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The In-Between Hour
Barbara Claypole White


What could be worse than losing your child? Having to pretend he’s still alive…Bestselling author Will Shepard is caught in the twilight of grief, after his young son dies in a car accident. But when his father’s aging mind erases the memory, Will rewrites the truth. The story he spins brings unexpected relief…until he’s forced to return to rural North Carolina, trapping himself in a lie.Holistic veterinarian Hannah Linden is a healer who opens her heart to strays but can only watch, powerless, as her grown son struggles with inner demons. When she rents her guest cottage to Will and his dad, she finds solace in trying to mend their broken world, even while her own shatters.As their lives connect and collide, Will and Hannah become each other’s only hope—if they can find their way into a new story, one that begins with love.“A moving story about the challenges of OCD and grief combined with the power of the human spirit to find love in the most unlikely of places.” —Eye on Romance on The Unfinished Garden







What could be worse than losing your child?

Having to pretend he’s still alive...

Bestselling author Will Shepard is caught in the twilight of grief, after his young son dies in a car accident. But when his father’s aging mind erases the memory, Will rewrites the truth. The story he spins brings unexpected relief…until he’s forced to return to rural North Carolina, trapping himself in a lie.

Holistic veterinarian Hannah Linden is a healer who opens her heart to strays but can only watch, powerless, as her grown son struggles with inner demons. When she rents her guest cottage to Will and his dad, she finds solace in trying to mend their broken world, even while her own shatters.

As their lives connect and collide, Will and Hannah become each other’s only hope—if they can find their way into a new story, one that begins with love.


Praise for Barbara Claypole White’s debut novel,

The Unfinished Garden

“I learned so much about myself from this story—that fear doesn’t have to hold me back, but rather, it can move me forward. The Unfinished Garden is a touching and accomplished debut.”

—Diane Chamberlain, bestselling author of The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

“White…conveys the condition of OCD, and how it creates havoc in one’s life and the lives of loved ones, with style and grace, never underplaying the seriousness of the disorder.”

—RT Book Reviews

“A powerful story of friendship and courage in the midst of frightening circumstances….I highly recommend this wonderful love story.”

—Bergers’ Book Reviews

“A mesmerizing tale of fear, loss, and love. Tilly and James are richly drawn and wonderfully flawed characters who embody the contradictions and imperfections that exist in all of us. Barbara Claypole White has created a novel as beautiful and complex, dark and light, sweet and sensuous as Tilly’s beloved garden.”

—Joanne Rendell, author of The Professors’ Wives’ Club

“Barbara Claypole White has created such a likable, adorable, entertaining main character that I never wanted this book to end.”

—Lydia Netzer, author of Shine Shine Shine

“I found the writing style in The Unfinished Garden reminiscent of Rosamunde and Robin Pilcher. As a fan of both, I truly enjoyed this book and look forward to many more from Barbara Claypole White.”

—Julie Kibler, author of Calling Me Home


The

In-Between

Hour

Barbara Claypole White






www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


For my sister, Susan Rose

And for my friend Leslie Gildersleeve


Do you know me in the gloaming,

Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?

—From “Flower-Gathering” by Robert Frost

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

—Helen Keller


AUTHOR’S NOTE

Occoneechee Mountain became a North Carolina State Natural Area in 1999. Rising above the Eno River, the summit is the highest point between the town of Hillsborough, Orange County, and the Atlantic Ocean. Rare plants growing on the mountain and the presence of the brown elfin butterfly suggest the habitat has changed little since the last Ice Age.

The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation is a small Native American community located primarily in Pleasant Grove, Alamance County. In 2002, it won state recognition as North Carolina’s eighth official Indian tribe.

The seventeenth-century Occaneechi village in Hills­borough was excavated between 1983 and 1995. The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation held its first powwow there in 1995, and John Blackfeather blessed the ground in 1997. Reconstruction of the village began shortly afterward and was completed in 2004. The village has been moved to the ancestral lands in Pleasant Grove.

For information on the Occaneechi Homeland Preservation Project, please visit www.obsn.org (http://www.obsn.org).

For information on the Occaneechi Path, also called the Indian Trading Path, please visit tradingpath.org (http://tradingpath.org).


Contents

Chapter One (#ud9271b93-6f89-510a-9e90-38427f6ab106)

Chapter Two (#u0eb24410-41a5-59cf-be56-67a92c6d0bb9)

Chapter Three (#u97f715c7-e93c-5b26-8f40-4bf8a0a53d1d)

Chapter Four (#u55886955-c290-531c-80e5-a1269cf0fed9)

Chapter Five (#u4227522d-c0b4-59a2-a832-6d6b960b8f7c)

Chapter Six (#u785b4d4c-d2aa-5bd0-9c39-c7b75c2771ea)

Chapter Seven (#ue171a07c-678d-53f2-a413-47cef7c8c8ac)

Chapter Eight (#u7cae7c05-1ba7-53ab-b134-da0756f94da2)

Chapter Nine (#u420ec2d3-9f44-53de-a2c1-8c53a42c483e)

Chapter Ten (#u83f1a5f4-f39a-5715-9128-d922f32c0e56)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)

Reader’s Guide for the In-Between Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)

Listening Guide (#litres_trial_promo)

A Conversation with the Author (#litres_trial_promo)


One

Will imagined silence. The silence of snowfall in the forest. The silence at the top of a crag. But eighty floors below his roof garden, another siren screeched along Central Park West.

Nausea nibbled—a hungry goldfish gumming him to death. Maybe this week’s diet of Zantac and PBR beer was to blame. Or maybe grief was a degenerative disease, destroying him from the inside out. Dissolving his organs. One. By. One.

The screensaver on his MacBook Air, a rainbow of tentacles that had once reminded him to watch for shooting stars, mutated into a kraken: an ancient monster dragging his life beneath the waves. How long since he’d missed his deadline? His agent had been supportive, his editor generous, but patience—even for clients who churned out global bestsellers—expired.

Another day when he’d failed to resuscitate his crap work-in-progress; another day when Agent Dodds continued to dangle from the helicopter; another day without a strategy for his hero of ten years that wasn’t a fatal “Let go, dude. Just let go.”

The old-fashioned ring tone of his iPhone burst into the night as expected. Almost on cue. His dad’s memory might be jouncing around too much for either of them to follow, but it continued to hold both their lives hostage.

Answer, aim for the end of the call, get there.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Fucking bastards. They’re—”

“Fucking bastards. You told me earlier.” Fifty-seven minutes earlier.

Finally, this vacuous loop of repetition had given them conversation, and always it started with the same two words: fucking bastards.

“Fucking bastards won’t let me sit out and talk to the crows. Took away my bird call. Said I were disturbin’ folks.”

“We talked about this last time you called, Dad.” Will kept his voice flat, even. Calm. Defusing anger was an old skill—the lone positive side effect of his batshit-insane childhood. And emotional distance? He had that honed before he’d turned eighteen. “I told you I’d look at the contract in the morning. And you promised to take a temazepam and go to bed.”

There had to be some way to persuade the old man to meet with a psychologist, some way to unpick the damage of Jack Nicholson’s performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Fucking bastards. Want to steal my Wild Turkey, too.”

His dad veered off on the usual rant: trash the staff of Hawk’s Ridge Retirement Community—check; pause to exclude the new art teacher with the cute smile—check; ask Will when he last noticed a woman’s smile—check; hurl expletives at ol’ possum face, the director—check. Strange, how the old man failed to drop his g’s with the f word.

A retired grave digger who’d dropped out of school at sixteen to work in the cotton mill—third shift—Jacob Shepard might refer to himself as dumber than a rock, but he’d read every history book in the Orange County Library before retirement. The old man was an underachiever by choice, devoting himself to the only thing that mattered: loving his Angeline.

His dad was cussing again. One obscenity, two obscenities, three obscenities...four.

All those years in the family shack, neither of them had sworn. Wouldn’t have dared. Four foot ten, magical and mad, Angeline Shepard had ruled the house with more mood swings than a teenage despot. There had been no room for anyone else to flex temper muscles. Raising a voice in his mother’s domain would have been akin to standing in front of the biggest fucking bonfire and pouring on enough gasoline to fuel an Airbus. Great, now he was swearing. Will never swore (batshit didn’t count). But since his dad had started calling to unleash rage ten, fifteen times a day, Will’s psyche had slipped into battle-fatigue mode.

Will sighed. “There are rules about drinking in your room. You know that.”

“I’m eighty years old, son. I reckon I’m old enough to partake, if I so choose.”

“But you’re a loud drunk, Dad.”

“So I pick my banjo—”

“And tell people they’re dickheads.”

“That’s why I don’t talk to no one ’cept you. Half them folks in here is dickheads, son. Half them is.”

“And the other half?” Will didn’t mean to smile.

“Old-timers who get to complainin’ about bladder control. At least I don’t need no adult diapers, and my health is still good, pretty good. Why you at home of an evenin’, son? You need to be out dancin’ with an angel like your mama.”

“I write at night. You know that, Dad.”

Darkness keeps me alive, keeps me on the edge. Keeps me sharp. There was always a moment, in the middle of the night, when the world hardly breathed. When he could write safe in the knowledge that no one would intrude, that he had nothing to fear. But New York Times bestselling author Will Shepard wasn’t writing. Wasn’t sleeping in his institutional white bedroom, either. These days he catnapped fully clothed on his leather sofa—as if he were a millionaire hobo.

Even when he managed to close his eyes, there was no peace. His favorite dream in which he glided like an owl above the forest had contorted into a nightmare. In his subconscious state, Will didn’t drift on air currents anymore—he stumbled through the woods on Occoneechee Mountain. Searching for, but never finding, escape.

“So when you goin’ to start livin’ that dream of yours, son? Find a woodland property with a driveway that’s impassable after a real heavy snowfall?”

“That was a kid’s fantasy. I’m never moving back to North Carolina, you know that.”

You know that. Why keep bashing his dad over the head with all that he’d forgotten?

A gust of wind whipped through the chocolate mimosa in the huge glazed pot. Buffeted, the delicate leaflets held on and bounced back. You can do this, Will. You can do this.

“The new guy, Bernie, who just moved in down the hall, his grandkids took him to that fancy diner on Main Street last Sunday. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had blueberry pancakes?”

When did the old man start caring about pancakes?

“You know what they give us for breakfast? Little boxes of cereal fit for kids. You know how long it’s been since I’ve eaten anywhere real nice? I want blueberry pancakes. And I want to see my grandbaby, goddamn it. When you bringin’ Freddie to visit?”

Time slowed or maybe stopped. Will was at the end of a tunnel, his dad’s voice muffled as it said, over and over, “Willie?”

Will’s arm shot across the wrought-iron table, smashing an empty water glass to the concrete. A spill of shards spread.

Unwanted memories multiplied, images tumbled: Frederick and Cassandra in the car moments before it crashed; Will driving through the night to Hawk’s Ridge with news no grandfather should ever have to hear; his dad flailing and screaming before the security men pinned him down, before a nurse sedated him. And in the months that followed, a never-ending cycle of short-term memory loss and anger. The old man vented, forgot, repeated. Alcohol didn’t help.

“Freddie with his mama this week?”

Will ground his knuckle into his temple. “Yeah. He’s with his mama.” A half-truth that kicked him in the chest like a full lie.

Was this his dad’s new reality—living with a mind so broken that it found fault with the breakfast menu and yet erased family trauma? Would Will have to constantly torture his dad with the news that had felled them both? Certain sentences, no matter how brief, should never be repeated. Never. If his dad could forget the crash, could he, one day, forget Freddie?

“You tell Freddie’s mama to have him call his granddaddy.”

“I can’t!” Will didn’t mean to yell, really, really didn’t mean to yell, but he could hear Cassandra taunting him: So, William. You’re a father. She always called him William, pronouncing it Willi-amm, treating his name the way she treated life—with a wild exaggeration that had led only to tragedy. A scene flashed—an illusion. A little boy and his mother caught between realms of life and death. Traveling from the plane of existence to a blank page of nothing. “I can’t because...they’re traveling.”

Shallow, jagged breaths stabbed his throat. Blood thundered around his skull; a frenzy of lights exploded across his vision. Airway closing; heart fluttering; pulse yo-yoing.

Will sucked in oxygen with a whooshing sound, then exhaled quietly. He would reduce everything to the skills that enabled him to scale a rock face with his hands and his feet and his mind. He would focus on nothing but finding balance in this moment in time, on finding a good, solid hold.

“I...I don’t remember, Willie. I...I can’t remember stuff.”

This, too, was part of the daily roller coaster. The realization that his grizzly bear of a dad had become a featherless fledgling fallen from the nest. Will could end the conversation right now. Make some excuse and get off the phone. But what was the chance his dad would remember any of this? Zero. Tomorrow would bring a fresh memory wipe. Tomorrow, Will’s computer screen would still swirl with patterns, not words. Tomorrow, his five-year-old son would still be dead.

“Where, Willie? Where they travelin’?”

Will stared up at the blinking lights of a jet floating across the black sky, carrying families toward new memories. He’d never taken Freddie on a plane, but he’d planned their first trip in his mind. Europe, they were going to Europe as soon as Freddie was old enough to appreciate the art, the architecture, the history.

“Europe.” Will swallowed hard. “Listen, I’ve gotta go. Get some sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Okay, son. Okay.”

Will whispered, “Good night, old man.”

But the line was dead.

* * *

Will scooped up his laptop and walked back into his empty apartment. Out in the hallway, the elevator dinged. A couple passed his front door, stabbing each other with words. The woman would win the fight. She was the one setting the tempo, as Cassandra had done. He’d never figured out why, eighteen months after their affair fizzled, Cass contacted him to suggest he meet the son he hadn’t known existed until that very moment. As an heiress she didn’t need child support, and the ground rules were set from the beginning: Freddie’s my son; you’re not listed on the birth certificate; you see him if and when I decide.

He should have fought for his son.

“Munchkin, I’m sorry,” Will said.

Sorry for not keeping you safe. Sorry for being a coward.

His cowardice slid out as easily as the fast and furious plots that had made him a thirty-four-year-old literary powerhouse. Corporation Will Shepard careened from success to success, despite the fact that its CEO had been writing-by-numbers for years. When fans looked at him, they saw nothing but the glitter of achievement, which was the way his staff tweeted and scripted his life. Everything was about creating the cardboard cutout.

Only fatherhood was real.

He’d been a good dad—patient, fun, firm. Although there had been a few too many online purchases from FAO Schwarz. Not that he was trying to buy Freddie’s love. He’d just wanted Freddie to have everything Will himself had never had. But not in the material sense. A young kid should believe that he was the center of his dad’s universe. Because once you realized your happiness mattered to no one but you, life was a slalom ride through loblolly pines—until you crashed into the revelation that all your relationships were severely messed up. Except for fatherhood. From day one, he’d cleared out space physically and psychologically for his son.

