The Peach Keeper

  They finally reached the top of Tinpenny Falls, and it was a magnificent sight. The river leading to the precipice of the falls was very calm and surprisingly shallow. But when the water met the edge of the rock, it roared over and dropped more than a hundred feet into a pool littered with large, flat rocks below.

  This was the area’s most famous waterfall, named after a handsome but boastful man named Jonathan Tinpenny. As the story went, almost two centuries ago, Mr. Tinpenny rode on horseback from his home in Charleston, South Carolina, through the rolling green mountains of western North Carolina, in search of the waterfalls he’d heard were in this area, where the waters were reportedly healing and there were claims of curative miracles. Mr. Tinpenny was only in his twenties at the time, but rheumatism came early to the men in his family. Though he suffered from this ailment, Mr. Tinpenny made the pilgrimage by himself out of pride for his supposed fortitude, because he was the youngest, tallest, and most hardy of his brothers. But he wasn’t expecting the roads in the high, cool mountains to become so rough and rutted. He wasn’t expecting a land of clouds. He led his horse through quagmires in the road that were waist-deep, and he filled several bottles with fog to take home with him, because he didn’t think anyone would believe how thick it was. The journey was hard on him. When he found Tinpenny Falls, he was almost delirious with pain. He lost his footing and fell over. Miraculously, he survived, and he was found by hunters only hours later. He was taken home by train, where he slept most of the time in a luxuriously appointed private car. He claimed the waters must have, indeed, been healing, because look how hard his journey was on him to get there, and how easy it was on him to get home. At his funeral years later, his children opened those jars of fog he’d collected, and legend had it that fog as thick as smoke filled the city for days.

  Tourists loved that story. And they loved to buy those commemorative Jars of Fog in town.

  But as beautiful as it was, this obviously wasn’t the destination Colin had in mind. He led her across a natural bridge of flat rocks to the other side of the falls. “What made you decide to become a landscape architect?” Willa asked, when he reached back and took her hand in his as they walked in single file.

  He shrugged, still trudging forward. “There’s a grove of hickory trees on my parents’ estate, long rows of trees with their branches stretching into each other, constantly having to be cut back. I remember going out there when I was a boy and lying under them and just staring up at the canopy. My mother used to call it my thinking place. There was an uneasy symmetry to them. Their chaos was given structure by the landscapers, but that structure was always threatened by their own wild nature. I decided landscaping was like lion-taming,” he said, looking over his shoulder with a smile. “But I didn’t decide to go into landscape architecture until after I graduated from college. My undergraduate degree is in finance, which is what my dad wanted, because that was his degree, too. But after college, just as an excuse not to go home, I went on a tour of Europe with my girlfriend at the time, and the castle gardens there sort of reawakened my desire to lion-tame.” He paused. “And then there was you.”

  “Yes,” she said, knowing where this was going. “And then there was me.”

  “I was pretty miserable in college, and I remember thinking to myself, Willa Jackson is probably doing exactly what she wants to do with her life right now. You went out with such a bang.”

  “This may come as a surprise to you, Colin, but I wasn’t any more happy when I left than when I was here. I was wild and irresponsible and flunked out of college. I was working as a gas station attendant and was two weeks away from losing my apartment when my dad died. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t come back.”

  “You never got the chance to find out,” he pointed out.

  “No. Coming back and facing everything was exactly what I needed to do. And if I ever leave here again, I can do it with confidence. I won’t be running from it.”

  That made him stop and turn to her. “Is that what you think I did?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “But here’s some advice you don’t want to hear: Spend more time here and maybe people will see you as you are now, and not as the Stick Man.”

  “You sound like my sister.”

  “Don’t give Paxton a hard time,” Willa surprised herself by saying. “She’s got a lot on her plate.”

  “So now you’re bosom buddies?” he said, smiling as he took her hand again. “We’re almost there.”

  He led her off the trail and through the woods, and eventually they stopped at a small tributary of the river they’d just crossed. It trickled down a very large, flat rock and into a forest pool.

  Colin took off his backpack and threw it to the bank below. Then he sat down and unlaced his boots. “You know, the reason they say Jonathan Tinpenny survived is not because he fell off the falls but that he actually slid down this rock instead.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Just taking off my boots.” He stood and tossed his shoes down, too.

  She suddenly understood what he was going to do. “Did you see those signs? It said no sliding down the rock.”

  “No, I didn’t see them,” he said, walking carefully out onto the glistening rock. “I never see them.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  He sat down and scooted to the edge, sucking his breath at how cold the water obviously was as it flowed over his legs. “Come on, Willa. I dare you.”

  “You think that’s all it’s going to take. A dare?”

  “I know you want to.”

  “You cannot possibly know that.”

  “Until you can tell me exactly what you do want, I’m going to make it up as I go along.” And with that, he propelled himself forward and went sliding down the wet rock.

  “Colin!” she yelled after him.

  He splashed into the water, disappearing for a moment. Then he resurfaced, shaking his head and flinging water out of his hair. He looked up at her. “Come on! The water feels great.”

