Prairie Gothic by J.M. Hayes Read Free Book Online Page B

romantic life hadn’t stopped. He and Judy were prominent figures in Buffalo Springs, big fish in the smallest of ponds. Benteen County was the antithesis of modern-urban America in which a sexual revolution and a multitude of personal freedoms made for all sorts of acceptable alternative relationships. It all happened in Benteen County, of course. It was just still “dirty” here—unacceptable— something to keep in the closet and out of the public eye. It wasn’t proper for a teacher or the county sheriff to be involved in extramarital affairs, or at least not to get caught at them, so the two had soon fallen back into bed. Their daughter, Heather, was an excuse for spending a lot of time together. The community could pretend it wasn’t unusual for divorced parents of a child to discuss her future until all hours, even if they were pretty certain a lot more was going on behind the family’s drawn blinds.
    Then along came the other Heather, Two of Two. She was only a few months older, and so physically similar that the pair looked enough alike for strangers to think them twins. And they were actually related—distant cousins by a series of improbable twists the sheriff preferred not to think about. He preferred not to think about them because they were painful, Two of Two having come from about as dysfunctional a family as he could imagine—a family that had met its tragic end right here in Buffalo Springs. The second Heather had suddenly needed a foster family, and remarkably, turned into the linchpin on which he and Judy hung their second pledge to love, honor, and cherish, until death did them part.
    Having two Heathers in the house was a complexity that probably should have been solved by name changes. Though neither Heather had been especially fond of her name before that option presented itself, neither proved willing to abandon what she was used to. And soon, both were arguing it wasn’t necessary. It was no problem to them to call each other Heather. They always knew to whom they were speaking. The solution finally developed from the first Heather’s addiction to Star Trek. The moment the character Seven of Nine appeared on the Voyager series, she knew how they would do it. She would be One of Two—after all, she was the first in the house and the natural child and deserved that minuscule privilege. Two of Two didn’t have a problem with it. She was grateful for a place to go and people who wanted her. She retained her own last name, Lane, so that at school, there weren’t two Heather Englishes, but around the house for the last three years, two girls answered together, or avoided answering, when addressed as just Heather, but responded with Borg-like enthusiasm to their Trekkie designations.
    The sheriff parked his Chevy in the street in front of the house and tried to think of an excuse to put off his mission and go do something else. There were plenty of other things that needed doing, but, although he was sure the infant’s mother wouldn’t be found here, he needed to expand belief to certainty. They were going to be hurt by what they would perceive as his lack of trust, and they were going to be angry when he asked them to betray what they knew or suspected about their friends. He didn’t want to do this, as sheriff or as father, but both positions required it of him.
    The wind tried to tear the storm door off the house while he fumbled with the latch and let himself in. It stung his face with occasional snowflakes as well, though he couldn’t tell whether the clouds were fulfilling their threat or the wind was just rearranging what was already lying about.
    Boris, the family’s aging German Shepherd, provided a suitably enthusiastic greeting as the sheriff entered, but the house was ominously silent.
    â€œHeathers?” he shouted, but he already knew there was no one home.
    The note was on the dining room table.
    Don’t