Freddie looked at Will—all five feet seven inches of him—and saw a dragon slayer! The invincible hero! A storyteller who could answer the only question that mattered: “What happened next, Daddy?”

Will placed his laptop in the middle of his desk and stared at the drawing on the wall. Two colorful stickmen—one big, one small—were holding hands and celebrating the day they met. March 30. “Happy Our Day,” Freddie had said, jumping up and down. “Mommy helped me pick out the frame in a huge store. Huuuuuge!”

Not so long ago, Will had believed that if his apartment were on fire, he would risk everything to save his laptop. But now it contained nothing more than a stalled-out, unnamed manuscript, and his only possession worth saving was Freddie’s drawing.

Will flopped onto his leather sofa and covered his eyes with his right arm. Storytelling had always been his escape and his shield. His last line of defense against the truth. And for the first time in his life, he was without a story.

* * *

Jacob twisted his hands around the phone. Some thought—just out of reach.

Where you hidin’, thought?

It were warm in his room, too warm. All summer, it been too cold. Most non-Carolina folk didn’t understand how to live, wanted to be sealed up all nice and tight with air-conditionin’. He and Angeline never had no air-conditionin’. No sir. And now it were too hot. Couldn’t even manage his own goddamn heat. But them dickheads, they couldn’t control him. They could take away his bird call and try to take away his Wild Turkey—if they could find it. But they didn’t know what they was in for, ’cos Jacob Shepard, Jr., eighty years old with a mind shot to shit, were gonna fight.

“Ha,” he said, liked the way it sounded and repeated it. “Ha!”

If only he were outside sittin’ by a fire, punchin’ it with a stick. He’d use hickory on that thing, make it nice and toasty. That were his kind of heat.

Jacob threw the phone on his bed, his narrow only-for-one bed, and heaved open his window. No moonlight tonight, no stars. No owl to call to. No trains. When Angeline disappeared into one of her spells, he would listen for the rumblin’ and the whistlin’ of the trains—sounds as soothin’ as real heavy rain on a tin roof.

He inhaled the night. Couldn’t see the forest, but it were out there, waitin’. He could smell cedar. Sweetest smell in the world. You burn that stuff and mmm-hmm, fannnntastic. He made a smudge once that were just plum cedar dust. Willie used to love that. Said it were like Christmas all over again.

A man could suffocate in this shithole of a hotel. Stank of bleach and death. ’Course that could be part of the plan to hurry the inmates along their journey to the spirit world. Death were comin’ faster than it should, thanks to them dickheads.

Freddie were on his mind. Freddie.

Freddie loved all them stories about his grave-diggin’ granddaddy. Like the time at the cemetery he’d...what? What had he done? What! He circled his room and concentrated real hard, but that trickster memory kept on hidin’ from him.

He slapped the table. White, round, new, Will had bought it without permission. Why’d he keep buyin’ furniture and payin’ bills as if his daddy couldn’t afford to?

He’d been happy in the shack with his memories of Angeline. The good memories, only the good memories. Why couldn’t he stay in the shack? He reached for the pen next to the phone and gouged a nice scar into the tabletop. There. Now the table was all scratched up, like him. Like his shack, like...

Freddie were travelin’! Lucky little scamp.

He’d wanted to travel, take Angeline places, but they couldn’t afford the gas to cross the state line. Heck of a woman, his Angeline. Loved a good adventure, yes sir. Best smile in Orange County. Woo-wee! Sweet sixteen and she’d had her pick of the menfolk. Day she stood by his side and spoke her marriage vows, he had to pinch hisself into believin’. But no, he weren’t thinkin’ about his Angeline, his angel...Freddie! That’s right, Freddie.

Freddie were travelin’, going places his granddaddy couldn’t imagine.

Jacob grabbed an unopened envelope and scrawled “Ask Will about Freddie’s trip” across the back. Look at that. Goddamn hand had the shakes. Better have another drink to stop them tremors. But first he was gonna stick his note on the fridge. Get to his age and you’d forget half your life if you didn’t write it down.

C.R.S., can’t remember stuff. But this, this, he wanted to remember.

He’d write another note, and another and another. Tape one to the phone on his nightstand, so he could see it at sunrise. And he’d buy a map. Heck, a big world map! Take the shuttle to the Walmart and buy a map. Nail it to the wall! That would annoy them dickheads. And he’d label it My Grandson’s Great European Adventure.

Ha! Take that, Bernie down the hall!

Maybe he’d follow Willie’s advice and get some sleep. Tomorrow were gonna be a real fine day. He had a project and it didn’t involve sittin’ on his ass in the arts and crafts room with tissue paper and a pair of safety scissors.


Two

An owl hooted in the forest, a mournful farewell to the night. Yanking the scrunchie from her wrist, Hannah wrestled her hair into a ponytail. Early-morning air—Saponi Mountain air—expanded her lungs and forced out the pollutants of LAX and the flights. Made her clean. Made her whole. Welcomed her home where everything was familiar and nothing was the same.

The crispness of fall carried the silent threat of forest fires. All summer, with Orange County cycling through murderous heat and once-in-a-century drought, she’d prepared for brush fires like a general perfecting frontline strategy. Even her contingency plans had backups. But while she was busy figuring out how to rescue her animals, the real threat in her life had built. Silently. Unobserved. Until her firstborn staggered into the nearest E.R. and told the receptionist, “I want to open my veins and bleed out.” Less than ten words that allowed the state of California to lock up her son for seventy-two hours under an involuntary psychiatric hold—section 5150. A number she would never forget.

Hannah flattened her hands across her chest. Her thoughts would not turn maudlin. For Galen’s sake, she needed to be strong and well rested, a mother at peace with her mind and her body. A mother who could heal herself and her son; a mother who could paste her shattered family back together.

Top of her list? Good sleep hygiene. In the two and a half weeks she’d been in California, she’d slept only in snatches, jolting awake as anxiety marched through her chest and what-ifs scratched at her brain. Images of Galen strapped to a gurney. Screaming and struggling. He hadn’t been in restraints—at least, she didn’t think he had. It was hardly something she could ask. By the way, honey, did they restrain you during those three and a half days you were in the locked psych ward? And Galen wasn’t sharing.

Parenthood started with such optimism: your child would achieve his baby milestones, collect gold stars, maintain a good grade point average, hang out with the crowd that didn’t drink and drive. And then, when you weren’t paying attention, it all stripped down to one horrifying truth: you just wanted your son to find the will to live.

Behind her, a hundred acres of tangled forest waited to reach out and protect her, to pull her back into its bosom. Sunrise over Saponi Mountain with the blended light of day and night always lifted her spirits, but the clocks wouldn’t change for another month. In the meantime, she and the dogs were trapped in dark mornings. Once dawn came, however, they would hike up to the Occaneechi Path, the historic Native American trading route on the crest of the hill. A well-marked trail, nothing grew there. Soft-soled moccasins had packed the soil tightly day after day, month after month, decade after decade, treading memories into the land. Sealing them in forever. And after the leaves were down, the track would remain hidden until spring.

Jink, the newest member of the household, wheezed her asthmatic cough and wound around Hannah’s ankles. Hannah reached down and combed her fingers through satin fur. If only everything in life were as simple as adopting a stray cat.

“Go scavenge,” Hannah said. “Catch a vole for breakfast.”

The voles had inflicted more damage than the drought. Two months earlier the loss of her scarlet ruellias—a gift from an aging client who couldn’t afford her vet bill—would have caused genuine pain. But now she had real context for the themes of life and death.

Hannah’s right foot nudged a pile of broken acorn shells—a squirrel’s last supper—and she stared down at the decking. Boards long overdue for pressure washing and weatherproofing, she and the ex had nailed them together fifteen years before with dreams of withstanding hurricanes and ice storms and poundings from little boys and big dogs. Dreams came, dreams left, and she would do what she always did: adapt.

In the distance, a car spluttered and clonked as it began the torturous journey down her driveway. A predawn pet emergency, no doubt. Containing work between the hours of eight in the morning and ten at night was a pipe dream. Clients knew she was available 24/7, and how could she not be? A holistic vet specializing in peaceful euthanasia could hardly keep office hours. Not that she had an office, other than her duct-taped Ford truck.

The dogs rose one by one to close around her in a circle. Mush for brains, all five of her rescue babies. Introduce people to their world, and they could flee. An eternity ago she had juggled the demands of work, laundry, motherhood and cooking as if she would never surface for air. These days she was responsible only for herself and a pack of strays. Turn around, and everything changed.

Rosie, her blind German shepherd, whimpered.

“It’s okay, baby.” Hannah kneaded Rosie’s head, and the dog trembled against her leg.

Hannah didn’t mean to have favorites, but she and Rosie were conjoined at the heart. Some woman had found Rosie four years earlier, scavenging for food in the Occoneechee Mountain parking lot and bleeding from a gash on her paw. The woman flew in with kinetic desperation, wanting to adopt Rosie now, wanting Hannah to fix Rosie now. But Rosie had needed stitches and a quiet, warm place to sleep. Hannah insisted on keeping the dog overnight; the woman begrudgingly agreed. Older, but still beautiful, she had a gray pallor and yellow patches around her eyelids that suggested heart disease. Hannah had planned to inquire gently about her health the next day. But the woman hadn’t returned as arranged, and for that, Hannah was grateful. Her mother had encouraged her to believe in fate. And Hannah and Rosie-girl? They were meant to be.

The car lurched around a bend and stopped, the beam of its lights illuminating a lumbering opossum. Only one person she knew braked for opossum. And thank goodness, because she couldn’t face anyone else’s high-voltage chatter.

There would be comfort food in the back of that turquoise Honda Civic, too. High in carbs, sickly sweet and much appreciated. Dropping a jean size had been the only welcome side effect of her son’s breakdown; dropping two jean sizes had been a warning.

Poppy’s car spluttered through a mechanical imitation of Jink’s asthmatic cough. Time to remind her friend, yet again, about the importance of oil changes. Guided by instincts—some good, most not—Poppy’s monkey mind never settled on the mundane, unless it involved sugar or sex, horses or art.

The Honda chugged around the final curve. Hannah’s ex had insisted on this ridiculous gravel drive despite the acres of pasture that lay between the house and the road. He’d pronounced it authentic and likely to deter bikers from joyriding up to their house after spilling out of the redneck bar opposite. Of course, that could have been Inigo’s secret wish all along, since he’d upped and left six years earlier for a gay ménage à trois in rural Chatham County. A midlife crisis with not one younger lover but two. Both guys.

Hannah searched the top of her head for her reading glasses and had a flashback to stuffing them into the seat pocket of the airplane. Oh well, another pair lost.

Poppy parked and flung open the door decorated with a prancing mare. She painted horses on every surface except paper. Take the norm, turn it inside out and flip it backward—that was Poppy’s thought process.

“Hey, girl.” Poppy emerged, bottom-first. “Thought you might need a sugar fix.”

“At seven in the morning?” Hannah and the dogs walked down the steps.

Poppy jiggled a Whole Foods bag, and her silver horse earrings danced a rhumba. Then she took out her gum and dumped it in the car’s trash can. “Never too early for chocolate.”

“Come here. You’ve earned a hug.” Silly move caused, no doubt, by sleep deprivation. Even drunk, Poppy wasn’t a hugger.

Poppy stiffened, and Hannah tried to cover her mistake with a pat on the shoulder blade.

“Thank you. For looking after the animals, the house and—” Hannah pulled back and chewed the corner of her lip. She hadn’t cried in two and a half weeks. Why now? She sniffed. “But you should not be shopping at Whole Foods, not on your budget.”

“I know, I know, but I figured you needed first-rate treats. Chocolate croissants, still warm.” Poppy sniffed the bag. “Mmm-hmm. And extra chocolate supplies. Had no idea Brits understood chocolate, but this, girlfriend, is the real deal.”

Poppy reached inside the bag and waved two long, thin sticks of chocolate wrapped in twisted yellow foil. They resembled emaciated Christmas crackers, the kind Inigo had introduced to Christmas dinner when the boys were little. Such a fraud, the ex, flooding their lives with all things British—or rather Celtic—when he’d left Wales as a two-month-old. A Christmas memory snuck out: Inigo, Galen and Liam popping crackers and giggling. Her guys, the three people she thought she’d known best in the world. Turned out she hadn’t known them at all. If her mother were still alive, how would she label this bottomless emotion Hannah refused to name? Was it grief? Was she mourning her before life?

Think better, Hannah.

“Cadbury Flakes, they’re called,” Poppy continued. “The Brit section in Whole Foods is opposite the dog food, but don’t let that put you off. What time d’y’all get back last night?”

“Late. Or early, depending on your definition. And it’s just me.”

“Our boy?”

“Couldn’t spring him from the post-hospitalized program. Another twelve days and then he can come home.” Hannah paused. “I need to find him a therapist here. And an A.A. group.”

“On it, babe. I know a shitload of drunks.”

“Somehow, I never doubted that.”

Poppy disappeared into her car, muttering about a lost cell phone. She bobbed back out. “Sleep on the plane?”

“I rested.”

“The answer’s no, then.”

“Welcome to my brave, new world.”

Poppy took a bite out of one of the chocolate croissants, then shoved it back into the bag. Her eyes flicked toward the house; clearly she was thinking, Coffee. But talking about Galen was easier in the dark surrounded by sounds of the waking forest rather than under the glare and hum of kitchen halogens.

“I just need to get him home,” Hannah said. “Out of California, away from the ex-girlfriend and the mental hospital. Home to the cottage, so I can help him heal.”

“Think that’s a good idea—leaving him unsupervised in the cottage?”

Acorns splattered the cottage porch in a series of pops as if fired from a muzzled BB gun, and the Crayola-colored spinners she’d hung for her father the week before his death swirled in a sudden breeze, whirring softly.

“He’ll be home,” Hannah said. “And he won’t be unsupervised. I’ll be watching over him, which is better than right now. His therapy ends at four and then he returns to an empty apartment for the rest of the day. He spends every evening and every night alone.”

Poppy sucked chocolate off her fingers. “And the whole heavy-duty meds thing isn’t freaking out your inner holistic-ness?”

“Sometimes medication is the cure.”

“And sometimes it makes things worse. People in pain do painful things, Han.”

The downside of exposing secrets to a friend: she knew how to hurt you.

“So.” Poppy rustled the bag closed. “You figure out what happened? I mean, the whole sequence of events?”

“Not entirely, since Galen didn’t want us in any of the therapy sessions. It still makes no sense to me. How can you return to grad school, drop out of classes and decide to die in a matter of weeks? I was hoping, when he came home, he might talk to you.”

