“You don't want to be outside on the mountain during a lightning storm.” He pushed the door the rest of the way open and moved past her. “You still have Jake's flag, right?”
“His flag?” She followed him into the living room. “What are you talking about? And I did not invite you into my house.”
“He used to keep it under the stairs.” He poked his head into the shadowed alcove beneath the risers. “Yep, there it is.” He pulled out a long cardboard tube.
“Are you listening to me at all? You can't just come in here and make yourself at home, uninvited.”
“I've got extra rope and carabineers in the truck, in case the ones from last year have gone missing,” he said. “Hurry up and change. Jake always insisted we start at dawn, but I thought I'd better let you sleep in.”
Maggie was not a violent woman, but he gave her no choice. She pounded on his back with both fists. “Listen to me. I am not going anywhere with you. Get out of my house.”
“Don't you even want to hear what I'm proposing?”
“So far you haven't
proposed
anything. You've been ordering me around as if I was some dim-witted child.”
“I never think of you as dim-witted.” His gaze lowered to the vicinity of her chest and the corners of his mouth quirked up. “Or as a child.”
She had to fight back a smile, which only irritated her more. She focused on the cardboard tube he held. “What is that?”
He popped the plastic cap off the end of the tube and shook out a red-and-white striped roll of fabric, which turned out to be a large American flag. “Jake flew it at the hermit's cabin, up on Mount Winston, every Fourth of July,” he said. “I thought you and I ought to continue the tradition.”
“Why did my father fly a flag at the hermit's cabin?” she asked.
“He said he wanted people to know the hermit was a very patriotic guy.”
“You talk about it as if there really was a hermit,” she said. “Was there?”
He shrugged. “Someone lived in that cabin a long time ago, but not for years. It was just a joke Jake played on the tourists.”
“That doesn't mean I have to be part of the joke.”
Jameso re-rolled the flag and slid it back into the tube. “Come with me. Please?”
She hesitated. What would be the worst thing that could happen if she spent the day with Jameso? That she'd stop resisting the physical pull between them? Barb would vote for that option.
You deserve to have fun after the hell Carter put you through.
Maggie could practically hear her friend whispering in her ear. But there would be nothing fun about getting hurt again. Jameso definitely had pain potential.
But if she turned him away, then every time she saw the flag flying on Mount Winston she'd play an awful game of what-if? “I'll go,” she said. “But only because you asked nicely. And because I want to see this hermit's cabin up close.”
She retreated upstairs to change. When she came down, dressed in jeans, hiking boots, and a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, she found Jameso leaning against the tower of packing boxes. “Is this your famous glass collection?” he asked.
“That's it.”
“Nice.” He looked at the boxes. “I can see why you love it so much.”
“How's the motorcycle?” she asked.
“Repaired and safely in my garage. If we didn't have so much to carry with us this morning, I'd have brought it and given you a ride.”
The idea of thundering down the road clinging to Jameso's muscular back sent a tremor through her stomach. “I'll pass,” she said.
“Oh, you haven't lived until you've been on a ride with me.”
The sexual inference was so overt Maggie had to believe it was deliberate. She turned away. “Let's get going. I have other things to do today.”
Though Mount Winston was just across the valley from the cabin, the route there was a circuitous one, over bumpy back roads that navigated shallow stream crossings and wound along narrow ledges. “Why does everything around here take three times longer to get to than it should?” Maggie groused as the truck growled its way up yet another steep gravel slope.
“Maybe it takes just the right amount of time to get there,” Jameso said. “And everyone else is in too much of a hurry.”
“I used to feel as if my life was crawling by,” Maggie said. “Lately it's rushing. I've heard that's a sign of getting old.”
“You're not old,” Jameso said.
“I'll be forty in September.”
“Age is a state of mind.”
“Do you have any other clichés you'd like to share?”
“I'm serious. I felt a lot older at twenty-six wearing full battle gear and staring down a kid with an IED in Fallujah than I do now at thirty-two.”
Thirty-two. So she'd been right to think he was younger than her. Eight years wasn't that much, but still . . .
“We'll do something special for your birthday,” he said. “Your first birthday as a free woman.”
She didn't feel that free, not really. She was living in a different place, working a different job, but it didn't feel as if much inside her had changed. She was the same woman, with the same uncertainties and fears she'd always had. The impact of Jameso's words registered. “What is this âwe'?” she asked. “I told you I wasn't interested in going out with you.”
“I've got a few months to change your mind.”
She started to tell him he couldn't persuade her, but she wasn't exactly avoiding the man, was she? For all her resolve not to get involved, she kept tangling with him. He was like one of those sticker-filled vines she used to pull out of her garden in Houston: persistent and impossible to shake off. “I might not even be here in a few months,” she said.
