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Her hands twirled around. The magic of it forming a couple. He couldn’t see their faces, but he could see that they were in trouble. When he appeared on the scene, he had his gun out, something that he’d not touched since coming here. David watched as he, in the vision, checked out the couple to make sure that they weren’t hurt too badly.
“When you hear the gunshots, I want you to go out the back.” He heard the barely whispered order and wondered what was going on. The couple nodded and then stood. The woman, whomever she could have been, was fat with child and holding her belly. “I’ll be out in a few minutes. Just run to the van that’s out there. Please. If I don’t come out right away, you have to leave without me. They’re waiting on you.”
“Do I die there then?” She told him that he was immortal now. And couldn’t die. He watched as he moved along the tall pallets of boxes, careful where he stepped with each movement. The person he seemed to be looking for was standing nearby, his gun at the ready. His face, like the couple, wasn’t something he could make out. “That man there, the one in the shadows, who is he?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the couple either. They are only one couple that you saved because you came here. Your work with Jamie and Mark is something that you fall into one night when you are asked to help. You become a very important person to a great many people. Because you are here now.” He looked at her. David knew that his eyes were full of unshed tears. As they began to roll down his cheeks, he asked her if she was telling him something that he needed to hear or if this was the truth. “I cannot lie to you, David. None of us can because we all consider you family. And I would hope that you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t anyway. You’re a good man. A better friend to everyone here than you think you are. You are a thriving part of this family and someone that we’ve all come to love and trust. This, right here, is your future. But only if you want it.”
“You could take this all away.” She nodded. “I don’t think I want to know how you do it, but I believe you.”
He sat there for a long time, not really thinking about anything. His mind seemed to be blank. When she put out her hands again, as she had done when she had first joined him, he asked her what would happen if she were to take the pain away.
“You would lose a hand from a splinter that you can’t feel.” He stared at her for a second before laughing. “You find it funny that you would die so stupidly?”
“No. I find it funny that you said that just like you were telling me about the weather. And if you take the blisters away, what will happen then?” She told him. “I would be able to chop more wood so that this winter, none of us freeze. I don’t believe I’ve ever had calluses before. I think perhaps I’d go with those rather than losing my hand.”
She brought his hands into hers and kissed the back of them. When she released them, standing as she did so, he wondered at someone so confident in themselves that they could just give you the information that she thought you’d need and then walk away. He asked her what she was going to do now.
“We’re going on a hike to find a car that was used in a bank robbery.” He laughed again. “Would you like to join us, David? It’s about an eight-mile hike up the mountainside.”
“No thanks. I think I’d rather stay here and chop wood on level ground. At least here, I know that I won’t run into any bears.” She was still laughing when Frazier came out of the house and took her hand into his. As they walked into the tree line and out of his sight, he thought about what he’d said. He supposed being afraid of bears when he lived with a sleuth of them was sort of silly. David bent to his task, trying his best not to think of what if and why’s for a change.
Though he had to admit he did feel calmer than he had. Also, his hands, while still a little sore, weren’t nearly as painful as they had been before his talk with Amelia. David thought that he might be on the road to recovery. He hoped so anyway.
Chapter 3
The walk was wonderful, Frazier thought. There was just enough crispness in the air that he could tell that soon, the mountain tops would be covered deeply in snow. When Amelia asked if they could stop for a moment, he did so without hesitation. The two of them had been enjoying their last couple of days together, and he was thrilled beyond words that he belonged to her.
It had been two weeks since the two of them had found each other. And he couldn’t have been more in love with her than he was right at this moment. Yesterday she’d taken him, by magic, to each of the homes they both owned since her mom had died. Amelia was looking for a spell book that had belonged to her mother and couldn’t find it among her things. As of this morning, it was still missing.
“How often do you guys hike up here?” Frazier told her he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in this direction. “Yes, well, it does look untouched, doesn’t it. Like it was just waiting for the two of us to come along and discover something. Besides the car, I mean.”
“That’s what I feel like every time I go on a tour with people at work. Here too, but it’s more profound for me when I have a group of people with me. They’ll see something, or I will, and I have to refrain myself from going on and on about whatever it is for hours. We don’t have that much time for me to be too wowed over a salamander or a bug.” She laughed, and he loved that part about her too. She was never too serious for him. “I have been known for going overboard on information when talking to people.”
