She screamed his name as Eleanor’s horse and buggy crashed through the sugar cane into the clearing. The tired, frightened animal went wild with panic as it stumbled into the gully, landed on its side, and struggled to rise to its feet. The buggy held it down.

Eleanor, meanwhile, was flung free, and she scrambled to stand, her skirts and face covered with dirt, the gun still in her hand. “You,” she said, glaring at Maggie with all the hatred of hell in her face. “I’ll kill you for what you’ve done to me!”

Maggie was in the open; if she ran for cover, Eleanor would surely shoot her before she could escape. She gasped for breath and willed her heart to slow to a reasonable meter. Before she could ask what it was that she’d done to Eleanor, she heard Reeve’s voice again, heard the cane shifting as he ran through it.

“Maggie, where are you?”

“Stay away!” she called back, both relieved and terrified to know that she hadn’t imagined his presence. “Eleanor has a gun—she’ll kill you—”

Reeve didn’t listen, and everything happened, it seemed to Maggie, in a split second. He entered the clearing on her right, about twenty feet from where she stood, and Eleanor spun and fired at him wildly. Maggie screamed as he fell and lunged toward him, forgetting her own safety.

“Reeve!” she gasped when she reached the place where her husband lay, a crimson stain pooling around his right shoulder in the dirt. Maggie hurled herself on him in a desperate attempt to shield him.

Eleanor laughed like a madwoman; Maggie heard her approaching and knew that she was going to die. She looked up and saw such rancor in the woman’s once-beautiful face that she had to look away. It was then that she spotted the snake, dark and sleek, slithering over the ground toward Eleanor.

“Look out,” she choked, clinging to the unconscious Reeve, determined to absorb any bullet that was fired at him. “There’s a snake—”

Eleanor only laughed again. The sound was wicked and cold. “I was almost a McKenna once, did you know that?” she asked. “Did you know that Elisabeth is my little girl?”

Maggie could not look away from the snake. “In the name of God, Eleanor, behind you—”

“You don’t think I’m going to fall for that old trick, do you? If so, you’re sadly lacking in that ingenuity Americans are so famous for.”

There was a hiss and the snake struck, not from a coil like a rattler, but in one flying black line of vicious fury. Eleanor shrieked in pain and shots peppered the ground around Maggie and Reeve as her hand convulsed on the trigger of the pistol.

Maggie awaited pain and death and felt nothing. She watched as Eleanor sagged to the ground and lay staring up at the sky, her eyes widened and blank.