The Splendour Falls

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  ‘The Teen Town Council?’ Her tone had definitely capitalized the words, and I repeated it the same way.

  Paula waved a hand. ‘You’ll meet them. Bluestone Hill makes a good meeting place, so they’re always around.’

  I glanced at Rhys again to see his latest reaction. But he was gazing straight ahead, his hands on the wheel, as if the road required more concentration than a fourlane divided highway warranted.

  Paula reached across and patted his shoulder. ‘And of course, Rhys and his dad are a godsend. They needed a cheap place to stay and didn’t care that we’re not even open – goodness, not even ready yet.’

  Some tension – maybe I had been imagining it – ran out of him, and he smiled, entirely genuine. ‘There’s a bed and there’s Clara’s stellar breakfasts. We can’t ask for a better situation.’

  ‘Even when I recruit you to drive me to Birmingham.’ She glanced over her shoulder to tell me, ‘I don’t like to drive so far by myself.’

  I wanted to ask more about Rhys and his father’s situation, but this last comment distracted me. ‘How far a drive is it?’

  Rhys looked at his watch. ‘Less than two hours. We should be there in time for a late supper.’

  ‘Two hours?’ Gigi squirmed in my lap, as if she knew what we were talking about. ‘We’re going to need a rest stop before then.’

  Nodding, he changed lanes. ‘There’s a spot on the way.’

  We’d quickly left the suburban homes and strip malls, and were now on the tree-lined interstate. I usually had a very good sense of direction, but I was slow to get my bearings after the tiring trip. I had no idea where we were, except, apparently, a long way from our destination.

  ‘I need to fire my travel agent,’ I grumbled.

  ‘Any large airport would be a bit of a drive,’ Rhys said.

  Paula confirmed this with a chuckle. ‘Yes, we’re really out in the sticks.’

  ‘And you’re opening an inn?’ I asked. ‘Who do you expect to stay there?’

  ‘Oh heavens. People come from all over to hunt and fish or just enjoy nature. There’s antique shopping, we’re on the way to Mobile, and Selma’s not far away at all.’

  I couldn’t decide if I was more annoyed or appalled at myself for not asking these questions before I’d left New York. I could have at least looked the place up on a map. ‘What’s the name of your town again?’

  ‘Well, the Hill is the country, a few miles from a charming little town called Maddox Landing.’ Paula spoke with some pride and a lot of tour-guide enthusiasm. ‘I expect you’ll know everyone’s name within a day or two. They’re all looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘Oh God.’ I didn’t realize I’d groaned aloud until I sensed her bristling in the front seat. No taking it back, I guess. ‘Why would they want to do that?’

  ‘Because you’re a Davis, of course.’ She’d pokered up, her back ramrod straight, giving me a disapproving look over her shoulder. ‘It would behoove you to be a little gracious if folks want to welcome you home.’

  A quick rush of remorse scorched my ears. I was being ungracious and ungrateful. The fact that this wasn’t my home seemed like a pointless argument. Especially with someone who used ‘behoove’ in a sentence without the slightest irony.

  I didn’t want to look at Rhys, but I couldn’t help that any more than my blush. He was watching me again, but not with disapproval or sympathy. Just that same, studying look, as if I were a puzzle he was trying to figure out.

  Join the club. I didn’t even know what was going on with me lately. He would have to stand in line if he had questions.

  And I was going to have to figure it out here, in Alabama. Land of my father’s birth. Back end of nowhere.

  It was so weird to have Paula talk about this being my home, when I’d never been here, never even really discussed it with Dad. I knew he left when he was eighteen. As far as I can remember, he never returned, though he must have kept in touch with Paula, because she’d known about his funeral.

  The highway wound around the smoothly tumbled remnants of the Appalachian foothills. In places it dipped down between trees and lush vines that knitted everything together into a comforting canyon. Then it would crest one of the hills and, across the tops of the trees, I could see a panorama of green spread out in a dizzying vista.

