by Meg Moseley
It was even longer since she’d felt free.
Two weeks of fasting and early-morning prayer walks had left Miranda shaky but clearheaded. She eased the back door closed, allowing only a faint click that couldn’t possibly wake the children, and hung her camera around her neck. Making no sound, she walked down the weathered steps. The wind snatched at her skirt and cape, flapping them around her like wings of blue and gray.
She hoped God knew she’d started her fast not because Mason had told her to, but because she wanted to hear God too. She wanted to hear Him tell her to stay in Slades Creek.
Fighting the dizziness that always accompanied a fast, she kept her eyes on her shoes as they nosed through long grass and the first violets. By the time the girls finished their morning studies and went outside to pick a teacup bouquet for the kitchen table, Mason might have called again. He didn’t give up easily.
“I don’t either,” she said under her breath.
Her choices were limited, but she wasn’t helpless. She could arrange for child care and hold down at least a part-time job. She could earn money with her photography, and she had the monthly income that she never would have seen if Mason hadn’t talked some sense into Carl, years ago.
Yes, Mason was smart about money. He was smart about a lot of things.
He liked to document everything. He kept better records than God, she’d heard somebody say at one of the Sunday meetings. He’d probably hung on to his notes from that long-ago counseling session.
With the old fears nipping her heels, she slipped behind the barn and into the clearing. The camera rocked against her stomach and kept time with her footsteps and the swishing of her skirt. The faraway bleating of the goats faded as she ducked beneath the big dogwood and entered the dripping woods.
Thinking she heard footsteps, she looked behind her. No one was there, of course. It was only the wind making bare branches sway and creak.
She faced forward again. Her foot skidded across last year’s dead leaves, slippery with moisture. She nearly fell but regained her balance and walked on. Rounding the last bend, she slowed to take in the view that never got old.
The mountain peaks still hid in the mist, but the sun was fighting its way through in a glorious dazzle of white light. She held her breath and savored the sensation of standing in a cloud that had descended to her little piece of the earth.
No matter what Mason held over her, she couldn’t sell her family’s land.
Venturing closer to the heart-stopping drop-off, she peered over the edge of the cliff to the rock-choked creek far below, crisscrossed with fallen trees. It had been years since she’d dared to stand so close to the edge.
The first time she and Carl had walked his late mother’s property together, he’d reminded her that the cliffs were no place for children or even for surefooted goats. When he was a boy, one of his grandfather’s young goats had fallen the twenty feet to the bottom. She’d landed on a boulder, breaking her neck.
Miranda had swallowed, sickened by the imagined sound of slender bones snapping.
The far side of the ravine wasn’t an abrupt fall like the near side, but it was treacherous too, especially when wildflowers came into bloom and disguised its dangers. Rock-cress, bloodroot, stonecrops, and bluebells would soon soften every cranny.
By the time the asters blossomed in the fall, Mason might have moved far away.
She reached into the pocket of her cape and pulled out his checklist, still folded in a neat, thick rectangle. She opened up the paper, just enough that she could crumple it, and pitched the lightweight ball into the air. The small white wad bounced off a mossy ledge and disappeared into a tangle of leafless brush.
“Lord, help,” she said softly, as if anybody could hear her so far from the house. “Help me outsmart him.”
There were no sounds but the soft splashing of water on rocks and a few birds singing. Far from the commotion of her household, she could almost believe that God would speak to her, but either He wasn’t answering or He’d struck her heart deaf to punish her sins.
Mason heard God though, or claimed to. If he heard correctly, heaven had asked a hard thing of her. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Miranda removed the lens cap from her camera. The fog was lifting. If she worked fast, she could capture the mountains veiled with fog but kissed by the sunrise.
There it was. The perfect moment. She tripped the shutter.
A new wave of dizziness blindsided her. She hung her head to send blood to it, the camera still held to her face, and smiled at the silliness of staying in picture-taking mode when she had only a clump of dry weeds in the viewfinder.
