“Go down the back stairs!” she whispered to him, unnecessarily.

“What the hell’s Chase doing here?”

She glanced at her lover’s face, tanned up to his hat line and furrowed now with anxiety, and it hit her at that inconvenient instant that she was going to have to do something about Red Bosch. When they first tumbled into bed, she’d assumed they were both just a couple of horny-toads hungry for sex in a county where romantic partners were as scarce as yaks. That, plus the fact that at least he wasn’t married, and she did have some standards. But lately Red projected a possessive, boyfriend kind of air that worried her.

“I don’t know! It’s Bobby and Meryl, too! Go!”

Red fumbled as he picked up his jeans, dropping them. The huge metal buckle on his belt hit the wood floor with a clattering thump. They both froze for a second, staring at each other, and then continued hurrying into their clothes.

“They’ll string me up in the barn if they catch me here,” Red whispered.

“Are you kidding? You’ll be lucky to get to the rafters!”

He half laughed, half shuddered at her serious joke.

Physical harm wasn’t the real threat. It wasn’t as if the uncles were going to thrash him for bedding their niece. Getting him fired at a time when ranches were foreclosing, not hiring-that was the risk.

Jody rushed into jeans, a bra, a T-shirt, and pulled on socks and cowboy boots, while Red dressed down to his own socks, picked up his boots to carry in his fingers, and then disappeared down the back stairs that led to the kitchen and the back door. She hoped that he’d had the sense to park his truck someplace nonincriminating. She took the time to run a brush through her hair, managing to flatten some of the dark curls that Red’s long fingers had tangled. Even facing the possibility of an emergency, she couldn’t show up in front of her uncles half groomed, not in the middle of the day when all decent Linders were supposed to be at work-as were their hired hands. Nothing much got by the uncles, not a bull trying to get to cows in another pasture, or a niece trying to hide her affairs. Besides, her grandmother would eventually hear all about this, including what her granddaughter was wearing, if it was anything out of the ordinary by her uncles’ reckoning.

“I’m coming!” she yelled.

Finally, she hurried downstairs, hanging onto the banister, skipping steps in her loud, clomping rush to the bottom.

“What’s going on?” she demanded of them breathlessly.

Three polished straw, immaculate summer cowboy hats hung on pegs on her wall, identical except for their bands: the sterling silver one was Meryl’s, the twined black leather one marked Chase’s hat, and Bobby’s was plain with no band at all.

There they were, the avuncular blessings and banes of her life: Chase, who got more handsome every year, as if the cool restraint with which he held himself somehow firmed his jaw, widened his shoulders, slimmed his torso, dissolved the age lines on his handsome face, and brightened the blue of his eyes; Bobby, muscular and taciturn, with a broad face that was as inexpressively flat as the plains that surrounded them; Meryl, with his kind, canny eyes and a girth that came from Belle’s fried chicken and a lawyerly life spent behind a desk. Two of them were the younger brothers of her late father; Meryl had been like a brother to him.

Her uncle Meryl’s eyes frightened her at that moment, because they filled with wet sympathy when she looked into his flushed, beefy face. Meryl Tapper had been her father’s best friend long before marrying her aunt Belle. His own large family hadn’t valued ambition and education, so he’d gravitated toward the Linders, who valued those things and him.

Her uncle Chase’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, which she thought suspicious in and of itself since he was standing in a dim hallway. With his fashionable shades, monogrammed white shirt, tailored trousers, engraved belt buckle, and black boots, Chase looked like Hollywood’s idea of a cowboy, except that he really was one, and an exceptionally good one at that. Jody had always heard that he’d been a fun and teasing charmer when he was young, but after her father died, Chase’s lighthearted nature died, too. She knew him as a disciplinarian, tough-minded, sarcastic, protective, and bossy. Her uncle Bobby, looking as massive as the bull rider he once was, and as vigilant as the soldier he had also been, stood at the screen door, facing sideways to the street. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see his left side, where the shirtsleeve hung empty, its cuff tucked into his belt. He’d left the arm in Iraq during the first Gulf War, a battle he hadn’t known was ahead of him when he enlisted in the Army right after his brother’s murder. Standing at her front door, Bobby looked as if he were waiting for somebody, or watching out for something.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded of them.

She had a sudden, intuitive start of wondering-was that what people asked each other twenty-three years ago on the day her father was killed and her mother disappeared? When people saw their neighbors’ eyes fill with tears and fear, did they ask that same question with their hearts hammering and their voices shaking as hers was now? What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Has something happened? Rose was a tiny town, some said a dying one, where almost everybody looked out for everybody else. She’d grown up without parents, but cosseted and safe in a town that had sometimes felt to her like a whole community of babysitters.

“Billy Crosby’s sentence got commuted,” Chase told her, in his blunt way.

She shook her head, not comprehending. “What?”

William F.-Billy- Crosby was in prison for murdering her father.

“He’s getting out, Jody,” Meryl, the lawyer, reiterated, and then dropped a second bomb. “The governor set him loose this morning.” Meryl dropped the third bomb: “He’s coming home this afternoon.”

Something about the way she looked in response to that news moved Chase to reach out a hand to grab her right arm to steady her. “Commuted?” Jody said the words as if trying to pronounce something in a foreign language in which she could mimic the syllables without understanding their meaning. Billy Crosby had been in prison for twenty-three years. According to everything she’d ever been told-promised-he wasn’t supposed to be getting out anytime soon.

They waited while she took it in.

Jody frowned, still not grasping it. “Are you telling me they let him out of prison?”

Meryl nodded. “Yes. That’s what we’re telling you.”

She gasped, and stared from one to the other. “He’s out? He’s coming back here? To Rose?”

Still standing guard by the front door, Bobby turned his face toward her, saw her wide-eyed disbelief and horror, and nodded once. But then he said in his deep voice that often sounded on the edge of anger, “It doesn’t mean he’ll stay.” The edges of his lips turned down. “I’ll shoot him first.”

“I’ll hand you the gun,” Jody said, trying for shaky bravado, and then she brought her hands to her mouth, whispered, “No!” and burst into tears. “How could this happen?” Her eyes flooded with grief, fright, and accusation as she exclaimed, “How could you let this happen?”