The Witch of Roan Mountain (5 page)

Maeve. In trouble again. Imagine that.

That girl had only been home a few days, and she’d brought nothing but chaos. Her granny had a broken leg, she’d seen a ghost and now she was stuck at the top of Sugar Mountain in a gullywasher.

The weather changed fast up here. He’d seen days when it was seventy degrees at noon and snowing buckets by sundown. Maeve knew better than to venture out to a remote location alone with bad weather on the way. She was a native, for God’s sake, not a silly tourist.

There never was any talking sense to that girl.

He was off duty and rushing to her rescue. Again.

The rain was coming down so hard, it rushed over the windshield like a solid wall of water.

Damn Maeve. Hadn’t she ever heard of checking the weather?

By the time her got to the end of the road, he was furious. He left the Explorer running and hopped out, slamming the door as hard as he could. “Maeve,” he hollered. “Where are you?”

Her car, a Volvo coupe that didn’t belong anywhere higher than Asheville, wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Mud was halfway up the tires and still sloshing down the steep hill.

“Over here! I’m stuck!” She was standing beneath the branches of a Poplar tree.

But he saw her. All of her. The white T-shirt she was wearing didn’t hide anything. Her dark skin was visible under her shirt and her nipples were hard. No bra. Holy smokes. Her low-slung skirt clung to her hips and showed a stripe of flat stomach. She’d always been beautiful, but he’d never seen her like this. It was something he’d fantasized since the first time he’d seen her. Making love to Maeve in a rainstorm. It was in the top five, for sure. Maybe the top two.

“Can you stop staring at me and help?” she shouted.

Right. He wasn’t here to ogle her. He was here to rescue her.

There was a huge torrent of water rushing between them. It was too wide for her to jump and too fast to attempt to wade through. Shit. He’d have to meet her halfway or throw her a rope.

“Did you even watch the weather this morning?” Campbell yelled over the roar.

“I thought I could beat it,” was her answer.

Campbell shook his head. He took a few steps toward her. Water rushed around his feet, coming all the way above the hem of his pants. He had a nylon rope in the car but he wanted to try it by hand first. “I’m going to see if I can stretch far enough for you to grab my hand.”

Maeve nodded and stepped closer to the rushing water. Campbell anchored his feet and bent at the waist. Stretching across the water, he reached for her hand.

With a grunt, she grabbed it. The feel of her hand rushed through him like the heat of a shot of moonshine. He’d forgotten what it felt like to touch her bare skin.

“On three, you jump and I’m going to pull you toward me.” She nodded. “One, two, three!”

Campbell used the muscles in his legs to pull her toward him. One moment she was across the water and the next she was in his arms. Her body was pressed against his. The heat of her. The feel of her.

Her lips were inches from hers. She smelled like apple blossoms and fresh earth. The only thing separating them was the rain. Her eyes, blue as cold fire, met his. When she took her bottom lip between her teeth, Campbell couldn’t resist the pull of her.

The resolve he’d spent years building washed away, and there was nothing but Maeve, the storm, and him alone on the top of a mountain with only the rhythmic sound of the rain hitting the leaves on the trees. It was as if not a second had passed.

He pressed his lips to hers. They were soft, both hot and cold. She tasted like fresh rain and Campbell took the kiss deeper. Maeve went with him. She ran her tongue along his bottom lip and he shivered with the sensation. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her to him. God, she felt wonderful. She fit against him perfectly. Like she was made for him.

He knew where this was going and he was powerless to stop it.

“Come here,” he growled, pushing her backward until she was against the hood of the Explorer. He wrapped his fingers in her hair and kissed her again, shoving his tongue inside her mouth, desperate to taste every inch of her. The hunger, the old one that had been so familiar to him for so long, was still there. He wanted to consume her, melt into her.

Never breaking the kiss, she moved onto the hood of the SUV and opened her legs. She wrapped her hands around his waist and pulled him into her. He stepped into the V of her and she locked her legs around his waist. His lips never left his and he hoped they never would.

Campbell tore at her T-shirt while she ripped at the buttons of his uniform. By the time they were skin to skin, he was on fire. Every cell in his body craved her taste, her smell, the press of her body against his.

