So I wasn’t exactly a poster boy for anybody’s American Dream. I still had no children and still said I never wanted any, but kids saw through me the way cats head straight for people who swear they don’t like cats. I’d never been married, either, but didn’t regret that at all. My kind of woman was reliable. I always picked the ones who needed protection. Usually from themselves.
Eddie, thank god, thought I had spent my career pretending to be Harrison Ford in a Tom Clancy movie. I sent her the occasional photograph of me in a tux posing beside ambassadors and their socialite wives. To Eddie, I would always be the hero who had saved her life when she was a baby. The man who swore he’d make the world safe for her.
Now I looked at Hush Thackery’s photographs again. This woman didn’t have to ask for help keeping her world safe. I laid the photographs aside, frowning.
The aide approached. “The First Lady feels you need to be aware of Mrs. Thackery’s uncooperative and threatening attitude—”
“Give me specifics.”
“She had a confrontation with Miss Jacob’s Secret Service detail over access to her house and farm this morning. And a confrontation with the First Lady, as well. She threatened to call the media. Resorted to black mail, or at least threatened to.”
“Who won?”
The aide coughed again. “Mrs. Thackery.”
I picked up Hush Thackery’s orchard photograph. Always keep your eye on the mother. I studied her objectively, or tried to. All right, so you know how to take care of your own. Good. But I’m the one they send when they want people to be afraid.
And I’m sorry, but you will be.
I STEPPED DOWN from the jet at an air force base outside Atlanta. An aide handed me the keys to a hulking camo-green Humvee with government tags. “We thought you’d want this, sir,” one said.
“I’m not invading a foreign country. Just driving into the mountains above Atlanta.”
“There’re places in those Appalachian hollows where they still threaten to feed strangers to the pigs, sir.”
“I’ll take my chances with the pork. Get me a rental car.”
The land at the northern cap of Georgia rose above Atlanta like the hump of a big animal, until I felt as if I were driving up the backbone of a sleeping bear. The Georgia interstate began to flow through shoulders of big hills covered in hardwood forest tinged with the first gold and red of autumn. The mountains rolled across the horizon in giant hummocks, looking old and placid compared to the raw Rockies. I was fooled into thinking they seemed tame.
Davy Thackery Ford Truck, Next Exit, a billboard blared in big letters beneath a life-sized painting of a blue-and-white stockcar with Thackery Racing on the door and hood. Champion Of The Dirt Track. I turned off the interstate past a sprawling dealership doing brisk Saturday business next to a diner and a gas station. Thackery’s stockcar—real, not a painting—sat out front atop a broad concrete platform. Several people were posing beside the car with their kids, taking pictures. Even dead, Hush Thackery’s husband drew a crowd.
Frowning, I steered the rental car along a shady two-lane heading toward a heaped-up skyline of mountains that closed in too quickly. The Appalachians suddenly wrapped themselves around me. I felt as if I’d been swallowed.
Visit Famous Sweet Hush Apple Farm, 10 Miles, a large, well-kept sign in red-and-white told me from a landscaped clearing framed by two apple trees picked clean of their lowest fruit by four deer that didn’t bother to run when I drove by. September to New Year’s. A Chocinaw County Tradition. And then another sign. Historic Dalyrimple, shops, inns, fine people. The heart of Sweet Hush Apple Country.
Now I understood. I was in a separate country. The Civil War hadn’t settled that issue, at least not around there.
I guided the sedan up the first of many inclines that began to curve along mountain ridges and skim their edges like icing on the edge of a tall cake. Another sign appeared, this one draped in honeysuckle vines. Entering Chocinaw County. We Welcome You To The Home of the Sweet Hush Apple. And below that, in bright DOT orange: Steep grades and dangerous curves, next ten miles. I held the steering wheel lightly, watching the edges of the road fall off into space. This way to Hush McGillen Thackery and a downhome apple-pie world she and her family control with a lot of pride and no apologies.
All the warning signs told me so.
