The Story Keeper (7 page)

She seemed a piece of the mountains themselves, pressed into human form, her skin the smooth olive-brown of drying leaves. For a moment, he wondered if the things they’d said about her were true. Out of instinct, Rand’s fingers traveled to the gold cross in his pocket
 
—the one that had seen his father and grandfather through travels to many lands. He touched it through the fabric, cast off the heathenism of Jep and his men. This battered creature had been formed by God, not the forest. Though she knew nothing of the Almighty, the Almighty knew of her.

Somehow you must stop this.
The conviction was instant, all that he knew was right, and sane. This evening’s events could not reach their intended end. Quite simply, he could not live with it. Could not live with himself if he allowed it.

Force was not a viable option. He was outnumbered and weaponless. He must think of something. Quickly.

He slipped the holy cross free of his pocket as the men turned their attention temporarily to the question of pitching their horse picket. Opening his palm, Rand studied the treasure, this thing that had remained with his family, given from one generation to another since even before the first Champlains reached the New World by
way of Charleston Harbor. The cross had ridden heavy in his pocket, mile upon mile, these past weeks, reminding him that he had not been entirely honest about his reasons for this trip.

“That thang ain’t gonna protect ya. Don’t go gittin’ no fool ideas,” Ira hissed under his breath. The sound caught the notice of Jep, and Rand closed his fingers over the cross again.

Jep returned to the area near the lantern, his gaze traveling to the girl and back to Rand. “She lookin’ at’cha, young sap. She lookin’ at’cha like she
know
who you
be
. You a friend a this gal’s people?”

Rand hazarded a glance at her. She was watching him, true, and clutching some form of pendant
 
—a small, rectangular locket, shaped from bone or ivory. The bauble hung with several carved beads and shiny bits of wampum shell on a leather cord around her neck. A bit of something misty and blue dangled over her thumb, and though he could not identify it for certain, it looked much like the salt glass occasionally found along the shores near Charleston.

“I do not know the girl.” Inside, cold fear chilled the heat of indignation, threatened to abort the plan forming in his mind.

“She lookin’ like she knowed ’im!” one of the other men called from beyond the lantern arc. “She look to be waitin’ on ’im fer somethin’.”

“I do not know the girl,” Rand insisted.

Jep squinted at him, then moved to his captive, grabbed her hair, and pulled back her head so that she glared at him with the one good eye. “He one a yer people, is he?”

“I have never seen the girl.” Rand’s words came rushed, a bit desperate now, but he forced himself not to move, not to rise.

Somewhere in the trees, an owl called. Rand thought of Peter denying the Christ three times.

Jep released the girl, propelled her with the sole of one boot, and she fell in a heap once more. Rand didn’t look her way again. Around him, the party of men went about making their camp and, at Ira’s uneasy invitation, pillaging the mule wagon for stores. Rand waited for them to satisfy themselves with food and alcohol, to become sated around a newly lit fire and not so well within their faculties before he set about his plan.

“She be lookin’ at’cha again, young sap,” Jep observed finally, and Rand knew his time had come. There would be no other opportunity. Jep was rising to his feet, intent on the girl again. “And you be lookin’ her way. Mayhaps you ain’t knowed her people. Mayhaps you be waitin’ fer a chance to try’n take me. That it, pup?”

Rand’s temper came surprisingly short, and with it a hasty response pressed his lips, the response of a boy who had always towered confidently above his contemporaries. He bit back the words and smiled a tight smile instead. “I would like to purchase the girl.” The offer came too fast, a bit unleveled and uncertain. He clutched the cross more tightly, steeled himself. This was not a boy’s game. This was a game for men. A game of life and death.

Jep looked deeply into him, narrow, piggish eyes giving no hint of the man’s thoughts. If there was a soul in this man, anything but evil, it lay well hidden.

Around the camp, the others turned their heads drunkenly. The girl only watched without moving. Rand wondered if, perhaps, she
did not even speak English. There were those in the mountains who only knew the old languages. Cherokee, Catawba, French, Scotch.

“Undamaged,” Rand added.

“She done witched ’im, that’s what she done!” one of the men stammered, the words blending together. “She been holdin’ that thang round ’er neck, and he done look in her eye. You’s a fool, boy. Don’ never gander a Melungeon in the eye. She’s turned ya spellish now.”

