Spread out before her in the forest clearing that Pops had called the mountain’s cathedral was the vast ginseng bed Zachariah Woodruff had stumbled into over a century ago. At this time of year, when there were thousands of pale yellow leaves shivering above the rich mulch of the forest floor, it looked like a vast bowlful of gold. Acres of wild ginseng that had been growing and reseeding itself here since ancient times—these days with a little help from the Woodruffs. It was probably worth a fortune if you sold it all.
But, with ginseng, you never harvested it all at once because only the mature roots provided a real benefit—like the relief of nausea and chemo-related fatigue in cancer patients. And the roots that had to struggle for years to survive in the rocks and shallower ground were often the most potent, chemically. No, ginseng wasn’t a crop or a product that you could grow in a green house or under artificial shade, although she had tried. It was a creation of the mountain. You harvested judiciously and replanted where you dug up the roots, thus aerating the soil and assisting with self-seeding. Pops had loved it when, as a high school student, Grace had labeled their relationship with the ginseng as “symbiotic mutualism”. He had laughed and told her she would fall over with all those heavy words weighing down her head. She gulped down more of the hot tea to ease the sudden tightness in her throat. All those years and only a handful of Woodruffs had tended to this bed. Certainly her great-great-grandfather Jeb, and she was sure that his mother, Granny Lily, had as well.
Her father hadn’t. She smiled grimly, imagining Marshall Woodruff in his Gucci shoes and Armani suit standing in the deep loam or scrabbling on the rocks, getting his hands dirty. Not that he didn’t get his hands dirty on a daily basis, but that was the kind of dirt that stained the soul.
Grace was glad Pops had never entrusted her father with the secret of this place. And now it was a secret that, for the moment, belonged only to her.
Secret because there were those who would dig up the entire bed, both mature and immature roots, and ravage this place for the money buried beneath those nodding leaves of gold. Sang poachers skulked through the woods in the dead of night and dug wild ginseng, seeds and all, caring nothing for future harvests.
It was a reflection of Pops’s trust in her that he had introduced her to this sacred place when she was a child. And it was a reflection of her respect for him that she had kept the secret close, not even sharing it with Daniel.
Pooka sat up and looked south, ears at attention. Grace listened, but heard nothing unusual. It was odd how many things the dog found to track, sniff, and bother along the way, but how relaxed he became once he crossed into this place. As if no other creature had trod within these borders for him to scent, and he wasn’t worried that any would dare.
“Hear something out there, boy?” She scratched between his ears, looking around the area thoughtfully.
“The sang won’t let anyone find it lest it wants to be found, Gracie-girl.”
Grace preferred to be extra careful and always did a bit of doubling back on her way here to make sure. No one had disturbed this place in her lifetime, except for Pops and Pooka and herself.
But Pops’s theory did explain how easily her guests got lost up here, even with their fancy GPS units. Jamie, who was a GPS whiz kid, had mapped out an area on the mountain where, no matter where you stood or what you did, GPS units wouldn’t work, and neither would compasses. Jamie delighted in telling guests that this was the Woodruff Triangle. When Grace had taken a look at Jamie’s map, she had realized the ginseng bed was right in the center of that triangle, which was actually more of an egg-shape.
The heart of the mountain. There were times when she thought of the mountain as a living thing, its heart thrumming in the soil, its voice sighing through the woods. Something larger than life that had always been there, its ancient song a slow counterpoint to her own. Even when she was far away from the mountain, she sensed it in the distance.
Grace was glad she had come out here today, if only to reassure herself that the sun still filtered down into this vaulted space and that no filthy smoke swirled up from the rocks behind her. Seeing this place in her dreams had shaken her more than she wanted to admit.
Reaching the edge of the rocks, she looked down into the shadowy darkness below, remembering a long ago time when a little girl had run up here and crawled down into that very crevice so she wouldn’t have to leave Pops or the farm. Wouldn’t have to go back to the prep school she lived at most of the time. Wouldn’t have to abandon these living columns of wood for ones made of cold, dead stone.
