This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author makes no claims to, but instead acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the word marks mentioned in this work of fiction.
Copyright © 2014 by Jennie Davenport
HEMLOCK VEILS by Jennie Davenport
All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Swoon Romance. Swoon Romance and its related logo are registered trademarks of Georgia McBride Media Group, LLC.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Published by Swoon Romance
Cover designed by Najla Qamber
Cover copyright by Swoon Romance
For my cherubs, Sam, Josh, and Luke, who have reminded me I’ll never be too old for fairy tales.
Chapter 1
Every trace of Willem’s blood had been scrubbed away days before, but Elizabeth Ashton’s hands would never be clean. It caked the space beneath her otherwise spotless fingernails, embedded there for life.
She drove northwest on Oregon’s U.S. Route 26, the cone of her only functional headlight attempting to cut through a fog so dense it had the ominous appearance of a living, breathing being. It had hovered from the moment she passed through Warm Springs twenty-eight miles ago, like a protective shield that settled over the Indian Reservation.
Cash fattened the worn corners of the manila envelope on the passenger seat. It screamed for her attention, but she didn’t look. She wouldn’t be able to see it in the dark anyway. It taunted her as bluntly as the murderous smile of her brother’s killer. It belonged in the hands of its rightful owner, not on the hardened vinyl seats of her Saab.
At that moment, the fog lifted like an unveiling curtain, and rain pelted the windshield with a livid fury, the almost-midnight sky heaving its early April wrath. With a rigid hand, she turned on the wipers, setting rubber shrieking against glass. She slowed the car when her single headlight illuminated the wooden sign announcing Mt. Hood National Forest, which meant Warm Springs Reservation was behind her.
A certain peace settled through her at the sign’s passing, despite the highway that appeared as a flowing river. It was the presence of her father, the way this wilderness she’d never seen embodied the man she missed more than anyone, even her only brother, Willem. Her father’s soul had never left this place he used to gush about, his heart always belonging with the firs and cedars of Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness. Willem had been too young, and later too distant, to remember most of their father’s tales, but Stephen Ashton had spoken of these forests with lifted brows and animation in his eyes.
She chose this place as a sanctuary for that reason—this wilderness she had seen only in her imagination. Though she wasn’t free of her conscience, or the money beside her, she was painfully free of ties, free of weighted responsibilities for the first time she could remember. And now she would see the places that had once meant everything to her father, the places he used to swear he would take her and Willem to one day, when he got healthy again.
Only, he never got healthy again.
By the time the junction appeared ahead, several minutes and miles had passed in thoughts of her father. The highway split two ways and she took it left, continuing west on 26, where the forest thickened. The towering Douglas Firs barricaded her on both sides, their topmost branches somewhere far above the range of her Saab’s headlight. She only then thought it strange that she hadn’t passed a single vehicle since the town of Warm Springs. Perhaps it was the storm, or perhaps this forest transformed into magical territory in the late hours of the night, as her father had said.
She had studied her father’s maps countless times as a child, committed them all to memory. She passed through the small town of Government Camp now, where she would have had an excellent view of Mt. Hood if the sun had been shining. The edge of Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness was somewhere near, buried miles deep in the old growth south of the highway to her left. That was his favorite place of enchantment, he used to say: the place of curses and magic—creatures misunderstood by men. Sure, he had said, all of Oregon territory was magic. But none held the secrecy and beauty of Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness. Dense rainforest and mossy vegetation larger than life: there were always new places to unearth, always a dark corner yet to be discovered.
Elizabeth had long since become too realistic to believe in folklore, but it had flooded her with delightful imagination as a child—delight that ended the moment her father became sick and she was left caring for Willem when she was only twelve. Those stories made up the fondest memories of her father. The Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, fables of the Aglaé and demons known as Diablerons, and even stories of beasts so demented that Hell itself denied them: her father’s conviction had never left him, even on his deathbed in that stale hospital room. She had been eighteen and Willem thirteen. And while her disgruntled brother sat in the corner with earbuds jammed in his ears, Elizabeth had listened to her father tell his last fairy tale. She had displayed patience, yet screamed inside at the way he had chosen to spend his final breaths.
Stillness settled over the car; even the rainfall adopted an unusual calm. Only she and her father were here, his last words reverberating in her mind’s ear—even the breathy tone in which he’d spoken them. She grasped hold of the memory, grasped hold of the way he’d been desperate to keep her a believer, desperate to convince her that magic could dwell wherever she was—even if that place was Los Angeles.
Earlier that morning, she’d fled from Los Angeles, on account of her banishment. Her father’s death may have been eleven years ago, but from that moment—the moment she’d turned into her brother’s mother at age eighteen—she’d learned that Los Angeles didn’t have a single grain of magic running through it. She wouldn’t miss even a glimpse of that place and the cancer it had been on her family. The place that had destroyed every last one of them. She was better off fleeing, and even without Frank Vanderzee’s demand that she never set foot there again, she would have left.
