Maggie's Mountain (12 page)

His blood was humming a mile a minute when he pulled down her drive. The splashes of fall colors surrounding the small clearing felt brighter than they had before. Clarity of purpose, he supposed, then stepped out of his car. His head was filled with a strange static. Fear, he realized, and stopped short. He’d never been afraid of attraction before. Anxious, sure, but uncertain? He swallowed and shook his head. He was
not
afraid of Maggie Mae.

He kept that mantra in his head as he strolled up to the door. Repeated it as he waited impatiently. Whispered it when he made his way around to the back of the house. Then he saw her on her knees, digging in the earth, her head covered with a ratty straw hat, her gloved hands coated with rich dirt. The words were replaced with the hard pounding of blood and libido.

“Maggie.” Her name sounded as hard edged as he felt.

Her head snapped up and he could see a smudge along her nose and right cheek. What should have been a detraction was acutely becoming on her. Lust must be melting his mind to mush.

“Hale? What are you doing here?” The question quavered and he realized there were tears in her eyes. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

Worry punched his gut with a hard left hook, sending his desire skittering to the corner. “Maggie, what’s wrong? What happened?”

She waved her hand over the small garden; it was obvious she was too distraught to try to shrug his concern away. “The garden…it’s all…it’s dead. Or dying. It’ll all be dead by tomorrow.”

He recalled how she’d said the land had fed her family, how she sold the produce, and understood why she was hurting. He didn’t think; he went to her, going down on his knees to the pungent earth. He looked at the withering vines, the shriveling vegetables, the brown leaves.

“What happened?”

She shrugged and let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know. I just…I have no idea. I haven’t done anything different this year.”

He touched a dead vine and cocked his head. “No freezes that I’m aware of.”

“Nothing that would damage these plants. I know what I can plant for the fall, Hale, and these were thriving yesterday. It makes no sense.” She bit her lip and wiped her palms down her worn jeans.

He narrowed his eyes and studied her for a moment. “What is it you aren’t saying?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do.” He reached over and took her gloved hand in his. “What is it, Maggie? Tell me.”

Indecision danced in her violet eyes as she hesitated. “I…it’s stupid.”

“It can’t be that stupid if you’re worried about it.” He willed her to trust him, to share the trouble with him. He wanted to help her carry the burden, to hash it out, to come to conclusions and make decisions. If he hadn’t been so concerned about her his thoughts would have had him shaking in his boots.

“It’s just…if I didn’t know any better I’d think someone poisoned the garden.” Her voice sounded small, thick and wounded. “I told you it was crazy.”

Hale took a deep breath and let her words sink in. To anyone else what she’d said might have sounded overdramatic, but not to him. “I never said that, Maggie. The fact is you’ve been growing this garden your whole life. I’ll bet you learned from your mother, who learned from hers and on back. You know this land, you know the plants, you know how they should look, feel, smell. If you have a hunch someone might have poisoned the garden then chances are something, maybe even some small thing you can’t quite put your finger on, is telling you that. It seems logical to me.”

She let out a long breath and drooped back. “I wish that didn’t make so much sense because now I have to wonder who’d come out here and do this.”

He was worried, too; something like this was blatantly personal and deliberate. “Did anyone else stop by yesterday, besides your friends?”

She shook her head. “No one that I know of.”

“That you know of?”

“Jo and I ran into town to pick up pizza and a bottle of wine. We were gone for about an hour. After she left, I soaked in the tub for a while and went to bed. Anyone could have come out last night while I was gone or while I was asleep.”

“Damn it, Maggie, this is exactly why you shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

Her face fell into a half-hearted scowl. “Stop it, Hale. I’ve lived out here just fine for years.”

He raked a hand through his hair and tried to keep the worry from his voice. “And now you’re not. Someone killed your garden.”

“Yes, they did, and I have a feeling it’s—” She looked away from him and began gathering her tools.

Suspicion had him snaking his hand out to grab her wrist. “Wait, it’s what? What aren’t you saying?”

She sighed, the sound of the resigned, and looked back at him. “It’s about you. Well, maybe not specifically you, but it did start when you got back into town.”

“Me?” He couldn’t help but be flabbergasted at her deduction.

“Like I said, not you in particular, more like the Warrick name. I should have guessed this might happen but I thought—hoped—we were past all this.”

He stared at her, hard, before he spoke. “This sort of thing has happened before?”

