Chapter 2

In June in the Great Smoky Mountains, the promise of spring is fulfilled by the bounty of summer.

Great fragrant roses in radiant shades of red and pink droop sleepy heads over split-rail fences, yellow roses no bigger than a thumbnail flare like candle flames in the sun, and tiny pale-pink rosebuds sprinkle confetti petals in celebration of the season. The fruity scent of creamy elderberry blossoms mingles with air deepened by the scent of the roses, and tart wild strawberries nuzzle out from beneath heart-shaped green leaves. Melons burgeon, sweet-smelling grass throbs with the tuneless song of insects, and banks of rhododendron deck the mountainsides with color.

John found plenty to photograph, but Cassie was his true interest. He saw her grubbing regularly in her garden, which involved hoeing, weeding, and dirt up to her elbows. She always wore a scruffy straw hat that looked old enough to have been her grandmother's, but she looked beautiful wearing it.

One day he called from his car, "My scratches are fine. That marigold stuff worked great." She only smiled and turned her back in a way that told him she'd rather not be friendly. Maybe she was embarrassed about the way she looked; most women, he supposed, would prefer to be approached when their fingernails weren't underscored by a line of dirt. Or when they'd put on makeup or styled their hair.

Yet at other times—say, in the evening after dinner when he would have enjoyed a congenial conversation—he'd ramble through the woods toward Cassie's house and wait at the edge of the clearing for signs that he was welcome. But by the time it was dark, she'd turned out the house lights. He never hung around. The last thing he wanted was for her to think he had inclinations toward being a peeping tom.

He finally hit upon an excuse to approach her. When he was out jogging one morning, he realized that her rural mailbox, almost hidden behind a tangle of weeds three feet tall, was located around the curve in the road not far from her house. While he studied it, a letter carrier driving his U.S. Mail truck passed by on his route.

After tipping his hat and introducing himself as Joe Clutter, the mailman asked curiously, "Do you know this Cassie Muldoon?"

"I've met her," acknowledged John.

"I've got mail for her. A lot. She hardly ever empties her mailbox."

John leaned down and rested his elbows against the truck's open window. He emitted a long low whistle when he saw the stack of envelopes. "You mean that's all for Cassie?"

"Sure is. I drive up to the top of Flat Top and honk my horn, but she never comes out and gets it like she's supposed to. I knock on the door, she doesn't answer. Guess I'll have to send it all back where it came from."

"Want me to give it to her? I see her outside sometimes."

The mailman brightened. Then his face fell. "It's against postal regulations. I'm supposed to put it in her mailbox. There's too much to fit, you can see that."

John switched on his most engaging smile. "I'll give it to her. Promise." He made an absurd little gesture, a child's cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die.

The mailman studied John's face, finally deciding that John could be trusted. "Here," he said, handing John the mail. "I sure appreciate this. Don't know why she doesn't want it." He shook his head.

"Tell you what," said John, thinking fast. "You deliver the mail to Cassie's mailbox and I'll check it every day and see that she gets it. I jog past here every morning."

"You'd do that for me?"

"Sure I would. For you and the postal service. You know, through rain and snow and dark of night or whatever the saying is?" He grinned.

Joe Clutter stared off into the distance for a long moment. "You know, my boss is beginning to think there's something wrong with me, bringing all this Cassie Muldoon stuff back to the post office. 'Refused,' she writes on it. I been working for this same post office for thirty-three years and I do a good job. It's not my fault if somebody doesn't want their mail."

"I'll see that she gets it," repeated John.

"I'd appreciate it." The mailman threw the truck into gear. John waved cheerfully as the red-white-and-blue vehicle bounced down the rough road.

He stared down at the armload of letters and packages. Then he smiled to himself and began to climb the steep road toward Cassie's place.

"Male call," he said to a redbird sitting on a fence rail, and then he chuckled.

* * *

Cassie sat at the kitchen table nibbling on the eraser at the end of her pencil. She'd long ago given up trying to write music; she simply didn't have the heart for it. But transferring her thoughts and feelings to paper helped her to understand herself, and understanding was the key that would open the lock to—what? That was the thing she didn't know.

The knock on her door startled her. She'd been lost so deep in herself and her journal that she hadn't heard anyone walk up the steps.

"I brought your mail," John said when she came to the door.

The disorientation and dismay on her face told him he'd arrived at an inopportune time.

"I'll set it down wherever you like," he offered when she made no move to take it from him.

