GABRIELLA WALKED ONLY A SHORT DISTANCE BEFORE SHE IMAGINED she heard someone behind her. The sudden realization of what she’d done hit her so hard it stole her breath. She had just dashed off into the night—into the full-moon night. Alone! What had she been thinking? Her heart went into hyperdrive, hammering a hole in her chest wall. She didn’t burst into a run because she knew her legs wouldn’t carry her if she tried.
Then, in a reality ripped from her recurring nightmare, she felt a hand on her shoulder. But this was no dream. No overactive imagination.
And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, Gabriella Carmichael decided she was prepared to die—if it was quick. She wouldn’t let him drag her off somewhere and ... No!
It only took a second to whirl around, but by the time she faced him she was determined that the only way Yesheb Al Tobbanoft would get her off this street was to kill her.
She opened her mouth to cry out, but didn’t. Just stood there staring.
“I am sorry,” Pedro said. “I only wanted … you looked upset when you left. Are you all right?”
Gabriella couldn’t speak. Terror and surprise and relief banged into each other in her head like bumper cars. Her knees felt weak. And she had to strangle back a peal of hysterical laughter.
When she said nothing, Pedro looked more closely and was instantly contrite.
“I really frightened you. I am sorry, I never meant …” He took her arm and guided her to the porch steps in front of the dry goods store where she plopped down with a decidedly unladylike clunk when her knees collapsed out from under her.
Gabriella finally found her voice. “Don’t be … sorry, I … overreacted.”
“No, you other reacted. You thought I was somebody else—who?”
“Pedro, do you believe in evil?”
“That is like asking if I believe in air. Evil is. Whether I believe in it or not—whether anybody believes in it—does not matter.”
“Do you believe in … demons?”
“Same question. Evil is the what; demons are the who.”
“So you think demons are real, that they exist here, around us?”
“I think the single best promotion of evil in the history of mankind was when we made it a cartoon and dressed it up in a red suit with horns and a forked tail.”
“But how can you tell the difference between real evil and … homicidal insanity? Between someone who is savage and brutal because he’s evil and someone who—?”
“If you are on the receiving end of the savage and brutal, it is a distinction without a difference. Is someone trying to hurt you, Gabriella?”
Her voice grew quiet. “The kind of man who delights in hurting other people—is he crazy or evil?
“Both.”
* * * *
Yesheb stares dumbfounded at a young woman who looks just like his Zara—but isn’t. Flowing black gown. Long black hair hanging straight down around her shoulders. Bangs cut to a point on her forehead. Red fingernails, bright red lipstick. And a scar! The scar. The exact scar that graces the face of his beloved.
“Who are you?” he demands, his voice tightly controlled so she hears no emotion, neither anger nor desperation.
The girl backs up a step. “Who are you?” But she appears only startled, not frightened. And then he watches it happen, the shift, sees in her eyes what he has seen in the eyes of countless other women so taken by his good looks they wouldn’t notice if he held a severed head in his hand that was dripping blood on their shoes.
“Why are you dressed up like Zara?”
“Zara? Oh, no, not Zara! Though they’re certainly quite similar, aren’t they.” The girl touches the scar on her face and giggles self-consciously. “But in my mind’s eye, I see Rebecca Nightshade’s appearance as merely suggestive of Zara, like a sketch of the original, an underdeveloped negative. I wrote that in a paper once, the underdeveloped negative part. I got an A minus.” She realizes she’s babbling, stops and refocuses. “But who knows how much of herself Rebecca Nightshade poured into Zara since she’s never granted an interview. That’s why we want her to come here.”
“Who is ‘we’?” He speaks each word individually, for clarity and because his jaw is clenched so tight he can barely speak at all. His blood is beginning to boil. Literally. Rage is a blast furnace in his chest. Every vein, artery and capillary is swelling with over-heated liquid.
“We are The Live Poets’ Society … like the movie with Robin Williams, except not ‘dead.’”
Yesheb doesn’t respond.
“English majors at Plymouth State University.”
He still doesn’t respond.
