THE FIRST LETTER ARRIVED IN EARLY JUNE. IT lay nestled, like a snake in high grass, among the inevitable bills, a long, funny letter from my college roommate now living in Nashville, and a men's-health magazine brimming with advice I gleefully ignore. I thought at first it was just a card of some sort, noting only the Corpus Christi postmark and wondering who the hell did I know down on the coast.

I sat at the kitchen table, still laughing from my friend's letter, and pulled the card out of the envelope. I dropped it immediately when I saw the blood.

A dried X of crimson gore splattered the front, obscuring a cartoon cat's knowing leer. The envelope fell nervelessly from my hands. My stomach churned.

I gulped a couple of long, steadying breaths, then retrieved a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer. Using them, I pried the card open—the paper resisted for a moment, because the blood gummed the edges closed. Redness lined the missive, like the dark signature of the devil. I saw first the preprinted salutation on the card: THINKING ONLY OF YOU. A scarlet spatter scored the wish. On the other side of the card, letters cut from a magazine spelled out a cheerless message:

I sat for a long while, breathing through my mouth, reading the hateful words again. Cursive, dainty letters formed the PROVE and they looked incongruous in the hurtful context. Bile rose in my throat, along with a hard, burning anger. I balled my hand into a fist.

Stay away bastard.

The phone rang, jarring me out of my reverie. I scooped the receiver up with a shaking hand. “Hello?” My own voice sounded dank and rheumy, as if I'd just surfaced from some deep darkness.

“Hey, son, how you?” Bob Don's voice revved along, probably fresh from having closed a sweet deal on a fine preowned vehicle. “Hadn't talked to you in a couple of days and I missed you. What's up?”

I swallowed hard during his flurry of words. My heart pounded in my chest, and when I spoke, my voice cracked on my first assurance that I was well. “Doing fine. How are you?”

He regaled me with a funny story about one of his salesmen that normally would have had me laughing com-panionably. Instead I forced a weak titter. He asked about Mama and I answered I'd been out to the horse farm and she was well. The dance of words, meaningless to me at the moment, continued until I could stand it no more.

“Bob Don, let me ask you a question. Did you tell the rest of your family about my coming to this reunion next month?”

“Oh, sure, son. I weren't hardly gonna surprise them with you and make everybody uncomfortable. I told Uncle Mutt I was bringing you, and my sister Sass, and I'm sure they've informed the rest of the folks. You're big news to the Goertzes. Everybody's real eager to meet you.”

“I see.” I stared at the blood-smirched card. Someone had not taken the news of my arrival kindly.

“That's all right, isn't it?” Bob Don sounded concerned. “Son?”

“Yes, of course it is. I just wondered.”

“Well, I'm so looking forward to the reunion. I can't wait to show off my boy.”

Pleasure and pride laced his voice, and I smiled despite myself. I glanced back on the obscenity on the kitchen table. “I'm looking forward to meeting them, Bob Don.”

We made small talk for a while, and he invited Candace and me to dinner the following Friday night. I hung up the phone and turned back toward the table.

I resisted the urge to destroy the card. I got my camera, snapped a couple of pictures of the perverse mail, and carefully slid the card into a plastic Baggie. Telling Bob Don would upset him no end, and I felt furious at the idea of being warned off the reunion by someone so cowardly they veiled their hate in blood and anonymous threats. I stored the card carefully in an antique wooden box in my room, loath to eye it again. I stared down at the shut box and imagined the evil on the other side made the carved lid tremble, ever so slightly.

I wondered who might hate me so, sight unseen.

Two weeks later, rich hickory smoke perfumed the air as Bob Don flipped steaks on his backyard grill. Gretchen had flown on her broom to Brenham to visit her aunt and Can-dace was having dinner with her folks. We were bache-loring dinner together, but I had scant appetite for blood-rare steak and a loaded, buttery baked potato, fluffed with salt and pepper. My secret admirer had mailed me good wishes again.

The second bit of correspondence was more direct in its threat. He or she had opted for another mass-market greeting card, the kind that women buy for other women on birthdays, dripping with sexual innuendo. A handsome blond fellow leaned against a column, bare belly rippling with muscle, jeans faded and strategically torn. Vanilla frosting was lightly smeared across his well-defined chest and gut and his puckered lips held a small, lit candle. The inside, preprinted message said HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT

IT, TOO. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

The outward message, though, was of greater interest. The man's visage had been carefully sliced in an X with a razor, and inside my well-wisher had pasted in stolen script:

Cold chilled my bones. I could never be handsome enough to be a model, but the fellow on the card was lanky, a thick-haired blond, and green-eyed—like me. I couldn't imagine that the hate-mailer had gotten lucky in choosing a countenance and coloring like my own. And the vandalism on the card had been minutely done, careful to preserve some semblance of the model's face.