“When I was kid there were some people who would go out of their way to make life difficult for us. The fact that the Warricks didn’t care for us was enough ammunition; the rumors about my mother only added fuel to their fire. They didn’t just snub or verbally harass us, but they vandalized our car when we were in town, laid tree branches across our driveway so we couldn’t get out, spray painted our windows black when we weren’t home. It stopped just after I started college and there’s been a sort of shaky truce, I suppose. But the past few years it’s felt like maybe it was a permanent state. I guess I was wrong.”

The urge to simultaneously curse and comfort her stretched his raw nerves tight. “Why didn’t you leave if the people in town were doing those things?”

“This is my town, too, Hale. I was born here. I grew up here. My family is buried here. If I didn’t let your father bully me out of Exum I sure wasn’t going to let a handful of petty people do it, either.” She paused and he watched as her face went pale.

His eyes narrowed as he latched onto her last words. “What do you mean let my father bully you out of Exum?”

She licked her lips and tried to stand. “I’m not getting into this with you.”

“Yes, you are.” He stood up beside her, grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the cabin. “You’ve done a lot of avoiding, Maggie Mae, and it’s high time you stopped dodging and swerving.”

He led her into the house and closed the door behind him. He studied her, made sure there was more fire there than fear, then crossed his arms over his chest. There were so many things that had to be said that he wasn’t sure where she might need or want to start. But by God she was going to explain about his father, and she was going to do it right now. He lifted an eyebrow and waited.

Finally, she propped her hands on her hips and glared back. “Sometimes I can see Royce in you.”

“I suppose sometimes that’s not a bad thing.”

“I suppose you’d think so.”

The bitterness of her words sank in and rolled down deep. “I didn’t always agree with my father. In fact there were times he was a ripe son of a bitch. But not everything he said or did was necessarily wrong.”

She shook her head. “Don’t talk to me about how Royce Warrick was a misunderstood man, about how he was some poor fool who was hounded by a money crazed whore.”

The fury was there in her voice, but so was the pain. He hated hearing either there, so he kept his tone calm. “I never called your mother a whore.”

“You thought it. And so did most everyone else at one time or another. In fact she was called one to her face on several occasions, which was exactly what your father wanted everyone to think.”

“It’s hard to deny the facts, Maggie,” he pointed out quietly.

“Facts?” She let out a hard laugh. “Your father never dealt with facts when it came to my parents. He dealt in fantasies brought on by a bruised ego.”

Hale closed his eyes for equilibrium, opened them again. “All right, I know how everything that went on between our parents hurt you. I’m sorry for that.”

His words seemed to take the rage from her sails. When she spoke again, it was in a soft, almost reluctant voice. “You don’t know, Hale. You have no idea.”

He tried to touch her but she recoiled. He curled his fingers into his palm as he absorbed the quick stab of emotional pain.

“I want to know, Maggie. I want you to tell me. What did my father do to bully you?”

She took a deep breath, waited a long beat, then answered with heavy words. “Not long after I started my business your father paid me a visit. He was very businesslike. He said he couldn’t have me setting up something that might upset the applecart.
His
applecart, of course. He offered me money to stop my silly little money making scam. That’s what he called it, a silly scam. I refused. He told me he’d have us thrown off the mountain. I informed him that we owned the land and the house, free and clear, and we had the documentation to prove it. That’s when he really got mad. He swore he’d make sure no one in Yates County would do any business with me. He promised me we’d be flat broke and begging for help in less than two months. When I told him that the internet was international and he couldn’t control it, or me, or the phone lines that we paid for and used, he was furious. He threatened to burn us out, to burn down the whole damn mountain, because he
deserved
to have my mother. He said he’d have her no matter what he had to do.”

Hale stood and stared at her, trying to sort through what she’d just told him. His father had not only demanded Maggie stop trying to make money, he’d demanded she step aside and stop trying to take care of Rebecca. So he could have her. It made no sense. But why would Maggie lie? There was absolutely no reason for it; besides the fact, she simply didn’t have it in her to be so deceptive.

“But your mother—”

“Never loved Royce. It was always one sided.”

His muscles began to tighten into knots as uncertainty crept into his veins. “She chased my father. She even showed up at our house a few times.”

“To beg him to stop making her life, and mine, so difficult.” Her features softened and he felt her body begin to relax. “He made it so bad for us that my father started drinking. He couldn’t find a decent job because of the almighty Warrick name.”

