My Sister, Myself

If Christine didn’t show up to take this job, she’d lose it.

Another green sign whizzed by the passenger window of Tory’s new Ford Mustang. Shelter Valley, 1 mile.

Christine. Tears flowed from Tory’s eyes, as they’d been doing for most of the trip, trailing almost unnoticed down her face. Christine. So beautiful. So worthy.

What do I do? How do I go on without you?

And then, to herself, How do I not?

Tory’s life had been spared. That made no sense to her. Justice had not been served.

“What do you want me to do?” she cried to an absent Christine when the silence in the car grew too overwhelming. “Bruce thinks he killed me, not you.” Pulling over to the shoulder of the road, Tory barely got her car into park before the sobs broke loose.

Her beloved older sister had only been dead a week.

Tory was all alone. Completely and totally alone for the first time in her godawful life. And she’d thought, after spending two years fleeing a maniacal ex-husband, that it couldn’t get any worse.

Her tearstained face turned toward the sky, she tried, through blurry eyes, to find some guidance from above. Was Christine up there in all that blueness somewhere? Watching over her, guiding her?

There were no answers from up there. But straight ahead was another green sign with fluorescent white lighting. Shelter Valley, this exit.

Twenty-six-year-old Tory Evans had been searching for shelter her entire life. But she’d never found it. Was this time going to be any different?

As long as Bruce thought her dead, she’d be safe from him.

Coming from old New England money, he had widespread influence. His tentacles were everywhere. They’d infiltrated every city, every small town, every hut she’d ever inhabited while trying to evade him. Bruce Taylor had never been denied. His mother, having found him perfect in every way, had refused to allow any kind of discipline in his life—still refused to see that her grown son was less than exemplary, making excuses for him at every infraction. And his father, a shipping magnate, had assuaged the guilt of his neglect with everything money could buy. He’d even bought off someone in the legal system the one time Tory had gone to the law for help regarding Bruce’s physical abuse. Somehow the tables had been turned on her, the innuendoes so twisted that Tory had known, even before she’d faced the judge, that she was going to lose.

She would never have gotten her divorce if she’d gone about it the normal way—filing, having him served. In her desperation, she’d come up with a pretty clever plan: coaxing Bruce to accompany her on a Tiajuana get-away and then, in the middle of his three-day drunk, taking him to the local courthouse for a quickie divorce. He’d demanded the divorce be nullified. She wouldn’t agree to it, but he still hadn’t accepted her no.

At thirty, Bruce didn’t know the meaning of the word no. He took what he wanted, accepted it as his due. And he wanted Tory. Was obsessed with keeping possession of his ex-wife. The only way to be safe from him was to be dead. To stay dead. And to let Christine live.

It was never going to work.

CHAPTER ONE

BEN SANDERS approached the Shelter Valley exit with trepidation. Maybe he shouldn’t have come. There were other places to get a good education. Other places to start over. What if the town was nothing more than a few old buildings, some houses and a street or two? What if it wasn’t home?

He’d heard about Shelter Valley his whole life, heard it described as a town where people cared, where they looked out for one another. A place where family mattered. He hoped it was true.

Signaling his turn, Ben guided the Ford F-150 from the highway, slowing as he came to the end of the ramp.

With everything he owned packed in boxes and stacked in the bed of his truck, he took the turn toward Shelter Valley, glancing avidly around him. He had no idea what he was looking for. Something he recognized, maybe. But no matter what his boyhood imaginings told him, he knew there would be nothing. He’d never been here before.

Except in his heart.

He’d been hearing the story of his grandmother’s journey from Shelter Valley since before he was old enough to understand its significance—a fourteen-year-old girl separated from her family, from the strong father she’d adored, from the only way of life she’d ever known. That story was the one piece of family lore his father had ever shared with him.

Shelter Valley had been beckoning him ever since. Maybe because of the nomadic way he’d grown up. Or maybe he’d inherited more than his share of his great-grandfather’s genes. Maybe old Samuel Montford was calling him to come home.

Maybe he’d just built up some stupid fantasy of a home because at the age of twenty-six he’d never had a real one.

