LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Long before she reached the top of Randolph Mountain, Beth Warner knew she had made a big mistake. Earlier in the day when she’d been heading westward toward Lexington, she should have resisted the impulse to visit southeastern Kentucky. She didn’t cherish any fond memories of this part of the country where she had lived for eighteen years of her life. When she’d left over four years ago, she’d hoped she would never have to return, but there was no other way to repay the obligation she owed Shriver Mining Company.

      The January day was clear and crisp, but it had snowed recently, and as she turned off the paved highway, Beth looked in dismay at the quagmire that passed for a gravel road leading up the side of the mountain. Deep ruts marked the slippery clay surface of the wet, narrow track. Could her small car possibly negotiate that incline? When she had traveled this road in other years, it had always been on foot or in her father’s pickup truck.

      Beth was afraid to tackle the hill, for she had owned the car less than a week, and she wasn’t an experienced driver. Her driving expertise had already been tested to the breaking point on the narrow, serpentine road crossing Pine Mountain from Whitesburg to Cumberland, but at least there had been guardrails along that mountainous stretch. Here, one false move could send her over an embankment. But while she wasn’t inclined to take any chances, she’d come too far to turn back now.

      She started slowly, gripping the steering wheel with moist hands, and sat straight as a ramrod while she slowly and steadily maneuvered the compact automobile up the slippery road. She released her breath when she reached the summit. Her hands were clammy, and when she lifted her foot from the accelerator, her leg trembled.

      She pulled to one side of the road and parked on the soft needles in a grove of hemlocks. The wind swept briskly across the mountaintop, whipping the branches of the tall evergreens and buffeting her car. Beth slipped off her shoes and pulled on a pair of wool-lined boots, wrapped herself in an insulated coat, and tied a wool scarf around her long, straight, chestnut hair before she looked for the path that would take her to the brink of the mountain. Briers, thick vines and small trees barred the path’s entrance, but Beth walked around the underbrush and into the deeper woods where the trail was more distinct.

      A ten-minute walk brought her to the edge of a rock cliff, and from that vantage point, she had an unobstructed view of the rugged mountain hollow where she had been born.

      “Just as ugly and wretched as I remember,” she muttered.

      Her eyes followed the crooked roadway leading into the small valley that showed no sign of life except for two crows perched in the leafless branches of a poplar tree, their harsh, strident cries echoing from one mountainside to the other. The towering cedars in the family cemetery where her parents were buried stood like watchmen over the hollow. A sparse snowfall had dusted the barren ground and the roofs of the deserted, ramshackle buildings, making the whole scene more desolate than it would have appeared in another season.

      Even during the days when she had yearned to leave this hollow, Beth had always been sensitive to its beauty—the flowering redbud and dogwood trees in early spring, the green of the deciduous trees in the summer, and their yellow-and-red foliage in autumn. Today, however, she couldn’t summon any nostalgic thoughts of the past; all she saw was ugliness.

      Her

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