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  “So, does the death look suspicious?” Beatrice asked.

  “I hate to say it,” Annie said, dipping her bread into the creamy orange soup. “But it does to me. It looks like she was placed in a sack. I’m not sure she could have put herself in it. And there were these weird markings on her arm.”

  “Markings?” Vera said. “Like scratches?”

  “Sort of,” Annie said. “It might not mean anything.” She turned back to her soup. “Man, this is good, Cookie.”

  A smile spread across Cookie’s face. “Thanks.”

  Cookie didn’t smile like that often, Beatrice mused. It wasn’t that she was gloomy; she always had a look of bemused happiness. But it was in her eyes and the way she spoke.

  Beatrice tuned out the chitchatting. Until they knew it was a murder, what was the point in speculating? She didn’t want to believe there was another murder in this community. Damn, the soup and bread were just what she needed today. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

  Just then there was a knock at the door. It was Detective Bryant, who walked into the kitchen.

  “I heard you were at the park this morning,” he said to Sheila. “Did you see anything suspicious?”

  He looked happy, like a man with a mission, energetic.

  Sheila thought for a moment. “No. It was pretty quiet. But if I remember anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Oh my God, it smells heavenly in here,” he said, stretching his arms, then turning around to see Beatrice. “But look what the devil brought in.”

  Beatrice swallowed her soup. “Bite me, Bryant.”

  He chortled.

  The detective sure could hold a grudge. But then again, so could Beatrice.

  Chapter 3

  Vera’s back twisted in pain as she placed a sleeping Elizabeth into her crib. After all the years of dancing, who would have thought parenting would be the most physically taxing thing on her body?

  “She’s down for the time being,” she said to her mother, who was sitting next to the fireplace, wrapped in a quilt.

  “Go and have a good time,” Beatrice said. “This fire is so nice. Think I’ll stay right here. Be careful, Vera. It’s not safe out there.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  It had been almost a week since the mysterious body washed up in their park, with nobody claiming it. How sad to think that nobody missed this woman enough to report her absence—or to claim her body.

  But still, Beatrice was acting a little more concerned about her safety than usual. Vera wondered if Beatrice would ever be the same. After she returned from her vacation in Paris, a general malaise hung over her, and no matter what Vera said or did, it was clear Beatrice didn’t want to talk about this trip, which she and her long-gone husband had dreamed about taking for years. Vera had thought she would return home with countless stories about the city, its food, and its people, but she didn’t. Instead, she’d shared a few photos and thoughts, said she was glad she went, but that was it. Vera mused over this as she opened the door to Sheila’s basement scrapbooking room.

  “How’s Lizzie?” Sheila said after Vera sat down at the table and cracked open her satchel of scrapbooking stuff. She was still working on chronicling Elizabeth’s first birthday party.

  “Rotten, but asleep for now,” Vera said, feeling a wave of weariness, reaching into her bag for chocolates. She had found a new chocolate shop in Charlottesville the other day and was smitten with the handmade dark chocolate spiced with chili pepper. Who would have imagined? She sat the box on the table. “Chocolates,” she said.

  “Have some pumpkin cranberry muffins,” DeeAnn said, shoving the plate toward Vera.

  “Thanks,” Vera said.

  “God, these are so good,” Annie said, taking another bite of muffin.

  “Thanks. We’re selling a lot of them at the bakery,” DeeAnn said and sliced a picture with her photo cropper. “Business hasn’t slowed down a bit for us, thank God.” She made the sign of the cross across her ample chest, even though she wasn’t Catholic. She was the town baker, and her place was always busy, particularly in the mornings.

  “Wish I could say the same thing,” Sheila said, pushing her glasses back up on her nose. “Digital scrapbooking is all the rage. I’m losing business with it being so paper based.”

  “My business is going through a rough patch, too,” Vera said. “This darned economy.” After a few minutes of silence, Vera brought up the subject of the mysterious body. “You know, I just can’t get the dead woman out of my mind,” she said. “Any word yet on who she is?”

