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“I bet you are. Change, then, while I gather my work gear.”
Hayden needed less than a minute to organize his laptop, charger and notebook. For good measure, he added the extra blanket from the closet and pocketed his wallet. Sometimes a kid did things out of desperation.
Brody reappeared, a waif in oversize clothes, the gray sweats rolled up at the ankle and the shirt hanging below his hips. He’d scrubbed at his hair with a towel and it stuck out like porcupine quills. He held the wet clothes in his hands. “Where should I put these?”
“I’ll take them. They’ll have a dryer.” Carrie would know, and he hoped she hadn’t gone to bed. She was apparently a friend of the innkeeper and knew her way around the inn.
Hayden added the jeans and shirt to the items he’d take downstairs, then flipped back the mulberry-print comforter and gestured. The boy climbed in, his cold feet brushing Hayden’s hand. Tucking in a kid brought an odd sensation, and he had a sudden gray-edged memory of his father, the scent and soot of the mines imprinted in his pores, snugging a blanket beneath Hayden’s chin.
Brody’s pale fingers gripped the edge of the cover. His eyes drooped and he sighed, a pitiful sound of relief and exhaustion.
Hayden stepped back to leave.
“Mister?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks.” Brody’s lips barely moved as his eyelids fluttered shut.
Full of a pity he didn’t want to feel, Hayden waited less than a minute before the skinny chest rose and fell in rhythmic sleep. Softly he murmured, “Good night, Brody.” What was left of it.
He clicked the switch and sent the room into darkness lit only by the flicker of leftover lightning. So much for writing during the storm. The best part was nearly gone.
Skirting the third step, he made his way back to the kitchen, where Carrie cleaned up the evidence of the night’s activities.
When he entered the room, she paused, closed Oreo package in hand, to nod at Brody’s wet garments. “Let me have those.”
Hayden handed over the soggy clothes and followed Carrie down a short hall behind the kitchen to a laundry room.
“That was nice of you,” she said.
“What else was I going to do? Toss the kid back out in the storm?”
“I could have woke up Julia and gotten the key to a vacant room.”
He shrugged. “No need. I’m up anyway.”
“Right.” She tossed the clothes into the dryer, added a softener sheet, clicked the door shut and hit a button that set the tumbler into humming motion and the warm humid smell of peaches swirling about the space. “So you can kill people.”
“Uh-huh.” Starting with the parents of a certain half-drowned boy, he thought with grim satisfaction.
Carrie headed back to the kitchen to finish the cleanup. A neat freak with the neurotic need to be cleaner than his boyhood, Hayden joined in.
“I know that boy,” Carrie said as she sponged down the countertop. “He comes in the library nearly every day after school for our tutoring program.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
She shrugged. “He probably doesn’t know who I am. Kids don’t notice librarians.”
He did. “What do you know about him?”
“He hangs out and plays on the computers, reads some but rarely checks out a book. He likes mysteries and adventure.” She flashed the charming dimple. “Librarians always notice reading preference. He doesn’t say much or bother anyone, but he generally stays awhile, as if he has no place else to be. We get our share of those at the library.”
“Do you know his parents?”
“He lives with his father. No mother in the picture. Brody’s one of the street kids around Honey Ridge. I don’t believe for one minute that he was lost.”
Hayden filled a coffee carafe and started another pot. “That was my take, as well. His father isn’t out of town, either.”
“Why would he lie about a thing like that? If his dad is at home, why didn’t he let us call him?”
There were plenty of reasons, and Hayden, unfortunately, knew too many of them.
* * *
Long after Carrie trudged up the stairs in hopes of a few hours’ sleep, Hayden contemplated the night’s events and stared at a blank word processor. Fueled by the cookies and strong coffee, his mind whirled, though not in the direction he’d hoped. Carrie, Brody and Dora Lee wouldn’t leave him alone.
He stretched, rolled his neck and roamed the parlor.
Finally, frustrated by the lack of progress, he grabbed the blanket and a throw pillow and flopped down on a curved, skinny Victorian sofa clearly not intended for napping. Especially by a man with long legs.
After fifteen minutes of misery, he rolled off onto the area rug, taking the pillow and cover with him. Much better.
The pillow smelled of peaches and the floor of wood polish, though a dark stain spread from the rug to the fireplace. The wood was old, likely original to the house, but he wondered why this section hadn’t been replaced.
