Black Ember (22 page)

This had once been the prettiest house in Conway, North Dakota. It had been white, with green shutters and scalloped shingles and a white railing all around the porch. From the front of the house you could see the road that led into town and her mother’s flower garden and the mailbox with the red flag that Roan was allowed to put up on days they had a letter to mail. From the side porch you could see the barn and the fields and the cattle grazing and, best of all, the bunk house where all the hands lived. When Roan grew up she planned to be a cowgirl herself, and she would take care of the cows who were sick, and the baby calves, and maybe even learn how to be a veterinarian in her spare time.

Roan sighed, dragging a stick along the floorboards, tapping the wood and listening for a hollow echo. This whole idea had been stupid. She would have to come back with a flashlight and a better plan for figuring out where the secret hiding spot was. All she knew for sure was that it was somewhere on the first floor - and even that was subject to the vagaries of her childhood memories, which probably weren’t all that reliable.

Roan paused to wipe her hands on her jeans. There was a thick layer of dust everywhere, even though the county had nailed plywood over the windows after the fire. How long had it been? Four…almost five years now. Roan had moved out years before, but her father - and Evil Mimi - had lived in the house until his death. The fire had destroyed the home only two months after his heart attack. Everyone thought Mimi would have the place torn down and rebuilt - but instead she moved to town and left the barn and the bunkhouse to fall into ruin alongside the shell of the house that had been in the Brackens family for generations.

Roan swore she would never return. And she never would have, if she hadn’t been desperate. Besides, she wasn’t there for herself: she was there for Angel.

 A sound outside made her freeze, her heart pounding in her chest. It was a footfall on the old porch. Then another one. Whoever was out there was moving slowly, which was smart, since it would be all too easy to put a foot through the rotting porch floor. Roan had broken a board herself that way.

She looked toward the arched passage from the dining room to the hall leading to the kitchen. The fire had destroyed most of the second floor but, miraculously, the center of the first floor was mostly unscathed. There, on the cabbage rose wallpaper, were the outlines of the paintings that had once hung there - paintings Mimi had sold after Roan’s father’s death. There was the door to the kitchen. And there - in the direction of the footsteps - was the front door.

Who would be out here snooping around? One of the oilmen, no doubt. Half a dozen of them had moved into the bunkhouse last summer when Mimi figured out she could charge a fortune in rent, now that the oil boom had made lodging so scarce in town. Roan didn’t know anything about the tenants, but she knew a lot about oil men, since she waited on them at the Bluebird Cafe six days a week. Most of them were okay. Some weren’t. They could put away a lot of food after a twelve hour shift, and they tipped especially well on payday, and that’s all Roan figured she needed to know.

“Hey,” a male voice called. “I know you’re in there.”

Roan crept to the interior wall of the dining room, stepping as lightly as she could and pressing herself against the plaster. She edged cautiously toward the hallway, praying that the back door hadn’t been nailed shut - and guessing that it had. She’d had to pry the nails out of the front door with the claw hammer that was in her backpack, and cut the padlock with the bolt cutters she’d “borrowed” from Pete. There was no way she’d be able to escape out the back without making a lot of noise.

And she was a trespasser here.

“I’m coming in,” the man called. The door swung open. A heavy boot crunched on the broken glass littering the front hall. A beam of sunlight momentarily blinded Roan, and all she could make out was the figure of a man standing in the doorway of the house that she’d lived in until she was eighteen years old.

Panic made her run. She burst away from the wall like she was coming out of the blocks at that long-ago state track championship, her lungs roaring with her breath and her fists and legs pumping hard. She bolted past the man, shoving him against the wall with her shoulder and barely breaking her stride, down the steps across the snowy yard and heading for the woods, before she registered what she’d seen in the split second before she burst out the front door:

The man had a gun, and it had been pointed at her.

Black Heat

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