Poppy broke eye contact. “Sure.”

In the forest, a pair of coonhounds bayed, a nasty reminder that at least one of the fancy new homes on the ridge was now occupied.

“On to happier things. Fill me in on your life,” Hannah said. “What have I missed?”

“I met this guy.”

“Poppyyyyy. Not again.”

“Eighty-year-old guy. You’d approve.”

Hannah slapped the side of her head. “Argh, sorry. Completely forgot about Hawk’s Ridge. How’s it working out?”

“You were right about the whole art therapy thing. Love hanging out with the old folks. Don’t think it’s going to turn into a paying gig, but the director and the staff stay clear. Let me do my own thing. There’s this sweet guy, Jacob. You, missy, would love him. Knows a shit-ton about plants and trees. A real woodsman. Such a shame to see him cooped up in that place. Has this grandson who’s on an amazing European adventure. I took Jacob to Walmart the other day and we bought a huge map and colored Sharpies so we could plot the kid’s route. They’re not supposed to tape stuff to the walls.” Poppy grinned. “So we stuck it up with half a roll of packing tape. Bwah-hah-hah.”

“You think that’s a good idea?”

“Rules, Han, are for breaking. Especially when you’re eighty. Can I borrow the truck today? I found a kiln for sale. Thought I’d check it out.”

Poppy already had two kilns but barely used one. The recession was strangling her ceramics business.

“And where are you going to put another kiln?”

“Lordy, a girl can never have too many kilns!”

“Okay, sure.” Hannah meant no. No, it’s horribly inconvenient; no, I need the truck for work. But no was such a difficult word. It always gummed up her mouth like sticky toffee. Still, good to know your greatest weakness, even if, at forty-five, it was more of a fluorescent tattoo inked on your forehead.

Hannah stretched her right arm, then her left. Fanning out her hands, she released the tension needling at her fingertips and imagined it floating up into the sky. Disintegrating into the earth’s atmosphere.

“Galen’s going to be fine.” Was she reassuring herself or Poppy? “It won’t be easy; it won’t happen overnight, but I can fix him.” Her words condensed into a tiny cloud, the only water vapor in what would, no doubt, be another beautiful, dangerously dry day. “And I’ve promised he’ll never have to return to another mental hospital.”

“I know, girl. We’ll keep him safe. So. We standing out here till the next millennium, or are you offering me coffee?” Poppy brushed past Hannah and jogged up the front steps. The dogs, except for Rosie, followed.

The screen door slammed, but Hannah stood still in the dark and listened for the sound of falling leaves. A reminder that cooler weather was on the way, that eventually the oppressive heat would break.

Ghosts stepped out of the shadows—memories of Galen and Liam riding bikes and falling out of trees. Well, Liam was the one who fell out of the tree, while he was grounded and attempting an escape. Galen, always the big brother, had tried to cover up the misdemeanor with a lie. Not a very good one, either.

Hannah smiled.

Lie to me and your asses are mine, she’d told the boys when they were old enough to understand. She had never elaborated, preferring to let their imaginations construct a suitable punishment. Liam had decided this meant Mommy would smack him with a wooden spoon—a threat she had issued once. But Galen’s mind had drawn an elaborate scenario that involved Mom locking him in the crawl space where he would be bitten by a brown recluse spider and die in excruciating pain.

Honest to God, she used to believe Liam would end up in Sing Sing. Constantly seeking to be high on life, his wild streak far exceeded hers, and she’d lost her virginity at fourteen. But Galen? The worst thing he ever did was stay up till 3:00 a.m. on a school night writing poetry.

Through the darkness, a flush of blooms hovered over her mutabilis rose like brightly colored butterflies. How wrong she had been to assume all roses were high maintenance. This old-fashioned plant had thrived in her parched garden, and now it burst open with a second round of buds and flowers the color of apricot, baby pink and crimson. As petals unfurled in drought and sometimes opened at dusk, hope grew in unexpected places.

Hannah shoved her hands into the front pocket of her UNC hoodie and stared toward the tree line, wishing on miracles and ignoring the whisper of concern that told her wind in a bone-dry forest was never a good sign.


Three

Needles of rain softened to a drizzle as Will slipped on his Ray-Bans and became another B-list celebrity walking through Central Park. A bag lady ranted about the Apocalypse, and a beautiful young woman pushing a double stroller smiled at him. Or maybe she was appreciating the ridiculously large bouquet of flowers he had bought for his overworked publicist.

The path climbed steeply toward Dene Rock, and Will followed. He would perch on the outcrop and find the solution to unraveling this mess with his dad. Lying once about Freddie’s death had been an unforgivable lapse of judgment, and yet Will was now stuck in the middle of that lie—a spider caught in its own web. The old man had hooked up with the substitute art teacher, and the two of them were tracking Freddie’s trip with an energy previously reserved for circumventing the rules at Hawk’s Ridge Retirement Community. The first time Will had lacked the patience to deal with his dad’s memory loss, the first time he’d thrown out some comment that was meant—meant—to be forgotten, and his dad had glommed on to it. How could the old man recall a brief, late-night phone conversation but erase the evening Will had told him about Freddie’s death? Some cruel cosmic joke that wasn’t funny. And it had spun out of control. Time to bring the charade to a close.

Tucking the bouquet under his arm, Will scrambled up the slick rock behind the rustic summerhouse. As he sat, his iPhone vibrated in his pocket.

“Hey, Dad. How did you sleep?”

“Good, good. Had a great day, son. Had a great day.”

“Had? It’s only nine o’clock.”

“Been to Walmart and bought a map.” The old man chuckled. Chuckle was a verb Will hated, a word he would never use in his writing. His dad, however, was definitely chuckling. “Bought me a huge world map, son. To track Freddie’s trip.”

“I know, Dad. You told me yesterday.”

“I plan on showin’ it to that new guy, Bernie, down the hall. His grandsons visit every Sunday. Take him to that fancy diner on Main Street for blueberry pancakes. Wait till I tell him the whole cotton-pickin’ story about Freddie. Hell. Five years old and he has a passport. I never owned one, son. Never been outside the state.”

Will flopped onto his back. Droplets of mist fluttered to his sunglass lenses, but in his mind a slab of grief was falling from heaven, crushing him into dust. Three months and nine days, and each hour the grief took on a more solid form.

“Willie? You still there?”

Will positioned the bouquet across his chest like an arrangement of funeral lilies. “Dad, Freddie isn’t—”

“Able to contact us. Yes, yes, you told me yesterday. Shame on you, son. Just ’cos Freddie’s out of reach don’t mean we should give up on him, do it?”

“Dad—”

“Sorry, son. Poppy’s here with some more of them colored markers. Got to go.”

For real? His dad had hung up on him? Will stared at a flock of gray pigeons moving silently through a gray sky. Always he forced himself to look up, never down, forward never backward, and yet these days his mind lingered in places he didn’t want to visit: the last game of tickle monster; Freddie pumping his legs on a swing and singing “The Wheels on the Bus”; Freddie standing alone on a crowded street because the woman who should have been holding his hand had wandered off to look at a pair of five-hundred-dollar shoes in a boutique window.

If only he’d paid as much attention to Cass’s personality as he had to her ass, then maybe he would have figured out that she was a total psycho and self-medicating with alcohol. You’d have thought, given his childhood, he’d be able to spot crazy—despite the disguise of a well-cared-for body poured into sexy, couture clothes. Unlike his mom, Cass could’ve afforded the best treatment. When Will was sixteen, he’d found a psychiatrist who would take Medicaid patients, but always his dad had the same answer: “I’ve seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, son. Besides, your mama’s just high-strung. That’s the price we pay for her beauty.” As if his dad were really that shallow.

Will breathed through his nostrils, panting like a beast.

He’d spent three decades praying he didn’t have a dark side, since that concept came with seriously twisted DNA. Retreat was his strategy for relationships; anger was a soul-sucking distraction he had learned to push aside...and yet. And yet. If he allowed himself to think of Cassandra, the person who had murdered his son, who had turned his baby into a statistic, another kid killed by a drunk driver with a blood alcohol level of point two-six, Will would have to admit that he was capable of violence. How could he wish two people were still alive for such different reasons—Freddie so he could hold him and never let go; Cassandra so he could kill her himself?

Will jumped up and scrambled down the rock. There was only one thing left to do.

* * *

The light would be fading and the temperature dropping as he down-climbed, but he wanted to feel air on his back, on his exposed skin; he wanted to strip away his layers. If he could climb naked, he would. Will tugged his T-shirt over his head and tossed it into the trunk of the Prius along with his iPhone.

He pulled back his shoulders and stretched into a swan dive without leaving the ground. The clutter in his brain floated away, disappeared into the blue sky above the Shawangunk Mountains like a handful of balloons set free.

Nothing existed beyond the challenge ahead: the mastery it would take to scale Shockley’s Ceiling; the choreography of his body moving across the horizontal cracks; the euphoria of standing above the world and looking into the face of God.

He was going unroped.

He would ride doubt and push aside fear, and trust in nothing but his own judgment. And the payoff would come as his mind and body lapsed into harmony. When everything reconciled. When he found clarity. When he knew what to do next.

He grabbed his chalk bag and his nylon shoes. The rest of his rack was still in the car from his last climb. He would sort it out when he returned to the city.

Will began walking. He followed the connector trail to a twenty-foot-wide toe of rock and ignored the small group of tourist spectators. A woman with a pair of binoculars giggled.

Loss of concentration leads to poor self-control and frantic climbing.

Already, he was reading the route, decoding the puzzle, figuring out individual moves. He could climb left of the roof, but no, he would not avoid the crux. He would face the obstacle and crank it. A deceptive 5.6, pitch three demanded more skill than less-experienced climbers realized.

He strode past the large flake to the right and arrived at the base of the climb. He cracked his knuckles and stared up at the rock. No doubt, no thought except for one: I can do this.

* * *

An easy mantel would get him over. Don’t think, don’t hesitate, don’t stop.

Will pushed down on the ledge with his hands, swung his feet up, balanced and stood. Hard not to feel a little gripped. He had cleared the roof; he had nailed the crux. But he had to keep going. Momentum would take him the last sixty feet to the top. Soon he would rest but now wasn’t the time. His mind was often ready to quit before his body. He was not going to flame out.

He stepped around the corner to the second roof and eyeballed his next hold, trusting his left hand for balance.

He dipped into his chalk bag, blew on his fingertips, reached up with his right hand, found a roundish hold, gripped with his finger pads. The muscles in his shoulder stretched out. Taut. For a moment he hung, suspended in air. Time grew still, stripped down to a single camera shot, a study in absolute control. The world stopped breathing. There was nothing beyond the rhythm of the climb flowing through his limbs, through his muscles, through his breath.

He pictured his next move—a heel hook—held it in his mind, executed it. He was over the second roof.

Grabbing, pulling, swinging, Will kept moving upward into the sky.

When he topped out, he threw back his head and let his spirit soar toward the heavens. He released his voice into the air: a scream of triumph, a scream of existence, a commitment to life issued in his own private chapel. The echo floated down to the forest below, to the vast seascape of green speckled with advancing fall. Green, the color of rejuvenation, the color of life. His mind was clear; he knew his way forward. His work-in-progress may have grown cold, but Freddie’s adventure had a heartbeat. So what if it was fiction with an audience of two? He was crafting a better version of the truth, crafting a story worth living for, a story to remember. Giving his dad the gift of untainted memories when he had so few left.

Will flung his arms wide. Standing above the world, he got it. He finally got it.

In the four years since his mom’s death, his dad had been a mess of binge drinking and misfiring brain signals. Only a few weeks ago the old man had said, “People tell you it gets easier, son. But that ain’t the truth. Every day I miss your mama more.” Despite the mashed-up memory, his dad never forgot how much he still loved that one person who’d meant everything.

Just as his dad had never let go of his mom, he would never let go of Freddie.

He would never stop missing Freddie, and he shouldn’t have tried. He shouldn’t stomp down the memories. He should bust them open. He should celebrate Freddie’s life.

As soon as he got back to his apartment, he would start researching Freddie’s adventure. His last, great adventure. And for as long as it took, he would hold Freddie in the present tense.

* * *

The second he picked up his phone, Will knew he’d screwed up. Four text messages from Ally, all variations on a theme: “Where the hell are you, and why are you not answering your phone?” Then one message that said, “Have you lost your freakin’ mind?”

As he tugged his T-shirt over his neck, he glimpsed the tiny scar Ally’s teeth had left on his bicep. Thanks to his mother’s stories, he’d grown up believing that true love was a narrow path with room for only one. What a masochistic legacy to hand a commitment-phobe.

They were five years old with his-’n’-hers scraped knees when Ally bit him. It was the first time he’d tried to kiss her. He tried again at seventeen, adding a declaration of love, and she slapped him. There hadn’t been a third time. When her husband lost his Wall Street job five years ago and Will hired her, even he hadn’t been sure of his motivation. But the moment Freddie entered his life, that whimsical decision to put Ally on his payroll proved to be the wisest move he’d ever made. After all, Ally had been guarding his secrets since grade school. She’d always had his back.

He hit speed dial one and pictured five feet two inches of brown-eyed female indignation.

“You went soloing?” she yelled.

“How did you know?”

“I wouldn’t be a very effective P.A. if I couldn’t weasel information out of your publicist, would I?”

Damn. That was a silly mistake. Why had he felt the need to explain his absence from the weekly spin session?

“So, what’s up?” he said.

“A journalist from the National Enquirer. She was prowling around outside the apartment when I stopped in to check messages. She wanted to know if you were the father of Cass’s little boy.”

Will ground his teeth. “What did you tell her?”

“To move or I’d call the cops, you dolt.”

“She’s just fishing, eliminating former lovers by the math of dates. No one’s buying the story that the poor loser who died in the crash with them was Freddie’s father.” Will and Cass had only agreed on one thing outside of the bedroom: keeping Freddie’s life private and his paternity secret. Will had expected everything to change once Freddie entered the school system, but Cass, who loved to travel on a whim, kept insisting on private tutoring. No preschool, no kindergarten, but Will had been gearing up to fight for first grade. A kid needed friends. How else could he survive his parents?

“No one knows the truth except you and Seth.”

“Not strictly true. Your entire P.R. office knows. And so does Cass’s publicity machine—”

“Ally, I just worked hard to clean Cass out of my mind. Can we not talk about her?”

Ally sighed heavily. “You scared me. I thought you’d do something stupid.”

Will fiddled with the beads wound around his wrist. A one-of-a-kind gift of mini skulls strung together like shrunken heads, the friendship bracelet had been Ally’s idea of a joke the first time he hit the New York Times bestseller list: In case you get bigheaded. The one person who knew him better than anyone, and even she didn’t understand. He hadn’t driven to the Gunks that morning to end his life. He’d been trying to save it.