This person knew what I looked like.

Thickness coated my throat. My glance had gone to my windows, my door. Were they watching me now? Did they know my face, or was it a lucky guess based on Bob Don's own looks? I checked again for the postmark—this time it was Beaumont, much further up the long, curving Texas coast from Corpus Christi. So my admirer traveled, or had an accomplice. I sealed the second harassing missive in another Baggie and stored it with the first. And spent a long, sleepless night, listening to Candace's soft breathing in the darkness.

I hadn't told a soul.

Now, watching Bob Don cheerfully grill dinner, the soft voice of the Rangers baseball announcer chronicling a home game, the chirp of crickets in the trees, the hate felt far away. I sipped at my Shiner Bock and listened to the soporific drone of the bugs, singing away their short lives.

“Earth to Jordan,” Bob Don boomed out after I'd been idling moments away in my own world. I looked up at him with surprise.

“Something's got you out of gear, son. The Rangers ain't losing that badly.”

I smiled. Son. Despite my ambivalence about Bob Don as a parent, I have to admit the endearment had a nice ring. When my father died from his bout with cancer and my mother forgot who I was, I'd thought son would be a word dropped from usage in connection with me. But here was Bob Don, ready to pick up the reins. Ready to love me like a father, like the one I'd lost. I stood suddenly and walked through the smoke wafting from the grill.

“You and Candace crossways?” he asked my back.

“No.” How, how to do this? “I need to ask you a question. Is anyone in your family considered—dangerous?”

“Good Lord.” He blinked at me with honest surprise. “What on earth would make you ask such a thing?”

I felt torn about revealing the poison-pen letters. Part of me wanted him to know, to tell me I didn't have to go to the reunion, that he'd find out who was terrorizing me. Another half of me wanted to entirely ignore the epistles, not give in to the foul bullying they represented. But I was swimming into unknown waters here, and I needed to know where the sharks lay.

I ran my tongue along my lips. “I just would like for you to answer the question, Bob Don.”

“I will, when I know why you're asking.” He swallowed another long swig from his Shiner longneck.

“I'm just wondering if everyone in your family is going to be delighted by my presence. There could be some resentment against me. After all, I'm somewhat of an unwelcome addition.”

“Why unwelcome? They're just going to love you—”

“If you say so,” I interrupted, cutting off his extrovert's flow of words and tasting my beer. I'd been giving some thought as to why I—as the newest member of the Goertz family—might merit vituperative messages. And I'd concocted a theory. “Uncle Mutt's rich, right?”

I asked this while Bob Don was in mid-gulp and he nodded his assent. “Yeah, rolling in it.”

“Are we talking millions here?”

“Mutt's probably worth about ten million or so.”

Ten million. No wonder someone didn't want another claimant to the family fortune around.

“And he's in good health? Not expected to kick off anytime soon?”

Bob Don gave me a long, measuring stare. “I don't like where this conversation's heading. I hope you want to go to meet my family because it matters to us both, not to hit Uncle Mutt up for cash or get on the beneficiary list.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” I hemmed. “Not at all, Bob Don. It just occurs to me that some of your relatives might not be overly thrilled at another potential heir.”

He didn't answer me immediately, the smoke from the grill framing his face in the dusky light. He turned and ministered over the steaks, piling the two thick cuts onto a plate. “Nearly let these burn,” he muttered to himself. “And why don't we eat out here? It's a nice evening and the mosquitoes ain't so bad.” In counterpoint to this comment, the blue haze of his bug zapper brightened and an electric hiss announced the demise of another of our bloodsucking friends. “Why don't you get the taters?” he asked.

I went back inside, wondering why he was dodging my question. I fetched the warming potatoes from the oven, sliced them open in a cloud of fragrant steam, and slathered them with butter, sour cream, and chives. I retrieved the salad I'd made earlier from the fridge, grabbed a bottle of ranch dressing, and piled all on a tray, along with plates and silverware.

When I returned to the patio, Bob Don was staring toward the purplish horizon, watching the dying light play along the branches of the loblolly pines and the live oaks that dotted his expansive backyard. The air felt warm and wet from an afternoon shower, but we're tough about humidity in Texas. He didn't even glance back at me when I began to unload the fixings.

“I hope you're hungry, Bob Don,” I began, '”cause we sure got us a mess of food here. I'm hiking my cholesterol just looking at it.”

He turned to me then and I could see an alien sadness coloring his face. I say alien because I'm not sure I could ever understand the emotions that painted that particular expression. He looked like a man who's gotten every gold piece in creation, only to see it all turn to brass in one dreadful second. I turned back to setting the table.