“In Plymouth.” She is beginning to address him like a three-year-old. “That way.” She points toward White Mountain, a gigantic dark smudge on the black New Hampshire sky—where the clouds have cleared away in front of the full moon. “The society is dedicated to living authors. We’re into nontraditional literature like horror fiction. And the Silver Center for the Arts flicks its intellectual ashes all over ‘trade writers,’ only invites speakers like Rosanna Warren, Marilyn Nelson, Sharon Olds.”
She pauses. “Warren … Nelson … Olds … poets!”
Yesheb can tell the grace his good looks purchased for him has about run out. His grace toward her is about gone, too.
* * * *
Gabriella’s heart could finally speak each beat clearly again without stuttering. She took a deep, trembling breath and yanked the conversation firmly away from discussions of pain and evil. Even managed a small smile when she asked Pedro about something she’d been wondering all evening.
“When I got here this afternoon with Ty, it was almost like Steve was waiting for us. He came up with that steroid IV out of his van in seconds. How could he possibly have known we were coming?”
“His granddaughter, Cheyenne, called and told us about you. She’s the redheaded girl you met when you were looking for Steve. She’s allergic to bee stings so she spotted right away what was wrong with Ty.” He paused. “Now Steve has an interesting moral dilemma. He’d grounded her—that’s why she wasn’t here at the party—for running up a $450-and-change cell phone bill, took her phone away and said she couldn’t make another cell phone call of any kind all summer. So should he—?”
“He can’t punish the kid for trying to help—it wasn’t exactly a trivial call.”
“Sí, you are right. He would be violating Rule 139.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s Rule 139?”
“Do not sweat the petty stuff and do not pet the sweaty stuff.”
* * * *
The young woman standing before Yesheb smiles at him dismissively.
“I really need to go. I left my dog in the car and I—”
“Why are you dressed like Zara?”
“I was picked to make a presentation about being broad-minded, thinking outside narrow paradigms, to the Silver Center this afternoon—before Bartlett’s annual June Moon party.” She nods toward the lighted house where the music is so loud you can understand the lyrics out on the street. “And I came up with this idea—didn’t tell anybody—that it would be more effective if I gave the presentation looking like Rebecca Nightshade! My roommate, Ruell—rhymes with spool and tool, it’s from the Bible—she’s a theatre major and she is a-ma-zing at stage makeup. You should have seen the Quasimodo head she did for—” She stops, refocuses again. “Anyway, she made the scar out of latex, used the picture on the book jacket to—”
He hits her in the face with his cane. It is made of hand-carved ebony, a serpent whose head and forked tongue form the handle. He smashes it into the fake scar on her cheek, watches her fly backward in slow motion with blood squirting out of her nose and mouth. Then he takes two steps to where she lies crumpled like a broken doll, the black wig askew, pale blonde hair spread out in a halo in a growing pool of blood. He lifts his foot to slam it down on her face, again and again until every trace of his beloved Zara is gone. But he hears voices; someone’s coming. He turns, silently blends into the shadows and is gone.
Gabriella thought they should call the trout “star-spangled fish” since they were caught on the Fourth of July.
“Okay now, stand under the sign and hold that fish up high,” Pedro said.
When he was satisfied with Ty’s position, he pulled out his cell phone and captured several shots. He’d post the pictures of the boy and the trout he’d caught in Piddley Creek on the Wall of Honor in the Mercantile, in the “first catch” category.
Pedro had arrived early that morning with three days’ worth of supplies and his fly fishing gear—to try again. He and Ty had already spent two unsuccessful fishing excursions, traipsing up and down the creek, and today Ty finally landed a trout. Pedro caught two more—enough fish for supper. It was a shame Theo missed the excitement. The old man hadn’t gone to the creek with Ty before lunch like he usually did, said, “This thin air done give me a headache again,” and had spent the whole day stretched out on his bed.
As soon as Theo had adjusted to the altitude enough that he could walk more than ten yards without gasping, he began to accompany Ty and P.D. across the meadow to the waterfall. He’d come back weak, winded and hobbling painfully. Then he’d get up the next morning and do the same thing again.
