by Ninie Hammon
Her eyes were suddenly moist.
“Then what …?”
“I painted a picture last night with the oil paints. I didn’t know it’d still be wet this morning. We can’t take it with us.”
“Put it on the refrigerator.”
Ty grinned. “And we can get it when we come back next summer.”
She nodded, then made a shooing motion. “Go on now, go get it. We’ve got a plane to catch.”
They went back into the cabin and Ty bounded up the stairs with P.D. a step behind him.
Gabriella turned to Pedro.
“Pedro, I’ve been trying to think of a way to say—”
“Shhhh.”
“But—”
He pulled her into his arms. “Call me when you get back to Pittsburgh.” He held her tight and she breathed in the soap smell of him as he whispered into her hair. “We have many things to talk about.”
They heard Ty’s footsteps like the rumble of a stampede down the wooden stairs. He held a piece of paper from the art tablet in his hand, 12 × 16 inches. He went to the refrigerator, pulled off four magnets and carefully affixed them to the unpainted edges of the paper and positioned it below the watercolor he’d done of the view from the front porch of the cabin the day Yesheb—
The room went airless. Gabriella looked at the piece of art paper and the world slowed down and stopped. Didn’t move on its axis. For a breathless, eternal moment nothing in the universe stirred.
Below the little-kid-drawn watercolor of the valley was an oil painting of a single, perfect bristlecone pine tree—a tree that glowed. Somehow, Ty had captured the incandescence, the light from within. Each needle on every branch was a golden firefly. Around the tree were hundreds of points of light, sparkling, each a star, a universe of its own. The glow spread out into the shadows; the rock walls curved protectively around it.
It was stunning, a work of art!
Gabriella dragged her eyes from it to the picture above it—a child’s scrawl on a refrigerator door with the Mona Lisa. She looked at Pedro, saw his eyes go from one picture to the other, watched him make the same comparison, reach the same conclusion. He turned his eyes toward her, opened his mouth, but no words came out.
Ty was completely oblivious to their response. He stepped back, adjusted his baby-owl glasses on his nose and looked it over himself.
“I wish Grandpa Slappy could have seen it,” he said, his voice thick with unshed tears.
“Me, too,” Gabriella managed to gasp.
Then Ty turned around and saw that his mother and Pedro were gaping at him.
“What?” he asked, looking from one to the other. “What’s everybody standing around for? I thought we had a plane to catch.”
THE END
*****
If you enjoyed this book, would you please consider writing a review of it on Amazon so other readers might enjoy it, too. Just a couple of sentences. That would mean a lot to me.
On the pages that follow are previews of my other books. If you have a few moments, I'd love to tell you a little something about each one. Just click the video links.
Thank you!
Ninie Hammon
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Young Life and the staff of Frontier Ranch, the Young Life camp located in a 9,500-foot hanging valley on the side of Mount Princeton, for granting me access to the real chalet in the real bristlecone pine forest above the camp at 12,000 feet. Standing there in the cold wind after a summer storm, I stared across the valley at Mount Antero and this story was born.
For Tom, my rock and inspiration always.
Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about HOME GROWN.
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Somebody shot Jim Bingham, shot him dead on the street in front of his own newspaper office, and now his heartbroken daughter must abandon the world of academic journalism for the real world of running the newspaper he left behind.
But Sarabeth Bingham soon discovers that marijuana-growing has corrupted the idyllic little central Kentucky community where she grew up. The sheriff can’t get a marijuana conviction because the county’s jury pool is tainted. Her cousin grows weed and has lost his wife and daughter to the world of drugs. After three children find dope money in an abandoned building and the dopers kidnap them to get it back, Sarabeth heeds the words on the plaque that has always hung above her father’s desk: “Don’t mess with a man who buys ink by the barrel!”
In the next issue of the newspaper, Sarabeth declares war on dope in a blazing front-page editorial! Now, the growers have to shut Sarabeth up. And dopers fight dirty.
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Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about SUDAN.
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Sudan 2000.
Hiding in the chaos of a civil war, the Arab government of the largest nation in Africa has practiced a ruthless program of systematic genocide and more than two million southern Sudanese tribal people have been massacred. But American human rights journalist Ron Wolfson isn’t in Sudan to cover the war. He’s risking his life there to chase a different story—reports of a massive government-assisted slave trade.
When Arab Murahaleen guerrillas attack a small village and kidnap a little girl named Akin to sell on the slave market in the North, her father, Idris, goes after her and Ron joins the simple villager in his desperate effort to rescue his child. While Ron’s brother, a U.S. congressman, battles indifference to force international political pressure on the Sudanese government, Ron finds the story he’s been looking for and suffers the brutal retaliation of a slave trader.
On the eve of the sanctions vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, the lives of Ron and Idris hang by a thread, their fate in the hands of a bloodthirsty mercenary and an orphan boy. But even if they survive, is it already too late to save little Akin from the brutal horror her master has panned for her?
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Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about
WHEN BUTTERFLIES CRY.
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On August 11, 1969, two anguished voices on opposite sides of the planet cry out in terror at the exact same instant and their desperate pleas release a strange power. That power will change the destiny of a West Virginia family in a strip mined hollow that lies in the shadow of a 300-million-gallon coal slag lake—held in place by a makeshift dam high on the mountainside.
Grayson Addington
…returns from Vietnam to his wife, Piper, and 2-year-old daughter a broken man, ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome, a chaplain who left his faith in the jungle mud with his massacred unit.
Piper Addington
… doesn’t know her husband anymore. In his absence, she turned to his brother Carter for support. Now, she must choose between them.
Carter Addington
…is in love with Piper and intends to have her by framing the shell-shocked returning soldier for a heinous crime he didn’t commit.
Maggie
…is a mystery. A strange, battered child with amnesia, she shows up on Piper’s porch and instantly bonds to Sadie, a cripplingly shy toddler. When Maggie runs away and takes Sadie with her, the warring brothers must team up to search for them, unaware that Piper’s raging older brother is also in the woods—with a deer rifle, intent on shooting Carter and Grayson on sight.
But something more than chance has brought the child called Maggie to this wounded family. And nothing less than destiny will be fulfilled by her incredible sacrifice…
�
�� on the foggy morning when the makeshift dam on the mountain above them explodes.
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Ninie Hammon
Ninie Hammon spent 25 years as a professional journalist, worked her way up from a reporter to a publisher who started her own newspaper. But that was before she tried her hand at fiction and discovered making up the facts was waaay more fun than reporting them. She became a novelist then and she has never looked back.
Her first book, a biography published by Penguin Putnam’s Berkeley imprint, was followed by seven novels published by Bay Forest books. Each of her novels is a fast-paced, riveting tale of ordinary people who are forced by circumstances to fight for their lives, gloriously complex characters who grab the reader by the lapels and drag him into the story to live it with them.
Ninie grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, and says she now lives “somewhere in the sky over Greenland.” She and her husband, Tom, travel back and forth between their home in Louisville, KY and one in the village of Great Linford in Buckinghamshire north of London where Tom directs Young Life in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia. The couple has six children and eight grandchildren.
Ninie would love to connect with you on her website, niniehammon.com. You can also find there links to other social media where she can chat with you.
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