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  Once Dew was let out, he immediately began exploring the front yard. D.J. stood by the car tentatively.

  Mrs. Sanderson walked back to her and followed her gaze to look up proudly at the house. “What do you think?”

  “This is your home,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, of course. And I am so happy to share it with you.”

  “I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  “Oh, good Heavens, I need all the intrusion I can get,” Viv said enthusiastically.

  “But I...I’m not used to living with anyone.” D.J. tried again.

  “The upstairs apartment is completely private,” Viv assured her. “There’s a little second-floor deck off the back with a beautiful view at sunrise. And I’m as quiet as a mouse. Well, maybe not a mouse. But except for bridge club and Town Girls and Library Friends, the VFW Auxiliary... the Chamber of Commerce, but that’s just once a quarter... the United Methodist Women and... other than that and the occasional friend or neighbor, nobody ever darkens my door.”

  “I’m not sure if it’s the best thing, as librarian, for me to live with the head of the library board.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” Viv responded. “In a town this small, keeping a respectful distance simply isn’t possible. And remember, I’m providing the accommodation rent-free. With the sad little salary we pay, that will certainly help you save your pennies.”

  The woman did have a point, D.J. agreed. She was frugal by nature and with the money left to her by her parents, she’d paid off her student loans. Still, savings was always good. Besides, she intended to spend most of her time at the library. She could certainly sleep in the upstairs apartment of a well-connected local gadfly. “Well then, I suppose I should unpack the car.”

  “I’ll help,” Viv volunteered. “I was going to ask my son to come by and carry your things up, but then I thought, ‘why introduce them when she’s all hot and sweaty.’”

  Two

  041.4 Biographies in American English

  Scott Sanderson glanced up to see Jeannie Brown standing at the narrow counter that served as the pharmacist’s window at Sanderson Drug.

  “Hi, how are you doing today?”

  The thirtysomething woman blushed and shrugged. “I was going to be in town anyway and I thought... Well, I thought why don’t I go by and get Mother’s prescription while I’m here and... so here I am. I mean, I’m fine.”

  Scott smiled at her. “It’ll just take me a minute.”

  “Oh, I hope it’s not any trouble.”

  “No, of course not,” he answered. “Look around, have a coffee. I’ll bring it out to you.”

  She was blushing again. And he was smiling back. Scott liked Jeannie. She was nice. She’d been nice in high school. Now, divorced with a couple of smart, well-behaved kids, she was even nicer. And she liked him. It was hard to mistake that. He should probably ask her out sometime. He probably should. But he knew he never would.

  Jeannie would make some guy a nice wife. But Scott had already tried that. He’d already settled for “nice.” He’d married the nicest girl in town. And that had really not worked out for him. Next time, if there was to be a next time, it was going to take something more than nice to capture his attention.

  He finished gathering up the final two scripts in Dutch Porter’s post-operative medication regimen and then called his wife’s name. The woman already looked exhausted and her husband hadn’t been home for a whole day yet.

  Scott went through all the medications, when they were to be taken, alone or with food, and what to watch out for.

  Mrs. Porter was nodding, but he was fairly certain that she wasn’t hearing much of what he was saying.

  He pulled out his business card from the holder at the side of the window and stapled it to the top of the sack.

  “My cell phone number is on here, you call me anytime, night or day. This is complicated enough that I expect you to have questions.”

  The woman immediately looked relieved. “Thank you, Scott.”

  “Tell Dutch we expect him back in here lying to us about fishing as soon as he’s up to it.”

  She was smiling now, looking better. Dutch’s health was falling apart piece by piece. His wife, Cora, was witness to that on a day-to-day basis. If he could give her a break from that worry, even for only a minute or two, he would. That was as powerful as any medicine he had in the store.

  As Mrs. Porter moved away, Scott glanced across the room toward the long, marble-topped counter and the soda fountain that had been a fixture in Sanderson Drug since the day it opened in 1920. His great-grandfather made more money as a soda jerk than he ever had as a druggist. But he had loved crafting medicines. And apparently that had been passed down all the way to Scott, though what crafting was done these days didn’t occur behind the pharmacist’s window.