Pedro slipped his phone back into his pocket, took the fish from Ty and laid it with the two he’d caught on the natural table formed by a large rock that stuck up out of the ground just beyond the front porch. From a leather scabbard at his waist, he produced a vicious-looking hunting knife, the kind that was no doubt used to field dress a deer, and chopped off the fish heads before he began to clean them.
“Your Uncle Garrett and I used to break rocks on that piece of granite, looking for thunder eggs,” Gabriella told Ty.
“What’s a thunder egg?”
“It is a rock that looks ordinary on the outside …” Pedro stopped. “No, actually they are particularly ugly rocks on the outside, round and kind of lumpy. But there’s beauty deep down inside that you can’t see.”
“Are you talking about a geode? Mom’s got the prettiest one you ever saw in your whole life! I’ll show you.”
Ty raced up the steps and into the cabin.
Pedro stopped cleaning the fish and looked questioningly at her. “You found a geode on Antero?”
“No, but we found them in other places our parents went rock hunting. When I was six, we went to Keokuk, Iowa, and it’s known as the geode capital of the world.”
“Anza used to stand with her nose pressed to the glass, staring at the geodes in the rock case in the store.”
“Oh, they’re the perfect kid rock, like Easter eggs you crack open and find candy inside.” Gabriella smiled at the memories. “Garrett and I’d sit here in the evening with a hammer, breaking up hunks of granite, certain we’d find a thunder egg if we looked hard enough.”
Ty burst out the front door with Gabriella’s geode and held it out to Pedro.
“Bet you’ve never seen anything like this!”
Pedro looked at the rock—his hands were too fish slimed to touch it—and Gabriella watched the surprise on his face downshift through wonder into awe. That’s how she had always felt about the rock, too—wonder and awe.
The whole geode would have been bigger than a softball. This was only half, like a cantaloupe split down the middle. But instead of seeds in the hollow center, a lone three-inch crystal the size of Gabriella’s thumb rose up like the Washington Monument out of a shell carpeted with sparkling white crystalline quartz. The large crystal was as clear as a drop of pure water and its planes refracted the sunlight into colored beams that danced in the air around it. Surrounding the base of the crystal like the petals of some exotic flower were seven smaller crystals the size of two-inch pencils. The seven were identical, the same size and shape, except each was a different color—the colors that sparkled in the air around the clear crystal. The colors of the spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
“I … I’ve never seen a geode with …” Pedro stammered. “How can it be …?”
“It can’t,” Gabriella said. “This rock is a geologic anomaly. Unexplainable. Impossible.”
A pale memory formed in Gabriella’s mind, thin and transparent, gauzy with the collected dust of time.
She and Garrett are eleven. They live in the little house on Churchview Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Baldwin neighborhood, the one that has no rocks, no crystals and no hope. Hard times. Her father doesn’t go to work; her mother waits tables.
That evening, her father has brought home an old friend he ran into in a deli, a geologist turned jeweler who appraised Phillip’s aquamarine and other gemstones years ago in another life. Natalie is polite to the man, fastens a smile on her face like a Halloween mask, serves him a soft drink, offers him cookies. But her eyes are as dead as they always are except when she is talking about Grant.
The house is small and cramped. Garrett is in the tiny bedroom they share playing Chopin on his keyboard. He has perfect pitch and says not a single key on it is in tune. Gabriella is on the floor beside the couch, playing with her rock collection. Though her parents got rid of all their minerals—the memories were too painful—she still has a small collection of rocks she found herself when her parents were out looking for more impressive specimens. Two shoe boxes full of granite chunks, petrified wood, one fossilized trilobite, some sparkling fool’s gold and half a dozen geodes—all different sizes, broken open to reveal the crystals inside.
The jeweler and her father are making small talk, forced and stilted. The man obviously knew about Grant’s death but didn’t realize until he got here that the wound was still raw and bleeding. Suddenly, the man stops in mid-sentence and stares at the geode Gabriella has in her hand. He is a tallish man, with a long, horse’s face, jowls and a large mole on his right cheek below his eye.
He reaches out his boney hand. “May I see that?”
Gabriella gives it to him. It is the largest of her geodes—the prettiest of all her rocks. The prettiest rock she has ever seen, in fact.
