Exhaling in relief, Bay threw a load on her own welder. She began the bottom weld on her spear and was immediately lost in her work.
How long was it before she picked up on the change, the smell? Two minutes, three? It couldn’t have been much longer. In any case, the strong odor, wholly unnatural to their environment and so clearly wrong, prompted her to throw up her hood and sniff again.
She turned around.
Smoke was coming from Glenn’s table, so much smoke that she couldn’t see him. Nevertheless, the nauseating smell told her he was there. Swatting the hood off her head, she ran to his machine, flipped off the ignition switch and, while her reaction was fast, her movements automatic, her mind froze on one thought. Heart attack.
The horrible stench gagged her as much as the smoke did, speaking too clearly of burning clothing and worse. As horror urged retreat, she grabbed the lead to get the stringer out from beneath him, at the same time pushing against his shoulder to roll him off it. In that instant something struck her forearm.
Through tearing eyes and suffocating smoke she saw a metal rod—no, one of the Maiden’s lances.
The spear was impaled through Glenn’s back.
Also available from MIRA Books and HELEN R. MYERS
FINAL STAND
DEAD END
LOST
MORE THAN YOU KNOW
COME SUNDOWN
WHILE OTHERS SLEEP
No Sanctuary
Helen R. Myers
For Norma L. Wilkinson
Who has also known what it takes to stand alone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Like many, I grew up hearing the sage advice “Two things should never be discussed at the dinner table—politics and religion.” An adage, I should add, that was rarely heeded by those who taught it to me. Then my family moved south of the Mason-Dixon Line and, a few years after we were married, my husband and I settled in east Texas, a place, I have wryly concluded, where there are more churches than pine trees. As hard as I try, avoiding the subject of religion here is more difficult yet—in fact it’s virtually impossible. Salutations are typically followed by one of two questions: “What church do you belong to?” or “Who are your people?”
It is partly because of such troubling and inappropriate queries that this story evolved. My other inspiration came from actual crimes—two in particular. One to this day remains unproven, although I’m sure the U.S. Treasury Department continues to watch over it hoping for a break, and the other was brought to trial but failed to win a conviction. From there on, this is a work of fiction. To the best of my knowledge, Mission of Mercy Church does not exist in this area. But sadly, I have seen a few too many variations of it and of characters like Martin Davis and Madeleine Ridgeway. They present great fodder for a writer, but I despair for the innocent minds they abuse and corrupt.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several people need to be thanked for sharing their stories and expertise, or for going out of their way to try to arrange interviews—Darese Cotton, Karen Kelley and Linda Broday. To those of you who write in approval of my protagonists’ “real” professional backgrounds, I hope you’ll enjoy Bay and her work. All credit for its accuracy goes to my husband, Robert, a master craftsman and shaman with metal. Any error there and elsewhere is entirely my own.
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.
—Benjamin Disraeli
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