He’d dreamed again about Peach Orchard Farm and the old mill across the road. Except the mill hadn’t been old in his dreams. It had thrived, the big wheels grinding under the hand of Thaddeus Eriksson, a Yankee in a land of Confederates, a misfit. It was the only comparison between himself and Thaddeus he could find.
This morning the memory was as thick as fog and about as easy to hold on to. Yet the scene lingered in the back of his brain and gave him an uneasy feeling he didn’t understand.
He wanted to blame the haunting dreams on the late-night helping of Mississippi Mud Brownies Julia had placed in the parlor for guests. Wanted to but couldn’t. A man didn’t dream about the same people and place more than once without believing his subconscious was trying to tell him something.
What, he didn’t know.
Against his hip, his cell phone vibrated, but he didn’t answer or even check caller ID. Earlier he’d spoken to his agent and emailed with his assistant and editor. That was enough business contact for one day. His few friends knew he’d disappeared to write as always and respected his privacy.
He’d been called enigmatic, quiet or reserved. None of those were true. He was cautious.
Brody was cautious, too.
The boy haunted him every bit as much as the bizarre dreams and sent his mind down dark alleys he’d prefer to avoid.
He’d attempted to start the new book last night, but Brody kept intruding. Brody and Carrie and a pair of fictional dream people. Everything in him wanted to write the nineteenth-century story, but the talk with his agent reminded him again of his obligations. Readers expected and paid for certain things in a Hayden Winters novel. Changing horses in the middle of the stream could derail his lucrative career.
The idea of losing everything he’d worked for frightened him more than a serial killer with a penchant for torture. Those he understood. Their twisted psychology kept him writing, kept him digging deeper to know more about how their minds worked.
He understood broken minds.
After several false starts at the computer that included a bomb squad renegade and a psychotic zookeeper, he’d come away uninspired, leaving his psychologically wounded hero to work out his frustration with a second helping of brownies.
Bad decision.
His editor expected something on his desk soon.
And he had nothing other than a fragmented story outside his moneymaking genre.
He rolled his shoulders to stretch tight muscles and crouched on the creek bank. His clean-shaven face stared back, mirrored in the clear water. An honest face full of lies.
What would the people of Honey Ridge say if they knew?
He felt a connection here. With the town, the house, the people. Especially the people.
He blamed Carrie Riley, the squeaky librarian with the big brown eyes and the pretty feet. He’d enjoyed their trek up on Honey Ridge, liked being with her.
He didn’t form attachments, not normally, but he was feeling far from normal since his arrival.
At the bottom of the shallow creek bed, pale, ghostly minnows darted in bunches above the brown rocks.
Had Brody camped here that stormy Friday night? Had he stared into the mirrored pool and watched the minnows?
Hayden blew out a frustrated breath. He wanted to ignore the warning signs and focus on work. Carrie, whom he considered his ally in the quest to know more about Brody, vacillated between assurances that nothing was amiss and fear that it very much was.
Carrie. Warmth edged into his somber mood.
The curvy, hilly trip up on the ridge had proved interesting in a number of ways, especially getting to know Carrie. She was more than a cute librarian who jumped at her own shadow and squeaked at the sound of thunder. She was a caring person who worried about kids and special-ordered books for an agoraphobic cat lady whose husband died smuggling drugs into the United States.
Drugs. Death. Crime. And an intriguing dose of agoraphobia. If the cat lady didn’t get his imagination flowing, nothing would.
Mulling as he was inclined to do when ideas brewed like dark coffee in his veins, Hayden walked away from the stream and pressed deeper into the shadowy woods. Maybe something more would develop here among the dying leaves and deadly silence.
Deadly Silence, a good title, already taken. Too bad.
The idea of a mute victim rattled around in his head. Silent. Alone. Unable to cry out.
Or squeak.
Carrie again.
How was he to create scenes of depraved evil when her fresh, warm smile and big doe eyes kept crowding in?