  Jeannie was sitting at the fountain. She had her back turned to him, but he caught her stealing glances at him in the mirror. He pretended not to notice.

  Quickly he clicked though the screens on the computer until he found her mom’s regular monthly prescription. He clicked on BUY/PRINT that produced the label. Jeannie’s mother was in the store every few days and could undoubtedly pick it up herself, but if anything were true about the citizens of Verdant, it was that logic and reason were not always the first choice as a guide to behavior.

  Scott walked straight to the right bottle on the right shelf. He’d been working in this small, rigorously organized space practically since childhood. His father had been the pharmacist then, and he had trained Scott in the same way his own father had trained him. Every evening, every Saturday and every summer, Scott had worked in the pharmacy. It had never been considered that he might want to do anything else. In small towns, stores were simply passed down. But Scott enjoyed what he did, and he knew he was lucky in that. What if the family vocation had been septic tanks or mortuary service? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  He glanced up to see Jeannie looking at him again. He didn’t make eye contact.

  For Scott, living as a divorced man in Verdant meant there were two kinds of women to be avoided: single women and married ones. Or to put it another way, those who expected commitment and those who couldn’t be bothered with it.

  Scott had experience with both types.

  He’d started dating Stephanie Rossiter his sophomore year in high school. Six years dating. A two-year engagement. The biggest, fanciest wedding that Verdant had ever seen. But the marriage was dead on arrival. Including the divorce’s 60-day waiting period, they had been lawfully yoked together for exactly eight months.

  Scott had hardly begun to recover when he found a shoulder to cry on in Eileen Holland. The wife of the proprietor of C&H Grain Elevator secretly amused herself with brief but thrilling affairs. She was discreet enough not to get caught, and savvy enough to pick men who wouldn’t give her away. It would have been lying to say he hadn’t enjoyed it. But there was an emptiness to it that he hadn’t expected and that he hadn’t been able to tolerate. Scott had been the one to bow out first. That was apparently an uncommon experience for Eileen, and she hadn’t liked it much. She hadn’t spoken to him since, which was very hard to do in a town that size.

  Scott poured a guesstimate into the pill tray and swept them across one-by-one with the quick precision of a man who had done this a million times. He was only off by one, which went back into the storage container. The month’s supply went into a prescription bottle. He double-checked the label before affixing it to the front. Then he rang it up on the computer to be billed at the end of the month. Although city pharmacies wouldn’t dream of distributing drugs on credit, most of his patients expected to run a tab.

  He bagged it, stapled the bill to the front and carried it out to Jeannie.

  She smiled up at him. A broad, friendly smile that was even more winning in the dark pink lipstick she was wearing. Jeannie looked great today. Big blue eyes and blonde hair cut to frame her face. She’d gained a few pounds ov
er the last few years, but she was more curvy than chubby, and Scott found her very attractive.

  “Do you have time to take a break with me?” she asked.

  He didn’t want to give her hope, but he couldn’t be rude.

  “Sure,” he answered, but instead of taking the seat beside her, he walked around the counter.

  Paula, his fountain help, looked pleased.

  “Well, great. I’ll take this chance to make a trip to the ‘Ladies,”’ she announced.

  The last thing Scott wanted was to be left alone, but he could hardly ask his employee not to go to the bathroom.

  With a falsely cheerful smile, he drew himself half a glass of root beer with lots of ice and perched atop the cold box. He was immediately opposite Jeannie, but with twenty-two inches of solid rock between them.

  “So what brings you to town?” he asked her.

  It was an innocent enough question. It was probably asked in his store alone a dozen times a day. For those who lived and worked on the thousands of acres of surrounding wheat fields, a trip to town always had some purpose.

  “I... I just came in to go to the gym.”

  Her hesitance made it sound like a lie. And Scott figured it probably was. She had on dressy jeans and a crisply pressed blouse. Her makeup was perfect and her hair completely straight except for the one blonde curl that she kept nervously tucking behind her right ear.

