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The Heart Only
Knows
Paperback: 258 pages
Publisher: Covenant Communications Inc
ISBN: 1577348613
Published: August 2001
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Only the
heart knows how to find what is precious. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
When your
fiancé is an incredibly handsome professional baseball player, it’s hard to
find time to be alone. Not that Andi Reynolds is complaining. It’s just that
everyone wants a piece of superstar Greg Howland—from the news-hungry media,
to his adoring fans. The only thing that keeps Andi sane is the knowledge
that in a few short months, Greg will take her to the temple, and then he’ll
be all hers…until the next baseball season, of course.
But then an old enemy begins
stalking Greg and the stakes rise drastically. When the stalker kidnaps
Andi’s younger brother, Greg must make an impossible choice—who will live,
and who will die.
“A great finish for a fantastic
series! My whole family enjoyed them. The loveable, human characters show
us that we can overcome our trials and achieve our dreams. I highly
recommend these books and look forward to more!” Betsy Brannon Green,
best selling author of Hearts in Hiding & many others—from a review
Excerpt from
"The Heart Only Knows"
Only the
heart knows how to find what is precious.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Chapter 1
Andi
Reynolds didn’t believe in harbingers, omens, or foreboding. It was difficult,
then, for her to explain the flutter of her heart and the sudden clamminess of
her palms as she gazed up at the solitary crow perched in the rotted pine.
One
crow for sorrow, two crows for joy…
Despite
herself, Andi gripped her book as she glanced around. These woods were full of
crows; there must be another one somewhere in sight. She knew from working at a
zoo that crows are sociable creatures. It was only reasonable to suppose that
this one was part of a flock.
Murder,
she reminded herself. A company of crows
is called a murder.
Her emerald eyes scanned the wide
Arizona
sky above the Mogollion Rim, but there was only the one crow to be seen. One
crow for sorrow. Andi’s heart went from a flutter to a stead thump, and
her breath came a little faster. At the bird’s sudden, raucous cry, she
pressed the book to her chest, then closed her eyes and drew a deliberate,
calming breath. This was ridiculous. She wasn’t afraid of a crow,
for heaven sakes.
Let
my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.
A
dimple winked into Andi’s cheek and she opened her eyes and smiled,
remembering. Last night her brother had held a flashlight under his chin and
recited “The Raven” for his part in the family reunion talent show.
Apparently, pieces of Poe’s classic were still caught in her subconscious, but
she shouldn’t be silly enough to note them. It was almost
noon
on a bright and beautiful day in early September, not “once upon a
midnight
dreary,” and she had to stop all this “wondering, fearing, doubting,
dreaming.”
Well,
she thought as her dimples deepened, perhaps
not the dreaming. All the dreaming she had done of late was of her fiancé,
Greg Howland, and their still-too-distant wedding day. She pulled a cell phone
from the pocket of her jeans to consult the time. Greg should call any minute
now, which was why she had left the campground—to have a measure of privacy
when he called to tell her about his visit to the District Attorney’s office.
A
sudden realization came tapping at the door of Andi’s conscious mind. While
all the lovely wondering and dreaming she had done lately was of Greg, all the
odd doubting and fearing was for him as well. It wasn’t foreboding she felt
now as much as it was certainty of things unseen: Greg was in trouble. She knew
it. She had known it for some time in fact—despite his denials—but she
hadn’t known the cure for his cares and could only guess at the cause.
But
in an hour or so, she thought as she continued to scan the sky for black birds,
she would finally see him again and hold him close and know that he was
safe—if only for the moment—in her arms. But the sky was empty of crows and
the nagging fear returned. Shouldn’t he have finished with the District
Attorney by now? Greg had said he would call to tell her when he was on the way.
Where was he?
One
crow for sorrow, she recited, looking up at the majestic, ebony bird, but
only because one is such a lonely number. Checking her phone again to make
certain it was on and that she was still within the cell area, Andi slipped it
back into her pocket. The crow called out mournfully.
“Keep
calling,” she counseled it softy. “Your love will come.”
Nevermore.
Andi
frowned, then tried to shake off this final flight of her fancy by reminding
herself that Poe had placed his raven on a bust of Pallas Athena, the Greek
goddess of wisdom, to show the folly of allowing superstition to overcome
reason.
Thank
goodness I’ve always been a reasonable sort of person, she thought as she
turned away from the withered pine toward a more verdant part of the forest. And
thank goodness I’m studying Shakespeare this semester instead of Poe.
She
dropped the thin volume of Romeo and Juliet onto the soft carpet of pine needles and removed
the phone from her pocket before sitting down. If Romeo and Juliet had each had a cell phone, she thought, their
romance would have turned out better. She opened the book and turned to the
part of the play where she’d left off earlier. True,
Romeo might still have been exiled to
Mantua
, and Juliet might have had to stay behind
on that balcony in
Verona
, but at least they could have talked
about it.
Certainly
Andi couldn’t imagine asking, “Wherefore art thou?” of Greg and receiving
no response. And there was no telling on any given day wherefore art he was,
although it was never, unfortunately, in the bushes below her window. Being
engaged to a profession baseball player was not without its drawbacks. For one,
it meant that she saw Greg more often on television and in newspaper pictures
than she did in person. But she was fortunate, she knew, to live in a time when
she could at least talk to him. Without a doubt, hearing her love’s voice
every day helped stave off the fatal combination of melancholy and
miscommunication which had sent Juliet to the apothecary.
Andi
opened her book and tried to concentrate on Juliet’s concerns rather than her
own, but found her attention wandering back to Greg. What was taking him so
long? She fingered her phone and watched a squirrel gather pinon nuts. When the
rodent paused with full cheeks and seemed to regard her quizzically, she held up
the phone. “I’m expecting a call,” she told it. “Cell phones are the
greatest invention of the twentieth century.”
