Page 133 of In These Hills

“So after hoping I might be safe, the clock started ticking on that very first night. And every day since, I check The Chattanooga Times before Mr. Daniel gets in, hoping nothing about the incident will be in there.”

He peered over. “Is that why you took to making sure his newspaper is all nice and pressed?”

She gave him a look.

“Very clever, Miss Dunham.” He hesitated. “Is that even your real name?”

She nodded. “Something else I wasn’t planning on using . . . until Mr. Poyner did, with you. There was no going back after that.”

A breeze stirred the trees, and a leaf fluttered and dipped and twirled before finally landing noiselessly at their feet.

“Do you think Mayor Darden had your brother killed?”

“I do, although I have no proof. But my parents believed that, too.”

A moment passed, and he started to say something when someone called his name from a good distance away. She turned and looked behind them.

“It’s all right.” He smiled. “Even in winter, you can’t see this spot from up on the hill. But it’s probably best if we get back. Just in case anybody saw us coming down here. You’re a married woman, after all.” He stood and offered his hand, and pulled her up. A slow smile tipped his mouth. “Don’t be looking at me like that, Mrs. Dunham. You have no idea what that does to me.”

“Oh I think I have some idea.”

He closed the distance between them and kissed her, but much more slowly this time, his hand on the nape of her neck, the other tracing a slow path down her back that awakened every nerve in her.

“You not being married,” he whispered against her mouth. “That’s about the best news I’ve ever gotten.”

She laughed, looking up at him. “And you letting me climb up into your wagon that night . . . without assistance, I might add—”

He groaned, which only deepened her smile.

“—you saved me from being caught and taken back to Atlanta, and to prison.”

“God saved you from all that. I just happened to be the conveyance he chose at the time.”

Hearing the conviction in his tone, she found herself wanting to believe that God still knew the details of her life, and that he cared enough to step into them.

They walked back uphill. Nearly to the top, he paused. “You’re going to have to keep being Mrs. Dunham, at least until we can figure out next steps.”

His use of the word we—and even next steps—made her feel not so alone. “Yes, I know. And believe me, I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

He looked pointedly down at her right hand, then back at her, and she quickly moved her mother’s ring to her left.

“Two are better than one,” he said quietly.

It took a minute, but she gathered his meaning. “I never knew that inscription was there until after my mother died. But—” She looked up at him, wondering what Miss Anthony would say if she could hear her now. “I’m beginning to think it may be true, as much as that frightens me.”

His laughter was immediate and warm. “Oh, I know it’s true. And if it helps, it doesn’t frighten me a bit.”

When they crested the hill, a farmhand, Jake—Josephine thought his name was—saw them and waved. “Hey boss, I don’t know who you talked to—” Jake gestured to a loaded wagon in front of the barn. “But the supplies for dipping got in a day early.”

The wagon’s driver, an older man with skin well aged by the sun, looked down at Dodge. “You Dodge Coburn, the man in charge of all this?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Well I hope you know what you’re doing with it, ’cause you could kill ’bout everything in Moore County with this stuff.”

“We’ll be careful. Jake, get some men and let’s get it unloaded. Everybody wears gloves. And every last box or bucket of this goes in the shed like we discussed. Nothing in the barn. Nothing anywhere near living quarters or animals.”

“You got it, boss.”