"I don't want it," she said.

"I promised Joe Clutter that I'd deliver it to you personally." He smiled, hoping to engage her. "If I don't, I'll be in violation of Postal Regulation Number One Thousand Six Hundred and Twenty-eight Point Two. And you know what that means."

She stared at the mass of envelopes and packages in his arms and made no move to let him in. If his large frame hadn't been blocking the door, he would have bet she'd have bolted past him. Judging from her cornered expression, he was positive that she was considering it.

"Is there really a postal regulation like that?" she asked, not without curiosity. He had been about to say that anyone in violation of such a postal regulation was required to take a beautiful woman out to dinner, but it had fallen flat.

"No, there isn't any such regulation," he admitted.

"Just... just toss it all on the chair over there. And... and thank you."

He put down the mail but couldn't resist adding a few words. "You don't sound as though you want to thank me. You sound as though you'd rather curse me. What do you have against mail? Do you realize that you're missing all the sweepstakes entries, chances to win a new boat or a house or maybe a hundred thousand dollars a year for life?"

She shrugged. Either she had absolutely no sense of humor or he'd interrupted something very important, although he couldn't for the life of him figure out what. He took stock of the scene. A notebook and a pencil were on the table, an orange tiger cat snoozed on the hearth rug, and the skunk, thank goodness, was not in evidence.

She shook her head as if to clear it. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was in the middle of something." She closed her eyes for a brief moment, only a second. When she opened them, he was arrested by the sadness revealed in their depths.

"Then it's time for me to be going." He zipped his light jacket and stuffed his hands deep into its pockets. "See you around, Cassie." He wheeled and jogged down the porch stairs, slowing his pace when he reached the road.

Clearly the task that he'd assigned himself was going to be more difficult than he'd expected. How in the world was he ever going to get her to respond to him?

* * *

After John disappeared from view, Cassie couldn't concentrate on her journal. She pushed it aside and sat on the floor next to the chair to sort her mail.

"Another letter from Morgana. I'd recognize her half printing, half writing anywhere," she told Tigger the tomcat, who looked bored.

She sorted through the magazines, which she chucked into a wicker basket. The latest issues of Billboard joined the others. There were circulars, letters, and squarish envelopes that contained wedding or graduation invitations. These were all reminders of the life she had given up. None of these correspondents believed she planned to stay on Flat Top Mountain.

She had no intention of leaving. Her life was here now, and every time she began to understand where she had been in relation to where she was going, something from outside intruded. Mail was the worst annoyance of all. A big plus of living on Flat Top Mountain was that cell phones didn't work here. She had no internet service. She owned no television, no radio, nothing that could pull her out of herself.

And now not only the mail had intruded, but John Howard bringing the mail. Why didn't he just go away? She was doing fine all by herself.

John Howard. Those eyes sparkling at her, wanting to make jokes, and his immediate kindness when he realized that her mood was not congenial. He'd shown both understanding and patience, she admitted grudgingly as she tossed aside unopened letters to use as fireplace tinder and stuffed others in the bottom of Gran's antique chifforobe. She threw the rest of them over near Bertrand's box.

"You can make short order of those," she said when the skunk poked a curious black nose up from his blanket of wood shavings. Bertrand just loved to tear up paper.

Slowly Cassie stood and went back to her journal, delving inside herself for inner peaceful feelings. She'd almost been in touch with them and ready to commit them to paper. But that was before John Howard had arrived uninvited. Today, seeing him in those brief running shorts, each muscle of thigh and calf clearly defined beneath a furring of soft hair, his rugged sensuality had teased her dormant senses.

Being celibate meant being in charge; it meant you didn't feel weak when a man looked at you in a certain way or go wobbly in the knees when he touched your arm.

Oh, John Howard, she thought, not ready to re-experience the wealth of her body or discover the pleasures of anyone else's. Go away. Nothing can come of this. Nothing. Nothing.

* * *

He brought the mail every day. She saw him sometimes from where she hid behind Gran's crocheted curtains, but all he did was deposit her mail on the cane-bottom hickory rocking chair and lope away, whistling a tuneless tune. If she happened to be outside, he'd do his best to strike up a conversation, but on those occasions she accepted the mail with as few words as possible and disappeared into the house as soon as she could.

He tried. She had to give him that. "The phone guys haven't come to install my land line yet," he said, and "I didn't realize I'd have such a hard time finding a good local restaurant." He told her that he liked the way she wore her hair and mentioned offhandedly that he'd enjoy her company on his photographic forays into the countryside. His voice was deep and appealing, and she liked hearing it.