So she had, abandoning her apartment and finding a storage locker for her larger belongings, then stuffing the rest into her 1991 Saab, once-upon-a-time cherry red. She’d left that morning, the day following her brother’s funeral—of which she and two others had been the only ones in attendance. She should have found that surprising, even disheartening, but even the two men she didn’t know had been more than she’d expected.
What should have been more disheartening, however, was the way she had remained numb through it all, emotionless. A tiny swell of a sob had built up inside her after he’d been shot, when she cradled his body, but it stayed below the surface, safe and dormant. She’d lost the ability to cry on that overcast afternoon in her father’s hospital room.
And the truth was, Willem had been dead long before the age of twenty-four. Wherever his soul lived now—whether it was with their father or somewhere less fulfilling—she prayed he understood her numbness. Maybe even her relief.
On U.S. 26, or what was known here as Mt. Hood Highway, the rain gathered intensity. With visibility near zero, she brought the car to a slow crawl, cursing her burnt-out headlight. Government Camp was six miles behind her now, and the town of Rhododendron three more ahead. There, in Rhododendron, she would stay until the sun came up and the rain dispersed, then head on her way. To where, she had no idea. The only destination her heart wanted to take her to was the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness.
Anxiety took residence in her chest and, just as she pressed harder on the gas, a threatening pop echoed beneath the hood.
Her headlight went out. At the same time, the unearthly glow of her dashboard blackened.
She could see nothing.
In darkness, she guided the vehicle to the shoulder, the steering wheel nearly stiff.
She’d already replaced her alternator twice in the past year, buying used ones at scrap yards and paying her only decent neighbor a light fee to install them. The last one she’d bought, eight months ago, had lasted the longest. It felt fitting though, cosmically and unfairly so, that after taking her this far it would die now: in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of a downpour.
The heavens scourged the car, and despite the sensation of drowning, she contemplated waiting out the storm. But this was Oregon, and waiting out a storm could mean waiting out your own starvation. Just she and the rain existed now, and a dense, larger-than-life forest. She hadn’t let herself feel real fear in more years than she could remember, and now was no different. But there was something life-like about the night and the pines that protected her from every side. She popped open the glove box and felt for the flashlight she’d stashed there last month. A cold, metal thing, just small enough for emergencies.
She squinted when it came on, targeting the money with its ring of light. She deliberated before stuffing the envelope into her leather shoulder bag, as well as the keys and a change of clothes from her suitcase in the back seat, all while holding the flashlight between her teeth. She put on her jacket, flipped the hood over her head, grasped the bag, and heaved a sigh. The flashlight’s circle of light targeted the windshield, where rivers streamed. She may not be able to make it all the way to Rhododendron on foot before the light’s batteries would give out, but by then, hopefully, her eyes would adjust to the darkness.
Upon her exit, the brisk rain brought her to attention, nearly shocking her nervous system. She gasped, locked the door behind her, and shivered. She swept the flashlight around her, its small beam turning raindrops into falling shards of light. Hemlocks grew snug with statuesque firs, and plant life blanketed the forest floor. If she were to venture deeper into the forest, she would also find alders and cedars, just as lofty as the firs, with trunks blanketed in green moss. Her father had spent hours teaching her this vegetation, showing her picture upon picture of the indigenous trees, but it was something different entirely to be standing before them, feeling so small in their breathtaking splendor.
She raised her flashlight beam from the base of a fir to the narrowing top of its trunk, at least two hundred feet above. It froze her in place, the grandeur along with the chilling rain. At one time, her father may have even stood where she did now.
A distant and undecipherable noise sounded behind her, muffled by the static of rain: a howl, a yell—she couldn’t tell. She swept her light over the forest that lined the opposite side of the highway—just as green and only slightly less dense than the side she’d been studying. It was the forest that contained Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness somewhere far inside its barrier.
Another howl lifted from the forest and for the briefest instant a light flashed deep within the trees, their dancing shadows backlit by the panicked beam. Tightening her drenched strap around her shoulder, she crossed the asphalt and stopped in the mud at the other side. This forest was different than the rest, even different from its companion across the highway. Something lingered here. Someone, maybe. And if someone was here—a Good Samaritan, perhaps—it might save her the three-mile trek to Rhododendron. Taking just a half-step closer, she peered into the trees.
“Hello!” she called, trying to make her voice boom, but rainfall swallowed the sound. Her teeth chattered and water poured from the rim of her hood, impairing her vision. “Anyone there? My car broke down and—” She cut herself off. I’m a helpless woman, she may as well be shouting. Alone, with only my father’s rusty pocket knife to defend myself!
The forest didn’t respond, and she should have been relieved. Turning, she folded her free arm over herself and walked the slick shoulder, heading in a westerly direction and trying to avoid the largest puddles. A bend in the highway lay just ahead. Surely she would find something beyond its curve, maybe some sign of civilization.
Vegetation rustled behind her. Heavy heels scraped on the gritty, wet road.
