It took Danny three days to make the crossing between Antelope Valley and Spearfish Lake. He was pushing fairly hard because there was little else to do but drive. There was a lot of interesting, if empty and cold-looking, desert as he went up I-15 and turned onto I-70. He went through the high country, covered with even more snow than he would expect to find in Spearfish Lake, up through the Eisenhower Tunnel under Loveland Pass, then down into Denver and out onto the plains. The second day, he began to realize that he was catching up with a snowstorm, and only made it to Dubuque before he decided to call it a night. From there he made it on into Spearfish Lake in an easy day, even though the roads proved to be pretty skanky.

Driving that far got pretty dull, especially since much of the trip he often couldn’t go the posted speed limit due to the snow. That gave him a lot of time to think, to reflect on the events of the last few weeks – and the last few years. Not that he actually settled anything in his mind, but the monotony of the drive, especially after leaving Denver, meant that his thoughts ran through pretty much the same channels without churning up much that was very new.

He did think about Amy a lot. There was still quite a bit of residual guilt there – somehow, he thought he ought to have done something, but when he stopped and thought about it, he really couldn’t separate Amelia from the other Redlite Ranch women, at least in a moral sense. The only difference, really, is that he’d known Amy, and fairly well, before she’d shown up there. That made it more personal, but it was her life, after all, and given the circumstances, she was pretty well out of his now.

Somewhere along in Nebraska, the thought crossed his mind that if the sex drive had been a little more evenly distributed between the two sisters he wouldn’t have been in either mess in the first place. There wasn’t anything he could do about that, either; like a lot of things, it was water down the river. And, he reflected, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known that it was pretty unevenly distributed between the two, since at least back to the time when he and Josh were going with Amy and Marsha. He had sort of been a ride-along in that deal when it started, and it really had been more Marsha’s obvious athleticism that had drawn him to her than it was any real promise of teenage sex. Marsha had been a pretty good athlete in those days, and, to be honest, still was – not exactly in a class with his sister Brandy, few women were – but not a long way behind, either.

It was all in the past, now, and that was where he needed to leave it, although he realized it was going to be hard. Maybe being home again, starting over, would help. It was time to move on – or at least, go back and start over.

The roads were all unfamiliar to him – he’d never been that way before, but once he got to Camden, things instantly turned familiar on the bypass around town. He’d been going up and down that road as long as he could remember, not often the last few years but he’d been up it last summer, the last time he’d been in Spearfish Lake with Marsha. North of Camden, the four lanes of the commuter road shrank to two, just about the point where the city gave way to farm fields, which very quickly gave way to forest. There’d been snow on the ground all the way since somewhere west of the Rockies, but now it grew deep again, not like it had been in the high country but filling the woods with its cold white. On north he drove, through familiar towns and past familiar sights . . . Meeker, Blair, Albany River. Next stop, and the last stop, Spearfish Lake. It was home to Danny in a way that Florida had never been. He may have been returning with his tail between his legs, but he was returning.

Not far south of town late in the afternoon, Danny came across the spot where Mr. Sloat had his heart attack all those years ago. It was where he and Josh and Marsha and Amy had rescued him and his wife, saved their lives, cementing four kids together pretty closely in the process, and changing his life in many ways. He could never pass that spot without thinking about that evening, at least a little. Like it or not, it was part of his history.

On towards town . . . there was a gravel road shortcut to downtown that the locals often used to shave a few miles off the State road and miss a lot of the highway business section, but it was never a good idea to use it if there’d been a recent snow. It had been a long, long time since Danny had driven in deep snow, not since he’d married Marsha, so he decided to give it a pass and stayed on the state road down to the stop light at Central Avenue.

He glanced at his watch – his folks would both still be at work, and he didn’t have a key to the house. Might as well stop off and tell them I’m home, he thought. He headed on down Central toward the lake; the Record-Herald was at the corner of Second, down near the shore – but when he stopped at the light at Second, looked across the corner, the Record-Herald wasn’t there! Where the ramshackle old wooden building had stood all his life, there was now a vacant lot, a sign half covered in snow reading, "Future Home – United Bank of Camden Branch Office – A Clark Construction Project."

What the hell? How had that happened?

