She’d been walking for some time, deciding against taking her colt up into the hills, which is what she normally did. This particular evening, with the stars so bright and the air so mild, she wanted to stroll through the streets of what used to be a friendly, convivial town. Since Kestler and his boys rode in all those months ago, beat up poor old Stefan Moss, the sheriff, and sent him packing, everything had changed. Lawrenceville was now a miserable place to live. People moved away whenever they could, but recently Kestler’s men kept a much tighter rein on people’s movements. Things took a turn for the worse on the fateful night Kestler took a shine to her, approached her in the street, and invited her for dinner.
‘I’m a married woman,’ she said, not that that was her only reason for r
