"Hughes’s snappy dialogue and strong writing aptly describe the small Southern town and its attitude towards a girl corrupted by the big city.” --Publishers Weekly

Excerpt from Valley of the Shadow:

BOOK ONE

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring.
Will be to arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot
"Little Gidding."
From Four Quartets

PROLOGUE

A narrow, twisting mountain road at midnight.

Dark as a sinner's heart; treacherous as his deeds.

A slivered moon, a broken headlight, a vintage pickup truck

Make slow work of the journey.

From the bush along the road

Eyes glitter.

The driver suddenly brakes

And shudders

As his grim cargo rolls across the bed of the pickup truck.

A deer darts into the road

Freezes, caught in the glare of headlights.

Eyes, fearful and trapped.

The man remembers another pair of eyes

Horrified and bulging

As he'd closed his hands around her lovely throat

And silenced her forever.

Eyes that seem to watch him even now

Through the layers of the quilt he'd wrapped her in.

Her burial shroud.

He struggles with the urge to look over his shoulder.

Will he find those eyes watching him?

Will he see them every time he tries to sleep?

Only one answer.

Bury her deep.

"...In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall
speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents;
and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them;
they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."
Mark 16: 17,18

CHAPTER ONE

God, she had gone and lost her poor mind. Or what was left of it after these six months. Meg supposed everybody had a breaking point, and she'd obviously reached hers that morning outside of Mama's Used Cars. That's the only excuse she could give for trading the equity in her gorgeous 1997 Ford Explorer, with its genuine leather seats and custom cellular phone, for this aged avocado-green camper with harvest gold shag carpeting and dark paneling. That, and the fact that Mama's eldest boy, Tank, was a slick-talking car salesman.

Now, as Meg Gentry stood beside her roommate outside their Atlanta apartment complex, she tried to sound enthusiastic over the deal, but her voice was as flat and leaden as the late October sky. Libby Simms stared at the battered vehicle much the same way the Munchkins had stared at Dorothy's house when it'd dropped from the sky and landed in Munchkinland. She circled the camper, peering at it through clumsy-looking glasses that had a tendency to slide down the bridge of her nose so that she was forever pushing them back in place.

Meg shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans and rocked back and forth on the heels of her high top sneakers as she tried to gauge her friend's reaction. Libby was hard to read at times, and Meg wondered if it was a trait she'd developed throughout her years as a high school guidance counselor. Never let the other side know what you're thinking. Also, they were vastly different. At forty, Libby's dark hair was liberally streaked with gray, but it would never have occurred to her to color it. Meg, who was ten years younger, had her own light brown hair frosted blond every six months to sort of camouflage the gray when it appeared. One less thing to worry about, as far as she was concerned.

"Well?" Meg prodded curiously. When she had first moved in with Libby six months ago, her friend's approval had mattered a great deal. Of course, Meg's self-esteem had been lower than a mole hole at the time, thanks to her SOB husband, who'd left a crater in her heart the size of Kansas.

Libby looked at her. "I think it's finally gotten to you, kiddo. It's pushed you over the edge."

Meg knew she was referring to her divorce, which had become final the previous week. Three years down the toilet. She still saw Roy in her mind the way he'd looked the first time they'd met, working a drive-by shooting in a neighborhood rife with crack houses and prostitution. Roy had been the detective in charge, and she was assigned to cover the story for the paper.

Police didn't like the media; they often accused them of getting in the way. But Meg had been on her best behavior the night she'd met Roy Gentry, her attention focused on the handsome, blond detective instead of the bulging body bags. Afterward, they'd driven to the Huddle House and gotten better acquainted over coffee and pecan pie. Meg knew the divorce rate was high among policemen because of job stress, but she'd filed that information in the back of her mind next to all she knew about lung cancer, though she smoked regardless.

Libby craned her neck, giving Meg a suspicious look. "Were you sober when you bought it?"

Meg shot her a dark look. "Please don't worry about offending me, Libby," she said. "Tell me what you really think."

"You should demand your money back."

Meg fumbled through her purse for her cigarettes. In the months since her separation, she'd become a bona fide chain-smoker, not an easy task considering it was illegal to smoke almost everywhere these days. She also drank more than she should and had added a few more four-letter words to her repertoire of vile language. Libby claimed what she really needed was a good healthy cry, but Meg would've swallowed broken glass first.

