Chapter One

Grace let weariness settle over her like a blanket. As she drove over the eastern mountains, crossed the width of Ohio, slogged through Indiana and onto the broad plains of Illinois, she was met by a steady cold rain which persisted well into night. It was nearly 10:30 when she reached the suburbs of northern St. Louis. She curled her toes in the fleece-lined duck shoes and wished for a hot drink and an electric blanket. She ignored the slight chugging sound the car made. Nearly there now, just a hundred or more miles over the hills in the dark.

Her fingers thumped against the dashboard, “C’mon, c’mon,” a prayer to the Toyota heating gods. She tapped harder. After a whistle that would have done justice to a steaming kettle, the heater grumbled a promise of more warmth.

The winding asphalt of the St. Louis suburbs gave way to the I-370 outer loop stretching through the flood plains of the Missouri River. Suburbia sprawled here, too, with planned neighborhoods trying to mimic the feel of the town squares she’d known as a child. Under a large round clock tower, a facade of brick advertised a dry cleaner. New salt-box colonials peeked through perfectly spaced, perfectly matched ten-foot-tall Bradford pears, the builder’s cookie-cutter answer to landscaping. Federal-style row houses crowded in, all symmetrical and matching, like marching soldiers. In the dark, just past the development, lay the levees holding back the river with its sloughs and inlets.

Grace pushed her hair out of her eyes and checked the clock again. Past Columbia, another crossing of the winding River would bring her near home. There was a hum from the rain grooves in the pavement meeting her tires, slick singing as the wet bridge rails flew by. She looked hard, scanning, futilely searching for the thirty-foot-high cutout silhouettes of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that once graced the bluff overlooking the River. Spotlights should reveal a tall, buckskin-clad pair of explorers on the steep hillside. At some point, someone had scuttled up the bluff and cut off Meriwether and William’s heads. They stood for many years, trekking across that ridge with empty shoulders. Grace and her three sisters would kick their small legs against the deep backseat of the Chevy and point them out, squealing with glee, knowing sight of the explorers promised they were nearing Granny Stillwell’s house.

Lewis and Clark, tattered and worn, were eventually removed from the river bluff, no view of them now in her mirror, another missing mark of a childhood more than thirty years gone.

She was leaving her house, her job— just bagging the whole thing. What had once been interesting and fulfilling had become dr