Large rain drops splattered on his shoulder, causing him to shiver while the rest of his body smoldered.

“Maeve,” he whispered on her lips.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“You sure?”

In answer, she unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his pants. The pants, along with his boxers, were around his ankles in a flash. He pushed the skirt up past her thighs and tugged at her panties. She wiggled, shimmied out of them. He ran his palms around the curve of her ass, loving the feel of her soft skin.

“Campbell,” she said, as he ran one finger along the inside of her labia. “I can’t wait.”

He pushed into her, felt the hot, tightness of her.

God, she felt good. Better than good perfect.

She dug her nails into his ass, pulling him deeper into her. She was wet with want for him and he thrust into her as smoothly as he could manage. Maeve bit his lip, hard, and he tasted the iron of blood. “This isn’t sweet,” she whispered. “This is fucking, Campbell.”

He plunged into her, as deep as he could go. He showed no mercy, driving into her harder and harder, erasing years of frustration, heartbreak.

Maeve arched her back and lay down on the hood of the SUV. The rain fell on her breasts, her stomach. He matched their rhythm, pounding into her with a ferocity that surprised him.

Some kind of wildness raced through him, wanting to please her and punish her all at the same time.

She moved against him, meeting each one of his thrusts, pushing back against him. Her hands squeezed his ass so hard it hurt. “Campbell,” she moaned. She shivered with her climax, goosebumps popping out all over her skin.

He let go, grabbed her thighs, and fucked her until he found his release.

It was earth-shattering. Fierce. Like the world ceased to exist.

When he finished, he leaned his weight into the grill of the Explorer.

“What the fuck was that?” he asked.

*****

Maeve pushed his Campbell’s weight off her and slid back onto her feet. Her shoes had fallen off at some point, and her feet sank into the soft mud.

“You okay?” she asked. She hadn’t seen it coming. One minute she’d been on the wrong side of a raging torrent of water, and the next, she’d been pressed up against him looking up into his green eyes. The intensity hadn’t changed at all in ten years. One taste of him and she was lost.

He’d pulled up his uniform pants and was buckling his belt. “Yep.”

“You don’t want to talk about what just happened?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it herself, wasn’t sure she had the words to explain what just happened.

“Nope,” he said, buttoning his shirt. He kept his back to her while he dressed. “Get in the car. We’ll come back and get your car later.”

Maeve, after taking one look at her mud-soaked panties, tossed them off the side of the mountain. “Those are a lost cause.”

“You got another pair?”

“Not with me.”

Campbell grunted. “Get in the car, Maeve. We need to get down to the main road before the washout gets worse.”

Her notebook was a sodden mess, all her notes ruined. “Damn it!”

“Put in in this,” Campbell said, handing her an empty evidence bag. “If it’s mostly written in pencil, you might be able to dry it out and still read your notes.”

She shoved into the bag and he opened the passenger side of the Explorer. When Campbell got behind the wheel, he tossed her a blanket. “Here. You need to get warm.”

“I’m pretty warm,” she said.

Campbell shoved the SUV into reverse and made a tight turn. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay, okay. No need to be so uptight, Campbell. It’s not like we’ve never done it before.”

“Enough, Maeve.”

The road was close to a total washout. She was glad Campbell was driving. He navigated the ruts in the road so well, she barely felt the bumps. Maeve kept her silence until they reached the main road. “Thanks for coming to get me. I was scared.”

“What the hell were you doing up here? Didn’t you know the weather was moving in?”

“I knew it was coming, but I thought I had time.”

“Why were you up here in the first place?”

Maeve knew Campbell would be even more pissed when she told him she was still chasing a ghost. “Delphine is buried up there.”

“Shit, Maeve.” He pulled the truck over onto the shoulder of the road. “I’ve already told you not to say her name out loud.”

“If you don’t believe in ghosts, why does it matter?”

He winced. “Just don’t mention her name, okay?”

She shrugged and nodded. “Okay. You’re the one who asked. I was up there looking for some answers.”

“Find any?”

