Somehow, despite knowing the seriousness of Dixie’s predicament, she’d been able to insert an image of the woman she knew into surroundings she could only imagine. Yet within moments of arriving at the jail, she realized she’d been right about only one. And it wasn’t Dixie. The Dixie Dunn whom Tori knew was a force all her own. Hovering somewhere around the five-foot-three mark, the woman was solid through and through. Her white hair and age spot–adorned skin might lull a person into believing she was slowing down, but her sharp tongue and fear-inducing glares set the record straight in about two seconds flat. The Dixie Dunn sitting across from them at that very moment was but a shell of the original. The solid take-no-prisoners stance she usually wore like a badge of honor was gone, in its place a hunched-at-the-shoulders posture that was as foreign to the woman as the defeat that robbed her hazel eyes of anything resembling fight or even life.