She refused to discuss anything more complicated than the weather.

Even so, Cassie was doing battle within herself. She found herself trying with all her willpower not to think about John's lips, so wide and generous, or about the way he towered over her when they occasionally stood face to face. She willed herself not to measure his charm and his appeal or to think about his brilliant energy, which was more than enough to sweep any woman off her feet.

"Not me, of course," she informed a totally uninterested Tigger. "My feet are firmly anchored to the ground."

So strong was John's effect on her that she knew she couldn't afford the time and energy to fend him off, so she never let him get close enough to make it necessary. She kept her distance. She remained reticent, vigilant, watchful and elusive.

And in the meantime, John stewed. Now that he had met her, seen her, touched her, Cassie was no longer a hazy figure to whom he felt an obsessive gratitude for a good deed that she had probably forgotten. She was more than that now; she was a real-life flesh-and-blood person with whom he found himself totally fascinated.

* * *

Two weeks after the arrival of John Howard, Cassie waded carefully into the bed of mint in her garden. The weather that morning was clear and dry, perfect for harvesting now that the dew had evaporated.

She gathered the skirt of her shift into a catchall, baring her brown legs even more than usual, and she was bending over to pluck yet another leaf when she heard John Howard hailing her from the path through the woods.

She straightened, unused to anyone approaching from that direction. John always brought her mail down the driveway from the road.

"Cassie," he called, and their eyes met.

Oh no, she thought with dread. He'd caught her with her guard down for once and at a time when she wasn't expecting him. She'd been enjoying her solitude and absorbed in the task at hand. Now here he was, and inexplicably a quotation blipped through her head like words on a Goodyear blimp: "We glide past each other... because we never dare to give ourselves." Who had said that? It was someone famous—but why should she think of it now?

John knew in that moment, when their eyes met, that he would never forget the way she looked, slightly bent over and vulnerable, tiny green mint leaves ruffling around her brown ankles, her hair shot through with the morning sun. He could tell by the expression in her eyes that she was thinking of something that had arrested her thoughts.

"The phone people finally came out to hook up my phone yesterday, and this morning there's no dial tone," he said. "Not only that, there's a black wire hanging down the side of the cabin."

As he spoke he was walking so rapidly toward her that she left behind all thoughts of gliding past each other and thought instead, in a burst of shyness, of dropping her skirt and running. This morning John Howard carried himself with an all too sure knowledge of his sexuality, too much in tune with the lushly seductive sounds and smells of summer on the mountain.

He stood before her now with his hands resting below his hips, unwittingly drawing her attention to his form-fitting jeans and the body within. The jeans were faded, and the body was clearly defined by well-washed denim. The male form, she thought wonderingly, as though seeing it for the first time. I'd almost forgotten.

At least he hadn't hooked his thumbs under his belt and tilted his pelvis forward in that self-conscious macho swagger of a man on the make. John Howard was not such a man—of that she was certain. His eyes were too sincere, and he never tried to mask that sincerity.

"May I use your phone? I think I'd better report it right away. I don't trust that hanging wire." His eyes on her face were friendly, and he seemed unknowingly surrounded by an electromagnetic field so highly charged that it received as much energy as it sent.

Determined to let him know that she was not about to respond to his sexually oriented signals, she picked her way gingerly toward him, clutching her skirt to her body. "I don't have one," she said. "I'm afraid I can't help you."

John found himself captivated by the tinselly tone of her voice and the whispery quality underlying it. "No phone?" His expression was incredulous. "'Way up here on the mountain?"

"I'm used to it," she said. "It's no big deal. Now if you'll excuse me?" She brushed past him, heading for the house.

He refused to be squelched. "Cassie, wait," he said, and his hand on her arm sent a shiver through her. "Go with me to town. I need to check with the phone company and find out what's going on. We could... we could have lunch together."

Her startled eyes found his. "I'm busy," she told him. "I don't often lunch in town."

"After eating one of the Hungry Cafe's greasy burgers, I understand why. Coleslaw on a hamburger?" He made a face.

She snickered, and he felt a sense of satisfaction. At least she was interacting for a change.

"Try the barbecue," she said. "It's fantastic. Sauce made out of vinegar with hot pepper."

