Evil in Waiting

Shivering more from fright than from the predawn chill permeating the crumbling adobe of the desert ghost town where she hid, Rae Nardeen let her mind reel backward over the events leading up to her desperate flight into the eerie stillness of the Arizona night.

It had begun in Wheeling, West Virginia, shortly after her mother's death, when Rae read the letter Vera Nardeen had written just before she died. Only then did Rae learn that she had a grandmother who lived in Arizona. Prefacing the request with a mysterious plea for forgiveness, Vera had asked Rae to visit Esther Boone—and to always wear Vera's turquoise necklace.

Against a landscape ringed by the Superstition Mountains, guardians of the Lost Dutchman gold mine, and studded with gigantic, multi-armed saguaro cacti, Rae encountered her formidable rancher grandmother for the first time. In this land of sinister legends, Rae was destined also to find romance in the person of Arthur Hastings, a dark-eyed novelist with a villain-like moustache, Western garb, and a Stetson hat.

Here, too, Rae met her grandmother's neighbor and lifelong adversary, Ray Harper, whose eyes riveted to the turquoise necklace upon first seeing the girl who wore it. It was, in fact, Ray Harper's startling revelation—and pretty Lea Cardoza's careless boast—that inadvertently made Rae Nardeen the victim of the evil waiting in the shadow of the mist-enshrouded Superstitions.