“Absolutely,”
a voice agreed.
As
part-time keeper at the Phoenix Zoo, Andi was used to talking to animals—but
not to hearing them respond.
“If
it’s a choice between antibiotics and cellular communication,” the voice
continued, “give me a telephone any day.” Andi’s cousin leaned around the
wide trunk of a nearby tree.
“Oh,
hi, Zona,” Andi said, mustering a weak smile. If she had made a list of people
she hoped to avoid by leaving the campground, Zona May Reynolds would have been
at the very top. Andi tried not to stare at her cousin’s boysenberry-hued hair
and quadruple-pierced ears, but the only alternative was to gape at her
outlandish outfit. Who but Zona wore a Speedo tank top with Bermuda shorts and
combat boots? She looked like she had tumbled out of one of Andi’s little
sister’s books—the one where you turned the tri-cut pages to make a picture
of something comic—in this case a mermaid/tourist/fireman. Andi regretted the
involuntary note of dismay in her voice as she asked, “What are you doing all
the way out here?
Zona
lifted her own wonder of modern technology—a 35mm camera. “Photographing the
wildlife,” she said, “before somebody captures it all to put in zoos.” Her
crazily plucked brows rose in challenge.
If
Andi had learned anything in the last day and a half of the reunion, it was that
Zona May was not only anti-zoo, she was anti-Church and
anti-almost-everything-else right now. Unless you were prepared for a debate you
couldn’t win, it was prudent to defer to her on relatively minor issues like
animal rights, and to avoid major issues like women and the priesthood at all
costs. “Well, I came out to talk to—”
“The
squirrels,” Zona said.
“No,
to Greg.”
“Oh,
right,” Zona said. “The Jock. AKA Poster Boy for the Decline of Western
Civilization.” She got to her feet, making no effort to brush the forest floor
from her baggy shorts before reaching for her camera bag. “I predict you’ll
get more intelligent responses from the squirrels.”
Andi’s
eyes flashed, but Zona’s departure and the digital melody of the phone saved
her the necessity of a retort. She tossed her mane of auburn curls over one
shoulder. “Greg!” she said. “Where are you?
“Just leaving town,” he responded. His voice was deep and quiet and
unbelievably dear. Andi’s fingers curled around the phone as he added, “The
deposition took a little longer than I expected.”
“What
did they say?” she asked. “Do they have enough on Zeke to convict him?”
Greg’s former publicist, Zeke Martoni, had
attempted to blackmail the ballplayer, using his relationship with Greg’s
older brother to gain information to gamble on the World Series. In the process
he had addicted Jim Howland to illegal drugs. Now Jim was dead, and Zeke had
been indicted. Knowing this, Andi was even more concerned by Greg’s slow
response. She gripped the phone tighter. “Greg?”
He
cleared his throat. “The DA said my testimony ought to guarantee Zeke fifty
years behind bars.”
Andi
listened for elation—or at least satisfaction—in his voice, but it wasn’t
there. Instead, he sounded weary. “Martoni will be almost a hundred years old
if he gets out,” she told him. “At least we can be pleased about that.”
“I
guess fifty years in prison is going to have to do,” Greg responded. “At
least until a better punishment can be arranged for eternity.”
“Eternity?”
Andi repeated as she looked up at the tips of the gently swaying trees.
“Isn’t that how long it’s been since I’ve seen you?” As top pitcher
for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Greg had been on the road with them for more than
a week, but to Andi it had seemed more like a lifetime. “I’ve missed you,”
she continued, surprised and pleased to find that her worries about Martoni
could be overshadowed by the dappled sunshine on her face and the joy of knowing
she and Greg would be together soon. “When will you be here?”
“About
an hour and a half,” he guessed. “Better tell the Board of Inquiry to
assemble.”
She
smiled up into the sky—a sky as deep and blue as Greg’s incredible eyes.
“My family will love you as much as I do,” she promised.
“Uh,
huh,” he said. “Tell me that one again. It’s my favorite fairy tale.”
He
wasn’t as serious now, Andi thought in relief. She could almost see his
lopsided grin when he added, “Ill tell it to you
then. Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who lived in a tall ivory
tower. Everybody in her kingdom was a scholar or an attorney or a physicist.”
He paused when she giggled then concluded ruefully, “And they all prayed each
and every day for a hick ballplayer to come along to dumb down their
bloodlines.”
“You’re the smartest man I know,” Andi protested.
“Smart
enough to marry you.” His voice was rich and low and full of longing.
Andi
was about to remind him that fiary tales always ended in “happily ever
after” when the crow above her spread its blue-black wings and sailed from its
perch on the pine to a fallen log eight feet from Andi’s knees. There it sat
perfectly still, seeming to read her mind with its knowing yellow eyes. The
blissful words she might have said died on her lips, and goosebumps rose on her
bare arms.
’Tis
the wind and nothing more.
“Hurry, Greg,” she whispered.
“Andi?
Is something wrong?”
“No,”
she said, but the crow cocked its feathered head.
One
crow for sorrow.
“Hurry
and finish the story,” she urged.
“Huh?”
“The
fairy tale.” Her voice sounded strained even to her ears, and she tried to
lighten it. “Don’t you know how to end a fairy tale?”
“You
mean ‘and they lived happily ever after’?”
“Yes,”
Andi said. She turned her back to the bird. “Promise me we’ll live happily
ever after.” She longed to be held in Greg’s strong arms, but for now she
would settle for a note of reassurance in his voice. “Greg?” But there was
only silence.
She
lowered the phone from her ear. He must have entered the first of many canyons
between
Phoenix
and the Rim. Once again, their connection was lost.
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