“I understand,” Bentley said in his most conciliatory voice. Then he made eye contact with Lenora and added, “I’ll tell you what, Gus, Lenora and I will fly up there. I’ll talk to the county commissioners at their next meeting, and Lenora would like to see Jamie Long.”

Lenora nodded her approval.

“Why does she want to see the girl?” Gus demanded.

“Well, Lenora became quite attached to Jamie and is concerned about her. She has tried to call the girl numerous times but has never gotten through to her. And Jamie has never responded to her letters.”

“I’m not even sure she’s still there,” Gus said flatly. “If she is, I’m sure she’s fine.”

Lenora frowned and leaned forward, ready to add something to the conversation. Fearful she might say something that would annoy Gus, Bentley shook his head at her.

And to think that only a couple of months back, he had actually been thinking about ending his association with the Hartmanns and cutting back his practice, Bentley thought with a sigh. That had changed when his wife found a rundown Victorian mansion out near Round Top and decided that she had been put on this earth to restore it, a project that would cost a king’s ransom.

Of course, he could protest all he wanted to, but in the end, Brenda would get her derelict mansion, which would take away any hope he had of ever ending his association with the Hartmanns.

At least the old house would keep Brenda busy for years.

The correspondence course was a godsend. The textbook was well written, the supplemental readings fascinating. Jamie immersed herself in American history. When she finally had the first two lessons ready to mail, she felt elated. She addressed a manila envelope and put the lessons inside. She left the envelope unsealed, certain that Miss Montgomery would feel it her duty to make sure she hadn’t violated any rules, and slid it under the housekeeper’s door. To celebrate, she called Lester. “I want an extra-long walk this afternoon,” she told him.

“Don’t you get bored with all that walking?” he asked.

“Not really. I experience something new every time we go out.” Which was true, Jamie thought. Only yesterday, she had watched an armadillo ambling down the middle of the road as though it didn’t have a care in the world and not minding at all that Jamie, her hand firmly on Ralph’s collar, was following along behind it.

She had learned to listen to the ever-changing music of the prairie-the sounds made by animals and insects, the whisper of the prairie grasses waving in the wind. And she admired the ever-changing palette of color as the sun traversed the sky and slid behind an occasional cloud.

The daily walks also had led to a deeper awareness of her own body-a different sort of awareness than when she was on the track team. Running was all about pacing and required intense concentration. With walking she was able to relax and enjoy the feel of her muscles working in concert as she strode along. Sometimes she would take a deep breath just to feel her lungs fill and expand and to relish the health and youth and strength of her own body. The muscles in her legs were almost as firm as they had been when she was running track and working out almost daily. She sometimes wondered if walking had become an obsession with her. Or was it simply a coping mechanism that helped her deal with isolation and loneliness? And with fear? She was sailing in uncharted waters. The changes in her body went further than the muscles in her legs and the capacity of her lungs. She could no longer button her jeans, and there was a firmness to her belly that had nothing to do with the underlying muscle structure.

“Actually I have a specific destination today,” she told Lester. “I asked Freda about any points of interest I might visit on my walks, and she told me about an abandoned farmhouse a few miles north of here. Do you know where it is?” she asked.

Lester said that he did and would be out front in fifteen minutes.

Ralph’s tail started wagging when Jamie got her hiking boots out of the closet. “So you think you’re going to go with me?” she teased.

She and Ralph made their way down the main staircase and headed for the front door. Lester hadn’t arrived yet, so she and Ralph sat on the front steps. Freda’s pickup truck with its camper-shell clinic was parked under the portico, a seemingly daily occurrence. Jamie assumed that the nurse came to visit Ann Montgomery. In spite of the difference in their ages, the two women seemed to be close friends. Probably it was their devotion to Amanda Hartmann that brought them together.

A visit with a friend would be nice, Jamie thought. Or a letter from one. Without knowing her current address, Jamie realized that her friends and sister would not be writing to her, but she wondered why she hadn’t heard from Lenora. Other than her correspondence course, the only mail she had received were her monthly bank statements, which were being mailed to the ranch by the anonymous “third party” and opened by Miss Montgomery before passing them along to Jamie. Such measures seemed ridiculously extreme to Jamie, but then, as Lenora had pointed out more than once, privacy was a major issue with the Hartmanns.

When Jamie saw Lester’s truck approaching, she stood. He pulled up beside her and rolled down the window. Jamie could hear Vince Gill singing “A Little More Love” on the truck radio.

Lester turned down the radio. “I have to be back by noon, so you’re going to have to ride at least part of the way.”

“I’ll walk first-for an hour,” Jamie said, glancing at her watch then heading down the drive. Lester turned up the radio. When Vince finished his song, Reba began pondering “Is There Life Out There?”

Jamie jogged a bit to get ahead of the radio. She liked Reba but didn’t want the distraction.

She slowed as she approached the main gate, waiting for Lester to activate the opener. As soon as the gate swung open, she and Ralph headed north.

She walked down the middle of the empty roadway. Ralph ran excitedly from side to side, sniffing clumps of prairie grass and frantically digging up gopher runs. She wondered what he would do if he actually caught a gopher.

At the end of an hour, Lester honked at her, and she and Ralph rode the rest of the way. “There it is,” he said, pointing toward a mailbox hanging crookedly on a fence post. The name on the box was “McGraf.” At the end of an overgrown lane she could see a listing barn, a windmill with a missing blade, and a stone chimney jutting out of a rooftop.

“I want to take a look,” she told Lester as she reached for the door handle.

“No way. I’d lose my job if you fell down an old well or through a rotten floor.”

Jamie started to protest but decided she didn’t want to get Lester in trouble. Disappointed, she stared at the desolate scene. “Why did the McGrafs leave?” she asked.

“Actually there are several deserted farmhouses on the ranch,” Lester explained. “Word has it that Mr. Hartmann paid the back taxes on the farms and had the occupants evicted. The McGrafs didn’t get very far, though. They loaded up their truck and drove off right before a blizzard hit. No one knew they were missing, so no one went looking for them. It was a week or so later when some hunters spotted the truck out in the middle of a field. Mr. McGraf and the missus and three kids were all packed into the cab of the truck. Apparently they lost their way in all that snow and ice and froze to death.”

“How horrible!” Jamie said. A family had tried to make a living here and failed. But they shouldn’t have had to pay with their lives.

“Yeah,” Lester agreed. “Every few years something like that happens. Sometimes a farmer gets lost on his way back from his own barn. Weather gets that bad sometimes.”

She imagined the family members taking what they could fit in the back of an aging truck and leaving the rest to be scavenged by drifters over the years. Had Gus Hartmann given them a deadline, threatening to send the sheriff to evict them, or had they simply not realized a blizzard was on the way?