“Not sure. I may have to start from square one if my notebook isn’t salvageable.”

“You should leave that old story alone,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Why does it bother you so much? You don’t think she’s real, you don’t even believe in ghosts. Why do you care?”

He gritted his teeth. “It just gives me the creeps. Always has.” It was more than just a story, to him, it was personal.

Campbell pulled back onto the road and headed toward the cabin. “I was on the way to check on Granny when I got the call.”

“I checked on her this morning. She’s healing. She’ll be home in another day or two.”

“She’s going to need your help around the house.”

“My God, Campbell. Do you ever shut off?”

“I’m just reminding you that Granny isn’t as young as she used to be. She needs you to stay with her until she’s okay on her own. I don’t want you doing one of your mad dashes.” He pulled the Explorer into the yard of the cabin and put it in park. “You’re famous for those.”

Maeve had heard enough. “Fuck you, Campbell. I did nothing wrong by leaving Avery County to go to college and then to law school. Just because I didn’t want to stay here and spend my life working at Bertie’s or working for peanuts at the bed and breakfast I’m a bad person? That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“You should have come home. You belong here.”

As they drove, she looked out the window and looked at the crinkled folds of the mountains. Maybe he was right. Maybe she did belong here.

When he parked the car and looked into her eyes, she saw the old wounds. He was making it about Granny when it was really about him. Maeve didn’t have the heart to drive the dagger any deeper. She placed her small hand on top of his larger one. “I’m home now.”

I don’t like the graveyard. Everybody claims they see me there, that I try to jump into their car. That’s foolish. Why would I want to get into a car when I can go anywhere I want?

Besides, I don’t like cars. They’re new, shiny, unpredictable. If I was to jump into anything it would be a horse buggy but I haven’t seen one of those in so long I’m not sure they even exist anymore.

I was in the cemetery when Maeve came. It nearly made me sick. It does every time I see that stone.

Witch.

I was a lot of things, but I was never a witch.

But carving that on my headstone made them all feel better, I reckon. What they didn’t know was that by falsely accusing me, they made me so mad I couldn’t rest.

Can’t rest.

Won’t ever be able to rest until my name is cleared.

I did lay with Jenks. I loved Jenks. I know he was another woman’s husband and that what we did was wrong.

I didn’t lay with anyone but him after Hoke died.

But I didn’t kill him.

Bessie thought she got the last word but I’m not resting until I make sure she didn’t.

I might have tried to talk to Maeve but I don’t feel comfortable there. That place makes me feel the same way I used to when Hoke had beaten me and I’d look into the sliver of mirror I kept beside the sink. It was a hollow, empty feeling, like cold air was rushing through my insides.

Not only did the place make my skin crawl, but I felt electricity in the air and it was more than the storm. I knew Campbell was coming. I gave all my energy to the air so that she could call for him.

She needed help and I knew that feeling. The fear that rises up in your throat and tastes like iron.

Maeve doesn’t know the things I know.

She doesn’t know that you can’t ever outrun your heart.

*****

Maeve spread the notebook out on the hearth and lit a fire. The rain was still lashing against the outside of the cabin and beating on the tin roof.

After a quick supper of tomato soup from one of Granny’s quart jars, Maeve sat on the hearth with her second cup of hot chamomile tea, Granny’s prescription for relaxation. For the first time it wasn’t working. Her shoulders were stiff and every muscle in her body felt tight and ready to spring.

It wasn’t just Delphine. It was Campbell, too.

He was much easier to ignore from Atlanta.

Her body still tingled at the memory of him. The way he filled her. The taste of him. The sex had been amazing. Beyond amazing. It was as if every emotion they’d ever felt for each other had been distilled into one steaming hot encounter.

She wasn’t staying in Avery County forever and Campbell was a forever kind of guy. If she’d met him in college or in Atlanta, she’d have married him, but he was here in Avery County and he wasn’t going anywhere.

Ten years later and the problem was still the same.

Determined to get her mind off Campbell, she ran her index finger along one of the pages of the notebook. The dry heat of the fire had taken most of the moisture off the pages. While some of the notes were blurred, she could still read them. She read through each line slowly, trying to piece together the information she’d found into one narrative.

