Tal blinked for a moment, then broke out a big smile and gave me a thumbs up.
Suddenly Trey grabbed a phone from inside his jacket. His face deadly serious, he read a message then pivoted on the stool to look into the forest, giving a curt hand signal.
All laughter stopped.
He lurched to his feet and turned toward us. “Kern’s here.”
Tal ran to him and jammed her arm beneath his. She was as tall as him and very strong. “You’ll never limp fast enough to get back in the woods in time. Come with us.”
With her supporting him and me running to open the bakery door, we covered the brown winter earth quickly. Once inside Tal locked the door’s iron bolt. “How did you know?” Tal asked him.
“We have cameras along the road.”
Tal and I traded a startled look. The Knights seemed to be low-tech, all the way. Primitive camping, no running water, no electricity. We’d been surprised to find out they had cell phones.
And where did they go to charge those phones?
And now . . . security cameras in the woods?
Trey put a finger to his lips. He held up his phone.
We watched a live feed showing the clearing outside.
Kern drove up, a Lexus slinging cold dirt and winter grass. When he got out he slung a pistol from inside his leather jacket over a dark suit. He fired into the air until the chamber clicked empty.
“He died because of you,” Kern yelled at the woods. “He looked for you for the past two years. You broke his heart, you fucking loser. You couldn’t make it through Ranger training. Couldn’t even earn your sergeant stripes. Ended up just a PFC mechanic patching up Humvees and going for joy rides on a colonel’s motorcycle. You got your leg blown off racing a stolen Harley through a mine field. That’s some retarded shit, baby brother.
“You always acted like you were the real son and I was just a stray puppy Mom took in. Everybody treated me that way. But I proved I’m the one she and Dad could count on. The one to be proud of. She knows it. I was there today, burying him. Standing beside her.
“You’re too ashamed and afraid to show your face and admit you’re a fuck-up. Too afraid to be compared to me. I got the scholarships. I got the officer’s commission. Top of my Ranger class. Ten years and I came back here a badass hero. I take care of business, now.
“I know you’re in these fucking woods somewhere. Come out of hiding. Be a man. If you don’t, I’ll find you. Don’t make me have to come looking. I’m in charge, now.”
Kern looked from the wooden stool to the bakery. We held our breath.
He grabbed the stool and slung it so hard it splintered when it hit the shop’s brick wall.
He headed towards the bakery, focused on the door with laser intensity.
Trey pulled a pistol from his camo jacket.
Tal grabbed me by one arm. “Climb those stairs in the corner. Hide in the attic. It’s better if I do the talking. He’ll freak out if he sees you here.”
“No. He’ll torment you. He’ll find a reason to arrest you. He’s cruel.”
“Not while Pike’s still sheriff.”
“He’s working behind Pike’s back. Even Delta says so. He’ll hurt you. He’ll find the Knights.”
Trey whirled towards us. “If I don’t open that door and talk to him, the Knights are going to start shooting.”
I staggered back, jerking my arm from her grip, pivoting to head for the stairs.
A hand closed around me.
Invisible, ethereal, gentle.
I looked at Tal and she was transfixed, not looking at me but staring into space.
“You feel it too,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
Kern slammed a fist on the door. “Open up. Goddammit, Tal, if you’re in there hiding him . . . ”
The explosion rattled the bakery’s windows behind their plywood shutters. The concussive force washed over us.
And yet it made no sound.
A sonic boom with no boom.
Silent thunder.
We heard Kern’s footsteps retreating on the bakery’s stone stoop. Lights danced in my vision. The encompassing hand faded away. The shawl I wore rose like wings and twirled in the glitter of the air.
“I don’t know what the hell just happened,” Trey said, “But the only other time I’ve seen him scared like this was when . . . ” His voice trailed off. “Anyhow, thank God he’s gone.”
