Mountain Mystic by Debra Dixon

creek and a railroad trestle. Chapel Road is on your left. After that I don’t know how far it is. We’ll have to start checking the mailboxes.”
    “What mailboxes?” Victoria asked. “We haven’t seen one in”—she broke off and looked back over her shoulder for a second—“there it is again!”
    “What?” Joshua craned his head around to survey the view from the back window.
    “The yellow signs with the black arrows that point out the turns and curves. They all have holes in them like they’ve been victimized by big metal-eating moths. At first I thought it was my imagination, but it’s not. There are holes in every single one of them.” She pointed. “There! Another one.”
    “Oh. That.”
    “Oh. That,” she mimicked impatiently. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird?”
    “No, but then, I grew up here.” Joshua shifted uncomfortably as he confessed, “I put my share of holes in these signs. Actually not in these
particular
signs, as I recall.”
    An uneasy suspicion began to take root in Victoria’s mind. “Joshua, how did you put holes in signs?”
    “With a gun,” he answered bluntly. “We shot them from moving cars for target practice.”
    If she hadn’t been driving, Victoria would havegaped at him. Instead, she gaped at the road. “You shot poor, defenseless road signs for fun?”
    “Well, not anymore.”
    “But you did.”
    “I did.” Not that he was thrilled to admit it. “Obviously, someone else still does.”
    “Why?” she asked incredulously. The whole concept was like a foreign language to Victoria—incomprehensible. “From a car no less! On roads like this!”
    “Guns and mountain men go together. We were the original survivalists. In Texas they play cowboys and Indians. In Tennessee we play moonshiners and revenuers.”
    “I don’t believe that for a minute. Why did
you
do it? You don’t look like—”
    “Like I could be young and stupid and drunk and angry? Well, I was angry a lot when I was younger. I was angry until I got off the mountain.”
    “Why’d you come back?” Victoria asked quietly.
    “I don’t like crowds. Turn here.”
    Automatically, Victoria slowed the truck and flipped the blinker, but she came to a complete stop before she turned. Victoria pursed her lips and looked at the bumpy, twisted gravel road. “Are you serious? You call that a road?”
    “If you’re worried about the truck, maybe we should go home and phone the woman,” Joshua suggested hopefully. “No sense overheating the engine in this old thing.”
    Grinning, Victoria said, “You’re not going to discourageme, Joshua. I’ll climb a lot bigger hills than this one if that’s what it takes to get what I want.”
    “And what is that?” he asked.
    “A life,” Victoria told him as she punched the gas pedal and drove the truck onto what bore more resemblance to a washboard than a road. “Which patient is this?”
    “Naomi Marlowe.”
    “Pretty name. There is a Marlowe’s Wash-O-Rama in Bodewell. Is she related?”
    “Yes and no.”
    “Well, which is it?”
    “Naomi’s one of the Mention Marlowes. They don’t speak to the Bodewell Marlowes, but they are definitely related if you take the family tree back to about 1860, when the feud started.”
    “How do you know all of this?”
    “My grandmother is something of an authority on the bloodlines and family feuds in this area.”
    “In this day and age you expect me to believe that there is still a family feud that has been going on since the Civil War?”
    “On the mountain we don’t forget. We don’t forgive. You betray us once. You might betray us again.”
    “That’s a little harsh, Joshua.”
    “Folks who settled this area were hard people, Victoria. They had to be. They were nonconformists; they didn’t fit in or want to try. Many of them had been run out of work by slavery, which took all the jobs for an honest hardworking man in the flatlands. East Tennessee was overwhelmingly