Mountain Mystic (6 page)

“Yeah. Want a ride?” Joshua asked before he remembered his decision to limit his contact with her.

Victoria had already thought about living dangerously, about crawling up on the back of that machine, putting her arms around him, and holding on for dear life, flying around curves at speeds that would take her breath away. Assuming she had any left after getting that close to Joshua, her legs straddling his hips. But she wasn’t about to admit any of that to Joshua. Her mouth went dry at the thought.

“No sense of adventure?” he teased as he headed for the passenger side.

“My sense of adventure is just fine.” Victoria
opened her door in unison with him and slid behind the wheel. “It’s my sense of impending doom that causes me to hesitate. You stick with that machine, and I’ll stick with old Bessie here.”

Not for the first time Joshua felt frustration at not being able to get a sense of her true emotions. Did she hate motorcycles, or was she scared of being that close to him? He wanted to know. He wanted to know if the thought of being wrapped around him on a motorcycle was as exciting to her as it was to him. The thought of her breasts pressed tightly against his back and her fingers roaming across his stomach, sliding lower, made his mouth dry.

He watched her, trying to find a clue in her expression or body language. She seemed to have dismissed the conversation and was pulling out a necklace from beneath her dress. A chuckle escaped Joshua as he realized it was more like a dog-tag chain than a necklace. Instead of tags, the silver chain sported Victoria’s car key. Her jewelry selections continued to fascinate him: expensive earrings, Mickey Mouse watch, and car-key necklace.

“Don’t laugh,” Victoria informed him as she pulled the chain over her head. “It beats looking for my car key at three in the morning, when I absolutely have to get to the hospital.”

“What about your house keys? Aren’t you worried about losing them?”

“Of course not. I’m sure I could borrow an extra set from the landlord, or he could let me back inside
the cabin.” Victoria turned an innocent expression on him, her eyes full of mischief.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to be any trouble.”

“Have I been?”

“Not yet.”

“Then let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Unfortunately, we’ll be crossing several of those today.”

Joshua was studying the list of names and addresses, but Victoria had a feeling that he wasn’t talking about the incredible number of creeks that sliced through the mountains.

As she turned off the highways and onto the smaller paved roads, Victoria was amazed at the stark contrasts in the terrain. Unconsciously, her hand found its way to Joshua’s knee time after time as she became excited about the scenery and wanted his attention. The roads had been literally cut into the mountainside. As often as not, sheer walls of rock rose on one side of the road, and a sickening drop lurked on the other.

The drops scared her as much as the escarpments awed her. The mountain fell away at the side of the road without so much as a guardrail in most places, and even the bushes beside the road were deceptive because they were really the tops of trees from below. She shuddered to think that a moment’s distraction, especially at night or in the winter ice, would send the
unfortunate motorist on a downhill ride that one had little chance of surviving. Forcing the depressing thought aside, she focused her attention on memorizing the area.

Mobile homes had been planted on every level spot available and had taken root, transformed into permanent homes with flower beds bordered with cinder blocks. She saw brick houses, tar-paper shacks, wooden houses marching side by side up the mountain. Many houses had been added on to over the years until they finally had enough rooms but no architectural unity. Other houses, hidden in little hollows beside the road, were no more than a rooftop peeking over the edge of the asphalt paving. Almost all the wooden houses had a porch enclosed with a picket-fence railing.

Some of the towns they passed through were only wide spots in the road—a collection of buildings around a stop sign or railroad tracks. Victoria couldn’t imagine living less than twenty feet from an active train route, and wondered why the houses hadn’t shaken apart over the years. A few dead coal mines also dotted the landscape, their chutes and works rusted with age and idleness. The mines looked like ugly tentacled creatures hunkered down in the midst of a gorgeous panorama.

The leaves were beginning to turn color, but foliage still sheltered much of the road from sunlight. Patches of light dappled the shade as she negotiated the serpentine road and hairpin curves that would have nauseated her if she hadn’t been driving.

“Slow down,” Joshua advised.

“But I’m only doing thirty!”