Tal’s voice, full of wonder, was telling me how the pies and cakes smelled and looked in the handsome shelves; how the breads scented the air as the big ovens browned them. “And over there, in a tall glass case with filigreed metal racks, I see trays of taffy and butterscotch drops. Marzipan fluffs with candied dates in the middles. And . . . ”
“Teacakes soaked in molasses syrup,” I finished. “Opal liked them.”
We stared at each other.
The Knights pounded on the door.
Tal put her finger to her lips. I nodded. She went to the door, pulled the bolt back, then opened it wide.
“Something must have spooked that fucker,” one of the Knights said.
They hadn’t heard or felt a thing.
The Knight we called Doc pushed forward. An older man with sad eyes and the red blotches of a heavy drinker. Doc looked at us both as if diagnosing a secret. “Whatever happened just now, it stopped one brother from killing another.”
“That’s what’s important,” Tal said.
Heads were craning. Noses sniffed.
“Let’s eat,” someone yelled.
“Beer!”
And they poured inside, leaving Tal and me standing in the shadows, sorting out mysteries.
Trey leaned against a wall, looking away from what his brother had said.
5
We have to talk. I don’t like it when you keep secrets from me.
KERN’S TEXT message cut me in half. I spent most of a day trying to breathe.
“This goes into his file,” Alberta said. She tapped a key on her laptop, sending the screen-saved image to a folder named BURKETT HARASSMENT.
Macy hugged me. “Say the word, and we’ll let Pike know that Kern’s stalking you, again.”
“No. I’m going to handle this. I’ve got to get stronger.”
“You’re trying to impress Gus. We get that. But Gus is thousands of miles away.”
“No. He’s close by.” I whirled a finger at the air.
They studied me the way they looked at over-heated hens wobbling around the chicken yard in August. Alberta arched a brow. “Can he use a Star Trek transporter? Have you let him know about Kern? Or about Monzell always looming over us?”
“No.”
“I thought he could do hokey pokey psychic voodoo, like you.”
“There’s nothing he can do about Kern, not from the other side of the world. And why should he? We’re just friends.”
Macy rolled her eyes.
“I saw that,” I said. “Look, I have to learn to take care of myself. That’s why I came here originally. To heal. To toughen up.”
Alberta sighed. She thumbed a hand toward my hidden crotch holster. “Then let’s at least teach you to shoot something bigger than that tiny metal dildo.”
Gus
I KNEW WHERE Kern Burkett came from. At least, as much as anyone knew. He was raised hard, and abandoned at the age of ten by his mother, one month after his father, a shift foreman at one of Monzell’s processing plants, died of cancer.
Kern got off the school bus at their trailer in the woods of the Big Walk community. Late November. The start of a week-long Thanksgiving holiday.
His mother had piled boxes of his favorite Captain Crunch cereal, loaves of raisin bread and jars of peanut butter on the kitch
en table, stuffed about a hundred dollars into the knock-off Air Jordans his dad bought for him from a roadside flea market, and taped a note to a framed picture of his dad holding him as a baby.
Sorry. I know this is hard.
But it is harder on me.
I am not your mother. You might as well know it now and get used to the idea.
Here is a list of phone numbers. Don’t be stupid. Call and somebody or other will take you.
I did right by you. I forgave your daddy for bringing you home to raise.
But raising you by myself wasn’t part of the deal.
Have a good life. Happy Turkey Day!
—Mom
Kern tied all the food and camping gear he could handle onto the battered four-wheeler he and his dad had used on the hunting trails. He stopped at the Big Walk Drive Up, a tiny gas-grocery store on a dirt road, and bought bullets, matches, cigarettes and batteries. None of which rang any alarm bells thirty years ago, even if the customer was a third grader wearing an imitation samurai sword his dad had bought for him at a gun show.
School had been back in session for a week before T. K. Jefferson Elementary teacher Olivia Clayton called her sister Vivian, a loan specialist at the bank in Turtleville, to ask if Marcia Burkett’s phone number at the trailer was out of order. Olivia was hunting for Kern.
From that moment on, the grim news spread swiftly: Kern Burkett had last been seen driving the four-wheeler along a forestry trail on the lower ridges of the Ten Sisters before Thanksgiving.