She had scared Pops that day, disappearing into the cave that was hidden down there with only her daypack and a flashlight. A flashlight that, in hindsight, could’ve gone out at any time and left her stranded in the dark. But it hadn’t. And she couldn’t remember even feeling the slightest bit afraid—then. That sense of Something crooning in her ears, urging her onward, had not been frightening, but somehow familiar and expected.
Grace sat on the edge of the crevice and remembered making her way through the narrow twists and turns of that cave long ago. Pops had told her stories about people falling into bottomless pits or wandering forever in caverns like this one, but that day she heedlessly explored until she had found a room with a swirl of primitive-looking carvings on the wall. To her they had looked like a childish creation Daniel had once drawn in crayon on the wall of their playroom.
Out of all the carvings on the wall, and she remembered there were many, she could only recall one specifically—the one she had felt compelled to reach out and touch. It was a human handprint engraved in the center of all the other carvings, barely within her reach, and a perfect fit for her small hand. She remembered it because she had been reluctant to approach the wall, but then she had seen what looked like writing in the handprint. When she’d gone closer, the tiny letters “LLHW” and “1881” in elegant white script were apparent on the palm.
Lily Loreena Hickey Woodruff. Granny Lily.
So, convinced that it was safe, and fascinated that her great-great-great-grandmother might have placed her hand there long ago, she pressed her fingers into it. She wondered for a moment why Granny Lily’s hand was so very tiny when in 1881 she would have been really old—at least from an eight-year-old’s perspective.
On the trip back, the path had been easier and she had found herself at the entrance much faster than she expected. When she had recounted her trip through the cave to a very relieved Pops, he had smiled as if she was making up some magnificent tall tale. But when she described the handprint with the initials and the date, he had gotten really intense and quiet, asking questions about the carvings that she couldn’t answer.
“I’m thinkin’ that’s real old magic down in there, Gracie-girl. Older’n the Cherokee, that.”
Pops had tried more than once to find the room by himself, to no avail. Each time he would either end up at a different dead end or in a different loopback to the entrance. Later, when she was a teenager, they had gone back together, and to Pops’s delight they had found the room and the carvings with no trouble. But, oddly, although Granny Lily’s initials were still there, the handprint was gone. Grace had sworn to him she hadn’t imagined it, and he had believed her—“The old magic does what it will, Gracie-girl. It’s not ours to command.”
Pops had tried to persuade Grace to go back in alone to see if the mountain would show the handprint to her again, but she had refused. As a teenager, the whole idea of the mountain being aware that she was there, alone, and somehow adjusting to her presence had been disturbing. But as a child she had felt only a sense of wonder and delight down there. It had seemed the safest place in the world.
Now, much to Pooka’s dismay, Grace climbed down into the crevice and stood, blinking in the dim light and waiting until the cave mouth emerged from the murk—a darker hole in the darkness. Briefly, she considered crawling in to see if she could find that room again, all these years later. Even more briefly, she considered just st
aying in there.
“You suspected it, didn’t you Pops?” she said. “You thought I might have her gift.” And she wondered about Daniel, and his dreams.
Pooka whined from above her, just as he had done that day when he and Pops had finally found her, climbing up out of the warm dark.
Plants that shouldn’t survive. Dogs that live far longer than they should. Loved ones who are rarely ill. And now Tink. She sighed. “You were afraid of what it meant. You were afraid for me—”
And I refused to see it. Until a fairy forced me to—
Perhaps that was what was wrong with the mountain. She had rejected this gift. She was still rejecting it, not trusting it, trying to control it, instead of accepting it and—
And what? It was impossible—as impossible as asking her to “fix the mountain” or screaming at her in an archaic language to guard against poison and plague. There had to be a scientific explanation.