"I can't get my money back," she said, lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply. "It's a done deal. I've already got the title and everything."

"Oh, my --"

"You're not looking at it from a practical standpoint, Libby. I couldn't afford to keep up the payments on the Explorer. This way, I owe zero money, and, not only do I have transportation, I have a place to sleep." Meg paused, giving her time to consider the logistics. Tank had made it sound so wise and sensible. And Meg had believed him, because she didn't think any man who still wore leisure suits and white loafers could outsmart her.

"You're not exactly broke, you know," Libby replied. "You still have half the money from the sale of your house."

Meg didn't want to think about the century-old fixer-upper she and Roy had bought shortly after their marriage. They had put so much hard work into the place. Later, she'd realized all that effort had been nothing more than a diversionary tactic aimed at keeping her focus off her troubled relationship.

"I need to save that money. Now that I'm unemployed," she mumbled.

"So maybe you shouldn't have quit your job. I told you not to make any life-altering decisions until you'd had time to heal."

Meg couldn't believe Libby still had advice left, after all she'd already given. Quitting her job without giving notice hadn't been the best decision she'd ever made, but it had been a relief. In the three years she'd worked the crime beat, she'd been chased through a junkyard by a pit bull, taken hostage by a lunatic who'd mistaken her for an undercover cop, and found herself caught in the cross-fire between a couple of drug dealers and the DEA. She'd had to crawl beneath a garbage truck to keep from being shot. And all this had happened while she was working. It didn't include the mugging outside Clancy's Sandwich Shop near her apartment, or the peeping Tom incident that'd gone on for months before the creep had been apprehended.

She'd signed up for one of those self-defense courses where they taught you how to ward off purse snatchers and would-be rapists. She'd purchased a canister of Mace and learned to talk tough while covering crime scenes in Atlanta's seedier neighborhoods where prissy-sounding women often became victims. She'd became known as "that smart-ass reporter from the Journal," the one with the attitude. That title had served her well over the years.

Roy had bought her a hand gun as a wedding present, romantic fool that he was, and she'd given it right back. Statistics proved most gunshot victims died by their own weapons, either accident or suicide. She'd thought of those days just before her period when she felt bloated and life appeared so bleak, and she figured she and the rest of the world would be a safer place if she remained unarmed. Of course, she still had the hunting knife her father had insisted she keep beneath the seat of her car, in case she happened upon a crazed psychopath while stranded on an isolated stretch of road. Meg doubted she would ever be able to use it on another human being -- except for Roy -- but she kept the knife anyway. If she did get stranded, she figured she could always hunt for her own food.

Nevertheless, she was tired of big-city life. She was sick to death of writing about violence -- drug deals gone wrong, grisly homicides that kept her awake nights, battered women who, more often than not, returned to their abusers as soon as they left the hospital. She had paid her dues; she deserved to be assigned the cushier jobs now and then. Her boss hadn't seen it that way. He assigned the good stories to his pet reporter, a Maria Shriver look-alike who wore panty hose on a regular basis.

Meg finished her cigarette, dropped it on the asphalt, and rubbed it out with the toe of her sneaker. "I've got to get out of this place," she told Libby at last. "I've been thinking maybe I'll go home."

Libby offered her a blank look. "Home? You mean to Tennessee?"

Meg nodded. "I got a letter from my mother yesterday, and she said the leaves have started to turn. People travel from all over this time of year to see them. It's the most beautiful place in the world."

"You sound like you've already made up your mind."

Meg grinned. "Why do you think I bought this ugly ass camper?"

Libby cocked her head to the side, as if looking at it from a new angle might make a difference. "You could always have it painted."

Meg wasn't listening. "I should drop by the Atlanta PD tomorrow and invite Roy and his new lover out to lunch. Park right out front, let everybody get a look at my new wheels."

Libby crossed her arms and gave Meg a stern look. "Do the words restraining order mean anything to you?"

"Yeah. It means Roy's a pussy." Meg was delighted to be able to use one of her new words in connection with her ex-husband. "I mean, seriously. What kind of man serves a woman with a restraining order? What could I possibly do to him?"

# # #

Roy Gentry stretched his long legs out before him and took another sip of the black coffee that had kept him and a dozen other detectives going for almost sixteen hours now. As they sat around the conference table, waiting for the captain to arrive, he could feel the tension building. The case wasn’t going anywhere. The hand of blame pointed to him.