"That's why it's absolutely necessary for you to go with me," he raced on, talking fast. "It's your neighborly duty to help me find a decent meal around here. And anyway, why shouldn't you be treated to lunch once in a while?" He addressed the loneliness in her eyes.

"I—I can't," she said, ducking her head and fleeing.

He followed her. "Cassie, wait!" he called in exasperation. He wanted her company, and this wasn't a ruse. His phone really was out of order and there really was a wire hanging down an outside wall of his cabin.

But by the time he reached her door, she'd shut it. Slam, right in his face. Nonplussed, he took two steps backward and cursed under his breath. She didn't reopen the door, and he heard no sound on the other side. No one had ever slammed a door in his face. Who the hell did she think she was?

He resisted the impulse to plant a well-aimed kick right in the center of the door and stalked furiously back through the forest to his own cabin, a small three-room place shingled in gray bark. It was adequate but nothing special after the standard of living to which John was accustomed; the bathroom ceiling leaked and the mattress was lumpy. He'd only signed the lease because the property abutted hers, and its discomforts suddenly seemed like a lot to put up with when she wouldn't even talk to him.

Easy, man. Her friend Morgana tried to warn you, didn't she? Cassie wants nothing to do with you, and you knew it before you brashly insinuated yourself into this situation. So take it easy, play it cool. There's plenty of time before you have to leave. They wouldn't be looking for him at the office until September. Thanks to competent managers, he could handle the details of running AirBridges Cargo Transport by telephone and woefully inadequate dial-up internet. Once the telephone worked, that is.

John cooled off before he got in his rented Explorer and headed down the winding road toward town. He wondered what he could have done to convince Cassie to join him. He knew that there was a tragedy in her past but not what troubled her so deeply that she'd chosen to retreat to this mountain. It amazed him that she worked so hard in that garden of hers and put herself at the disposal of people who thought nothing of showing up to ask for her remedies day and night.

He'd heard the slamming of car doors and hollered good-byes at all hours. Cassie offered remedies for everything from morning sickness to hangnails. She gave unstintingly of herself to others; why would she give none of herself to him?

Riding in the car gave him a chance to think about Cassie undistracted, but he braked at a particularly rough patch of road. The mountain blacktop was treacherous, with curves and switchbacks. Where it leveled out for the first time, he had to swerve sharply when a chicken skittered across the road with a child in full pursuit. The child—boy or girl, he couldn't tell—captured the chicken and stood staring after him as he sped past, feathers fluttering in his exhaust.

The kid must belong to the tumbledown house on the right, thought John, consulting his rearview mirror for one more glance. The windows of the shack were broken and mended with plastic film, and the door hung lopsided on its hinges. The people who lived there were Cassie's nearest neighbors besides him.

Which made him wonder again for the eleven-hundredth time: What in the world was a classy lady like Cassie Muldoon doing on Flat Top Mountain?

Cassie was such a puzzling entity that on the spur of the moment, John decided to do some snooping around Scot's Cove. The logical place to start was with Ned Church, his landlord and the prosperous proprietor of the town's gas station and minimarket.

"Say, Ned," John said when he went inside to pay for gas. "I've been seeing a lot more traffic on Flat Top Mountain than I'd expected. What's going on up there?"

"Oh," Ned said, his mouth working a wad of tobacco, "that's just folks going to see Cassie Muldoon. She gives 'em medicines she makes from herbs. Her grandma used to do the same thing years ago."

"She pretty friendly? Easy to get to know?"

A spark lit Ned Church's eyes. "What you got in mind?"

John laughed, man to man. "I thought I might ask her to go to dinner with me. It gets lonely up on the mountain."

Ned Church chuckled before becoming serious. "Cassie's not the friendly type, if you know what I mean. Doesn't see anyone much except the people who stop by for her remedies. I heard she gets along with the oldest Ott girls okay. One of them works in her garden, the other runs that roadside stand of hers. But Cassie, she keeps to herself. Don't think you'll get anywhere." Ned stepped to the door and spat a brown bullet of tobacco juice toward the highway.

"You know her long?"

"Cassie used to visit her grandma in the summers. She came back a couple years ago, and she's been living there since. I get a few words out of her when she comes into town, which isn't often. No, Cassie's kind of a hermit."

"Mmm," said John, thoughtfully. Unfortunately, he hadn't learned much that he didn't already know.

Reaching Cassie Muldoon was proving to be a difficult task indeed, but for him, there was no turning back.

He'd crossed the continent to find her, and he wasn't ready to quit.