Their fortress was a narrow rock ledge dusted with snow and ice. I hunched my shoulders against a bone-deep cold that seeped out of the abyss. My whole life has felt like this.
“I’m coming down to your level,” I called to the boys.
Gabby
I HEARD WILL’S helicopter coming.
“I’m going to distract your aunt,” I told Arwen. Buy Jay and the boys some more time. Stay here, okay?”
She nodded. “Donny was right. You’re a nice lady. And Cousin Jay . . .”
“He’s on your side. I promise you.”
She nodded.
I crept up the mountainside. When I reached the bald, Denoto was still shouting into the starlit sky, telling Dustin how it didn’t matter if his cousins were sacrificed, that they were like the wild hogs of the valley, just useless feeders.I eased into the edge of her wildly swinging lantern light. Waiting for the right moment, watching the gun swing in her other hand.
Jay
“I’M GOING TO jump to my death if you touch me!” Donny screeched.
“Donny, get a grip,” Dustin ordered, hugging his damaged arm. “Turn off the voices for a sec, okay?”
The wind whipped around us. Behind me was nothing but mountain ridges and Falling Doom. I snagged the collar of Donny’s silver-paint-smeared denim coat. My other hand was busy hanging onto the exposed root of a brave old fir tree that stuck out from the mountainside side a wild hair thumbing its nose at a razor blade. I planted both booted feet into the crevice of a ledge just wide enough to keep me, Donny and Dustin from taking a quick re-enactment of the cliff scenes from Last Of The Mohicans, which was filmed in these mountains.
I slammed Donny against the rock face. He slumped. “Ouch. Meanie. Mean man. Darth Vader of Wakefields. You’re hurting me.”
“You want to get your sister and Dustin out of this predicament? Then do what I tell you. If I’d wanted to destroy your crazy butt I’d have throttled you in Asheville.”
“They’re all around you. The spirits. They’re talking at me. They’re saying . . .” His eyes, large and strangely lit by the flashlight I’d jammed into a crevice, stared into a world only he could see. “They say . . . chocolate ice cream with Reese’s Pieces. What does that mean? But it’s good!”
“Focus, Donny. Focus.” I shook him lightly. “You climbed down here. You can climb back up.”
“Noooo! She’ll shoot me! She’ll separate me from my sister. We are twins. We are one heart! I’ll die! Arwen’s the only one who can keep the voices under control. Dustin, help. Dustin. Dustin, help!”
“I’m hurt, dude. I have to trust Cousin Jay. So do you. There’s no other choice.”
Donny grabbed the front of my jacket. His pale, young face was full of horror. “What happens next? Grandfather will lock us up. We’ll never see Mama again. We won’t get to go with her to Disney World.”
“I swear to you, Donny, that’s not going to happen.”
His pale eyes flickered, shifted, then settled on me, widening. “You. Oh. My. God. Ohmagod! You. You’ve changed. You’re . . . because of her . . . Gabby, it’s you! They recognize you! He’s home, they’re saying. He’s here!” He smiled. “They’ve been trying to tell me, but I didn’t understand, before. It’s you they’ve been waiting for.” He let go of my jacket and clamped his clammy hands around my face. He lurched forward and smacked a cold kiss on my forehead.
“Keep it together, Donny. Just climb up and stay in the shadows. Don’t go toward Aunt Denoto. Head down the mountain into the woods. Arwen’s waiting there, with Gabby. I’ll help Dustin up, right behind you. And then I’ll climb up. I promise you, Donny. I’ll protect you and Arwen and Dustin. I swear to you.”
He relaxed. Something inside his churning brain, some illusion or angel voice, had given me the live-long-and-prosper seal of approval. He patted my face. “Now I hope you don’t die,” he said.
Well, that was progress.
He let go of me and climbed up nimbly.
Gabby
I WAS FACE DOWN in the dirty snow with my nose bleeding and Denoto’s knee in the center of my back. She pressed down on my spine, digging the breath out of my lungs. She grabbed the back of my hair and shoved my face into the mountaintop’s not-so-delicious crust. “Eat that, Pickle Queen.”
