Colton by Marriage. Marie Ferrarella

       Prologue

      “It’s here, Sheriff.” Unable to contain his excitement, Boyd Arnold all but hopped up and down as he pointed toward the murky body of water. “I saw it right here, in the creek, when Blackie ran into the water and I chased him out.”

      Blackie was what Boyd called his black Labrador retriever. Naming the dog Blackie had been the only unimaginative thing Boyd had ever done. Aside from that one example of dullness, the small-time rancher had an incredibly healthy imagination.

      Some people claimed that it was a mite too healthy. At one time or another, Boyd had sworn he’d seen a ghost crossing his field, watched in awe as a UFO landed near Honey Creek, the body of water that the town had been named after, and now he was claiming to have seen a dead body in that very same creek.

      As the town’s recently elected sheriff, thirty-three-year-old Wes Colton would have liked just to have dismissed Boyd’s newest tall tale as another figment of the man’s overworked imagination. But, because he was the recently elected sheriff of Honey Creek, he couldn’t. He was too new at the job to point to a gut feeling about things and so he was legally bound to check out each and every story involving wrongdoing no matter how improbable or wild it sounded.

      Dead bodies were not the norm in Honey Creek. Most likely someone had dumped a mannequin in the creek in order to play a trick on the gullible Boyd. He hadn’t put a name to the so-called body when he’d come running into the office earlier, tripping over his tongue as if it had grown to three times its size as he tried to say what it was he saw.

      “Was it a woman, Boyd?” Wes asked now, trying to find the humor in the situation, although, he had to admit, between the heat and the humidity, his sense of humor was in extremely short supply today. Local opinion had it that a woman of the inflatable variety would be the only way Boyd would be able to find any female companionship at all.

      Wes would have much rather been in his air-conditioned office, going over paperwork—something he usually disliked and a lot of which the last sheriff had left as payback for Wes winning the post away from him—than facing the prospect of walking through the water searching for a nonexistent body.

      “I think it was a man. Tell the truth, Sheriff, I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. Never can tell when you might come across one of them zombie types, or those body-snatchers, you know.”

      Wes looked at him. Boyd’s eyes were all but bulging out. The man was actually serious. He shook his head. “Boyd, you want my advice? You’ve got to stop renting those old horror movies. You’ve got a vivid enough imagination as it is.”

      “This wasn’t my imagination, Sheriff,” Boyd insisted stubbornly with feeling. “This was a real live dead person.”

      Wes didn’t bother pointing out the blatant contradiction in terms. Instead, he stood at the edge of the creek and looked around.

      There was nothing but the sound of mosquitoes settling in for an afternoon feed.

      A lot of mosquitoes,