He sat there frowning as the light changed, and some idiot behind him honked his horn. Confused, he drove on down to Lakeshore and took a left to drive around the block. Now that he thought about it a little, he seemed to remember a phone call in which his mother said the paper was moving, but it hadn’t been of prime interest at the time. But it had happened – where did it go? It didn’t matter really; he could go around the block and over to the appliance store – as far as he knew that was still in the same place.

He glanced down the block, wondering what else had changed. Another sign for the Record-Herald caught his eye, on the front of what he remembered as the Villa Romano Pizza building. He pulled to a stop on the side of the street near the beach, his mind running a little free. He’d had some good times in that building, especially in the days before Marsha had come on the scene. He remembered one night, when a gang of kids hanging around had turned into a little friendly kissy-face and touchy-boobie with Carole Carter, the first time he’d ever managed it. She must have been a senior then, he must have been a junior, the summer before he first started going with Marsha. A long time ago, for sure.

For an instant, he wondered what had happened with Carole – she’d been a good looking blonde, if not terribly well built, kind of skinny, with not a lot in the way of boobies to touch. He remembered seeing her a few times around the campus at Athens in the following years. He’d talked to her a couple times, just catching up, but Marsha would have been around then and resenting him talking with other women, so he must not have talked with her much.

For that matter, what had happened with a lot of the kids he went to school with? Oh, well, he knew that most of the classes that graduated from Spearfish Lake High school had a more or less permanent class gossip living around town, his mother would know who it was, he’d have to look them up some time.

As he got out of the car, he remembered that Villa Romano had closed some time while he’d been in college, and that Marlin Computer had moved in there, but they must have moved on somewhere, too. Oh, well, he thought. It’s like Frenchy said, things change.

The cold wind off the lake bit at him when he got out of the car – he had on the heaviest jacket he owned, so warm he’d hardly ever worn it in Florida, but it was too damn light for Spearfish Lake in January. Doing something about that would have to be an early priority. But, it was enough for this short walk; he waited for a break in the traffic and hustled over to the Record-Herald.

It was a new office, of course, and everything had changed from what he remembered. In the last good memories he had of the old place, the paper had just been switching over from the old desk-sized blue Compugraphic typesetting machines to primitive personal computers, 286s if he remembered correctly. How his mother had raved at how slick they were! Now even those were gone, too . . . there were lots of loose memories coming at him at this moment.

Danny noticed a big painting of an unfamiliar young woman on the wall in back of the front counter, a sharp looking redhead, holding up some kind of an award, and . . . he blinked, barely able to believe his eyes – she was wearing handcuffs!

"Well, look what the cat drug in out of nowhere," a familiar voice said, dragging his attention away from the painting. He looked up – looked up a fair amount, since Mike was about five inches taller than he was, and Danny was not short. Mike McMahon had been the editor of the Record-Herald as long as he could remember, getting to be fiftyish now, he thought, still looks like he’s in good shape. Back while they were still in school, he and Marsha had beaten Mike and his wife Kirsten in the Club mixed pairs championships, and it hadn’t been easy. "Good to see you home. So how was Nevada?" Mike asked.

"Empty," Danny smiled. "We may think there’s not a lot around here, but where I was, there’s nothing out there."

"Your mother said that you were out some place where they used to set off nukes, back in the fifties and sixties," Mike grinned. "That’s got to be getting pretty close to the middle of nowhere."

"The guy who owned the motel where I stayed saw some of them set off," Danny reported. "He said they lit up the whole sky. Is Mom around?"

"She went up the street somewhere, she ought to be back in a few minutes," Mike grinned. "So, how have you been?"

"Getting along," Danny smiled. "Nevada turned out to be more interesting than I expected, but it’s great to be home."

Mike turned to the open room behind the counter; there were only three people there. "This is Danny Evachevski, Carrie’s youngest," he announced. "You’ve heard a few stories about him."

"Hi, Danny," one of the women said. Danny had to struggle with the name for a second, but realized the middle-aged woman with the dark brown hair was Sally Szczerowski, the ad manager; she’d been there since he was back in grade school.

"Hi, Sally," he said. "How are the kids?" Danny didn’t have a lot of clear memories of her kids; they were quite a bit younger than he was.

"Oh, Nicole’s married, of course," she reported. "She’s teaching history over at the school, and she has Terry in one of her classes, that’s got to be fun. He’ll be graduating next year, and Meagan will be starting high school this fall. They’re growing up on me. Do you know everybody else here?"

