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  PRAISE FOR BARBARA TAYLOR SISSEL

  The Last Innocent Hour

  “This is a plot worthy of Daphne du Maurier . . . a compelling tale of innocence lost.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Sissel’s writing is strong and the characters and their motivations clearly drawn.”

  —Bev Vincent, author of The Road to the Dark Tower and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion

  “A taut psychological suspense thriller, exciting and quite dark with no light in sight adding an almost gothic feel.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Sissel’s first novel is a worthy achievement . . . along the lines of Iris Johansen. Frightening . . . poignant. Sissel’s strength lies in her multi-dimensional characters . . . that make the reader react—with fear, with relief, with anger, with tenderness.”

  —Book Browser Review

  “The Last Innocent Hour will ensnare you in a web of family secrets and suspense, powerful crisp writing and characters so real you’ll think you’ve met them.”

  —Colleen Thompson, bestselling author of The Salt Maiden and Phantom of New Orleans

  The Ninth Step

  “Barbara Taylor Sissel crafts a sure-handed, beautiful garden of a novel on ground tilled by Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve. Firmly confronting issues of human frailty, redemption, and letting go, The Ninth Step is a story about what is, but it aches with the stories of what might have been as one man’s quest for forgiveness leads him to the impossible task of forgiving himself, and the lives of the people he’s wronged are drawn into a shattering spiral of events. Sissel’s vibrant voice, rich characters, and deft plotting draw the reader in and keep pages turning to the gripping, unexpected end.”

  —Joni Rodgers, New York Times bestselling author of Crazy for Trying, Sugarland, and the memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair

  Evidence of Life

  “The slow pace of Sissel’s novel allows readers to savor the language and the well-drawn characters. Exploring love, marriage, deception and trust against the backdrop of a gut-wrenching mystery leaves little time for the hinted-at romance. This quiet story is enjoyable and insightful.”

  —RT Book Reviews, 4 stars

  “A chilling mystery with a haunting resolution you won’t see coming.”

  —Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of Garden of Stones

  Safe Keeping

  “Past secrets contribute to present-day angst in this solid suspense novel, and the even pacing keeps the reader’s interest until the captivating conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Impressive writing and affecting subject matter.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A gripping read . . . perfect for a book club.”

  —Library Journal

  “A book you need to set aside time for because you will not be able to break away!”

  —Suspense Magazine

  ALSO BY BARBARA TAYLOR SISSEL

  The Last Innocent Hour

  The Ninth Step

  The Volunteer

  Evidence of Life

  Safe Keeping

  Crooked Little Lies

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Barbara Taylor Sissel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503938915

  ISBN-10: 1503938913

  Cover design by Janet Perr

  For Heather and Christy, my borrowed daughters

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  Jordy wasn’t dead.

  Sandy plucked that single fact from the sea of information she was hearing from the police sergeant, and she clung to it as tightly as she clung to the phone. Behind her, she felt the bed shift when Emmett sat up. She felt his warmth, his sleepy unawareness—his beforeness, and she envied him. “What is it?” he asked, and he was close enough that his breath on her bare shoulder made her shiver.

  “Jordy’s been in a car accident,” she said, and the words floated away from her, separate, foreign sounding.

  “What? Is he all right?” Emmett switched on the bedside lamp.

  Sandy blinked. “I don’t know.” She glanced at the clock on her night table. Both hands on its old-fashioned face pointed to the three, while a finer-moving hand ticked off the seconds, oblivious.

  The cop—she hadn’t caught his name, didn’t recognize his voice—was detailing his location, voice rising over the scream of incoming sirens. “I’m . . . something, something . . . miles north something . . . ” West? East? Sandy didn’t catch it. “ . . . of Wyatt on CR 440.” He was shouting now.

  CR 440 was a county road, but Sandy couldn’t place it exactly.

  “Is that an ambulance?” Her voice thinned with disbelief.

  “We’ve got two out here,” the officer said, not to her but to someone there at the scene. “There’s one in the car still, a girl.”

  Sandy bit her lips, making herself breathe.

  Emmett got up and came around in front of her, and mirrored in his gaze, she saw her own denial and the harsher urgency of panic that wanted to come. He wouldn’t allow it, and neither would she.

  “How bad—how badly is Jordy hurt? Can I talk to him?” Sandy asked the cop.

  “No, ma’am. The paramedics are working on him.”

  “Who else was in the car?” she asked, but she knew before the officer said it that her nephew, Travis, was involved.

  “Your son told us Travis is his cousin? We ID’d the girl, too. Michelle Meade. She was in the backseat. Only one with her seat belt on.”

  Only one with any brains. The cop might as well have said it.

  Were they drinking? The question stood up in Sandy’s mind, a giant headline, the elephant in the room. “What hospital are they being taken to?” She was on her feet now, grabbing shorts and a T-shirt from her dresser drawer.

  “Sandy, what the hell is happening?” Emmett asked.

  “Wyatt Regional,” the cop yelled. “It’s the closest trauma center.”

