Chapter 4

Beatrice was thinking about Jenkins Hollow, too. She thought she heard Elizabeth fuss and checked on her, saw she was still asleep, and stood for a moment looking over her granddaughter, whose face shone in the glow of the night-light. What an amazing, beautiful little creature she was—and that shock of red hair, well, if she kept it, the girl was going to be even more unusual. That was one thing Beatrice could claim she had given Elizabeth. Beatrice, of course, was mostly white-haired now.

Beatrice had read how redheads were dying out. The gene pool was getting slimmer and slimmer for them. She knew of a group of families in the Nest, which was a neighborhood in Jenkins Hollow that had always had several generations of redheads. For years she’d ignored the rumors concerning the intermarrying and inbreeding, but her husband had confirmed it one morning, after he delivered a Down syndrome baby that didn’t make it.

“It was a mercy to them,” he’d told her. “It doesn’t feel like that now, of course. But that baby was the product of, well, a brother and sister.”

“What?”

“Yes.” He’d lowered his eyes. “It’s quite a problem up there.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Beatrice said.

“Of course not, Bea. It’s all hush-hush,” he said and held her hand. “There’s plenty in this world you don’t know about, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

Beatrice smiled at the memory. Here she was, eighty-one years old, and back then she couldn’t have imagined some of the things she was exposed to now every day, as a matter of course. Girls running around half naked in public was just part of it; the other was the lack of respect the girls had for themselves. It was almost as if sex was the only thing they cared about. And as if they thought they had invented sex. She looked at her grandbaby and felt that same sense of protection that Ed must’ve felt for her. And yet she knew it was futile. Elizabeth would start out seeing much more in her life than what Beatrice never could have imagined all those years ago.

She supposed the redhead must have come from the hollow, and believed the police would find out what happened—eventually. She hoped it was an accidental drowning. She ran her hand through her mostly white hair. Thinking about it all—the possibility of a murder here, in Cumberland Creek—sent spasms of fear through her.

Back to Jenkins Mountain. Beatrice used to hike on the ridge that looked over Jenkins Hollow and out over the river. On one side of the river was a group of Old Order Mennonites—those that still dressed in plain clothes and eschewed “modern” conveniences, like electricity and cars. There were plenty of other kinds of Mennonites around, though, like some of her neighbors, who dressed normally and embraced technology but still held true to some of the basic tenets of the religion. Beatrice didn’t know exactly what the schisms between the Old Order Mennonites and the other sects were based on. All she knew was that most of the Old Orders kept to themselves. They always had. Although they were neighborly, they were never overly so.

On the other side of the river and around a small hill was the Nest—the neighborhood that was a melting pot for castoffs, inbreeds, and other troubled sorts. Most of them were impoverished and still didn’t have running water. Ironic since the river life force that fed the valley started deep in the caves on Jenkins Mountain.

Beatrice sighed. She hated that so many of them were exactly what the rest of the world envisioned when they thought about Appalachia—that they were all inbreeds, that they lacked education and were impoverished. Damn.

She had traveled all over the world and still thought the Cumberland Creek Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains were the most beautiful places on the planet. That included Jenkins Hollow. From the ridge, you could look down on the settlement, with its beautiful white clapboard church at the center and the steep mountains folding into one another in the background.

As you looked farther and farther into the distance, the mountains grew smaller and smaller, but they sort of looked as if they were fanning out from one another. In the fall of the year, you couldn’t ask for a prettier place to visit. It was unique because it was so hard to get to that the tourists left it alone. Hell, many of them probably didn’t even know it existed. There were no tourist shops, fences, or paved paths.

So many legends existed about the place. It was a remote place when she was a child that everybody had a scary story about. Ghosts. Aliens. Wild, marauding Native Americans or mountain men. Several of the ghost tales were about jilted lovers taking their own lives. Then there was the story that claimed a curse was placed on Mary Jenkins, one of the settlers of the region, because she took up with a Native American chief and bore his children, provoking the suicide of a young Native American maiden, Star, who had been promised to him. She cursed them before she leapt to her death. None of the story was probably true, mused Beatrice. Still, it was interesting to ruminate on it in terms of some of the landmarks on Jenkins Mountain. Lover’s Ridge. Suicide Plunge. Star’s Tears, which were boulders shaped like tears.

Beatrice leaned her head back in the rocker. A streetlight shone on the wall just where a puffy little lamb was jumping across it. She pondered life and the randomness of it. Ghosts. Lambs. Churches. Precious sleeping babies. Mountains. Rivers. And dead redheads washing ashore.

She felt the drifting sensation of sleep and then jerked back awake. Was she falling? She grabbed the chair to steady herself and blinked. Oh, it was just a dream. Just a dream.