She fought to step away from the cliff’s edge, but her feet melted beneath her. Someone dropped a curtain from the sky, shutting out the light.
two
Jack Hanford hated early-morning phone calls. They never brought good news.
Abandoning his briefcase and his half-eaten toast on the kitchen table, he went in reluctant search of his aging cell phone. Over the clatter of a trash truck in the alley and the distant roar of Monday morning traffic on the interstate, he tracked down the phone where it vibrated between piles of books and papers on the couch.
The screen showed an unknown number from outside the Chattanooga area. Not one of his colleagues, then. Not his ex, who wouldn’t be calling anyway. Not her parents, who just might.
The phone buzzed again as he took it back to the kitchen and the mess in his briefcase. His students deserved a slightly higher level of organization on his part. February was nearly over before he’d adjusted to being out of January.
“Updated syllabus. Hold that thought. And stop talking to yourself.”
The phone vibrated a third time. He lifted it to his ear. With his free hand, he resumed rifling through his papers.
“Hello.” He checked the clock on the wall. If he wasn’t in the parking lot in twenty minutes.…
“Hello?” The caller sounded young. Nervous. He said nothing after the initial greeting.
“How may I help you?”
“I need to talk to Jack Hanford, please.”
“Speaking.”
“This is Timothy.”
“Timothy?”
“Timothy Hanford.”
Jack lost his place in the papers. The name took him back—how many years?—to two towheaded toddlers and a young mother with a sad smile and dazzling blue eyes. Wearing a gray cape and a circlet of blond braids, she’d reigned over a rickety porch in the mountains of north Georgia.
Miranda’s son should have had no reason to call.
Dread slowed Jack’s response. “Carl and Miranda’s son?”
“Yes sir. Mother—” The boy’s voice cracked but he continued in a terrible, stiff calm, as if he were reading from a script while somebody held a gun to his head. “Mother said if anything happened to her, I was supposed to read this letter.”
“Why? What … what happened? Is she all right?”
“She fell off the cliffs behind the house. They’re taking her to the … to the hospital.” The kid sucked in a noisy breath and kept going. “Here’s what the letter says. ‘I pray you’ll never need these instructions, but if anything should happen to me, call your father’s half-brother, your uncle Jack Hanford. In my will, I have named him as the guardian of you precious children. I believe he is a good man who wants to do right.’ That’s all it says. Plus your phone number and stuff.” Timothy exhaled, long and loud.
Guardian? Guardian?
Jack stared around the kitchen as if the sight of his bachelor digs could anchor him there, safe from startling developments and complicated relationships. A sniffle from his caller prodded him back to less selfish concerns.
“Is she going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.” Timothy sounded younger now. Frightened.
“Is anybody there with you?”
“A man from the sheriff’s department.”
“May I speak with him?”
“He’s outside, talking on his radio.”
“All right.” Jack tried to harness his thoughts as they galloped away. “You’re in good hands, for now. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but it’ll be, say, a two-hour drive. I’ll have my phone, so call again if … if you hear anything.”
“Okay.” Timothy hung up without another word.
Jack snagged his raincoat off the back of a chair and ran out, hardly remembering to lock up. He remembered the way to Miranda’s ramshackle log home though, up in the hills behind a tiny town with only two traffic lights. The route to Slades Creek was seared into his memory with painful clarity, along with the rest of his time there.
This was his chance to make amends for long-ago wrongs. A chance to restore what someone else had stolen.
He climbed into his car with a vague sense of conflicted triumph coloring his sense of impending doom. Carl had hated him. Now, without so much as a by-your-leave, Miranda had put him in charge of Carl’s children.
“Lord, have mercy.” Jack swung the car into the street, shifted into first, and punched the accelerator. “It can’t get any weirder than this.”
Unless she didn’t make it, and then God help them all.
