Like many teenage runaways, Shallie hadn’t given much thought to the dangers waiting for her out there in the big, wide world; in retrospect, the risks she’d taken, hitching rides with strangers, sleeping in rest-stop bathrooms, stealing food when her money ran out, made her shudder.

She’d really been quite sheltered back then, despite her half-assed upbringing, and ridiculously naive, as well.

Rain hammered at the roof of her car as she resisted yet another overwhelming temptation to shift gears, do a three-point turn and lay rubber getting the hell out of there. Again. But Shallie was through running away, wasn’t sure it was even possible. After all, here she was, parked in the same old lot, in front of the same forlorn pile of weathered boards, broken gutters and dirty windows.

There was a certain inevitability about it.

Besides, she’d spent the last years carefully reinventing herself. She wasn’t that unwanted child anymore; she was the person she had decided to be, strong, educated, responsible and self-confident. And that person had business in Painted Pony Creek, Montana. Business of one kind and another… She drew in a shaky breath and loosened her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. She sat still and took in her surroundings.

Even through the torrent, she could see that time had been especially unkind to the small motel at the side of a forgotten road. In its heyday, long before her time, the place had been a going concern, conveniently situated at the edge of a busy highway.

Then, in the early 1960s, a wide, well-paved interstate, long under construction, finally opened to traffic. The Painted Pony Motel was suddenly irrelevant, too far off the newly beaten path to attract more than a few of the random travelers who, along with hikers, hunters, fishermen and vacationing families of limited means, had sustained it.

Seeing the place now, through the eyes of an adult, Shallie marveled that it hadn’t been bulldozed years ago, the land cleared for grazing or a trailer park or a crop of Christmas trees.

Instead, the Painted Pony kept its sad, slump-shouldered vigil, hunkered down like some beaten creature awaiting the next blow.

The paint was peeling away from the clapboard walls, and the roof sagged. The neon Welcome to the Painted Pony Motel sign, though still clinging to its weathered metal post out by the road, was dark, every letter burned out and coated with grime.

There was an enormous spider-shaped crack in the office window, as if someone had bounced a rock off the glass, or plugged it with a bullet. The word Vacancy glowed, dimly hopeful, in the lower right-hand corner, as in days of old, though only the V and the two c’s had any juice.