Suspicion

Steph reached the pharmacy’s white-painted steel door. The open pharmacy door.

She froze in disbelief. She remembered locking up the night before. That’s when she’d turned and nearly bumped into Hal. She blushed at the memory. But she had closed and locked the door.

Hadn’t she?

A chill ran through her. A vise of tension wound itself around her head. Her heart beat louder and her breath came in short spurts.

“Easy,” she murmured. No reason to freak out. Not yet.

Careful not to let her fingers touch anything, Steph kneed the door ajar. She slipped inside and headed for the cabinet where she kept the narcotics locked up. But before she got there, she caught sight of the empty shelf against the back wall.

The pseudoephedrine was gone. Her worst nightmare had come true. Her thief was making meth.

Ginny Aiken, a former newspaper reporter, lives in Pennsylvania with her engineer husband and their three younger sons—the oldest married and flew the coop. Born in Havana, Cuba, raised in Valencia and Caracas, Venezuela, she discovered books early, and wrote her first novel at age fifteen while she trained with the Ballets de Caracas, later known as the Venezuelan National Ballet. She burned that tome when she turned a “mature” sixteen. Stints as reporter, paralegal, choreographer, language teacher and retail salesperson followed. Her life as wife, mother of four boys and herder of their numerous and assorted friends, brought her back to books and writing in search of her sanity. She’s now the author of more than twenty published works and a frequent speaker at Christian women’s and writers’ workshops, but has yet to catch up with that elusive sanity.

For I have kept the ways of the Lord; I have not done evil by turning away from my God.

—Psalms 18:21

To Lynette Eason, a real-deal friend,

for helping me stay sane in a year of insanity.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Loganton, North Carolina

“It looks even more ominous out there than it did fifteen minutes ago.”

Pharmacist Stephanie Scott shuddered as she stared out the front window of her general store/pharmacy again. September could bring nasty weather into her mountainous corner of the Carolinas, and that purply black sky in the early evening meant nothing good.

She turned to Jimmy Miller, her stock clerk. “You can go ahead and leave. It’s ready to storm.”

The sixteen-year-old’s freckled face brightened with a grin. “Cool, huh?”

“Only if I’m indoors—which is where you better get going unless you want to become a lightning rod.”

With a wave, Jimmy ran off, and Steph resumed her nightly routine. She tallied up the prescriptions she’d filled, cross-checked her computer list against her handwritten log and relaxed when everything matched up. She then locked her controlled-substances cabinet, brought down the metal grate over the counter, twisted the combination knob, left the pharmacy part of the store and then secured that door as well.

With her purse over her right shoulder and the night-deposit sack under her elbow, she latched the front of the store, set the alarm and slipped out the back. The satisfying snick of the dead bolt gave her a sense of security each and every night. She’d done everything she could to protect the community from drug thieves. That was a major source of concern and topic of discussion among pharmacists of late.

As she took the key from the regular door lock, an unexpected scritch sounded behind her.

Steph froze. Before she could turn, she was shoved off the back steps. She flew through the air, the key clutched tight in her fist. She landed on the filthy asphalt alley floor by the communal Dumpster, banging her right leg against the cold metal.

Pain stole her breath, but she knew what she had to do.

“Help!” Steph yelled, so loud her face throbbed from the effort.

A dark figure launched itself onto her back. The sharp blow from a knee to her spine took her breath away. Her attacker’s weight on her middle flattened her against the ground; the upright position gave the mugger advantage over her.

“Give me the key,” her attacker said in a guttural whisper.

Steph squirmed, tossed, bucked and kicked, all the time holding the key in her fist. She shoved her hand between her abdomen and the asphalt, out of the mugger’s reach. The rough surface ground away at the skin on her knuckles. With each kick at her assailant, the knees of her pants ripped more. At no time did she stop screaming.

At no time did her assailant stop beating. Her shoulders and the back of her head felt each blow twice, once when her attacker struck and then again when she hit the alley floor.

Time, however, did stop. Steph registered pain, the heavy weight on her back, the dampness of rain, the stench of trash…and something vaguely spicy and sweet laced in with the rot. Her fear-filled mind couldn’t identify it, but she knew it was there, somehow familiar, just beyond her grasp, important but elusive.