Chapter One

“Hurted me,” was all Merrie said, swiping ineffectually at the gush of blood pouring down her forehead, over her eyebrow and into her left eye.

Charlie McClintock turned from the books she was stacking in a packing box, expecting a skinned knee requiring a kiss to make it better. When she saw the blood, she couldn’t help burping out a tiny scream, which, of course, let three-year-old Merrie know that the cut on her forehead was, after all, something worthy of pitching a fit over. And so she did.

Dropping dramatically to her knees, Merrie tilted her head back and began to wail, a high-pitched screech that should have etched the sound syllables into the glass in the windows. Charlie took two steps and scooped the little girl up into her arms, mumbling soothing words — “Shhh, sokay, shhhh, momma’s gotcha, shhhhh” — trying to keep the child still long enough to examine the wound.

Ordinarily, Charlene Reneé McClintock was not a woman easily rattled, but she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after last night’s freak storm and the violent fury of it left her … unsettled. It had struck without warning, no rumble of thunder to signal its approach. It hadn’t even been sprinkling when a sudden wind savagely attacked the house, tearing the front screen door off its hinges and ripping the porch swing off its chains to use as a battering ram against the wall. A strobe of lightning burned into Charlie’s retina the image of the front-yard willow tree’s branches lashing out like a cat o’ nine tails, the juniper trees cavorting like those blow-up figures you see at car dealerships and grand openings, ripped-off limbs threatening to come crashing through the windows … and then it was over.

It didn’t ratchet down in ferocity. It just … stopped. Blew through and was gone in — what? Three minutes? Five? When she’d stepped out on the porch to survey the damage, she could see stars twinkling in the velvet black sky.

A twister perhaps? How could you have a tornado without an accompanying thunderstorm? There hadn’t been a drop of rain. And the fresh, after-a-storm smell in the air … it wasn’t there. She smelled only the honeysuckle around the porch. She’d been in a hurricane once in South Florida and it had been no more ferocious. That’d make the record books: The Appalachian Hurricane of June 1995.

It wasn’t just the ferocity of the storm, though. It was the sound it’d made. The wind had … wailed. Sounded like crying children … or lost souls in hell. Now, maybe that was the normal sound of a hurricane in the mountains — hard to know a thing like that when there was no such thing as a mountain hurricane. But perhaps last night’s storm was holding up for Charlie McClintock’s inspection the outside edges of “no such thing.”

Who knew?

Well, what she did know was that the cut on Meredith’s forehead, far from as life-threatening as the amount of blood would seem to indicate, did need a couple of stitches. And unless Charlie wanted the little girl to carry for the rest of her life a permanent reminder on her forehead of tripping over a storm-tossed tree branch in her grandmother’s driveway, the sewing should be done by a plastic surgeon. That certainly wasn’t going to happen if she took Merrie to the emergency room at the Beaufort County Hospital in Carlisle.

But where else could she go?

She couldn’t haul a screaming three-year-old all the way to Lexington! And Nower County, Kentucky had no hospital.

Nower County, Kentucky had no … anything.

Charlie was facing a half hour’s drive through the mountains with a bleeding, shrieking toddler strapped into a car seat behind her.

Goody.

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