“How about pancakes tomorrow morning?” she asked.

“Of course. It’s Sunday and we always have pancakes before church,” he said. “And we agreed before we ever left home that wherever we were on Sunday morning, we’d find us a church with a parking lot to fit this vehicle, and we’d attend services.”

“Yes, we did.” She laid a hand on his arm. “And maybe this one will feel more like home than the last one did. It was just too big.”

She got her phone from her purse and looked at the little house that was still on the market. There were others—one down the street from Lucy looked pretty good—but that white house with the big front porch was the one she liked best. She wished she had a picture of their little church to look at. Big, small, or in between, nothing could replace it.

Chapter Eighteen

Tucker polished his boots, ironed his shirt and jeans, dusted off his cowboy hat, and got into his truck with plans to go to Luke and Carla’s place for Melanie’s birthday celebration. Maybe it would be a level of closure to be there with others who loved her and share experiences with everyone that evening. He drove straight to their house, a redbrick place in a really nice area of town. He parked across the street and watched the family through the big plate-glass window. From the looks of it, they’d put aside the fact that Luke was dying and were laughing and having a good time.

A blast of icy wind hit Tucker in the face when he opened his door. He instinctively shut it again and drew his coat closer to his body. He should brave the wind and the family, but he couldn’t make himself do either. Finally, he started up the engine and drove back to the inn. He took a full bottle of whiskey with him to the living room and turned on the television just to have some noise. He surfed through the stations until he found an NCIS marathon. He recognized it as the second season, the one where one of the team members got killed at the end, and thought it appropriate that evening. He drained the last drop of whiskey from the bottle and threw it back just as the shot rang out that killed the character Kate.

“Some of us don’t have any luck,” he slurred as he got up to go get another bottle, but he’d gone only a few steps when the room began to whip around him so fast that he couldn’t get his bearings.

He sat down in the foyer with a thud. After a few minutes, he started to get back on his feet, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. Finally, he stretched out on the floor with intentions of shutting his eyes for only a few minutes. In an hour what he’d drunk would be out of his system, and he’d get up and go to bed before Jolene got home from the bar.

Jolene slipped on the ice once as she made her way from the bar to her truck, but she was able to right herself before she fell flat on her fanny. She got inside her vehicle and started the engine and then got back out to scrape the ice from the windshield. Freezing rain stung her face as she worked, but neither a knight in shining armor nor a big strong cowboy on a white horse appeared out of the darkness to do the job for her.

Her teeth were chattering by the time she finished and hurried back inside the truck. She’d almost warmed up by the time she’d gotten out of town, but neither the windshield wipers nor the heater could keep up with the freezing rain. She pulled off the road into a closed service station. The awning over the gas pump gave her enough shelter that she could remove the buildup again, but she was already thinking ahead to other places where she could repeat the process.

“Dammit!” She realized that she hadn’t switched the heat to the windshield. “No wonder it wouldn’t warm up and melt the mess.” She sat there several minutes until the heater melted the last of the ice.

What was usually a five-minute trip to the inn took fifteen just to get to the turn down the lane. The trees glistened with ice, and the ground crunched beneath the tires. Sleet still peppered the windshield and the top of the truck.

The foggy outline of the inn was in sight when suddenly a deer jumped right into the road in front of her and stood there, staring at her with big eyes. She braked and whipped the steering wheel to the right. The deer ran off and the truck slid right toward a big pine tree, coming to a gentle stop against it. Her heart raced and her pulse pounded in her ears. She laid her head on the steering wheel for several minutes until she could catch her breath, and then put the vehicle in reverse. The wheels whirred and spun out on the ice, but she couldn’t get traction. She swung the door open and got out, only to see that the back wheels had dropped into a ditch about six inches deep. There was no way she’d be able to get the truck out that night, and maybe not until things thawed.

She dug her phone from her purse and called the inn. Surely that party for Melanie hadn’t lasted until three in the morning. After ten rings she hung up and tried again. Still no answer. She called Tucker’s cell phone, and it went straight to voice mail.

She grabbed her purse, shook her fist at the sky, and trudged the rest of the way to the inn. She was hungry, angry, and chilled to the bone with sleet hitting her in the face all the way to the door. Lord, even her eyelashes were frozen. A rush of welcome warm air greeted her when she unlocked the door and pushed it open. She took a step forward, reached up to feel for the string to pull on the light, and tripped over something on the foyer floor.

The fall knocked the wind out of her, but when she could catch her breath, she realized that she was lying on top of a person. Visions of a dead body flitted through her head as she pushed away from it. Then she got a whiff of whiskey, and a fresh rush of anger filled her heart and soul.