Memorial Day had gone nothing like I planned. It really should’ve been simpler to launch my summer yard service.
My goal was to find enough customers to cover my mountain bike racing expenses. Since I was already out on summer vacation—and the public schools didn’t let out for another two weeks—I had a competitive advantage that I intended to use. All six of my customers from last year had signed up again, and several had passed along referrals. I was on track to have as much business as I wanted this year.
I’d headed out this morning, expecting to be gone for two or three hours. Right. I’d forgotten how much people cared about their yards. The grass had to be so thick. So green. All this talk about grass made me glaze over.
One referral customer, Mrs. Joffrey, was especially intense about her lawn. I’d listened for five minutes about the height alone. The grass had to be exactly three and a half inches tall—not four and not three.
“Do you understand, Mark?”
“Yes, ma’am. Three and a half inches.”
“Good, then. You’ll start tomorrow morning? Eight o’clock sharp?”
I gave her the confident nod of an experienced entrepreneur. “I’ll be here.”
With an impatient glance at her watch, she hurried inside.
I checked my watch, too. Damn. My original plan for the holiday had included an extra-long afternoon training ride. Instead, I’d wasted most of today talking about grass.
I rode home and tore upstairs to my room. A stack of clean bike shorts and jerseys lay neatly on my bed. I threw on my gear and ran back downstairs.
A gorgeous smell halted me at the garage door. I looked in the kitchen.
Mom stood at the stove, throwing shredded cheese into a pan of steaming broccoli. A slow-cooker bubbled nearby.
“Pot roast?” I asked her.
She nodded. “With roasted potatoes.”
My second favorite home-cooked meal. What a decision—to eat it fresh or go on the bike ride. “When will it be ready?”
“Now,” she said with an apologetic smile. “I thought you’d already be done with training.”
I’d thought so, too. Since I couldn’t afford to miss a day, the meal would have to wait. “Can you leave my share in the slow-cooker for later? I’ll get a protein bar to tide me over.”
Her face fell. “That’s fine.”
I stared at her a moment. She was more upset than I would’ve expected. “Is something wrong?”
“Not really.” She turned her back on me. “Maybe you could sit with me while you eat your bar.”
I didn’t want to, but didn’t see how I could say no. “Sure, Mom.”
By the time she joined me at the table, I’d finished the bar and was staring obviously at the clock.
“Mark?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Have you heard from your sister?”
Ah. Finally getting to the point. My mother wanted to discuss Marissa. “We talk most days.”
“By phone or email?”
“Both.”
“She won’t pick up the phone when I call.” Mom’s voice
wobbled.
Even though my sister had moved to Denver three weeks ago, she was still the main topic of conversation around here, just as I’d expected. Before she left, Marissa bet me twenty bucks that Mom would be smothering me by Memorial Day. I knew I’d win. Obsessing over my sister had become a way of life for Mom. She wasn’t going to lose a bad habit that quickly.
Mom bent her head over her pot roast, pushing it around with a fork. “Has she made any friends?”
“A few.”
“Has she registered for summer classes yet?”
“No.”
Mom looked up from her plate, frowning. “Why not?”
Damn. Marissa had lied to my folks about why she’d moved to Colorado. She should be the one to tell them the truth. “You’ll have to ask her.”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
“Mom, please.”
She stabbed a chunk of beef. “Can I use your cell phone?”
“No, Mom.” Did she really just ask me that? “It might work once, but then Marissa would never speak to me again either.”
“You’re right.” Mom’s eyes were wet.
It was horrible to see her cry, especially on days when she wore mascara. I needed help. “When will Dad be home from San Francisco?”
She wiped her nose on a napkin. “In two weeks.”
That sucked. If Dad the engineer had been here, he would’ve listened to Mom whine about Marissa and then explained in logical detail how to get over it. Since Dad’s solution wasn’t available to me, I was stuck until he returned.
Maybe I should steer the conversation to a safer subject. “How’s your new job?”
“Are you trying to distract me?”
“Yes.”
“It’s working.” She added a glob of butter to her broccoli. “The job is tough. There’s a lot to learn.”
My mother had switched from trauma nursing to hospice care the same week Marissa moved. The timing wasn’t so great.
“Like what?”
“We don’t try to save people. Our goal is to keep them comfortable. It’s a different mindset. I didn’t expect it to be as difficult as it is…”
She talked for a while. When she paused to chew, I asked questions. And I actually paid attention to some of what she said, although I watched the clock, too.
Dad rescued us both by calling. While she paced around with the phone, I headed for the garage.
The delay meant I’d have to change my route. I couldn’t train far from home this close to nightfall. Conveniently for me, there was a greenway that edged our neighborhood, connecting Umstead State Park to the other pedestrian/ biking paths leading into Raleigh. I would take the greenway toward Umstead.
