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furiously, weighing her options. The sash wasn’t too tight and there was a little slack inside the second robe. It wouldn’t be too hard to wriggle free. And then? If things really were coming unraveled, there had to be a way out of this mess. She’d call Cam. He’d help her find a way to throw all the blame on—
    Abruptly, something looped her throat. There was a sudden tightening, a constriction that left her unable to breathe. Frantically, she struggled to jerk away, but the pressure increased inexorably.
    No way to use her arms or hands to yank it away from her neck. In fear and rage, she sank to her knees and butted backward with her head, her body arching and twisting to free herself, to take one deep lifesaving breath. A quick lunge forward and she felt the cord loosen. For one second, she could almost breathe again.
    Oh please oh please oh please—
    And then the pressure was back. A frantic twist and something tore in her throat. Searing pain lanced across her dying brain and sparked a last incoherent thought of water . . . her healing shower . . . hot water . . .

CHAPTER 2
    All the big apple orchards are gone.
    . . . peach trees, old horse apples
    that came from Civil War days.
    I remember the Indian and Clear-seed peach . . .
    All that, gone.
    —Middle Creek Poems,
by Shelby Stephenson
    T UESDAY NIGHT
    Y ou ain’t never gonna get a man to vote against his pocketbook, Deb’rah,” Daddy said, waving a hard roll at me to make his point. “And right now, every one of them commissioners ’cepting maybe Abe Jacobson’s granddaughter is either in the building trade or got real close ties to somebody that’s making a bunch of money offen the new folks. So lessen you plan to quit being a judge and run for commissioner yourself, you can just suck it up.”
    “I don’t want to suck it up,” I said petulantly as I dipped a piece of my own roll into the dish of olive oil on the table between us. “I just want them to start thinking about the people of Colleton County.
All
the people, not just the ones that pay for their political posters and campaign ads.”
    “Oh, I reckon them people’s paying for a lot more than that,” he said cynically as he waited for our server to bring him some butter.
    After finishing up a court session that ran late, I had stayed on in Dobbs to catch up on my paperwork until it was time to meet some of the family for supper. It had surprised me to get to the restaurant and find Daddy there. He doesn’t drive at night much any more and I hadn’t realized he was coming.
    Ferguson’s is a little pricy, but their steaks are dry-aged and supposedly hormone-free. Here on a Tuesday night, it wasn’t very busy and the waiter had already been around once to refill our tea glasses.
    “Anyhow,” said Daddy, “when did you start thinking county commissioners oughta be different from any other politicians?”
    “Ever since I heard they’re letting NutriGood build a store at Pleasant’s Crossroads.”
    I have nothing against the NutriGood grocery chain, per se. I may not preach the gospel of whole grains and free-range chickens like a born-again health nut, but I do like them; and whenever I’m in Raleigh, I swing past the NutriGood to pick up store-baked bread and organic vegetables that aren’t yet ripe in our garden. Hell, I even bring my own reusable cloth tote bags so I won’t have to decide whether it’s paper or plastic that’s going to wind up in our county landfill.
    A chain store in Raleigh’s one thing, and I can grit my teeth and live with the sprawling commercial mess around the interstate exits several miles to the east of me. But an upscale town store to anchor a strip mall at Pleasant’s Crossroads? Only three short miles from my own house? That’s a whole ’nother can of something, and no, I’m not talking organic worms.
    Pleasant’s Crossroads is the intersection of two backcountry roads that used to go nowhere. Nothing was there except scrubby woods,