living room and a few more outside the house, and returned to his car.
Tom’s last visit was to Francine Brice, and any hopes he’d had of her knowing where to find John Paul were quickly dashed. When he told her one of the neighbors suggested that earlier on she’d been friendly with one of the Hobbs boys, she folded her arms across her chest.
“It was Rosalie Henderson, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t actually get the name,” Tom said apologetically. “But I thought—”
“Well, you thought wrong, mister. I don’t know what kind of trash Rosalie told about me, but I assure you not a word of it is true. John Paul was only interested in the woods and nothing else.”
“She was talking about back when you were in school—”
“That was over fifty years ago. I ain’t heard from Johnny Hobbs since then. Now git on out of here, and don’t be spreading Rosalie’s trash talk around town!”
With that, she stepped back inside and slammed the door.
The road ended just beyond the Brice house, so Tom slid behind the wheel and started back down the mountain. He slowed to a crawl when he passed what was left of the Hobbs place. Dwarfed by the forest of Virginia pines and sycamores surrounding it, the house looked small and sad. It was hard to believe a woman like Margaret had grown up there and harder still to believe Eliza Hobbs had raised nine children in those four tiny rooms.
Tom found himself thinking about Eliza and wondering what her life had been like. He tried to envision the house as it might have been back then with childish laughter echoing through the trees and pots of flowers sitting on the front porch, but he couldn’t do it. There was a bone-deep sadness in that house, one that had been there before the fire. He’d felt it the moment he lifted that picture from the wall.
His thoughts drifted back to the picture. The man with his hair slicked back and nose pointed straight ahead, the woman with eyes lifted and face angled toward him. Tom was all but certain that woman was Eliza Hobbs. The picture, taken at a time when she was young and so obviously in love, seemed to promise a lifetime of happiness, and yet something had gone terribly wrong.
As he moved on and left the house behind, Tom felt a certain sadness clinging to him. Perhaps it was nothing more than bits of soot stuck to his skin or the gloom of the mountain, but it had somehow changed things. This was no longer just a case to be solved; it now felt more like a commitment to Margaret.
When he reached the end of the road and left the graveled patch to pull back onto Campbell’s Creek Drive, he knew the hollow with its natural beauty and obvious poverty was a different kind of world. It was the kind of place where people lived and died without ever stepping foot off the mountain. They held fast to their secrets, but he was as determined as these strong-backed, tight-lipped people. Tomorrow he would visit the city clerk’s office in Charleston, and after his work there was done he would return and talk with Caldonia Markey again. She had something more to say, and he was beginning to believe it was a key to unlocking this mystery.
1901
West Virginia
Defying the Devil
AFTER MARTIN’S IMPOSSIBLE REQUEST ABOUT what to do with the baby she was carrying and the bitter way they’d parted, Eliza feared it could be months before Martin returned, but the following Saturday he came whistling up the hollow as if there’d never been a cross word between them.
At the time she was in the kitchen, holding Margaret Rose to her breast. She looked up with an apprehensive smile.
“Had I known you were coming, I would have fed the baby earlier.”
“No need to rush,” he said, then crossed the room, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and whispered that he’d brought something for her. Pulling a paper bag from his pocket, he placed it on the top shelf next to the money jar.
“I’ll leave this up here so none of the kids get into it. You can see to it later.”
Believing he’d brought a bag of candy to make amends for the ugliness of the previous weekend, she pushed her anger aside and asked if he was planning to stay the night.
“Of course. If need be, I can stay through Monday.”
Eliza heard what she wanted to hear.