“The road drops out from under you around the next curve.”

“Oh.”

She glued her eyes on the road where it disappeared around the mountain, and Joshua kept his eyes on her, noticing the way her hands clutched the steering wheel. “Nervous?”

“About what?”

“About your first patient.”

“Oh. No, I’ve had lots of patients. It’s the road and all that talk about it dropping out from under me. Why don’t you people have guardrails?”

“We do. In some places.”

Victoria shot him a sour look. “Not in enough places.”

Ignoring her displeasure, Joshua asked, “How can you have had a lot of patients? This is your first practice.”

“I’m new but not untried, for heaven’s sake. I’ve done more clinical course work than I care to remember. They don’t give us a book exam and turn us loose on the unsuspecting public!”

“Well, what do they do? I mean, you can’t exactly call up Acme Midwife School.”

“Actually you can. There are about forty nurse-midwifery programs, but my bachelor of fine arts degree didn’t qualify me. So I went to nursing school to get my R.N., much to the horror of Richard, my ex-husband. After the divorce I got my midwifery certification
and a master’s degree from Columbia University.”

“Why’d your husband object to nursing school?” Joshua asked as he pointed out another sharp curve.

With her attention split between the road and the conversation, she answered the question more honestly than she intended. “Wives don’t work; they dress well, volunteer, and entertain. A really good wife can do all three simultaneously.”

“I take it that wasn’t enough for you.”

Victoria hesitated. The truth was that Richard wanted a business arrangement with bedroom privileges, not a real marriage. Unfortunately, he hadn’t let her in on the secret until he slipped the ring on her finger and announced his agenda for success, expecting her to fall in line like the well-connected society debutante he’d thought he’d married.

Instead of telling Joshua the truth, she gave him the same flip, easy explanation that satisfied most people. “Midwifery beats wallpapering hands down as the acid test for a relationship.”

“But you weren’t a midwife when you were married to Richard,” Joshua objected astutely. “You didn’t get into the midwifery program until after the divorce.”

Abruptly, she asked, “How much farther?”

Joshua’s eyebrows shot up. He got the message loud and clear. Victoria’s failed marriage was not open for discussion. Fair enough. He didn’t want to have to drag all the details of his past into this relationship either.
Relationship?
He thought he’d settled that question
this morning.
Then why are you nosing around in her past?
Because I never could resist nosing around in the past, he admitted honestly.

“How much farther?” she asked again.

“Not very far. A couple of miles up the road you’ll see a creek and a railroad trestle. Chapel Road is on your left. After that I don’t know how far it is. We’ll have to start checking the mailboxes.”

“What mailboxes?” Victoria asked. “We haven’t seen one in”—she broke off and looked back over her shoulder for a second—“there it is again!”

“What?” Joshua craned his head around to survey the view from the back window.

“The yellow signs with the black arrows that point out the turns and curves. They all have holes in them like they’ve been victimized by big metal-eating moths. At first I thought it was my imagination, but it’s not. There are holes in every single one of them.” She pointed. “There! Another one.”

“Oh. That.”

“Oh. That,” she mimicked impatiently. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird?”

“No, but then, I grew up here.” Joshua shifted uncomfortably as he confessed, “I put my share of holes in these signs. Actually not in these
particular
signs, as I recall.”

An uneasy suspicion began to take root in Victoria’s mind. “Joshua, how did you put holes in signs?”

“With a gun,” he answered bluntly. “We shot them from moving cars for target practice.”

If she hadn’t been driving, Victoria would have
gaped at him. Instead, she gaped at the road. “You shot poor, defenseless road signs for fun?”

“Well, not anymore.”

“But you did.”

“I did.” Not that he was thrilled to admit it. “Obviously, someone else still does.”

“Why?” she asked incredulously. The whole concept was like a foreign language to Victoria—incomprehensible. “From a car no less! On roads like this!”

“Guns and mountain men go together. We were the original survivalists. In Texas they play cowboys and Indians. In Tennessee we play moonshiners and revenuers.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute. Why did
you
do it? You don’t look like—”

“Like I could be young and stupid and drunk and angry? Well, I was angry a lot when I was younger. I was angry until I got off the mountain.”