The fact that he was in charge didn’t look good for him. He’d wanted to be chief detective more than anything. Hell, he'd even married for it, a last-ditch effort to appear more stable when it looked like someone else was going to get the position instead. After two and a half years on the job, he’d developed an ulcer and high blood pressure.

The stress was killing him.

Captain Bernard Maxwell pushed the door open and stomped through with the grace of a tank. He was a squatty, hairless man whose bull dog face wore a perpetual frown. “Okay, now that I’ve canceled my goddamn fishing trip, I want some answers, and they better be good or somebody’s head’s gonna roll.”

Roy braced himself. "It's like I said over the phone, sir. The call came in at 2200 hours. Albert Thurston's son heard a noise coming from his father's bedroom, and when he checked on him the elder Thurston was nowhere to be found. The family suspects kidnaping."

"Have they received any ransom demands?"

"No sir."

"Then it's a bit premature to call it a kidnaping, don't you think?"

"Well, considering his vast wealth--"

"Did you put out an APB?"

"Yes sir. And I've spoken to the FBI."

"You contacted the goddamn FBI, and you don't even know if it's a kidnaping?"

"I thought under the circumstances--"

"What circumstances? You ain't got shit, Detective." The captain was angry. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth as he sputtered obscenities. "Thurston could've run off with the town floozy for all you know, and I probably canceled my fishing trip for nothing. Do you have any idea when I took my last vacation? Hell no, you don't remember. You were still in diapers.”

Someone knocked on the door. "Detective Gentry?" A fresh-faced rookie stepped inside. He was holding a box. "This just came for you, sir. Some guy said a woman paid him fifty bucks to deliver it."

"That could be from the kidnappers," Maxwell said. "Maybe they've discovered the family is nothing but a bunch of dick heads, and they'd rather deal with us."

Roy wondered at the captain's sudden change of heart. It wasn't likely any kidnapper would prefer dealing with the police, but the box indeed looked suspicious. The mailing address consisted of letters cut from a newspaper, the fonts and sizes different. No return. Just what you’d expect to see in a ransom letter. Someone trying to hide their identity.

"Did you get the guy's name?" Roy asked the rookie.

"Naw. He just handed it to me and split."

"And you didn't even try to find out who the hell he was?" Maxwell demanded. "Jesus Christ, what is this, ballet class? Give me the damn box and get your scrawny ass out looking for him!" Maxwell motioned to a couple of detectives. "Go with him so he doesn’t get lost." He pulled a pocket knife from his trousers and cut the string binding the box.

"You might want to have that x-rayed first, Captain," Roy said, not at all offended by his boss opening a package meant for him. He had too many enemies on the street, druggies and pimps who felt they'd been given a raw deal. He suddenly wished Maxwell weren't standing so close. He'd heard stories of police officers losing their hands and faces while opening unidentified packages.

Ignoring him, Maxwell pulled off the lid and stared into the box for a moment. "Well, now. Looks like a bunch of women's underwear to me, although I can't for the life of me figure what it has to do with Thurston." He rifled through nylon and satin, searching for clues.

The blood drained from Roy's face as recognition dawned. Panicked, he made to get up and leave the room, but his legs wouldn't move. Sweat beaded his brow; he felt sick.

Maxwell pulled out a large manila envelope and ripped it open. In his haste, he ignored the photos that fell and scattered across the conference table. "Here we go." He pulled out a note and read from it.

"It says, 'Dear Roy. I'm sending you all my lingerie, even though that wasn't part of our divorce settlement. You always looked better in it than I did. And to show there's no hard feelings, I'm enclosing photos my private investigator took some months back. You and Tom make such a cute couple. Fondly, Meg.’”

Maxwell suddenly snapped his head up as though just realizing what he'd read. His face turned an angry red. "Is this some kind of joke, Gentry?" he said, tossing the letter aside like it was yesterday's trash.

Roy tried to smile, but the muscles in his face were numb. "My ex-wife has a strange sense of humor, sir. Tom Raford and I were on a case when those photos were taken. Under cover," he added.

The captain glared at him. "Jesus Christ!" He slammed out of the room.

Roy sat there while several uniformed and plain-clothes officers sifted through the pictures. One or two snickered. They didn't believe the undercover story anymore than the captain did. He looked at the box and almost wished it had contained a bomb.

In some ways, it had.