The town came into view in a hurry. Over a hill, and there it was, out in the desert right where his great-grandfather had left it. Surrounded by hard ground and cacti, the town of his dreams had a color scheme of shades of brown and a backdrop of majestic mountains. Slowing the truck as he drove into Shelter Valley, Ben tried to notice everything at once. The neighborhoods, what he could see of them, looked nice, nothing fancy for the most part, but clean and well kept. There were people about, an old woman pruning a rosebush, some kids playing with a ball on the sidewalk, a teenage girl roller-skating alongside him.

He let her pass.

This time was for him. He wanted to savor it alone.

A few mansions sat interspersed on the distant mountain ahead of him. He wondered if a Montford lived in one of those houses. If there were even any Montfords left in this town.

He’d always believed he had family here.

More wishful thinking of a lonely boy.

Ben wasn’t a boy anymore. Marriage had cured him of that. Raising and supporting the child he’d believed was his had finished the job. Or maybe it’d been losing her—

No! He’d promised himself he wasn’t going to allow himself those thoughts, those memories. The pain. Not ever. He had a new life now. The one that had been interrupted during his senior year in high school. He was going it alone, counting on the only person he knew he could count on—himself. No more looking back.

His new address was on a piece of paper that lay on the seat beside him—an apartment in an older home near the campus of Montford University. Classes started in two days, but it wouldn’t take him that long to get ready. He’d already registered by mail and phone, only had a few books left to buy. Some boxes to unpack.

Eight years later than he’d planned, he was starting college.

Slowing even more as he neared downtown Shelter Valley—a strip of stores on both sides of Main Street, with angled parking along the curbs—Ben smiled. The Valley Diner, with its forest-green awning, Weber’s department store, the drugstore, were all just as he’d imagined. Almost as if someone had crept into his boyhood fantasies, stolen the images and dropped them here for him to find all these years later.

And then, as he reached the intersection at Main and Montford, he noticed the statue holding pride of place in the town square. Surrounded by lush green and carefully cropped grass, the life-size sculpture sparkled with a newness that reminded him of Christmas. Its polished stone surfaces glistened beneath the setting Arizona sun. The placard was so big he could read it from the road.

With a rush of incomprehensible feeling, Ben pulled his truck into the first empty spot he found, locked it up—kind of pointless considering all the stuff piled in the back—and as though compelled, headed straight for the statue. He read every word of the brief biography typed in smaller print on the placard before allowing himself his first real look.

He’d been waiting all his life for this moment.

And he wasn’t disappointed.

Incredulous, his heart full, Ben stared up at the likeness of his great-grandfather. The sculpted features were solid and real, almost as though Samuel Montford would come to life if the sun got warm enough. And as Ben stood and stared at the man who’d lived so many years ago, he could have been looking in a mirror.

A couple strolled by hand in hand, engrossed in each other, but they smiled at Ben as they passed. He smiled back. He wanted to ask if they saw the resemblance, half expected them to notice without his asking. They might have, too, if they’d ever fully looked his way.

There’d be time for that later. The rest of his life.

Bidding his great-grandfather a silent “See ya later,” Ben strode eagerly toward his truck. The apartment he’d never seen before was calling him. He’d come home.

“COME ON, CHRISTINE, where are you?” Dr. Phyllis Langford paced in front of her living-room window, watching the road intently. She found herself playing an old childhood game: Christine’s would be the fifth car to drive down her street. No, the tenth…

Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the window, she was a little frightened by the tension she read there. Even framed by her flyaway red hair, her face looked stiff, unyielding.

With Christine already weeks later than she should have been, Phyllis was growing more and more anxious to see her, to know that her friend was all right. Daylight passed into darkness, and still Christine didn’t arrive. Her note, obviously quickly scrawled, had said today was the day.

It had said nothing about the car accident that had delayed her. Nothing to convey to Phyllis the extent of Christine’s injuries, the damage to her car, how Tory had fared. Cryptic to the point of impersonal, the scribbled note had merely said she’d be arriving this afternoon.

Afternoon was over now.