Chapter 2

Dulcie Hughes brought the rented car to a stop in front of a boarded-up old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

This was it? The mysterious Montana property? She couldn’t help her disappointment. She hadn’t known what to expect when she’d flown into Great Falls and driven across what was called the Hi-Line to Whitehorse.

The small Western town hadn’t been much of a surprise, either, after driving through one small Western town after another.

She had driven under the train tracks into Whitehorse, telling herself she understood why her parents had never brought her here. There wasn’t much to see unless you liked cowboys and pickup trucks. That seemed to be the only thing along the main street.

A few bars, churches, cafés and a couple of clothing stores later, she had to backtrack to find a real-estate office for directions to her property.

A cute blonde named April had drawn her a map and told her she couldn’t miss it. Of course that wasn’t true given that the land and all the old farmhouses looked alike. Fortunately she had the GPS coordinates.

The difference also was that her farmhouse had apparently been boarded up for years. Weeds had grown tall behind the barbed-wire fence. Nothing about the house looked in the least bit inviting.

“How do you feel about bats?” April had asked.

“Bats?”

“Whitehorse is the northernmost range for migrating little brown bats. They hibernate down in the Little Rockies and Memorial Day they show up in Whitehorse and don’t leave till after Labor Day. They come for the mosquitoes. I hope someone warned you about the mosquitoes. And the wind.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t be staying long. I’ve just come to see the property for myself before I put it on the market.”

“So you don’t think you’ll be falling in love with it up here and never want to leave?” April joked.

Dulcie wondered all the way across the top of the state why anyone in their right mind lived here.

“I thought there would be mountains and pine trees,” she had said to April.

“The Little Rockies are forty miles to the south. There’s pine trees down there. Ponderosas. Your property isn’t far from there.” She’d grinned. “I guess you missed the single pine tree on the edge of town and the sign somebody put up that reads, Whitehorse County National Forest.”

Funny. But stuff like that was probably all they had to do around here for fun, Dulcie had thought as she had taken the map and thanked April for her help, promising to get back to her about listing the property.

For Dulcie, who lived in Chicago, the pine trees and the mountains had been farther than she thought—about twenty miles away.