  I rubbed my hands over my eyes. My body was stiff and aching and a dizzy, disconnected feeling was invading my brain and moving down to my stomach. I’d been travelling since six a.m. Eastern Standard Time – taxi, 747, turboprop commuter plane and now the soccer mom wagon. It all seemed to fall on me at once, an avalanche of exhaustion.

  ‘Next exit,’ said Rhys, as if he’d read my mind.

  Paula glanced at him. ‘You aren’t going to wait un-til Clanton?’

  It figured she was a backseat – well, a passenger seat – driver. But Rhys took it in stride. ‘I thought the rest stop would be better for her to walk the dog. Lots of grass.’

  That was what we needed. If I could just put my feet on the ground, walk around a bit, I’d feel so much better.

  Gigi squirmed restlessly as Rhys put on the turn signal and slowed to exit the highway. By the time he pulled into the paved horseshoe in front of a swath of green dotted with picnic tables, my hand was on the door latch, braced for escape.

  I grabbed Gigi’s leash from her bag and climbed out, not bothering to put on my shoes. I probably should have been worried about glass or other nasty things, but I was mostly interested in feeling the grass under my feet, burrowing my toes down until I reached the cold soil beneath.

  Setting Gigi onto a stretch of lawn away from the picnic tables, I did just that, sinking my toes into the grass like I was putting down roots. The queasiness vanished, and a few deep breaths later, my head stopped spinning. Like magic.

  I immediately wished I hadn’t thought that. It was merely an expression, or it had been until that night in the Park with John. Before I had started second-guessing every whimsical thought that flitted through my imagination.

  Really, Sylvie? Magic?

  No, not really. I don’t think magic exists.

  Whew. Then I must not be crazy. Today, at least.

  Except then I had to worry about talking to myself. I couldn’t win.

  From behind me, I heard the car window roll down. ‘Sylvie, honey, where on earth are your shoes? Have you lost your mind?’

  The question made me laugh. After that, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear her, so I called over my shoulder, ‘I’ll just be a second, Cousin Paula.’

  Gigi, after some searching, found an acceptable spot to christen and I left her to it while I looked around. The rest stop consisted of the paved crescent, the grass we occupied, and the concrete picnic tables, all ringed by a wall of trees. The warm breeze carried a hint of the woods beyond, not really enough to compete with the stink of exhaust from the highway.

  A sign warned, ALL PETS MUST BE LEASHED, which was good advice. Done with her pee, my dog trotted persistently around the clearing, nose to the ground, which might mean that she wasn’t finished, or might mean she was checking messages from previous canine visitors.

  ‘Don’t wander off, Gee.’

  She glanced at me – her ears pricked, her fluff standing defiantly out from her head, her plumed tail held saucily over her back – then did exactly what I’d told her not to.

  I sighed. This was not going to win us points with Paula.

  In addition to being on the big end of the breed standard for a long-haired Chihuahua, Gigi tipped the scales on what dog books euphemistically call an ‘independent personality’. As long as I had a treat in my hand, she was reasonably well behaved. But other times she was six and a half pounds of fluffy you-and-what-army.

  She pranced purposefully towards a path that led through the trees, away from the concrete picnic tables, the asphalt circle, and Cousin Paula’s soccer mom wagon.

  ‘Gigi! Come back here.’ The very expensive trainer that Mom had hi
red said that I had to be the pack leader, but it was hard to feel like an alpha dog when most days I didn’t even feel like getting out of bed.

  At my command, Gigi did pause – just long enough to pull back her lips in a tongue-lolling smile before she dashed down the path and out of sight.

  Paula called to me as I followed Gigi, and I heard the car door open, then close. Ignoring both, I stalked after the dog in my bare feet.

  A sign with an arrow indicated we were headed to the ‘Indian Mound’. Great. My dog was going to desecrate an ancient burial ground within an hour of our arrival in the state.

  My feet weren’t as calloused as they once were, but the grass trail was well beaten down. It led to a large clearing, ringed by tall pine trees that cast long shadows in the setting sun. I’m not sure what I expected an Indian Mound to look like, but I was unprepared for the house-sized knoll of grass-covered earth in front of me.

