She’d eaten supper with their families, in their clean, orderly houses. In her early teens, J.P.’s older sisters, Clare and Josie, had given her clothes, brushed and braided her hair and, when the time came, taught her a million things she would’ve had to learn by trial and error otherwise.

How to make the most of her features with a minimum of makeup, for instance, and which colors looked best on her. They’d insisted that being smart was a good thing, more important than being pretty or popular, though both of those things were fine, in and of themselves. A girl just had to remember that being pretty didn’t mean jack-shit if you were ornery or a liar or a cheat. Popularity, the very popular McCall sisters agreed, was fun all right, but it didn’t have much substance in the long run.

It was great to be class president or prom queen or a cheerleader, but some people got stuck, Clare and Ellie maintained, and accomplished little or nothing after graduation.

Who wanted to peak in high school?

Watching them, Shallie wondered about her own future with her friends. With Reba. And with Eli, J.P. and Cord. Especially Cord…

Was it better to say something right now?

Or do nothing?

CHAPTER ONE

Evening of Thursday, June 6

THE NIGHT REBA SHANNON’S ghost materialized in the cramped storeroom behind Sully’s Bar and Grill, where Cord Hollister and his best friends, J.P. McCall and Eli Garrett, sat playing their usual every-other-Thursday game of five-card stud, the famous big sky was fixing to bust wide open and dump a shitload of rain.

Cord, never the anxious type, had been curiously uneasy all day. Woken up that morning with the small hairs on his nape and forearms rising and an odd twitch in the pit of his stomach.

The storm had been brewing even then, but it wasn’t the impending gully washer that was getting under his hide. He was used to violent storms, having lived in God’s country from the age of three; hell, he relished them, always had. Could stand at a window for hours, watching lightning slash jagged rips from sky to ground, dance along the rods on the barn roof, roll itself into a fiery ball and tumble from one end of the horizon to the other—and back again.

The wilder the show, the better Cord liked it.

Which was a damn good thing, since on the Montana plains extreme weather was common enough—blazing hot summers, apocalyptic blizzards in winter, flash floods and the deep, sticky mud residents called gumbo in the spring, when the rains came and the snow began to melt high in the Rockies.

Some springs were mild; creeks and rivers, freshly thawed, stayed politely within their banks.

Flowers dotted the meadows, and the grass grew green and rich and plentiful on the range.