The Story Keeper (9 page)

“Sure you don’t want information on our partner hotels? Somewhere else?” The clerk nose-wrinkled, sniffing the air. “What’s that
smel
l
?”

Friday, tucked in beside the luggage, was once again making his presence known.

“No telling.” Where was the fairy godmother with the pumpkin coach and the glass slippers when I needed her? She could’ve turned Friday into something with couth . . . a footman, maybe. “I’ll just take the car as booked. I’d better get going so I can make it there before dark.”

The agent handed over my paperwork. “Good luck, then. Enjoy your time in Looking Glass Gap.”

Chapter 10

A
gush of air rushed into my lungs as I woke, blinked the hand-hewn cabin rafters into view, remembered where I was and why I had come.

I hadn’t been plagued by the suffocation dream in years. Now it lay clear in my mind, like a movie left playing after the theater lights come on.

This time in the dream, the six of us had been standing along the shore of Looking Glass Lake. The air smelled of pine and black locust blooms, wild witch hazel and woodsmoke. Marah Diane, Coral Rebecca, Evie Christine, and I had our skirts wrapped up between our legs and tucked in at the waist in a way we never would’ve dared at home. Joey had rolled his pants up high, and Lily Clarette, born after the two miscarried babies buried in the orchard, wore one of Daddy’s old T-shirts, as long on her as a dress.

We were learning to swim, and even in the dream I was aware that this was only a conjuring of my imagination, not a memory.
I’d always known how to swim. Down on Honey Creek, there were quiet, clear-water swimming holes and waterfalls that rushed into churning pools. Marah Diane and I had been skittering away to those places since we were big enough to slip from the house while Mama and the youngest were sleeping.

But in the dream, it was Looking Glass Lake, not a hole on Honey Creek. The cold, spring-fed expanse of water lay so clear and still that its surface was a mirror, solid and flawless, a second sky inside it, a hawk artfully circling.

Looking Glass Gap lay on the other side, far away. Forbidden. I’d already decided to swim across to it, to see the place I’d read about. The place where a magical portal could whisk you away from all the troubles of this world and into the arms of a protector. Nathaniel, a guardian, a Time Shifter, was nothing like the hard men I’d known. His unbreakable, gentle, desperate love for Anna, a mere mortal, was the sort of thing I wanted to believe in.

“Daddy’ll git the rod after ye-ew,” Marah Diane drawled, a mild speech impediment making the words slow and thick as molasses. “Ye’ll git it good. ‘He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginnin’.’”

“It’s only water.” The fringes glided cool and sweet around my feet as I stepped in.

“Yew can make yer own trouble. I don’ care,” Marah Diane shouted. “Sinner!”

I swam out until I was far enough away that my sister’s words couldn’t reach me. Daddy couldn’t reach me. No one could. Rolling onto my back, I looked at the sky and watched the hawk and felt free. Finally.

And then something was pulling me down, dragging me beneath the surface. I could see the air but not breathe it, scream but make no sound, reach but touch nothing solid.

Staring at the log beams overhead, I waited for my heartbeat to settle, my mind tossing through the basket of past and present, sorting scraps.

At thirteen, I’d become the one responsible for laundry and supervision and helping to put meals on the table. We’d moved from the little trailer down the road and settled into my grandparents’ house so Momaw Leena could help watch us. With my grandfather gone on to glory only months after my mother disappeared, there was space in the house, but no space in my grandmother’s heart. We were still tainted goods. Our mother’s children. Burdensome things.

Always, in the dream, my siblings were with me, and always Marah Diane scolded against taking those first steps away. And always I finally did it . . . I left them behind, all five of them. Always just when I tasted the first honeysuckle drops of freedom, something grabbed me and pulled me down. Down from the sky, beneath the water, through the ground, where the soil closed over my head like the quicksand in the movies I’d seen only occasionally at school, because we didn’t have TV at home.

Always the dreams ended in terrifying, painful, certain death. Exactly what we had all been promised, should we turn away from the ways of Lane’s Hill.

It bothered me that the dream was back this morning, that it could propel me from my bed, gasping, even now.

Tossing off the quilt, I stood, then looked around the cabin in the dim morning light. There wasn’t much to the place. No doubt it had been built as a fisherman’s shack at some time in the past. The main footprint was no more than thirty by thirty. A peaked roof and a small sleeping loft perched over one end, reachable only by a pine-post ladder.

