Unfortunately, she had not gotten the stranger’s name and phone number, so there was no one to corroborate her story but Ryan.

Now Rod was accusing her of making things up, and getting Ryan and Jill to tell the same stories. The few incidents that she had evidence of he somehow twisted around to being her fault, saying she was careless, a bad mother.

And somehow he’d found out what that one repairman had said about the dryer.

That was when he really lost his temper with her, which lately hadn’t been very good, anyway. He’d taken it out on her … he hit her, telling her she deserved it, deserved to be punished, because she was not only unfit to be the mother of his good son, Rod, but was crazy and was making the other two crazy, and he was just going to have to beat the craziness out of her.

Her life had become a nightmare.

But the real nightmare was not the attacks on her children, or even the bruises that Rod’s beating had left.

The real nightmare was that she was beginning to think he was right. She was going crazy.

She didn’t know what else to think, after what had happened this afternoon when she’d been making spaghetti sauce in the pressure cooker.

She had just put the pot on the burner. She had turned around to pick up a pot holder, and had looked up at a sudden movement, thinking one of the kids had come in.

There was an Indian in her kitchen.

An Indian with a mohawk, some kind of shell necklace around his neck, a blanket tied around his waist, fringed leather pants—carrying a hatchet with a shiny metal blade in one hand, some kind of wooden club in the other. And his face—it had such an expression of hate that she shrank back with a little squeak of panic, so terrified her voice wouldn’t work.

Then he was gone. Just gone. He didn’t leave, he vanished, completely.

Just as Ryan appeared in the doorway.

It couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds from the time she’d lit the flame to when the Indian vanished into thin air. She wasn’t sure what warned her, then; some instinct, God only knew. But the moment Ryan appeared, she knew, something horrible was going to happen, and she just leapt on him, tackled him, and pulled him to the floor right outside the kitchen.

Just as the pressure cooker exploded.

She got both of them just out of the way of the shrapnel—for the pot had literally exploded, rather than having the lid blow off.