Down an incline his loafers slipped, reminding him to wear hiking boots the next time he ventured away from the house. Tennessee landscape, like Kentucky, could be rugged, and he hadn’t hiked the woods and mountains in a very long time.
A love-hate relationship.
The leaves showed signs of changing—a few here and there had yellowed—foreshadowing deep fall when the woods would break out in sunset colors as surely as the warbler serenading his solitary walk broke out in song.
He examined the ground, covered in leaves and twigs and the occasional bit of paper, a shiny gum wrapper, an aluminum can. He wasn’t sure what he looked for, but sometimes the strangest or simplest thing triggered a twist or a plot point that poured out of him onto the page.
A squirrel scolded from a sugar maple, and next to it a persimmon tree hung heavy with green fruit. The seeds, he’d learned, were roasted, ground and used as a coffee substitute during the Civil War. He’d never tried the coffee, but he’d eaten his fill of persimmons, some orange and sweet, while others puckered his mouth and made his belly hurt.
Hunger pushed the bounds of good taste and common sense.
He thought again of Brody. The boy appeared as healthy and clean as any fifth grader, especially one who liked the outdoors. Yet Hayden wondered who fed him, what he ate besides cookies at the library.
Hayden dodged a tree limb, shoving the branch to one side as he passed. A silvery-white spiderweb bright as a snowflake stretched above his head. A moth had met his doom there.
He thought of the web he’d spun around himself and wondered if someday he’d be caught like the moth with no hope of escape.
Up ahead in the thick underbrush Hayden spotted a rudimentary shelter of some kind, definitely created by human hands. An A-frame made entirely of broken limbs and wilting pine boughs, it was fairly well designed, using the trunk of a huge oak as an anchor. The shelter was not tall enough to stand up in, so Hayden crouched low to peer inside. The interior was dark, lighted only by sun rays slanting through the roof. It smelled of pine and wet earth but of warmth, too.
“What have we here?” he murmured softly.
When his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Hayden saw an empty butter bowl, a cardboard box and what appeared to be a lidless tackle box next to a neatly folded piece of blue plastic tarp.
His chest clutched like a clenched fist around his windpipe.
The sense of tumbling backward through time made him dizzy.
He put one hand on the damp ground to keep from falling sideways.
A scratching sound caught his attention and brought him back from the brink. Something rummaged for crumbs inside a deep cardboard box. Curiosity won out, and Hayden ducked inside the enclosure, hunched over like Quasimodo.
Nestled in a leafy bed, a young cottontail looked up at him with button eyes and quivering nose. A crude bandage, some sort of white cloth, was wrapped around a back leg. Blood had seeped through, leaving a brown spot on the outside. Someone had tended the injured rabbit, adding a plastic lid of water and a handful of gnawed carrots.
Someone like Brody Thomson.
CHAPTER TWELVE
If you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, be here at closing time.
—Lynn, café owner
THE MORNING SMELLS of bacon and coffee permeated the interior of the Miniature Golf Café and stirred Carrie’s stomach to life.
She and Hayden were early, but the good ol’ boys had already gathered, and Hayden seemed to be soaking up the small-town atmosphere like a fresh biscuit in hot gravy.
Hayden, with his smooth charm and easy smile, had fielded a few questions about writing and then sidestepped anything personal with a finesse that Carrie wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been listening intently to get a hint about his life beyond his career. In five minutes’ time, he’d had the good ol’ boys running off at the mouth while he sat back and listened.
Carrie sipped at her cream-laden coffee while Poker Ringwald regaled Hayden and anyone else who’d listen with a tale from Honey Ridge’s storied past. This one about the Frederick brothers, who’d squared off in an epic fight at town center over a prize watermelon. One of the pair had ended up pumping three bullets not into his brother, but into the melon.
“To this day, those fellas live in this town with adjoining farms and never speak to each other.”
“Human nature is a funny thing,” said Sugar Bo Jackson, a former pugilist with the flat nose and cauliflower ear to prove it.