  Instead of a dome shape, like a pitcher’s mound, it was squared off, with steeply sloped sides going up twenty feet or more, ending in a flat top, like a miniature version of the pyramids I’d seen on a vacation in Cancún.

  What a bizarre thing. On the far corner was a placard, possibly explaining the site, but as curious as I was, I was even more interested in collecting my dog, who sat halfway up the slope of the mound, waiting expectantly for me to climb and get her.

  With a sigh, I did just that, figuring that if this was some kind of sacred ground, it was better to defile it with my bare feet than with anything Gigi might leave behind. Rather than risk the steep rise with my weak leg, I crawled up on my hands and knees. Gigi started to dance back out of my grasp, but I lunged and caught her. I landed face-first in the grass, but at least I had the laughing dog in my hands.

  I knew, as soon as I pushed myself upright, that I had an audience. There was nothing weird or magical about it. Just that there must be some unfair universal law that applied to handsome guys coming along just as you face-plant in the dirt.

  Sure enough, when I rolled over, Rhys stood at ground level, holding my shoes and looking very entertained. ‘That was by far the most graceful belly flop I’ve ever seen.’

  Nice. Not even the accent made that go down any easier. On the whole, I preferred his calling me princess to his laughing at me.

  ‘Thank you.’ I feigned composure, holding Gigi in one hand while I brushed at the grass stains on my T-shirt with the other. ‘I’ve had years of training.’

  ‘I can tell.’ He held up my red leather flats. ‘Paula sent me.’

  ‘Of course.’ I untangled Gigi’s leash from where I’d draped it around my neck, and clipped it to her harness. ‘My cousin has a real steel-magnolia thing going on, I’ve noticed.’

  Rhys climbed a few steps up the slope, to my level, his eyes making a sweeping inspection. ‘Are you feeling better? You’ve got some colour back in your cheeks.’

  Falling on my face will do that, not to mention that quick but close examination that I felt like the warmth of a spotlight. But I let his assumption stand. ‘The fresh air helped.’

  Paula would be waiting, but I couldn’t make myself hurry back. To my surprise, instead of insisting we go, Rhys lowered himself to sit beside me. Not close. Maybe an arm’s length away. It seemed a carefully chosen distance, though, and I wondered if he felt the same zing of awareness that I did.

  He certainly gave no clue, so I determined to do the same and distracted myself with a look around the site. The shadows of the trees were lengthening, falling like bars across the clearing. The breeze stirred the branches, so they seemed to move sinuously towards us as we sat on the eerie relic of raised earth.

  ‘What was this place?’ I asked, my curiosity genuine. ‘Do you know?’

  Rhys squinted towards the top of the mound, then around the clearing. ‘A mound like this usually means a buried structure of some sort. Unexcavated ruins.’

  The authority in his answer surprised me, and it must have shown, because his mouth twisted sheepishly. ‘My father is a professor of anthropology at the University of Cardiff. On sabbatical at the moment.’

  ‘Oh really.’ In my world, ‘on sabbatical’ meant that someone was in rehab or on a diet. ‘And he picked rural Alabama out of all the places in the world?’

  His grudging smile widened a fraction, acknowledging my point, my persistence. ‘He’s researching a book.’

  That reluctant curve of his lip was devastating. My heart tripped all over itself, and I told myself it was merely triumph at having elicited a smile that wasn’t at my expense. ‘So, you’re just here for grins,’ I prompted.

  He shrugged. ‘I’m sort of on a break too. So I’m helping Dad with his research.’

  I wondered what ‘sort of’ on a break meant, and whether that was another way of saying ‘out of university but haven’t found a job yet’. Not that I was one to throw stones at people who had their lives on hold.

  ‘Are you in the same field?’ I asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’ He rose to his feet and climbed a few steps higher so he could survey the clearing. ‘But I’m getting a grounding in the local history. I can tell you that these mounds baffled early Spanish and French explorers. They considered the natives here too uncivilized to construct anything like this.’

  ‘Of course they did.’ Gigi had curled up in my lap, and I ran my fingers through the grass, letting the history draw my imagination down, wondering what lay beneath the surface.

