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  Chuck put his head back, closed one eye, and said, “Me thinks thou art trying to escape from something.”

  “Yeah,” Jackie said. “Work.”

  Everyone, including me, laughed, and I noticed both Allie and DeeAnne looking from Jackie to me speculatively. Before they started matchmaking, I said to Allie, “So tell us about old man Belcher’s saintly son.”

  “Saintly, ha!” Allie said, sipping her wine. “Edward Belcher wanted to marry Harriet Cole only because the town was named after her family. He seemed to think that uniting the descendants of two of the seven founding families would raise his status. He had his eye on the governorship.”

  I was thinking of this in writer terms. “Those seven families seem to be important here in Cole Creek,” I said. “Besides old man Belcher and Miss Essie Lee, are many of them left in town?”

  “Yes,” Allie said softly. “Tessa and me.” She looked at me. “And Rebecca is from one of the families.”

  DeeAnne looked at Allie. “It’s amazing that any of you are still here.”

  The smile left Allie’s face. For a moment she hid her face behind the big balloon wineglass, and when she set it down, she was solemn. “There’s a blood descendant of every family still in Cole Creek. Except for the Coles, that is. The most important family is missing.”

  Her tone seemed to take the joviality out of the party, and I started to ask what was going on, but Jackie nudged me under the table.

  “So tell us about this great love story,” Jackie said brightly.

  “There’s nothing to tell. Sometime in the 1970s, fat old Edward decided he was going to merge his family name with the Coles’ through marriage, and rename the town Heritage. But Harriet eloped with a handsome young man and had a baby. The end.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked, watching Allie closely and wondering if she’d give the same answer as Miss Essie Lee had.

  “I don’t really know.”

  She’s lying, I thought. But what was she lying about? And why?

  “Edward died not long afterward, and I think Harriet did, too,” Allie said at last. “And I think Harriet’s handsome young husband left her.”

  “What happened to their child?” Jackie asked quietly and I hoped I was the only one who heard the odd tone in her voice.

  Allie finished her glass of wine. “I have no idea. She didn’t grow up in Cole Creek, that’s for sure. No more direct descendants of the Coles live here, and I’d stake my life on that!” She said the last so emphatically that the rest of us looked at each other as though to say, What was that all about?

  Except for Jackie. She was sitting very still and I was willing to bet that she was doing some subtraction in her head. Seventies, Allie had said. Harriet Cole had had a baby, a “she,” in the 1970s and her young husband had left her.

  Jackie had been born in the seventies and her father had left her mother. And they had lived in Cole Creek when Jackie was very young.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jackie

  I didn’t want to tell Ford but there was a big part of me that wanted to run to the nearest bus station and get as far away from Cole Creek as I possibly could. There were too many strange things happening to me, too many things that I seemed to remember.

  On Sunday I put on a 1940s dress and walked to church. It was about three miles from the house but I “knew” a shortcut through the woods. When I got there, I saw the charred stone foundation and brick chimney of what had once been a large building, and I felt sad that “my” church had burned down.

  When I got back to Ford’s house, he asked me if I’d enjoyed the service, but I just mumbled a response and went up to my room. I changed clothes and cooked a big dinner, but I couldn’t eat much. How had I known my way through the woods? When had I been in this town before? Oh, Lord, what had happened to me here?

  “Want to talk about whatever’s bothering you?” Ford asked.

  He was being sweet but I didn’t want to tell him anything. What could I say? That I had a “feeling?” Kirk had laughed at me the one time I’d said I’d a “feeling” about something.

  In the afternoon I puttered in the garden while Ford watched some long movie on TV, and I wished I’d invited Allie and Tessa over. Long ago I’d found that sticking my nose into other people’s business made me stop contemplating my own problems. I could have spent the afternoon asking Allie why she didn’t leave Cole Creek when her husband was transferred. And in spite of my vow never to speak of it to anyone, maybe I could tell her what Kirk had done to me. But then, I was ready to talk about anything except how I was feeling in this little town.

  When Ford spoke from behind me, I jumped.

  “You scared me,” I said, jamming the little trowel into the dirt around the roses.

  “Why don’t you call your old friends?” he asked as he sat down. “Have a few laughs.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “Here, move your foot. You’re on my glove.”

  He moved his foot the smallest distance possible to get it off my glove, then looked up at the sky through the trees. “It’s nice here.”

  I stopped gouging out weeds and sat down on the ground. “Yeah, it is.” Mountain climate had always been my favorite: The sun was warm, but the altitude made it cool in the shade.

  “What happened at church today?” he asked, making me look at him.

  He had really intense eyes that could bore into a person. “Same ol’, same ol’,” I said. “You know what church services are like. Or do you?”

  “I know enough to know that no preacher ever let out early. So what happened that you didn’t stay for the whole service?”

  I opened my mouth to emit some quickly-made-up lie, but I stopped when something big and heavy came sailing through the trees. As it whistled through the air, we both ducked for cover.

  Actually, I ducked and Ford sort of did a swan dive out of his chair to land on top of me. I’ll give it to him that he was protective of women.

  “Sorry,” he said as he rolled off of me. “I heard—Then I—” He looked embarrassed.

  When I got up, I had to take a couple of breaths. He’s tall and he’s heavy, but, worse, my trowel had been under me. I felt my ribs. I didn’t think they were cracked, but I was going to have a beaut of a bruise there tomorrow.

  Ford was searching through a thorny tangle of shrubbery as he looked for the projectile that had come sailing toward us. Wincing at my bruised ribs, I got up to help him look.

  We saw it at the same time: a big rock wrapped in two-inch-wide clear tape so we could see the note underneath. Using his pocketknife, he cut the tape away.

  Both of us held our breaths as we looked at the note. “Time Magazine,” it read, “in July 1992.”

  For a moment he and I looked at each other in puzzlement, our thoughts reflected in each other’s eyes. Who had thrown this rock at us? Why? Should we have gone after the perpetrator before we searched for the rock? And what did this date mean?

  “Too bad it’s Sunday,” Ford said. “The library is closed today or we could—”

  The same idea hit us both at the same time. There had been hundreds of old magazines—Time included—stacked in the entrance to the house when we moved in.

  Ford looked at me in horror. “You didn’t—?” he whispered, meaning, Did I throw them away?

  No, I hadn’t. I’d planned to give them to Nate’s grandmother to sell over the Internet but hadn’t yet. “Servant’s bedroom. Attic,” I said over my shoulder as I started running for the nearest door into the house.

  Ford, with his longer legs, got there at the same time in spite of my head start. “Ow!” I yelled as he tried to push into the house first. “My ribs.” Immediately, he stopped pushing, so I slipped under his arm to reach the stairs before he did, but he took them three at a time.

  “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to cheat?” he called down to me when he reached the top first.

  But I beat him into the room anyway because he was out of b