“Come on, darling. You know me better than that.”

“Will, you’ve barely left the apartment in three months, and suddenly you want to shimmy up a rock face alone and unroped?”

“I picked a climb I’ve done many times before.”

“When you had good reasons to live.”

“I still do.”

“Not that I don’t agree with you, but since you refuse to talk with a therapist about any of this, it’s my job to make sure you’re thinking straight. What, exactly, do you have to live for? And if you answer the Agent Dodds movie deal, I’ll bite your other bicep.”

“You. Your poor, long-suffering husband. The chocolate mimosa you guys gave me for my thirtieth birthday. My dad. All good reasons to live. Happy?”

“If you’d told me you were going, I would have come along. Kept my eye on you.”

There was a time when the thought of Ally watching him climb would have floated his boat for all eternity. Loving her had saved him many times, but like the healed scar, it was no longer a mark of anything more than his past.

“I wanted to be alone. I came here to work the piss out of a route and get my head together.”

“Be one with the rock?”

“If you want to put it that simplistically, yeah. Look, I didn’t mean to cause worry. Why don’t you take Seth out for dinner on the corporate credit card? A pre-Halloween bonus.”

“What the hell is a pre-Halloween bonus?”

“A gift from a grateful boss. Listen, I’m going to find somewhere to stay overnight. I’ll be back in the city tomorrow.”

“You want us to come join you?”

“No. It’s ninety miles—a colossal waste of time and money.”

“Promise me you’re okay, Will. No bull. Just you and me and the truth.”

Will looked back at the mountains. “I’m good.”

“Okay, but do me a favor. Please take an hour to check your email, answer some messages. Act like a guy who cares about his business.”

“I don’t need to care about my business. That’s why I have you.”

“Will—”

He knew that tone.

“Let it go, Ally. I’m doing all I can right now.”

“I know. Love you.”

“Ditto.”

“And, Will? Don’t forget you have a hair appointment tomorrow at four. Please don’t make me reschedule again. You look like a surfer dude with a really bad dye job.”

Will ducked down and glanced in his wing mirror. She had a point. He inspected a clump of dirty-blond hair. The tip was platinum—discolored by the sun during his last climb. He stood and tried to run his hand through what used to be his bangs, but his fingers snagged on a huge knot.

“Go henpeck your husband.”

She gave a laugh. “Bye, you.”

Will stared at his phone. Might as well take ten minutes to dump emails. Trashing unread messages was strangely liberating. Grief had either desensitized him or revealed that ninety percent of his life was disposable. He clicked on the email icon and began deleting. He stopped, finding one he should read—one from Hawk’s Ridge. What was his dad’s latest infraction? Will huffed out a sigh. Had the old man demanded pancakes? Circulated another petition for a fall dance?

Dear Mr. Shepard, the director had written, I trust this email will solicit prompt action on your part.

Pinching his thumb and forefinger together, Will touched the scene and then spread his fingers apart to zoom in on the type.

His dad had been right all along. Fucking bastards.


Four

Blinding October sunlight burst through the trees, jolting Will’s attention to his speedometer. Eighty-five, he was clocking eighty-five. Flying, rather than driving. He slammed his foot on the brake pedal, and the tailgating idiot behind blasted his horn.

Will pulled into the inside lane and waved. Dickhead.

One state away and already he was thinking like his dad. Will hit Pause on his iPod. Bad enough to be heading back to Orange County, North Carolina. He didn’t need to mess with his head by listening to the drumbeat of a Boxer Rebellion song that summoned up the ghost of powwows past.

Why hadn’t he waited for sunup and dealt with this latest crisis by phone? Why had he driven back to New York, packed an overnight bag and jumped into the Prius at two in the morning like Batman on an ecofriendly mission? Will Shepard planned and orchestrated, didn’t do spontaneity, never released anger, but here he was, acting like a caped avenger. Rushing to defend what remained of his dad’s honor. Trying to save someone who likely as not could no longer be saved.

The state border zipped past; the forest, a sleeping ogre with the strength to tear him to pieces, stretched toward the Carolina blue sky.

A bloated deer lay on the grassy verge, its flesh ripped open to expose bone, and unidentifiable chunks of roadkill littered the painted lines dividing the lanes. To his right, a barn—roofless and caving in on itself—struggled to rise out of the undergrowth only to be tugged back by wild vines. To his left, a regiment of transmission towers flattened everything in their path as they marched over the horizon like metal warriors.

Will clutched the steering wheel. Two days max and he could do this trip in reverse. But first, figure out how to take down the director of Hawk’s Ridge.

Precision and balance, Will.

A climber who rushed, who didn’t strategize, was a dead climber.

He would book into a motel, crash for a few hours, meet with the director, placate him, spend an afternoon with his dad, get knee-walking drunk, sleep it off, drive home. But how to placate the director? Be nice, but firm: You can’t kick my dad out. Where else will he go? Will shook his head. Lame, totally lame. Begging might be involved. Or maybe he could offer to do a book signing. Yeah, right. Like that would make a difference.

* * *

“How about I organize a book signing with local authors?” Will said five hours later in a face-off across a cherry desk. Beautifully crafted, it was too big for the room, too grand for the doofus opposite.

“I don’t think so.” The director of Hawk’s Ridge craned his neck—not that he really had one, just a gelatinous mound of fat—and peered into the mirror on the far wall. He adjusted his tie slowly.

Will flipped over his hand and rubbed the calluses. If he could tackle cliffs of rock, he could handle this groundhog of a man who lumbered through the leftovers of people’s lives.

Thud. Will jumped as a bird crashed into the sparkling windowpane. “A bluebird just—”

“Mr. Shepard, please.”

Will stared beyond the splatter of feathers to Occoneechee Mountain. My blood’s all over that mountain, the old man used to say. Unfortunately, so was Will’s.

“Your father is loud, abusive and, half the time, drunk.”

I would be, too, if I had to live here.

“Last week he hounded poor Mrs. Wilson into signing his petition for a Friday-night social. Chased her down the hall.”

Mrs. Wilson’s in a wheelchair. How much chasing could be involved?

“She was terrified.”

Why could Will think of nothing to say other than fucking bastard?

“Alcohol was involved.”

“I appreciate everything you’re saying. But I want to assure you that my father is not an alcoholic. My moth— I grew up with someone who abused alcohol. I know the signs. As I’m sure you do. I don’t mean to question your judgment.” Will’s left eye began to twitch. “My father’s always been a heavy drinker, but he’s not a drunk. And right now, seems he has little to enjoy but his Wild Turkey. Where’s the harm in that?”

Stupid, Will. Never ask a question if you’re not prepared to hear the answer.

“With all due respect, Mr. Shepard, I don’t think you realize how the situation has deteriorated since your last visit. Many of our residents are heavily medicated. They cannot drink. And, to be honest, I think your father has emotional issues. We’ve had great success with Risperdal in some of our more aggressive residents.”

“Seriously? You want to give my dad an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia?”

“And, finally—there’s this business with your son.”

Will sat up, senses alert.

“When he told one of the staff his grandson was on some big trip, we let it go. We thought it might be his way of dealing with grief. But then he started bragging to other residents, and...well. This incident last night. Brawling, Mr. Shepard.” As the director shook his head, his entire upper body waddled.

“We’ve never had a violent episode in our community before. Not one. I don’t need to tell you how upset the female staff was to see two grown men rolling around on the floor like boys. The security guard who separated them has a black eye. A. Black. Eye.”

Will heard it just fine the first time.

“According to witnesses, your father entered into some silly game of my-grandson’s-better-than-yours with one of our new residents.”

“Bernie down the hall?”

“Mr. Fields, yes. I have already spoken with his family. They have generously agreed not to press charges.”

“Oh, come on. They wanted to prosecute an eighty-year-old granddad for bragging?”

“Mr. Shepard. I cannot allow your father to stay here if he’s going to incite violence. Your father is an alcoholic. He has psychotic breaks with reality. He has problems with anger management.”

Really, the guy didn’t have to speak at half-speed. Will got it, totally got it.

“These are serious issues,” the director said. “I need you to treat them as such.”

“I do, honestly. And I’m not questioning your experience.” Will picked up a glass paperweight and put it back in the same place. “But have you considered that he’s still mourning my mother? Could we bring in a grief counselor?”

The door that Will had deliberately left ajar crashed open, and a woman carrying a Kit Kat and wearing jeans that clung in all the right places marched into the room. Oranges, she smelled of oranges. And chocolate chip cookies.

The director’s face turned puce. “Poppy, I’m in a meeting with—”

“You cannot be serious about kicking Jacob Shepard to the curb,” she said. “Where will he go?”

My point exactly. Then Will couldn’t help himself, he looked at her butt, which was hard to miss, since it was rather large and she was now bending over the cherry desk. How many hours had he wasted staring at women’s asses and where had it led? Back to the one thing he’d spent his life running from: craziness. Will cleared his throat and focused on the bookshelf, empty except for a set of Agent Dodds novels in hardback—signed and donated on moving-in day.

“Mr. Shepard.” The director’s voice was tight like a slingshot. “I don’t believe you’ve met our temporary art teacher, Poppy Breen. She’s filling in for a few weeks.”

“Jacob’s a sweet, lonely guy.” Poppy spoke to the director and ignored Will.

Sweet might be taking it a bit too far. Stubborn, ornery...

“Short-term memory in the shitter,” she continued. “But he just needs a buddy. When I took him to Walmart to buy his map, he chatted away like a kid. Told me about his days in a bluegrass band with his baby brother.”

Really? His dad had talked about Uncle Darren? The old man hadn’t mentioned another family member in decades. There’d been some falling-out when Will was little. He didn’t remember the details but the cause was the same as always: his mom.

“What about music therapy?” Poppy said.

“I’m in a private meeting, Poppy. With Jacob’s son.”

“Excellent.” She hurled herself into the chair next to Will. “Then I arrived just in time.”

“Poppy, I’d like you to—”

“Stay.” Will turned to his new ally. “I’d like you to stay.”

She looked at him for the first time and her eyes—not quite amber, not quite green, not quite brown—slowly appraised his face. Will waited for her to finish. It wasn’t that he was some egomaniacal dick, but women often looked at him and liked what they saw, which proved you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Fantastic, exhaustion was dragging him down the primrose path to overused clichés.

Will sighed. “We were talking about grief counseling for my dad. I think he’s still grieving for my mom.”

“Yup. Agreed.”

“If you’re going to stay, Poppy—” the director’s eyes, which were too small for his face, flicked sideways in an oddly reptilian gesture “—at least close the door.”

Will tugged on the neck of his T-shirt. Closed doors, trapped in a confrontation with two other people. Not good. So much of his life wasted hoping his mom would be incarcerated, and yet shove him in a room and shut the door, and he could blow. Claustrophobia—yet another legacy of his childhood, and the one thing he could blame on his dad. He used to beg—please, Daddy, don’t lock me in my room—but his dad always had the same response, “It’s for your own good, son. I need to deal with your mama.” What was that supposed to mean? That Will could look after himself even as a tyke?

Will stood and grabbed the back of the chair. He had an appalling desire to shove the director and make a run for it.

The director’s index finger tapped the open folder on his desk. “It says here your mother died four years ago.”

“You think there’s an expiration on grief?” Will glanced at the now-shut door. His mouth was dry; the words tasted stale. Palpitations, definitely had heart palpitations. “You want my dad to be complacent, easier to handle, right?” Firing dumb questions again. Stupid. Might as well be tumbling off a rock face in an uncontrolled fall.

The art teacher with the cute butt gave a smug laugh.

“Mr. Shepard, this meeting is over.” The director closed the folder. “You have two options: you take your father to a geriatric psychiatrist and get medication, or you find alternative accommodation for him.”

Reason snapped. Will would not be cornered like a dog. He was done listening; he was done following other people’s ultimatums. Cass’s voice seemed to trill in his head—He’s my son, William, and you will see him when I say. This small-minded stranger had no understanding of a private family matter and no right, none, to make decisions about the old man’s mental health.

“You know what? Forget it. He’s leaving today.”

Relief—the relief in the room was palpable. But was it his or the director’s? Didn’t know, didn’t care. Needed out.

Will tugged his books free from the bookshelf—a self-destructive act that deleted a fan from his Facebook page. Team Shepard would not be happy.

“I donated these to the library,” Will said, “not to you personally.”

“We don’t have a library, Mr. Shepard.”

“Exactly. Which makes this place hell.”

* * *

Will tossed open the door and slammed into his father’s chest.

“Aren’t you a little beyond listening at keyholes, Dad?”

The old man’s shirt was untucked on one side, and he was carrying an armload of empty cardboard boxes. He was smiling, too—his grin as fat as Freddie’s had been after he’d unwrapped the two huge Playmobil sets on his fifth birthday. Will had been unable to decide which castle to buy, so he’d settled on both. Plus the catapult. And the battering ram. And the dragon.

“Where you been, son? Got some boxes off Poppy.”

“Boxes?” Will bit his lip.

“For packin’, son. For packin’. Ol’ possum face kick me out, did he? And look!” His dad held up a cardboard mailing tube. “Look what Poppy found me. I said I reckon it’s the perfect thing to protect our Freddie’s map.”

Behind him, Poppy shouted, “You can’t fire me, asshole, I’m a volunteer.”

“Hi, Poppy,” his dad said. “Have you met my son? Poppy’s a firecracker. Only spark of life around here. You leavin’, too, Poppy? You leavin’, too?”

His dad repeated himself when he was excited, which, admittedly, wasn’t often these days.

Great. Will had just hit the self-destruct button, and the old man was behaving as if they were embarking on a fishing trip.

“Yup, we’re both moving on to greener pastures, Jacob. Can I borrow your cute son for a sec?” Poppy beamed at his dad, who beamed back.

“Sure thing, Poppy. I’ll wait right here.”

His dad used the cardboard tube to point at the red carpet that appeared to be the evil twin of the hall carpet in The Shining. Will looked up at the empty bulletin board with the smiling employee-of-the-month photo, and along the silent hallway of closed doors with the handrail that ran only on one side. Somewhere a door slammed. This was a place inhabited by nothing but echoes. Why had he never noticed before?

“Come with?” Poppy stroked Will’s arm, and the edge of a jagged scar poked out from under her cuff.

Will jolted back. He was so done with crazy. “Nasty scar.”