After arriving last night and finding the key in the mailbox at
the end of the dirt-trail driveway, I’d slept downstairs on the pullout sofa without even bothering to open it. I was a little afraid of what the mattress underneath might look like. The sofa was ancient, a harvest-gold-and-brown-plaid Early American style that appeared to have hosted many a fisherman.

The place did have an incredible view, though. Through the pines, the water glistened, as alluring now as it had been last night with the moonlight reflecting against its surface. Looking Glass Lake was as beautiful as Evan Hall had described it in his books, as magical as he’d made it seem. Even though this place was less than an hour’s drive from the farm where I’d grown up, I’d never seen it, other than through the words in his books. As a teenager, I’d imagined it many times, but to ask to come here would’ve been to admit that I’d been reading Time Shifters, and that would have brought swift and certain retribution. Even Wilda Culp wouldn’t have approved of my new fascination. Not when I had her vast library of classics at my fingertips.

Outside the cabin, my loaner car looked bedraggled. The washed-out driveway was an adventure in itself. Judging by the condition of the route in, no one had been here in a while. The furniture seemed too well-worn for a rental, and the bulbs in the overhead fixture, high in the eaves near the loft, were burned out. I’d found my way around last night by the dim glow of a floor lamp built from deer antlers stacked around a metal pipe.

This morning, the natural sun was more than adequate, its rays pink and amber as it crept over the mountains on the opposite side of the lake. Down in the gap like this, the hours of direct light would be few, the towns having a cloak of shadow and mist that lent itself to stories of ghosts and haints, and Spearfinger, the Cherokee witch who tempted precocious children away and then ate their livers. The lake felt like a place where Evan Hall’s famed
race of alien Time Shifters might hide the secret portals through which they warped the fabric of time and space, ever waging war with the Dark Ones. Whatever lay beneath the water would be perfectly concealed by the reflection of trees, sky, and rock bluffs laced with silver ribbons of falling water.

The paintings on the cabin walls recorded the lake in different seasons
 
—the shore and trees sprinkled with snow in the winter, dogwoods and redbuds blooming in the spring, leaves ablaze with color in the autumn. I leaned close to one, glanced out the window, then looked at the canvas again. The view was the same. The painting had been done from here. And done very well. It was nice artwork.

The artist’s name lay tucked in the bottom corner amid umber and crimson leaves piled next to an abandoned garden rake.
H. Hall.

A relative of Evan Hall’s, perhaps? Could I possibly be so lucky?

Hard to say.
Hall
wasn’t exactly uncommon. Still, there could be a connection. . . .

Friday awakened, yawned, and stretched, watching me from his new favorite chair as I rummaged through the cabin, looking for contact information for the owner, hoping for clues. Hollis hadn’t given me any details.

“’Lo-o-o the house.” The echo of a voice wound through the window sashes, both surprising me and transporting me in time. In the backwoods, you never approached someone’s place without first calling out to make sure you were welcome. A breach of protocol might result in a rifle fired your way, or worse yet, directly
at
you. Where marijuana patches lay hidden among corn crops, meth labs proliferated, and distilling moonshine and strawberry brandy remained a matter of both pride and commerce, people lived in seclusion for a reason. They had secrets to keep.

Friday went on high alert as I crossed to the door and stepped out, still in my sweats with a twisty ball of hair stuck atop my head. A man was walking up from the lake. His face, other than the point of a long, shaggy salt-and-pepper beard, lay hidden in the shadow of his worn brown hat. Coming out of the mist with the dampened light behind him, he seemed to rise from the water itself.

Standing on the porch, shivering in my stocking feet and the single layer of clothing, I waited for him to approach. He didn’t meet my eyes as he ascended the steps but instead seemed to watch me from the corners of his vision. Not an uncommon habit around here, but one Miss Wilda Culp had been determined I would leave behind.

Backward,
she’d called it.
Do not apologize for yourself, Jennia Beth Gibbs. A woman must walk into the world with confidence, and if she can never do it, she is never more than a girl. Look people in the eye when you speak.

The man on the porch stood several feet away, uncertain of me. Friday moved into position between us, his back arched, a low growl jiggling his fat rolls.

“Friday, hush.” He ignored me, of course.

“Everythin’ ar’ty the cabin? Anythin’ you be a-needin’?”