  “We’re going to get arrested!”

  He floated on his back, still staring up at her. “That didn’t used to stop you.”

  Staring down at him, her fingers twitching with the thought of what a rush it would be to slide down this rock, she realized that yes, there was some of the Joker left in her. Probably always would be. And when she acknowledged that, she could finally see how little there was left of it. Enough to get her into trouble every once in a while, to satisfy this crazy need to feel her heart pound with adrenaline, but not enough to ruin the life she’d made for herself. And that made her feel better, not quite so afraid of herself anymore. And not so afraid of Colin, either, and all that she thought he’d known about her just because she hadn’t had the courage to look there herself.

  What an absolutely freeing epiphany.

  So this was what she was going to do. She was going to take her boots off and throw them to the bank below. Then she was going to scoot onto the large, flat rock. She was going to slide on the water into the pool below, and enjoy it every moment. She was definitely going to come up laughing.

  And that’s exactly what she did.

  After a lot of swimming and flirtatious playing, they finally lifted themselves onto a rock on the bank to dry themselves in the sun. They stretched out side by side in comfortable silence. Willa was almost certain that Colin felt smug about getting her to do this. But she was feeling too good to call him on it. The rock was warm underneath her, the gentle sound of the water was lulling, and the forest smelled of mulch and green leaves, of both the past and the future. She wasn’t much of a nature girl, but she could get used to this.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Colin said.

  Willa turned her head on the rock. He’d taken off his T-shirt, and his bare chest was tan and taut. His eyes were closed, so she felt free to study him at her leisure. She’d never spent time
with someone so tall. There was so much of him. “Yes?”

  “What makes you think your father got fired?”

  That surprised her. “Because he never went back to teaching.”

  “I was there the day he left,” Colin said. “And he wasn’t fired. He quit.”

  Willa sat up and turned to him. “What?”

  Colin opened his eyes, then lifted one arm to block out the sun. “When you pulled the fire alarm and then let that banner fall, announcing that you were really the Joker, my parents showed up almost immediately, demanding an apology from the principal because I’d been his number-one suspect since you put that Ogden Nash quote on the marquee. Your father was called in to apologize, as well. I could tell he was upset with your being escorted out of the school by the police. It was clear he didn’t want to be there, apologizing to us like he’d done something wrong. By that time everyone had figured out that the reason you’d been so successful as the Joker was because you had your dad’s keys and passwords. The principal said to your father, ‘I know it’s not your fault you have a sneaky daughter. You won’t be penalized for that.’ And your father just lost it. He said that if I had pulled something like what you had just pulled and was caught in the act, I wouldn’t have been hauled off by the police. In fact, when everyone thought it was me, no one took action, because of who my family was. He said he was proud of your acts of rebellion, that he wished he’d had the courage to do it himself when he was your age, and that he’d known what you were doing all along. Almost from the very beginning. He said something about being tired of living such a cautious life and for once he was throwing caution to the wind. And he quit.”

  Willa was flabbergasted. “That doesn’t sound anything like my father.”

  “I know,” Colin agreed. “But that’s what happened.”

  “He knew?”

  “Apparently so. I thought you should know.”

  “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  Colin shrugged and closed his eyes again, and it didn’t take long to tell that he’d gone to sleep. She sat there, her arms wrapped around her knees, thinking about the possibility of her father actually knowing about her pranks all along, about him saying he was finally throwing caution to the wind. What did that mean? She’d always assumed he was happy with his life, happy doing what Grandmother Georgie told him to do. And she’d thought he was ashamed of her actions as a teenager.

  She and Paxton had planned to meet at the nursing home tomorrow to talk to Agatha again. Maybe Willa could ask Agatha about her father and Grandmother Georgie’s relationship. If it was like everything else she’d learned lately, there was a lot more going on there than she’d thought.

  She didn’t know how long she’d sat there, lost in thought, before she turned to see if Colin was still asleep.

  He wasn’t. He was staring at her, one arm propped under his head.

  “Did you have a nice nap?”

  “Sorry,” he said as he sat up, his ab muscles tightening. “I didn’t mean to conk out on you. I don’t sleep well, especially when I come home. It catches up with me.”

  She gave him a sympathetic smile and brushed some of his dark hair off his forehead. “Yes, I noticed that when you passed out on my couch.”

  “That is a great couch.”

  Their eyes met, both smiling. As if by mutual consent, Colin leaned forward and she met him halfway, their lips touching gently, sun-warm and dry. It wasn’t long before gentle turned hungry and insistent. She found herself leaning back, and he went with her. She’d never felt like this with a man before. He made her chest feel like it was going to explode. God, to feel this way without actually breaking the law was amazing. Okay, so technically they had broken the law by sliding down the rock, but kissing here on the bank, this was simply living in the moment, and there was no law against that.

  She felt his hand push at her shirt, and she arched against him. “You’re so beautiful,” he said as her shirt passed over her head, landing somewhere behind them. His hands went to her breasts, and she sucked in her breath. “I think I’ve always been looking for you. I can’t believe you’ve been here all along.”