The man studies the rock. “Where did you find this geode?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Her father chimes in then. “I’ve never seen this rock.”
Gabriella had been playing with it the night before, making colored sparkles on the wall as she sat on the floor beside her father’s chair. He had never looked down.
“We took the twins with us to Iowa and Georgia, but I imagine this is one she picked up in Kentucky.” Her father pulls his glasses down off the top of his head and settles them on his nose. When he focuses on the stone, really sees it, he gasps. He and the jeweler exchange a look.
“It’s plain quartz,” Gabriella says, looking from one to the other. “Right?” Even Gabriella knows quartz is the most common mineral in the world.
The jeweler nods. “But … the crystal—six-sided prisms terminating in six-sided pyramids. Flawless. Not milky—as transparent as window glass. Every one of them, all eight crystals, they’re perfect.”
“The colors,” her father stammers. “How did …? All those different colors are—”
“Utterly impossible,” the jeweler finishes for him and shakes his head in wonder. “There’s no way it could have happened … but there it is. It’s like—”
And then he says the odd thing that Gabriella never forgets.
“What does nomally mean?” Ty asked and pushed up his glasses. When it was hot, his glasses yo-yoed up and down his sweaty nose.
“Anomaly. Something not normal.”
“You mean it’s like … magic?”
“I don’t think scientists know for sure how a geode forms, at least they didn’t when I was a kid.” She looked a question at Pedro and he shrugged. “But the simplest explanation is that water seeps through a crack into the cavity of a rock and whatever mineral is dissolved in the water slowly turns into crystals there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that either; nobody does. But I do know the crystals are usually quartz.” Another glance at Pedro.
“I got some for the store once that had agate crystals and there were some that were way too expensive that I didn’t get with amethyst crystals. All the rest were quartz.”
“And I also know that no matter what mineral forms them, the crystals in a geode are only one color. Several shades of the same color, maybe, lighter and darker. And different colors in different geodes.” Gabriella shook her head. “But seven different colors in one geode. The colors of the spectrum—which is a refraction of light. It’d be hard to find a darker place than inside a rock! And arranged in order like a rainbow. No. Possible. Way.”
“Must be some way,” Ty said, “’cause there it is.”
“An old jeweler who spotted it in my rock collection said there was only one explanation—it was ‘made by the hand of God Himself.’ He was so impressed with the rock my father gave it to him.”
“But it was yours,” Ty said. “You were the one who found it.”
“That didn’t matter,” she said quietly. “I didn’t matter.” She saw the dismay on Ty’s face and hurried on. “The jeweler mounted it on black velvet and set it on the counter of his jewelry store. Said it was more rare, more precious than a diamond. Kept it there for years. When my father died, the old man brought the rock to the funeral home and gave it back to me.”
“If you don’t remember where you found it, how do you know you didn’t find it here?” Ty asked.
“Well, I don’t. But—”
“It could have been here, couldn’t it?”
“Anything’s possible. But—”
“Me and P.D. are gonna find a thunder egg, too.” He leapt to his feet, bounded down the steps and started scouring the ground like someone looking for a lost contact lens.
“Try around the waterfall,” Pedro said. He picked up the cleaned fish and started up the steps to take them into the kitchen. “Water washes rocks down from the top of the mountain. That’s why the old prospectors used to pan for gold nuggets in creeks.”
Ty turned wordlessly and raced off toward the waterfall with P.D. one step behind.
“Why are you encouraging him? You know—”
“I know little boys love to look for buried treasure.” He went into the house, came back a few minutes later with his hands smelling like dish soap, and sat down beside Gabriella on the top step of the porch.
“You’re right about little boys and buried treasure,” she said. “If you’d told Garrett there was a treasure here, he’d have dug up the whole mountain!”
Pedro picked up the geode off the porch and watched the crystals refract light. “Where is your twin brother now?”
Gabriella felt like he had kicked her in the belly.
“He’s … dead. Suicide.”
Now it was Pedro who looked like he’d been kicked in the belly.
“Both of your brothers. Lightning, then suicide.” He set the rock back down on the porch. “It was not you, was it? Tell me you did not …”
“Find him? Yes, it was me.”