Helmet on, I wheeled my bike across the backyard, through the wooden gate, and onto the wide pavement. No one else was out during the dinner hour. I loved the greenway like this. Quiet. Deserted. No people or dogs to dodge. It was as if I owned a dim, cool tunnel of trees.
A quarter mile away, a dirt track forked away from the greenway’s pavement and into a dense pine forest. Ready to go off-road, I turned onto the rutted track, hopped over a pair of tree roots, and maneuvered down a slope toward the banks of Rocky Creek. Up ahead, I could hear Whisper Falls murmuring as it plunged from a low bluff into the shallow creek below. The bluff had a steady incline. Steep, but not crazy steep.
I didn’t slow as I swooped along the bottom of the hill. I’d studied another cyclist—a guy with a lot of first-place finishes—who attacked inclines like this head-on, as if he would knock the hill down. I was going to give the technique a try.
I slammed into the approach, caught a tire on a rock, and lost my balance.
Okay, that didn’t work. Fortunately, there was plenty of natural compost to break the fall.
I tried again and got a little farther this time.
“How foolish.”
The words whispered past me, so faint it could’ve been my imagination. I looked around. Was somebody watching me? Did they assume I was being an idiot? Not that I cared. To train thoroughly, I had to practice skills like this, which meant I had to fall and bust my ass on occasion. All part of the process.
It was just irritating that anyone might’ve witnessed it.
I walked my bike down the hill and stopped at the bottom. Rocky Creek babbled a few feet away, boulders dotting it at irregular intervals. When I was little, I loved trying to hop across the creek without getting wet. I’d rarely succeeded.
The falls were the best thing about the greenway, and it wasn’t only the eight-foot curtain of water that was cool. There was also the cave. Not very tall or deep, but eerie. Full of moss-covered rocks. A great place to hide and chill and be totally alone in the middle of the city.
Something hovered near the mouth of the cave, behind the falls. A rectangle of cloth seemed to glow in the fading light.
A shadow wavered and shifted. It was a girl about my age. She wore dorky clothes—a long-sleeved brown shirt, an ankle-length skirt, and a ghostly white apron. Silent and unmoving, she stared at me through a liquid sheet of glass.
I guessed it was my turn to speak.
“Did you say something?”
She waited before responding. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and husky. “You’re being foolish. If you wish to reach the top, perhaps you’ll arrive more quickly by carrying your odd machine.”
And there it was, a completely wrong interpretation of a perfectly reasonable technique. The need to explain was irresistible. “I don’t want to arrive at the top quickly. I want to get there by riding the bike.”
She had no reaction—just watched with big, dark eyes in a pale, oval face.
This was stupid. Why couldn’t I drop it? The daylight was disappearing while I wasted it on a stare-down with an Amish girl.
After securing the bike to a tree, I hopped from boulder to boulder along the creek’s edge, stopping on a rock that would get me as close to the falls as possible without being sprayed.
“Do not take another step, or I shall scream.”
I halted and gave her a closer look. The girl stood on a flat rock behind the falls, only a few meters away, her face expressionless and fists clenched against her sides. She was a head shorter than me, thin but not to the eating disorder level, with dark hair hidden under a cap. Her bare toes were visible below the hem of her brown skirt.
I couldn’t stop a smile. She had nothing to fear from me. “Don’t scream. You’re safe.”
“Indeed? Why should I believe you?”
“For starters, that’s an incredibly expensive bike back there. I’m not leaving it alone.”
“A bike? Is that what you call your odd machine?”
As if she didn’t know what a bike was. “Right.”
The girl was so still. Her face. Her body. Nothing on her moved except her lips and her eyes. “May I ask an impertinent question?”
“Sure.”
“You wear most unusual clothes. Where are you from?”
Damn, she was frickin’ strange. Did her keepers know where she was? They really shouldn’t have let her roam around on her own. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“You’re the stranger in our village, not me.”
“Right.” Village? With a half million people? “I was born and raised in Raleigh.”
Her chin jerked up. It was the first real reaction I’d seen from her.
“You cannot be speaking the truth. Raleigh is miles away, nor did it exist when you were born.”
“What are you talking about?” I shifted onto the balls of my feet and scanned the bluff above her, looking for signs of other freaks in dorky costumes. But I saw no one.
A chill wind swirled around me. This was getting creepy, like I’d stepped onto the set of a bad reality TV show, only there were no cameras rolling anywhere that I could see. “We’re in Raleigh right now. And the city’s been here since the 1700s.”
“Indeed, it has. Since 1794, to be precise. Two years ago.”