I spat out the dirt and tried to flip over, but she twisted my arm behind my back and pinned me tighter to the ground. Through the roar of blood in my ears I heard the whump whump whump of the helicopter landing
“Let Gabby go!” a shrill voice yelled. Oh my God. Donny.
Denoto shoved me aside and clambered to her feet. She rushed forward.
I got up and hurried after her. Ahead of us, in the light of lantern she grabbed and held high, Donny stood like a deer frozen by an oncoming train.
“You’re the Wicked Witch!” he yelled.
“Donny!” Arwen screamed, from the woods.
The sight of his beloved sister running toward us, and their aunt wildly waving the gun, sent Donny leaping towards Denoto. She stopped cold and aimed at him. A strange little smile crossed her face. I dived for her but was too late.
Jay, however, wasn’t.
He shoved Donny out of the way with the speed and agility that had made him a star in college football.
She fired.
The rush to Asheville
BLOOD STAINED a wide portion of Jay’s shirt. I held his hand and hunched beside him on the helicopter’s rumbling floor. His eyes, a little too calm and empty, frightening me, were trained on mine. “Right here,” I kept saying, pointing to my eyes. Don’t look away.
He had lost a lot of blood.
Will’s people had Denoto under control, and were taking Dustin, Donny and Arwen to a quiet place. Bonnie sat cross-legged on the copter’s rumbling floor beside Wren, who had one Latex-gloved hand pressed to Jay’s bullet wound. A tuft of tubular cotton protruded from the hole in his chest. Field emergency. A tampon. “Best way to staunch the bleeding,” she had murmured.
When Jay recovered, he’d get a laugh out of being plugged with it.
He will recover. He has to.
She put her stethoscope to Jay’s bare chest. “ETA?” she asked Will.
“Thirty minutes to Asheville. They’re waiting for us on the helipad at the hospital.”
“He’ll need blood. Fast.”
I studied the pallor in Jay’s face, and the way his eyes had gone half-shut. I put my face close to his, my lips brushing his cheek. In a distant part of my brain, my broken nose ached. “Don’t leave me. I swear to God, if you do, I’ll come after you.”
His eyes flickered. His lips moved. I put my ear to them, dreading what he might say.
He said it.
“Love you. Always.”
“Don’t you dare.” I wrung his hand, which was cooling inside my ferocious grip. “I won’t hear it! Not this way. I did not hear it! You hear me? You can’t say it this way! I know what you’re trying to do. You know I love you and the only way you’d leave me is to finally admit you love me too. Don’t you leave me! No! Jay. No!”
He shut his eyes.
I bent my forehead to his and prayed to every god I knew.
Gabby
The long night of worry and love
EIGHT A.M. CHRISTMAS morning. Touch and go. Jay was out of surgery and in recovery. The bullet had nicked an artery. “He’s stable,” the surgeon said. “For now. The next few hours will tell us more.”
Will and Bonnie waited with me, along with George Avery, who never sat down. He paced the floor along with me. “I let him down,” George said. “I should have gone with him up there.”
“He had to go about this in his own way, George. He doesn’t ever like asking for help, not from you, and not from me.”
?
??He is a good man. Like a son to me. I’ve never told him that.”
“I believe he knows it.”
“His plan was working. He would have accomplished exactly what he intended. Gotten the kids out of his uncle’s control, secured the mineral rights for Free Wheeler permanently, and broken E.W.’s power base once and for all.” George stopped, his throat straining. “His plan is working. What am I saying? I can’t be negative. I’m talking as if . . . Oh, my God.”
“Tell me about this plan,” I said hoarsely.
“Bit by bit. Suspicious land deals. Bribes. Under-the-table arrangements with politicians. Mining accidents that were hidden from safety regulators. We’ve always hammered E.W. on all the little things we could find. But the big ones . . . they go so far back that many of the records don’t even exist. Courthouses burned down. File clerks lost files. Sometimes they were paid to lose paperwork. Deeds were rewritten. Wills disappeared. Back in the old days . . .”
“How far back?”