He sifted through the memories of the day, tossed out the conversation with his mother, which was guaranteed to keep him awake and suffering from dyspepsia, and focused on the fascinating old house.
His fingers grazed the stain, interestingly cool to the touch. With a weary sigh, he closed his eyes and let himself feel the memories clinging to the fireplace and the floor, searching for that one kernel of story that would become a novel. His last conscious thought was the low vibrating rumble of a distant train.
4 (#ulink_407a7785-e082-526e-9625-784aa7df9e91)
It is said that some lives are linked across time, connected by an ancient calling that echoes through the ages.
—Prince of Persia
1867
Heat seared his lungs and scorched his skin. Flames leaped and clawed. His shirt melted against his back. He coughed, once, twice, as hot tears rolled down his face.
Amelia! Grace! Where are you? Their names stuck in his throat, burned shut by the hungry flames.
“Sir! Wake up. You’s havin’ a bad dream.”
Thaddeus Eriksson opened his eyes with a start. A broad black face, as dark and shiny as a coat button and most certainly not his wife or daughter, stared down at him. Thad sat up straighter, reorienting to the inside of the Tennessee passenger train. The metallic click of the tracks rumbled below him. Smoke puffed past the windows. He was on a train bound for southern Tennessee, not in the burning house in Ohio.
He dragged a shaky hand down his face. “I was dreaming.”
He’d not had the dream in weeks. The engine smoke must have set him off.
“Yes, sir. You sure was. You all right now?”
Thaddeus saw kindness in the obsidian eyes of Abram, an ex-slave, fit and strong like a field-worker, not old but old enough to be on his own on a southbound train, though from the haughty glances and grumbles, there were plenty on board who disapproved of his presence. The slaves were all free now that the war had ended and a bumpy kind of peace had descended on the country. Still, a black man alone on a train was taking a risk.
From the moment Abram had boarded the train, Thaddeus had kept a watchful eye until fatigue and the train’s rhythm had lulled him to sleep. He hadn’t intended to doze. A former Union soldier and a freed slave on a Southern train weren’t especially welcome, and he knew better than to let down his guard. He tried to keep his voice low to hide the Ohio accent, but Abram couldn’t hide who he was.
Surrender may have come, but the nation was far from being united.
Even now, a rotund man with a cigar squinted at them in hostile speculation.
The scarlet padded seat gave as Thaddeus twisted toward the friendly freedman. Abram sat behind him, but they’d exchanged a cordial conversation on the long ride. No one else seemed inclined to pass the time.
“I’m obliged you woke me.”
He’d slept for five nights on a series of conveyances on his way from Ohio to Honey Ridge, Tennessee. The train cars were noisy, dirty, and the interruptions unpredictable but the ride was still a luxury considering the miles he’d marched and places he’d slept during the war.
Like most of the South, railroad service had yet to fully recover, and the flood of Northern profiteers into the South had raised the hackles of former Confederates.
“Bad dreams can be an omen. That’s what my mama always said.” Abram’s rough, weathered hands gripped the seat back as he leaned forward, speaking low. “You were hollering out to somebody named Amelia.”
Sometimes bad dreams were reality. The hard knot of pain tightened in Thad’s gut. “My wife. She died.”
Even after a year, the words shocked him.
“Now that right there is a pure shame, Mr. Thaddeus. I sho is sorry for yo’ loss. Do you have any chilren?”
“Grace. She died, too.” He was the only survivor of the fire that had taken his home and family, and Thaddeus knew he should be thankful to the Almighty for sparing him. But after a year alone, a year of strangling grief and regret, he often wished he’d died with them. “What about you, Abram? You got a wife and children?”
“No, sir. I had me a sweetheart once, but the masta’ sold her off somewhere when the war started. My mama and brothers, too. Pappy, he died in the fightin’.”
Abram’s words were a useful reminder that others had lost as much or more in the long, painful War Between the States, a struggle he still believed was righteous.
“That’s a shame.”
“Yes, sir. I’m gonna find them, though.”
“Is that where you’re headed now?”
“Uh-huh. Chattanooga. Miz Malden, she couldn’t pay us no more after Mr. Malden passed. The war done took everything.” He laughed softly. “Even us workers, thank the Lawd. But she looked in Mr. Malden’s book, and told every one of us where our families was sold off to.”