Fueled by sudden frustration, Grace clambered out of the crevice and donned her backpack, much to Pooka’s relief. For half of her life she had studied and trained to become a healer, had dreamed of discovering the next miracle plant in the rainforest that might help cure people of some disease or another. But nothing she had learned in those classrooms or labs had given her the tools or the knowledge to deal with this. She studied her hands.
If there was some ancient melody humming through these rocks, she was certainly off-key and out of tune with it. Caught between incomprehensible dreams and an unbelievable reality, she was beginning to feel utterly lost and alone.
He was lost. Absolutely lost. And that was a first.
For a while, following Grace had gone just fine. Nick had his GPS as well as a backup compass and a damn fine sense of direction. He was a good tracker, having worked on some rather interesting cases in some pretty remote places. It wasn’t too cold, although he wouldn’t have described the day as warm exactly and the forest floor never really got beyond a kind of dim dusk because the trees were so thick, even without their leaves.
Then the GPS had gone out. Not only lost the signal, which wasn’t surprising considering the tree canopy in here, but stopped working entirely—no display, no nothing. And it was followed by his regular compass, which started spinning erratically. Cursing, he had switched to using the map, his gut, and his tracking skills. In spite of it all, he had been making good progress when he had heard what sounded like something crashing through the brush parallel to his track. Although he had known that no animal stalking him would’ve made that much noise, it had still distracted him, making him reach for his weapon and focus on that instead of on the faint trail Grace and the dog had left through the brush. Once he had established that it must’ve been a branch or small tree falling nearby, he had managed to find the track again and forged on.
The second noise had been more like a rumbling growl, and way too close—Grace’s mountain lion? His gun had been out before he had spun around. However nothing had leaped out at him. Nothing was even in range of his senses that could have made that kind of noise, that close. Suspicious, he had stood there for a long while, taking in the forest around him. He wondered if he had imagined it. Finally holstering his gun, he’d found that the trail had disappeared completely.
He hadn’t lost it. It wasn’t behind him, or to either side of him. After an hour or more of looking pretty far in all directions, he had conceded that it was gone, and he was lost.
So now Nick sat on a convenient rock—there were a lot of those around—and leaned back against a stone outcropping, washing down an energy bar with coffee from his thermos and trying to convince himself that the overwhelming fatigue he felt was an aftereffect of the adrenaline. Yeah. That was it. He closed his eyes and let the cold from the stone seep into him.
When you weren’t worried about being stalked by some invisible feline, this place was amazing. In the silence, he could hear a creek babbling not far off and, further still, what sounded like a waterfall. It felt cool and tranquil, almost healing. If he sat here long enough, perhaps whatever it was would extinguish the fever lingering in his gut.
Then again, he was just as likely to go to sleep and provide Grace’s big cat with a nice snack. He opened his eyes at that thought.
No, he didn’t plan to just disappear up here. He couldn’t do that to his mom or Alison. His damn job had done enough damage—too much time away, too many secrets. But his family at least deserved to know what kind of an end he came to. And besides, simply getting lost in the woods didn’t set a heroic enough example for his nephew to look up to.
His laugh was more of a dry cough.
Of course, neither did dying of some damn wasting disease. And he knew now it was back. Recess or intermission or whatever the hell it was, was over before it had begun.
The smell of rotten eggs and cat piss slammed into his gut like the bad memory it was and he nearly fell as he scrambled to his feet. He closed his eyes and sniffed deeply, then again.
“Gotcha.”
Nick knew that smell far too well after waking from countless sweaty nightmares with the memory of those noxious fumes in his nostrils.
A meth lab. A big one. And it was close.
He felt a stab of disappointment. Just this once, he could have lived with his gut being wrong, but it seemed Dr. Grace wasn’t hiding anything more magical than a meth lab in these mountains of hers.
