Silk and Stone (23 page)

“You stupid cow,” he said. “You didn’t make a fool of my stepfather. You made a complete, fucking
idiot
of yourself and your whole family.”

Ellie held his gaze without blinking. “What I said is true. I don’t call it progress when a golf-course developer flattens the top of an Indian burial mound and turns it
into the eighteenth green. Or when Pandora Lake is lined with so many boathouses, the wild ducks barely have a place to nest. Or when the chamber of commerce moves its annual dance to the country club and charges fifty bucks for a ticket. And what Orrin Lomax said about ‘wonderful new opportunities’ means only that people who drive Mercedes and own quarter-million-dollar homes have the opportunity to do exactly as they damn well please. If that upsets you and him and your cold-blooded mama, too bad.”

“My mother turned this backwoods town into something special, and if you had half the sense God gave a rock, you’d be glad.”

“Stop using the macho juice,” she said softly. “Steroids are rotting your brain.”

“I don’t take drugs.”

She shouldn’t say it. She had no proof. But, like Jake, she knew a lot of secrets about their classmates that couldn’t be proven. And the heady events of the night were combining with adult freedom to push her over the bounds of caution. She leaned toward him and whispered, “Yes, you do. You use steroids, and amphetamines, and sometimes after a game you’re so wired you drive up to Razorback Bald and drink a case of beer to calm down. And when you’re like that, you give your girlfriends a couple of slaps if they get on your nerves.” Ellie stepped back. “Now, shut your face and go pick on someone who cares what you think.”

He grabbed her forearm with one brawny, blue-veined hand. Other students latched on to his massive shoulders, yelling at him to let her go. Ellie jerked back, but he dug his fingers in until she thought they must be touching bone, and she felt his sweaty fear. “I’ll break your fucking arm if you tell lies about me,” he said.

Suddenly Jake’s broad hand clamped down on Tim’s wrist. Ellie looked up to find her typically mild-mannered brother’s eyes infused with a violent gleam. He’d discarded his mortarboard somewhere along the way, and coppery-black hair fell over his forehead. Years spent outdoors in the mountain weather had given him squint
lines and darkened his skin; his eyes were cold green emeralds in that face.

Without a word he twisted Tim’s wrist. Tim gave a guttural yelp of pain and let go of her, then turned furiously toward Jake. Humiliation flashed through his eyes, and he glanced around at the eager, horrified audience. “You want to get into it?” Tim asked loudly. “You want me to beat the hell out of you?”

“No,” Jake said, drawling the word as if giving it real thought. “But if you put a hand on my sister again, I guess I’ll have to risk it.”

“You’re nothing. You’re less than nothing. You’re not even going to college. Mother says you’ll end up running some crappy rockhound shop and selling cheap garnets to tourists.”

“Could be.”

Jake’s lack of argument seemed only to outrage their cousin more. He hunched his thick shoulders and stepped closer, his jaw thrust out. “Everybody knows you don’t have anything to do with girls. I think you’re a fucking
queer.
”

“I doubt it.”

“That’s why my mother has kept her nieces away from you. Or maybe you just like
little
girls.”

Ellie gasped. Jake stared at Tim without a shred of outward reaction, but his arm brushed hers and she felt the slow, invisible ticking of his patience. Leave it to Jake, she thought with awe, to sort through insults as if they were meaningless pebbles, separating the gems from the plain rocks. “You listen to your mother too much,” Jake told him. “She’s the one you’re trying to prove something to. Not me.”

Tim shoved him. Jake took a step back, tall and lean, moving with the practiced grace of someone who’d negotiated sheer mountain cliffs since he and Ellie were old enough for Granny to take them into the high ridges with her. “You probably shouldn’t do that again,” he warned, his voice never rising.

“Coward,” Tim said, and pushed him again. Jake’s right arm moved in a blur of motion. The next thing Ellie
knew, Tim was sprawling on the floor, blood pouring from his nose.