Twenty minutes later I officially drove off the map into some no-man’s land at the top of Chocinaw Mountain. I brought the car to a stop on a patch of gravel beside a steel guardrail, then walked over to a view of endless, undulating mountain valleys and round, wooded crests. The view was so beautiful it hurt.
I don’t know what made me stop there. The sheer loneliness of the place, probably. A flash of sunlight on polished surfaces caught my eye, and I looked over the guardrail, a hundred feet down. A rough but calculated rectangle of polished granite as long and wide as a car stood on end among the native boulders and rhododendron like a huge domino. An inscription was carved on the gray obelisk in tall, deep letters meant to be easy to read even from the roadside a hundred feet above it.
DAVY THACKERY
1960-1995
HUSBAND, FATHER, HERO
HE DROVE FAST, HE LIVED LARGE
AND HE DID US PROUD
ONLY A MOUNTAIN COULD BEAT HIM
Jesus Christ. This must be where Hush Thackery’s husband had died; trying to set a land-speed record on a mountain road that could sling a car off the way a dog shakes a flea, even at normal speeds. I walked back to my tame sedan, looked at it a second with a prickle of competition on the nape of my neck, and decided I should have driven the Humvee. Nothing like two tons of all-terrain domination to impress the hell out of a family who thought driving off a cliff was heroic.
I turned and looked at the steel guardrail and the sheer drop-off, then up at the blue sky where a single hawk hung on a current of air, and finally at the unbroken panorama of wild, lonely mountains heading to the horizon. Hush Thackery’s hero husband hadn’t died well or easy. He’d died alone and bleeding and broken on the side of this mountain. She must have wanted to tear her heart out.
I stopped cold. Eddie could have ended up on the rocks down there, too, thanks to Davis Thackery, Junior. A black mood slid up behind my eyes.
You are in a world of trouble, Junior.
When I reached the bottom of the mountain I turned the car sharply at a lazy intersection in the middle of the woods. A green metallic county marker said McGillen Orchards Road. A bright, handsome, red-and-white sign pointed the way to Sweet Hush Farm.
I drove fast along the orchard road, until suddenly the road burst out of the forest. I was surrounded by fields that filled a long, narrow gap between the mountains. The entrance to Sweet Hush Hollow. Hundreds of big orange pumpkins dotted the rows of vines. A wooden sign along the road said, Pick-Your-Own Pumpkin Festival, October 1-31, Sweet Hush Farms. Then the pumpkin fields gave way to regimented fields of neatly tended ornamental pines. A sign said Cut-Your-Own Christmas Tree Festival, November 1-December 24.
The road plunged into the forest, again, flashing through sunshine and shadow, my hands tightening around the steering wheel. Cars began to meet me going the opposite way, moseying at lazy speeds. Suburban cars and vans, well-kept SUV’s, all filled with parents and children and grandparents and fat family dogs, ambling through the late-afternoon shadows of an early fall day. Their contented faces flashed by me. They’d been drugged with apples. They’d be easy marks for the pumpkins and the Christmas trees.
I traveled backward alongside that parade of pleasant and secure Americana making its contented pilgrimage home from Sweet Hush Farm. Suddenly the woods opened into a broad valley, and I was forced to slow down. A rush of apple-scented fall air filled my lungs through the car’s open window, and afternoon sunshine blinded me. I pulled over to the mown roadside and
stepped out again. I took a few deep breaths, calming down.
Apple orchards covered the valley. A patina of purple-gold afternoon light made me think of old paintings and soft beds. The red peaks of a large farmhouse roof and stone chimneys showed among trees at the valley’s distant backside. Up front, good-looking barns and parking lots sprawled among orchards just beyond the road where I stood. There must have been two thousand people there that day, wandering between the pretty barns and shops and a pavilion filled with apple bins, or stretched on blankets under apple trees. The sound of a bluegrass fiddle and the low, sweet drawl of an old mountain song came up to me on a gust of breeze. Musicians commandeered a small stage in the pavilion, and craft tents dotted the area around it. Chocinaw County sheriff’s deputies and teenagers wearing neon safety vests directed traffic with equal authority, as if life were so easy a teenager armored in only orange plastic could control it. The warmth of the sun crept over me, and the scent of the apples, and the music. The music.
