More Than Magic (3 page)

Jamie came running up to the doors into the sunroom with Pooka barreling along behind, barking loudly. “Is that Dr. Daniel? Is he coming home?”
 

“And I can see that you are getting that peace and quiet.” Daniel sounded amused.

“Well, at least Jamie doesn’t hover and try to feed me comfort food at every hour or follow me around constantly asking me if I need anything,” Grace responded. “Besides, your girls won’t respond to just anyone.”

“How are they?”
 

“They’re doing well. Jamie’s an excellent beekeeper.”

“The girls’re fine as frog’s hair, Dr. Daniel!” Jamie shouted. “But they miss you somethin’ awful.”

Grace passed the phone into Jamie’s small and grimy hand so that Daniel could get a quick update on his bees. And since Jamie would chatter non-stop given the chance, Grace went in to put on water for tea.

Jamie’s mom, Beth Campbell, was a neighbor and a close friend. And, because she was single and working as a trauma nurse with an insane commute across the mountains, Grace got an extra pair of hands to help around the place and Beth got free babysitting.

Grace smiled as she turned on the teakettle.

Despite being only nine, Jamie was a wiry little dynamo who was willing to learn anything and do anything, no matter how distasteful. In fact, the most distasteful tasks seemed to be the ones undertaken with the most enthusiasm. Many a time Grace had found it necessary to call Beth to explain the smell and the mess before it arrived on Beth’s doorstep.

“Dr. Grace? He wants to talk to you again.” Jamie ran into the kitchen waving the phone, followed closely by Pooka, who’d stopped obediently at the kitchen door.

“Thanks sweetie. You go on and do what you can with the leaves. It’ll be dark soon,” Grace said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get ’em to the compost pile afore I head home.”

“Hopefully tomorrow we’ll manage to find some time for your NISC project,” Grace added.

“Good! I’ll work on the puzzles tonight and then go out on Thursday or Friday to find ’em.” A flat grimy hand hit an equally dirty fist emphatically. “And I’m gonna nail ’em this time.”

“I’ll make a botanist of you yet.”

“No ma’am. I’m gonna be a cryptologist!” Jamie grinned and bounced out the doors and through the sunroom into the garden. Pooka hesitated at the door, then followed.

“Hey,” she said softly into the phone, taking two teabags out of her stash of breakfast tea.

“Well, our Jamie hasn’t changed a whit.”

“If we could just figure out how to bottle that energy and sell it,” Grace sighed.

“So, Jamie tells me you don’t smile much anymore. Ouida tells me you’re not sleeping well and that you spend every hour you’re awake in the lab. And Eddie tells me you keep going out looking for Pops’s walking stick.”

“Lovely,” Grace growled and poured the boiling water into her mug. “Good to see I can still have secrets.”

Pops’s prized walking stick, which he was never without, had disappeared the day he died. It hadn’t been found near his body or anywhere on the farm. Only days before, Pops had called Grace and told her to come home for the weekend, that something was wrong with the mountain. Not on the mountain, but
with
the mountain. But apparently he hadn’t shared his concerns with Eddie, the farm’s long-time handyman, or Ouida, their live-in cook and Grace’s surrogate grandmother.

“You know something more about his death, don’t you?” Daniel’s voice was tense. “Look, this project can wait. I can get on a plane—”

“No, Daniel. There’s nothing more to know. The sheriff says he fell. Probably forgot his walking stick or mislaid it, and without it he lost his footing,” she recited the words like a coroner’s report. “I just want to find it. It’s been in the family a long time.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Daniel sounded like he wanted nothing so much as to drop everything and come home. “So—I mean—Well, I’d like to hear about you smiling again sometime soon at least. I know you shut down production because some of the testing was off for that last batch of herbs. Have you figured it out yet?”

“That’s what I’m working on right now,” she said. She hadn’t really told him what was off about those herbs…yet.

“Okay. I know you are usually pretty happy when you are noodling with something in the lab, so if it’s not Pops, is it that foundation thing? Or that idiot boyfriend of yours?”

“I told you. Brian is ancient history. I haven’t heard from him in months.”

“Well, he
was
sort of fixated on saving the rainforests.”

“Singlehandedly, as it turns out.” When Grace had decided to delay their plans for the Amazon so she could settle her grandfather’s estate, Brian had just packed up and headed out on his own.
That
had been a bit of a shock.

“Sorry, sis,” Daniel said softly. “So what
is
going on?”

“It’s complicated and I
can’t
talk about it on the phone. I’ll tell you all about it when you come home.”

“You are freaking me out now.”

“Like back when we were teenagers, and I had that kudzu in my room?” Grace tried to layer as much meaning into that as she could.

“Kudzu?” There was a long pause. “Oh.”

“Exactly.” She took a deep breath, choosing her words carefully. “It’s best right now if I keep the visitors up here to a minimum, at least until I can get this…get things under control.”
If I can.

Another long pause. “Gracie?”

Grace smiled. “Yes,
Danny
?”

There was a long moment of static and silence.

“Whatever’s going on, whatever has you burrowed in up there, I’d hate for you to give up your plans. The rainforests are vanishing pretty damn quick.”

“I know.” Along with the medicinal plants Grace had hoped to find. “But—”

“You can’t shut yourself off from the world forever.”

“Not forever.”
Not if I can help it.

“Good.” He sounded relieved.

“So, what are
you
doing to celebrate Pops’s birthday tomorrow? I mean today?” Grace asked.

“Going to Mount Tsukuba. It’s called the purple mountain and from what I hear, it’s a lot like home.”

And by home, he meant their mountain. “Sounds lovely. We’re doing the soul cakes for him. Ouida made the dough before she left. And, of course, I’ll set a place for him at supper.”

“Just like he used to do for Gram.” Daniel sounded like he missed their annual ritual.

