The gesture was familiar, another echo of Reba, and so was the big talk.

“Unless,” she went on, assuming a thoughtful expression, “you plan to run me in on a vagrancy charge or something.”

“I could do that,” Eli warned, but he was wearing down, Cord could see that. Hell, they all were.

It was surreal, as if they’d slipped out of the world they knew into some parallel dimension, where the rules were very different. Here, in this new place, it seemed that Reba wasn’t dead and gone, long before her time. Her presence was palpable.

And she wanted something.

Cord hadn’t gone to Reba’s funeral; none of them had. Wouldn’t have known she’d died if Brynne Bailey hadn’t come back to Painted Pony Creek to take over her parents’ failing restaurant and mentioned it one morning, when the three of them stopped by for breakfast.

Breast cancer, Brynne had said. About two years ago. It had been a shockingly quick decline. All very sad. She hadn’t attended the services, either, since she’d been out of the country at the time on a research trip for her job with an art gallery back east, but she’d seen a notice on social media and sent flowers.

She hadn’t said anything about Reba having kids.

Shaken again, Cord refocused his attention on Zelda.

She was wearing a skimpy tank top and stylishly ragged skinny jeans. He registered that much. And there was a tattoo on the rain-beaded skin at the base of her throat. A musical note. A double one with two stems.

J.P. got out his cell phone, peered at the screen. He needed glasses but was too vain to wear them in public, so he squinted a lot.

“Calling the cops?” the kid asked in a tone breezy with impudence. She darted a glance in Eli’s direction. “That seems unnecessary since the head honcho is right here.”

“Listen,” J.P. interjected, ignoring her remark, “can we get down to the proverbial brass tacks here?” He slipped his phone back in his shirt pocket and glared down at the girl, marking off each point on a finger as he made it. “You’re seventeen years old. You just turned up in the back room of a seedy beer hall in small-town Montana, during the middle of the goddamned storm of the century. None of us ever saw you before and given the size of this place, that means you aren’t a local. It follows that you’re a runaway, and maybe in some kind of trouble, too. Somebody, somewhere, is worried sick about you.”

Some of the zip went out of the girl. “Nobody’s worried about me,” she said, with a note of sadness none of them missed. Again, she examined their faces, each in turn. “Cord Hollister, J.P. McCall and Eli Garrett. That’s you guys, right?”