"Don’t know anybody else here," Danny nodded.

"Well, this is Debbie Elkstalker, my sidekick," Sally smiled at the woman at the next desk.

With that name, she was obviously an Indian, dark-skinned, not small, apparently fairly big-boned, with a face that could easily be called exotic, and long, straight black hair pulled into a pony tail. About his age, he thought, but he had no memory of her. "Three Pines?" he guessed out loud, referring to the reservation over in the next county.

"At least somebody remembers the right name," she smiled. "Since the casino opened, most people call it Three Cherries, anymore."

"Back over there in the corner," Mike added, "is Matt Peckanen; he’s the junior reporter, but he doesn’t count anymore. He’s been here about as long as any one we’ve ever had except me, but we’re finally running him out of here, down to the Geneva Post the end of the month."

"Good deal," Danny said by way of congratulation. The Record-Herald had a long tradition of hiring reporters, usually right out of college. They would stay for six months or a year or more to break into the business and build up their resumés a little before moving on from the little country weekly, usually to a much larger daily paper. Some had moved well beyond that; Danny barely remembered Andy Bairnsfether, who had been a junior reporter there for a while, back when he’d been in grade school – he now covered the White House for CNN!

Danny glanced back at the picture on the wall – had no idea who that was. "That picture?" he asked. "What’s that all about?"

"Oh, that’s Brenda Hodunk with her Aherns Award," Mike smiled. "She’s a real point of pride around this place. That’s like the second highest award in American journalism, and I’ve kicked myself ever since that I didn’t submit it to the Pulitzers. It worked out OK, she got her Pulitzer last year, anyway."

Danny had never heard of the Aherns Award, but the name ‘Pulitzer’ rang a bell. "She must have been something pretty special."

"Yeah, she was," Mike smiled. "She had about the hardest damn nose I ever ran across in a reporter, and especially for a junior reporter. You remember how crappy the Camden Press used to be?"

"I remember it used to be pretty bad," Danny nodded.

"After she got the Aherns, they kept bugging her to go to work there. She really didn’t want to; she’s from Camden and didn’t want to move back near her mother, so finally she told them she didn’t want to go down there for anything less than city editor, a pot load of money, and full control," Mike laughed. "Well, they wanted her and that award hanging on the wall bad enough that they finally went for it."

"And I’ll bet she didn’t like that one bit," Danny laughed, remembering the girls at the Redlite Ranch jacking up the price to ‘walk’ a client – and then having them meet their price. It sounded like exactly the same thing.

"You got it, she was steamed," Mike grinned. "You have to remember Brenda was barely a year out of college at the time, but the old city editor down there had mostly hired his staff on the basis of whose pants he thought he could get into, rather than if they knew any journalism. Brenda walked in there the first morning, fired a couple people right on the spot when they got mouthy, and a couple more quit before she got the chance. Then she pretty much took a bull whip to the rest of the staff. She got them working so hard that they won the Pulitzer just to get her off their asses. And they did, she’s city editor at the Nashville Tennessean now."

Serious domme, Danny thought without saying anything. She must have the disposition of Jennlynn interrupted by a phone sales call, or even worse, Marsha . . . with PMS. "So, what’s the deal with the handcuffs?" he asked.

"You didn’t hear about that?" Mike frowned. "I thought you got the paper."

"I used to," Danny shrugged. "And then I discovered that Marsha was throwing it out before I could get to it. She didn’t want me knowing about or even thinking of Spearfish Lake. So, what didn’t I hear about?"

"It was the story that got the Aherns for her in the first place," Mike explained. "She got friendly with Carole Carter not long after she got here, and she got the idea of wearing Carole’s spare pair for a couple months, just to identify with her."

"It was sort of a vision quest for her," Debbie added. "Although she didn’t think of it that way at the time. She sure came out of it a stronger, more confident person than when she started, not that she didn’t have a pretty good start already."

"Carole Carter?" Danny frowned, remembering the blonde he’d just been recalling having some heavy drama with, way back when. "You’ve lost me. What did she have to do with it?"

"You didn’t hear about that, either?" Mike shook his head. "Hell, I thought everyone knew about it."

"About what?" Danny replied with a puzzled look.

"Carole wore handcuffs for six years straight," Mike said flatly.

"She what?"