  ‘Is it something like the prehistoric barrows in Britain?’ I had the strangest sense, not just of being connected to the earth here, but connected to the past. ‘That’s what it feels like.’

  ‘Feels like?’

  His voice sharpened on the question, and, when I glanced up, the keenness of his look snapped me back to my senses.

  ‘I mean—’ What did I mean? The words had come out of my subconscious. The one that imagined historical reenactments when I got loaded. ‘You know. A vibe.’ That wasn’t too weird, right? ‘Some places you just get a sense of them being really old.’

  ‘You meanlikeStonehenge.’The curiosity vanished – provided I hadn’t imagined it – and he spoke with dismissive condescension. ‘Every American says that.’

  Good. That meant I wasn’t losing it. But also bad, because I didn’t appreciate his tone.

  ‘I couldn’t see much of Stonehenge through the tourists,’ I said coolly. ‘I mean all the other stones and heaps of earth we saw on that trip. Dad must have dragged me over half of Britain looking for Iron Age relics. It’s like any time your ancestors had a rest stop, they stood a rock up in the ground.’

  He tilted his head, either ignoring my snippy tone or simply not thinking he owed me an apology. ‘Your dad was interested in standing stones?’

  ‘My dad was interested in everything that anyone ever did to decorate a landscape.’ The words were brusque, but I couldn’t keep the warmth of memory from my voice, for those weeks spent visiting famous gardens and ancient sites, Dad explaining them with the fervour of a pilgrim.

  Rhys gave a considering nod, then went on in a tour-guide sort of voice that amused me. ‘Then you know the barrows in Britain are smaller than this. And older. They’re burial chambers, from as far back as four or five thousand years.’ He glanced up, towards the apex of the structure. ‘The people who built these lived here as recently as five hundred years ago.’

  ‘I love how you British think that’s recent.’

  He turned back to me with a raised brow. ‘We Welsh think it’s recent, and it is – to everyone but Americans.’

  My lips curved at that offhand nationalist disdain, even though it should have annoyed me. I mean, everything annoyed me lately, yet there I was, sparring with this stranger, feeling a slowly uncurling warmth that I couldn’t even name. When I met his gaze, the moment seemed to hang in time, as it had in the door at the airport. Except instead of coming or going, in or out, I was weighing amusement against my usual misery, inexplicable attraction against confusion an
d cynicism and common sense.

  Well, not inexplicable. I liked his strong features and confident bearing. Maybe I was just intrigued by the mystery, because he was so miserly with personal details, and there were so many enigmatic contradictions. He had the body language of an alpha dog, as Gigi’s trainer would say, but he was spending a slacker summer working for his dad. He talked like a college guy, but he had the hands of a labourer. There was probably a very boring explanation, and if I knew it, this unsettling … whatever it was … would go away.

  Gigi stretched and yawned in my lap, making me wonder how long we’d been sitting there. ‘We should start back,’ I said.

  Rhys winced. ‘I’m surprised Paula hasn’t used the horn.’ He descended the ridge, then held out a hand to help me. ‘Don’t forget your shoes.’

  I sighed and put them on. The right one was tight on my still swollen foot, but I’d live until I got back in the SUV. Instead of taking Rhys’s waiting hand, I dropped the end of Gigi’s leash into it and made my way off the slope by scooting on my rear end. Might as well make the back match the front.

  Gigi scampered happily down, and I reclaimed her leash from Rhys. He gestured for me to go ahead of him on the path. It wasn’t far, but the vegetation was thick, with dense, broad-leafed vines encroaching on even the cleared areas, creating a wall between this eerie world and the prosaic one where Paula waited in the car.

  ‘So, who’s Clara?’ I asked, mentally, as well as physically, returning to the road ahead.

  Rhys held back a branch, looking amused but answering helpfully. ‘Paula’s business partner. She handles the cooking. She and her daughter live on the property.’

  ‘And this Teen Town Council?’ I ducked under his arm. ‘What kind of fifties throwback is that? Are Wally and Beaver members? Do they put on shows in the barn?’

  He paused on the path, just before the last bend that would put us in sight of the car. I stopped too, and turned to find him studying me again. ‘You truly don’t know any of this?’