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    By some miracle, she’d gotten safely away from New York. By some miracle, she hadn’t been followed—or caught. Yet.
    She felt like she’d been driving forever and her eyes were bleary. Her head hurt. Her shoulders and butt ached from the long hours in the car. But she was here, and in her pocket was the key to a one-bedroom furnished apartment, hers for the next month.
    If she needed to stay that long. Maybe Ricky would be in touch in a matter of days, not weeks, and this entire nightmare would be over. Maybe Archie hadn’t really died, maybe he’d been resuscitated by the paramedics, and Ricky had managed to clear his name, and whoever was after this damned package was in jail.
    And maybe she was Julia Roberts and this was all just a very bad dream.
    She found the Pine Hills apartment building with no problem. The nondescript rectangular building was only three stories high and set back from the road, flanked on either side by a meadow full of bluegrass and wildflowers.
    It couldn’t have looked more different from her fiftytwo-story Manhattan high-rise, and she wondered fleetingly what the provided furnishings in her “furnished” apartment would look like.
    It’s only for a few weeks, until you hear from Ricky,
she told herself as she parked in the lot facing the balconied units.
You survived foster home musical chairs and two
years with the Hammonds—this will be a piece of cake.
    She dragged her suitcase out of the Blazer, secured her tote over her arm, and slammed the Blazer’s door.
    Ty Barclay stood in the shadows of his small balcony on the second floor, sipping his beer, alone with his thoughts. He couldn’t miss the brilliant glory of the sunset sky now, but it didn’t soothe him the way it usually did when he was out riding in the mountains or even driving the winding roads through the foothills. It just didn’t matter.
    He was thinking about five years ago today, when he’d watched Meg walk toward him down the aisle wearing her mother’s ivory wedding dress, her red hair all pinned up, with just a few curls framing her face, and everyone they both knew in the world filling the seats in the church.
    And he felt the tight knot of pain he lived with every day clenching inside him, more painful than ever.
    Damn it, baby, I miss you so,
he thought.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not for us.
    A car pulled into the parking lot then, making some kind of clacking sound that penetrated the darkness of his thoughts. In the rosy gold light he saw it was a Blazer, with a dent in the passenger-side door and a low right rear tire. The woman driving it parked right next to his car below, sat for a moment, and then got out.
    He watched her automatically, because it was what he did, who he was. A cop. He’d never seen the Blazer before, so she didn’t live here. Either she was visiting . . . or she was a new tenant.
    As she pulled out a suitcase and slipped a black tote bag on her shoulder, he stopped with the bottle lifted halfway to his mouth.
    He’d never seen her before, but she didn’t look like anyone from around here. His keen eyes saw the sweep of chin-length silky blonde hair, the jeans that hugged her lean figure, the dainty pink tank top encasing small, firm breasts.
    He couldn’t see her face too well, but nothing about her that he could see looked familiar.
    She’s probably from Hope or Medicine Bow or Douglas and got hired on as a waitress or guest wrangler at the
dude ranch,
he thought, taking another swig of his beer. The Crystal Horseshoe Dude Ranch, owned by Wood and Tammie Morgan, had more employees than just about any other business in Thunder Creek, and they were always coming and going. Most of those who didn’t live in the bunkhouses on the Crystal Horseshoe property lived here at the Pine Hills, which offered half of its units with month-to-month leases.
    Between the dude ranch’s wealthy guests and its employees, a small but steady flow of strangers came and went