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from Ukiah this morning, bringing the urn with Josh's ashes in it. Together they planned to carry out Josh's final wish. She sighed. Not exactly a task she was looking forward to, and yet once it was done…
    She sighed again. Once it was done, she could begin to heal. She hoped.
    Shelly glanced at the clock on the nightstand and groaned. Ten o'clock, but her body felt as if she had never gone to sleep. Not getting to bed until three-thirty in the morning would have been bad enough on her system, but jet lag added its very own problems. She made a face. By the time her plane had landed and she'd picked up the new Bronco from the dealership where it had been waiting for her, it had been well into evening. She should have stayed overnight in San Francisco—as her more seasoned traveling friends had advised. Oh, well, she had never been very good at taking advice—“but you'd think I'd learn,” she muttered, as she dragged herself from the bed and staggered toward the bathroom.
    Half an hour later, freshly showered, her wet hair hanging around her shoulders and wearing a worn pair of blue jeans, she wandered down the stairs. The scent of coffee teased her nostrils the same moment her bare feet hit the bottom step. Maria?
    A flutter in her stomach, tension knotting across her shoulders, Shelly pushed open the door to the kitchen. A sturdy, dark-haired woman, her salt-and-pepper hair neatly caught in a bun at the back of her neck, was in the act of pouring a cup of coffee. At Shelly's entrance she glanced in her direction.
    An uncertain smile curved the woman's lips. There was just the faintest hint of a Mexican accent as she said, “Good morning, Miss Shelly. I hope you slept well after the long drive in last night. Did you find everything you needed?”
    Maria Rios had not changed overmuch in seventeen years. She was not quite the same dark-eyed, smiling young woman Shelly remembered so well from her youth, but she recognized her instantly. As well she should! Maria had come to work for the family when Maria had been a shy twenty-year-old and Shelly had been a two-year-old toddler. Some of her earliest memories were of Maria's lilting voice and soft, warm, comforting body. There were a lot more strands of gray these days in the gleaming black hair and more lines and creases on the smooth olive skin of her face than there had been when Maria had been thirty-six and Shelly had seen her last. But she was still Maria.
    Seeing Maria, the kindness and sympathy, the pain reflected in her brown eyes, Shelly's tension fled. “Oh, Maria,” she cried, the missing years vanishing as if they had never been as they met in the center of the kitchen and embraced, “it is
so
good to see you—even under these circumstances.”
    There were more hugs, tearful exchanges, half-started sentences, smiles that crumpled, but above all Shelly was aware of the warm welcome and the shared grief.
    “Well, well,” drawled a half-remembered voice, “what you don't see when you haven't got a gun.”
    Shelley spun around, noticing for the first time the sun-worn face of the old cowboy seated at the oak table in the sunroom attached to the kitchen. She stared at him for several seconds, trying to place that dark, creased face, the white hair of his head, and the truly magnificent handlebar mustache that draped the lower half of his face. It was the mustache that gave him away.
    “Acey!” she cried happily. “I didn't expect you to be here.”
    He rose to his feet, revealing a small, wiry frame, the worn blue jeans fitting his narrow hips in a way that younger men envied. “No reason you should, girl,” he said as he swept her into a hard embrace. “It's damn fine to see you again—even under these circumstances.”
    Acey Babbitt had to be over seventy, and yet there was nothing but his lined features and heavily veined hands to reveal it. Certainly his age was not apparent in the bear hug he gave her. When she caught her breath again, Shelly