Sugar Bo sat across from Poker, shoveling pancakes into a Latino face that had probably been handsome before opponents had battered it flat. Now he suffered seizures and could neither box nor work a regular job, but he did odd jobs all over Honey Ridge. Occasionally, Carrie hired him to set up tables and chairs for events at the library.
Poker and his wife, magenta-haired Lynn, owned and operated the Miniature Golf Café. If truth was told, Lynn operated while Poker shuffled a deck of cards, played solitaire and kept the customers coming back for friendly conversation.
Poker flrrred his cards against the table and tapped the ends. One, two, three times. In the chair next to him was Judge Rutherford Black, who’d sat on the bench at the county seat for years until his retirement. Now he sported a beard and played President Lincoln for the occasional history lesson at Honey Ridge school. His wife was suitably eccentric as Mary Todd Lincoln.
The keepers of the past, as she’d described them to Hayden on the way over, gathered every day at the retro café with its green vinyl booths and checkerboard floors. They told stories, rehashed history and politics, drank Lynn’s coffee by the vat and held sway in the small café forgotten by time but not by Honey Ridge.
“You all ready to order, Carrie, honey?”
Lynn had left behind two plastic menus, although Carrie wondered why she bothered. Today’s offerings were written in black marker on a whiteboard that hung over the register beneath the thought for the day: If at first you don’t succeed, don’t go skydiving.
“The smell of bacon is torturing me. I’d better have some.”
Lynn scribbled on her pad. “With biscuits and gravy?”
“You know me too well.” To Hayden, she said, “Anything you order is good.”
“Bacon and eggs over easy.”
“Biscuits and gravy?” Lynn asked without looking up.
“Grits, too.” Hayden handed her the menu with his charmer’s smile, the one that made Carrie’s stomach jitter. “Might as well go straight for the arteries.”
Lynn laughed, scribbled and hustled away.
With a smile, Carrie said, “You can’t get food like this in New York City.”
“I’m not sure if that’s bad or good.”
She chuckled softly. “Both, I imagine. A steady Southern diet is tasty but hard on the waistline.”
“You don’t seem to have a problem with that.” His smoky gaze held hers for two beats and caused the jittery thing to happen again.
The compliment flustered her. Her cheeks heated, and her pulse kicked up. She didn’t like it, didn’t want to feel anything remotely resembling attraction.
Yet she did.
Carrie dragged her eyes away from his and pretended interest in the café.
The door opened, a bell jingled and a man who resembled a depressed version of Morgan Freeman slumped inside.
“Our pessimistic funeral director, Mr. B.,” she whispered.
“If you think about it, optimism in an undertaker might be off-putting.”
“I guess that’s true. Not many of us are optimistic about being in a coffin. Well, except you maybe.”
“Only for a character in my books.”
“Preferably a villain.”
“Or not,” he said with an ornery twinkle.
“Mr. B., who you got down to the funeral home?” Lynn held the coffeepot in midair. A pencil stuck out of stiffly sprayed hair. “I saw the hearse creep past the nursing home last night.”
“Shelton Vandyke. A stroke, poor soul, took him to the other side.” The undertaker took the final seat at Poker’s table and looked respectfully solemn. In a dramatic orator’s voice, he intoned, “Life is short and full of sorrows.”
“Short?” Poker flrrred his deck of cards against the tabletop. “Wasn’t Shelton in his nineties?”
“Yes, he was. Yes, he was.” Mr. B.’s body rocked with the melancholy affirmation. “But a vapor, we are, Poker. Here today and gone tomorrow. No one gets out alive.”
“Well, God rest his soul.” Lynn topped off Carrie’s coffee without asking and leaned in with a mischievous grin. “The crooked old skinflint.”
Poker shuffled the cards again and straightened the edges. Thwack, thwack, against the vinyl tablecloth. “Now, darlin’, don’t speak ill of the dead.”
Lynn didn’t pay the mild rebuke a bit of mind. “Old Vandyke’s so crooked Mr. B. will probably have to screw him in the ground.”
