AFTER TWO HOURS OF straight driving and forty more minutes of going down this street and that, Julie finally found the house. She tossed the sofa cushion into the back, no longer needing it. “That’s the place!” she whispered as if the people in the house across the street could hear her. “How do you want to handle this?”
They both stared at the new-model home with the painted green rocks in the front that served to look like a grassy lawn. Being a desert community, keeping up even a small patch of grass was costly and time consuming, so some people seemed to have gone the green-rock way, while others sported front yards of white or lava rocks.
The house they studied looked quiet and unoccupied.
“I hate to admit this, but the woman will probably run scared if I show up—if she’s even ther