Rand rose slowly to his feet, stood himself straight, regarded Jep from only slightly below the other man’s height. “I can assure you, I am not bewitched. Nor do I have any fear of whatever she may be. I am a Christian, sir. I put no stock in such things.”

Jep blinked once, again, struggling to regain a greater measure of sobriety, and for the first time, Rand saw a sense of concern in him. “You be a preacher man, young sap?”

Rand opened the hand with the holy cross in it. “Preparing to be.” It was not, precisely, an untruth, he hoped, lest these be his last moments on earth. “This was given me by my grandfather, carried by many generations of my family as they brought the gospel to the darkest corners of the globe.”

Jep staggered backward a step. “I ain’t offerin’ her fer sellin’. Not yet, leastwise.” He took another swig of Ira’s mash liquor, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and stretched the jug toward Rand. When the gesture was refused, Jep reached toward the cross as if he meant to take it, then pulled his hand away again, said instead, “But might be I done decided to go soft on you, boy. Might be I let you live to learn a few thangs. Might be . . .
not
.”

“Jep, you can’t go killin’ no preacher man,” one of the others warned. “Could be he’s why the witchin’ spirits and haints ain’t flew agin us a’ready.”

Ira climbed to his feet cautiously, seizing the opportunity now that liquor had dulled minds and loosened the conversation. “Preachin’ do run pow’rful thick wit’ this’un. He ain’t stopped talkin’ ’bout it since I brung him outta Murphy. You go on and kill him, you be havin’ the
unseen
a-comin’ on ya from above
and
below all at oncet. That be why the girl been lookin’ at ’im. She scared’a his magic.”

“That so?” Jep’s lips parted into a brown-stained smile and he turned his regard to Ira. “Might be I just gut
you
, then.”

“Leave him as he is.” Rand’s pulse was rapping like a beggar at the door, but his thoughts were acute, precise. He sensed the balance slowly turning. He could feel, for the first time in his life, the power of good against evil.

Jep backed three crooked strides toward the girl. She drew away, tried to scramble out of reach, but the man caught her by a handful of her brown woolen dress and her hair, dragged her upward as buttons popped and stitches tore.

“You ain’t nothin’.” The words ground low, and then Jep threw the girl forward. Encumbered by the chains, she fell facedown in the dirt at Rand’s feet.

He resisted the urge to help her. This was a delicate game of cards they were playing. He could not risk revealing his hand.

On the ground, she gathered herself to her knees, wrapped both hands over the carved amulet strung around her neck, and began
murmuring in some tongue that he’d neither heard before nor understood.

“It be the devil talk!” The other men backed away, putting the wagon between themselves and the girl.

“You fix ’er,” Jep commanded, spreading his feet to catch his balance before pointing at the girl and then at Rand. “Git the devil outta ’er. I’ll put my brand on ’er then, and she might be worth keepin’.”

“Do it, boy,” Ira commanded. It was impossible to tell whether he believed such a thing to be possible, but it hardly mattered now.

Rand pretended to consider the request, to assess what sort of procedure might be needed. The girl’s murmurings grew louder, the language strange and guttural, almost familiar in some way, but he couldn’t isolate it.

The flame flared and popped. Both Rand and Jep jerked toward it.

A strangeness slid through Rand then, a current of doubt, a sudden lacking of faith. He banished it quickly, narrowed his focus, let the doxologies whisper through his mind. “I’ll need my saddle pack that I might retrieve the Bible from it.” He angled toward the wagon, but no sooner had he taken a step than Jep’s pistol was trained his way.

“Hack, bring ’im his book.”

“I ain’t touchin’ it!”

“Bring his whole pack, then!” Jep took another swig of whiskey, swung the pistol toward the wagon, fired off a shot that struck the dirt and sent the mules skittering on their tethers. Puddinhead sat back on his lead, trying for all he was worth to pull down the tree to which Rand had secured him.

“Now!” Jep demanded, turning the weapon toward the girl. “I want ’er fixed.”

At the wagon, the men elected Revi to deliver the pack. Rand waited anxiously, counting each step until the pack was safely in his hand. The pistol lay within it, but what now? He was a fine shot, and quick, but Jep’s weapon was already drawn.

He took out the Bible first, the old brown leather-bound that had been given him by his father. A family heirloom that had seen the pulpit in many a church. Turning the pages, he envisioned childhood days when he’d stood at altars in empty sanctuaries and pretended to preach the sermon. He’d put on convincing performances back then.

