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"You know, if I can't get my mitts between your thighs, either you're gonna have to go on a diet or you're gonna have to practice your splits in the back room. I don't like you, I don't trust you, and I think you're carrying some contraband on your person. I just feel it."

The back room was a dimly lit hospital-style space where women were forced to endure indignities based on their physiology. Flat on their backs, legs apart, feet stuck in metal stirrups.

"I'll do better," she said, all the while wondering what it would be like if she'd been an actual prisoner there, not a lowly visitor?

The altercation caught the attention of a chubby-faced woman in the back of the line. Her strawberry-blond shag had matted unflatteringly to her forehead. Her pulse quickened, but she kept her affect blank. She didn't want to stand out and she didn't want a trip to the back room for any kind of exam. She carried something so precious, so vital, that its discovery would ruin everything.

Be cool, Ponytail's taking the heat. Thank you, Jesus.

She concealed her prize in a place she hoped no one would dare probe. Inside. Personal. Private. Besides she knew the matron only groped because she got off on it. No one was looking for someone to take much of anything out of here ... they mostly watched for contraband coming in to the visiting room.

The matron fixed her eyes on the strawberry blonde with the secret. Her eyes held her with unyielding grip. She waited a beat.

"You can go," she said.

The woman with the secret acknowledged the command and started walking in the direction of the lockers in which she had stored her coat and car keys before going under the arbor of razor wire, through the gate, to the visiting room.

"Wait a minute," the matron said.

It felt like her heart stopped beating. She was going to die. Going to be caught. Adrenaline kicked her ticker back into play. She's going to take me in the back room. She going to ruin everything.

"Did you hear me?"

She slowly turned.

"Are you speaking to me?"

"No, I'm talking to the man in the moon"

She stared. Her heart bounced. Thump. Thump. Thump.

"Get over here"

She stepped back toward the matron.

"You forgot your purse"

Her hands were sweating now, so much so, she thought the vinyl zippered purse would slip from her fingers. She reached for it and acknowledged the gesture with a quick smile.

"Oh, thanks"

Like others who had been around the matron, she faked a smile.

The woman smiled, hers strangely genuine. "No problem. And you have a nice day."

With that, the strawberry blonde hurried to the lockers. Soon she'd be home, and in time destiny would come to pass.

BOOK ONE

The Eye of the Storm

Chapter One

Monday, 5:36 EM., Cherrystone, Washington

Emily Kenyon was thrashed and she looked it. She pulled herself from her gold Honda Accord, picked up her purse, and walked toward the front door. She turned to view the end of Orchard Avenue. The neighborhood of vintage homes was safe. Unscathed. Not a single fish-scale shingle from the threestory painted lady across the street had been harmed. Not so much as a splinter. Emily could even hear kids playing a couple of doors down. Everything was as it had been. The only hint that the world had turned over was the slight scent of acrid smoke that wafted through the air. It was faint, but enough of a reminder that across town homes and cars had burned.

It had been two days since the tornado pounced on a section of Briar Falls Estates two miles away. It came almost without warning and left a jagged swathe of destruction that stole the hard work of homeowners and gardeners in ten minutes' time. Roofs had been peeled off. Play sets and bi cycles hurled into trees. There was no making sense of whose house had been spared and whose hadn't. Destruction reigned on the west side of Hawes Avenue, while the east side remained pristine. Across the street from a home that had been nearly ripped in two, a birdbath stood without a drop spilled over its chipped stone rim.

No one died. It was true that an elderly lady who had holed up in her bathroom was in bad shape and had been hospitalized. Emily expected that the woman, in her eighties, would survive despite her trauma. The lady was a retired junior high social studies teacher with a classroom assignment that indicated she was tougher than most. After all, if she could endure teenagers of the 1960s, she'd survive the tornado, too.

Emily stepped into the foyer. As she set down her purse on an antique walnut console table, its contents shifted. Her detective's badge holder slipped out along with a pink lipstick she wished she'd used up and could toss. But she was thrifty and, despite the fact that it didn't really work with her dark brown hair and eyes, she'd wear it until it was gone. She scooted the badge and lipstick tube back inside the pouch and called out for her daughter.

"Jenna? I'm home"

The scent of cinnamon toast and an empty glass of milk on the counter indicated Jenna was somewhere in the house. Emily didn't wait for a response.

"I'm going to take a shower. Then let's go out and get something to eat"

"Okay, Mom," a voice finally came from down the hall. "I'm on the phone. I'll talk to you when you're out. I'm hungry. Take a fast shower!"

Emily smiled. Jenna was seventeen, but still very much her little girl. It was just the two of them now. David had left for Seattle and become a somewhat shadowy figure since the divorce was final. There had been a few dates with new men even a kind of serious affair with a local lawyer. Cary McConnell was too possessive and controlling and Emily had enough of that with her first and only-marriage. Cary still called but she avoided him whenever she could. That wasn't easy. Cherrystone, Washington, was a town of less than 15,000 people. She was in the courthouse two or three times a week. So was he.

Emily snake-hipped out of her black skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, and let it fall to the floor. She was slender, blessed with long legs and a figure that looked more twenty than forty, which she was approaching on her next birthday. She twisted the shower knob with the red H all the way to the left. The C was moved a quarter turn. The old pipes clanked and steam swirled. Emily liked hot water.

"Pietro's?" she called out before stepping inside the whiteand-black tiled interior. "I'm thinking pizza."

Of course she really wasn't. She was thinking of the tornado and its aftermath. Twisters were rare occurrences in Washington state. Only a handful of damaging storms had been recorded there; the worst had been one that killed eleven people near Walla Walla in 1952. The twister that came to Cherrystone on Saturday had howled in the darkness and snatched up all in its wake. Houses and cars were shredded in a giant steel-toothed blender. A dairy near the junction of Wayne Road and U. S. 91 had been so pulverized that a magnifying glass was needed to determine what color the barn paint had been before the storm. The Cherrystone Granary was flattened, which meant already scarce jobs instantly had become even more limited. Five trucks, carefully parked in a row after the shift change, had been tossed to their absolute ruin. Power lines snapped like frayed jute. A semi was lifted more than a hundred yards and slammed into a hillside.

Emily tilted her head backward; hot water beyond a temperature most could endure flowed over her body, sending the stress of the freak storm, and the worries of a long day, down the drain. Stepping from the shower, Emily wrapped a thick cotton towel around her body. She bent over, wrapped a second one around her head, then flipped her hair back. She called once more to Jenna.

"You never answered, honey. Is Pietro's all right?"