Prologue

      Mary Ellen Barnett slammed the car door, hitched her wedding gown to her knees and hiked up the porch steps into the kitchen. Without a pause for breath, she locked the door, pulled the curtains, flipped open the oven and switched on the gas.

      Suicide was for cowards, but that didn’t bother her—she’d been an ace pro coward for years. Truthfully, she was feeling more murderous than suicidal, but that was irrelevant, too. She’d had it. Really had it. Being jilted at the altar wasn’t the first time she’d made a humiliating fool of herself, but it was positively the last.

      The sickly sweet gas fumes invaded the small, closed kitchen quickly. Too quickly. Cripes, they were making her gag. She’d never manage to kill herself off—at least not before throwing up.

      Impatiently she jerked off the gas, snapped the oven door closed and stormed outside.

      There had to be another way. Yanking off her long white veil, she plopped her fanny on the porch steps and inhaled gulping lungfuls of fresh air.

      A balmy breeze drifted off the Georgia coast. The blasted evening was damn near breathtaking. In any normal Christmas season, the weather would be obligingly cold, damp and dreary. Not this year. The wind drifted through her hair, as soothing as a caress, as soft as a whisper. The stars were just coming out, backdropped against a velvet sky and a dreamer’s crescent moon.

      The night was so disgustingly wonderful that it was darn near impossible to concentrate on doing herself in, but Mary Ellen was furiously, stubbornly, bulldog-determined. How many times had she made embarrassing, mortifying, humiliating mistakes? Millions, that’s how many. The flaws in her character were unfixable. God knew, she’d tried. And though her self-esteem and self-respect were nonexistent at the moment, she’d never lacked for imagination. The trick was simply applying her fertile mind to effective suicide methods.

      She stuck her chin in her palm. Minutes passed. As violently and tenaciously as she focused on morbid thoughts...self-destructing just wasn’t going to be that easy.

      Gas was out. Car crashes were no good, either—there was too much risk of hurting someone else; she’d die before hurting anyone else—and if she screwed up and failed to take herself out, she could end up a vegetable on machines that someone had to take care of. That was out of the question. Hanging was even less palatable—somebody would be stuck finding a gruesome scene. The time-honored traditional method of slitting one’s wrists had that same unfortunate glitch and anyway she hated—really hated—the sight of blood.

      She concentrated harder.

      Poison struck her as a stupendous idea, but the thought of drinking drain cleaner was too repulsive to stomach. Swallowing enough pills to go to sleep was the easiest out, but there was an inherent problem with that method, too. She’d always been as healthy as a horse. The only medicine laying around was a little PMS stuff, and since that was a regular plague, there were only a few pills left in the bottle. Somehow she didn’t think taking six tablets was going to get the job done.

      Drowning was a possibility, but awfully tough to pull off. She could swim like a fish. Starvation? Mary Ellen rolled her eyes to the sky. That’d never work. She’d been born with the appetite of a lumberjack. If there was food around, for absolute sure, she’d never have the self-control to turn it down.

      She scowled. There had to be some way. A suicide method that she couldn’t bungle. A way that left no mess and looked like an accident—everyone in town knew she was distraught and distracted after that debacle tonight in the church, so a careless accident would be understandable. She didn’t want anyone blaming themselves. She’d never deliberately hurt anyone.

      But damnation, there didn’t seem to be a method that fit all the criteria.

      The more she thought about it, the more she came to the unavoidably nasty conclusion that—blast and hell!—she was just going to have to live.

      That morose thought barely registered before an alternative took its place. She could run. If she was cowardly enough to consider suicide—which she certainly was—there was certainly no reason to sweat any scruples about running away from her problems. No one would miss her. Like removing a thorn or a bee stinger, it would be a relief to everyone if she were gone. She’d been a Class A problem from the day she was born, especially for those she loved. And living down this latest fiasco and humiliation would be far easier if she were removed from the picture.

      The idea of running gained momentum like a tumbleweed gathering speed in a high wind. She could do it. Disappear. Become someone else. Go someplace where no one knew her or had any idea what a disastrous mess she’d made of her life.

      Positively it had to be a place with no men—she’d made a fool of herself for absolutely the last time over that half of the human species—but that tiny detail presented more of a challenge than a problem. There had to be someplace in the continental United States that had no men.

      She just had to find it.