“Son, I love you.” I was still unloading the tray and I didn't look up again. A twitchy discomfort arrowed through my body and I felt my face tighten.

“I haven't said them words to you in a long time. Not since after we—after you found out about me.” He'd murmured them in an intensive-care hospital room after taking a bullet while saving my life from a vicious killer. I'd held his hand, and like a little boy, I'd cried. But since then the topic of his paternal feelings for me had been avoided, a maelstrom to be carefully circumnavigated.

My mouth felt dry. I stared down at the jumble of torn lettuce, quartered tomatoes, and sliced onions in the salad bowl. The smell of the steaks had set my mouth watering, but I couldn't swallow past the dense block in my throat.

“It's okay,” he murmured. “You don't have to say nothing. I know you still have trouble seeing me as your father.”

I coughed past the blockage and glanced up at him. “Bob Don—”

“It's just that you coming to this reunion, God, it means the world to me. And I don't want you scared off by some idle worry that my people are gonna think that you're just gunning for Uncle Mutt's money. But after the past year we've had—getting to know each other, you letting me into your life more—I just want us to be able to acknowledge each other. To say publicly that we're father and son.”

I clanged silverware down on the table. My stomach, grumbling anxiously a moment ago for meat and potatoes, quieted like a hushed baby. I didn't look at him and I didn't know what to say. I wasn't ready for this, not yet. Not yet.

“You're sure keeping quiet. That's not like you,” Bob Don finally said.

“I—I don't mean to be quiet. You've just given me a lot to think about.”

He touched my arm, as gently as he might a baby's, and I glanced into the full want in his face. His voice was hoarse, rasped raw by emotion. “You're my child. I can never, ever regard you any other way now. I see so much of myself in you, of your mother—”

“And my father. My—other father,” I interjected quickly. My real father, I'd nearly said, and bit the words off just in time. But the reality was, as far as the dictates of biology went, Bob Don had claim to that particular title.

He lowered his arm. “Yes, of course. You've got his kind streak. Most of the time.” He sat down and began to slice into his steak. “Sit down and eat, Jordan, before your supper gets cold.”

I took an uncomfortable seat. I was evading his demand, but he had neatly skipped past my question. I considered telling him about the cards, but knowing Bob Don, he would have insisted I stay put and out of any potential harm's way. I wasn't about to be skittered off by a sick threat. My own curiosity gnawed at me as to why someone was going to such careful trouble to frighten me off the family tree. If I pressed him for details on who in the family might be dangerous, I might need a reason to justify my queries. For now, I decided to keep my own counsel.

We ate in silence. The meat was meltingly tender, the potato creamily smooth and peppery, the salad crisp, but it all tasted like cardboard in my mouth. My bones felt like they were trembling inside the bag of my skin. I had been avoiding publicly acknowledging Bob Don for over a year, and he was going to force the issue. No pun intended.

I chewed a chunk of meat, my appetite fading. Why wasn't I ready? I snuck a glance at him, scooping out the buttery innards of his baked potato.

Because he wasn't my daddy. He was a nice man, a kind fellow with a big heart, but he wasn't the man who raised me and taught me and spanked me when I deserved it and hugged me when I didn't. He wasn't Lloyd Poteet, and he could never be. You cannot erase twenty-odd years of fatherhood with an announcement of true paternity. You can't push your daddy's memory deeper into the grave by turning to all folks you know and saying, “This man is my real father.” It's not possible. If our hearts are homes, some rooms can't be rented out once the occupant dies.

Thankfully, Bob Don abandoned the subject and we ate the rest of our meal with the drone of the baseball game on the radio as our companion. We drank beer and we talked of the weather. He did not tell me family stories and I did not ask him to. He did not mention again that I was his child. He exhausted his collection of Aggie jokes and I made myself laugh through them all. But I felt a creeping, unfamiliar misery nestle in my chest.

I was saying goodbye to him in the den when Gretchen returned from visiting her aunt.

“Hello, hello,” she chimed as she came through the kitchen door. She gave her husband a cheek kiss and favored me with her uncertain smile. I've sometimes wondered if the long years of drunkenness wiped the memory of how to truly smile from Gretchen's mind. Her grin is half grimace and it never settles correctly into her face. “Did you boys enjoy y'all's dinner?”

“Yes, it was great,” I croaked, coughing for no reason. We made an odd tableau in this den: the very scene where a wasted Gretchen had brayed out her hatred of me, blaming me for her long years of inebriation, and finally the truth that I was Bob Don's bastard. His precious bastard. The times I came to this house, we did not linger in this room, as though its walls still held the faintest stain from her venom. It was still the spot on earth where my world unraveled for all time.