Letting the book lie flat in one broad palm, he allowed the night air to tease the pages, noting that Jep, his men, Revi, even the girl, seemed momentarily transfixed by the movement.

And a moment was all he needed.

Before Jep could react, Rand had drawn the pistol, aimed, and sighted it. Jep’s bleary gaze met his at the end of the barrel, the realization dawning slowly.

Ira grabbed his gun as the others scrambled for their weapons. “You’uns jus’ quieten over there. Believe we’s about to be havin’ us a diff’rnt kinda conversation, now ain’t we? Now, ya done et my food and stolt goods off’n my wagon. I don’ care none ’bout the girl. You gimme back all’s mine and you take ’er and git. We gonna figure this’ere bidness be done with and we gonna part ways. Ain’t got no more twixt us, savvy?”

Skirting the lantern, Rand stepped backward so he had the whole of the group in his sights, including Ira. “We’re leaving,” he informed them. “And we’re taking the girl with us.”

Chapter 7

I
t was nine thirty at night when I finally called Jamie. By then, I’d read through the three chapters of the manuscript at least a half-dozen times. I’d tried Google searches on the title of the story, the characters’ names, and other key phrases, looking for publication information, but come up dry.

The manuscript, as far as I could tell, had never been in print. Once that was established, I scanned the piece like a code breaker trying to ferret out its secrets, understand its power. Why did it seem as though something lay hidden just beneath the surface . . . something I was missing? Why did the manuscript compel me so? I’d never bought anything tied to Appalachia. In fact, I’d avoided such projects when agents pitched them to me. Too real. Too close to parts of myself I wanted to forget.

But this story had me by the throat. I needed to know why.

Jamie was the only one I could call. A best friend will come over
at nine thirty on a Friday night when you can’t explain the reason, and if she happens to be brilliant as well, so much the better.

Friday leapt from his chair and went ballistic when I let Jamie in the door. The little Napoleon didn’t cotton to visitors generally. He barely allowed me to live here.

Jamie curled her lip and growled back at him. “You know, Friday, I’m totally an animal person, but you are seriously obnoxious. Maybe you should consider therapy.” She unwound a fashionable scarf and dropped it with her designer coat. She had on a little black dress and ridiculously high heels with a platform sole under the toe. No doubt she’d been out with her roommates.

“Great shoes. Can I borrow those sometime?”

“Yeah, if you’d ever go out with us. It’s like that thing with Brian ruined you for good. You know, just because he turned out to be a schmuck-ola doesn’t mean every guy you meet is a loser.” Bracing her hands on her hips, she tipped her head to one side. “So what’s with the big phone call?”

I picked up the envelope, the packet reassembled exactly as I’d found it. I wanted Jamie to get the full effect. “Look at this. It was on my desk this morning at work.”

“You dragged me over here for a
submission
? Seriously?”

“It’s not a submission. I mean, it wasn’t delivered to my in-box
or
my pile. I’m saying that I
found
it on the corner of my desk this morning. No explanation.”

Jamie teetered on one foot while she unbuckled a shoe, then switched to unbuckle the other and finally kicked both off by the door. “Ohhh, my toes.”

She crossed the room to the kitchen, skirting Friday, now back in his night-night chair, and proceeded to the refrigerator, where she began sifting through the takeout until she found a
container of egg drop soup. “Will I get food poisoning from this?”

“Ninety percent chance, no.”

“Thanks, that’s comforting.” Helping herself to the microwave, she stood there twirling the spoon in the air. “So the new mail service at Vida House is sloppy, is what you’re saying?”

“No. This thing is over twenty years old. My guess is that it came off Slush Mountain.”

The microwave’s chime punctuated the sentence, but Jamie didn’t reach for the button. “You
stole
something off Slush Mountain? As in, the stuff you were never supposed to touch? That
nobody
is supposed to touch?”

“No, follow me here. I’m saying it appeared on my desk overnight.”

Suddenly the soup and the microwave lost all importance. Jamie abandoned them, crossed the kitchen, and reached for the manuscript. I knew she would. “And you kept it? You should be ashamed of yourself.” Settling her fingers over the envelope, she withdrew the contents and slipped into a chair.

By the time she finished reading the pages, she was hunched over the table with her feet tucked and her blonde hair stuffed behind her ears. She sat staring at the last page for a minute before laying it on the stack. Her soup was cold, even though I’d put a spoon in it and set it beside her.