Parents and other relatives were, by then, pressing into the lobby to find their graduates. There were general shouts of alarm, and people scurrying about, and Mother and Father were suddenly beside them, Father edging Jake, Ellie, and Mother behind him with an outstretched arm. For once, Mother was too shocked to do more than stay behind him, one hand wound in Ellie’s robe, the other in Jake’s. Father commanded the barricade, but Mother ruled the troops.

Tim sat on the floor, both hands pressed to his ashen face while blood dripped slowly onto his suit.

“Get up.” Aunt Alexandra pushed her way through the crowd and stood over him, her hands clenched. Tim’s eyes filled with shame. The strained dignity of the dispossessed overtook him, and he clambered to his feet, towering over her with wounded composure that reduced him to scrubbing one hand over his bloody face and wincing.

Alexandra gestured curtly at Father. “Don’t shield your flock like some Old Testament patriarch. If your black sheep wants to butt heads, get out of the way. Tim can take care of himself.”

“I didn’t raise my children to be professional boxers,” Father said. “And it seems to me that Tim has already gone down for the count.”

“Heard you broke your cousin’s nose last night,” Joe Gunther said cheerfully, standing in the front yard beside the open door of a car, a large wrapped package in his hands.

Jake walked out to meet him, draping a threadbare towel over one damp shoulder, and trailed by an enormous, half-grown bloodhound still soggy and morose from the flea dip to which Jake had just subjected him. Jake had named him
Bo
—short for bow-legged, not
Beauregard
. Bo wasn’t much of a tracking dog, but he was a great actor. He looked serious about the work, and people assumed
he was the reason for Jake’s success. Jake’s reputation as a tracker had spread all over the mountains.

Jake shook Mr. Gunther’s hand. “What happened between Tim and me, well, I guess you could call it a philosophical dispute.”

Mr. Gunther grinned at him. “Still waters run deep. Never figured you for a man with a temper. Heard Ellie rattled a few cages with her speech too.”

Jake shrugged and politely avoided staring at the package, which was wrapped in bright floral tissue paper and topped with a blue bow. Not Joe Gunther’s style. Mr. Gunther liked to decorate himself, not packages. Every finger gleamed with a gemstone—most of them found, over the past four years, under Jake’s guidance. And in return, Mr. Gunther had looked out for Samantha and her family, and filled Jake in on the peaceful progress of their lives.

“So,” Mr. Gunther said. “Where’s the rest of your cantankerous crew?”

“Ellie’s with Father, working at his office. Mother left for Florida this morning, with Katie Jones. Mrs. Jones works the craft show circuit, selling baskets. She talked Mother into going with her. Mother took some of her watercolors. She’s sold a lot of them around here, so she’s thinking of branching out.”

“How’s it feel to be an educated and free man?” Mr. Gunther asked.

“Good. I was never much for sitting in classrooms. Got more on my own, reading whatever I wanted, making up my own mind.”

“Wouldn’t hurt you to go to college, you know. You could study geology, or something.”

Jake waved a hand at the rounded blue-green mountains looming around the valley like sentinels. “I’ve got teachers.”

“Money in the bank, the way you dig into them.”

“They share. I don’t take too much. We have an understanding.”

“But still, college—”

“That’s for Ellie. She got a scholarship to Duke, but
I’ll help the folks pay for any extras she needs. Besides, if I left, who’d help pay the god-awful taxes on the Cove?”

“So you’re stuck to this valley like white on rice.”

“Always have been. It’s where I belong. I like it.”

“You
love
it,” Mr. Gunther corrected him. When Jake said nothing, he changed the subject diplomatically. “So what are your plans?”

“Dig a few rocks, do a little tracking for the Sheriff’s Department”—Jake looked at the bloodhound, who had flopped on a patch of grass at the edge of Mother’s iris beds, dejected—“if Bo doesn’t desert me for giving him flea baths every week. As many weeks as I’ve been dunking him, you’d think he’d get over it.”

“A man can depend on the goodwill of a dog.” Mr. Gunther studied Bo, who was 100 pounds of loose red hide. “Especially one so ugly no one else would have him.” Mr. Gunther cleared his throat. “But there comes a time when a man ought to ask himself if he needs more company. Something with two legs instead of four. Something that smells better than Bo and wears lacy underwear.”

