The Witch of Roan Mountain (3 page)

He’d filled out in the years she’d been gone. He’d transformed from a lanky boy into broad-shouldered man. When he’d pulled her into his chest, she felt the hardness of him. He still smelled the same. Crisp, clean. Like Balsam trees after a soaking rain.

Campbell. That ship had sailed when she’d left for Clemson.

She wasn’t going to solve anything tonight. It was full dark now. Maeve placed her wine glass on the porch rail and walked out into the yard. She loved the cool crush of the grass under her feet. Up above, the stars were incredibly bright. Living in Atlanta, she’d never given the stars a single thought. Maeve had forgotten just how beautiful the night sky could be.

She’d forgotten a lot of things.

A lot of important things.

The best thing about being dead is that no doors are closed to you and you can come and go as you please.

Two freedoms denied to me when I was alive.

My first husband, Hoke, was a sorry drunk. My daddy made me marry him. Said I’d be an old maid soon if I didn’t. Forced my hand. I never forgave Daddy for that.

I also never forgave him for telling me a woman with a claw for a hand like mine ought to just take what she could get.

Don’t expect I ever will, even if I’m fated to wander these mountains, somewhere between the living and the dead, for another hundred and fifty years.

I didn’t want to marry Hoke. I wanted to wait for Jenks. He’d gone to The War and I was the only one who believed he was coming back alive. Even if he was dead, in some unmarked grave somewhere in the cold ground of the North, I’d have rather waited for all eternity than to have to sleep beside Hoke every night of my life.

Hoke never went to The War. He said he was too old but I knew otherwise. He was too much of a lazy coward. He spent the last bit of money we’d saved to pay for another man to go in his place.

The best stroke of luck I ever had was the night he drank too much and fell asleep in the snow. I found him the next morning frozen as solid a log. I know that sounds mean. I tried to care about Hoke but he didn’t care for nothing but himself and a drink of whiskey.

By the time he died, he’d beaten me so many times I didn’t feel anything for him but white-hot hatred.

I still loved Jenks. Through and through. From the day I’d met him, when we were five or six, I was never able to figure out where I stopped and he began. We were like two branches on the same tree.

But by the time he’d come home, nothing but skin and bones, I was married. There was nothing for him to do but marry Bessie.

I had no idea then that anything could hurt me more than knowing he was lying beside her every night.

I was wrong.

*****

The next morning, after a night filled with strange, mist-filled dreams, Maeve dressed and headed toward town. She was going to check on Granny and then she was heading to the library. Surely they’d have something about Delphine.

Granny was eating bacon, eggs, and biscuits slathered in gravy when Maeve arrived.

“Hungry?” she asked with one eyebrow raised.

Granny slugged back a glass of milk and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “The gravy was a little lumpy but overall those ladies in the cafeteria do a pretty good job.”

She spent a few minutes with her grandmother, heard all about the night nurses and the ridiculous waste of supplies. Granny didn’t believe in wasting anything. She washed bread bags instead of buying Ziplocs. The idea that hospitals used everything only once and then tossed it really irked the old woman.

“Anything you need me to bring you?” Maeve asked, rising from the recliner in the corner of the room.

“I’d give a pretty penny for my knitting.”

“Right beside your chair like always?”

Granny nodded. “I told Homer, the man who drives the ambulance, to go back into the house and get it but he wouldn’t.” Granny shook her head at the injustice. “How long could that have possibly taken him?”

“He probably didn’t want it to be tossed around on the drive here.”

“Bring the whole basket. I might need some stitch markers or something.”

“Need anything else?” Maeve walked closer to the bed and looked down at Granny. Her color was better and her cheeks were rosy.

“That should do it.”

Maeve bent over the bed and kissed Granny on the forehead. Her gray hair was as fine as corn silk. “Love you.”

“Love you, too.” Granny grinned.

Behind her, Maeve heard the door to the room open. She turned on one heel expecting to see the nurse.

Campbell Hyatt.

Talk about shitty timing.

“Hey,” he said. In one hand he held a cup of coffee. In the other was Granny’s knitting basket. “Thought you might get bored and want this, Granny.”

When the hell did he start calling her grandmother “Granny”?

Granny’s smile took years off her age. “Aren’t you just the sweetest man in all of Avery County?” She shot a sidelong look at Maeve. “So thoughtful.” She was pouring it on thicker than cane syrup.

Maeve glared at her and moved past him. “I’ll see y’all later,” she said, walking toward the door.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Campbell asked.

Maeve let out a sigh. “Yeah. I guess.”

Granny was still smiling when they stepped out into the hall.

Campbell closed the door and gestured to the sitting area across from the nurse’s station. “She’s going to need some help for a while,” he said. “I was just wondering if you planned on sticking around.”

“I can take care of Granny.”

He took a sip of his coffee and looked into her eyes. “You’ve been gone a long time, Maeve. I look out for her. I need your word that you’ll stay until she’s okay on her own again. You can’t run out on her like you did last time.”

“Where the hell do you get off? Run out on her? I went to college, Campbell. I graduated from law school. It wasn’t like I was on some joy ride.”

“It’s been hard on her.”

Maeve shook her head. “I don’t see how. You’re around all the damn time. What could she possibly need me for when she’s got the
most thoughtful man in the county
looking after her?”

“She needs someone.” Every eye at the nurse’s station was trained on Campbell and Maeve. He lowered his voice and leaned toward her. “She’s not as young as she used to be.”

How dare Campbell treat her like she was some irresponsible teenager? She’d been off earning a living, sending money to Granny every month. Maybe she hadn’t visited often enough but with her crazy schedule and the drive, it had been too much for a weekend.

