and rabbits. Rain was still pouring and night had set in with alarming suddenness. She could barely make out the path and stayed on it mostly by instinct. Whenever she blundered into the surrounding thickets, cruel branches and thorns grabbed at her shredded jogging pants and stabbed her legs.
After what seemed like several hours, she slowed her pace. The heavy rain was letting up, and the night was silent except for the rustle of dripping trees and the mournful hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The clouds separated and a partial moon drifted out from the lacy screen.
Isabel crawled in among the lower branches of a cedar tree and paused to catch her breath. She was chilled through, badly winded, weak from loss of blood. Her arm had begun to throb painfully. She wondered if the gash could have become infected so soon.
But in spite of the cold and the pain of her injuries, she was most distressed by the fact that she no longer had a plan. Her only thought was to put distance between herself and anybody who might be searching the riverbank. Beyond that, she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do, or how to make her way to Abilene so she could use the key that was still safely tucked in her running shoe.
Various possibilities presented themselves, none of them very rational.
She could knock on the door of a farmhouse along the river, tell the owner she’d been in an accident and ask to call her father.
No. Pierce Delgado was in Europe on business.
Maybe she could ask for help from her brother or one of her father’s personal staff, but after what she’d seen a few weeks earlier, she didn’t really trust any of them. And she didn’t want anyone to know Isabel Delago was still alive.
Besides, even making a phone call would mean revealing her identity. Nobody in their right mind would let a stranger into the house to use the phone, even an injured one.
Maybe she could claim amnesia, saying the trauma of her accident had driven all memory from her mind.
But then they would call the police, and that prospect was so distressing that Isabel, who never cried, began to sob aloud.
Suddenly weary beyond endurance, she stretched out and lay full-length on the soft carpet of leaves. Her head and arm throbbed, and her body ached with fatigue.
I’ll just rest for a minute, she thought. After a little rest I’ll feel better, and then I can decide what to do.
It was her last conscious thought for many hours. Almost at once she fell deeply asleep and didn’t wake until the morning sun was high in the sky.
CHAPTER TWO
THE IRRIGATION PUMP had broken down again. Dan Gibson knelt and prodded it carefully with grease-stained fingers, wondering if all it needed was something simple like new washers, or if this was going to be another expensive overhaul. Maybe he’d even have to replace the creaky old piece of machinery.
He couldn’t afford a new pump without getting another operating loan. And even Bill Hendricks, the sympathetic bank manager in Crystal Creek, was probably going to tell him that was impossible.
Wearily, Dan sat back on his heels and squinted into the fading sunlight where his children played along the river.
Twelve-year-old Ellie was in the water, wading up to her knees, bent almost double as she searched for arrowheads in the bright shallows.
Chris was four years younger than Ellie, and she wasn’t allowed to go into the water unless Dan was with her. She was dragging their red wagon along the river’s edge, and she and little Josh were filling it with mounds of colored pebbles they intended to use for some mysterious game of their own.
Josh was only two, chubby and energetic in a blue-denim romper suit. His sisters were in sandals, but Josh wore heavy miniature boots to protect his feet from the rocks along the shore. His golden curls shone in the sunlight, and his voice drifted on the wind, as happy as a little bird’s.
Dan grinned briefly and tipped his cap back, watching the children. But his smile faded when he looked around at the hay meadow behind him, then at the stalled irrigation pump.
At least a heavy rainfall the night before had provided some moisture for his rapidly maturing crop. It gave him a little breathing room while he worked on the pump. But if he couldn’t harvest this final hay crop and pay back a few loans, his financial prospects for the coming year were going to be damned bleak.
“Ellie,” he called, “it’s time for the kids to have a bath and go to bed.”
The two girls raised a howl of protest, claiming extra privileges because it was Saturday night. Josh chimed in, though Dan suspected his son was objecting more to be companionable than out of any real indignation.
Josh was such an easygoing little boy. He actually loved the routines of bedtime, with his bubble bath and toys and storybooks.
“Okay, fifteen more minutes,” Dan said. “But you two have already been up more than an hour past your schoolday bedtime.”
A contented silence fell, and he returned his attention to the pump.
Dan was a tall, well-built man in jeans and a plaid work shirt, with a disheveled head of light brown hair that was as unruly as Josh’s if it got too long. He had smoky green eyes and a grin that transformed his hard face, though these days it was an increasingly rare occurrence.
As he probed the pump mechanism with a screwdriver blade, something caught his eye and he looked up quickly. A flash of color glimmered in the brush near the water, just downriver from where his children were playing. But whatever was in the thicket vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
He frowned, wondering if one of the McKinney horses had strayed this far from the Double C. If so, he’d have to give J.T. a call.
For a moment he considered going over and checking, then dismissed the thought.
Most likely it was a deer, or a hawk flying low after some scurrying rodent, or even a plastic sack blown along the river in last night’s storm, caught and fluttering from a branch.
At least to his immense relief, Dan found the problem with the pump—a ragged washer—and knew the repair was only going to cost a few dollars. He had only to get to the hardware store in Crystal Creek.
Disaster was averted for another day, he thought wryly.
But how many bullets could a man dodge before one of them finally hit him and killed all his dreams?
“Come on, kids,” he said, getting to his feet. “Time’s up.”
There was another brief protest, but this time it was halfhearted. They knew he meant what he said, and it was pointless to argue.
Chris walked at her father’s side toward the little farmhouse, holding his hand and pulling the wagon, now heavily loaded. Dan looked down into her earnest, freckled face. “What are you going to do with all the rocks, honey?”
“Josh and I are building a castle,” Chris said. “We’re starting on it tomorrow. It’s going to be awesome, Daddy.”
“Awesome,” Josh said contentedly, trotting at Dan’s other side, clinging to his other hand. “Gonna be awesome.”
“You two babies don’t have a clue how to build a castle,” Ellie said scornfully from behind them. “It’ll just be a big mess.”
Chris’s face turned pink with outrage, and Dan ruffled her hair.
“Maybe I’ll have a little time to help with the castle tomorrow, sweetie,” he said.
His younger daughter’s eyes blazed with happiness. “Really, Daddy?”
“Maybe,” he said cautiously.
Chris rounded on her sister in triumph. “Daddy’s going to help me and Josh build the castle,” she said, “and it’ll be the best castle in the whole world. So there,