  They had been friends since high school. He hated that both of them now being single had to ruin that. In Verdant, however, the unmarried comprised a tiny segment of the population and there was constant pressure to dwindle the numbers. Most people wed high school sweethearts and never looked back. Both he and Jeannie had tried that without success. And they’d both found being back on the dating scene in their thirties to be dicey. They couldn’t even see a movie together without raising speculation. And if they raised speculation and nothing came of it, that would be even worse— especially for Jeannie. For Scott, it would merely disappoint his mother. As a single man, he could still play the field and be admired for it. Old Mr. Paske was known as the Rest Home Romeo, and the townsfolk cheered him on. It was different for women, though. Misogyny was alive and well in the small town of Verdant. And any guy whose ambition was not to be a total jerk needed to remember that.

  He searched his brain for some subject of conversation that might put her at ease.

  “How are the kids?”

  “Oh, they’re great. Great.”

  “How’s your wheat?”

  “It’s pretty good,” she answered. “Browning up nicely. Dad hasn’t checked the moisture content yet, but I suspect we’re not more than ten days to two weeks from showtime.”

  Showtime was the local euphemism for harvest. Winter wheat was the lifeblood of the area, the foundation of the local economy. There were soybean fields, too, and more than a handful of oil and natural gas wells dotting the area. But it was wheat that paid the bills for everybody in this part of Kansas.

  “What have you been up to?” Jeannie asked him.

  Scott shrugged. “It’s Verdant. Same headaches, same people.”

  “Well, not all the same people,” Jeannie said. “The new librarian arrived today.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Suzy Granfeldt called me,” Jeannie revealed. “She hasn’t met her yet, but she said Miss Grundler hated her on sight.”

  “Miss Grundler hates everybody,” Scott pointed out. “Sometimes even without seeing them.”

  Jeannie giggled. “True. So that’s at least one thing in the librarian’s favor. And then, of course everybody knows that your mom picked her. Your mom is so good about people. She wouldn’t choose somebody we couldn’t live with.”

  Scott wasn’t so sure. A year ago he would have trusted his mother’s judgment completely. But since his dad’s death, she’d been different. He’d expected her to be grief-stricken and lost, and she had been for a while, but lately she was all motivated about something. He couldn’t figure out what. And there was that crazy food thing. His mother, who was cooking for one, bought enough canned goods to feed a small army for months.

  “It’s probably good that Mom’s getting more involved in the library,” he told Jeannie.

  “I’m sure the new librarian will be just what we need,” she said. “Although honestly, why Viv thought we needed anybody remains kind of a mystery. I mean, we’ve gotten along fine forever. Now suddenly our sad little book collection requires a professional?”

  “Maybe she hopes that people will actually go to the library,” Scott suggested.

  “Well, the kids still go,” Jeannie pointed out. “They have to. But since I got my e-reader, it’s worth it to me to keep my distance.”

  He nodded. “I don’t think you’re alone in that. Every time I’m there, the place is like a tomb.”

  “A tomb to share with Miss Grundler.”

  “And James, don’t forget James.”

  “Oh, yeah, James.”

  “Do you think there really is a James or is he just a figment of our imagination?”

  Jeannie giggled. “Well, you can’t prove it by me. I’ve hardly caught a glimpse of the guy since tenth grade.” The bell at the front door tinkled and Maureen Shultz, coughing into a handkerchief, arrived with a prescription for antibiotics.

  As if she’d been listening from the door to the stockroom, Paula returned to the fountain immediately and kindly offered to make Maureen a cup of hot tea while she waited.

  The woman might have been ill, but it apparently didn’t hamper her hunger for gossip. As Scott filled the script, he overheard the three women sharing what little they knew about the new librarian. No one had met her. No one had even seen her, except Scott’s mom and Miss Grundler, but that didn’t deter speculation. It seemed to stimulate it.

  “She’s moving into the upstairs apartment at Viv Sanderson’s house,” Maureen revealed.