So this was the hidden queendom Hush Thackery ruled. Shangri La, southern style. Somebody’s fantasy. Not mine. I couldn’t believe it really existed.
Take Eddie home. Get the hell out of here.
And don’t look back.
“BEES!” HUSH PUPPY YELLED. “Bees, Aunt Hush! The bees are after me!”
I heard her screaming as I headed down the front path from the house, intending to drive back up to the public barns. I pivoted and ran up a dirt lane to a gray-weathered barn that looked as if it had grown out of the ridge behind the house. This was a real barn, over a hundred years old. “Do you need help, Mrs. Thackery?” Lucille yelled. She and three of her fellow agents shared surveillance of my flower beds, driveway, and front veranda. But they were no match for swarming bees. I shook my head and kept running.
A short cut across a tumbled row of field stones sent me straight through the barn’s tall, shadowy side entrance and into the sifted sunlight and sweet-hay scent of the old structure’s past. Two large tractors vied for space in the old mule stalls alongside tillers, plows, and a big wagon I’d bring out for mule-drawn hayrides as soon as the weather turned crisper.
“Over here, Aunt Hush!” Puppy shrieked. “I’m in the corn crib!”
“I’m coming, honey! Stay put!” I dodged between aging, oak-slat bushel baskets stacked head-high like upended ice-cream cones. Dozens of yellow jackets swarmed in a corner streaked with sunlight through the barn’s rough walls. Puppy rattled the wood hitch from her safe place on the far side of the crib’s heavy plank door. I could just make out the crown of her dark, wavy hair in a crack above the doors’ cross brace. Her blue eyes peered through a smaller horizontal crack, below. “I was chasing Toad the cat, and the yellow jackets buzzed out of their hole in the ground.” Her voice, a six-year-old’s treble squeak, rose even higher on the word hole. She began crying. “Aunt Hush, I’m not cut out to be the Sixth Hush McGillen. I don’t have sugar skin. Those jackets stung me on my finger!” She sobbed. “I might as well be like anybody else!”
“Baby,” I crooned, “the bees just haven’t figured out who you are, yet. Now, when I say, ‘Go,’ you open the door and step out, and just walk slowly out of the barn. And you go get Gruncle Thackery and tell him to bring a smoker can from the hive shed.” We had smoker cans for working the honey-bee hives in the orchard. Smoke was the only thing that could drive the yellow jackets off my skin. “Don’t run. Just go down to the public barns and find Gruncle. All right?”
“All right.”
I stood before the swarming, yellow-and-black bees with their ferocious stingers. “It’s me,” I said softly to the insects. I pushed up the cuffs of my sweater to my elbows then held out both hands with my fingers spread, said a small prayer, and stepped into their midst. Slowly, the yellow jackets lit on me. Within less than a minute they covered my hands and forearms like a living pair of gloves. I could feel their tiny pressures on my skin, their tickling, tasting insect mouths. A dozen or so floated upwards to my face and hair, settling on my cheeks, my nose, the scar below my right eye. I could feel one tickling his way along the crescent of sensitive flesh. Davy hurt you, but we never will.
After another few seconds not a single yellow jacket remained in the air. The entire nest was enamored of me. I still had the knack for charming bees, even if the rest of my life had begun to buzz out of control. “Puppy?” I said in a low voice.
“Yes?”
“Go.”
The crib door creaked open on its old iron hinges. Puppy eased her head out, looked at me wide-eyed, then crept into the open. She’d seen me do this, before—tame the bees—but still, she stared in awe. “I’ll get Gruncle with the smoker can,” she whispered. She sidled about ten feet through the stacks of bushel baskets, then broke into a run and bolted out the barn’s side entrance.
I stood there alone in the slivers of late afternoon sunlight, my skin a magnet for creatures who had a place and a purpose no less than my own in the creation of life’s fruit. I blew out a slow breath then whispered to them, “I’ve got lots worse to be afraid of than you right now, little bees. And I think you know it.”