  “Not that I know of,” Annie said. “I’ve called the police a few times. Bryant’s supposed to let me know.”

  “I wouldn’t trust that,” Sheila said, placing her scissors on the table with a rattle and a clunk.

  “Don’t worry,” Annie said. “I have his number. I’m already researching these symbols carved into her body.”

  “Symbols?” Cookie asked.

  “At first I thought it was Hebrew, but it’s not.”

  “Ooh,” DeeAnn said. “That just gave me the chills.” Her blue eyes widened, and she leaned on her large baker’s arms. “I’m thinking Satanists . . . or witches.... Sorry, Cookie.”

  “Witches don’t do that kind of stuff,” Cookie said. “We are gentle, earth loving, people loving. I’ve told you that.” She grinned.

  “I would assume you are not all the same, though,” Annie said. “That there are bad witches, just like there are bad Jews or Christians.”

  “Well . . .” Cookie shifted around in her chair as it creaked. “You’re probably right about that.” She turned and asked Sheila, “Now, how do I use this netting?”

  Sheila happily showed Cookie the technique. She unrolled the netting from the packaging ball. One side of it was sticky. She placed it on the page at a diagonal and pressed down, then cut it with her scissors, giving it a rough edge, which added to the textured page.

  “I honestly still don’t know why you call yourself a witch,” Vera said.

  “Oh, Vera, would you just please leave it alone?” Sheila said. “Good Lord. We are having a crop here, not a trial.”

  Cookie smiled slightly. “Thanks, Sheila, but I don’t mind answering. I call myself a witch because I feel I’m honoring the women who were burned at the stake in the name of witchcraft. I reclaim it. That’s all. And if people have a problem with it, they can either educate themselves or not. But I don’t dwell on their issues with it.”

  “Humph,” Vera said and laughed. “I guess she told me.”

  Cookie smiled. “Well, you asked.”

  “Indeed,” Sheila said. “I’d much rather talk about your sex life than Cookie’s witchcraft.”

  “Oh yes, me too,” Annie said. “What happened last week? What kind of kinky sex did you have last weekend?”

  “Good Lord,” Sheila gasped, red-faced, clutching her chest. “The way you just blurt those things out.”

  Paige, the other steady scrapbook club member, entered the room with a flourish. Paige, DeeAnn, Sheila, and Vera were the original crop. Annie came along last year; then came Cookie.

  When Vera thought about how things had changed over the past year, it almost gave her vertigo. She was now the mother of a sixteen-month hellion of a baby, who refused to take naps and didn’t want to be weaned. Annie was going to be a published author. Sheila’s daughter Donna was now in her senior year of high school—which set Sheila all atwitter from time to time. Paige had announced she was going to take an early retirement from the school system—this year, her twenty-fifth, would be her last. And DeeAnn’s bakery was just becoming more and more successful.

  Paige’s breezy pink silk shirt almost caught on the corner of the ragged table as she waltzed by. “Sorry I’m late.” She placed a scrapbook on the table and opened the pages. “I had a flat tire, and it took a while for my husband to get it changed. I mean, Jesus, it’s not as if he hasn’t changed a tire before. What kind of muffins do you have th
ere?”

  “Pumpkin cranberry,” Annie answered, holding her page up and eyeballing it. “We were just going to talk about Vera’s sex life.”

  “Oh, really? What did he do to you this time?” Paige asked.

  Vera just laughed and waved her hand. They wouldn’t believe her if she said that there was absolutely no sex between them the last time she went to the city. They just laughed a lot and talked even more. They had so much to say to one another. She would never tire of hearing Tony’s Brooklyn accent as he told her stories about going on tour with this or that dance company. His voice soothed her—it felt like home. And his touch burned her skin with a passion she hadn’t known since they were together all those years ago in college, as young dancers. Maybe it was time he visited Cumberland Creek. But how would Bill feel about that? Would he make trouble for them? God knows she couldn’t keep his coming a secret. He’d be arriving on a Harley, and if that wasn’t enough of an attention getter, he was a beautiful dark man. Not many of those around Cumberland Creek. He’d stick out no matter where they went.