“We could go back to the 1920s, but E.W.’s part starts in the late 1960s. He was in his late twenties then.”
“Around the time his father gambled away the mining right to Mary Eve Nettie?”
“Yes. It was around that time that E.W. staged a coup and took control of Wakefield Mining. And all its secrets. Some of which had to continue to be . . . tended. Like an old mine that has too many tunnels. You never know when someone will fall down an old shaft or stumble into a forgotten quarry and drown. They still have value—or liabilities. You can’t afford to let anyone take control of them and start prowling around, so as long as you remain the owner, you’ll always be filling in those old holes, covering up those old secrets.”
“He’s been involved in covering up crimes committed by his father?”
George nodded. “And grandfather. And great-grandfather.”
I stared at him. “Including . . . in the Little Finn . . .”
“That’s the heart of it, but actually one of the least he’s worried about. The MacBrides ran distilleries. They were famous for their liquor. Respected citizens. Patriots. But when Prohibition came along they refused to quit the business. That wasn’t uncommon. There was more liquor made in these mountains during Prohibition than before or after. But it made them a target. It was easy to use that as excuse. What Augustus wanted wasn’t just the mineral rights to the valley—he wanted the rights to other properties the MacBrides owned, more valuable ones, including gold, in these mountains. He wiped out an entire generation so that he could take over a dozen mines they owned.”
I found a chair and sat down. George lowered himself wearily beside me. “William did everything up to and including murder to keep those mines. E.W. took up where William left off.”
“He caused my mother’s death—I call that murder, but that’s not what you mean, is it?”
He shook his head. “Caillin MacBride. She didn’t die in a plane crash.”
“You’re telling me that E.W., as a young man . . . killed her.”
“No.” George looked at me evenly, a plain and friendly-faced man, a good man, the kind who expects to deal with ugliness but never doubts that wondrous and even miraculous things exist. “He only thought he did.”
I PACED IN FRONT of a window where dawn was warming up to a bright blue Christmas day. Asheville and the mountains looked silver and misty in the rising mists of mountain fog; pristine and yet painfully lonely to me. I limped as I tracked back and forth across a secluded end of the waiting room. Denoto had landed several painful hits on my right knee. My fists were raw. The nurses had given me a green scrub shirt to trade for my bloody sweater, and an ER doc had proclaimed my nose fractured but not “unaligned.” Since the bleeding had stopped on its own, he’d simply handed me some acetaminophen for the pain, then backed off as I rushed out.
“When can I see Jay?” I asked as a nurse arrived. She frowned at Charlie, who manned the door as my personal off-duty police security. “Ten minutes. We’re getting him settled in intensive care.”
Will asked, “Is he conscious?”
She shook her head. “We don’t want him to be. He needs to stay quiet for a few hours.”
She left, glaring at Charlie again. He gave her a grunt of manly appraisal. He and Daddy’s other old friends could not be dissuaded from setting up shifts as the MacBride family security team. Not only were reporters downstairs trying to sneak up here for inside information on the bizarre incidents of the night, but Denoto was being taken into custody. She needed help.
Suddenly, Charlie lurched down the hall like a happy bear, spreading his arms wide. “Baby Tallulah! Oh my lord, you’re a sight for sore eyes!”
I rushed after him. Tal. I had never been the teary, clinging one of the family; I was always the oldest girl—the stern, substitute mother, trying uselessly to replace Mama. Her death had been hardest on Tal. I knew that. But now I ran toward Tal as if I were the baby sister and she were Mama and Daddy and Brother Gus rolled into one. She turned from Charlie’s bear hug, mewled at the sight of my swollen nose, haunted eyes and limping, bruised-knuckle self, then threw her Christmas-sweatered arms around me and pressed her teary cheek hard against mine. Two big women colliding in an explosion of red hair and freckles.
Behind her, one brawny hand gently touching her back as a sign of support, stood the legendary Dr. Douglas Firth—veterinarian, Tal’s knight in shining Scottish plaid, a man who had already proved that he was not only her loving partner but also a devoted father figure for her young daughter—my niece, Eve.
Tal and I swayed, holding each other.
It was good to be home.
