Page 66 of Snow River

As she stepped toward the storefront, the familiar dress form caught her eye and she froze.Something had happened last night.Another dream.Waking up with Bear had erased it from her thoughts, but now it came flooding back.

“Us women hadto stick together out here,” Allison told her as she hovered near the bed.“It’s a man’s world, and we had to know how to take care of ourselves.We chopped our own wood, we always had a gun with us.”

“This is a private moment, do you mind?”Lila pulled the covers over Bear’s sleeping head.It felt so intrusive to have another person in the room with them, even a dead one, or rather, a not-real one.

Allison ignored Bear completely, as if she couldn’t see him.“You gotta remember, out here the world forgot about us.People thought the town was dead and gone with the mine.Forty years ago, we just fended for ourselves, like pioneer days.That’s how it felt.Like no one would know if anything happened to us.That kind of situation makes you stick together.It’s all for one.We shared everything with each other.The men always feuded, but mostly us women helped each other.I say mostly because there’s always a bad apple or two.”

“Does this bad apple have a name?Are you talking about Nancy?”

It was a stab in the dark.So to speak.

Hearing that name seemed to give the woman pain.“Of course not, Nancy was my good friend.I wish she was here now.The times we used to have…”

“Is she still alive?Can I find her?”

“If you find her, you tell her that I forgive her.I forgive her for everything.Oh, Nancy, you should never have gone up there with those people…”

Her image wavered and shimmered as Buttercup lifted his head from the foot of the bed and sniffed the air.

The dog growled, low in her throat, and the dead woman vanished.

Lila jerked backto the present moment and found herself staring at the dress displayed on the form.Allison had said,We shared everything.

Had that dress belonged to someone who wasn’t Allison Casey?For instance, Nancy?Allison’s husband had insisted the dress stay with the hardware store, that it be displayed like some kind of morbid memento of that tragic shooting.But did he have other reasons to want it kept front and center?

Was it a clue, in other words?

To get the door open, she had to push through the snow piled up against it.Buttercup sniffed at it, then plunged right in, nearly disappearing in the white fluff.The air smelled fresh and pure, as if the entire town had been washed with sparkling crystal water.A clean slate.A fresh start.

How many people had come to Firelight Ridge looking for exactly that, only to find that you couldn’t run and hide from your past or your secrets, or your fate?

Run and hide.

The repetition of that phrase made her shiver.She called for Buttercup, who trotted back through the snow.The dog took a moment to roll in it before she came back in.As Lila watched in dismay—she was going to make a mess!—she shook herself off and waltzed back into the house.

Where she met the immoveable object known as Bear—holding a towel.He bent to rub the water off the yellow collie, who squirmed throughout the process.Bear wore nothing but his underwear, but didn’t seem to notice that it was barely fifty degrees inside the house.Her stomach twisted with desire as she watched him handle Sam’s dog with so much gentleness and care.

“I had a visitor last night,” she told him.

He looked up sharply, clearly ready to search the hardware store for hidden entrances.

“In my dream.Allison Casey.She said something that made me wonder about that dress.She said she and the other women out here were very close and shared a lot of things with each other.Nancy was her good friend.It made me think of me and my friends, and how we used to share clothes and so forth when we were younger.”

Bear stood up, holding the damp towel, while Buttercup shook herself off and trotted over to the empty food bowl.“You think the dress belonged to Nancy after all?”

“Maybe it did.”

“Even so, what difference does that make?The gunman, whoever it was, shot several people that day, at random.He shot whoever happened to be in his line of sight.”

“Maybe, but maybe not.I’m starting to think there was more to it than it seems.What if Allison was shot deliberately?Except they got it wrong.What if she was shot because someone mistook her forNancy?”

“That’s a theory, all right.”Bear sounded skeptical.

Lila knew she was speculating out of thin air.No one had ever suggested it was anything but a random shooting.Even that podcaster had described the event as the result of one man’s angry stew of bitterness and rejection.

But did the podcaster really know the truth?He’d come into town as a stranger.How many people had told them everything they knew?Lila knew how Firelight Ridge worked.You had to put in the time, prove your authenticity, before people would open up to you.She was still a newcomer—a so-called “Cheechako”—but she’d been working at everyone’s favorite bar, so that gave her Alaska cred.And Bear—everyone knew and trusted Bear.

There was more to this story, a lot more.

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