  “Yoo-hoo.” Paige waved her hand in front of Vera’s face. “Where are you? I was asking about the dead body. Did you say she had red hair?”

  “Yes,” Vera said. “Long red hair. Annie saw her.”

  “You know, I was just thinking about this the other day. There seems to be a bunch of redheads that live up on the other side of Jenkins Hollow,” Paige said, twirling her own wavy blond hair with her slender finger.

  Vera looked at Annie, who, at the mention of Jenkins Hollow, coughed on her wine.

  “I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Annie finally said.

  Chapter 4

  Beatrice was thinking about Jenkins Hollow, too. She thought she heard Elizabeth fuss and checked on her, saw she was still asleep, and stood for a moment looking over her granddaughter, whose face shone in the glow of the night-light. What an amazing, beautiful little creature she was—and that shock of red hair, well, if she kept it, the girl was going to be even more unusual. That was one thing Beatrice could claim she had given Elizabeth. Beatrice, of course, was mostly white-haired now.

  Beatrice had read how redheads were dying out. The gene pool was getting slimmer and slimmer for them. She knew of a group of families in the Nest, which was a neighborhood in Jenkins Hollow that had always had several generations of redheads. For years she’d ignored the rumors concerning the intermarrying and inbreeding, but her husband had confirmed it one morning, after he delivered a Down syndrome baby that didn’t make it.

  “It was a mercy to them,” he’d told her. “It doesn’t feel like that now, of course. But that baby was the product of, well, a brother and sister.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.” He’d lowered his eyes. “It’s quite a problem up there.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Beatrice said.

  “Of course not, Bea. It’s all hush-hush,” he said and held her hand. “There’s plenty in this world you don’t know about, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Beatrice smiled at the memory. Here she was, eighty-one years old, and back then she couldn’t have imagined some of the things she was exposed to now every day, as a matter of course. Girls running around half naked in public was just part of it; the other was the lack of respect the girls had for themselves. It was almost as if sex was the only thing they cared about. And as if they thought they had invented sex. She looked at her grandbaby and felt that same sense of protection that Ed must’ve felt for her. And yet she knew it was futile. Elizabeth would start out seeing much more in her life than what Beatrice never could have imagined all those years ago.

  She supposed the redhead must have come from the hollow, and believed the police would find out what happened—eventually. She hoped it was an accidental drowning. She ran her hand through her mostly white hair. Thinking about it all—the possibility of a murder here, in Cumberland Creek—sent spasms of fear through her.

  Back to Jenkins Mountain. Beatrice used to hike on the ridge that looked over Jenkins Hollow and out over the river. On one side of the river was a group of Old Order Mennonites—those that still dressed in plain clothes and eschewed “modern” conveniences, like electricity and cars. There were plenty of other kinds of Mennonites around, though, like some of her neighbors, who dressed normally and embraced technology but still held true to some of the basic tenets of the religion. Beatrice didn’t know exactly what the schisms between the Old Order Mennonites and the other sects were based on. All she knew was that most of the Old Orders kept to themselves. They always had. Although they were neighborly, they were never overly so.

  On the other side of the river and around a small hill was the Nest—the neighborhood that was a melting pot for castoffs, inbreeds, and other troubled sorts. Most of them were impoverished and still didn’t have running water. Ironic since the river life force that fed the valley started deep in the caves on Jenkins Mountain.

  Beatrice sighed. She hated that so many of them were exactly what the rest of the world envisioned when they thought about Appalachia—that they were all inbreeds, that they lacked education and were impoverished. Damn.

  She had traveled all over the world and still thought the Cumberland Creek Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains were the most beautiful places on the planet. That included Jenkins Hollow. From the ridge, you could look down on the settlement, with its beautiful white clapboard church at the center and the steep mountains folding into one another in the background.