How did we get here?
She felt her cheeks flush, her eyes fill with tears. But Pedro didn’t respond like she expected. Didn’t get embarrassed, awkward that he’d obviously opened up a painful wound, didn’t try to back pedal or change the subject. He sat quietly beside her, staring out into the valley, tossing the geode up and catching it unconsciously like a pitcher waiting for a sign from the catcher. When she looked over at him, there were tears in his eyes, too.
He felt her gaze. Didn’t turn, just continued to stare into the valley thousands of feet below.
“I used to question why God allows suffering,” he said. His Spanish accent was very pronounced and it struck her that perhaps he had to concentrate to keep it out of his speech, that it took an effort he didn’t, or couldn’t, apply when he was upset. “But I do not do that anymore.”
“Suffering makes sense to you?”
“No, I do not understand eet. But I do understand that ‘why me?’ ees not the right question.”
“What is the right question?”
“Why not me?” He caught the geode and set it down on the porch between them. “Things happen for a reason, but knowing the reason does not change anything.” He turned to face her. “It still hurts.”
She thought of the beautiful little girl lying as still as a china doll in his living room. She almost asked about the child, but didn’t. She wasn’t like Pedro. Her own pain hadn’t made her reach out to others with compassion. It had isolated her, built walls lined with razor wire that imprisoned her.
Pedro changed the subject then, flipped the switch and turned off the spotlight of painful introspection he must have seen shining out through the cracks in her soul.
“You said you and your twin brother were prodigies, right? What special gifts did God give you?”
She had never looked at it that way—that their talents had been gifts from God. If she’d ever considered it at all—which she couldn’t recall ever doing—she believed they were less “special gifts” than door prizes. She and Garrett had walked into the talent store and happened to be the onemillionth customers. During a two-for-the-price-of-one sale.
“Garrett was a musician. The first time he ever saw a piano, he sat down and played—not a song, but chords and harmonies—a little like jazz, with no discernible melody but obviously music.”
“How old was he?”
“He’d just turned eight. It was in a music store right after Grant was killed.”
“And you?”
“I … drum roll please … am a poet.”
Her own words surprised her. She wasn’t being disingenuous, wasn’t consciously trying to mislead him, throw him off the scent so he wouldn’t figure out her identity. It had slipped out. Gabriella hadn’t thought of herself as a poet since those days years ago when her poignant, insightful, lyric verse earned her the Antivenom Poetry Award and the May Swenson Poetry Award and her first book of published poetry, The Crystal Pillow, was on the short list for the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award—and its $100,000 prize.
She didn’t see herself as a poet when she was writing lyrics for Garrett’s music, lyrics that spiraled down into the darkness of her brother’s soul. And she certainly didn’t see herself as a poet after she wrote The Bride of the Beast.
The handful poems she’d written here—the verse stiff and stilted from disuse—did that make her a poet again?
“You look troubled. Is writing poetry painful?”
“I guess you could say that,” she picked up the geode and watched the shiny crystal refract sparkles in the air. “You start with pure beauty—like this—and you have to exchange it for mere words. Sometimes it breaks your heart.”
“When did you realize that you—?”
“The day Garrett played the piano.”
“The same day?”
“Does seem odd, doesn’t it. Obviously, we’d been born with special talent—you don’t instantly acquire it out of nowhere. But I’m with you, I always thought it was strange that we both ... The first poem I ever wrote was about the suit we bought that day for Grant to be buried in.”
Her mother’s face, wild with grief, was still high-def clear in her mind. In a state of unrelenting hysteria, there’d been no reasoning with her, and Gabriella’s father had tried. Though he’d been shattered himself, he’d attempted to make his wife understand that there wouldn’t be an open casket, not with Grant’s body so … damaged. What was the point of a suit and tie? She’d shrieked that she would see him, even if nobody else did. He was her precious baby and she would dress him herself, make him look nice no matter …
So they’d been dispatched to purchase a suit.
“The poem was about the look in my father’s eyes when he picked it out, about how Mom’s hands shook when she took it from him and carried it into the back room at the funeral home and closed the door behind her.”