“No, I didn’t try and off myself,” Poppy said in a bored tone that suggested she was used to this comment. “I rescued an abused horse, a Thoroughbred chestnut mare. In other words, the triple whammy of high-strung. Miss Prissy’s as spirited at they come. Bucked me off into some barbed wire during the breakout. Love that mare, hate her former owner—my turd of an ex. Asshole wanted to make her another tame possession, like his trophy wife, who wasn’t me in case you’re wondering. Best guess? He abused them both.”

A story Will would normally consider harvesting for his writing notebook—despite the undercurrent of betrayal. As a kid, he’d collected stories the way most boys collected live critters or plastic dinosaurs. Right now, weighed down with a full set of Agent Dodds hardbacks, he lacked the energy to care.

Poppy opened the second door on the right, and they entered a small bedroom with a walnut dresser and a rocking chair. The bed was too neatly made, the colors in the framed print of Jesus too sunny.

“I’m sorry about your job,” Will said.

“Bah. I’ve been fired before. Being dumped from a volunteer job might be a first, though.” She bounced onto the bed, grabbed a needlepoint cushion that had been placed in middle of the pillows and hugged it to her chest. “Where’re you taking Jacob? Any thoughts?”

“I have a motel room in town. Guess we’ll stay there while I search for a new place.”

“You make crap decisions.”

“This wasn’t exactly something I planned.” He scowled at her.

“Yeah, whatever. I have this friend, a holistic vet, with a secluded place in the country. Ten acres of pasture in front, one hundred acres of forest behind. And a guest cottage with beautiful views. She’s looking for a tenant.” Poppy grabbed a copy of Triangle Gardener magazine from the nightstand. She ripped off a piece, then tugged a pencil from behind her ear and scrawled a phone number. “Hannah. Give her a call.”

“Thanks, but I’m not looking to rent. I have to be back in the city by—” When? He’d thrown his deadline away. For the first time in his adult life, he didn’t have to be anywhere.

“Wait lists around here are a nightmare. Could take a while.” She wrote an address under the phone number. “Drive by, have a look. You’ll love Hannah. She projects calming vibes.”

Right, the last thing he needed—some new-age hippy-dippy chick projecting anything at him.

“She’ll adore Jacob. Her own father—” Poppy waved the rest of the sentence away. “Jacob can catch his breath, detox from this place. You really think he’d cope with the bustle of a motel?”

I don’t think I can cope with the bustle of a motel.

“Want directions?”

“No,” Will said, but she kept writing.

A decade younger and she’d be just his type: great curves, shiny chestnut curls fighting to escape from a barrette. He had only one dating rule—no woman old enough to hear her biological clock, and this art teacher with the great butt was definitely over twenty-five. Closer to forty, if he had to guess.

By sixteen, he’d known he never wanted kids, which was a no-brainer for anyone with his family background. Birth control was something he established at the get-go of a sexual relationship, and Cass had told him she was on the pill. A lie, of course, since she’d hand-selected him to be a sperm donor. But the instant he drew his son close and smelled that powdery baby scent, Will had known their relationship was forever. And yet forever had turned out to be less than five years.

The fist of grief grabbed his throat, cutting off his air supply.

“Hey,” Poppy said. “You okay?”

“Fine.” Will forced himself to breathe. “I’m fine.”

“Here. Directions. Take them.”

She placed the scrap of paper on the quilt, hopped off the bed and disappeared before Will could say, “I have a GPS.”

The odor of bleach in the room was thick, thick enough to mask the lingering fumes of death. It transported him back to a summer evening fishing on the oxbow behind the ghost field, the year after the excavation of the Occaneechi village started. He and his dad had just caught a bucket of bream when Will snared himself on a hook. Bled all over his new shorts—thrift-store new, but his mom had bought them for his first day of kindergarten. “Your mama’s gonna be real upset,” his dad said, and young Will was terrified. Mama being upset could mean anything from her dragging Will by his hair to screaming that he was worthless. But his dad told him not to fret, told him bleach was the magic cure. Possibly, but not in the quantity the old man had used. Will never wore the shorts again, and his mom never noticed.

“Willie?”

Will jumped. In the five minutes he’d been responsible for his dad, he’d forgotten him. The old man was standing in the doorjamb, trailing empty boxes with one hand and clasping the roll of cardboard to his chest as if it were the family Bible.

“Had me a real bad thought while you were talking to Poppy. Heck of a bad thought, son.”

“Hey, it’s okay. Come here, sit.” Will guided his dad onto the rocking chair. “Want to tell me what happened?”

“Nope.”

“The gist of it?” Will crouched down.

“Somethin’ real bad happened to Freddie. He were in a car with his mama....”

Strange, how moments of heartbreak didn’t announce themselves, they just ambushed you. Shouldn’t there be an earthquake measuring nine point five on the Richter scale when the plates of your life shifted? But outside this room with the cheap print of Jesus and the bed with hospital corners, traffic continued to speed through the forty-five-miles-per-hour zone. And in the time it took to inhale, the cycle of grief regenerated. The wound tore open.

Will would never know what happened in the minutes after the crash, sometime around sunset. The sudden loss of light had added to the confusion. One witness had heard screams but couldn’t determine if they’d come from a child or a woman. True or false, Will’s brain had latched on to that snippet of information and created a scenario he could never escape: his son dying in pain and terror.

The chair clicked as his dad rocked back and forth, back and forth. “But I ain’t listenin’ to my no-good brain, son. My brain, it’s a trickster from one of your mama’s fairy tales. And I choose not to listen. Freddie’s the only good thing we got in our lives, ain’t that true? You didn’t tell me where he and his mama were headin’ this week.”

Will fell to his knees. Relief swamped him—ridiculous, selfish relief. He could still hide behind his story, one that wasn’t finished.

“They’re leaving for Florence,” Will said, “so Freddie can see Michelangelo’s David.”

“Woo-wee. Who would have thought? My grandson, seein’ a real live Mickel-angelo. Remember how you wanted to see that statue when you was a boy? Darren thought it meant you was, you know.” His dad’s right hand flopped as if his wrist were broken.

“You remember?”

“My mind ain’t gone, son. Full of holes, but some things I remember just clear as sunlight. Just clear as sunlight.”

Will stood and shifted the books to his hip. “Here. Let me take the boxes.”

Jacob handed over everything except the cardboard tube. “Heck, my memory’s just fine. Ask me about how your uncle and me went fishin’ down in the Eno this past summer with cedar poles we cut ourselves. Caught a lot of suckers down there.”

The window opened a crack, then slammed shut. Oh, Dad. You haven’t left this place in two years. And Uncle Darren died right before Mom. I know, because I paid for both funerals.

“If you throw liquid in the Eno, it’ll end up in the Atlantic Ocean.” His dad creaked up to standing. “It joins the Neuse River down in Durham.”

“I know, Dad.”

“And those rivers, they was trade routes and a source of food ’cos animals like bison got to have water. After the Europeans came they killed all the bison. One of the presidents, I forget which one...”

“Dad?”

The old man glanced around as if trying to orient himself. “When we was kids, Mother only let us play on the rivers and creeks. And on Occoneechee Mountain. It ain’t now like it was then. We was labeled colored and segregated in church, in school and in the movies, but they couldn’t segregate us in the woods. That’s how I met your mama. ’Course, she were only a little bitty thing first time I spied her.”

“Come on, old man.” He took his father’s arm. “Let’s get you packed.”

“Packed? We joinin’ Freddie?”

“I wish, Dad. I wish.”

Will stared up at the ceiling covered in bobbly plaster. Thirty-four years of practice at smothering his emotions, but how could he talk about Freddie with his dad person-to-person, lie-upon-lie, and not mentally disintegrate?


Five

Poppy smacked her cell phone on the steering wheel. Stupid cheap piece of shit. Best she could afford, but still... Aha! A ring tone.

“Han, it’s me. Where are you?”

“About to leave Saxapahaw. I had to put a Siamese cat to sleep.”

The line crackled.

“And how was that?”

“Peaceful. You’re not driving and talking on the phone, are you?”

Poppy laughed. Her friend had her pegged years ago, even before she’d liberated Miss Prissy and accused Asshole of felony animal abuse. He’d tried to bully her out of the lawsuit, since he hadn’t wanted his rich friends to know about the banging of the hired help, but it was Hannah who’d persuaded her to walk away. And offered up her pasture for Miss Pris. That was Han, the world’s biggest fan of lost causes and underdogs. Underdogs, ha! Besides, if she hadn’t done the dirty with Asshole, she might never have been fired from the interior design company for sleeping with a client, might never have branched out on her own, might never have met Will Shepard.

Will was definitely no asshole. Plus he was the cutest guy she’d met since dumping the last putz. But dating was like baking. Pie crust didn’t always turn out right the first time, either.

“Poppy, honey? You called for a reason?”

“Sorry, girl. Miles away.” Poppy swerved around a black snake. Dang. Car nearly off the road. “Guess what? I just met this total hottie. Looks kinda young, but didn’t Demi Moore prove age is irrelevant? Isn’t whatshisname fifteen years her junior?”

“What are you talking about?” Hannah said.

“Wait, forget that. They’re divorced. Still. Age doesn’t matter these days, does it? This guy looks like a young Daniel Craig. With more hair.” Poppy fanned her T-shirt against her boobs. “Lots of hair you want to run your fingers through. Bone structure says Johnny Depp, but his abs are definitely Brad Pitt in Troy. You know what? Picture the love child of Johnny Depp and Daniel Craig. He’s mighty purty.” She slathered on the sassy Southern accent that had cost her parents a small fortune to erase.

“Daniel who?” Hannah’s voice echoed.

“Girl, I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask that.”

Poppy pulled down her visor, grabbed the Green Day CD she’d burned with a continuous loop of “Horseshoes and Handgrenades” and shoved it into the slot.

“When d’you last go to the movies?” Silly question since all Han did was work and sleep. Sleep was so not Poppy’s thing. Lucky if she could crash for five hours a night. “You still there?”

The line had gone dead.

Piece of shit phone—oh. Out of juice. Must’ve forgotten to charge it again. Imagine that.

Poppy hummed along to Green Day and tossed the cell phone onto the passenger seat where it bounced off the boxed-up set of mugs destined for some Duke professor. She really had meant to deliver the order before 2:00 p.m. Package was C.O.D. and that grocery money could be mighty useful. Nah. She’d make up some excuse and take it over bright and early Monday. Painting Thoroughbreds on mugs for her parents’ country club friends sucked, but she loved the stock pieces. Always rearing up, her prancing mares reminded her to keep spinning just as she’d done since she was a little girl skipping in circles, earning her nickname of Poppy Bean. “Goodness gracious, child,” her grandmama always said, “you’re full of beans.”

But once in a while, when she looked at her painted mares, Poppy saw fear in their eyes, self-defense in their raised hooves. Not one for overanalyzing, she’d never followed that thought—until today. And it led to Hannah.

She was creepy calm. Did she not realize that her son was in a heap of trouble? Depression had been grabbing at him for years, and yet he’d always managed to stumble free. ’Course, Poppy didn’t know too much about these things, but Galen had confided plenty when he was a teen trying not to worry his mom. Should she have told Han how far back this crap went? Nah, Hannah would only have worried twice as much. And Galen? He would’ve been spooked worse than Miss Pris during a tornado warning. One thing about her godson, he was more locked down than Fort Knox.

Even as a kid, Galen had tried to protect his baby brother and his mom. But now he needed protecting, and Poppy could do that just fine without betraying any secrets. Steer things in a better direction. Interfere a bit.

Yes, Han told her frequently she should stop sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. Blah, blah, blah. But this idea about putting Galen in the cottage was beyond catastrophic. Give him too much personal space and who knew what could happen.

Han had always been the one to look out for Poppy. Now it was role reversal time. And her cunning plan had nothing to do with that stud-muffin, Will Shepard. Although, technically, he was more of a twelve-pack of Krispy Kreme original glazed donuts.

Poppy licked her lips and went back to singing.

* * *

The forest were his real home: his daddy and his mama, his ancestors and his past, his present and his future. ’Course, he didn’t have much future. His flame were goin’ out. But to finish his days in the forest? Now that might give him some peace of mind. There were trees all around. Not forest he recognized but didn’t much matter. If Willie stopped the car, he’d take hisself off for a walk so he could hear leaves rustlin’ under his boots.

Maybe Darren would be there, when they got home. Him and Darren were real tight as kids. Big fight, though, over the record deal. Darren wanted to go on the road, but how could he do that and leave Willie alone with his mama?

Be good to hear the clackety-clack and the whistlin’ of the trains again. Couldn’t hear no trains from Hawk’s Ridge. Missed home-style Southern cookin’, too. Institutional food weren’t no better than cardboard. Freddie, though, he were eatin’ real fancy food.

“C.R.S., son.”

“C.R.S.?” Will said.

“Can’t remember stuff. What’s the name of that ice cream Freddie’s bin eatin’?”

“Gelato.”

“Gel-aaaa-to.” His grandbaby were eatin’ things he couldn’t pronounce! “Think we can get some, for when Freddie comes home? Heck, son. You need me to drive? You plum near went off the road.”

He didn’t look so hot these days, his Will. Must be workin’ too hard. Needed a haircut and a good woman. A man his age should have a wife. Heck, he were married at Willie’s age. How old was he now? Couldn’t keep track of time. Lost August and September altogether. Now it were October. He could tell from the dogwoods.

“Dad?” Will said. “We’re taking a detour.”

“You’re not drivin’ to the cemetery, are you?” Jacob glanced down at the cardboard pipe in his lap. Looked like a giant bullet casin’. Freddie’s map were tucked up inside. Well protected. Good, good; good, good. “I won’t go.”

“No, Dad. I don’t want to go to the cemetery any more than you do.”

How many years since she’d crossed over? Three? Four? Didn’t want to know. Some memories was best left to rot. Never wanted Angeline buried. Wanted her ashes spread in the wind, but Will, he needed a grave. Needed to go visit her, make amends. Things been real bad between them when his Angeline crossed over. The boy wouldn’t even come to the funeral. It should have been him under that pile of dirt, not his angel. Ten years older. Should’ve been him.

Woo-wee, she were somethin’, his Angeline. Flitted around like a butterfly. Filled him with awe. Put him through hell during her black spells, but did he regret a single day? No siree, not one. Tough on Willie, though, real tough. She could be a real handful. The temper on her! Been hard on young Willie, that temper. Sometimes he’d had to lock Willie in his room. The boy resented it, of course, but how else could he keep his son safe?

Will swung the car around and put out an arm. Sort of thing he used to do when Willie were little, to keep him from shootin’ forward into the dashboard. Willie better not start treatin’ his old man like a kid. Where was they goin’? To the cemetery? He hoped not. He never visited. Couldn’t. Couldn’t think of his dear sweet Angeline under that red clay.

“I thought we was goin’ home, Willie. This ain’t home. Goddamn it. Take me home!”