  Scott raised an eyebrow at that news. During his divorce, he’d made the upstairs into a separate retreat for himself to take away some of the sting of having to move home with his parents. Five years ago, when he’d bought his own place, he’d encouraged his parents to rent it. They hadn’t been that interested. Once his mother became a widow, he’d renewed his urging, not wanting her alone at night in the big old house.

  “I don’t want a stranger living here,” she’d stated adamantly. “This has always been a family home. I’m not turning it into a boardinghouse.”

  Apparently, she had changed her mind.

  The discussion at the fountain continued. “What educated, professional woman in her right mind would want to bury herself in a town like Verdant?”

  The question had come from Jeannie, who had lived in the community, apparently by choice, for her entire lifetime.

  “A homely old maid, married to her cat?” Paula suggested.

  Maureen disagreed. “Karl saw her photo on that website job application thing and said that she looks kind of pretty.”

  “I never heard of a pretty librarian in my life,” Paula declared.

  Jeannie giggled. “That’s because you’ve always lived here, and we’ve always had Miss Grundler.”

  “Well, if she’s pretty and she’s here, then she must be running away from something,” Paula declared.

  “Maybe so,” Maureen agreed. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out. It’s as true as I live that when you set your future toward running away, your past will come to trip you up every time.”

  Three

  South Padre Island (Eight years earlier)

  D.J. woke with a terrible taste in her mouth and a pounding headache. She must have slept in her contacts. Her eyes were burning so much she refused to open them. She was slightly sick to her stomach and her whole body hurt. The twinges in the muscles of her legs and thighs felt like they did the first day back at the gym. She groaned. She hated being ill and she almost never was, but she must be coming down with something. Some really crappy something.

  She was s
weaty and hot, with a big, breathing body pressed up beside her. Her roommate’s dog must have sneaked into her bed again. She loved the big, goofy Labrador, but he should at least stay on his side of the mattress. Blindly she reached out to nudge him over.

  “Ugh.”

  It was not a doglike reply, and at that very same instant she realized that the skin beneath her fingers was not a healthy pelt of fur, but an expanse of human flesh.

  She sprang up like a jack-in-a-box, sitting rigidly in the bed, her eyes wide-open.

  She was in a strange room, in a strange bed, with a strange man asleep beside her.

  A wave of nausea swept over her, which she only just managed to swallow as the flash of memories from the previous night came flooding back. Sun. Surf. An excess of suds.

  Spring break.

  Take a vacation from who you are, she’d told herself. Find out what it’s like to be another woman. A crazy, sexy, wild woman. A woman who sleeps with strangers.

  As she remembered it, remembered it all, her terror turned to horror and embarrassment. Humiliation tinged with desperation. What had she been thinking? Obviously, she’d not been thinking at all.

  She had to get out of there. She couldn’t face this man, this person who knew all about her body, but nothing about her.

  Deliberately she tried to calm her breathing and engage her brain. She had to get away. And it was best to slip away unnoticed.

  He had his head turned from her. That was good. She didn’t need to see him to remember him. The way he’d touched her. The response he’d drawn from her. That was not forgettable. But she was determined that there would be not one more thing to remember.

  She eyed him warily as she slowly, carefully peeled the bedcovers from her body. Beneath the tangle of sheets she was totally naked. That is, unless she counted some whisker burn and a love bite on the inside of her thigh.

  She eased her right leg off the edge of the bed and rolled slightly trying to create the smallest impact possible on the mattress. She made it to her feet with minimal jostling, only to involuntarily gasp when her first step encountered something cold and wet and squishy. She glanced anxiously toward the man in the bed. When he didn’t move, she breathed easier. Standing on one foot, she peeled the used condom from her heel. She looked around for a place to throw it and was grateful to locate some of her clothes strewn on the floor nearby. Well, not really her clothes. There was Terri’s leather skirt. Heather’s sequin-covered bikini top. And the five-inch turquoise Plexiglas heels that had been the gag gift for her birthday. Yesterday she’d turned 21. She was a full-fledged adult now. And apparently her first official adult act had been to behave like a very stupid kid.