Campbell and Delphine were vying for attention, the two of them bouncing back and forth in her brain like ping pong balls. The more she tried to concentrate on what she was reading, the more she felt drawn to think about Campbell and this afternoon. In the rain.

After an hour, the tea finally started to work its magic and Maeve felt her eyelids become heavy.  She left the notebook on the hearth and crashed on the sofa.

Tomorrow, she’d talk to Campbell about the sex. Whether he wanted to or not.

She’d hurt him once and she didn’t want to hurt him again. She hadn’t know, not until she’d seen the look in his eyes, he hadn’t gotten over her. If she were honest with herself, she hadn’t gotten over him either. Not completely.

Maeve stared at the ceiling and tried to allow the sound of the rain to lull her to sleep.

*****

Campbell was wide-awake.

He had too much on his mind to sleep.

He’d spent ten years insulating his heart from Maeve and the first time he’d been alone with her, he’d had sex with her. She’d ridden in his Explorer with no panties. Just the thought made him hard.

The years had done nothing but make her more attractive. The coltish, willowy figure had been replace by curves and angles that were all woman.

Campbell couldn’t figure out what happened between him and Maeve up there. He knew better. Knew that she’d only break his heart. Again. But he hadn’t been able to help himself. She was like a heady drug that made him powerless.

From here on out, he was observing a strict, hands-off policy.

Sex with Maeve, no matter how amazing, just wasn’t worth the risk.

*****

When everyone got sick, they blamed me. Bessie made sure of that.

I understand why she did it. She was a scorned woman. Everyone in town saw the way I looked at Jenks and the way he looked at me. It wasn’t something either of us could hide. She knew his heart belonged to me and mine belonged to him.

When Jenks came back from The War, he was nothing but a bag of bones. His eyes were sunken back in head and his cheeks were hollow. Regardless of how he looked, my heart skipped when I saw him walk into the yard.

Two days after he’d come home, he’d married Bessie.

A week after that, Hoke was dead. Frozen in the last of the spring snows, along with whatever had been left of my heart.

When the weather cleared, Jenks came to the cabin. He brought me part of a smoked ham, more precious than gold in the mountains.

He followed me into the cabin and sat at the table. I put some biscuits I’d made for breakfast on the table and pushed the honey and butter toward him. “Need to eat all you can,” I said. “You’ve wasted away to nothing.”

He looked up at me, his eyes a fevered, blurry blue. “I aim to change that.” He grinned and it was as if I was looking at the same boy I’d known before the war, the boy I’d intended to marry.

I was never the same after I looked at him. Something deep inside me stirred to life, like a butterfly freeing herself from a chrysalis.

I took his hand in mine. It was rough and callused but it felt wonderful. Our fingers laced together as if they were cogs on two perfectly matched gears.

I was powerless to stop what happened next.

An hour later, lying beside each other in my bed, the yellow-white spring sun washing over the quilt that covered us, Jenks said, “There was never any woman save you in my heart.” He placed my hand on his chest and underneath the frail bones of his ribs, I felt his heart beating a slow, steady rhythm. It matched my own.

“I’m sorry about Hoke,” he said. “I know it will be hard on you without a man.”

He was right in one way, wrong in another.

“I didn’t want to marry Hoke.”

He leaned back against the wall and looked up at the beams on the ceiling. “I know you didn’t.”

All of a sudden, all the emotion I’d been carrying for so long, since well before The War, washed over me and tears ran down my face. “I never wanted anything but you.”

Jenks pulled me into his arms. “You’ll always have my heart.”

It was wrong. We both knew it and we were both powerless to stop it.

Even now, a hundred and fifty years after the first time we shared a bed, I still smiled at the memory, ached to feel his skin next to mine once more. I doubted that would ever happen. I wasn’t sure if either of us would get into heaven after what we’d done but I still dreamed that wherever I went when I finally took my rest, he’d be there to meet me.

I was ready to rest. I’d wandered these mountains long enough. I just needed a little more help from Maeve.