“Yes. And the wreaths and cider out at the cemetery.”

“Drink a toast for me.”

Grace smiled. “I will. And you— You dream good dreams for me, baby brother.”

There was a long pause. “I will.”

“Love you.”

“
Daisuki desu
, big sis.”

Grace slid the phone back into her pocket and walked out through the sunroom to check on Jamie’s progress in the garden. The youngster waved from the other side of a huge pile of leaves and Grace gave a quick thumbs up, barely managing to hold back the tears that suddenly threatened.

Normally she would be out there laughing right along with Jamie as they tried to keep the pile of leaves intact against Pooka’s determined onslaughts. But Daniel was right. She had forgotten how to laugh. And she realized she couldn’t even remember when the leaves had put on their brilliant show of color, much less when they had fallen.

Chapter Two

About a quarter of a way into the mountains, Nick had to admit that Matt was right—he hadn’t really
looked
at trees in a long while. And he’d never seen anything quite like the colorful show these mountains put on. But as Matt had also said, a bit further up and this season’s show was over: the trees were bare.

And Nick could see how easy it could be to get lost up here, especially after dark. It wasn’t exactly foggy, but the signs pointing the way seemed to blur and fade as his lights hit them, and shadows nearly obscured the entrance to the place where he was staying. Everything seemed a bit hazy. Even the rock and wood sign proclaiming Woodruff Herb Farm & Cabins, brightly lit and well-kept, seemed to blend into the surrounding vegetation as if it had grown there. He had to concentrate to see the stone posts that graced either side of the entryway.

Maybe the flight and the drive up from Asheville had taken more out of him than he realized. This last bit, up a blacktop road barely qualified to be called one, with hairpins and drop offs that would likely take your breath in the light of day, had squeezed out his last bit of adrenaline, and he had been running on reserves for a long while.

He drove up next to the post on the left where the rental agent down in Asheville said the keypad was mounted and rolled down the window of his SUV. There was a tremendous crack somewhere in the trees, followed by a crash and a cascade of noisy echoes. At least his reflexes were solid. His hand had moved smoothly under his jacket before he realized it must have been something falling out there in the woods—something large falling out there in the woods. Now it was completely silent once more.

Shaking his head, he entered the code the realtor had given him into the keypad. The gate, sitting back from the road in the shadows, swung open quietly. No doubt somewhere up there some kind of alarm had just gone off. Taking a deep breath of the moist air, he drove through.

In addition to warning him that he would find it hard to see the signs for Woodruff Farm and likely get lost up on the mountain because “everyone else did”, the locals at the Trailhead Tavern back in town had filled him in a bit. They were more than happy to tell him about how sinful it was that he had missed the great whitewater rafting and the peak fall color up here, in addition to the fabulous cooking of someone named Ouida up at the farm.
 

They also told him things he already knew from his research. Logan Woodruff, locally known as “The Woodsman”, was a brilliant botanist and the owner of the farm. He’d passed away only a few months ago. His granddaughter, Grace Woodruff, had inherited the place—actually the entire mountain.
 

Then there were those that spoke of Ouida’s cooking and said it was famous because of the herbs she used, the ones “Miss Grace” had been cultivating up there for retail and wholesale trade until she shut down production last month.

The owner of the tavern, who apparently was also the cook, had proceeded to prove it to Nick by serving him mountain trout “pulled right out of the river today” that tasted better than anything he’d had in quite a long time. Perhaps it was the air up here. But the waitress insisted that it was the herbs—Woodruff Herbs.

That had set off a debate at the next table about why Miss Grace had shut down production. Nick had managed to glean from the multiple conversations around him that this was evidently sacrilege to some of the old-timers.

They’d said that her great-great-grandfather had built his fortune on those herbs and on the Woodruff reputation for purity and efficacy. Some folks even attributed magical qualities to the stuff. The Woodruff label on a bottle
meant
something.
 

That comment had brought raucous laughter from some parts of the room, and comments about whether the fortune had been built on
sang
or
shine
.

At that point, Nick had wondered if he should’ve taken Matt up on that dictionary. He knew what
shine
was, but
sang
had been a verb the last time he checked. Then someone had muttered that maybe Nick was a “Revenuer” and the conversation had turned to other things: how the tourist trade would be during the upcoming season, what or who the Trail would dump on their sidewalk this week, how the ski runs really needed snow this year—and not just that stuff they blew out of those machines neither, and so on. Though some of it piqued his curiosity, none of it had really touched on Nick’s particular interest in these mountains of theirs.

It was apparent to Nick that, just like in any small town, there were some secrets hiding beneath the surface here and clearly not a lot of love for “Revenuers”, but he was pretty sure the folks in that room were just that—folks. The feeling that Matt had always called Nick’s “scum radar” had only pinged once, when a grizzled looking old guy in an ancient Army fatigue jacket paid his bill and left.

Then again, his usually reliable gut instinct had been a bit unpredictable lately.

It was somewhat intriguing that the lingo of the herb trade—diluting and cutting and purity—sounded like something else entirely to his ears. And the locals’ comments on the quality of the Woodruff Herbs were too much like the buzz in Atlanta over Smoky Mountain Magic. Too many coincidences. And he had long ago learned to be suspicious of coincidences.

Even more interesting had been the brief speculation about why his hostess at Woodruff Herb Farm, the mysterious Miss Grace, decided to stop production. And why she had given up “making a doctor”, according to the young thing with a nose ring who took his money at the register. Obviously the cashier didn’t plan for anything to derail
her
ambitions. She had made it very clear to Nick she was getting out of the mountains as soon as she could, and could not comprehend why anyone who got her M.D. down at Chapel Hill would suddenly shut herself off up in a holler “like some old witchy gammer or hippie freak”.