  He pushed her bra to the side and kissed her breasts. She opened her eyes and focused on the top of the rock. Someone could come along at any moment. “Colin, someone might see.”

  He lifted his head. “And tell me that doesn’t excite you on some level,” he said as he put his lips to hers.

  She pulled at his hair until he lifted his head again and looked down at her. He was breathing heavily. “It excites me now, who I am now, Colin,” she said, because, for some reason, it was important for her to tell him. “This isn’t me being someone I used to be.”

  He looked confused.

  She suddenly felt sad. This wasn’t going to be what she wanted it to be. How could it? It was built on too many misconceptions. “You’re not going to stay, are you?” she asked.

  He hesitated a moment before he said, “No.”

  “So your plan is to seduce me and then leave.”

  “There was no plan.” His eyes bore into hers. “Why don’t you come with me?” He wasn’t a disingenuous man. In her heart, she knew that. He was trying to find a way to make this work.

  “I can’t leave now. My grandmother is here.”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me you’re happy, Willa.”

  Disingenuous, no. Astoundingly unaware, yes. “Why don’t you do the same?”

  He lifted himself off of her so quickly it was almost as if she’d slapped him. “Of course I’m happy.”

  She readjusted her bra and found her shirt and put it on. “Right. That’s why you sleep so well.”

  He used both hands to scrub his face, as if finally waking up. He sighed and watched the water for a moment. “We should go,” he said, reaching over and handing her her boots.

  Well, at least one of them had learned something about themselves on this hike.

  Too bad it wasn’t him.

  They followed Tinpenny Trail back around to the trailhead. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was slanting through the trees by the time they reached the parking lot. They climbed inside his car, and Willa left her window down to let the warm summer wind blow on her as Colin drove.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, the first time he’d spoken to her since the rock.

  “Starving,” she admitted.

  “Let’s get something to eat. Let’s not end the day on such an uncomfortable note,” he said, and she appreciated the effort.

  “Have you ever been to the Depot Restaurant on National Street?” she asked. “Hikers come in looking like us all the time.”

  Once out of Cataract, the first intersection they came to was a four-way stop. To their right was a blue Audi.

  “That’s Sebastian’s car,” Colin said, giving them a honk and a wave. “He and Paxton must be heading home from the concert luncheon. I can’t believe it went on this long.”

  “Do you want to ask them to join us?” Willa asked, trying not to sound too eager to have someone join them and dispel this awkwardness.

  “That’s a good idea,” he said quickly. She guessed she wasn’t the only one.

  Colin got out and jogged over to Sebastian’s car at the intersection. He said something to them. When he jogged back and got back in, he said, “Good call. They look like they could use a drink.”

  From what Willa knew of Paxton and Sebastian’s relationship, she wasn’t surprised. “I think we all could.”

  THIRTEEN

  The Joker, the Stick Man, the Princess, and the Freak

  They drove to National Street and parked at the old train depot, which had been the lifeblood of Walls of Water more than a century ago, when this had been a busy logging town. But when the government bought the surrounding mountain forest and turned it into a national park, the train stopped coming, and everything had to change. The depot turned into a restaurant and visitor center. The stores turned into tourist shops. And dozens of outdo
or sculptures and markers were placed up and down National Street, all depicting waterfalls from the surrounding park. You couldn’t walk more than ten steps on this street before encountering another reminder that this was the way to the waterfalls. That this was the yellow brick road.

  The Depot Restaurant was located in what was once the roundhouse in the old depot. It was full of hikers that day, their backpacks propped against their chairs. Willa, Colin, Paxton, and Sebastian walked in, an interesting foursome, to be sure—Willa and Colin with their wrinkled clothing and tousled hair, and Paxton and Sebastian a beautiful complement to each other in their dress clothes.

  They were told there was a wait to be seated, but they could eat at the bar if they wanted to. They decided that was a great idea, especially since Paxton and Sebastian had already eaten and wanted only drinks.

  Paxton and her brother sat beside each other, Willa and Sebastian on either side of them. Willa enjoyed watching the siblings interact. She knew they were twins, but they were so unalike that she didn’t really get their similarities until she saw them together—their dark eyes, their kind smiles, the way they teased each other and sat with perfect posture.

  After they had placed their orders, Colin, Sebastian, and Paxton all commented on how nice the place was. They’d never been there before.

  That made Willa laugh. “You’re such townies.”

  “And you’re not?” Paxton asked with a smile.

  “I’ve stretched my boundaries.”

  When their drink orders came, Colin turned to Sebastian and asked, “How long have you been back in Walls of Water?”

  “Just a year,” Sebastian said. “What about you? Any plans to move back?”

  Colin carefully avoided looking at Willa and Paxton as he said, “No.”

  “I don’t get it,” Paxton said, lifting her margarita and taking a sip. “What’s so wrong about Walls of Water? It’s our home. We were born and raised here. Our history is here. Why would you want to be anywhere else? This place defines us.”