There had been five frigid nights below twenty degrees since then, with most days not getting much above freezing. One of the coldest seasons on record.
Pike hadn’t been sheriff for long. He was still recovering from a knock-down-drag-out fight with the Clayton brothers, Olivia’s cousins. He’d broken up their dog-fighting ring in the county, once and for all. They were headed to prison—not for animal abuse, but for assaulting a sheriff—and Pike was propped up in a Lazy Boy recliner at the office in Turtleville, with three broken fingers, a concussion, broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and two broken toes on his left foot, where Cirius Clayton had slammed him with a sledge hammer.
The Clayton brothers were worse off than Pike, by far.
Delta dove into her cooking to help make ends meet, baking biscuits non-stop. Her grandmother’s empty farmhouse, sitting no more than fifty feet from the Trace, was the perfect place to open a tiny diner in the front rooms.
Cleo McKellan, Delta’s new sister-in-law, took charge of the search for Kern. Short, strong, like a vintage Kewpie Doll and fond of leg warmers that matched the scrunchies she wore in her curly black hair, she was never shy. She declared herself head of the Jefferson County Volunteer Rescue Team.
“I can out-shoot and out-track any man in these mountains,” she said. “Because Jesus is my guide.”
“Does she say stuff like that in bed?” the menfolk joked to her husband, Bubba. He always had an affectionate comeback about her well-armed Jesus talk.
Cleo was nursing their son, Trey. She strapped him to her chest and went to look for the missing boy. Five brave men followed her, including Bubba. The rest laughed and went in the other direction.
She found Kern on a high ridge. He’d made a camp using a rocky overhang as a windbreak. He knew better than to build a fire that would draw attention, so his only warmth had come from thawing his hands over a camp stove—until the fuel ran out. He wore heavy camo coveralls, which helped. He’d wrapped himself in blankets, stuffed leaves inside to add insulation, and survived as well as any experienced outdoorsman might.
No one could understand Cleo’s uncanny sense of direction. She tracked him the way a cat tracks its kitten, the men said later. Bubba kept asking, How do you know where you going? But she just kept plowing forward, with Trey along for the ride as if he were still inside her, hidden under layers of sweaters and coat.
Kern was tucked in narrow gulley where the fallen shell of a massive tree formed a burrow. She crawled into that dark hiding spot to the spine-freezing sound of Kern saying, “I’ll shoot everybody and myself before I’ll get thrown away somewhere.”
No one could hear what Cleo said to him in response, because Bubba was diving into the gulley at the time. She stuck her arm out of the burrow with a pistol cupped in the palm of her hand. Bubba took the loaded .35 caliber weapon and watched incredulously as she crawled out with the half-frozen Kern in tow.
The sweat in his black hair had almost frozen to his scalp. Patches of frostbite dappled his face. He was stiff with the cold. The skin beneath his pale blue eyes was nearly purple. The coldness in his eyes would never depart. He managed to stand up and glare at her and Bubba.
There was no childhood left in him.
“I found him,” Cleo announced. She looked up at Bubba. “Jesus sent me straight to him. He’s mine.”
Bubba was flabbergasted at the way she said all that. But, having been raised with Delta as his sister, and accustomed to nodding rather than admitting his heart had just died, he only said, “Well. Okay.”
Trey shifted on her chest and made an unhappy sound.
Some said it was fear.
Lucy
I SAT AT A cluttered desk in the darkened back room at Bah Spa, amidst the fragrances of storage shelves filled with goat milk and herb soaps, lotions and bath balms. I smiled at one of Gus’s text messages on my phone.
His name’s Bazir. He looks like a kid in a Disney movie. Big bright eyes, big smile, shaggy black hair. I’ve got him and Eve trading pictures with their pet goats. My niece and Bazir, two kids grinning at each other beside their goats. Maybe world peace starts with that.
Outside, sleet stung the rooftops of Turtleville, seat of Jefferson County, where a tall statue of a pioneer cradling a goat stood atop a fountain in the park near the courthouse. Farlo Jefferson, the legendary goat man, had founded the town back in the 1840s.