Carrie, ready for anything, laughed, but Hayden nearly spit out his coffee. Lynn barked her rowdy guffaw and whacked him once on the back before moving on.
Sugar Bo pushed a wad of napkins across the space between their tables, his teeth bright white in a dark face.
“You gotta be prepared around here,” Sugar Bo said. “No telling what somebody might say.”
“That’s why he’s here, Sugar Bo. So don’t hold back.” As if holding back was in their blood.
“That a fact? You gonna put us in a book, Mr. Winters?”
Carrie answered for him. “Probably not. He murders people. You don’t want to get killed off—do you?”
“Just like in a good TV show,” Lynn said. “You get to liking the hero and next thing you know, he’s dead and gone.”
“Life is but a vapor,” intoned Mr. B.
Fighting a giggle, Carrie sat back in her chair and watched Hayden take it all in, satisfied he was getting exactly what he’d come for and fully aware she was getting way more than she bargained for.
* * *
HAYDEN CHEWED A bite of crispy bacon and listened to the conversation swirling around the small space. They were an entertaining group; Carrie was right about that. But the man who’d been introduced as Judge Rutherford Black fascinated him. Beneath a dark beard, the Abe Lincoln look-alike bore faint scars up the sides of his neck.
There was a story there.
Hayden experienced a sudden flash of Thaddeus, the man in his dreams. The miller had been burned in a house fire in a frantic attempt to rescue his wife and daughter.
The bell over the door jingled again, and six heads plus Lynn’s big hair swiveled in that direction. Two ladies bustled inside, dressed in identical shirtwaist dresses sprigged with lilacs, a black purse dangling from each left elbow. Probably in their eighties, the spry pair sported painted-on eyebrows and rolled hair in an impossible shade of daffodil yellow. They were as wrinkled as a pair of shar-peis, and their eyes snapped with wit and energy.
“Good morning, ladies,” Lynn called. “Come on in. I’ll rustle up so
me tea.”
“The Sweat twins,” Carrie told him quietly. “Miss Vida Jean and Miss Willa Dean, though only a few can tell the difference. Anything you want to know about Honey Ridge, ask the twins. They’ll know or make it up.”
Introductions were made, and the elderly twins turned fascinated eyes on him. “Hayden Winters, the novelist.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Though he doubted these white-gloved, proper Southern ladies read his genre.
“Vida Jean loved the way you stuffed that barber in a freight mailer and had him shipped to his ex-wife.”
“They were both such bullies.” Vida Jean nodded. “Served them right. Delicious, the way you dispatched them. Purely delicious, I tell you. Didn’t I say that, sister?”
“Delicious. Yes, you did.”
Hayden’s chest tickled with amusement. A writer never knew where he’d meet a fan.
Sugar Bo and Abe Lincoln aka Judge Black pushed out of their chairs. “You ladies take our seats. We can sit over by the window.”
“Not necessary, gentlemen, though we thank you kindly. We can procure an extra.” Willa Dean—or was it Vida Jean?—looked over one shoulder. “Poker, get your lazy carcass up and find Willa Dean a chair.”
Hayden studied the speaker—obviously Vida Jean—trying to tell the pair apart. Even in identical twins, something would be different.
Poker nearly turned the table over in his eagerness to obey. “Yes, ma’am.”
“The twins were schoolteachers for many years,” Carrie told him as he watched with interest. “I think they taught every person in here.”
“Ah. That explains the sudden rush to obedience.”
“They were disciplinarians, let me tell you, though always with a spoonful of sugar.”
“They taught you, too?”
“Miss Willa Dean for art. Music with Miss Vida Jean.”
“What instrument?”
“Piccolo. I marched in the band, but she never awarded me first chair.”
“Vicious old lady.”
“Shh.” Carrie suppressed a giggle and cut her eyes toward the scooting chairs. “They’re lovely, really. The matriarchs of Honey Ridge society.”
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