“Well . . . ,” she said finally. “I definitely wish I had more. I used to love it when that happened . . . back when I was working in fiction, I mean.” Jamie’s chance to move over to the magazine had come along out of the blue, years ago. She knew someone who knew someone. “I would’ve requested the rest of it. Good pacing and a nice sense of voice. I was right there under that
cabin with the girl in the opening scene. And now I’m wondering if they get away from the Huns here or not.”

Flipping the manuscript over, she looked at the aquamarine title sheet, then thumbed through a few of the pages behind it. “Gruesomely amateurish presentation, though. A cover page with someone’s hand-done illustration on it? And colored paper? Who does that? You learn better the first time you go to a writers’ group at a local library. This poor doofus was obviously living in a cave, which is probably why the material feels like such an organic experience. Wonder who opened this first and what they did with it. There’s no author name on the pages, no query letter . . .”

“I’d love to know the answer to that, but I can’t exactly
ask
anyone.” Jamie’s excitement fanned the flame of my own. “And yes, it’s amateurish, especially the whole title page thing, although the artwork isn’t bad. But it’s the voice that’s been bothering me. Something about it rings a bell . . . like I should
know
who wrote it. But why would I? It’s way before my time.” I turned the envelope over on the table, pointed. “There’s a postmark date, but the rest is too faded to read.”

Jamie lifted the envelope and brought it close to her face. “Something . . . North Carolina. Got any kind of magnifying glass around here?”

“No. Well . . . Wait. Hang on a minute, maybe I do.”

I hurried across the room and around the willow-branch screen that divided off the bedroom area. The corner was thick with shadows, but the cylindrical box with its wooden spool handle and unimpressive painting of sweet gum leaves was still where I had tucked it when I’d moved into the apartment. I worked the lid free and dumped the contents on the bed.

“There’s one here in my sewing kit.”

“You have a sewing kit? Do you know how to use it?”

At times like these I realized what an impostor I really was. I’d spent half my childhood sewing and patching up clothes. “Yes, I know how to use it.”

“So I’ve been paying for things to be hemmed or taken in at the cleaners all these years, and I could’ve just brought them to you? Why have you never told me this?”

“I haven’t opened this thing in forever.” But the antique magnifying glass was exactly where I’d kept it hidden since the day Wilda let me take it home from her place on Honey Creek. She’d found me trying to sneak it into my pocket after working in her greenhouse. The frame was beautiful and ornate, filigreed silver with colored gems in the handle. It seemed a shame that something so lovely was left lying on a windowsill with discarded nuts, bolts, and garden tags. I’d told myself she would never notice it was gone.

All you need do is ask, Jennia Beth Gibbs. No sense making a thief of yourself, now is there? You keep it . . . and remember that no matter how many wrong choices we’ve made in the past, we can always decide to make the right ones today. The past need not determine one moment of the future.

The memory covered me as I handed Jamie the magnifying glass and she leaned close to the envelope, attempting to decipher more of the postmark while elbowing me out of the way. “Cut it . . . out . . . Stop . . . You’re in my light. Shoot. I can’t . . . Just wait a . . . Do you have . . . a flashlight or a little lamp?”

I grabbed my phone and turned it on. “Flashlight app.”

“Clever.” We leaned together again, like a pair of Alices peering down the rabbit hole.

“Try putting the flashlight inside it. Sometimes when the
light shines through, you can see the pigments that are still down in the paper. I read that in a novel somewhere.”

“That was on
Pawn Stars
last month, you goofus. We watched it together, remember?” Jamie reminded me.

“Oh . . . maybe it was.” TV shows featuring all manner of undiscovered and rediscovered antiques were my weakness. Somewhere on my bucket list was,
Travel around the world looking for lost treasures.

Jamie carefully lifted the envelope and I slid the phone in.

“See anything?” No doubt her eyes were better than mine. I’d been half-blind in elementary school, until a teacher discovered I needed glasses and the Lions Club provided some in secondhand frames. LASIK had finally helped bring me closer to normal a few years ago.

“
E
. . . something,” Jamie mused. “It’s two words.
Emerald Isle
, maybe? That’s in North Carolina. We went there a couple times on vacation when I was a kid. It’s south of the Outer Banks. No, wait, it’s three words, and that’s not an
E
. That’s an
L
. . . .
Look
. . . something. That’s a
G
on the second word . . . and an
O
or . . . or maybe a
G
on the third.”

