She shook the rain from her hair and apprehensively trudged upstairs, hating the feeling of doom that had descended on her since she’d entered the house. Don’t get paranoid about this, she told herself. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime freak accidents, and now that she’d gotten it out of the way, the coast was clear. She was in good shape for the next hundred years. Still, it was creepy to have something drop out of the sky into your bed.

She switched the light on in her bedroom and pressed her lips together at the sight of the quilt. It was dead. It smelled like wet fowl, and water dripped from the ceiling with a depressing splat onto the soggy lump of torn coverlet and massacred feathers.

Something thumped overhead. Footsteps on her roof. The sound of a heavy object being dragged toward her. She searched for a weapon, finding only a hairbrush, flannel nightgown, empty yogurt cup. In desperation her hand closed around a cut-glass perfume atomizer.

“Whoever’s up on my roof better not come any closer,” she announced, and aimed the atomizer at the hole. “I’ve got Mace.”

David Dodd peeked over the edge and grinned down at her. “That’s not Mace. That’s a perfume atomizer. The best you could do with that is strip me of my masculine body odor.”

“You have to use your imagination.”

“Un-huh.”

She squinted into the darkness of the third floor. “What are you doing up there?”

“Trying to fix your roof. I’d have had it fixed sooner, but I had to drive all over town trying to find a big enough piece of plastic.” He disappeared, and a slab of wooden slats was shoved halfway across the opening.

Kate recognized it as a section of the six-foot-high privacy fence that separated their backyards.

“Hope you don’t mind that I used part of the fence,” he said, inching it into place. “It’s hard to get a lumber delivery on Saturday night.”

He walked around the perimeter of the hole and reached forward to tug the wood into place. Then there was the sound of tarred paper tearing and David Dodd dropped like a stone, through the hole in the roof, through the hole in the second floor ceiling and landed with a whump that knocked the air out of him, flat on his back, spread-eagle on the soaking-wet, smashed-in bed.

Chapter 2

Kate was afraid he was dead. He lay motionless on the bed, eyes closed, his body encased in a yellow slicker, his hands limp in small pools of gray feather water. She felt the breath clog in her throat, felt anguish smothering clear thought.

“Lord, no!” she whispered, rushing to his side, acting on instinct, never noticing the wet mattress she crawled across. She straddled his inert form, tugged at the raincoat zipper, and put her hand to his heart. “Dave!”

He opened his eyes. “Mmm?”