  As you looked farther and farther into the distance, the mountains grew smaller and smaller, but they sort of looked as if they were fanning out from one another. In the fall of the year, you couldn’t ask for a prettier place to visit. It was unique because it was so hard to get to that the tourists left it alone. Hell, many of them probably didn’t even know it existed. There were no tourist shops, fences, or paved paths.

  So many legends existed about the place. It was a remote place when she was a child that everybody had a scary story about. Ghosts. Aliens. Wild, marauding Native Americans or mountain men. Several of the ghost tales were about jilted lovers taking their own lives. Then there was the story that claimed a curse was placed on Mary Jenkins, one of the settlers of the region, because she took up with a Native American chief and bore his children, provoking the suicide of a young Native American maiden, Star, who had been promised to him. She cursed them before she leapt to her death. None of the story was probably true, mused Beatrice. Still, it was interesting to ruminate on it in terms of some of the landmarks on Jenkins Mountain. Lover’s Ridge. Suicide Plunge. Star’s Tears, which were boulders shaped like tears.

  Beatrice leaned her head back in the rocker. A streetlight shone on the wall just where a puffy little lamb was jumping across it. She pondered life and the randomness of it. Ghosts. Lambs. Churches. Precious sleeping babies. Mountains. Rivers. And dead redheads washing ashore.

  She felt the drifting sensation of sleep and then jerked back awake. Was she falling? She grabbed the chair to steady herself and blinked. Oh, it was just a dream. Just a dream.

  Chapter 5

  Annie pulled her lasagna out of the oven while she listened to the football game in the living room. She took in the scent of oregano, garlic, and tomatoes. All her boys, including her husband, were planted in front of the television, watching football, even Sam, who was just four. She slid the pan back in. She’d give it another twenty minutes.

  She sat back down at the kitchen table, where she thumbed through a huge book of ancient symbols. None of them seemed to match her carelessly drawn symbols from the drowned body. Was DeeAnn onto something? Was it a satanic ritual of sorts? Annie wanted to dismiss that, but she’d learned a long time ago not to rule anything out at the beginning of a story.

  “You getting anywhere?” Mike asked as he walked into the room, tossed his beer bottle into the recycling bin, and opened the fridge for another.

  “Not really,” she sai
d and sighed. “These symbols look so strange. They must have a connection to the death.”

  “Humph, maybe not. You know some of these young people are into carving themselves up. Cutting themselves. I don’t get it,” Mike said, then opened his bottle. The burp hissed into the air.

  “I don’t think she could cut herself on the upper arm like that. She seemed to be very young,” Annie said. “Though it’s getting harder and harder for me to tell how old someone is, let alone someone dead in a river for God knows how long.”

  “I hear ya,” he said and kissed her head, then left the room.

  Just then the doorbell rang. It was Cookie, who was dropping off some new die cuts for Annie. Sheila’s new Cricut machine made die cuts, which the women were enjoying placing in their latest scrapbooks. Sheila just chose the design, plugged the cartridge in, and slid the paper or cardboard in, and out came a sheet of easily punched-out designs—hearts, spirals, and even Namaste symbols.

  Annie was always working on at least one of her boys’ books, so she had plenty of cutout soccer balls and birthday cakes. But the croppers had spotted a Namaste symbol in one of the cartridges, and they all had asked for one, since Cookie had gotten them so into yoga and they were all working on a yoga scrapbook-journal project.

  Annie heard the front door open, and her sons greeting Cookie with squeals, hugs, and kisses before she waltzed into the kitchen.

  “Mmm. What are you making? It smells so good,” she said, arms full of paper bags.

  “Lasagna. Why don’t you stay for dinner?”

  “That sounds like an offer I can’t refuse,” Cookie said, placing her bags on the table. She fished around in one. “Here’s your Namaste. Isn’t it beautiful? I love the crimson you chose. It will look great on that beige page of yours.” She ran her thin, pale fingers over the rounded edges. “Look at that,” she said. “What a clean line.”