“Quincy?” Her voice echoed across the deserted parking lot of the Trail of Trails Interpretative Center.
She swallowed, glancing over her shoulder at the trees shrouded in darkness. An owl hooted. She shivered.
Maybe she’d come back tomorrow. In daylight. Raised in the flatlands, she wasn’t used to how night in the looming mountains engulfed the valleys in one fell swoop.
Rhododendrons rustled behind her. She tensed, but someone within the darkened interior moaned.
“Quince?” she whispered.
Stepping around the broken glass, she crossed into the Center and fumbled for the light switch. Something drifted in the air past her nose. She swatted it away.
The overhead light flickered to life. She gasped at the chicken feathers plastered against the smashed display cases, as if tarred and feathered. And then she spotted the words spray-painted on the far wall. The dribbling red lines gave the message the appearance of oozing blood.
Don’t Come Back Prairie N——
Her breath hitched at the racial slur. Something bumped behind her. She wheeled as a bloody hand appeared, rising, grasping the top of the case. Linden screamed.
Quincy, his glasses askew on his face, hoisted himself upright. “Linden?” Blinking, his eyes dilated in the artificial light. He wobbled.
“What happened?” She rushed forward, grabbing his arm. “Who did this?”
He shook his head and would have fallen except for her support. “They jumped me.” Touching a patch of blood at the back of his head, he winced. “Never saw their faces. But they were skinheads.”
Linden’s eyes widened. “In Cartridge Cove?”
His eyes darted, accessing the damage, and flitted to the encroaching darkness. “Said they’d be back if we didn’t stop this nonsense.”
“Nonsense?”
He nodded. “Bringing the divided tribes together for the commemoration.”
She frowned. “The Oklahoma band? The ones they called the prairie . . .” Her lips tightened. She wouldn’t use that word.
“We need to get out of here, Linden. It’s not safe.”
She draped his arm across her shoulder. “My car’s outside.” She lugged him toward the shattered door. “Then we’ll call the police.”
Linden felt the weight of eyes boring into her from the edge of the forest. A frisson of fear prickled against her skin. Her heart pounded. She dragged Quincy through the twilight around the corner of the building.
She pointed to the hood of her car. “They left something.” She stared at the paper trapped against the windshield. “It wasn’t there when I parked a few minutes ago.”
“That means they’re still here.” He shuddered. “Watching.”
Linden reached for the message.
He hunched his shoulders. “What does it say?”
“It says, ‘Shut down the festival or next time you’ll burn.’”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Welcome to Cartridge Cove, North Carolina.” Quincy cleared his throat. “Sure you don’t want to go home to Raleigh?”
She crumpled the note in her hand. “Their kind drove out the Cherokee a hundred plus years ago.”
Narrowing her eyes, she jutted her chin at the deepening darkness. “Nobody’s driving me out.”
***
“Would you look at what I’ve found?”
Her elbows resting on the sill of the attic window, Linden dragged her gaze from her contemplation of the majestic Snowbird Mountains. “What now, Gram?”
A Beach Boys tune from the Oldies But Goodies channel blared from the portable radio. Linden wended her way through the stacked piles of heirlooms. The junk her ancestors had accumulated—ahem, hoarded—like a bunch of pack rats.
Her sixtyish grandmother sat cross-legged and limber as a teenager beside the enormous, brass-studded trunk they’d unearthed under the eaves. Her Italian loafers keeping time to the beat, Marvela belted out her own gutsy, contralto rendition at “the Southern girls” part.
A smile flitted across Linden’s face. Nobody did youthful like the baby boomers.
“Did your people never throw anything away, Gram? There’s counseling for that now. Intervention strategies. TV shows.”
Marvela raised one sculptured eyebrow. “What? And deny us the pleasure of a treasure hunt?” She shrugged her shoulders. “Besides, this isn’t just Campbell heirlooms. When Fraser’s parents died, he was busy commuting between D.C. and Raleigh. I was busy having your father. We hired a company to box up the Birchfield place and stored everything in the attic like my grandmother always did.”
Linden snorted.
Gram gave her a pointed look, a by-product of graduating from Miss Ophelia’s School for Young Ladies. “Really, Linden. Snorting is so unladylike. And at your age . . .”
Only Gram cleaned out the detritus of decades—make that centuries—in Calvin Klein designer jeans and a Ralph Lauren sweater knotted gracefully over her blue Talbot blouse. And, still managed to look ready for a ladies’ tea or political fundraiser.
Linden sighed, wishing—not for the first time—she’d inherited Gram’s thin elegant form and classic, model-like features.
Gram could make a trip to the bathroom resemble a glorious adventure. And now, she’d gotten sucked into this latest scheme of Gram’s, to convert the old family home into a bed and breakfast in the far western corner of North Carolina.
Not that Linden had anything better to do when Gram announced her “retirement” plans to return to her childhood home in tiny Cartridge Cove, population five hundred. Nothing better to do in this economy after she’d lost her job during that PR fiasco.
And with her fledgling public relations company on the verge of going under, Linden had been sent by the family to act as a cushion—foil or field hand, take your pick—to balance her grandmother’s “youthful” exuberance. But at least, thanks to Gram’s influence, she’d managed to snag the Cartridge Cove commemoration as a client.
“Look, Linden, darlin’.” Marvela thrust two bundles of fabric, one in each hand, at Linden.
“A Union flag?”
Marvela’s eyes danced. “And a Confederate one, too.”
“You don’t mean . . . ?”
“One son fought for the Union. The other for the Confederacy.” Marvela fluttered a hand in the direction of the window. “A lot of families in the mountains split according to conscience.”
Linden fingered the dry, brittle fabric. She hoped her own mother would never receive a flag on behalf of Royce, Linden’s younger brother, currently stationed in troubled Central Africa.
Marvela brushed a strand of her silvered hair from her face and reached once more into the trunk. “Maybe this book I found underneath the flags will tell us more.”
Linden grabbed for the book. They swapped items. Marvela placed the flags alongside the other treasures she’d unearthed—a silver pocket watch, a doughboy-style helmet, and an Art Deco brooch.
She plopped down beside her grandmother and brushed her fingertips over the dark, leather cover, the edges and binding frayed and crumbling with age.
“It’s a journal. Somebody named