“We have to talk,” I told her. “It’s about Caillin MacBride.”
Jay
From the depths of the dream
LOOK AT THE ocean, Jay. It seems endless and . . . peaceful. Out there beyond the edge of the world. Where the water falls off the edge, into heaven. You and me. Let’s go see that waterfall. Together.
I was looking at Gabs’s profile as she held my hand, naked, in the gold-pink light of a Malibu sunset. Beautiful, I said.
“We’d hoped for more improvement in his vitals by now. He’s in a very deep place. I just want you to understand the challenges. We almost lost him in surgery. The outcome is still unpredictable.”
“Thank you,” I heard Gabs say to the doctor. “But you don’t know him the way I do.”
Lips brushed my ear. The scent of soft pickling spices and love filled me. Gabs whispered, “You owe me a visit to that waterfall. Please.”
I tried to turn my head toward her, to answer.
But the sunset stood between us like a wall.
Gabby
THREE A.M. ME and Jay, alone. Now we shared the day after Christmas. The night-shift nurses—wise and unflappable ICU veterans—wouldn’t meet my eyes when they promised it was just a matter of time before he woke up.
I sat on the bed with my hip against his, cradling his hand on my thigh, and talking to him about everything George had told me. “Do you think you have to die to make up for your family history?” I asked him. “No. You have to live. Anna Shepherd told me that a piece of yarn is made special by the strength of its core. I know what your core is, and it’s not your name or your family tree or your money or what happened in the past. It’s your heart. You are still that boy who wants the sweetness of chocolate ice cream. Your father was a great man. You’ve made him proud. My parents loved you. Gus and Tal love you. I love you. You have a family that defines you, and that family is us.”
But finally there was nothing to do but simply say, my voice so hoarse and small with misery that it was a whisper, that I loved him, I loved him, I loved him. That I would never leave him.
Crying silently, I bowed my head and shut my eyes.
His hand flexed inside mine.
He
was back.
The next day, onward
TAL AND I STEPPED off Will’s copter into the cold air of the Little Finn Valley. He stayed in the pilot’s seat, waiting. I wanted to get back to Jay as quickly as possible.
In the middle of the empty street of the town MacBrides had built, Tearmann, Anna leaned on a cane and watched us walk towards her. Her long gray hair wafted in the air; a beautiful shawl of gray wool moved gracefully around her body.
“Apples,” Tal whispered. “A whole orchard of them.”
I nodded.
I wore the pretty shawl Anna had given me when I arrived in the valley. As we drew closer to her I pulled it off the collar of my coat and held it out across my hands. “Well, now I know where my brother’s knitting talent comes from.”
Anna smiled. In the bright light, her face was much, much older. “I’ll send him some yarn. Core-spun. We MacBrides like our Wensleydale yarns to last a hundred years. At least.”
Her Irish lilt was gone. In its place, a soft Carolina drawl. As we stopped close to her, Tal said, “Is that how old you are? I know it’s not polite to ask. Our mama is whispering ‘For shame, Tallulah’, in my ear, right now.”
“Under the circumstances,” Anna said, “it’s certainly important to be honest. I am ninety-five. I was born in nineteen seventeen, here in this valley. I was thirteen years old when the massacre occurred. On a spring night in April, under a moon we called the shepherd’s moon.”
“Why have you stayed in disguise all these years, letting E.W. think you died?”
“He accused me of killing John. How John died is a painful story, and E.W. knows it was not my doing. That secret stays with me. But had he framed me for the murder, this valley would have fallen into his hands instead of going to John’s family.”
“You planned to remain hidden forever?”
Anna nodded. “But now my family has returned. And without my help, Jay’s efforts to conquer E.W. will fail.” She looked at Tal and I. “I won’t fail you. And I won’t let Jay’s sacrifice mean nothing. This is your home. Yours and your brother’s and Will and Bonnie’s. I finally understand that the power of what we were is still here. That it has passed down despite all the efforts to destroy it. That this valley, and the heritage here, can be trusted to family that includes, yes, even a Wakefield. A name I never thought I’d utter as an ally.”