“We can’t, Dad. We sold the old place two years ago. You had that fall, ended up at the rehabilitation center and we sold the shack. I tried to get you to come to New York, but you wouldn’t consider it.”

“I ain’t movin’ to New York. I been followin’ the trail of my people all my life. I ain’t livin’ anywhere but in the footprints of my ancestors.”

“I know, Dad. You made that pretty clear after your fall.”

Fall? What fall? But he remembered Will leavin’ him in that shithole, all right. Some things he remembered clear as day.

The car bounced around a curve. And that bubble of anger, it vanished. Pop! Gone.

Jacob sat up straight. Real straight. Ahead were a big pasture with snake-rail fencin’ and a horse skitterin’ around. And behind? A mighty fine view. So fine it could’ve been Occoneechee Mountain. His blood were all over that mountain. Heck, his skin, too. One time he banged up his right knee real bad sleddin’ down on the back of an old rockin’ chair. Woo-wee. Flew like the wind and ended up in the Eno. Still had the scar to prove it. Willie, he got scarred on Occoneechee Mountain, too. His mama, she felt real bad about that, but the boy never would let her apologize.

Them dogwoods, they were crimson, but the rest of the forest were still shades of green. Best color in the world. Color that made his heart sing. Didn’t he write a song about that once?

Well, he never. And an owl at the edge of the forest! Lots of Lumbee Elders, they said the owl were a bad omen, that if he hooted four times in a row, death were comin’. But he respected the all-seein’ night owl. Could set a man to thinkin’. No matter how great you thought you was, that ol’ rascal could look down and say, “Whoo, whoo, who are you?”


Six

Hannah followed half-buried signposts of time: a wagon wheel and two rusty mule shoes. There was living, breathing history in this forest, history that was tangible, history that endured. Protective spirits.

Saponi Mountain had spoken to her from the first day: You belong here. So much in life was transitory, but not the connection she felt to this piece of land. If she believed in reincarnation—and maybe she did, because her mother had been a psychic healer who taught her to discount nothing—she had lived here before, in another lifetime. And after everything that had happened with her father, well. Leaving wasn’t an option.

Weaving around wild blueberry bushes, Hannah turned into a shaft of dying sunlight, the orange glow of the magical hour her mother had called the gloaming. These days the gloaming descended too quickly into evening. Nothing beat the thrill of hearing coyotes and owls on her land, but nights alone were a bitter reminder that loved ones could leave and never return.

Crispy leaves crackled under her old hiking boots, and Hannah shivered despite the late-afternoon warmth. Dry wind rattled through the leaves of the hardwoods and, for a moment, she thought she heard a car. No, she did. There was a car on her driveway. Rising up on tiptoe, Hannah found a peephole through the sweetgums.

The back of her neck tingled.

Trusting people was her strength and, according to the boys, her weakness. Still, she was a woman without neighbors to hear her scream. She shook her head. How ridiculous, to think like Poppy and second-guess everyone’s motives, when honestly, who ever heard of a serial killer driving a Prius? Pretty pale green one, too.

Daisy whined, and Rosie flopped onto Hannah’s feet, rooting her to the forest floor.

The engine died and a young man got out. His hair said Californian surfer, but his clothes of tonal greens and browns suggested urban chic. Despite his tangle of blond hair, he blended in with the forest. He was slight but not skinny. Well-toned if she had to guess from this distance. He seemed oddly familiar. Was he one of Galen’s friends? Unlikely, since Galen hadn’t brought anyone home in a while. This guy didn’t look much older than either of her sons, but he moved with the stiffness of an old man. Maybe he needed some pokeweed. Always good for arthritic pain.

The stranger stared at her, or rather at the spot where she was standing. No way could he see her through the foliage and the shadows, but she huddled back against a white oak. A wave of light-headedness hit her. Another warning, maybe, that it was time to end the granola-bars-on-the-go diet.

A second man emerged from the car, much taller than the first. With the long, white ponytail and black leather vest, he had to be Native American. His head bobbed in agitation. The younger man moved quickly, circling the older man’s waist with an arm and guiding him back into the car. It was a filial gesture, and yet the two men couldn’t be related. They looked nothing alike.

The air tightened as if sealed in an invisible container, and the squirrels and the birds fell silent. Hannah closed her eyes through another wave of dizziness, her hands digging into the bark of the oak. A door slammed, the car drove off and a crow cawed.

When she opened her eyes, she was alone with the dogs. And in the bough above, there was an owl.


Seven

Will circled the bathroom. How were two grown men expected to share a space this small? How long would they have to stay here like a pair of shipwrecked refugees?

Dinner sat in the middle of his stomach—a coagulated mush of hushpuppies, the only thing he’d dare eat in the diner where everything was drowning in grease and nothing was organic.

He should find a hotel with a suite. No, find somewhere with a kitchen, a real kitchen, so he could prepare real food for his now-homeless dad. If nothing else, he could at least feed the old man. Will had learned to cook through observation at corn shuckings, wheat thrashings, canning parties and hog killings. The Shepard clan was huge. You only had to clock reactions when you answered the question “Who’s your people?” to realize the reach of his family. And yet it all boiled down to him and his dad and a cardboard tube in a Best Western. With a tiny bathroom.

On the other side of the paper-thin wall, a handful of kids screamed and giggled. A parental voice shushed them, and Will’s heart raced like a souped-up engine. No way could he stay here another night. He needed out; he needed to ditch this feeling of running barefoot through briars. He yanked the scrap of paper from his back pocket and stared at it. A cottage would come with a kitchen. Maybe Poppy’s friend would even consider a short-term lease. Really, at this point, what did he have to lose by asking? Will took a deep breath and punched in the phone number.

“Hello?” a quiet, warm voice answered immediately.

Was it too late to call? Had he woken her? He breathed through his mouth as he tried to block the smell of his dad’s shaving cream. A memory tackled him: his mother, breasts exposed, drunk in the family bathtub. His dad lifting her out. Now, son. You don’t need to see this. Go to your room and shut the door. Most of his family life had happened on the other side of his bedroom door.

“Who are you trying to reach?” the voice said.

Jesus, he’d forgotten to talk. “Sorry. Hannah Linden.”

“I can barely hear you. Can you speak up, please?”

“The art teacher from Hawk’s Ridge gave me your number. You have a cottage for rent?”

“Yes, Poppy stopped by earlier this evening, mentioned she’d given you my number.” Hannah paused but something had shifted. Wary, she had become wary. “I’m afraid she made a mistake. I’m not renting the cottage right now.”

In the next room, his dad snored.

“I’ll pay double whatever you’re asking.”

“That bad?”

“Have you ever shared a motel room with an aging parent?”

“I’d like to say yes, but both my parents are dead.”

Her honesty slapped him; pain settled in his temple. He was losing this conversation before it had begun. “Sorry. About your parents, I mean.” Apologizing, retreating. Time for his ace, the one that never failed. A lousy trick or a sign of desperation? “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Will Shepard, the writer. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

“The Will Shepard? The one and only?”

“Poppy didn’t mention it? She saw me lugging a full set of Agent Dodds novels out of the director’s office.”

“When Poppy’s on a mission she doesn’t notice much. You could run past her buck-naked and she wouldn’t clock your ass.”

He smiled and caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror. The smile, a nod to pleasure and happiness, felt like a betrayal to Freddie. He contorted his face back into its customary mask. Blank, expressionless.

“Plus, Poppy only reads glossy magazines,” Hannah said. “Ones filled with celebrity gossip.”

“But you’ve heard of me?”

“I’m a fan. Your plots suck me in and don’t let go.”

“And my characters?” Damn, his ego had to ask.

“You seem to enjoy exploring broken minds.”

Not so much enjoyment as an inability to escape total psychos.

Hannah started talking again. “Poppy hasn’t been at Hawk’s Ridge for long, but I’ve heard a great deal about your father. I gather he loves to brag about his grandson.” She paused. “Such a special bond between young boys and their grandfathers.”

A bond that transcends even death. Grief stirred in his stomach, moved up through his esophagus, threatened to spew out of his mouth in a macabre chant of He’s dead, my son is dead.

“Yes,” Will said quietly. He wanted to say more, but just breathing was a struggle. This bond, this special bond between young boys and their grandfathers, also led to fiction. To a lie, even though Poppy clearly thought it was the truth. He’d assumed all the staff knew about Freddie’s death. Or at least the night staff who’d had to restrain his dad one hundred and two days earlier when Will had driven down with the news of the accident. Maybe the director hadn’t briefed Poppy because she was a volunteer.

Will took a deep breath. Now he really, really wanted that cottage. It offered a clean chalkboard. No explanations necessary. What the hell, he’d go for some honesty. Not his normal strategy with women, but it was the only play he had left.

“My dad’s had a few rough years since my mom died. She was his life. His world collapsed and he’s...he’s not bouncing out of his grief.” The hitch in his voice was surprising. Unnerving. “We drove by your place earlier and it seemed peaceful. I think it would be good for him—the quiet, the forest. He’s always loved the forest. It would only be temporary, until I figure out what to do long-term.”

Silence. Was she digesting what she knew about his dad and Hawk’s Ridge? How much had Poppy told her? How much should he tell her?

Hannah sighed. “Okay, then.”

“He’s suffering some short-term memory loss. Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know. Should it be?”

Wait, she’d totally agreed. Why was he risking more information than necessary? He held the phone tight against his cheek. “My dad can be difficult.”

“And you can’t be?”

Was she teasing him?

“When he gets confused he gets upset,” Will said. “I think the lack of control scares him.”

“Lack of control scares most people.”

“Did Poppy tell you what happened at Hawk’s Ridge?”

“In some detail, yes.”

“I know how it looks, but he’s not violent.” Although the old man had just been kicked out of a retirement home for brawling. “Dad doesn’t even squish bugs. I had this pathological fear of spiders as a kid. He taught me how to catch and release them.” Did he just reveal personal details to a fan? “But I’ll be with him the whole time.”

“It’s fine.” He could hear her smile. “A senescent grandfather doesn’t bother me in the least.”

How perfect, she had used the word senescent. Will loved to be surprised by people’s word choices. Words held such power and such beauty. And such escape. As a young boy, he chose magical not mad to describe his mother. As an adult, he chose alive, not dead, to describe his son.

“You said this was temporary, but I prefer a six-month lease.” She gave a soft laugh, an easy laugh. No drama. “Is that a problem?”

Yeah, because if he thought he’d still be in Orange County in six days let alone six months, he’d kill himself and his dad. But he could easily pay out the lease. It was just money. The one thing he had plenty of.

“It’s not a problem if we can move in tomorrow.”

They discussed a price—or rather she suggested a figure and he agreed. Then Will hung up and cracked open the bathroom door. The old man snuffled from one of the twin beds with the psychedelic comforters. The giant map, stored away in its thick casing, lay on the floor next to him. Memories-to-go rolled up safe and sound. At some point they would have to return to Hawk’s Ridge—box up the rest of his mother’s knickknacks and arrange for a mover to haul the furniture, even though his dad had said it could stay for all he cared. Wasn’t his goddamn furniture, was it?

The old man had a point. Will had purchased it while his dad was at the rehabilitation center. New furniture for a fresh start, that had been the plan, but Will had given no thought to his dad’s taste. Problem was, he didn’t know if the old man had any taste. Always his mom set the tone; always his dad followed.

Even when his mom was going whacko and smashing crockery, his parents had a bond that excluded everyone. One of the reasons he’d been such a self-reliant kid. That and the fact of being a midlife oops baby, a bear cub—Little Moondi—according to his dad. But bear cubs were meant to follow and learn from their mothers, not run from them. When they were teenagers, Ally had pronounced him to be a coyote, and he’d believed her. Until he’d found out that coyotes often mated for life.


Eight

The pale green Prius from the day before crawled to the end of her driveway, and Will Shepard turned neatly to one side in a considerate act of parking.

His author photo had revealed nothing. Black-and-white, it was taken from a distance as he glanced over his shoulder. Headshots didn’t seem to be to his liking. Hannah had seen a partial of his face years ago in an out-of-date People magazine picked up in the dentist’s waiting room. At the time, she’d just finished the third Agent Dodds adventure, and her radar had been tuned to all things Will Shepard. If she remembered correctly, the photo had shown him escorting a young heiress to a gala.

Hannah fingered the key, and the dogs cowered around her. She could lavish ten more lifetimes of unconditional love on her babies, and still fear would stalk them. Daisy’s abuse had gone beyond neglect. The dog had been forced to fight. So many damaged creatures had passed through Hannah’s life in the past twenty years and most of them had come from Poppy. Now her friend had brought her a bestselling author and his grieving dad. A small happening that felt huge.

Hannah read Will’s bumper stickers: “I’d Rather Be Writing,” and “Love a Climber, They Use Protection.” Climbing—that made sense since Agent Dodds was an extreme sports freak. Was his creator an adrenaline junkie, too? Or a nocturnal reveler who dated beautiful socialites? The two of them hadn’t signed anything. If she had even a twinge of doubt, she would renege.

Will turned to talk with his father, and Hannah drummed her fingers on the porch railing. Impatience didn’t come often, but she had an appointment in... Unbelievable, she was wearing both her watch and her dad’s, and yet she had no memory of putting on either one. Focusing on life’s details was becoming impossible. She sighed.

Would it be inappropriate to ask Will to sign his books? Or would he be offended that she didn’t own anything beyond volume five? Galen was scathing about commercial fiction, especially the kind of thrillers Will had produced in recent years. Her MFA poet preferred incomprehensible allegories written by alcoholics and drug addicts who’d been dead for at least a century. And he would not be happy when he discovered she was renting out the cottage. Privacy was everything to Galen, and since the age of thirteen, he had proved himself worthy of trust, not surveillance. But during the previous night’s phone conversation with Will, she had realized it was time, once again, to adapt.

Coincidence spoke of connection, and renting the cottage to an aging widower was nothing short of symmetry. Her father would approve. No, he would applaud. After all, the cottage had been built as his refuge. And what if it went deeper than that? Her father’s last selfless act had been to protect Galen and Liam, to spare them from the moment of his death, to wander into the woods to die alone. What if some echo of that love reverberated across Saponi Mountain, telling her to contain Galen in his childhood room where she could keep him safe? Her mother had believed that the dead often remained tethered to the living—trapped either in their desire to right wrongs or in their refusal to leave loved ones. Hannah, too, was drawn to the idea that the dead never really moved on, although often it was the living who refused to let them go.

Kookiness aside, renting the cottage was a sound financial move. Galen had become a dropout in need of aid. Her father’s money was gone and she barely made a living, but Will hadn’t quibbled at her inflated price. Overcharging, not undercharging, was oddly liberating.

