Nothing about the room felt familiar. With a sigh of relief, Dulcie told herself she’d never seen it before. If she’d come to Whitehorse with her parents for whatever reason, then she’d stayed outside this house—outside where she could see the yellow curtains in the second-floor bedroom window and hear the weather vane on the barn.

A small, once-white dresser stood against one wall. She pulled out a drawer. Empty. She tried another. Also empty. How strange that everything else in this house seemed to be just as it had been left twenty-four years ago, except that Angel’s clothes were missing. Why take a dead child’s clothing?

Russell called the number his father had given him, surprised when a girl answered the phone. For a moment, he thought he’d dialed the wrong number.

“Is there a Finnegan Amherst there?”

“My grandfather. Just a moment.” The phone dropped but a few moments later a raspy, deep-throated voice asked who was calling.

“Russell Corbett from the Trails West Ranch outside of Whitehorse, Montana.”

He heard a soft, dry chuckle. “I wondered when you’d be calling.”

“Then you must know what I’m calling about,” Russell said, hoping his father and the other ranchers and farmers weren’t about to throw their money down a rat hole. The rainmaker definitely sounded like someone’s grandfather, old grandfather.

“You need a rainmaker,” Finnegan Amherst said.

“We need rain,” Russell corrected.

Again the man chuckled.

“So are you interested?”

The rainmaker sighed. “Let me think about it. If I decide to come up, I’ll be there tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll call.”

With a curse Russell realized that the man had hung up.

“Might as well go waste some more time,” he said to himself as he headed for his pickup, sure Dulcie Hughes would drive a hard bargain for her land.

Directly across the hall from Angel Beaumont’s room was the bathroom. Dulcie could make out a large old claw-footed tub against the back wall.

She moved cautiously toward the front bedroom. Through the partially open door, she could see part of the faded yellow curtains billowing in the hot air stealing in through a broken pane.

A chair was positioned by the window, a book lying on the floor, open and facedown and like everything else in the house, covered with dust.

Dulcie hesitated at the threshold to the room. She touched the door, pushing it all the way open. Nothing came scampering out, but she heard the sound of tiny feet overhead and thought of those critters Russell had warned her about.

When she stepped in, she saw the wallpaper and felt a jolt. She knew this pattern of old-fashioned tiny yellow flowers. It was so familiar that her knees threatened to buckle under her as she tried to fight the crush of dread mixed with terror.