Raeanne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer. RaeAnne Thayne
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healing sprained ankle into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and scanned the contents for something appealing to warm for her dinner. She finally settled on some of the sinfully divine cream of potato soup Dermot Caine had brought over from the diner a few days earlier—perfect for a cold, stormy night.
She dished some into a bowl, grateful the children hadn’t unloaded the dishwasher before they left or she would have had a struggle trying to reach the plates and bowls in the upper cupboard.
As she waited for the soup to warm in the microwave, her thoughts returned to her mother.
She could pinpoint exactly the moment Ruth had changed. April twentieth, twenty-four years ago, 11:42 p.m. She had been twelve years old, her brother eight, the same ages her kids were now. The night had been rainy, like this one. She remembered she had been sleeping when something awakened her. The doorbell, she realized later. Claire had blinked awake and lain there in bed, listening to the branches of the big elm click against the window in the swirling wind and wondering who could be ringing the doorbell so late and if her father would be angry with them because he always rose early for work.
And then she’d heard her mother cry out, a desperate, horrified kind of sound. With a sudden knot of apprehension in her stomach, Claire had opened her door fully and sidled out to the landing, looking down through the bars.
She had recognized the longtime police chief, Dean Coleman, but had been able to hear only bits of his hushed conversation.
Dead. Both shot. Jealous husband. I’m sorry, Ruth.
Everything changed in that moment. Gossip roared faster than a wind-stirred fire. Even though the adults in her life had tried to keep it from her and her brother, their children heard and absorbed snippets about the scandal and a few of them had delighted in whispering about it loud enough so they knew that Claire would overhear.
Her father—the man she had adored, president of the biggest bank in town, a leader of church and community—had been having a torrid affair with a cocktail waitress at the Dirty Dog, the sleazy bar outside of town.
Apparently the woman had a jealous husband, a biker thug by the name of Calvin Waters. When he came home early one night, he caught them in bed together. In a drunken rage, he shot them both with a sawed-off shotgun before turning the gun on himself.
The scandal had exploded in Hope’s Crossing. She could still remember those awful days as she had endured stares and whispers and hadn’t known what to do with all the anger and shame inside her—or with the grief for her lost innocence.
Claire and her brother had endured those first difficult months by keeping a few friends close and basically sticking their heads down and plowing through.
Ruth, on the other hand, had completely fallen apart. She had taken to her bed for several months after the scandal, addicted to alcohol and the Valium doctors had prescribed her for sleep.
Left with little choice, Claire had stepped up to take care of the three of them. She had been the one who did laundry, who fixed lunch for her younger brother, who walked him to school and helped with his homework and comforted him when he cried for a mother who had been too absorbed in her loss and humiliation to see her children needed her, too.
Claire knew now, taking charge of her flailing family had been her way of dealing with the chaos.
She sipped at her soup, wishing the rich, creamy taste could wipe away the bitter memories. Ruth had lived in that numb state for about six months, until Mary Ella and Katherine and other friends had forced her to break free of her addiction.
She had fought it with courage and strength and Claire would always admire that in her mother. But even after rehab, Ruth had continued to rely on Claire to make sure her life flowed smoothly.
Claire knew she bore plenty of responsibility for the patterns they had fallen into. Even when she had lived away from Hope’s Crossing while Jeff was in medical school, she had handled any crisis of Ruth’s long-distance, whether that was dealing with a parking ticket or a doctor bill or calling a plumber to repair a leaky faucet.
She could justify to herself that if she didn’t take care of things, her mother’s life would fall back into chaos, but she knew that was only an excuse. This was her way of feeling needed, important, to a mother who had basically forgotten her children amid her own pain.
With a sigh, she set down her soup. She wasn’t hungry after all. She would just watch the movie, she decided. She wheeled the chair to the sink and rinsed the bowl, reaching the switch on the disposal only with the help of a large soup ladle.
She headed back to the family room and turned on the movie, eager for any kind of distraction from her thoughts. The movie apparently worked too well. She barely remembered the first scene—when she awoke some time later, the credits were rolling and Chester was standing in the doorway, his hackles raised.
“What’s the matter, bud?” she asked.
He gave that low-throated hound howl of his and scrambled for the front door, his hackles raised and his claws clicking on the wood floor.
Claire frowned but curiosity compelled her to transfer to her rolling office chair and follow him. Chester wasn’t much of a watchdog but he would sometimes have these weird fits of protectiveness. Probably just the Stimsons’ cat or maybe a mule deer coming out of the mountains to forage among the spring greens. For all she knew, her silly dog could be barking at the wind that still howled.
“Come on, boy. It’s okay. Settle down.”
Still, the basset hound stood beside the door, that low growl sounding somehow ominous in the silent house.
Claire maneuvered down the hallway after him until she reached the window beside the front door, set just low enough that she could peek over the sill from her seated position.
She squinted into the darkness and caught a flash of movement that materialized into a dark shape there on the porch.
Her heart skittered.
Someone was out there.
CLAIRE COULD HEAR HER pulse pounding in her ears, but she quickly tried to talk herself down.
She was seeing things. A trick of the wind or a shadow or something.
And even if she wasn’t seeing some weird hallucination, if she really had seen someone standing on her porch, the explanation was probably perfectly benign. This was Hope’s Crossing after all. Not that the town was immune to crime—as the recent rash of burglaries would certainly attest—but a home invasion robbery was an entirely different situation.
Settle down, she told herself. She was only freaking out because she was battling a completely normal sense of vulnerability, alone and helpless in her big house on a stormy night. It was only natural to start imagining somebody out there with a chain saw and a hockey mask.
She was seeing things. She was down to one pain-killer at night, but maybe even that much of the stuff lingering in her system was messing with her head.
She gazed out into the sleeting rain again, straining her eyes to peer at the dark corners of her lawn. There. Again. This time, she couldn’t come up with another rational explanation. That was definitely a person out there dressed in dark clothing, lurking on the edge of the porch.
In a panic, not really thinking about what she was doing, Claire checked to make sure the door was latched and then flicked the porch light rapidly on and off a half-dozen times.
It was probably a stupid thing to do, only serving to let the guy know she had seen him. She would have been better off using that time to barricade herself in the bathroom and calling 9-1-1 or something.
Stupid or not, though, it worked. She had caught his attention anyway. The figure turned quickly toward the front door and she caught the pale blur of a face,