The poem described Gabriella’s fantasy of a strikingly handsome Grant lying in the silk-lined box in the suit, juxtaposed against the reality of what it must have been like for her mother to fit him into it, into any kind of clothing after what had happened to his body. It was a profoundly moving piece because it was so simple, a pen-and-ink sketch of horror—told with powerful, haunting imagery in misspelled words and endearingly clumsy iambic pentameter.
“I wasn’t as gifted at writing as my brother was musically, though. Garrett Griffith’s music was pure genius.”
“Garrett Griffith?” Pedro turned to her, his eyes wide. “… the Garrett Griffith?”
The geode slipped out of her hand and dropped into her lap. She wanted to rip out her tongue! She’d relaxed, dropped her guard. Pedro was so easy to be with, so easy to talk to. She never should have … but how had a Hispanic man in a dead little Colorado town ever heard of a grunge metal musician like Garrett? Why would Pedro listen to the desperately dark music of Withered Soul?
“How did you … where …?”
“Joaquin and his friends discovered Withered Soul on the internet about a year ago. Most of what they listen to is … is …” He turned to look out over the valley. “Rap ees not music!” he said. “Rap ees chanting!”
“How do you really feel about it?”
“The music of Withered Soul is amazing but the lyrics are … they bothered me.”
“They bothered me, too. I wrote them.”
“You wrote Wilted Dreams?” He paused, then surprised her by repeating the song’s chorus, word for word. “Despair rises in us like the tide coming in, the tide coming in, the tide coming in. Hope lies abandoned with the tide going out, next to death, pain and sorrow on the sand.”
Gabriella’s face flushed. Those lyrics had bubbled up out of the muck of an awful, dark place that had produced all manner of ugliness.
“It wasn’t exactly my finest work, but yes, I wrote it. Only that was when …” When she had hitched her wagon to her twin brother’s star that became a meteor hurling toward its own destruction—and she had very nearly flamed out with it. How could she make Pedro understand a thing like that? She couldn’t. Because she didn’t really understand it herself.
All she knew for certain was that there had been a time once when her … “gift” hadn’t been a dark burden.
“When I was younger, before … things were different. I was different. I wrote a poem called Morning for a third-grade writing assignment.” She closed her eyes and called the words of a stanza to mind.
“The light then scrubs the darkened skies
awakens deer and antelope.
And time breathes life in slow, sweet sighs
perfumed by jasmine, love and hope.”
“You wrote that at age … what? Nine!” Pedro studied her face. “Light and dark. You are a complicated woman, Gabriella.”
She felt her face flush.
“No, I’m not. I’m a simple life form. An amoeba, actually, in a protozoan world.”
Ty barreled around the corner of the cabin and skidded to a stop in front of the porch. He had used his shirt as a sack, held the bottom portion of it out in front of him and filled the hollow formed behind it with rocks, all sizes and shapes.
He dumped the pile of them at his mother’s feet and asked, panting, “Are any of these geodes?”
Clearly, they weren’t. Oh, a few hunks of granite in varying sizes were sort of round and definitely lumpy like geodes. The rest were flat slate.
But Gabriella took her cue from Pedro. “I don’t think so, but anything’s possible. The only way to find out for sure is to crack them open and see. There’s a hammer in the toolbox in the mudroom. Get a bucket of water and clean the fish slime off that rock first.”
TY DIDN’T FIND any geodes. He used the hammer to crack open all the rocks he’d gathered along the banks of Piddley Creek and near Notmuchava Waterfall where the water was all frothy so maybe it had broken something loose.
Nothing. Every broken rock revealed a solid center. No holes in any of them.
Ty was okay with that, though. He wasn’t likely to find a geode down here around the cabin anyway. He’d already figured out his mom probably found hers up there in the Jesus trees when she wasn’t supposed to go outside. Tomorrow he’d sneak away again and go to the chalet.
He turned and looked up at the mountaintop rising high into the bright blue sky.
