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be the grieving widower."
       "Isn't that double dipping?" Ramona asked.
       "Yes, it is. Genius, isn't it? But we both get what we want. He gets a dead daughter. I get a dead wife. He gets a company. I get to collect on the life insurance I insisted on buying for each of us. She's my beneficiary and I am hers. The minute we say 'I do' they go into effect. Everyone gets what they want and everyone feels sorry for us."
       "I don't feel sorry for you," she said.
       "Yes, you do. I'm sleeping with someone other than you and pretending to enjoy it. You have to feel sorry for me for doing such a sweet little deed."
       "I won't be there, so let's go over it again. No way it can be a suicide?"
       "I've got it under control. There's no way there will ever be a question to void that insurance. She's going to drown very accidentally." And he went on to tell her every detail of the scuba diving accident that could never be traced back to him.
       Jane's blood ran as cold in Ringgold, Texas at the Double L Ranch as it had that night. She couldn't believe what she'd heard and for a while she had almost convinced herself she had just had a horrible, horrible nightmare.
       But after blinking a dozen times and seeing her groom removing the woman's bra and kissing her so passionately it left no doubt that she was most certainly not his sister, Jane faced the cold hard truth.
       She'd been duped; not only by her fiancé but also by her stepfather, Paul. The oil company was hers by inheritance. It had belonged to her great-grandfather, passed down to her grandmother and then to her mother. Paul had been the CEO when her father was living and as she sat there in the den, replaying the events of her life, she wondered what had really caused her father's private plane to crash when she was a little girl.
       The next step had been getting back into the house without alerting John and his cohort. It had taken forever for her to quietly gather her glass and check for cookie crumbs. She had eased inside even more quietly than she'd gone out and had gone straight to her room. Without turning on a light, she had packed, written John an email in the dark, sent another one to Celia, and before daybreak been in her car on the way to the Jackson airport.
       She'd lived in mortal fear that John would be waiting at every bus stop and had spent most of the next day and a half looking over her shoulder. She'd be twenty-five in six weeks and the company held in trust until that time would be hers on her birthday. At that point, Paul would be at her mercy—if she could survive. She had no innocent illusions that John would stop looking for her or that Paul would call off the contract on her life. She was worth far more dead than alive and until midnight of the eve of her birthday, they'd turn over every single rock searching.

    A hand touched her arm. In that moment, she expected to look up and see either Ramona—or whatever the hell her name really was—or John, but instead found herself gazing into the eyes of Lizzy again.
       "Are you really my friend?"
       "Yes, I am," Jane said.
       "Well then, would you play with me?"
       "I sure will. Shall we take a walk and find a pot of gold?"
       Lizzy's chin quivered. "They said I wasn't magic because I didn't find it fast enough. They said I was a skunk after all and they held their noses and ran away from me."
       Jane came up out of the chair in an angry flash and took her hand. "I think they are wrong. Let's me and you go hunt for it and when we find it, we won't even tell them."
       They played a game of hiding from everyone as Jane suggested next moves until they reached the barn. Behind this tree. Over to that rose bush. Under the fence so fast no one could see them. Now behind the barn doors. Once inside she listened carefully and put a finger over her lips to keep Lizzy quiet.
       "The rainbow comes first. We have to see the rainbow because it