“Where would you go?”
“I was thinking of traveling. I've always wanted to do that.”
“Could you really leave here, now that the mountains are in your blood?”
He made Eureka sound like some sort of communicable disease. “I'm sure people leave here all the time. Otherwise, we'd be overrun with tourists who showed up in June and never went away.”
“People seldom leave once they belong here.”
“I'm not so sure I belong here.”
“You've settled in nicely. You have a home, a job.”
“If that was all it took to belong somewhere, I could go to any state in the Union and have those things. That wouldn't make any of them home. And don't say my father's cabin is home. I'm not crazy about the idea of spending the winter up there.”
“So get a place in town. I wasn't talking about the cabin, just that you fit in well with Eureka. Not everyone appreciates our quirks, you know.”
“Imagine that.” Just last week she'd written a story for the paper about a clash between summer residents who'd started a petition drive to install iron gates over every mine entrance in the district, and locals who'd pointed out attempting such a task would bankrupt the county in no time. But it wasn't only spending the money that people objected to, Maggie had learned. “The mountains aren't supposed to be as safe as a kindergarten,” one man had explained. “It's dangerous up here, and people need to respect that.” People in Eureka
liked
the danger; they were proud they'd survived it.
“We're almost there,” Jameso said. “Or at least as close as we can drive. We'll have to hike the last three miles.”
She started to protest that her idea of a fun day was not hiking three miles straight up the side of a mountain and then back down, but then she'd have to endure a pep talk from Jameso about how she could do it. Or worse, he'd accuse her of being afraid. So she kept quiet. The hike wouldn't kill her, and once she'd done it, her curiosity would be satisfied and she wouldn't have to do it again.
He parked his truck at a narrow pullout past the faint tracks of an old mine road and then pulled a backpack from behind the seat. “What's in there?” Maggie asked.
“Emergency supplies. Lunch. A few other things we'll need.”
“Emergency supplies? I thought you said this was only a three-mile hike.”
“If the weather changes suddenly, or one of us gets hurt, we could end up having to spend the night out. It's always a good idea to be prepared.”
That whole danger thing again. Or maybe he was trying to impress her. She followed him up the trail, which quickly grew steep. “If . . . anybody . . . can hike . . . up here,” she panted. “What's . . . to keep . . . anyone . . . from coming . . . up here?”
“It's not a trail on any map,” Jameso said. “It's not even a real trailâmore of a goat track. You have to really know where you're going to get there.”
“And you're sure . . . you know . . . how to get there?”
He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “Are you saying you don't trust me?”
Did she trust him? She'd tossed the remark off as another sally in the war of words they always seemed to end up in, but his questions forced her to think. “I believe you care enough about your own skin you wouldn't risk it on a climb you weren't sure about,” she said.
“I'm much more likely to risk my own skin than yours,” he said.
She flushed, searching and failing to come up with some flippant reply to diffuse this weighted remark.
“If I let anything happen to you, Jake would come back to haunt me,” he said, and started up the trail again.
Chapter 18
W
hen Lucas grew bored with riding around town on his bicycle or staying home with his books and computer, he liked to stop by Lacy's and look through all the old things. His grandmother would give him little jobs to do, and while he worked the two of them would talk. The conversations were rarely serious, but she enjoyed the insight into the way his mind worked. He was both sweetly innocent and scarily smart, both tough and vulnerable in a way that moved Lucille almost to tears at times.
Today he was sorting through a carton of yellowing newspapers that had been part of an estate Lucille had purchased in Montrose. She'd been ready to throw the box out when Lucas had asked to look through it. He pulled out a copy of the
Eureka Miner
dated August 1916. The headline was about a battle in France, but Lucas's focus was on a photo at the bottom of the page. The picture showed a train of burros weighted down with timbers and stovepipe and baskets of supplies for the booming gold and silver mines.
“Do you think there's still gold and stuff in the mines?” Lucas asked.
“I know there is,” Lucille said. “The problem is, what's there costs too much to get out of the ground.”
“Gold's worth a lot of money,” Lucas said. “How could it cost too much to get out?”
“It takes expensive machinery. And there aren't roads up to some of the places, so they'd either have to build them or use helicopters. That costs tremendous amounts of money.”
“What if there's something really valuable up there they don't know about yetâlike some really rare mineral they can use to make nuclear weapons or something? That would make it worth spending the money to get it out, wouldn't it?”
Lucille smiled. The boy definitely had an imagination. “I suppose so.”