“Why’d you come back?” Victoria asked quietly.

“I don’t like crowds. Turn here.”

Automatically, Victoria slowed the truck and flipped the blinker, but she came to a complete stop before she turned. Victoria pursed her lips and looked at the bumpy, twisted gravel road. “Are you serious? You call that a road?”

“If you’re worried about the truck, maybe we should go home and phone the woman,” Joshua suggested hopefully. “No sense overheating the engine in this old thing.”

Grinning, Victoria said, “You’re not going to discourage
me, Joshua. I’ll climb a lot bigger hills than this one if that’s what it takes to get what I want.”

“And what is that?” he asked.

“A life,” Victoria told him as she punched the gas pedal and drove the truck onto what bore more resemblance to a washboard than a road. “Which patient is this?”

“Naomi Marlowe.”

“Pretty name. There is a Marlowe’s Wash-O-Rama in Bodewell. Is she related?”

“Yes and no.”

“Well, which is it?”

“Naomi’s one of the Mention Marlowes. They don’t speak to the Bodewell Marlowes, but they are definitely related if you take the family tree back to about 1860, when the feud started.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“My grandmother is something of an authority on the bloodlines and family feuds in this area.”

“In this day and age you expect me to believe that there is still a family feud that has been going on since the Civil War?”

“On the mountain we don’t forget. We don’t forgive. You betray us once. You might betray us again.”

“That’s a little harsh, Joshua.”

“Folks who settled this area were hard people, Victoria. They had to be. They were nonconformists; they didn’t fit in or want to try. Many of them had been run out of work by slavery, which took all the jobs for an honest hardworking man in the flatlands. East Tennessee was overwhelmingly Union.”

“Tennessee’s a Southern state! They joined the Confederacy.”

Joshua shrugged. “They were the last to secede and the first to be readmitted. One county furnished more federal soldiers than it had voters. To make a long story short, the Mention Marlowes sided with the Union, and the Bodewell Marlowes are descended from the brother who fought for the South.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Dead serious … even though no one’s killed anyone since about 1936, when Harlan Marlowe shot James Marlowe in a driveway dispute. Ah, here we are!”

By the time she came to the end of a narrow dirt driveway and found the house which was hidden by a screen of trees, Victoria still hadn’t decided if he was teasing her. Bracing herself, Victoria murmured, “This doesn’t look so bad.”

Clothes hung limply on a line stretched between two wooden posts. The barren brown rows of a played-out garden were a small distance away from the clothes, and a shed nearby looked ready to fall over at the gentle push of one finger. Both the shed and the house were sided with roof shingles.

Victoria killed the engine and took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go.”

“You go. I’ll wait out here and catch twenty winks.”

Turning on him, Victoria ordered, “Think again, Joshua Logan. You just spent close to half an hour convincing me that these women are going to be suspicious
of me no matter what I do. You were born on the mountain, and that ought to count for something. So you get out of this truck and come with me. Having you along might even get my foot in the door.”

When he hesitated, Victoria noticed the dread in his expression. What on earth did he have to be apprehensive about? “Joshua, it’s just a visit. Help me do what I came to Tennessee to do. These women need me, or someone like me.” She touched his arm, gently resting her hand until he could feel the weight of it. “And I need this practice. It’s all I have.”

“I’ll knock,” he finally agreed, wishing he hadn’t helped her unload her damn truck when she moved in. Regardless of where she grew up or came from, he knew she was telling the truth about the practice. He pulled the door handle and got out. Resting a forearm against the roof of the truck, he leaned back in and told her bluntly, “But I don’t shake hands, and I wait on the porch. Understood?”

Stunned, Victoria realized that Joshua was serious. This wasn’t simply a male aversion to being stuck in a room full of baby talk. Something about these visits spooked him. Genuinely spooked him. Grateful for his help under the circumstances, Victoria smiled and said, “All right. Let me get my things.”