I sat down slowly on a low wood bench near where I kept my grandfather’s carving tools, carefully rested my elbows on my knees so no bees would be mashed in the process, then turned my bee-decorated face up to a shard of light. Like a tree in springtime, I was being pollinated. A sense of expectation rose like goosebumps on my spine. My skin bloomed strangely. I was here for a reason of some kind. Outside the barn, carried on the softest wind, came the whisper of the ancient Great Lady tree.
Be still and the bees will bring you new life.
AFTER I DROVE PAST the public areas of Sweet Hush Farm I entered the orchards, and everything of the outside world disappeared behind me. Even the quality of the light deepened, as if I were being drawn down a well. The trees crowded so close that the leafy tips of a limb, weighted with apples, knocked on my window. Let us in. You can’t win in a fight against the All-American fruit.
The road narrowed to a single car-width of gravel lined with golden flowers of some kind, and the mountains threw afternoon shadows across my car, changing the light even more and warping my perspective and sense of time. I tunneled through lifetimes and apple trees. This is a wormhole in the universe, I thought. I’ll come out in some other dimension.
Maybe I did. The orchards opened up and suddenly I stopped at a weathered gate and fences with split-rail crosspieces. Not worth a damn for keeping anything or anyone in, or out. But pretty. Beyond the gate, up a rise of lawn and terraces outlined in mossy stone walls overflowing with browning flower beds and shaded by big oaks going red, sat the big, handsome house with a red peaked roof and gray stone chimneys, a broad veranda draped in vines, and a front door of dark, carved wood and stained glass. Apples were carved on the newel posts of the front steps. Apples were carved in the door. Apples glowed red in its stained glass panels.
Apples, everywhere.
Three Secret Service agents came down a walkway of old stone hooded by snowball bushes big enough to hide behind. The place was a picturesque minefield of security risks. I got out the car and nodded to the agents. They looked like solid, clean-cut family men—the Services’ typical choice. None of them knew me on sight, and each kept one hand near their gun holsters as they walked my way. I had that effect on family men.
“Stop right there,” one called. “Do you have business at the house?”
I nodded, looking past them. I spotted an old barn and some other outbuildings beyond the woods, a glimpse of small pasture, and more orchards behind it all—hell, orchards from there to forever, an army of apple trees, bending and rising with the valley floor. A wave of apples. I was surrounded. I laid a hand on the locked gate as the agents reached it. “I’m Jakobek,” I said, and pulled my credentials from the pocket of old khakis. An agent took the open wallet and studied it. His
and the others expressions’ changed to relief, or at least recognition. “Lt. Colonel. Sorry to stop you.” They’d been told to expect me. Be careful what you wish for.
“No problem,” I said.
“Lt. Colonel,” a woman called. Lucille Olson strode down the stone path and out of the shadows of the subversive shrubs. Al and Edwina had asked me what I thought of her before she was put in charge of Eddie’s protection. I looked at her records, looked at her training, then went to her and asked one question: “Why would you risk your life to protect Eddie’s?”
She looked me straight in the eye. “Because when I was growing up in Minnesota my sister was raped and murdered by a stalker. I can only deal with that memory by making sure it doesn’t happen to someone else. I have to believe I can make a difference.”
I told Al and Edwina they could trust her with Eddie’s life. She’d never allow herself to let Eddie down. I understood the mentality.
“Agent Olson, where’s Eddie?”
“In the house, sir.” She unlocked the gate. “Upstairs. Sleeping all day. She’s had stomach flu, nausea. Nothing serious, although I tried to persuade her to let me call a doctor. No go. Davis Thackery is sitting with her. Can’t pry him away. I’m glad you’re here.”
I walked through the open gate, already moving swiftly up the path toward the house. “Be ready to go when I come back with Eddie. Have a doctor waiting at the airport. I don’t expect this to take long.”
“I don’t think you understand . . .” She hurried alongside me. “Eddie’s not that easily persuaded right now.”
“She’ll listen to me. Is Hush Thackery here? I want to talk to her, first. A little protocol. You do the introductions.”
“Well, actually, she’s . . . we have a situation . . . she’s in that barn over there, but I’m not sure what—”