The Raleigh Harmon Novels by Sibella Giorello

Author:Sibella Giorello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2019-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

On the forest floor, yellow flags of skunk cabbage waved when Jack ran past. I watched bouquets of green ferns sway like palms crying out Hosanna. But ten paces behind him, I was struggling, my lungs searing on every intake.

He yelled down the trail. “You okay?”

I nodded, too breathless to speak, and when I looked up, he was glancing back to see if I was all right.

The expression on his face stopped me. One split second. But I saw it.

Tenderness. Concern.

And then it was gone.

“You went soft down there in Dixie,” he said. “Must be that fiancé.”

He took off, and the trail got steeper.

This was not the hike I had in mind. But the geology was an epic crime scene. Before this quaint town laid itself across the foot of these mountains, some catastrophic event had lifted layered rock miles toward heaven. For untold years, wind and rain pummeled the rock while the shifting tectonic plates continued to grind at the fault lines that cut through the channel below. When the Ice Age blanketed the entire region, it scoured the stones, leaving frigid striations still visible on the dark boulders I passed at every switchback, leaning on them for rest.

When I finally caught Jack, he stood next to a large wooden cross. Waiting for my pulse to drop from heart attack country, and not wanting Jack to know it, I turned my back to him and read the sign beside the cross. It described a missionary priest who cut this trail and raised this marker, reminding every hiker who built the mountain and designed the trees and bestowed each of us with our laboring breath.

“Thirsty?” Jack asked.

Parched was more like it, but he opened his hand, presenting something like green snails, and popped one in his mouth.

“Fiddleheads, the tops of ferns. Keep you hydrated.” He grinned. “I promise, it’s not poison. Harmon, live a little.”

A texture like Bibb lettuce, a taste like chlorophyll, and he was gone before I could ask how he knew where we were going. Up the rest of the trail my quads burned as if my thighs decided to host the phillumenists’ convention. Jack slowed down enough that I could keep an eye on the back of his shirt, spined with sweat, but mostly my head stayed down as we pumped up the mountain.

Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the forest fell away.

We stood on a rocky plateau. Across the channel snowcapped mountains extended as far as my eyes could see, endless white rows. They sliced at the clear sky purged of particulate, offering a vision both beautiful and chilling. Chilling, because it was a place man could not survive. When I looked down, blue blossoms of forget-me-nots shook in the wind. I plucked one, marveling that such delicate flowers could survive high summit weather. The rock was some green gabbro, a metamorphic mix of stone churned and spewed from the earth’s deeper layer. Both flower and stone went into my pocket before I shrugged into my jean jacket.

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