“Then somebody should be up there looking in some of the mines, to see if they can find things like that.”
“Maybe someone will someday.” She set aside the set of silver candlesticks she'd been polishing, part of the same estate that had yielded the newspapers. “Are you about done sorting those papers?”
“Almost.” He pulled out another sheaf of yellowing newsprint. “Can I take some of these home with me to read through?”
“If you want.”
“There's a lot of funny old ads and pictures,” he said. “I could scan some of them into the computer and send them to D. J.,” he said. “He'd get a kick out of them. He likes machinery and stuff.”
“So you've heard from D. J.?” Lucille had hoped, since the boy hadn't mentioned him, that the two hadn't kept in touch.
“We e-mail all the time.” He refolded the paper, set it aside, and pulled out the next issue from the boxâfrom the 1940s, Lucille saw. “I don't talk about it much 'cause it upsets Mom.”
So he'd picked up on that. “You know, Lucas, your mother isn't upset with you,” she said.
“She's mad that D. J. wrote to me, but he wasn't just her friendâhe was my friend, too. Just because she got mad at him for not staying with us doesn't mean I was mad.” He spread a section of paper out on the table and studied the photograph on the front page, of a narrow-gauge locomotive half buried in an avalanche. “Maybe when he's done working in Iraq he'll come to see me, and Mom won't be so mad at him anymore.”
Lucille didn't think she imagined the wistfulness in his voice. Time to change the subject. “I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Founders' Pageant,” she said. “Are you excited about it?”
He lifted his thin shoulders in a shrug. “I'm mainly just doing it because Ms. Wynock couldn't find anybody else.”
“So she nagged you until you said yes.” That was Cassie's usual approach to anything, from getting more shelving for the library to a historical survey of the town buildings. People gave in because they grew weary of listening to her.
“Not really. She asked me and I thought I should do it because she helps me find books at the library, and I don't think she has very many friends to help her.”
Did Cassie have friends? Everyone in town knew her and most of them tolerated her, or accepted her as part of the fabric of the community. But Lucille could not think of a single person she would say was Cassie's friend. Had there ever been anyone? Were some people simply destined to always be apart?
She studied Lucas, his fair head bent over the old papers. He hadn't had a haircut since arriving in Eureka, and the blond locks curled around his ears and the nape of his neck. Lucille thought the longer style suited him, disguising the roundness of his head and the height of his forehead and size of his ears. “Have you made any friends here in town?” she asked. “Are there any boys or girls your age you, well, hang out with?”
“I know some kids.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I'm not really much for hanging out.”
She resisted the urge to reach out and smooth the back of his head, as one would soothe a small child. “It's good to have friends,” she said. “The longer you're here, the more people you'll know and the easier it will be for you to make friends.”
“How long are we going to stay here?” he asked. “Mom hasn't said.”
Olivia hadn't said anything to Lucille about her plans either. She was still dating Dan Brewster, though Lucille doubted the seriousness of that relationship; she'd also been seen in the company of at least two other men who frequented the Dirty Sally. Maybe that was for the best. If Olivia wasn't serious about any one man, she wouldn't feel the need to leave town if things didn't work out with one or the other. Lucille knew from experience a broken heart was a powerful motivation for travel.
“I hope you'll stay a long time,” she said.
“Yeah, me too.” His gaze remained fixed on the photo of the buried train engine. “Can you imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning and everything you knew had been swept away in an avalanche? Just wiped out by all that snow.”
“No, I can't.” Though her divorce had been like that: One day her world had been familiar and warm, the next it was empty and cold, home and family and her picture of the future wiped out with a single sentence:
I don't love you anymore
. The words were as cold and obliterating as a cataract of snow. She did reach out to stroke Lucas's head now. “No more avalanches for us,” she said. “We'll stay here where it's safe and warm.”
“It isn't always warm here,” he said, turning over another page in the paper. “With all that snow, I'll bet it gets really cold in the winter.”
Her winter would be a lot warmer if he and Olivia stayed, but the boy wouldn't understand such sentimentality. “You'll like it here in winter,” she said. “You can learn to ski. Or snowboard.”
“That would be cool.” He straightened a stack of papers. “I'll take these home.”
Home
. She hadn't given the boy much in his life, but she wanted to give him that. She hadn't realized before he and Olivia moved in how empty the old house had been. How empty
she'd
been. She hadn't minded being single all these years, but the maternal side of her that had screwed up so badly years ago longed for a second chance. A chance to be a grandmother to Lucasâand the mother Olivia had never really had.