He had first gone to the chalet the day after he overheard his mother tell Grandpa Slappy about it. He and P.D. had gone off to the creek, right after breakfast before his grandfather had his second cup of coffee. Then they sneaked through the forest behind the meadow to the other corner of the hanging valley. There was something like a rock wall about two hundred feet tall behind the meadow; Piddley Creek wound along the south side of it and fell into the creek bed below in Notmuchuva Waterfall. He’d seen what looked like a trail on the north side that had to be the one that led to the chalet.
He tried to hurry up it. He’d be in plain view as he climbed if his mother happened to go behind the cabin and look up toward the peak. But the trail was more challenging than he expected. It was steeper than he thought it’d be even though it angled across the incline. And the rock and gray dirt and gravel were loose underfoot. He slipped twice. When he finally made it, P.D. was waiting for him, wagging his tail.
“Show-off,” Ty said.
At the top lay the forest of Jesus trees you could see from the meadow. What you couldn’t see from the meadow was how gnarled and twisted they were, all of them leaning in the same direction, the way the wind had blown them for thousands of years. He could totally see why his mother and uncle had wanted to play there. Most of the stubby trees were short enough for grown-ups to see over, but they formed a labyrinth of passageways for children. He wasn’t about to get lost in them, though, like those terminally stupid kids you saw in movies or read about in stories who ran mindlessly into the woods without giving any thought to how they were going to find their way back out. He was smarter than that! He’d brought along a sack full of marbles from the Chinese checkers game in the cabin and dropped them at intervals behind him as he explored.
The trail was overgrown, barely visible. Just past a big pile of boulders stood the chalet. It was pretty bunged up. Unlike the cabin below that had been redone, nobody had fixed up this building. One of the posts that held up the porch roof lay on the steps and there was a hole in the chalet roof near the chimney. Ty managed to shove the door open and inside was the picnic table his mother had described. It was bunged up, too, but he could see carved into the surface the three G’s his mother had talked about.
Pedro’s voice interrupted Ty’s memory.
“Gotta go,” he said, and pulled his hat low on his brow. Ty knew that was so the hat wouldn’t blow off, but it still made Pedro look kind of like the bad guy in a cowboy movie. “Remember, you do not cast the fly rod, you—”
“Cast the fly line,” Ty finished for him. “The rod is an extension of your arm.”
“I have taught you well, Grasshopper.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
As Pedro’s muffler-free jeep rumbled away from the cabin, Ty picked up the hammer and cast a final glance at the mountain. Maybe the geodes were farther up, near the aquamarine at the peak. He absolutely, one hundred percent did not want to climb up that high. But no, his mother had said that while her parents and older brother went up the mountain, she and her twin played in the forest and that Uncle Garrett had wanted to explore … under the overhang!
Mom didn’t think the overhang would still be there, but it was. He’d seen it in the distance when he was at the chalet. It was just as his mother described it. Maybe the magic geode had come from there.
* * * *
The Reverend Jim Benninger actually had internet access! For the first time in three months. He and his wife had boarded a steamer a week ago—maybe more than that, the days tended to run together here—and traveled up the White Nile River to Khartoum so Betty Ann could get back on her feet from the virus that had been draining her strength since Easter.
The minister had been going through the backlog of emails in his Yahoo! account and spotted one sent yesterday from Pedro Rodriguez in St. Elmo. When he opened it, a smile spread quickly over his tired, lined face.
The message was short:
Thought you would like to see how much Gabriella’s son is enjoying St. Elmo’s Fire.
Pedro
So she’d actually come this year!
The attached picture said it all. It showed a little boy on the porch of the cabin holding a smallish trout and grinning so wide the smile almost split his face open! The look on the child’s face captured the essence of joy and peace Jim’s family always felt when they were in the mountains.
It occurred to the pastor then that he ought to capture that joy for Gabriella to remember. Quickly, because the WiFi in the hotel wasn’t reliable, he went on Google and found a store in Pittsburgh called The Frame House that did custom prints and framing. He emailed the photo of the little boy to the store and paid by credit card to have it printed, mounted, framed and delivered to Gabriella’s house so it would be waiting there for her when she returned home from Colorado.
He wanted the picture to bring her time in the mountains to a surprise end.
And it did.