“Did you have a nice visit with your aunt?” I asked her.

She blinked at my inquiry—kindness from me was suspicious. “Yes, we did. Poor old aunt's not getting younger. But it was nice to see her.” She patted Bob Don's arm and I saw genuine affection light her face.

“I'll be going, then. Thanks for the dinner, Bob Don.” I feared for one long, unmerciful moment that he was going to mention his desire to claim me as his son; surely he had discussed this with Gretchen. Hadn't he?

He simply shook my hand. “You're still planning on coming to the reunion, aren't you?”

“Of course,” I assured him. I saw the corners of Gretchen's eyes crinkle in consternation, then her smile— her offish, odd smile—slid into uneasy place on her face.

I wished them good night and drove home, peering into the rural darkness. A blanket of stars unfurled above my head as a wall of clouds pushed onward toward the Gulf, clearing the sky of its low haze.

Gretchen hated me—or at least she had once. Could she be behind the cards? If I never became a part of Bob Don's family, I could not trespass on her territory. I imagined her hands smearing blood across a card, razoring a printed face, pasting letters with malice.

It scared me that I could easily see her hands busy with such work.

Two days before the reunion.

“I'd really prefer you not go,” I murmured into the soft spill of Candace's hair. She smelled of flowers, and of lime from the ceviche she made for dinner. Moonlight played along our bare bodies as we cuddled in bed.

“Why don't you want me there?” Her tone was measured, which meant I might be in trouble.

“Because it's going to be complicated enough, sweetheart. I think I need to face the Goertzes on my own.” I fib best when not having to look directly into Candace's face, and I examined the top of her head with intense concentration. As if knowing my thoughts, she shifted in my arms to turn her blue eyes straight on my face. I hazarded a smile.

“Is that it?”

“Yeah.” I kissed the top of her forehead. I could hardly say, I'm getting vicious hate mail from someone in the family who doesn't want me around. And I don't want you to be in danger. So stay home. That wouldn't work— Candace would be bodyguarding my butt all the way to Uncle Mutt's island.

“Strikes me as odd,” she mumbled against the tender flesh of my throat, “that you don't want to acknowledge Bob Don as your daddy, yet you're bound and determined to go to this reunion. Meet his family, let them meet you. If that's not acknowledgment, I don't know what is.”

I swallowed as she began to play her fingers through my hair. Her other hand began a slow exploration of my chest, grazing a nipple and sending a shiver through me. I didn't speak. “So what's up, Jordan? I suspect you're not telling total truth here.”

“Listen, darling, it's nothing to be concerned over, I just think it might be best if you didn't go.”

She ran her fingernails across my chest, in a sensual tippy-toe that left me holding my breath. She lingered near the nipple again, and grabbed with sudden force. I winced.

“Honesty time, hon. What's going on?”

I pried her hand off from its death grip. She kissed me quickly in apology. So I told her about the cards.

“Sweet God.” She sat up in bed. “That's a crime, Jordan. We're calling the police.”

I touched her shoulder. “No, we're not. I don't want Bob Don to know about this.”

“Let me see these cards,” Candace demanded. I retrieved them from their hiding place, and carefully using a cloth, she read them. She stared at the bloodstained greeting card with disgust, and shook her head at the mutilated model.

“This is god-awful sick,” she finally murmured. “And just why the hell weren't you going to share this problem?”

“I knew you'd freak. And I didn't want you to worry. Now you see why I don't want you to come—”

“And why do you want to go?” she demanded. “Why put yourself in danger, babe? If you don't want Bob Don for a father—and you can't seem to decide—” She ended in a shrug and gestured at the hate mail. “Why not stay away from this—this—psychopath?”

“I don't scare easy,” I said with a bravado I didn't feel, “and I'm not going to be warned off by idiotic pranks like these cards. I want to know why now—why is someone so determined to keep me from the reunion? Why?”

“Curiosity may kill more than cats,” she cautioned. “If you're going, I'm going with you. You'll need someone to watch your back.”

“You sound like a bad cop show.”

“I'm not joking, Jordan. I'm not letting anyone hurt a hair on your head.”

I blushed at the intensity of her words, which was somehow more revealing than our casual nakedness in bed. And I knew better than to argue. “Okay, fine. As long as you stay out of trouble.” My blood ran cold at the thought of Candace near anyone who could send such missives, but we'd moved past the point of debate—I saw the stony set of determination in her face. “And not a word to Bob Don. I have my own plan for dealing with this sicko.”

“Tell me,” she murmured.

So I did.