LITMIR.BIZ

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      He kissed the top of her head. “Thought we’d ride home alone together. Give the young doc a chance to catch his breath after the long journey into our mountain wilderness.”

      “And spare him fresh off the boat from New York an untoward encounter with the likes of Leila Hummingbird?”

      He laughed and patted her shoulder. “Remember charity, my Sarah Jane. And, kindness.”

      She rested her cheek against the smooth brocade of his vest. “I speak the truth.”

      “But dost you speak the truth in love?” His words remonstrated, but his eyes twinkled. “Have you no curiosity about the gift I have for you, my daughter?”

      He hugged her close. “A gift of a new laborer unto the harvest of souls in our mountain fold.” He tugged playfully at a strand of her strawberry blonde hair.

      “Is he nice?”

      What she wanted to ask was if he were handsome.

      Her father’s face wreathed into a broad smile. “An interesting travel companion. A worthy sort with whom to while away a winter’s evening. Especially, I think, to a young lady, such as yourself.”

      Anticipation filled Sarah Jane with a certainty that something far better than silk awaited her at home.

      Today might just provide the first entry into her journal . . . An inexplicable feeling arose.

      Sarah Jane put a hand to her throat. Perhaps a milestone along the journey of the rest of her life.

      Chapter 3

      3

      2018—Cartridge Cove

      I don’t see why the tribe hired that white, big-city woman to promote what’s supposed to be a Cherokee event. Why not one of us?”

      Walker yanked open the door of his gunmetal gray F-150 and slid in beside his uncle. Cranking the engine, he slammed the dinging door shut.

      Hawk-faced, Ross narrowed his eyes. “Because she’s Marvela Campbell’s granddaughter, and the Campbells are one of us.”

      Walker shoved the gearshift into reverse, gravel spraying as he backed out of the temporary lodgings his uncle rented. “White Appalachian, Indian wannabes—”

      “The Campbells are good people. Marvela may be white, but she understands The People.”

      His uncle Ross had gone ramrod stiff, his spine as straight as the career soldier he’d been before retirement last year. “Their roots are as deep in this town as ours. Preachers, doctors, teachers the lot of them.” He cocked an eye Walker’s way. “She could teach you a thing or two about community service.”

      Walker shot Ross a suspicious look. “Sounds like you know her. And I thought her name was Birchfield.” The truck rattled over the wooden trestle bridge that straddled Singing Creek.

      Ross gazed out the window. “Born a Campbell. Her daddy and granddaddy preached at the old church on Meetinghouse Road. After she left Cartridge Cove, she married a Birchfield.”

      “Part of them Birchfields up Asheville way?” Walker crinkled his nose. “The timber people who almost stripped the mountains bare a hundred years ago?”

      Ross glared. “You and your trees.”

      “The Birchfields,” Walker gritted his teeth, “who hobnobbed with the Vanderbilts at the turn of the century.”

      Walker threw up his hand to wave at Calvin Ledford closing the co-op craft gallery, probably on the way home to feed his belly. Too early in the year for many tourists—not that Cartridge Cove being so far off the beaten path exactly crawled with tourists even in the height of the season. Which was just how Walker liked it.

      The peaceful mountain life he’d dreamed of while soldiering in the hot sands of Afghanistan would be irrevocably destroyed if his mother, the tribal council, and Marvela Birchfield had their way.

      Walker grimaced. “She married the Birchfield who became a U.S. Congressman, didn’t she? What did she want to come back here for, you reckon?”

      Ross averted his gaze. “Maybe she wanted to come home. After your aunt Bonita passed . . .” He sighed. “Maybe Marvela, like me after all my wanderings across the earth, just wanted to come home.”

      Walker glanced over at the strange expression on his uncle’s face. A man who’d fought in Vietnam, Desert Storm, and every twentieth-century military conflict in-between. “You know her?” At Ross’s shrug, Walker prodded. “Know her well?”

      Ross cleared his throat. “Knew her. A long time ago.”

      Walker negotiated a curve, calculating his uncle’s age and Marvela Birchfield’s.

      “Things were different then.” Ross folded his hands in his lap. “Summer after we graduated, Marvela and I met at the community gospel sing in Robbinsville. Dinner on the grounds. The one time Cherokee and non-Indians got together every year. Still do. She’d been reading that book by C. S. Lewis they made into a movie.”

      “And?”

      Ross shuffled his feet in the floorboard of the pickup. “I’ve always loved a good book.”

      Walker raised his eyebrows, waiting for the rest of the story.

      “She let me borrow it. Next week, the singing was held in her pappy’s church. Between singing groups, we talked about the book. The symbolism. The metaphors for life. The trials the children faced, and how in the end they triumphed over their own individual weaknesses to become the person Aslan knew they could be all along. You ever read The Chronicles of Narnia, boy? It’s a classic.”

      “I saw the movie.” Walker clenched his hands around the steering wheel. “At the base.”

      Feeling his uncle’s eyes on him, Walker dared not turn his head and witness the compassion he’d find there. If anyone would understand the kind of things you endured in the face of enemy fire, Uncle Ross would. But sympathy often undid him since he’d finished his tour and come home for good. And Walker was tired of being the object of everyone’s well-meaning pity.

      The old man laid a gentle hand on Walker’s shoulder. “I don’t fault you, son. If anyone’s earned the right to live the rest of their life in peace, it’s a veteran.”

      Ross smiled. The wrinkles around his hooded dark eyes deepened. Wrinkles earned over a lifetime of scanning distant desert and jungle horizons. And, juggling the responsibility of the lives under his command. “You’ve made your mom so happy since you’ve come home, come to the altar and been baptized a new man.”

      “The old Walker wasn’t so great. Figured it was long past time for a change. Of heart. In direction. In everything.”

      His uncle’s cheeks lifted. “Had a talk with God myself in a jungle in ’Nam. Until then, a more stupid, foolish young man you’ve never met in all your born days.”

      “You, Uncle Ross?”

      “Me.” Ross thumped his chest. “Don’t make the mistakes I did. Don’t try to run or,” he nudged Walker with his elbow, “hide in those trees of yours from life, love, and what God knows you can be.”

      Walker stiffened. “Mom’s been blabbing to you, too, hasn’t she? About the Sheriff’s offer? He’s concerned over the vandalism and the attack on the Center. Hotheads on our side are threatening retaliation, too. But I told her and I’m telling you, I’m done with violence. Give me those trees and a clean mountain breeze any day.”

      “Love’s so wasted on the young and foolish.” His uncle’s lip curled. “Those trees. Don’t you find bark a little rough for cozying up to sometimes? Especially when it’s cold outside?”

      Walker rolled his eyes. Just what he needed. A lecture on love from his elderly uncle. “Did the committee bother to investigate this Birchfield

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