just short of the small front yard. He got out the driver’s side door, and Officer Vivienne Norton got out of the passenger side.
    Sam was still walking with a slight limp as the result of being taken hostage by the men who’d killed Linda’s mother-in-law. They’d messed up his ankle—it had been severely sprained. They’d also dislocated his shoulder. The shoulder had healed quickly, but the ankle