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confused.”
    “Hell you are. Crazy as a loon.” Tom Jackson swiped a hand across his split lip. “Ought to give him a pill or something, Doc.”
    “He doesn’t know,” the doctor said. “He thinks he heard her—”
    “I did hear her. She was at my place just this morning.”
    Tom Jackson’s face went slack with astonishment. “She was? For true?”
    “Where is she?” Harvey looked around, eyes alight with excitement. “Is she here? Did you bring her with you?”
    “She disappeared before I could.”
    “Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?” Excitement gave way to fury. “What have you done with her?” Both Jacksons started forward.
    Daniel braced himself, but Doc shoved between them. “Stop it, you two! I’ll handle this!” Doc turned to Daniel. “You couldn’t have heard her, Hobart. And she wasn’t at your place.”
    “Yeah, she was, right there by the—”
    “Hannah’s dead, son.”
    Daniel froze, fists still up. “She’s what?”
    “She died December last year.”
    Daniel’s arms went limp. He took a step back.
Hannah? Dead?
He looked from one face to the other but saw the same certainty in each. Then he looked at the woman on the porch, and a terrible realization sent his mind into chaos.
    She stared back at him with a look of pure horror, both hands clasped over her mouth. Tears ran down her cheeks. And suddenly it all fell into place—why she was so sad, why he had felt that odd connection.
    He knew that anguish. He knew that pain. He had felt it himself when he’d stood over his son’s grave.
    “No,” he said, his voice muffled by the roaring in his head. “She’s alive.” He had seen Hannah. Talked to her. “Hannah’s not dead. I swear it.”
    With a cry, she whirled and stumbled into the house.
    “Wait.” Desperate to explain, Daniel started toward her, wanting to tell her Hannah was alive and waiting for them to come get her.
    Tom Jackson stepped forward to bar his way. “Get out of here, Hobart. You’ve done enough damage.”
    Over Jackson’s shoulder, Daniel watched the door slam shut. Panic gripped him. “Please, ma’am,” he yelled. “If you’ll just hear me out.”
    Doc nudged his arm. “Come on, son. Let’s go.”
    “But she’s real, Doc,” he insisted, as much to himself as to the people staring at him. “I saw her.” He had to believe that was true. Otherwise, he would have to accept that he was as crazy as Tom Jackson said he was.
    Harvey shoved the broken snowshoes into Daniel’s hands. “Take your dog and don’t come back.”
    He wasn’t sure how he got to Doc’s place. But as the fog of confusion began to clear, he found himself sitting in the kitchen at the back of the clinic, a mug of coffee clutched in his bruised hands.
    “She’s not dead,” he said for what must have been the tenth time. “I saw her. I talked to her.”
    “Son.”
    Daniel gave him a fierce look. “If what you say is true, then something happened to me under the snow. Something that makes no sense.”
    “Head wounds are—”
    “Tricky. I know. But Doc, my head is healed.” He shoved back the snow-dampened hair from his temple to show that the lump had gone down. “I don’t even have headaches anymore.” He let his hair fall back. “At least I didn’t until they pounded me. Everything is the same as it was before the slide.”
    “Except for your insistence that Hannah Ellis is alive.”
    Daniel pressed his lips tight and stared down into his mug. He knew himself better than Doc did. Surely, he would sense if something was wrong in his head.
    “So tell me why you’re so sure she’s alive,” the old man prodded gently.
    Reluctantly, Daniel told him all that had happened since he had first heard Hannah’s voice beneath the snow.
    Doc listened without interruption, or even a show of surprise, which was disturbing. Was he that convinced his mind was impaired?
    Yet, as Daniel put all that doubt and uncertainty into words and heard how strange it