She twisted, readying her stance—wishing her pocket knife wasn’t buried inside her bag—but what the beam of her flashlight caught wasn’t what she expected. A slender, elderly man with a coarse, whitish beard that came to his waist shielded his eyes from her light. His skin hung with wrinkles almost as pale as his beard. A large spotlight dangled from his neck, amidst the bristly facial hair, and lit his black leather boots. He wore a flannel shirt beneath fishing waders, an open yellow slicker, and a yellow sou’wester hat, the large rim falling down the back of his neck. He looked like a fisherman taken right off the Pacific Ocean and planted in the middle of Mt. Hood National Forest.
His hand still shielded his red-rimmed eyes, but it wasn’t until he cursed that she realized her light blinded him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping the beam.
“Do you have any idea what you just did?” His vocal cords sounded compressed, perhaps from old age, making his voice thin and high. He took an irate step toward her.
Elizabeth stepped back. “I’m sorry?”
Drawing his decrepit thumb and index finger together, he grumbled, “I was this close!” The double-barreled shotgun in his dropped hand—why didn’t she notice this sooner?—now swung.
“Whoa,” she said, lifting a hand. With the current events of her life, she shouldn’t have been surprised to run into a nut job in the middle of the forest.
“I had it right in my sights! I could’ve changed everything for our town if you hadn’t scared it away!” He exhaled, clouding the air with an angry burst.
“My car broke down and I saw your light in the forest…”
Wiping a hand down his face, he looked in the direction he’d come—through the forest—then in the direction she’d been headed—west—then finally at her broken-down car across the road. His breath puffed at a measured rate. He wasn’t crazy, just irritated. With a tone of defeat, he said, “There’s nothing I can do for you out here, ma’am.”
“Thanks for your time anyway.” She tried not to sound too deflated.
When she resumed her steps, he called from behind, “Not sure if you know this, but it’s a three-mile walk to Rhododendron.”
She turned back, adjusting her leather bag in the hope its contents weren’t completely soaked through. “It’s better than six miles back to Government Camp.”
“You know the area?”
She shrugged.
His eyes narrowed, and his beard dripped. “Walking alone isn’t a smart idea,” he said in that thin, almost backwoods-sounding tone. “Not through these parts, ma’am, not at this time of night. You have any idea what’s out here?”
“More old men in fishing gear?”
He raised a brow then chuckled, and though she hardly saw it through his beard, his smile was warm. “Much worse, ma’am.” Her eyes followed his, but she saw nothing. His jaw rolled rigorously as he chewed, then he spat to the side, leaving specks of brown in his beard; they washed away quickly. Finally, with a twinge of regret, he said, “A town’s one mile south of here, right through these trees.” He motioned to his left, into the forest he’d emerged from. It seemed his admittance of this town was the result of some internal battle being lost.
“A town is…through there?”
“My town: Hemlock Veils. We call it Oregon’s best kept secret.” He spat again, giving a proud half-smile. “You feel like a midnight hike?”
She didn’t answer.
“I know a mechanic myself,” he added, “who’d charge you half of what the folks in any of the villages at Mt. Hood would.”
St
ill speechless, she eyed the trees, trying to feel out the validity of his claim.
“Even if you take the main roads to Hemlock, it’s still closer than Rhododendron. Only two miles.” He pointed east. “You’d just need to go about half a mile back that way, take Road Thirty-Two a mile or so south, where it’ll curve west, until you come to Clayton Road. That takes you right into town. Course…you’re still better off cutting through the forest, time and distance wise.”
“I think I’ll just stick with what I know,” she said, uncertain. “Rhododendron.”
“You want to take the risk of walking alone for so long, that’s up to you. Or I could accompany you through this forest you’ve been eyeballing, since I know it like the back of my hand. We’d be in Hemlock Veils before you know it. It’s only one mile, ma’am, and with my trusty Betsy here,”—he lifted his shotgun—“you can be sure it won’t snatch you up.”
Eccentric or not, and cryptic statements aside, there was something she liked about this man, something she trusted. Her instinct told her to stay with him, however strange the idea seemed. One thing she’d always prided herself on was that she was an excellent judge of character. She smiled, just barely. “Are you saying you’ll be my bodyguard, Old Man?”
“Take it or leave it.”
Her breath hung in the dark, frigid air. She’d never heard of Hemlock Veils, and if her father had, he’d never mentioned it. Perhaps it really was Oregon’s best kept secret. Or perhaps this man was nothing but a senile, lost fisherman.
“Ma’am.” The old man’s voice softened, sobered. “Trust me when I say your best bet is coming with me. I’m heading home anyway, since you scared off my prey.”
Chills attacked her lower spine, but her trepidation wasn’t because of him. It was because with no other soul around, a sensation that they were being watched wrapped itself around her, tingling the back of her neck.
“Come on,” he said, guiding her by the elbow. “We’ll have Sheriff Taggart and Brian—that mechanic I was talking about—come back with you when it’s light, and he’ll get your vehicle fixed right up. We even have a motel to rest your pretty head.” He snickered. “Bill hasn’t rented out a room in years. We don’t get many visitors.” He paused, offering a bony hand. “Name’s Bathgate. Eustace Bathgate.”
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