  Her mind circled the word trauma, keeping a distance from it. It might have been a snake, coiled and ready to strike. But if she kept back far enough, then she’d be . . . safe. How she loved the word for the refuge it suggested.

  She gave the phone, their landline, to Emmett. “I have to call Jenna.”

  But when Sandy tried her sister’s cell phone, Jenna didn’t answer. Already on her way, Sandy thought, and scared out of her mind. But Troy would be with her. For the first time in a long time, Jenna wasn’t alone. Sandy dressed quickly and found her sandals.

  “Carter wouldn’t tell me how any of them are,” Emmett said when Sandy came back into the bedroom.

  “Carter?”

  “The cop on the phone—his
name’s Ken Carter. He’s new.” Emmett pulled on his jeans. “Huck’s there, too. Carter said he and Huck were first on the scene.”

  “Not Len Huckabee,” Sandy said, unhappily.

  “The very same.” Emmett was as grim. He grabbed his keys off the dresser, and Sandy followed him through the dark and silent house.

  They both drove trucks. Sandy’s was pale green, a vintage 1948 restored Ford F-1 pickup with her logo painted on both front doors: EJS LANDSCAPE DESIGN, with a perky daisy painted between the J and the S. She’d opened her business when Jordy was ten and bought the truck with a portion of her profits when he turned fifteen. He’d spent some time behind the wheel, first learning to drive, then working for her summers and weekends. He and Travis had both worked for her. Now they were twenty, and they teased her about the truck, her attachment to it. It surprised them she didn’t park it in the house, tuck it in nights, sing lullabies to it. Ha-ha, she’d say.

  Emmett drove a modern-day Ford F-250 pickup, gray with a darker-gray interior. The fenders were scratched, and there was a dent in the tailgate. A thin layer of dust dulled the shine. He was pretty much running the oil-field service company her dad had founded in the 1970s now, but in high school, Emmett had worked in the fields as a roughneck. Sandy’s dad had gotten him on with a crew of men twice his age, hard-living, hard-drinking men. Men who lived on the cruder margins. Back then, Emmett had stopped by Sandy’s house almost every day after work, and she’d sat with him in the front seat of a different truck, an old Chevy beater he’d named Brownie, while he told her stories. You won’t believe the crazy shit I heard today. That was how he’d begin. They’d drunk lemonade he spiked with whiskey from the pint of Jack Daniel’s he kept in his glove box. She’d run her palm, damp and cool with condensation from her cup, up his forearm, golden haired and brown from the sun, making him sigh with a mix of relief and desire. It had delighted and thrilled her, the power she had over him.

  Even then she’d known they would spend their lives together.

  Inside Emmett’s truck now, Sandy clung to the seat as he backed out of the garage and onto the concrete apron fast enough to make the tires squeal. He looked fixedly into the path of the headlights, minding his direction as they headed down the drive, but Sandy turned to look back, over her shoulder, at Jordy’s basketball goal, watching as it got smaller. He’d asked for it for Christmas the year he turned twelve. The plastic, sand-filled base was faded, the net torn. He seldom used it now that he was off at college, the University of Texas, in Austin, but there were days when the windows were open that she would swear she heard the ball smacking the concrete, along with shouts and whoops of laughter, and her heart would fall open, her throat would ache for no reason. It was silly. She faced front.

  The truck swung onto the highway, headlights bouncing. They lived on a farm-to-market road, FM 1620, some thirteen miles east of Wyatt and the hospital there. There were no streetlights, and it was pitch-black. The dark before dawn, Sandy thought. The rural road rose and fell, dipping blindly among the hills. It rimmed the edges of steep canyons. There were so many roads like this one, so many twisting, rural, go-nowhere roads. The Texas Hill Country where they lived was a lacework of such roads.

  Jordy had learned to drive on these roads, mostly in Emmett’s truck, with him riding shotgun. Sandy had been too nervous; she’d pushed her foot against her truck’s floor, braking for him, slowing him down. He’d been annoyed. Mom, I’m only going fifty-five. It was the legal speed limit. She drove at that speed or even sixty or sixty-five and thought nothing of it. But there were times when Sandy thought even the legal speed limit was too fast. She’d hear about an accident and think every road in the county was treacherous, nothing but a way to get injured or die. Carly Maples, a classmate of Travis’s and Jordy’s, had lost her arm in a wreck when they were high school sophomores. Sandy, Emmett, and Carly’s mom, Wendy, had been in the same grade all through school, and while Carly was still in the hospital, Sandy and Jenna had taken meals to Wendy’s house. Travis and Jordy had brought Carly her homework; Travis had often stayed to help her with it. He was good like that, and Wendy had appreciated his keeping Carly company, as the girl had been understandably angry and depressed. Wendy had talked sometimes about how difficult Carly was, but Wendy had been grateful to the point of tears that it was only an arm her daughter had lost and not her life. Sandy couldn’t imagine it then, the horror of being thrust into a situation where you were thankful your child was only minus a limb.

  Now she understood.

