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he traveled the world as a journalist,and Lily hadn’t really expected him to come back to town for the memorial service.
    “It would have been nice to see him,” Charlie murmured.
    She noticed a twosome working their way slowly down the church’s front steps. The woman was thin but determined in a bright green suit, her hair a shade of red Mother Nature had never intended. One hand manipulated a cane and the other clutched the arm of a tall younger man in a dark gray jacket and pale gray trousers. His hair was brown and in need of a trim. His chin was sharp, and his eyes, she remembered now, were a mix of blue and green, gold and gray, the color of the river on a stormy morning.
    Aaron Mazerik.
    She hadn’t thought about him in years. One quick glimpse of him, though, and she couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t. He’d been startlingly handsome in high school, dangerously handsome, handsome like a panther. The kind of handsome that could spring at you and leave you bleeding.
    She’d been scared to death of him back then. Scared, but intrigued.
    “Isn’t that Aaron Mazerik?” she asked, keeping her tone casual.
    Charlie glanced toward the church steps. “Yeah. All grown-up, just like us.”
    She shook her head in amazement. “I never would have guessed he’d be here in Riverbend. The cops would have run him out of town if he hadn’t had the good sense to leave on his own.”
    “He wasn’t that bad,” Charlie said.
    She shot Charlie a skeptical look.
    “Okay,” Charlie conceded, “so maybe he had a few run-ins with the police. That was a long time ago.”
    “What’s he doing in town now? Who’s that with him?”
    “His mother. She had a stroke a couple of years back. He came home to help her out.”
    Lily resisted the urge to laugh. Aaron Mazerik, the troublemaker, the kid who defied authority, who wore tight black T-shirts to school and spent half his time in the detention room, who seemed to know so much about life, so many dark nasty things, had come home to take care of his mother?
    Evidently Charlie sensed her disbelief. “It gets better,” he added. “He’s the basketball coach at the high school.”
    “You’re kidding!”
    “Coach Drummer retired and Aaron took over the team. And the high school put him on the staff as a counselor or something, working with kids on the edge. He’s got a master’s degree.”
    “Aaron Mazerik?” Her head ached. From the sun, she told herself, from the parching heat. From anything other than the shock of learning that the boy who used to send a delicious shiver of fear down her spine whenever she saw him had a master’s degree, of all things. “How do you know this?”
    “He bought Old Man Miller’s place up on River Road and renovated it. I lent him a hand.”
    “Wow.” She tried not to stare as Aaron helped his mother into the passenger seat of an old Pontiac parked in a handicapped space. “Riverbend has certainly changed.”
    “Not much,” Charlie argued.
    Lily should have been relieved. She didn’t really want her hometown to have changed. She’d come back to Riverbend because she wanted her old life back. She wanted to regain her faith in herself and her judgment. She wanted to trust her instincts again. She wanted to know she was a good person, not someone who harbored fear and hatred in her heart. She wanted to be the innocent, optimistic girl she’d been when she’d graduated from Riverbend High School and embarked on life’s grand adventure.
    If Riverbend hadn’t changed too much, maybe she would be able to find that girl somewhere here, somewhere inside her.
    But if Aaron Mazerik, the baddest bad boy in town, was working at the high school, coaching the basketball team and helping his mother, Lily knew that Riverbend couldn’t be the same place it used to be.

CHAPTER TWO

    T HE HOUSE WAS much too big for one occupant—three stories, with gables and sloping eaves and a rounded corner that rose towerlike to a cone-shaped roof. It