“Kind of her.” Thad’s heart had returned to a steady rhythm as the dream faded. He was grateful for Abram’s distracting conversation. “You think your family is still there?”
“Yes, sir. Hoping so. My mama and my brother, Jesse.”
Since emancipation former slaves were scattered, searching for one another and for a new start to a way of life few of them understood. There was no telling where Abram’s family was now. But Thaddeus didn’t have the heart to steal the man’s hope.
“Chattanooga sounds like the place to start.”
“Won’t be long now.”
Thad removed his pocket watch, a timepiece he’d carried since before the war. A long-ago Christmas gift from Amelia, it was his most treasured possession. Even as the polished silver glinted in the sunlight, he recalled her smile, her joy at presenting him with such a fine watch. The memory both hurt and comforted.
“Ought to be coming up on my stop soon and then Chattanooga not long after.”
He’d no more than spoken than the train began to slow and the brakes squealed. A shrill whistle nearly split his eardrums.
“This yo’ stop right here?”
“This is it.” A water stop for the train, and a place for passengers to disembark or board that wasn’t much more than a handful of clapboard buildings. “I hope you find your family, Abram. If you ever get up around Honey Ridge, stop in and say hello.”
Thaddeus hoisted his satchel and rose, turning to offer a hand to Abram. The ex-slave seemed momentarily taken aback before he clasped Thad’s hand with a grin. “Good luck to you, Mr. Thaddeus.”
Steam smoke swirled around Thad’s face as he disembarked, and the strong odor made him anxious. He knew the scent came from the train and yet the memory of the fire that had stolen too much haunted him more than the years of unrelenting battle.
He glanced around at the tiny town, then toward the rising blue haze that would be the Smokies to the east and the rolling countryside that spread in every direction in undulant shades of green. The landscape across Tennessee was beautiful, even though too many burned farms and ravaged villages littered the countryside like the dead Confederacy.
Weary but hopeful, Thad aimed toward a sign proclaiming General Store in search of information. If he was fortunate, someone would share an easy route to Honey Ridge. If he was very lucky, he might even find a wagon headed in that direction.
His boots echoed in the hot afternoon as he stepped through the doorway into the tiny store. The inside was dim and smelled of coffee and leather and hog grease. Shelves stuffed tight with an array of goods lined the walls of the narrow room, a promising sign. Three men stood talking around a spittoon, while a white-haired merchant wrapped a length of brightly printed calico in brown paper.
Thaddeus approached the merchant. “I’m headed for Honey Ridge. Might you direct me toward the best route?”
Nimble fingers paused in tying the package. “I might.”
Thaddeus waited, but the merchant didn’t say more.
One of the tobacco chewers, a short, squat man with a big nose, approached. “Where you from, boy?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d answered that question, though not everyone across the South had been unkind to a former Yankee soldier. There were sympathizers in Tennessee, including the rosy-cheeked woman who’d sold him a loaf of bread and thrown in some dried apples for good measure. Thaddeus had a feeling this man wasn’t one of those.
He sighed. “Ohio.”
The man spat a long stream of tobacco, narrowly missing Thad’s boots. Thad followed the insult with his eyes.
“Yankee.” The man bit off the word as if it left a nasty taste. He looked to his friends, both of whom stared at Thad with more than a little animosity. The one in red suspenders tilted back to stare and Thad saw what he’d missed. One of the men was missing a leg. A soldier, no doubt. A Rebel. Probably all three of them had been.
“I’m not looking for trouble,” Thaddeus said. “Just directions.”
“You won’t find them here.” The man ran his hands under his suspenders. “You best head on back to where you come from.”
The tiny hope that he might purchase some food or even share a ride on a farmer’s wagon dissipated in the dark confines of the general store.
The merchant kept his attention on the parcel now neatly wrapped and tied with string.
Thaddeus gave a head bob and walked outside. A hundred yards down the track, the train chugged onward toward Chattanooga, its smoke a gray feather tickling the blue sky.
The air was sticky and thick. Nights would be cooler, though every bit as humid. Will had sent him a map, drawn by his own hand. A former army captain who’d campaigned all over Tennessee, William Gadsden would be accurate. The trip to Peach Orchard Farm was a long one, especially without food, but nothing to a man who had marched with a hungry infantry for three years.
He shouldered his satchel and started walking.
