Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

to spend this first one with people and things I always have. Can we go home?”
    He looked at her for a long while, smiling slightly, and then got out of bed, naked and shivering, and scrooched into his
     sweats and socks, and said, “I think so. Let me see.”
    She heard him on the telephone in the next room but could not hear what he was saying. When he came back into the bedroom
     he was grinning widely.
    “Yeah, we can go home. In fact, it’s a good time for it. Hop up and get dressed and let’s get the car loaded. It’s snowing
     in Atlanta, so we’ll have to take it slow down the mountain. Should be a pretty drive.”
    “How do you know it’s snowing?”
    “I talked to them at school, to tell them to get the apartment ready early. It’ll all be done when we get there.”
    He had decided that for the first few days they would stay in the apartment at Hamilton Academy that was set aside for the
     headmaster.
    “It’s not big, but it’s big enough for the two of us, and it’s perfectly comfortable when all the furniture’s in place. I
     was having it redone while I was at your folks’ house, and they tell me they can move the furniture in today and even stock
     the kitchen. We can go right there, and then on to your folks’, if you want to.”
    She had not been happy about that at first…. “You mean live at your school? With all those children?”
    “It’s on another floor entirely. You wouldn’t necessarily see a single student; most of them are at home for the holidays,
     anyway. And besides, it’s your school, too, now.”
    “My school…,” she had said slowly. “My school…”
    She had not thought of Hamilton Academy in those terms before.
    “We’ll decide when we get there where we’re going to live,” he said. “I expect Mother and Dad will have some ideas about that….”
    Buckhead bloomed full and living in Crystal’s mind. Of course. Somewhere in Buckhead, near the big house on Habersham Road.
     Why had she ever worried about that?
    “Let’s go, then,” she said, jumping out of bed. The floor did not even seem cold to her bare feet.
    “What should I wear?”
    “Oh, honey, anything. Something warm. They said it hadn’t gotten above freezing down there in two days.”
    When he locked the door to the cottage in Burnt Cove, Crystal got into the car and did not look back. She never did, all the
     way down the winding, treacherous road to the interstate. She would never in her life remember the snow on Burnt Mountain,
     though my father would speak of it often as one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen.
    It was early dark, with light snow still falling silently, when they turned off the highway below Atlanta onto the smaller
     one that led up to the big wrought-iron gates of Hamilton Academy. The road home, so familiar to Crystal, was a strange snowscape,
     another country, rather eerie. Lit houses made holes in the darkness, but it was hard for her to identify them in the blue
     dusk. Only the one arch over the gates, with
Hamilton Academy
chiseled on it, was familiar. Once inside the gates, the road that led up to and around the school was dark and blue and
     white, punctuated only by occasional streetlights, and the lit mass of the school itself seemed small and far away. My father
     did not pull up to it but continued on the road around it, and beyond.
    “Where are you going?” my mother said, wiping at the windshield and peering out. She saw nothing but darkness. Darkness and
     snow.
    He smiled and continued on.
    The road ended at a pair of stone gateposts that had once held an elaborate wrought-iron gate. The gate was open, and the
     pair of iron lampposts on either side of it were dark. Awrought-iron fence stretched away on either side of it, marking off a yard that could not be seen.
    He stopped.
    “This is the old McClaren place,” she said, looking at him in puzzlement and annoyance. “What are you doing back here? There’s
     been nobody in this old