“I know exactly how old she is,” Maeve said through clenched teeth. “I don’t need you to tell me anything about my own grandmother.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve been here. You haven’t.”

Maeve felt her blood beginning to boil. “What was I supposed to do, Campbell? Stay here and get a job working at the Depot Café? Have a few kids and feel fulfilled?” She rose from the bench. “Don’t be mad at me for making something of myself.”

He stood. They were standing so close Maeve could see the rhythm of the pulse in his neck. “That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point?” Maeve raised her voice.

“The point,” Campbell said, leaning over so that his nose was only an inch or two from hers. “The point is that you’re the only family she’s got. She thinks you hung the damn moon. The least you could do is be part of her life.”

The criticism stung. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to spend more time in the mountains with Granny. It was just that her life went in another direction. She’d always planned to take more vacation time, visit more often, but she hadn’t.

“I am part of her life. I always have been.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Family is all we have in this world, Maeve.” He placed his hand on her upper arm. “I don’t want you to have regrets.”

“Why would I have regrets?”

His green eyes blazed. “I forgot who I was talking to,” he said, pivoting on his heel and walking down the hall.

“Don’t walk away from me, Campbell Hyatt,” she said as she charged toward his broad back. Anger, white-hot, flared in her chest, and she was determined to have the last word.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he asked without ever turning around.

******

No one could get to him like Maeve.

He’d wanted to hurt her feelings, make her understand how deeply she’d hurt him. It wasn’t like him but he hadn’t been able to resist. Campbell wasn’t a mean man, didn’t have a hateful bone in his body, but Maeve made him crazy. It would’ve been easier to handle the anger if it hadn’t been counterbalanced with a mad attraction he couldn’t seem to put a lid on.

She’d left Avery County and never looked back. He’d been a casualty along with Granny.

It did no good to rehash the past, wonder how things might have been if she hadn’t been so determined to get the hell out of the mountains.

Their relationship hasn’t been puppy love. It had been the real thing. So real he’d intended to propose marriage. The engagement ring had been in his pocket the night she’d told him the scholarship to Clemson had come through. He had known, standing in the yellow light of Granny’s front porch, Maeve would never be back for good.

He’d sold the ring to a friend of his and tried to forget.

Every day, for ten years, he’d tried to forget.

And then she had to go and drag her ass back home.

After checking to make sure Granny was comfortable, he headed back to his cruiser and started his daily patrol. He headed out of Newland and onto the backroads of the county. He climbed steadily, enjoying the roar of the engine. Campbell concentrated on the road so he didn’t have to think about Maeve.

Maybe that stubborn woman would realize that what she’d seen at the top of Roan Mountain wasn’t a ghost.

Ghosts weren’t real.

Hell, he was a cop. He’d seen just about everything. Shootings, domestics, suicides, but he’d never seen a ghost. If they were real, after eight years of wearing a badge, he would’ve seen one.

Maeve had only thought she’d seen something because she was under so much stress. It had been an illusion. Nothing more.

He knew why Maeve had come home. She’d been tossed out of Atlanta on her fine little ass.

She’d been representing a murderer. High profile case, all over CNN. The case against her client had been flimsy and everyone thought she’d get him off but in the middle of the trial, the son of a bitch had slipped up, admitted his guilt to Maeve, and she did the right thing.

She went to the judge.

Her employer wasn’t happy.

She’d come back to Avery County because her high-falutin life in Atlanta was on the skids. Not because she wanted to be closer to Granny. Not because she got home-sick. Certainly not because she missed him.

She just had nowhere else to hide.

Since Maeve had been gone, he’d kept an eye on Granny Holcombe. When he’d dated Maeve, the old woman had stolen his heart and he saw no reason not to continue the relationship.

When she’d left for college, he and Granny had comforted each other. They’d sat in chairs on the front porch, watched the sun slip behind the mountains, and silently thought about the one person who was missing.

Their Maeve.

Granny didn’t have anyone else. Maeve’s mother, a petty thief and drug addict who’d died of an overdose when Maeve was a kid, had been Granny’s only child. She was totally alone at the top of a mountain in a cabin heated only by wood.

Campbell had just been doing his duty.

But now, with Maeve back in town, he’d have to back out. She could take care of Granny. And when she left, which she would the first chance she got, he’d pick up the pieces. Just like last time.

Damn Maeve. Why couldn’t she have kept her ass at home? Like a normal person?

*****

The library was small. A converted brick home, it was just off Main Street. Maeve dropped her purse on a table near the back and headed to the section that housed all the regional books. It was in the same place it had been when she’d used it to write papers in high school.

She chose a few books and took them back to her table. She opened the new spiral notebook she’s purchased at the drug store and wrote the date at the top of the first page. Most of the books had at least a chapter on the ghosts of the higher elevations but there wasn’t much about Delphine.

By noon, she still had very little information and the yogurt she’d eaten for breakfast wasn’t cutting it anymore. She placed the books on the return cart and left the library. She walked down the street and into Bertie’s, a small café that served breakfast and lunch.

Maybe some of the regulars would know the story.

The café hadn’t changed at all. It looked like it was stuck somewhere in the 1950s. The only nod to the turn of the twenty-first century was the debit card machine. Bertie was still working the grill and his wife, Hazel, was still waiting tables.

“My, my, my,” Hazel said when she came to Maeve’s table. “Haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays. How’s Granny? Heard on the scanner she’d had a fall.”

“She’s fine. It’s a simple break. She’ll be home in a few days.”

“Glad to hear that. Are you going to stick around for a while after she gets home?”

What the hell? Did these people think she was the most irresponsible person ever?

Maeve nodded. “I’m between jobs so I’ll stay for as long as she needs me.”

“I heard that you got fired.”