I’d barely covered a block when my cell phone started its merry little song.

Tucker.

I scrabbled for it. Peered at the screen.

Tucker Darroch.

I jabbed at the talk button. “Hello?”

“Who is this?” demanded Allison. “You called earlier and, damn it, I want to know who you are.”

“J-just a friend of Tucker’s,” I said lamely.

“A friend,” she echoed, plainly suspicious.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Were you sleeping with him?”

I nearly took out a row of rural mailboxes, pulling off onto the side of the road, and I guess I took too long to answer, because Allison picked up the verbal ball and sprinted for the goal posts.

“Tucker’s children and I are in mourning,” she said. “Kindly have the decency to leave us alone.”

It wasn’t the best time to point out that she’d been the one to initiate this call, not me. Or to ask how she’d gotten hold of Tucker’s personal cell phone.

“I wasn’t—”

“You weren’t what? Sleeping with my husband?”

I pressed the end button.

Then I laid my head on the steering wheel and did some more deep breathing. Just when I was starting to think I wouldn’t faint, my cell made another noise.

Hope dies hard.

I checked it.

Text message.

I frowned, pressed the appropriate buttons to access it.

U-WLL-DY.

I squinted. “You—will—die,” I translated out loud.

Then I flung the phone down.

Allison Darroch, overreacting?

Or someone else?

I jumped out of the car, walked around it three times in my own personal version of a Chinese fire drill, and got back behind the wheel again. I’d had a purpose in mind—to release the sudden and terrible energy that surged through me—but it hadn’t worked.

I picked up the phone again. Hit the button for Tucker’s number.

“Hello?” Allison rasped.

“I know you’ve had a bad shock,” I told her evenly, “but sending me a threatening text message was over the line.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The hell of it was, I believed her.

She clicked off before I could speak again.

I thumbed my way back to the text message. No name, no number.

Joseph?

Geoff?

Heather?

The list of people who wanted to harass me, if not kill me outright, was getting longer every day.

I shut the phone off, in desperate need of a technology break, and sat there at the side of the road until I thought I could drive without risking life and limb. Then I drove aimlessly for at least forty-five minutes, up and down the streets of Cactus Bend, trying to remember.

Trying not to remember.

Imagine my surprise when I pulled through the gate of the town cemetery.

I wondered if cars could be haunted, as well as apartments.

Mine seemed to need an exorcist.