Don't Cry for Me

Dolly smiled as she reached for Mariah’s hands, holding them firmly in her grasp to punctuate her words.

“I know you saved my son’s life, and for that alone you will always hold a special place in my heart. Thank you, my dear. Thank you very, very much.”

The woman’s warmth was infectious. Mariah’s nerves began to settle. She felt embarrassed to be singled out like this when there were others who’d been there, too.

“We were just lucky to find him when we did,” she said.

“And how are you doing?” Dolly asked.

“‘Slowly but surely’ is a good way to put it,” Mariah said, and glanced at Meg, who was banging cupboard doors and opening drawers with confidence.

Dolly caught the look. “Don’t worry about her. She’s been here enough times in the past year that she knows where things are.”

Mariah nodded, but she still felt useless. She was scrambling for something to talk about and then remembered Quinn telling her that his mother had grown up on this property.

“Mrs. Walker, Quinn said—”

“No ‘Mrs. Walker’ business. Call me Dolly.”

“Okay. So, Dolly, Quinn told me you grew up on this property.”

Dolly’s eyes widened as memories washed over her. “Oh, yes. There were six of us kids, plus Mama and Papa. The old house wasn’t much, but it was home. All the girls slept in one bed. All the boys slept in another, and Mama and Papa were in the loft upstairs. Papa worked the mines, and Mama grew a big garden. The boys learned to hunt almost before they went to school, and all of us girls learned how to manage a house and feed a family with little to nothing to start on. We were dirt-poor and wore hand-me-downs until they were thin as tissue paper, but we always had each other and a whole lot of love.”

The words painted a picture that warmed Mariah all the way to her bones. What a gift it would have been to grow up like that.

“You were very lucky.”

Dolly shrugged. “There are plenty of people who would argue that with you. Living on the mountain can be a hard life.”

“Now, Mom, you know good and well money isn’t everything,” Meg said, and then winked at Mariah.

Meg’s wink made Mariah think of Quinn. “You and Quinn look alike,” she said.

Meg nodded. “I know. All of us Walkers look enough alike that you can definitely tell we’re kin.”

“I think I remember Quinn mentioning nieces and nephews. Are any of the kids yours?” Mariah asked. The smile on Meg’s face shifted just enough for Mariah to know she’d asked the wrong question. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten personal. You don’t have to answer that,” she said quickly.

Meg shrugged. “It’s old news, sugar. Besides, if you’re here, you’re considered part of the family and can ask anything you want. To answer your question, I do not have children. I would like to, but I’m minus a man in my life, so it’s not likely to happen.”

Dolly frowned. “Finish the story, Meg, or I’ll do it for you. It’s time you stopped being ashamed of something you didn’t do.”

Meg’s shoulders slumped, but she managed to put a smile on her face.

“What Mom’s trying to say is, I had a husband, but he’s now in the state penitentiary. I divorced him after he murdered a man down in Louisville over drugs.”

Mariah rolled her eyes. “That’s probably where a good portion of the kids I was in foster care with wound up. It’s also why I joined the army. The first eighteen years of my life pretty much sucked. I was looking for a place to belong, and in a lot of ways the army served me well.”

Dolly blinked. “You were in foster care your whole life? You never knew your parents?”

Mariah tensed, bracing herself for that look she got when people realized she was a throwaway.

“I was an abandoned baby, only a few hours old when someone found me. I grew up in the foster care system in Lexington until I aged out. After that I was on my own.”

Meg stopped making sandwiches and stared at Mariah, trying to imagine what it would be like to be that alone in the world.

But for Dolly, the story was shocking. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry I brought up a touchy subject.”

“No, it’s nothing like that, at least not for me. It’s a fact of my life and definitely taught me to be independent.”

Dolly got up, walked around the table and wrapped her arms around Mariah’s neck.

“Every motherly gene I have is imploding. This just breaks my heart, honey girl,” she said, and laid her cheek against the crown of Mariah’s head.

Mariah didn’t know how to react. She was confused and more than a little embarrassed, and Meg saw it.

“Ease up, Mom. If we scare her off before Quinn gets to work his magic, he’ll kill us.”

Dolly looked embarrassed, but Mariah laughed. And the moment the sound came out of her mouth, a little bit of the sad child she had been disappeared.

“Sandwiches are ready,” Meg said. “Looks like you have cold pop and iced tea to drink. What’s your pleasure?” she asked.

“Iced tea for me,” Dolly said.

“And for me,” Mariah added.

Dolly put the plates on the table, chattering as she worked. Meg was putting ice in the glasses and pouring tea while acting as the straight man for her mother’s monologues.

For Mariah, it was a peek into what a relationship between mother and daughter could be. It didn’t really make her sad, but she could definitely tell what she’d missed. And it was also an interesting view of how his family had molded Quinn into the man he was today.

They continued talking even after the food was gone, and Mariah was still smiling an hour after they left. When she finally lay down to take a nap, she rolled over and fell asleep without feeling a moment of panic. It was the first time since she’d been wounded that she slept without dreaming.

* * *

Every nerve Quinn had was on alert as he kept moving upstream. The squirrels chattering in the trees along the creek was normal, but the sudden silence that followed was not. He was jumping at every rustle in the brush, afraid he was missing clues beneath the water because he was so anxious about walking up on the bear.

Still, he couldn’t quit on this. His gut instincts kept telling him this was how the bear was getting away and why the dogs were losing the scent. Except for feeding, the bear was actually using the water as a highway.

He’d gone about a mile upstream from the kill site when he spotted something in the creek bed that gave him pause. There was a large, moss-covered boulder jutting out of the water with four long, distinct scratches cut into the moss. They were equally spaced and went all the way to the rock. It made him think of claws cutting flesh down to the bone, like he’d seen on the leg of the hiker he’d rescued.

He straightened abruptly, scanning the area to make sure he was still on his own, then took another step, slower this time, and began looking closer as he continued to move upstream. The next clue he found was on the actual creek bank, where a large chunk of earth and grass had been broken off, as if something very large and heavy had stepped too close to the edge and it had given under the weight.

He climbed up onto the bank to backtrack, eyeing the forest floor for further prints. But the ground was covered in leaves and pine needles in different stages of decay. If anything had passed that way, it wouldn’t have left any prints. He moved a few yards farther, still looking for signs of scat or the remnants of a kill. He was so focused on looking down that when something large suddenly darted out of the brush to his right, he fell backward. He was scrambling for his rifle when he realized it was only a deer. The doe leaped across his line of vision before disappearing downhill.

“Shit,” Quinn muttered, as he got to his feet and shifted his rifle to a better position.

He paused and looked up, then caught himself staring at the trunk of a sixty-foot pine. The gashes that had been cut into the tree were at least ten feet off the ground, maybe higher—just like the ones he’d found at the site where the hiker was killed. It was the bear—still marking territory.

He pulled out his two-way.