Dead leaves crunched under her feet as she walked. Now that there was no vehicular traffic to blow them off, leaves accumulated on the roads, and had almost completely covered the paved surfaces in her neighborhood. When the CME hit, civilization had slipped backward about two hundred years; she had coped, she had thought and planned and tried to organize, and though she’d accomplished some things at the end of the day she was acutely aware of how much she fell short.
Mike Kilgore was a rock, but he wasn’t a leader. He would back her up any way she needed, when what she needed was someone who could help her decide which way to go. Same with Trey Foster: capable, but not a leader. Carol had taken the job, but she didn’t want it any more than Sela did, and now she was injured and couldn’t help.
She let herself into her house, put some wood on the low-burning fire, then wrapped herself in a quilt and plopped down on the sofa, her tired mind spinning.
The house was chilly and quiet; she’d gotten accustomed to the silence and the darkness of night, but even though the sun was shining outside she felt as if the dark and the quiet had isolated her as if she was deep in a cave.
What had happened at the Livingstons wouldn’t be an isolated case. More outsiders would be coming through; some would be friendly, some not—and it was the “not” that scared her to death. She’d been naive to think she could handle this, even temporarily. Actually she hadn’t thought it at all; Carol had. And Carol likely wouldn’t know what to do, either, because this was as far outside her experience as it was Sela’s. She couldn’t even ask her aunt about this new development, not now. Carol needed to rest, to recover, not to mention that any advice she gave while she was taking pain pills might not be well thought out.
Carol. Jim Livingston. Ted’s hostility. Being accosted by Carlette Broward. It was too much, too much all at once.
In all her life, she’d never asked for help, at least not in anything big. Never. Maybe she was too quiet, maybe she was painfully shy, but she took care of her own problems. Adam. The business. Even Carol didn’t know that early on Sela had had to take out a loan, after a few bad months at the store. She’d paid the loan back, had scraped and done without until she’d managed to pay it off early. There hadn’t been any financial troubles since then, but no one else knew how she’d initially struggled.
No one else realized how deeply the divorce had hurt her. No one saw how she continued to carry that pain. Given the chance, she wouldn’t take Adam back—no way, that ship had most definitely sailed—but that didn’t change the fact that failing at her marriage had hurt. It had hurt that she hadn’t been enough for Adam, that he’d seen her as weak, as less.
She’d never gone for counseling, never poured out her heart to Carol or to her friends. She’d borne her hurts, her fears, in silence, rather than burden others with what she considered her failings.
But this was something she couldn’t handle, and others would suffer if she did it wrong. This time, she had to ask for help. And she knew only one person who had the experience to help her with the outside threat that had come to the valley.
Chapter Fourteen
She couldn’t drive by Carol’s house without stopping to let them know where she was going. Any vehicle on the road now attracted notice. To her relief Carol was napping, and Barb and Olivia didn’t ask many questions.
She wasn’t about to walk up Cove Mountain. Ben might be willing and able to make that hike—he’d done it at least three times since the CME that she knew of, and likely more times than that—but she wasn’t. It was afternoon already, and she wanted to get up there and back before dark.
Her heart thumped hard at the prospect of seeing Ben. It had been a month since he’d sat on her porch and drank tea with her, and looked at her as if . . . well, she still wasn’t certain how he’d looked at her. At the time she’d thought he looked aroused. Then she’d thought maybe he’d been alarmed that she might make a pass at him, because how could he know she’d never made a pass at anyone in her life? And what did it say about her that she couldn’t tell the difference between arousal and alarm?
It had been weeks since he’d gifted her with not one but two solar lights . . . and then stalked away as if he didn’t even want to look at her. Was she entirely wrong about the way he’d looked at her? She didn’t think so, but then again, maybe it was just wishful thinking.
She was so fiercely attracted to him she almost couldn’t make herself go to his house. Being that attracted meant she was vulnerable, that she was exposing herself to the pain of rejection, even if that rejection wasn’t personal. Her instinct for self-protection shrieked at her to turn around.
Duty kept her going.
She needed him, needed his help. Everyone in Wears Valley needed him. They needed his experience, his brain, his tactical thinking and expertise.
If Ted would listen to anyone, it was Ben. There was something about Ben that said “dangerous” to anyone with a lick of sense about them, or at least “this man can kick my ass seven ways from Sunday.” And even if Ted, or anyone else, didn’t want to listen they’d do so anyway, precisely because of that aura of danger.
She remembered about the big rock Mike had said was in the middle of Ben’s driveway, so she stopped short, well down the hill where there was a bit of a shoulder she could use to turn around. Doing so left her with a longer hike, but that was better than trying to drive in reverse down the narrow, winding private road.
Big, tall trees loomed around her on both sides, blocking out the sunlight and making it seem as if sundown was near. Living in the Great Smoky region she was always aware of the old, mysterious mountains, but actually being up in the mountains was always a different experience. She felt their age, the isolation, the sense that here humans were at the mercy of nature.
When she got out of her Honda the difference in temperature struck her, too; there was a good fifteen, maybe twenty degree difference between here under the big trees and down in the sunny valley. Cautiously she looked around, and listened for the sound of anything moving in the brush, but there was nothing alarming.
Even though there was no one around, no sign that a human other than Ben was anywhere near, she locked her car and stuck the keys in her pocket, and started up the steep road, which narrowed more and more and finally transitioned from asphalt to two parallel paths of gravel divided by weeds, testimony that even before the CME no one had come up here very often, if at all, and Ben had seldom driven down.
The way was steep, so steep that within fifty yards she was huffing and puffing, her legs aching. To ease the strain on her muscles she changed tactics and instead of tackling the mountain head-on she zigzagged her way up, like a boat tacking into the wind. Wind sighed through the big trees, the tops gently swaying, and the rich smell of the forest wrapped around her.
She stopped and just stood there for a minute, something in her connecting to the vibrant power of the mountains. She wished for more time. She wished for a camera, to record what her eyes were seeing, but what she felt wasn’t something that could be caught in a photograph.
Another hundred yards and she rounded a curve, came to the big rock Mike had mentioned. It was an effective security measure, one positioned exactly where no car could go around it on either side, and only a truck riding on a frame as high as Ben’s could clear it. The rock was mute testimony that she wasn’t making a mistake coming here. Ben would know what to do, how to give them a tactical advantage.