  Jordy was alive. That was all that mattered.

  She jammed her hands against her sides, shivering, wishing she’d worn socks and tennis shoes instead of sandals.

  “Are you cold?” Emmett glanced at her, his face a geometry of broken shadows. He turned the AC down, not waiting for her answer.

  She flattened her palm on his knee, and he covered it with his own. “Jordy will be so scared.”

  “We’re almost there,” Emmett said.

  “Do you think he knows we’re coming? Will anyone tell him?”

  “He doesn’t need anyone to tell him, Sandy.”

  She knew Emmett was right. Jordy would know they were on their way to him. He was their only child. They were always there for him. When he was younger, they’d called themselves the Three Musketeers. She couldn’t remember who started it or when the last time was that one of them had said it. But Emmett was the one who’d come up with Jordy’s nickname: Choo Choo, for his love of trains. His favorite story as a little boy had been The Little Engine That Could, read so often the book was falling apart. He’d printed his name inside it at some point. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the jerky row of letters that spelled Jordan Cline. He’d used an orange crayon.

  Wyatt Regional was relatively new, an eighty-four-bed hospital and rural trauma center that wasn’t quite ten years old. Sandy’s only experience of it had been five years ago, the three days she’d camped out at Jenna’s bedside after her sister had had her mastectomy. Folks in Wyatt were proud of the hospital; Sandy had heard good things about it, but pulling into the entrance and following the signs that led around the far right corner of the three-story building toward the emergency room now, she thought how small it was. She thought fleetingly of the huge medical complex that had been near the apartment she and Emmett had shared while attending the University of Houston. By contrast, Wyatt Regional was smaller than the office building in downtown Houston where she’d gone for regular gynecological exams and OB visits when she’d been pregnant with Jordy.

  The triage area was chaos, a tangle of tight voices rising and falling from behind curtained cubicles. Sandy felt her knees give; her heart banged the walls of her chest. She heard a sudden shouted command, “Clear!” and went swiftly in that direction but stopped abruptly when the curtain was flung aside and Jenna came into view. Troy had his arm around her. Even so, Sandy could see how badly she was shaking. Badly enough that she’d have fallen without Troy’s support.

  “Jenna?”

  At the sound of her name, Jenna met Sandy’s gaze, and the fear in her eyes hardened into something else, something feral, enraged. “You can tell Jordy ‘I’m sorry’ won’t cut it this time.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t talk to you right now. They have finally gotten Travis stabilized enough to move him to the helicopter.”

  “Helicopter?” Sandy repeated.

  Several people, three who were obviously paramedics, and two others who were nurses, burst out of the curtained area, rushing a gurney tethered to an assortment of tubes and beeping machinery toward the opposite end of the triage area. Sandy caught a glimpse of the patient on the gurney—Travis? She couldn’t see more than his head encased on either side by huge blocks of what looked like foam. The face between them was swollen and blue, unrecognizable. Stunned, she jerked her eyes to Jenna and past her to the now-vacant cubicle.

  Blood.

  There was so much blood. On the floor, acros
s the face of a metal cabinet. It streaked the clothing that was strewn over the floor. Travis’s clothing. Sandy recognized the T-shirt flung into one corner. Jordy had one like it, navy blue, printed in neon green with the slogan: KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD. A pair of jeans, also blood soaked, had a ragged tear up the leg, through the waistband. They’d been cut off him, she realized, and she bit her teeth together, forcing back a dizzying sensation of hysteria.

  When she looked around again, Jenna and Troy were gone. A doctor approached. He said his name was Dermott, Kelvin Dermott, and asked for their names. He asked if they were Jordy’s parents.

  “Yes,” Emmett answered. “Where is he? Can we see him?”

  “How is he?” Not like Travis, Sandy prayed. Not blue faced and swollen beyond recognition, and then she felt ashamed, anguished. She darted her eyes in the direction Jenna had gone.

  “We boarded him already,” Dr. Dermott said. “We’re not equipped to treat critical injuries here. They’re going to Mercy Hospital in Austin. They’ve got an excellent level-one trauma unit there and a great staff, the latest in technology. Trust me, the boys will be in good hands.”

  “Jordy’s going with Travis?” Sandy was confused. She thought maybe he meant Jordy would accompany Travis in a support capacity until the doctor explained there was room inside the life-flight helicopter for two patients.

  “Plus the medical personnel to handle the boys’ needs,” Dermott added.

  Sandy felt stupid; she felt battered from the inside by the hammer of her panic.

  Emmett asked the hard question. “Is Jordy conscious?”

  “In and out. The head CT we did shows some injury to his brain.” Wanting to offer reassurance, Dermott patted the air. “It’s not so bad as it sounds. The sort of bruising he’s sustained usually heals on its own, but it’s best to play it safe, I think, and send him to Austin, too.”

  A sound came, a heavy, rhythmic throbbing. The helicopter, Sandy thought.

  “You folks know how to get there?”

  “We can find it,” Emmett said, shortly. “But what the hell happened? Can you tell us?”