Delta, a Jefferson descendant, said there was more than a little goat in all the old families.
Bah Spa was one of my safe places away from the farm. The Crossroads Café was the other. The little shop—Delta and Cathy’s idea, with proceeds going to Rainbow Goddess—sat along a narrow road beside the river, where mists feathered passing cars and enormous oaks pronged their roots from the craggy banks like the claws of large birds.
Living with the river running through town was a challenge at times, especially during heavy rains. At the Turtleville Kiwanis’ Forked Tongue Spring Storytelling festival every year, there was an entire category of River Tales. Delta had won a grand masters’ blue ribbon for hers.
“A jury let my mother’s great aunt Molene walk free even though she shot her business partner dead in broad daylight in front of a dozen witnesses. It was 1932, hot and muggy, August, and the courthouse back then had no electricity and no way to move air except to open the big windows and fan yourself with a cardboard fan from the Jefferson Funeral Home.”
Don’t tarry, we bury.
Jesus is ready for you, and so are we.
“Nobody wanted to serve on the jury in August.
“Especially not when the river was up. And loud. The bugs got worse. Chiggers and mosquitoes and blue-bottle flies came in slow and buzzed loud next to your ear, brrrr. There was more sweating and slappin’ in the courtroom than in a tent revival full of married people confessing who they’d hugged too tight at the last carnival dance.
“Town had just been hit by two weeks of frog-drowning, goose-wallowing, mud-sloshing, Baptist-baptizing rainstorms that turned it into such a monster that old Grandpa Joe Walking Cloud, the last Cherokee Indian who had escaped the Removal, then a hundred years old, Grandpa Joe called that monster river of 1932, Weehatcheedonnawallachokacola.
“‘The river with a name that goes on for miles’ . . . ”
“Lucy?”
I clicked the phone off. “Yes?”
“Give me that phone. You can’t help Gus until you get better at looking after yourself. Take it from the original ‘Me’ Girl.”
I’d never been good at resisting authority. I turned it over. Cathy barricaded the phone behind photos of her husband Tom, their teenage girls and the twins.
Cathy Deen Mitternich, the woman who’d been the highest paid female movie star in the world, the actress named The World’s Most Beautiful Woman by more than one major magazine not that many years ago, had survived a near-fatal car accident in California that left her with burn scars on the right side of her face and body. She’d hidden in her Nettie grandmother’s isolated home here in these mountains, just wanting to fade away and die. Thanks to Delta, she’d met Tom, a hard-drinking widower, and they’d fallen in love.
Bah Spa was only one of her enterprises. She was a major board member at the farm, and children knew her now as the beloved voice of Dazzle the Dragon Rider in a series of movies and videos. Bah Spa sold soaps and lotions and candles, all made locally. The Bah Spa online store was slowly building a customer base across the South. Women I’d taught to knit and crochet sold soft cotton face scrubbers there, also felted wool slippers, hand-knitted cosmetic bags, and rice-filled heating pouches. I’d written a brief note for the bi-fold card attached to every item:
The women of these mountains, both Cherokee and immigrant pioneers, were experts at making rugs, clothing, and housewares from plant and animal fibers. Near here, a large spinning and weaving mill run by the women of the MacBride families in the Little Finn Valley made the finest wool cloth in the Appalachians. The craft and business of textile work instilled progressive ideals of education, confidence and leadership in mountain women.
“Lucy?”
“Sorry. Daydreaming.”
Cathy pointed to the computer screen. She tapped a key. The screen filled with digital sketches of cartoon sheep smiling in bubble baths.
“And here’s my sweet girl,” she said, flicking to the next sketch and pointing to a brown-and-white cow wearing a Carmen Miranda headdress of fruits and vegetables while reclining in a spa tub. The cartoon cow was inspired by Cathy’s namesake cow, Cathy, who lived at Rainbow Goddess. Tom had named her after giving emergency assistance at her birth.