I floated up the holler toward Granny Holcombe’s cabin. I knew the place well. Very well. I stood in front of the rough-hewn door until I slipped through it and into the main room. A fire was burning in the hearth and Maeve was asleep on the sofa.

I saw the notebook and knew this might be my chance.

My handwriting never was the best. I only went through the fourth grade. With Mama dead, Daddy said he needed me at home more than they needed me at school. I only had the one good hand and so the only things I ever wrote were recipes on scraps of paper. I only signed my name a few times in my life.

When I realized Maeve was missing part of the story, I knew I had to call my letters to mind. I had to write in her notebook, point her in the right direction.

It took all my energy to pick up the pencil. I had to concentrate on every single loop, every stroke.

It was more difficult that climbing to the highest peak in these mountains.

I wrote only one sentence.

I am innocent of murder.

*****

“This shit isn’t funny, Campbell,” Maeve said. She’d gotten his cell number from dispatch. When she’d grabbed the notebook off the hearth and seen the spidery handwriting next to the notes she’d taken at the cemetery, she knew he was responsible. He was the only one who knew about Delphine and the notebook. She still hadn’t told Granny. Maeve wasn’t sure why she was keeping it from her. “If you thought you could scare me that easily, you’ve got another thing coming.”

“What are you talking about?”

Maeve huffed. “You know good and well what I’m talking about. Don’t play dumb with me.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.” Something in his voice made him believable. “Really, I don’t.”

“Oh, no.” Maeve whispered.

If it wasn’t Campbell then who wrote it?

A cold shiver ran up her spine and make her scalp tingle. “You didn’t write anything in my notebook?”

“Of course not. It was sopping wet the only time I ever saw it.”

“Oh, no,” she repeated, hating the fear in her own voice. “I’m really scared.”

“You at the cabin?” He spoke quickly, slipped into cop mode.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Wait for me.”

Like she had another choice. Her car was still at the top of Sugar Mountain and while the rain had blown out overnight, the ground wouldn’t be dry enough to reclaim her Volvo until tomorrow at the earliest.

She was stuck. Waiting on Campbell to save her. Again.

Maeve looked around the cabin. Everything looked the same. Nothing had been moved, shifted. She could swear no one had been inside the cabin but her in days, yet there was something different in the air this morning. She’d thought it was the changing weather, the nip of fall in the air, but now, when she took a deep breath, she knew it was more than the changing seasons.

Delphine had been here.

There was an unusual smell, earthy and misty, like the smell of fog.

When had Delphine come? The thought of being asleep on the sofa while a ghost prowled through the house made the hair on the back of Maeve’s neck stand up. She had to get out of here. She had to get to the bottom of this.

Maeve grabbed the notebook, her jacket and purse and ran out onto the porch. She closed and locked the door behind her. She wasn’t going back inside, not until she had some answers.

In a rocking chair on the front porch, Maeve opened the notebook and ran her finger across the sentence. She shook her head. Maeve didn’t know much about what made a woman a witch in the 1870s. From what she remembered about her American History class at Clemson, it didn’t usually involve a specific crime and the 1870s seemed kind of late for witchcraft.

There was something she didn’t know. Something she hadn’t figured out yet.

The lawyer deep inside her clawed to the surface. It climbed over the fear she’d felt since she’d figured out that no living hand had written those words in her notebook. She was going to get to the bottom of Delphine’s case, treat her just like she could any other client.

By the time Campbell pulled into the yard, Maeve had a plan.

She hopped into his cruiser and slammed the door. “Can you take me to the museum?”

The inside of the car smelled like Campbell. Fresh and clean, like the smell of rain filtering through the Balsams. Rain. She wished her brain hadn’t made that connection. Campbell didn’t even turn to look at her. He wore dark sunglasses, and he’d just shaved.

“Good morning to you, too, Maeve. I thought I was here for an emergency.”

“Morning. Sorry. And it was sort of an emergency but everything is okay now. Sort of okay.”

“Where was the fire?” Campbell asked.

He looked so delicious, she was tempted to turn his question into a double entendre but then she reminded herself that he wasn’t the kind of man who’d be okay with a fling. He’d always been an all or nothing kind of guy.