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except a hairline, and that too would be gone within a month.
    “What do you say we get the stitches out?” he asked.
    Heather shrugged, but her face screwed up with anticipation as Greg carefully clipped the threads, then worked them loose with a pair of tweezers. When he was done, he re-covered the cut with a piece of surgical tape, then replaced the old bandage with a new one.
    “How about your head?” he asked when he was finished. “That was a pretty nasty bump you got. Any headaches? Blurring of your vision?”
    Once again Heather shook her head. “I took aspirin for a couple of days, but there was hardly even any swelling.”
    “Okay,” Greg said, making a couple of notes on Heather’s chart. “Then I guess that’s it till next week, when you should be able to get rid of that bandage.”
    Heather made a sour face. “Who cares about the bandage? My mom won’t let me go out for two more weeks anyway. And none of it was even my fault.”
    Greg leaned back in his chair and gave Heather a speculative look. Perhaps, in this case at least, Heather was right. She’d been in the backseat of Jed Arnold’s car, and hadn’t been drinking. But then he remembered the two six-packs of beer that had been found in Jeff Hankins’s car. “And I suppose you weren’t going to drink any of the beer either, were you?” he asked.
    Heather’s expression tightened into a pout. “Maybe I didn’t even know it was there.”
    “Maybe you didn’t,” Greg agreed. “But I’ll give odds you did, and I’ll give even better odds you would have had more than your share of it if you’d all gotten up to the canyon.” He leaned forward and the lightness disappeared from his voice. “It hasn’t occurred to any of you kids how lucky you were, has it?” he asked.
    Heather shrugged sulkily as she realized she wasn’t going to be able to con Dr. Moreland into talking her mother out of grounding her. “Can I go now?” she asked.
    Greg opened his mouth as though to say something else, then changed his mind. He nodded, told Heather to make an appointment for the following week, then watched as she left the room.
    A girl, he thought, who was heading for trouble.
    Just like so many of the kids in Borrego.
    Not much to do, and not much to look forward to.
    For the most part they’d wind up like their parents, getting married too young, having too many kids, then living out their lives in trailer houses, or ugly little concrete blocks, like the ones they’d grown up in.
    Every day Greg saw it—saw the discontent and unhappinessof the parents, saw the boredom and disinterest of the children.
    That, perhaps, was why he’d returned to Borrego.
    He wanted to change what he saw there.
    But some days, like today when he tried to talk some sense into kids like Heather Fredericks, he wondered whether he was simply wasting his time.
    Kids like Heather and her friends just never seemed to listen to him, never seemed to learn.
    Still, he couldn’t stop trying.
    He sighed, glanced up at the clock, then began clearing off his desk. In another hour he was due at his aunt and uncle’s house. If he hurried, he’d have time for a quick shower, and maybe even half an hour of sleep.
    Even if Judith Sheffield was still as pretty as he remembered her from ten years ago, it was going to be a long night.

Chapter 3
    Judith sat quietly in one of the large leather-upholstered club chairs that flanked the fireplace in the Morelands’ living room. She was finally feeling the exhaustion of the long day on the road, and though she supposed she should have excused herself an hour ago and gone upstairs to bed, she’d lingered on, listening to the talk between Max and Greg.
    It was apparent to her that Max was proud of his nephew, and Judith could understand why. Greg seemed to her to have lost the hard edge of sophistication he’d affected in his college days, and the almost artificial perfection of his features had softened slightly as he’d matured.