"She was a little crazy," Mike shrugged. "It turned out that it was kind of a survivor’s guilt thing over Wendy. I think everybody sort of realized it, but nobody said much about it."

"You’ve still got me lost," Danny shook his head. "What was the deal with Wendy?"

"She almost got killed in a jetski accident." Mike shrugged. "Just thinking about it, it couldn’t have been long after you got married and moved to Florida. She’s been a quadriplegic ever since. Interesting woman, she’s gone a long way to overcome it. Carole was wearing handcuffs at the time in a two-month project for some kind of a psychology research, and she just never took them off. It was sort of a way to make herself handicapped to identify with Wendy. Wendy wound up writing a book about the whole thing, it got published last summer."

Danny shook his head again. "I can’t imagine how something like that could have gone on for so long and I never heard a thing about it. I mean, it’s not like I’ve been totally gone, I have been back here a few times in the past eight years."

"The weird thing is that nobody in town took any notice of it," Debbie commented. "I mean for years, if you saw Carole she had her handcuffs on. You just didn’t notice, or if you did you didn’t say anything. I mean, it’s like someone has a prosthetic arm or something." She shrugged and went on. "Now, Brenda, I thought she was the crazy one, since she didn’t have the same kind of reason. But it was a real life changing experience for her, so it worked out."

"Unbelievable," Danny shook his head. "You say Wendy wrote a book about it?"

"It’s mostly about Brenda’s perceptions about knowing Carole and wearing handcuffs," Mike explained. "But Brenda’s articles from the paper are included."

Danny shook his head. "Just unbelievable. Where can I get my hands on a copy of this book?"

"Right here," Mike smiled reaching behind the counter and pulling out a hardcover book with a dust jacket. "We got several dozen copies wholesale. That’s $23.95."

Danny glanced at the book; there was a photo of a woman’s hands, handcuffed together by some really heavy-duty handcuffs. The cover read "Andromeda Chained, by Wendy Carter."

"Unbelievable," Danny said again, shaking his head as he reached for his wallet. "How could someone manage that?"

"Remarkably well," Mike said. "We all watched Brenda learn to manage it, and she did her regular job all the way through it. It’s in the book, really pretty good reading."

Danny glanced at it. It had to be more interesting than War and Peace, and it was pretty clear he was going to have some time to kill until the rock trains started running. This was an unbelievable enough story in the first place, but to have it happen in his home town and never have heard a word about it was pretty incredible. He’d missed a lot. What else had happened that he didn’t know about?

He was still standing there, shaking his head at the thought when he heard a rise in the noise level and the slight change in pressure as the wind off the lake blew a cold draft in the front door. He looked up, to see his mother coming in the door, dressed for winter in Spearfish Lake, with a big smile on her face. "Danny!" she said, "You’re looking good!"

"I feel good," he said, "especially to be back home."

"How was the trip?" she asked as she came over and put her arms around him. She was still pretty slender, the way she’d always been, getting some gray in her long brown hair, starting to look her age, now – which had to be pretty close to sixty, he thought. Fifty-six, fifty-seven, something like that.

"Long, cold, dull, windy, and snowy," he smiled as he put his arms around her. "I just made a pit stop every four hours."

"How was Nevada?"

"Interesting, what little I saw of it," he told her. "The best sight of all was the courtroom in Piute Wells just a few days ago."

"I’m glad that’s over with," she sighed. "And, I mean all of it. But let’s not talk about that now."

"Fine with me," he said. "I’ve been trying to put it behind me, and it does seem like more than six weeks ago, well, seven weeks ago, now."

"Oh, Danny," she said, squeezing down hard. "It’s just good that you’re back. Look, I’ve got a few things to finish up here, and then I’ll head home and get started on dinner. Is there anything special you want?"

"Nothing special," he said. "In fact, I really don’t want very much. I’ve been eating fairly heavily; I need to cut back a little."

He heard Mike stifle a laugh. "Not much chance of that with your mother involved," the tall editor said.

"Says the guy who can out eat anyone in the building," his mother laughed. Danny remembered that Mike had one of those irritating metabolisms where everything he ate went right through him without hanging around long – in other words, he could eat like a horse and never put on an ounce. "Look," his mother said, turning back to him, "why don’t you go over and let your father know you’re home? If he’s not busy, maybe he’d like to knock off early and come home."

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