My mind took a moment to translate. The old-timer-speak here in the Blue Ridge was its own music, a pidgin of crammed-together and alternative words recognizable only if you knew the place.

“It’s all good. I found the key in the mailbox, no problem. Thanks for checking.” I heard it, then, the slight twang at the end of the sentence, the stretching of the words, a small step toward homecoming.

He glanced upward, just a flash of gray-blue eyes against swarthy skin and dark eyebrows. I thought of all that I’d read about
Melungeons. Could he be one? Had I ever
known
a Melungeon? According to my reading, most had eventually been pushed farther west toward Tennessee, but some had stayed, hidden their ancestry among the dust of family secrets, claimed to be Creole French or Spanish. No doubt Melungeon blood ran deep in these mountains of western North Carolina, the place where the first European explorers discovered strange blue-eyed people already living in log-house villages in 1654.

“Been a-told t’ see after ya.” The tone conveyed more than words. He wasn’t happy to be visiting with me. “Miz Hall gott’er a busy day up to the shop, what wit’ all the crazies come round town.” Another glance came my way, a little longer this time, an obvious assessment. He was trying to decide if I was one of the crazies.

“I didn’t know I was hitting such a busy week. Did you say she has a shop in town? I’d like to thank her for the use of the cabin. I get the impression it isn’t normally rented out.”

The artist's signature was still in the back of my mind,
H. Hall
. This was as good a place to start as any.

“She don’t norm’ly lend it. Nope.”

“So you look after the place for her, then?”

“Do thangs she needs did. Gardenin’, most-time. Tend the root places.”

I nodded, understanding about the root places. My grandmother had them
 
—locations in the woods shown to her by her mother and grandmother. Hidden spaces where ginseng root, wintergreen, black cohosh, and other medicinals grew. Things that could be eaten, traded, sold, or used to treat ailments. Even today, ginseng root was as good as mountain money, and good ginseng slopes were painstakingly guarded from poachers
 
—protected with guns, mantraps, and dogs.

My grandmother never told anyone where her treasure troves
were. As the oldest girl, the secrets would have been mine when I married and started a family of my own. Perhaps now the root places belonged to Marah Diane. Perhaps she gathered wild goods, carried them to town on trade days, and bartered for things her family needed. Barter was more common than cold, hard cash around Lane’s Hill and Towash.

I was struck again by how far this place was from New York City. The other side of the world. Or a different world altogether. In the city, you’d never walk into someone’s place of business and offer up a handful of dirt-covered roots to pay your bill. In Towash, you’d do it without thinking twice.

“Can you tell me which shop is Ms. Hall’s?”

He seemed reluctant to say but finally offered, “Be the med’cine shop. Mountain Leaf.”

“Thanks, I’ll go by there.”

He turned to leave the porch, and Friday advanced a step, nipping the air behind the man’s pant leg. I reached down and scooped up the dog as the caretaker paused on the steps, turning back to me. “Anythin’ more you be a-needin’ here?”

“Lightbulbs, whenever you get a chance. It’s not an emergency or anything, though. Just . . . if you think about it.”

“Git by here again, on up’n the mornin’, if I can. See after it.”

“I probably won’t be around. Should I leave the key in the box? I have business to take care of in town.”

“Miz Hall tol’ me.” He held up a key to show me he had his own.

“She did?” I hadn’t anticipated this at all. What exactly had Hollis said to persuade the cabin’s owner to rent it to me? How much had she revealed?

“Said you’s one a them writin’ people. He don’ talk at none a ya. Been crossed thataway oncet too many times.”

My pulse sped up. The cat was out of the bag
 
—not only out of the bag, but roaming freely around Evan Hall’s hometown, apparently.

There was no choice but to go forward now. “My being here has nothing to do with Time Shifters or Warrior Week or anything like that, I promise you. I just need to meet with him for ten minutes. I have something very important to discuss, and when he knows what it is, I think he’ll want to talk with me. Do you have any idea how I can get in touch with him? He’s welcome to call me on my cell . . .”

“He don’ talk to folks.” The man was off my porch and headed toward his boat before I could stop him. “Leave it lay, be best.”

“Can you at least tell him I’m here and all I want to do is speak with him for a few minutes?” My voice echoed toward the water, too loud for early morning. “He can reach me here at the cabin. That is, if the phone in there works. Does the phone work?”