“Looking Glass Gap.”

“You can make that out?” Jamie leaned back, then forward again. “Why does that sound so familiar, though? Is that on the beach somewhere? Maybe I’ve been there.”

“It’s not on the beach. It’s in the mountains.” The only reason I could decipher those words was because they were so close to home. Our high school played Looking Glass Gap in football. I’d never been to a game, but I’d desperately wanted to go to the ones in Looking Glass Gap because . . .

A thought struck so suddenly that I tore the seam of the envelope pulling away. “Holy cow! Oh . . . oh . . . Whoa . . . That
can’t be. There’s no way that . . .” Connections rushed together like raindrops racing down a window, meeting, combining, gaining speed, the pathways so clear that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen them before now. Grabbing the manuscript, I turned it over, started leafing through the pages, reading passages, looking for proof.

“What? What, what,
what
?” Jamie’s hands flailed. “Holy cow . . .
what
?”

Across the room, Friday growled, protesting the interruption of his beauty sleep.

“Grab my computer. It’s in my . . . Wait, oh. Here it is.” I was on such a wild ride that I’d forgotten it wasn’t still in my briefcase. I’d already been on it this evening, trying to figure out the mystery of
The Story Keeper
, but the answer was right under my nose all along.

So incredibly close to home.

I brought up a webpage, clicked backward through the books listed on it, looked at a sample chapter.

Jamie moved into position behind me. “Are you going to tell me the deal, or do I have to keep guessing?
Why
are you on the Evercrest Books website, on the Time Shifters page? Are we thinking there’s, like, some kind of alien abduction involved in this manuscript? Or has your taste in literature changed?”

I tapped the screen. “I think
he’s
the one who wrote this. Evan Hall.” There was an author photo on the press pack, probably an old one by now. Evan Hall hadn’t penned a new book in ten years. Not since his Time Shifters series took off overnight, generating a movie franchise and a cult of crazed followers who wanted to believe that there really were alien time-travel portals hidden in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In the jacket photo from the first Time Shifters novel, he
brooded for the camera, his dark hair swirling over eyes that were deep blue and eerily intense. He was probably only eighteen or nineteen then, ridiculously young to have hit on such massive success. That was one of the media hooks the publisher had used to push the book. It made for a great story
 
—
Unknown engineering student sits down and writes blockbuster book one day, out of the clear blue. . . .

He’d generated a flurry of teenage sci-fi Cinderella fantasies, grabbing hearts everywhere. Including mine. I’d sneaked the first book home from the school library when I was thirteen and tucked it in the old springhouse downwater from my grandparents’ home. Fetching the hanging meat and crock vegetables stored there had always been my job. That book was the first rebellious thing I’d ever attempted. Reading it amounted to both a protest and a survival mechanism
 
—an escape. My mother had recently vanished in the night, and with her, the gossamer-thin protective layer between my father, my grandparents, and us kids. Suddenly I had become what my mother was. A barrier stretching and tearing and binding up before being punctured again.

“Evan Hall?” Jamie’s voice seemed to rise out of the blue. “Oh, come
on
.”

“No, just listen.” I turned the manuscript around, slid it into the space next to the computer. “Look at the phrases here. Some of the pet words. Every author has them. And the postmark
 
—Looking Glass Gap? That’s right where the Time Shifters books are set. That’s where he’s
from
.”

Jamie sucked in a breath. “Oh, I know that place. I bought a feature piece on movie-inspired fashions a couple years ago
 
—remember that time I guested and did the little fashion-show spot on
The View
? Part of the article was about Time Shifters and the people who are, like, crazy into it. They make pilgrimages to
Looking Glass Lake, dress up in clothes from different time periods. Some of them even carry antique weapons and money and wander around the mountains
looking
for time portals. Personally, the background material from that piece freaked me out just a wee bit.” She slanted an appraising look at the manuscript. “But this isn’t sci-fi. It wouldn’t be Evan Hall’s kind of thing.”

“What if it
used
to be his kind of thing? He came out of nowhere with the time-travel books. According to his bio, he’d never written before that. He just had the idea for Time Shifters one day when he was sitting in a physics class. What if that was some clever spin-doctoring
 
—to add a little author mystique when the first book came out? ‘Future aerospace engineer falls off the turnip truck and writes blockbuster book’ is a great hook, but the truth could be that he’d been writing and trying to get published for a while.”