Winter's Edge Read Free Page A

you can answer that far better than we can, if you wanted to. All we know of your movements is that you left your husband five weeks ago, two weeks before you turned up in that wrecked car. Perhaps you’ve changed your mind and feel like enlightening us?” He didn’t look hopeful.
    She shook her head.
    “I’m afraid I can’t.” Despite the man’s hostiliiy she wanted the same answers that he did, and she made an effort to smile politely.
    “I sun ply don’t remember. Not right now, at least. I
     
    should before long, or at least that’s what the doctor assures me. ” He snorted, his contempt obvious. He must have thought she was a spoiled, frivolous creature, and yet she didn’t feel very frivolous, except for this silk suit she was wearing. Had she got it from her handsome husband, she wondered, the one she’d run away from? Or from her dead lover?
    “Is my husband here yet?” she asked, dreading the moment when she had to meet the stranger who would have so much control over her life, the stranger she had run from.
    There seemed no way to avoid it much longer.
    Apparently there was.
    “He’s not coming,” Lieutenant Ryker said shortly.
    “He’s gotten a friend of his to come and get you. I don’t imagine his feelings toward you are any too charitable right now.”
    “I imagine not,” she agreed faintly, wondering desperately what, besides a husband she hated, would await her when she arrived at her forgotten home. The answers were there. The answers she needed, the reason she’d run.
    But more than answers might await her. She couldn’t picture a place, or a person. But she recognized the familiar feelings that swept over her as she contemplated her return.
    Longing.
    And fear.

Chapter Two
    The car sped across the endless stretch of crowded, highway, the landscape brown, dead and dreary. What an awful time of year, she thought gloomily. Everything dead from winter, the spring teasingly out of sight. She wondered dismally where she was going. Bucks County, they’d told her. Somehow that didn’t sound promising.
    “Excuse me, Officer Stroup.” She leaned forward and spoke to the thickset shoulders in front of her.
    “Where is it exactly that we’re headed?” He permitted himself a stare of incredulity before returning his stolid gaze to the fog-shrouded highway.
    “Come off it, Mrs. Winters. You know as well as I do where we’re going. To , your husband’s farm in Belltown, Pennsylvania. In Bucks County, where you’ve lived for the past seven years.” She leaned back with a languor that came easily to her, a languor she didn’t like. She sat back up stiffly.
    “Do I know you?” she asked suddenly. She hadn’t registered any sense of familiarity when she’d been
     
    introduced to the sullen hulk of her husband’s errand boy, one of the local policemen, apparently.
    “Your husband and I have been friends for years,” he said, but there was an undercurrent in his voice she couldn’t quite define.
    “We could have been friends too, if you know what I mean. If you weren’t so picky.”
    She could guess what he meant, and she shuddered.
    “Why didn’t he come and get me?” She finally voiced the question that had been eating away inside her. There was no reason it should bother her-she didn’t remember the man, so why should he have the ability to hurt her? But he did. Perhaps it was no wonder that she hated him.
    “I don’t imagine he wants to have any more to do with you than he can help,” Stroup shot back, his thick red neck mottled with irritation.
    “I owed him a favor or two, so I offered to take this little chore off his hands for him. Besides, I thought you might be feeling a little less uppity after getting involved in a murder.”
    Her eyes met his in the rearview mirror, and there was no mistaking the meaning in them. Another shudder washed over her.
    “I’m feeling as uppity as ever,” she said sharply, leaning back against the seat. Her head was throbbing