Letting out a sharp breath, Rivers picked up the work gloves, once tan leather, now stained on the palms, the stitching stretched, a small hole near the index finger of the right hand. He slipped the gloves over his hands and closed his eyes, seeing images of James driving a tractor in the spring, lifting baled trees onto a trailer while snow was falling, riding a horse through the woods, another horse beside him, a woman rider laughing as they splashed through the icy banks and slow-moving current of a stream. But he couldn’t make out the woman’s face, nor the color of her hair, nothing about her.

The image shifted, and he felt anger, dark and seething, saw the axe lifted high, then come crashing down, splintering wood, sending kindling spinning. Another chunk was placed on the chopping stump. Another ferocious swing. Crrraaack! Pieces of wood splitting and flying away from the blade. And again. And again. He felt the sweat, the strain of muscles as the axe was swung hard and fast, sensed the anger burning through the axe-wielder’s blood.

Anger at a woman.

Hate. Rage. Blind fury.

Megan’s face floated into view, no longer a smiling girl with honey-colored hair and a quick, sexy smile. Now . . . red-faced, teeth bared, she screamed, “You don’t love me. You never loved me!” They were outside, near a stable where horses peered from their stalls. She picked up something—a grooming brush?—and hurled it at him. It bounced against the wall, near a stable door, and the chestnut in the stall shied and reared, neighing in fright.

“Are you nuts?” James demanded, and as he calmed the horse, Megan ran out of the stable through an open door into the night. It was winter. Snow lay on the ground. But it was not the night she disappeared.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Rivers switched his thoughts to the night of the altercation, the night Megan had vanished. He saw nothing, felt nothing. Whatever secrets the gloves held about the evening Megan disappeared, they were keeping.

Rivers stripped them off, pulling them inside out. This is certifiable, you know it is.

He noticed the stain then, a dark red blotch on the inside of the left palm. Blood. Cahill’s? Or someone else’s?