Will pulled himself from the car. She’d been right: he was small for a guy. His taupe knit shirt, however, revealed a muscular torso, and his thick, straight hair was only slightly less tousled than the day before. Obviously, he didn’t own a comb. He walked toward her, not with the swagger of someone whose name was a long internet search of awards, but as if he were a kid dragging his body to a reprimand. An unexpected blend of curiosity and recognition tightened in her gut. He was so familiar she almost said, “Oh. It’s you.”

His eyes were concealed behind funky green-tinted sunglasses, which wasn’t helpful. You could learn a great deal from a person by the way he held—or avoided—your gaze. He was also beautiful. A pretty boy young enough to be her son, if she’d gotten pregnant that first time.

Will paused in front of the cottage, squatted and waited. Rosie and Daisy sidled down the steps, their claws clacking on the wooden boards. He held out both hands, offering his palms, and a chunky silver sports watch slid down his wrist. He cooed something at the dogs, words Hannah couldn’t make sense of, but her girls clearly understood. Daisy flopped to the ground and exposed her belly; Rosie actually whimpered. Animal behavior rarely surprised her, but her dogs had just told Hannah all she needed to know about this man. Even if he hadn’t been polite enough to remove his sunglasses.

Hannah joined Will and the dogs. Up close, his face was a little too perfect, its bone structure a little too predictable. She preferred faces with wrinkles and scars, faces that spoke of struggles and triumphs. This guy looked no more than thirty.

“Will Shepard.” He rose slowly.

“Hannah Linden. I imagined you to be older.”

“I write fast.” Will extended his hand but flinched.

Now the sunglasses made sense. “Want something for that headache?”

“I thought Poppy said you were a vet.”

“A holistic vet. Treating pets often means treating owners. You’d be surprised how many clients ask for help with minor ailments. But if it makes you feel better, my father was a rural doctor. When I was a teenager, he let me help out with patients.”

“Is that legal?”

“Would it bother you if it wasn’t?”

He winced.

“Bad one?”

“Killer.”

“I have to visit a couple of clients this afternoon, but I’ll be back by early evening. I can pop over then with my acupuncture needles and a feverfew tincture. Should help you sleep, too.”

Will turned as his dad clambered out of the passenger seat. “I don’t sleep much.”

“Well, there’s your problem. Good sleep habits are the key to a healthy mind.”

“Really.”

She would excuse his snide tone, since her girls had given their approval. “By the way, we’re in a drought, so please be mindful of water usage.” Hannah handed over the key. “Short showers, minimal toilet flushing. And any water you’d like to recycle, please toss over there, for the garden.”

As she pointed at the huge galvanized tub under the outside shower, Jacob Shepard shuffled over. Hannah covered her mouth and swallowed. Jacob’s expression was identical to the one her father had worn in those final months of unbearable grief—his eyes, his mouth, even the skin on his cheeks appeared to be dragged down by sadness. The lines grooved between his eyebrows, the faint scowl, seemed to say, “I no longer understand the world in which I live.”

“Are we home, Willie?” Jacob said.

For a moment, she considered kissing Jacob’s cheek, whispering, You can be happy here. Instead, she strode to meet him with a smile.

“I certainly hope this will feel like home. You must be Jacob. I’m Hannah, a friend of Poppy’s. She’s promised to swing by this evening and see how you’re settling in.”

“Poppy?”

“My friend Poppy. The art teacher at Hawk’s Ridge.”

“Firecracker, that Poppy.” Jacob grinned, showing yellowed, higgledy-piggledy teeth. He was taller than Will—over six feet—and broad shouldered, despite a slight stoop. If she had to guess, she’d put him around eighty. Once again, Hannah glanced from father to son. These two couldn’t possibly share a gene pool.

“I—I’m not good with names, little lady,” Jacob said.

“That’s okay. I answer to anything. Call me Hey You if it’s easier.”

“Hannah,” Will said, his voice sluggish. “Her name is Hannah.”

“That’s a pretty name, name for an angel, but I like Hey You better.”

“Hey You, it is. I love your necklace.” Hannah nodded at the string of bear claws that hung on his chest. “Occaneechi?”

Jacob’s eyes crinkled.

“Yes,” Will answered. “My dad is Occaneechi.”

Will Shepard was Native American? Although, something about his square jaw and thick eyebrows... Yes, she could believe he had native ancestry.

“My mother—” Will pushed his sunglasses up into his hair, and Hannah gasped “—was not.”

* * *

“What do you mean you’ve seen his eyes before? Haunting as they are. Huge and icy blue.” Poppy swirled wine around her goblet and then drained the glass.

The sun disappeared behind the treetops, and Hannah brushed an oak leaf from one of the cushions under her arm. Dry and brittle, the leaf crumbled to ashes, then scattered into the air.

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “They’re so distinctive, so familiar.”

Jacob was napping when Poppy had arrived, but she’d insisted on staying for a girls’ night. A feeble excuse, no doubt, to keep Will in her sights. And the overnight bag and large screw-top bottle of wine suggested Poppy intended to get snookered in the process.

Poppy had a proclivity for dating guys who were either married or inherently messed up, and Will Shepard clearly fell into at least one of those categories. The absence of a wedding ring meant nothing, but Will didn’t act like someone who was married. He did, however, act like a person in pain, pain that went beyond a mere headache. You didn’t have to be a holistic practitioner to understand that physical symptoms often hinted at emotional distress. Hannah chose not to think about the study she’d read that morning, the one linking depression with heart disease.

She and Poppy slid back and forth on the retro metal rocker, both of them watching Will retrieve a brown bag of groceries from the trunk of the Prius.

“Hubba-hubba,” Poppy said. “Look at the muscles on those forearms. Girl, I bet he gives new meaning to the term sexual endurance.”

“Maybe he spends his nights hanging from the rafters.”

“Think he’s dating right now?” Poppy fiddled with the array of elastic bands on her left wrist, none of which represented anything other than her love of bright colors.

“He has a son, Poppy. Kids tend to come with mothers.”

“It’s weird, there’s so little about his personal life on the web. It’s all work, work, work. Wikipedia doesn’t even mention that he’s a dad.”

So, they’d both checked him out.

“At one time he was linked briefly with that New York socialite who died a few months back,” Poppy continued.

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“You should read the gossip mags, Han. She killed herself, her lover and their son. Smashed their car into a wall. Theory is her brakes went, which is pretty suspect. Smacks of a cover-up if you ask me. But nothing I found says he’s married. Used to be a player, these days he seems to be a monk. What a waste of that body.”

“I’m changing the subject. Tell me what you know about Jacob.”

“Not much to tell. Sundays were skeleton staff days at Hawk’s Ridge—the director told me sweet-shit-nothing about the residents. Jacob has short-term memory loss, adored his wife, worships his grandson. Figured all that out by myself.”

“And Will?”

“Didn’t know Jacob had a son until I butted into Will’s meeting. Bad blood between them, if I had to guess. What’s the Galen update?”

“He’s coming home next week. Inigo’s promised to pay for his ticket and give us a two-week pass before he visits. Until he can check his melodrama at the door, Inigo’s a problem I can’t handle. He was completely hysterical in California. It was like having a third child.” Hannah sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking, allowing me to marry at nineteen.”

“Could they have stopped you?”

“No.” Hannah smiled. “He was hard to resist in those days—the exotic name, the Celtic heritage, that sexy smile.” Her in-laws had scheduled Inigo for greatness from inception, hoping he would become a famous architect like his namesake, Inigo Jones. And Inigo carried himself with a confidence that suggested he believed the family propaganda. But he alienated his parents in three easy steps: he married a high school classmate who wanted only to be a country vet, then he became an English professor, and for his pièce de résistance, he changed his sexual orientation.

“Of course, now my ex is a dick.”

Poppy snorted out a laugh. “Finally, after six years she trashes her ex. Proud of you, girl. So, it all worked out, then. With the cottage.”

Will balanced the bag on his hip as he tugged open the screen door.

“I guess,” Hannah replied, chewing the inside of her cheek.

* * *

The screen door slammed and Will turned to watch the two women on the porch drinking red wine.

Hannah and Poppy were clearly plotting, leaning toward each other in a female conspiracy. Maybe they were discussing him and his dad, trying to figure out their relationship. Good luck on that one. Thirty-four years of living the relationship and he couldn’t figure it out.

Will placed the last bag of groceries on the kitchen table and headed upstairs to check on the old man. Exhausted from the stress of food shopping, his dad had gone upstairs to lie down the moment they’d returned. Wise move. Normally, grocery shopping was heaven on earth: the smells, the tastes—grazing around the free samples, concocting recipes in his head. Before Freddie’s death, buying fresh produce was the closest Will came to a hobby. Today, with his dad, it had ranked on par with drug-free wisdom teeth removal. Next time, he’d hire a dad-sitter.

The stairs creaked as Will dragged himself up by the banister. The ceiling of the stairwell was midnight blue and covered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, the same ones he’d stuck all over Freddie’s bedroom. When the interior decorator had finished, Will had balanced on a stepladder for hours, creating a perfect constellation for his two-year-old. After the accident, he’d destroyed it in minutes—ripping down stars, paint and drywall. When he returned to New York, he would hire another decorator, a cheaper one, to erase the evidence of grief.

The upstairs hallway in the cottage was empty except for a large black-and-white photo framed and hung at the far end. The photographer had captured the woods at sunrise in early April. Dogwoods, in full bloom, rose like ghosts through a veil of early-morning fog.

Everything else in the hall was white like the edges of a dream. Interesting how different white could be. White in Hannah’s hands seemed to be warm and calming. White in his apartment was cold and sterile. And since all his furniture was crafted out of pale wood, the only color came from his lime leather sofa. One of his ex-lovers had referred to it as the bilious margarita.

Will ran his hand over the hall railing, reading the grain. Wood could reveal a thousand stories. He’d done some carving as a kid, inspired by his dad’s garden sculptures of downed tree limbs. He and Ally had once imagined them to be fantastical creatures. By the time he was a teenager, Will saw them for what they really were—talismans.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing against the crouching headache, the throbbing pain. Nothing about this trip was turning out the way he’d planned. Not that he’d had a plan other than get in, get drunk, get out. He would never start a climb without a strategy for descent, and yet in this situation he was behaving like a frantic novice about to bomb.

His dad used to have a horde of cousins in the area. They’d spent their adolescent years together, toe-to-toe, as Uncle Darren used to say. Were they still alive? Should he reestablish contact with the tribe? Maybe his dad just needed to be part of a community again. Yeah, right. Whatever his dad needed went way beyond socializing and probably involved a retirement home upgrade from independent to assisted living. From stage one to stage two.

Will eased open the door to the larger of the two bedrooms. A twenty-four-hour crash course in the care of the elderly had taught him that the old man’s balance was seriously off-kilter when he woke up. The shortest possible distance to the nearest toilet had been the deciding factor in the bedroom allocation—unless he wanted to start cleaning up his dad’s shit. Literally.

The old man had collapsed onto the bed like a battery-operated toy run out of juice. A very large, very broken toy. Jacob Shepard used to have such presence—his height, his ability to say a great deal with a handful of words, his snippets of self-made philosophy.

Even now, Will could hear his dad’s voice teaching him to hunt rabbit. Got your bow, Willie? Don’t get excited now. That rabbit, he’s under the wheat straw, but he’s gonna zig and zag. Will didn’t believe him, and when the rabbit performed as predicted, Will fell on his butt. His dad had howled with laughter.

Will slid down the wall to the pale gray carpet and watched the man with his white hair tugged half out of its ponytail. The man who had taught him to hunt and fish, to whittle wood and identify animal bones. The man who had been a devoted husband and yet had failed to teach his son how to love a woman so she loved him back.

Uncle Darren had said, “Your daddy, he loved your mama his whole life. Like she cursed him. He waited for her to grow up. He waited through her mistakes with other men. He waited with nothing more than the faith that, one day, Angeline would love him. And one day she did.”

Once upon a time, Will had applied that philosophy to his feelings for Ally. For so many years, she was the only good part of his life. Such a fierce friend, Ally was the one person he trusted, the one person who—until the lie about Freddie’s Great European Adventure—knew Will’s every secret. But somewhere along the way he’d found hard cynicism. Or maybe he’d just been smart enough to realize she would never love him as more than her best friend. He’d dated other women, never seriously, but then Freddie had entered his life and filled the hole Ally had left in his heart. And now? Now it was as if he were slowly bleeding to death.

A small thought escaped: he should have brought Freddie’s ashes. Death had finally granted Will full parental rights, and he didn’t need a headstone. He carried Freddie in his heart. Maybe Freddie’s spirit could be happy here. The few times they’d visited, he’d loved the forest.

Will glanced around the sparsely decorated room that ran the width of the cottage. Two smaller windows on one wall looked directly into the main house; a huge pinnacle-shaped window at the back held a perfect view of Saponi Mountain. Through it, a wall of dark green was splattered with bursts of foliage the color of dried blood. The dogwoods were turning, which meant every morning his dad would wake to what was about to become a symphony of fall.

The headache tightened. Now that he’d brought the old man back to the forest, how would he ever persuade him to leave?

A small glass vase of horribly familiar greenery sat on the dresser. Hauling himself to his feet, Will reached out and ran his fingers up one of the stalks. Hesitating, he raised his palm to his nose and sniffed. Freshly cut sage and the memory that reeked of madness.

A herb renowned for its healing properties, sage had become a popular bedding plant. Will had seen beautiful sage flowers of red and purple in private gardens—had even admired them from a distance. But get too close, and sage could blister his mind the way poison ivy blistered his skin. Sage was the smell of powwows; sage was the barbed remembrance of his mother dancing half-naked and disgracing them all; sage was the symbol of Uncle Darren warding off evil.

Will staggered downstairs and out onto the porch swing. The headache was waiting to roar, waiting to tear him apart. Even the fading daylight burned his retinas. He closed his eyes and let his head droop to his chest. Blood pounded; pain pulsed through his brain in leaden waves.

The smell of sage clung to his nostrils, leached his brain with the slow-moving film playing in his head. It must have been winter, since he was in his footed pj’s, similar to the ones Freddie had owned. Will was supposed to be asleep, locked in his tiny bedroom off the porch. Uncle Darren was outside yelling, waving his bundle of dried sage, demanding to come in and smudge the shack to banish diabolical spirits. The old man refused and there was another blowup about his mom. Had she been laughing outside the bedroom door, or had Will invented that last part?

Pressure on his knees. Soft and gentle. Human touch.

“Will?”

Where had Hannah come from? He didn’t hear her approach. She smelled of hay and lavender. Mild country scents warped into sensory overload by his exploding brain.