She laughed again. It was unrestrained yet beautiful too. “The view from here is spectacular, don’t you think? I mean, you can see for miles and miles, and I’m betting that if I were to venture a little forward, I’d see things below me that are just as amazing.” She moved closer to the edge of the slip they were on. “I was thinking about this place last night. Not here but nearer the edge of your mountain. How lovely—and dangerous—it would be to have a house sitting so close that you only had to go out your back porch to see all the wonders of this park. I love it here.”
“I do as well. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.” She agreed with him. “My father loved to take long walks. I think now that I know better that it was to get us boys out of the house for my mom. Grandda told us that she was never happy living here.”
“That’s sad. I feel sorry for her that she didn’t get to love all that was around her.” Frazier told her that he was sorry as well. “I wonder if she would have ever come to enjoy being here with you boys had she not died. I believe that it would certainly have been different for you boys if she had stayed to raise you. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t think that any of us would have been able to stay here. I don’t know why, but I think, being our mother, she would have taken us at some point to a larger area that had no mountains around it. Certainly not Tennessee. She would have wanted flat places and city lights. Not that it matters too much now, I suppose. I hate to think about what brought her to her decision, but I’ve come to think she was quite selfish in doing what she had. Just leaving us in the house without a thought as to if we’d be all right there. That’s what she did the day she leaped off the waterfall to kill herself.” Amelia told him she was sorry that she’d brought it up. She’d not meant to hurt him. “No, it’s not your fault. My brothers and I have been talking at different times over the months about the stories that Grandda and Grannie would tell us about the two of them. Mother was selfish in that she made my father’s life difficult because she hated it here so much. I would have figured that she should have known about the law stating that we’d have to live here in order to keep the land. But we’ll never know that.”
“I couldn’t imagine bearing six children and then leaving them in a house alone to do what she did. I suppose you should be grateful that she didn’t do any harm to the six of you. That seems to be the trend. People killing off their children rather than having to deal with them anymore.” Frazier held Amelia in his arms while she spoke. “I know that not every person goes to those extremes. I know that. But you read about it more and more in the newspaper. I’m so happy that she didn’t harm any of you. Maybe—perhaps she wasn’t as selfish as she could have been. Also, she provided for the six of you, too, so that you’d be able to support yourselves as well.”
“Yes. They both did that for us.” He stood there holding her while he watched the clouds, fluffy white ones, dance over the mountains and trees. Off in the distance, he could hear the screech of a hawk. The bellow of some cross animal. When Amelia told him she was ready to go, he kept her hand in his, and they started up the mountain once again.
Just after two, they reached the car. He was surprised to see that it seemed to be in good shape for as old as it was. It had been in the thirties when it had disappeared. It looked to him as if, other than the rust all over it, nothing had bothered it since it came to rest against the tree.
“Look how the growth of the tree pulled up the front of it. Almost as if it was a jack so that someone could look under the hood.” Walking around it, he could see the tires had been long since rotted. Pieces of them were missing that he was sure could be found in a den somewhere. He wiped at the window in the back seat and could just make out a skeleton of one of the occupants there. “I can see one person in here. How many do you think will be found?”
“Three people. A woman and two men.” She told him their names. “Clara would have been twenty-five at the time of their deaths. The man, brothers were seventeen and twenty. Some speculate that she was the ring leader, but she wasn’t. Tommy, the youngest, was.”
“Sort of like Bonny and Clyde, I guess.” She told him that was what she’d been thinking. “There are some bullet holes back here in the trunk. I guess I’m assuming that’s what they are. I guess we should open the doors and see what we can find out.”
“Can you do that?” He told her that he was a federal officer. “Oh. I guess I forgot that you’d have the authority to do that. If you want to wait to open it, I know exactly what you’re going to find. If you wanted, you more than likely know as well. But I think it would be more fun just to open it up—not that I’m morbid, but this case is so old that it’s something you don’t run across every day.”
It took him longer than he thought it should to get the driver’s side door open. He didn’t want to rip it off the body of the car, but it had been closed longer than he’d been around. Getting it open, he was shocked to see that the three bodies were intact. Other than they were dead, of course.
“It looks like maybe rats or other small rodents were able to get inside and tear at the clothing. I don’t want to think about what else might have gotten to their bodies.” Frazier surmised they were in good shape because the windows had been closed, and nothing could have breached the doors. “I guess that’s good. What do we do now? I mean, other than stay with it until someone comes to look it over.”