Chapter Four
Scrambling to get everything back into his pack, which had tipped over, Nick sniffed the air like mad, checking the wind, trying to get a direction. His GPS unit, which hadn’t been working a minute ago, had suddenly acquired a signal, or was trying to. But he was in a shallow ravine surrounded by rocks. He would have to climb up to acquire enough satellites.
His compass was working though. South. The smell was drifting from the south. Of course that didn’t mean much, since he had no idea exactly where on the map he was, but he could figure it out pretty accurately once he had the last trackpoint the GPS had dropped.
Right now he wanted to reconnoiter and get a visual. Blundering into a working operation alone wasn’t what this case was about and likely wouldn’t answer any of his boss’s questions, but he could at least confirm what his nose was telling him.
He hefted his pack by the straps and scrambled out of the ravine, one eye on the GPS display, expecting it to disappear at any second, but hoping—
The dog didn’t so much bark as yell at him—a deep baying noise that scared the crap out of him and made him drop the GPS and his pack. He had almost reached his gun before he recognized the slender figure in the gaudy but colorful hat catching up with the dog. The crunch his pack made as it hit the rocks below echoed in the silence. His GPS made an equally loud noise scraping back and forth against the zipper of his jacket as it swung on its tether.
Pooka stood in front of him, tongue lolling, apparently not sure whether to go for his throat or lick him.
“Am I glad to see you,” he said, looking up at Grace as he sank to his knees in front of the dog. “I thought I was a goner.”
Lovely.
Mr. City Man was kneeling in front of her dog in the middle of her trail to her sang bed and for just a moment he hadn’t looked at all like the convalescent who had checked in last night. In fact, she had regretted coming up here without her 12-gauge. But now he looked like he was going to throw up.
Grace took a deep breath. A million questions tumbled through her brain and adrenaline made her hair stand on end. Was Nick merely another guest who got lost out here thinking his fabulously expensive GPS would save him? Was he following her? Why on earth would a very sick man—because he was clearly still ill whether he would admit to it or not—get up at an ungodly hour to follow her into the cold damp of these woods?
She looked at the perspiration beading on his upper lip with a clinical eye. He was either running a fever or really scared. And she honestly couldn’t tell which without whipping out her thermometer.
Was he after the
sang? Not in his condition. He couldn’t dig it up or transport it, but he might be trying to map its location for future digging. But why? He didn’t look like the average sang poacher. Clearly he had money of his own. Top of the line GPS. Top of the line hiking boots. Top of the line windbreaker, although it looked a size too large for him. More evidence that he was, or had been, really ill.
And she wasn’t really worried about the sang. Far better sang hunters had tried and failed to follow this trail, much less actually find the bed.
“Are you insane?” she asked.
Pooka relaxed and sat back on his haunches, but Nick gave her a puzzled look.
“Wha—”
“No, don’t answer.” She threw up her hand. “I apologize. That was an unfair question.” She took a breath. “What are you doing out here?”
Nick looked bewildered for a moment, then he looked down at his pack, and at his GPS, and back up at her again. “Hiking?”
She grimaced.
“Trying to hike?” he offered again.
“I suppose you forgot to look at the map I told you about. The one with the trails marked expert and beginner?”
He appeared baffled by her question and fished inside his jacket for a much-used map. “I had one that a guy recommended with the GPS waypoints—”
“This is private land,” she said, and felt an instant pang of guilt when he flinched.
“It is?”
She sighed. “Yes it is. This is my family’s land. Has been for generations. It isn’t on that map of yours. It is, however, on the map that we provide in the cabin. I don’t mind you hiking it, but I wouldn’t want you to get injured or lost on a trail that’s too difficult for you. I know you signed a waiver, but it would be bad for business.”
At that, Nick sat back on his heels, put his hands on his thighs and shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. I— I’m— I mean I was lost, pretty much. My GPS went out and then my compass started acting up, back there, so I headed in the direction I thought I had come and I—”
More Than Magic (Books of the Kindling) Page 6
