“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” she cried, slamming her fist against the steering wheel. “Because you were cowards? Because...” The answer came to her as if plucked out of the blue sky overhead.

“Because you didn’t want to tell me about my mother.” She said the words on a ragged breath, her voice breaking as she thought of the murder story and the way Laura Beaumont had been portrayed. An alley cat in heat. A mother who ignored her little girl.

But why hadn’t her grandparents taken both girls? Why had they left Angel?

As she hit the brakes to make the curve in the road, Dulcie realized she was driving too fast. The car fishtailed wildly, the back tires sliding off into the shallow barrow pit. The sound of the dirt and gravel scraping across the underbelly of the rental car drowned out everything except the erratic pounding of her pulse. She was going to wreck another rental car. As if that was her biggest concern.

She got the car under control and slowed, her hands trembling on the wheel, her whole body shaking. The tears finally came in a rush, a wall of water that forced her to pull over and stop. She leaned on the steering wheel and cried for the mother and father and sister she’d never known, for the two people who had raised her, for herself.

When the sobs finally ceased, she wiped her eyes and pulled herself together. She might not know who she was—but she knew what she had to do. She straightened up and got the car going again, telling herself she’d always been strong. Now more than ever she needed that strength for what was coming.

She felt a small shiver of fear prickle her skin as she saw the Old Town Whitehorse cemetery ahead.

After school, Jolene waited until everyone was gone before she walked up to the cemetery on the hill to meet Dulcie. The afternoon sun hung low in the sky after another torturous day of heat.

She stopped to catch her breath and pick some of the wildflowers that grew at the edge of the road. As she took her small bouquet and passed under the wrought-iron arch that read Whitehorse Cemetery to climb the hill, each breath burned her lungs.

The quiet up there was eerie. A stray gust of breeze stirred a bouquet of plastic flowers on a nearby grave. The air that brushed her face was hot as a fevered touch. She drew back instinctively and stood for a moment, trying to catch her breath.

She had to stop letting her imagination run away with her. There were no ghosts in this graveyard. The stories of the lights were nothing more than rural legends.