Hale’s world began to tilt and he shifted his weight to right it. “Your father couldn’t find work because he was an alcoholic. No one would hire Quinn because he wasn’t reliable.”

“He was reliable enough for your father to use him. Then my father met my mother and they fell in love. Royce wasn’t very happy about that.”

He shook his head in denial. This wasn’t right; what she was saying was all wrong. “No, my father was engaged to my mother. Rebecca had been going after him even then. Why would he care?”

“Oh, Hale, you don’t see it.” She brushed her fingers over his arm before she moved away. “Sit down.”

He went on watery legs, sinking into the soft cushions of the couch. “Look, I’m sure your mother told you her version of the story, and I know you want to believe her. You love her, I understand that. But I lived this, Maggie. I saw it.”

“I lived it too, Hale, every single day of my life. I probably saw more of it than most people imagine. But you saw what your father wanted you to see.” Her softly spoken words turned his confusion sharp edged.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“No, I’m calling Royce Warrick a liar.”

She seemed to debate with herself for a moment before she disappeared into her office. A few seconds later she was back, holding a large stack of letters. He stared at her in question when she held them out to him.

“These are the proof,” she said, her voice quiet. “My mother saved all of these in case Royce ever decided to try to attack me. Not her, but me. She didn’t feel that she had to defend herself to Exum. I suspect she knew she couldn’t, not when the town relied on the Warricks’ good wishes to survive. I don’t think she wanted to hurt you or Trent, either.”

He gazed at the pile of envelopes as a dark, sinking feeling clawed at his stomach. “What are you talking about?”

Maggie rolled her lips together, as if it was hard to let her words out. “Your family has always been the backbone of Exum. Really, I think it’s safe to say it’s been an important part of the entire county since it was established.”

Hale nodded, not sure where she was going with this, not sure he wanted to be led down the path she was walking. But he’d asked her and she was giving him what he wanted. What was that adage about being careful what you wished for?

“The Warricks are entrenched in this part of the world; they’re fairly well entrenched in everyone’s lives.” She knew he couldn’t deny that so he waited for her to continue. “That much can be said about a few other families around here, including my own. This land, this part of the mountain, has always been ours. We’ve never been rich, never had the same influence as the Warricks, but we’ve always been here.”

He felt himself begin to sweat. “What are you getting at, Maggie?”

“For as long as your family and mine have shared Exum there had never been trouble between them. Until Royce Warrick came home from college, saw Rebecca Richards one morning, and decided he wanted her.”

He felt a small jolt at the sound of her mother’s maiden name. She was right; the Richards had been here as long as the Warricks. Their roots ran as deep and as wide.

“The only problem was Rebecca came from a family of farmers, not from a well-bred-well-wed family line. Royce knew it and understood he could never marry her. My mother knew it, as well. It all could have ended with bittersweet memories, a sort of young sweetheart, untouched feelings situation. But Royce decided she was the prettiest woman in the county, and since he was who he was, he deserved the best.”

Hale rolled his shoulders as what she’d said settled in. “Sounds like him.”

She was gracious enough not to nod in agreement. “He wanted to set her up in a little house just outside of Exum so he could visit her without anyone knowing. Momma said no. He told her he’d make sure her parents wouldn’t ever have money trouble again. She still told him no. He promised her he’d take care of her, set her up in style, make sure she’d never have to work. She still refused. He got angry, very angry, and threatened her. He told her he loved her and no one else would ever make her happy; he’d see to that. But she didn’t love him, not in the way that makes a marriage happy, makes it work. And he didn’t love her, not really. He was just obsessed. She tried to explain that to him but he wouldn’t listen. During that time, Royce got engaged to Cordelia and he hired one highly recommended Quinn Cooper to help refurbish the Warrick home. One day on his lunch break, my father saw my mother sitting in Wilson’s Diner and fell head over heels. When he came in and introduced himself, momma fell for him, too. A week later they eloped. Royce found out and was livid. After that he made it almost impossible for my parents to live here. I suppose it would have been easier for my mother to have sold the cabin and the land, but like I said, family roots run deep. And daddy loved it here, too. It didn’t save him from the Warrick wrath, though. It didn’t help him when he couldn’t find work, or when he had to leave for weeks at a time because his only jobs were out of state. Ultimately I suppose Royce got what he wanted. Daddy lost himself in drink; he did that himself, there’s no one else to blame. And when he got so lost he couldn’t find himself any more, he took a rope out to the woods and lost himself forever.”