Â
After the first mile of climbing the steep, barely discernible track, Maggie silently cursed Jameso for ever talking her into coming with him on this fool's errand. After another half mile, during which she turned her ankle twice on loose stones, she switched to cursing out loud.
“Who cares if the damn imaginary hermit flies the flag on the Fourth or not?” she asked.
“It's a tradition,” Jameso said. “People would miss it if it wasn't there.”
“Then those people should climb up here and hang the flag.”
“Jake would have gotten a kick out of knowing you were carrying on something he started.”
If Jameso had caught her in a more sentimental momentâsay, after a few glasses of wine, or some time when every bone in her body didn't ache from the climbâshe might have been swayed. In her current state, she could think of few things less absurd. “Do you really think I'm concerned with impressing a dead man?” she asked. “One who couldn't be bothered to have anything to do with me while he was alive?”
Jameso stopped and waited for her to catch up with him. “Good for you,” he said.
“Good for me what?” She stopped beside him, bent forward, hands on her knees, trying to get more oxygen into her lungs.
“I was wondering if you'd been honest with yourself about what a bastard Jake was to you.”
“I might have once had illusions about my father, but living here in Eureka has opened my eyes.” She straightened. “Nice to know you've been so concerned about my mental health, but I'm fine. My father may have been the first man to disappoint me, but he certainly wasn't the last.”
If they'd been on level ground, she might have swept past him in some grand gesture, but that was impossible on this slopeânot to mention she wouldn't know which way to head if she did take the lead.
He took her arm and helped her up the trail beside him. She didn't resist, instead enjoying the strength and warmth of his grasp. It felt . . . supportive, not coercive. The difference was subtle, but important. “Tell me about these other worthless men,” he said. “I assume your ex-husband is a chief offender. What was his name?”
“Carter. Carter Stevens. We met my freshman year in college. A friend introduced us. She told me he would be perfect for me and I was dumb enough to believe her.”
He frowned at her, dark brows drawn together in reproach.
“Okay, not dumb,” she amended. “But naïve. I was nineteen years old and had my life all planned out: I was going to get married, have children, and live happily ever after, and anything that didn't fit with that picture I ignored. The truth was always there right in front of me, but I refused to acknowledge it. It was as if I wore blinders for twenty years.”
“What was the truth?” Jameso asked.
“That the thing Carter cared about most was Carter. He didn't want anything to inconvenience him, ever, and I played right along. I ran his business for discount wages, cooked his meals and kept his home, and let him convince me that children would be just too much trouble.” Her breath caught on the last words, the injustice of it too much to bear.
Jameso's hand tightened on her arm and she swallowed hard, determined not to break down in front of him. “You'll make a great mom,” he said.
“It's a little late for that now.”
“My mother was forty-one when I was born and I turned out all right, though I suppose some would say that's debatable.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“Seventy-three and she swims two miles every morning and teaches a seniors' exercise class at the Y in Clearwater, Florida. She'd read the riot act to anyone who tried to tell her she was too old to do anything.”
“She sounds like a remarkable woman.”
“I have an affinity for remarkable women.”
She chose not to acknowledge what might or might not be blatant flattery, but his words had cheered her. “Are we almost to the top?” she asked.
“Almost. The hermit's cabin is over this rise and to the left.”
Sure enough, two minutes later, they topped the rise and Maggie saw a flash of red, which turned out to be a pair of bloomers flapping on a clothesline strung between two trees. She laughed. “I don't think I realized before that red was a pair of bloomers.”
“Lucille's idea. She contributes the hermit and his wife's wardrobe every year.”
The cabin itself was little more than a façade tucked up against the cliff, an old washtub anchored by a large rock beside the door. “Where does the flag go?” Maggie asked.
“Over here.” Jameso led the way to a flagpole anchored in cement just beyond the clothesline.
“Who hauled a bag of cement up here?” Maggie asked.
“Who do you think?”
“Jake?” She glanced back at the path they'd just climbed. “But how?”
“When he put his mind to do something, he did it.” Jameso took out the flag and let it unfurl in the breeze. “Come here and hold this while I fix it to the rope.”
He fit carabineers into grommets along the edge of the flag, then fastened these to a rope on the flag pole. As the breeze caught the Stars and Stripes, snapping the banner in the wind, Maggie fought the urge to put her hand over her heart in salute.
“It looks nice up there, doesn't it?” Jameso came to stand beside her.
“How long do you leave it up?” Maggie asked.
“For a week after the Fourth; then I'll come up and get it. Jake originally thought he'd leave it up here year-round, but the sun and wind tears it up pretty quick, and it bothered him to see it falling apart like that. So he decided to just put it out for the holiday.”