“Ellie tied one of her bras on Bo’s head once, and he didn’t seem to mind.”

“Come on, boy, stop tiptoeing around the point. You’re a good-looking rooster. I’d bet the bank that plenty of sassy gals have been after you. Words out that you’ve never, well, you know. Never tossed your bait in the ol’ fishing hole, if you get my drift.”

Jake folded his arms over his chest and said drolly, “Just waiting for the right fish to come along. Nothing’s wrong with my rod and reel.”

Mr. Gunther threw his head back and laughed. “Well, I can’t fault your willpower.” The pleasantries done, he held out the package. “Your little fish isn’t so little anymore. She sent you a graduation present.”

Samantha
. A thread of excitement and curiosity raced through him. He remembered her as the ten-year-old he’d seen four years ago, but his mind’s eye had never lost the older image of her—an image that was closing in on reality now.

He took the present with a quick nod of thanks but made no move to open it. Self-protective privacy was ingrained in him—he guarded what he knew, what he felt, and what he shared with other people. Mr. Gunther waited in vain for a minute while Jake pretended to examine the absurdly delicate blue bow. He recalled the silent blond toddler who tied bows even on a cow’s tail, and how she’d looked at him as if she’d like to decorate him too.

“Well,” Mr. Gunther said finally, “I can see I’m about as welcome as a mosquito. Are we still set for the dig on Traders Mountain next week?”

“Sure thing.”

Mr. Gunther set one expensive, hand-tooled boot inside his car, posed in the door frame like a pot-gutted Roy Rogers, and studied him thoughtfully. “You really think some of DeSoto’s Spaniards mined emeralds up there?”

Poker-faced, Jake nodded. “That’s what the legends say. Mrs. Big Stick told me her great-grandfather talked about it. That before the blight killed ’em he found three-hundred-year-old chestnuts growing at the mouth of what looked to be a collapsed mine shaft.”

“Funny,” Mr. Gunther said, “how most legends about old mines end up being fairy tales, but you got a knack for knowing which ones aren’t.”

“Just lucky.”

“You know, it could be a sixth sense—the way you find things, and people.”

“Nah. I read. I study. It’s all logic.”

“Okay. Wouldn’t want people to think you’ve got second sight or some such thing. Folks might show up on your doorstep with their tea leaves and tarot cards and ouija boards. Make you feel like a sideshow freak. You’d have to get you a turban and a crystal ball.”

“They’d be disappointed.”

“Frannie Ryder loves all that silliness. You should see the pack of half-assed palm readers and fortune tellers and what-not who hang out at her store. She collects more nuts than a squirrel. Poor Miss Sammie watches
’em like they might steal the cash drawer.” Mr. Gunther eased his burly body into the car and slammed the door. Draping one arm out the open window, he shook his head and sighed. “You know how some preachers’ kids get force-fed so much religion that they won’t set foot inside a church after they’re grown? Well, I suspect your little fish has put up with such a load of flimsy mumbo-jumbo, she’ll ask her own shadow for ID before she’ll believe it’s real.”

He drove off up the driveway, waving his hand. Jake stood morosely in the yard, pondering what Mr. Gunther had said. He frowned at the soft, bulky package, moved leadenly to the porch, and sat on the steps with it balanced on his knees. Slowly he unwrapped it, pushing the colorful paper aside with careful fingers.

A quilt. A quilt in dark brown and gold, with a zigzag pattern so distinctly familiar he recognized it as a Cherokee design. He drew his blunt, callused fingertips along stitches so tiny and perfect, he wondered how human hands could have made them. Exhaling softly, awed by the work she’d done on a gift for him, he spread his hands on the soft material and absorbed her warmth. She had made him a quilt to sleep under, to dream under, and she had no way of knowing that wrapping himself in it every night would be like wrapping himself in her life, like sleeping with her.

But she was only fourteen. Chivalry forbade him to think about her that way yet—or at least to try not to think about her that way. He laid the quilt beside him on the porch floor but couldn’t resist smoothing a hand over it one more time.