Free Remember to Forget by Deborah Raney Page B

through some genius of special effects. The spectacle of lights took her breath away.
    She’d lost her sense of direction, but at a rise in the road, she spottedanother cluster of lights twinkling in the distance. These were close to the horizon and obviously man-made. Out here it was hard to tell how far away they were, but as the night grew ever blacker, she took courage in their presence. They gave her something to go toward, a goal.
    If she could just make it to those lights, everything might turn out okay.

She glanced furtively over her shoulder and was blinded by headlights cresting the hill behind her.

Chapter Thirteen

    T he rumble of approaching tires on the gravel stilled the chirping crickets. To Maggie, it seemed she’d been walking for days. The night air made her skin clammy. Her guiding, distant lights were ever more elusive—a cruel mirage that teased her with hope before they receded again behind the thousandth hill.
    She glanced furtively over her shoulder and was blinded by headlights cresting the hill behind her. In that moment she made up her mind. She didn’t care if the driver was another lone cowboy or Jack the Ripper. If he stopped and offered her a ride, she would take it. She moved closer to the ditch on the left side of the road and slowed her pace, walking between the edge of the ditch and the ruts that had been worn deep into the road’s surface by decades of eastbound vehicles—or perhaps even by covered wagons.
    In the hours she’d been trudging along this Kansas road, the centuries had seemed to fold back on themselves. Now, strangely, she wouldn’t have been any more surprised to see a stagecoach pull up behind her than she was to see the old wood-paneled station wagon that crept to a stop at her side.
    She stopped in the road, waiting. The window rolled down in a series of jerky movements. The interior lights came on and a young woman’s head appeared. At the same time the back window also slid down. Two matching curly blond heads bobbed into sight, then a third, a spike-haired boy she guessed to be about six.
    “Hey!” the woman yelled. “Everything okay?”
    The children echoed her question and she turned to shush them.
    Maggie approached the car.
    The front window jerked halfway up again. Maggie backed off a couple of steps. She, of all people, understood the woman’s caution.
    “I could use a ride.”
    “Your car break down?” Again three towheads popped out the back window. The woman rolled her eyes at Maggie and stretched over the backseat. “Landon Michael DeVore! Sit. Now. You girls buckle back in.”
    “No. It’s a long story. I’m kind of stranded.”
    “Well, where you headed?”
    “That town up there.” Maggie pointed in the direction of the lights, which had withered into the night again. She hoped she hadn’t imagined them. She was beginning to wonder.
    “Clayburn?”
    She nodded, relieved there was a town.
    “I can give you a ride. You live in Clayburn?”
    “No, I’m just visiting.”
    “Well, come on. Hop in.”
    Maggie jogged around to the passenger side, all at once weak with relief. The woman pushed the door open and scraped a collection of coloring books and McDonald’s Happy Meal bags off the passenger seatonto the floor. Maggie got in and gingerly found a place for her feet on the cluttered floorboard.
    “Where’d you come from? Oh. Sorry. I’m Kaye.” She nodded toward the backseat. “These are my kids. Well, three of them anyway.”
    Maggie turned to smile and wave at the children. “I’m . . . Meg,” she said, remembering in the nick of time.
    The children sat in a row on the backseat—statues watching her with unguarded eyes.
    Their mother laughed. “I ought to hire you to ride with us all the time. I haven’t seen them that quiet since the last time I got a speeding ticket.”
    “The cop made Mama cry,” the little boy offered.
    “Hush, Landon,” his mother said. She gave Maggie a conspiratorial wink. “It worked