Having missed the morning traffic in Chattanooga, Jack made it to Slades Creek in ninety minutes. That still wasn’t enough time to fully grasp the situation, but a patrol car at the end of Miranda’s winding driveway was evidence that the call hadn’t been a prank. To Protect and to Serve, read the motto on the car’s door.
A large white van stood there too. Mud-spattered and disconsolate, it warned Jack of the burdens of parenthood. PTA meetings, soccer practice, piano lessons.
If Miranda had died while he was on the road, he had inherited those responsibilities. Those kids. A boy and a girl. To his shame, he couldn’t remember the girl’s name.
“God, I need some time here,” he said under his breath.
His cowardly feet led him around the side of the house, where he spotted a path leading behind the barn. After a five-minute hike, he found cliffs dropping down to a shallow, rock-filled creek.
Two feet from the edge, his vivid imagination took him where he didn’t want to go. She might as well have fallen from a two-story building. Hands in the pockets of his raincoat, he hunched his shoulders, not so much against the cold as against the dire possibilities.
Across the ravine, purple gray mountains faded into a smoky horizon streaked with remnants of morning fog. The vista must have been Miranda’s last sight before she flew past rocks and brush and fallen trees on her way down.
An accident or a deliberate dive? He wasn’t ready to face the answer.
A twig snapped. Jack turned.
A boy stood in the muddy path, his hands balled up in the pockets of a denim jacket. He was twelve or thirteen, his eyes a cold, clear blue. “Are you Jack?”
“I am. You must be Timothy.”
“I heard your car. Why didn’t you come to the house?” Timothy didn’t sound young and scared anymore; the blunt question made him seem oddly adult.
“I needed a few minutes to think, that’s all.” Jack drew a slow breath of chilly air, delaying the news for one more moment. “Your mom.…?”
“She was unconscious when they put her in the ambulance. That’s all I know.”
A pox on the small-town hospital that would keep the family so ill-informed. Maybe they didn’t know who to call though. Especially if they had bad news.
“I’ll keep praying for her,” Jack said.
Timothy nodded, a quick jerk of his close-shorn head. Tears glazed his eyes.
Jack turned away, giving the kid his privacy, then shifted to watch from the corner of his eye. Teaching had given him a sensitivity to young people who were a tad off the track. This one bore watching.
“How do I know you’re really who you say you are?” Timothy asked.
Jack swallowed a phrase that wasn’t fit for young ears and dug in his pocket for one of his cards. Still not quite facing the boy, he held out the card. Timothy took it without comment.
“How’s your sister doing?”
Timothy didn’t look up. “Rebekah? She’s all right. The younger ones don’t really understand what’s going on.”
Younger ones … plural?
“I don’t know, ah, how many of you there are … now.”
The boy picked at one corner of the card with a fingernail and took his time answering. “Six.”
Jack let out a low whistle. Miranda had better pull through.
“Why did Mother choose you to be our guardian?”
Still flummoxed by it, Jack rubbed his chin. “Well, now. I met her when you were two or three years old. I remember sitting on the porch, drinking lemonade. Passing the time of day.”
“But if you’re our uncle, where have you been all this time?”
“In Chattanooga, cramming the joys of literature into the hard heads of college students.”
“That’s not what I meant. You wrote all those letters, but you never came around.”
“Your father strongly encouraged me to stay away, son.”
“I’m not your son.” Timothy took to the trail, his shoulders squared.
Squinting after him, Jack recognized the irascible tone and the inflexible body language. Timothy was only following Carl’s example. Carl, who’d warned that the letters would go straight into the trash. Maybe they hadn’t though, if Timothy knew about them.
Jack faced the ravine and the ever-changing Blue Ridge beyond. Glimmers of light on far-off glass and metal revealed the whereabouts of tiny towns tucked into the hills of Bartram County. Somewhere behind him lay the drowsy streets of Slades Creek. The place had grown to a six-stoplight town.
Somewhere behind him too lay Rabun County, his birthplace. The rainiest corner of Georgia, it snuggled up against the Carolinas and shared their beauty and their poverty.
