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naive enough to believe that she was living a fairy tale. Six months after they’d met, they were living together and she’d been planning their wedding. Three months later, she’d been running for her life.
    If Jake Vernelli was working with Michael, then he’d stop at nothing short of killing her. If he wasn’t, he was still dangerous. If he looked too close, he was going to see that her life was a house of cards, and she was only one pull away from having it collapse.
    * * *
    A T NINE THE NEXT MORNING , Tara wiped her face with a paper towel. On her way to work, she’d enjoyed the clear blue sky and brilliant sun. Now, just three hours later, the temperature outside had soared to ninety and was well over a hundred degrees in the kitchen.
    The hottest summer in fifty-five years. The television weather forecasters droned on about it. In Minnesota, where summers for the most part lasted about two months and a hot day was in the mideighties, fourteen straight days of over ninety-degree temperatures had everyone’s attention. People didn’t talk about anything else.
    Except for the past couple of days, they’d squeezed in a little conversation about the town picnic. Held every June fifteenth for the past hundred and ten years, the picnic brought the town together. Over five hundred people would gather at Washington Park, the two acres of land at the edge of Wyattville. Stories would be retold, recipes traded, new babies shown off and massive amounts of food consumed.
    Since early morning, she and Janet had been slicing the meat they’d cooked the day before. The Lions Club would have three large roasters available to keep the meat warm so that it could be piled high onto fresh buns and topped with sautéed green peppers. Other volunteers would have fired up a few grills, and there’d soon be hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling. Each family that attended would bring a dish to pass. There would be lemonade and iced tea and big barrels of cold beer. No one would go away hungry.
    The parade would mostly consist of tractors pulling hay wagons—decorated with crepe paper and plastic streamers—that could seat the mayor, city council members or anybody else remotely considered Somebody. Each would have a big bag of candy at his or her side, and they’d throw handfuls out along the way, and small children along the parade route would scramble for the loot.
    Boy and Girl Scout troops would march, proudly carrying flags. Wyattville didn’t have its own high school. Kids were bused to Bluemond, twenty-five miles away. The payback came at parade time when Bluemond’s seventy-five-person band showed up. The parade started a block north of Nel’s, so for the past half hour Tara had listened to a haphazard medley of blaring horns, whistling flutes and pounding drums as the kids nervously waited to begin marching.
    At 10:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before the parade was to start, Tara locked the front door. Normally on a Friday, the last lunch special wouldn’t be served until sometime around two but no one expected that today. Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day might be national holidays but in Wyattville, it was the town picnic that garnered universal observance.
    Under one arm she carried two lawn chairs, one for her and one for Janet. The older woman had left a few minutes earlier to supervise sandwich making.
    For most of the morning, Tara had been too busy to worry about broken windows or hit-and-run drivers. Now that her work was done and the rest of the day stretched before her, she was determined not to dwell on what-ifs but rather to focus on sunshine, silly games and the simple pleasure of dangling her bare feet in the spring-fed pond.
    At last year’s picnic, she’d been so new and so edgy that the loud, unexpected burps of noise from the tractors had practically had her jumping out of her skin. Janet had been insistent, though, and she’d somehow managed to draw up her lawn chair and while away the afternoon