He opened his eyes and tried to look at her, but he couldn’t raise his head. She had beautiful hands with long, healthy fingernails—surprising for a vet. No nail polish. One ring on her right index finger—silver, engraved. Native American.

“The headache still bad?” Hannah said.

He moaned.

“Give me your hands.” Her voice was low, soothing, the voice on the phone from the night before. “This won’t hurt.”

He obeyed, ignoring the intuition that murmured, Of course it’s going to hurt. You’re a woman.

“Do you trust me?”

“Why not?” What did he care if she stuck a thousand needles in his hand when ten times that many pierced his heart every minute of every day?

“Give me your right hand. Good, now splay your fingers.” She ripped open a small packet and took out a long, thin nail partially covered in copper coils. “I’m going to slide one needle into the webbing between your thumb and index finger,” she said, “into the LI4.”

“LI4?”

“Large Intestine 4. An acupuncture point for the head and the face.”

“In my hand?”

“In your hand.”

Will closed his eyes. This, he preferred not to watch. He felt a small amount of pressure but no pain.

She stroked his left hand, her fingers lingering.

“How did you get this scar?”

“Which one?”

“Oh,” she said. “You have several. Some nasty accident?”

“Ripped flesh. From rock climbing.”

“Interesting sport.”

“More like a religion.” He swallowed through the pain. “Are you going to do that hand, too?”

“Already done.” She placed both his hands in his lap. “Now sit for an hour, try to relax, then remove the needles. I’m leaving a bag of dried feverfew. Pour boiling water over it and drink it.”

“If I get blood poisoning, I’m suing for medical malpractice.”

Was that a laugh?

Everything went quiet, except for the tree frogs croaking through their nightly social. He didn’t hear Hannah leave, but he couldn’t sense her anymore. A random act of kindness. Wow, that was the stuff of folklore.

Will kept his eyes shut to avoid confronting the fact that his hands had become pincushions. They felt a little odd, a little tight, but there was no pain from the needles. Maybe, just maybe, if a stranger could pierce his skin with foreign objects and he could feel nothing, then a five-year-old could die by lethal impact and feel no pain.

His mind darted through unmoored thoughts, disjointed waking dreams he could remember only the essence of. Freddie died strapped into his five-point harness. Safest car seat according to Consumer Reports, unless, of course, your mother hurtled into a wall at seventy miles per hour. Why did Will’s mind have to sketch every detail, re-create an entire scene he had never witnessed and play it over and over again? Screeching tires, the crunch of metal buckling, screams, the smell of gasoline, the whoosh of flames. The explosion.

A tsunami of grief swamped him, dragged him down to the depths. He would never break through to the surface. He would never come up for air.

Eyes tightly closed, Will started to cry the only way he knew how. Silently.


Nine

Will woke to bright moonlight and the howling of coyotes. And a pair of delicate nails poking out of his skin. So, Hannah hadn’t been some ghostly mirage created by his burned-out mind. He felt—Will concentrated—okay. The headache had retreated into an echo of pain. Staring up at a full moon, he eased out the first needle, then the second.

How long had he been asleep? Jesus.

Will jumped up and tugged open the front door, gagging on the smell. The old man was stretched out on the futon, asleep and drooling. The new bottle of Wild Turkey, a quarter empty, pinned a note to the coffee table. “Dinner in—” indecipherable scribble. Oven? Oven!

Running into the kitchen, Will stopped to glance around for a fire extinguisher. As expected, Hannah was a woman with her shit together, a woman who placed a small fire extinguisher on the wall and a smoke detector on the ceiling. The green, blinking light suggested it was fully operational.

Will made a quick check through the glass door of the oven. Good, no flames. And the knob was turned only to two hundred degrees, probably because the old man couldn’t see without his glasses. Who knew what had happened to those.

What other details had Will missed? On a rock face, he never doubted his ability to protect lives, and yet here he was—spectacularly inept at looking after one octogenarian. Was he supposed to remind his dad to change his underwear, brush his teeth, wipe his ass—Will eased open the oven door—take the plastic wrapping off the lasagna before heating it?

No wonder Hawk’s Ridge charged exorbitant rates. The staff earned every cent.

A large mug of black coffee and an internet search later, Will had compiled a list of local assisted-living facilities and researched another leg of Freddie’s trip. Will laced his hands behind his neck and stretched. Rediscovering the joy of in-depth location research was invigorating. As with every aspect of his writing, he’d grown lazy, choreographing action around backdrops rather than exploring the psychological impact of setting on character. After all, a patch of forest could brand you for life.

The scar on his knee itched; he ignored it.

Freddie and Cassandra were in Vienna. They’d spent the evening before at the Prater, riding the Giant Ferris Wheel, and the morning at the Augarten Park. Fortunately, they’d avoided Hitler’s anti-aircraft flak tower, a concrete monument to evil.

If only Will could figure out how to use that Nazi behemoth in his work, incorporate it into a hate crime Agent Dodds could stumble into while on vacation. Except his hero was still suspended from the helicopter. Besides, Agent Dodds didn’t do vacations. Didn’t do downtime. Sex was rushed, desperate and usually with someone’s wife; A.A. meetings were an excuse for Dodds to check email. The only time Dodds unplugged was when he visited his paranoid schizophrenic mother in the nursing home surrounded by razor wire.

Will pushed back from the kitchen table and wandered into the main room. He should try and get his dad upstairs to bed. Or maybe not. Life was so peaceful when the old man was out cold. It was the relief of watching a sleeping toddler after a crazy-ass day of playground supervision. It was also the writing hour—or would be, if he had a story worth telling. Something other than the Great European Adventure.

He eased the cotton throw off the back of the futon and tucked it around the old man. A walk in the moonlight might unlock a little inspiration. Will refused to think the word muse, which resonated with literary pretension and angst. Of course, he’d always dissed the phrase writer’s block, too. Cosmic payback was one sick bitch.

Five minutes—Will tiptoed onto the porch—he’d only be gone five minutes. Long enough to take a look at the mare that was always tearing up grass with her teeth. Didn’t want the old man waking to an empty house.

A large buck with a trophy rack appeared on the edge of his vision, then glided back toward Saponi Mountain. Will turned his head away from the siren song of the forest. With any luck, he wouldn’t have to set foot in there before returning to New York.

Tree frogs croaked a concerto, and snuffling came from the compost pile. The raccoons were out in force. Above, an expanse of night sky shimmered with stars. Man, he’d forgotten the glory of Southern nights—how he was drawn to the stillness, the raw energy. As a kid, he’d loved reading or writing in the middle of the night. Unless there was a storm to whip up her craziness, terror tended to come with the light, when his mom was awake.

On the ground floor of the main house, a figure moved behind closed curtains. His temporary landlady was still awake. Temporary was such a wonderful word. It didn’t hold you to a thing.

And was that running water? Curious, Will changed direction and headed toward the beam of artificial light illuminating the far side of the main house. Too late he remembered what Hannah had said about an outside shower. He swallowed a huge, painful gulp.

Poppy was standing under a jet of water, and she was full rearview naked.

If she were ten years younger—and he hadn’t stopped dating when Freddie was old enough for sleepovers—Poppy would have been a classic Will Shepard babe. Curvaceous, wild, outspoken, she was fire inside and out, a woman who dazzled with a good-time guarantee and the knowledge that she could lose interest and vanish. Great sex, no future. But thinking with his dick had only ever led to disaster, and dealing with his dad was enough of a calamity.

He should turn away. Really. Because to stay meant crossing the line into being a sicko, a total perv. He should look away, but like a twelve-year-old with a stack of porn magazines, he couldn’t.

Poppy rinsed her hair, tilting her head from side to side.

Eyes up, Will, eyes up.

But his eyes, unable to heed the message from his brain, trawled lower. What was it about women’s butts that made him behave like a kid confronted with a wall of jelly beans in every flavor you could imagine and some you couldn’t?

Grab and eat your fill.

Then a door opened, and Will sprinted for the camouflage of the forest.

* * *

Had anything ever felt quite so divine? The buzz from a bottle of wine—minus Hannah’s one teeny-weeny glass—and the cool water caressing Poppy’s body. No wonder Hannah liked to shower in the moonlight. This was bliss. At least, it was until Hannah started cawing like trailer trash.

“Poppy!”

Poppy hummed loudly.

“Poppy!”

She should have plied Hannah with more wine, but her friend had stopped drinking after droning on and on about being on call. ’Course Hannah didn’t do drunk, didn’t do mad, and she hadn’t had sex in forever. What was her problem?

Stupid, stupid, s-t-u-p-i-d for a woman in her prime to say she wouldn’t date because of her sons—neither of whom even lived at home anymore. If she put in the smallest effort, Hannah would be a red-hot babe. And the boys wanted their mom to get it on with someone so they didn’t have to worry about her being home alone in the middle of nowhere. Well, that was Galen’s take. Liam’s motivation was more along the lines of “So she’ll, like, stay out of my business.”

Poppy had only kept one secret her whole life: that when Liam was sixteen and wasted, he’d asked Poppy to be his mom. Well, maybe she’d kept more than just that one secret.

The water stopped, and Poppy shivered.

“What?” She swallowed a belch. “I’m recycling water for your plants.”

She was thrust into a warm, fluffy white towel.

“You mean you’re hoping Will Shepard notices you recycling water for my plants while you’re standing out here naked.” Hannah raised her eyebrows.

“That, too.”

“Making goo-goo eyes at my new tenant is the worst idea you’ve had in a series of worst ideas. He’s got issues. It’s written all over his face.”

“I’m more interested in his body....”

“Which is barely out of diapers.”

“Yummy. Everything all firm.” Poppy snorted a laugh. “Dang, girl, you don’t have a hankering for him, do you?”

Hannah sighed. “I’m old enough to be his mother.”

“Bull crap, he’s older than he looks. Only a few years younger than me.” Eight. She’d done the math.

“Suppose it had been Jacob? You could’ve given him a heart attack. Although—” Hannah’s mouth did that cute little twitchy thing it did when she was thinking “—he would’ve died happy.”

“Ah. Didn’t consider that.”

“Exactly. No more outside showers while I have tenants.”

“Yes, mama dearest.” Poppy hiccupped.

“Are you drunk?”

“Yup.”

There was definitely movement by the tree line. Man-size movement. Poppy sashayed her hips as she followed Hannah and the dogs back inside. The trap was set and sprung. Now all she had to do was reel in that hunk of an author. Game on.

* * *

Branches snapped all around him, and Will glanced over his shoulder, half expecting a pack of saber-toothed tigers to leap from behind the oaks and shred him with six-inch razor fangs. Reduce him to gristle and bone.

Less than two days in Orange County, and he was back in the forest. It was nothing more than a Pandora’s box of the past, and unlike his dad, Will wanted that part of his life to remain in storage.

The memory assaulted him, anyway: his mother grabbing him by the hand after his first day of kindergarten, shrieking, “Let’s celebrate with an adventure! Slay the beast of Occoneechee Mountain!”

There had been a time when her grandiose schemes had sucked him in. Even after they’d imploded in a flurry of excess or fizzled as her attention darted to something else, he’d allowed himself to believe that next time, next time, things would be different. But by then he’d learned better. Five years old and already he was skeptical. As she pulled him deeper into the woods that day, he had cried to go home, and he never cried as a kid. Will rubbed his arms. The memory crawled under his skin, wormed into his cells, returned in stereo surround sound.

All morning in school, he’d been anxious, waiting for the other kids to tease him for being a runt, for not having a lunch box, for wearing secondhand clothes. His fears were realized at recess, until the little girl in a hot-pink tutu knocked down the bully who’d stolen his swing. Ally got in trouble for that, but she didn’t care. And he was smitten. No one had ever stood up for him before. No one had ever put him first. He jumped off the bus, eager to invite his new friend over to share his stash of library books. But his mom had other plans, and she wouldn’t let go. She held tighter and tighter until she dragged him over the rusty animal trap that sliced open his knee. It was the first time—maybe the only time—his dad got angry with his mom; it was the first time Will fantasized about escape.

He touched the scar through his jeans. The itchiness from earlier had gone. Once again, it was numb.

Waiting until the outside lights on the main house switched off, Will crept back to the cottage and picked up the plastic bag Hannah had left on the porch swing. What did she say? It should help you sleep.

Better pilfer one of those orange capsules from his dad—add a temazepam chaser on the off-chance dried feverfew wasn’t strong enough for total blackout.


Ten

Jacob smoothed out Freddie’s map on the table. Been another rough night. All them nightmares about Freddie. His grandson were on the trip of a lifetime. And his granddaddy’s no-good-for-nothin’ brain weren’t gonna say otherwise. ’Bout time he crafted a dream catcher, hung it above his bed and then took it outside so all them bad dreams could perish in the sunlight. Plenty of sunlight this morning. And warm in the front room. Shouldn’t be this warm when the dogwoods were firin’ up. Wouldn’t be much color this fall, not with the heat and the drought. Drought were a real serious business. Weakened trees fell, wells ran dry and that phantom of forest fires didn’t never go away. October could be a real dry month, too. Mighty fine month for travelin’, though. One time he took Angeline to Asheville—special trip for their weddin’ anniversary. They even stayed over! Spent a night in a motel! And they drove up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway drinkin’ in the wonder of fall in the mountains.

Where was Freddie and his mama travelin’ today?

He wanted to stick the map on the wall, but Willie said no. And he could argue the heck out of it, but seemed like a protest not worth makin’. Besides, with this sturdy cardboard casin’, he could take the map out whenever and wherever he chose.

It were real nice in the main room of this house. Big house, too. Had two bathrooms! And a separate toilet downstairs! Never lived in a house with more than one toilet.

Mornin’ sun hit them front windows just right. Whoever built this place sure knew what he was doin’. And all that glass at the back framed the forest real nice, like a paintin’. This weren’t his shack, and it weren’t Occoneechee Mountain. Didn’t rightfully know where he’d woken up this mornin’, but he reckoned he’d got it good this time. Real good. Bless Willie for bringin’ him here.

Now—Jacob rolled up the sleeves of his denim shirt—where was Freddie and his mama today? He squinted at the map.

“I’d offer to lend you my reading glasses,” a pretty gal with blazing blue eyes said. “But I have no idea where they are. Sorry to just walk in. I did knock but you didn’t hear me.”

He scratched his head. Had they met before?

“I’m Hannah. Or Hey You.”

Hannah, a name to keep, a name to treasure.

“How are you doing today?”

“Fair ta middlin’, I reckon.”

She held out her hand—delicate like china, but calloused. A little lady who grabbed life and held on. He smiled. Been a while since he met anyone who made him want to smile. Other than that firecracker of an art teacher. He wanted to smile—little enough to smile about since his Angeline crossed over. People told him death got easier, but he knew otherwise.




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