Straight ahead, the mountains stretched away toward the comparatively flat sprawl of Atlanta, two hours south. The vista was beautiful—the light, the blues and greens, the shreds and patches of drifting fog—and everything held the wet, green scent of spring.
He inched closer to the edge and peered down at an outcropping of rock ledges. Slippery with moss and seeping water, they slanted this way and that, untrustworthy stairsteps that went only partway to the creek. Its banks and waters were muddied from the movements of many feet. The paramedics must have had a devil of a time transporting their patient.
Maybe she’d left the kids sleeping. A widow with six children wouldn’t have much solitude, and sometimes solitude was a soul’s lifeline. Other times, as Jack knew all too well, it was the lead weight that took a drowning soul to the bottom.
Dizzy, he backed up. After one last gander at the view, he returned to the wet, trampled path toward the house, pushing aside damp branches of dogwood and laurel.
A flash of bright white in the mud caught his attention. His card, crumpled.
Jack picked it up for proper disposal and walked on, entering the broad clearing where the wind bent tall grass to earth. On the other side of the clearing stood an ancient barn, a wooden shed of more recent vintage, and finally the boxy, story-and-a-half log home.
Wood smoke warmed the air as he made his way around to the front of the house. The two weathered rockers on the porch were exactly as he remembered them, but years had passed since he’d sat there with Miranda and her toddlers. Nine years.
In the drive, the sheriff’s cruiser still blocked the van. The utilitarian vehicles dwarfed Jack’s black rag top, a toy beside them.
He crossed the weedy lawn under the gnarled branches of a giant oak, then counted five wide steps to the porch where he’d first met Carl and his mean streak. Rooted in unfortunate family history, the animosity had been insurmountable. Miranda had made up for it though, in spades.
The rustic door held a wreath of dried flowers and golden wheat, something the earth-mother type might have handcrafted. Jack knocked, t
hen waited, examining the wreath. Seven bunches of wheat, seven brown rosebuds—
The door creaked open. A large, graying man wearing a khaki uniform and a silver star filled the doorway and studied Jack with sad eyes. “Can I help you?”
“Yes sir, I hope so. I’m Jack Hanford. Carl Hanford’s brother.”
“Timothy told me you’d be here directly.” The man’s thick eyebrows drew together. “I never knew Carl had a brother.”
“Most people don’t know. I’m a half-brother, actually.”
The officer ducked under the low door frame and stepped onto the porch, forcing Jack to retreat. “I’m Tom Dean. May I see your ID, sir?”
“Certainly.” Jack pulled out his driver’s license.
After examining the license, the man studied Jack’s Audi. “Nice car. You aren’t much like Carl, are you?”
“I don’t know. I only spoke with him once.”
“But Mrs. Hanford named you as the guardian?”
“According to Timothy, she did. I had no idea until a couple of hours ago when he called.”
“Come out of the blue, did it?”
“Yes sir. I’m still trying to get a handle on it. I guess I’m the best she can do.”
“Well, then.” The deputy handed the license back. “Come on in.”
Jack stepped inside. The house must have been a hundred years old. Inside, it was warm. Cozy. Directly in front of him, stairs rose to the second floor. To his left, a bright orange fire crackled behind the glass of a black wood burner. For a house full of kids, the place was blessedly quiet.
A long, dark trestle table stood on the far end of the room. He imagined it filled with children. There was an old-fashioned wooden highchair too.
“Any news on Miranda?” he asked.
“She was banged up pretty good. Unconscious. You could call the hospital and find out.”
Jack nodded and continued his survey of the living room. Except for a few modern touches, it could have sprung from the pages of the Little House books he’d read to Ava’s niece and nephews. Sturdy furniture, braided rugs, needlework. Wooden pegs studded the wall by the front door. They were draped with jackets and capes in a variety of sizes but a paucity of color. Shades of gray and blue, all of them.