In a few minutes, she heard David coming back. She looked up and saw that his face was working, as if he were trying not to cry. He and Dean were friends, she remembered. Maybe not close ones, but they'd known each other a long time. She didn't blame David for being upset. It was the kind of reaction she'd expected from Dean, earlier. To find out that someone you'd known and gone to school with for years was a completely different person

than you thought -- it was going to hit everybody hard.

David's face was cahn by the time he reached her.

"Is he . . . how is he?" Jenny asked.

"I'm not sure. I think just his leg's broken, but I was afraid to move him," David said. "I told him what happened and that there'd be an ambulance soon."

Jenny was still shaking. David came and sat beside her, putting a washed-out denim jacket around her shoulders. They looked at each other and then they both spoke at the same time.

"What happened?"

"You first," David said.

She spoke carefully, tr3dng not to leave anything out. She told him about the scary things that had happened -- the snake and Peaches and the motorcycle -- and how she'd finally figured out that they were because of what she'd heard up here that night. She told him about the admiring phone calls and the presents, and how happy they'd made her. How glad she was when she got the one last night.

"I felt so alone," she said. "I didn't trust anybody, obviously." She looked at the wound on his forehead, and he smiled. "I guess I was so scared and confused that I wasn't thinking straight. If I had been, I never would have come up here. It just never entered my mind that one person was doing both things."

"It probably wouldn't have entered anybody's

mind/* David said. "Not anybody normal, anyway."

"Maybe. And then his voice!" Jenny went on. "I've heard Dean talk before, not much, but enough. He changed it some way, though. I just didn't recognize it. And I didn't think he was my secret admirer because of the way he winked at me that time."

*What time?"

"In the diner, just after everybody had heard about Diana," Jenny said. "My secret admirer was bashful, and anybody who winks like that isn't bashful."

"Dean's not bashful," David said. "He's always been kind of standoffish, though. Cold, I guess I'd say now. But he's not a winker, either. It must have been part of his plan. To fool you."

**Well, it worked," Jenny said. She shuddered and David put his arm around her shoulders.

They sat quietly for a minute, and then they heard the siren in the distance. "I know you're wiped out," David said, **but we've got to go. Can you make it?"

Jenny nodded and shrugged her arms into the jacket. He helped her up and across the rock. Then he lifted her down into the gully. He grabbed her around the waist, she draped an arm around his neck, and then he walked and she hopped away firom the rimrocks.