sand beaches on the shores of Lake Michigan. The boy’s eyes widened, his body began to jerk, and he let out a strange, guttural wail.
“See? He’s happy to meet you,” Lottie said.
“Hi,” Katie said softly as Luke continued to squirm. She was a bit uneasy, because she’d never seen anyone quite like Luke. He obviously couldn’t talk or move around on his own. The noises he made were unsettling, and the jerky motions were almost frightening, but Katie continued to smile.
“You go back to watching your TV now,” Lottie said to Luke. “I’m gonna get this young lady some breakfast. I’ll bring yours in directly. The two of you can get acquainted later on.”
Once again, Lottie took Katie by the hand and led her into a small kitchen surrounded by windows that overlooked the back of the property and the mountains beyond.
“Do you know where you are, honey?” Lottie said.
“Tennessee,” Katie said quietly.
“Gatlinburg, Tennessee. One of the most beautiful places on God’s green earth.” Lottie pointed out a side window. “That’s Roaring Fork Road, and just a few miles over that ridge is the town of Gatlinburg.”
Lottie waved a hand toward the mountains.
“And all of that, as far as the eye can see, is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We live right on the border. Now you just sit yourself right down here and let me get some food into you. We believe in a good breakfast around here.”
Katie watched in fascination as Lottie piled two eggs, two sausage patties, fried potatoes, and a slice of tomato on her plate. On another plate was a biscuit. Next to it was a small bowl of gravy, a saucer with a stick of butter on it, and a jar of blackberry preserves. On yet another plate was a mixture of apple and banana slices and grapes, flanked by a tall glass of orange juice.
“Dig in, child. Don’t be shy.”
Katie began to eat, slowly at first, but then with more purpose. She didn’t remember the last time she’d had a decent meal, let alone enjoyed it.
“Good?” Lottie said as she dropped a fried egg and a couple of sausage patties into a blender.
“Yes, ma’am,” Katie said, nodding her head. “This is the best sausage I’ve ever had.”
“Most everything is fresh,” Lottie said. “We buy fresh sausage from Mr. Torbett. He’s our closest neighbor; lives up the road a ways. The eggs come straight from the henhouse out back. Potatoes and tomatoes come from the garden. And your aunt Mary makes the best biscuits this side of the Mississippi.”
“Where’s Aunt Mary?” Katie said.
“She’s at work. She’s a nurse down at the hospital, you know. They let her work a special shift so she can spend more time with Luke. She leaves here at three in the morning and gets back home a little after noon.”
Luke let out a loud wail from the den.
“I’m coming, baby,” Lottie called as she pushed the button on the blender. “Just one second.”
“How old is he?” Katie said.
“Luke? He’s seven.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He has cerebral palsy,” Lottie said. “It’s a sickness that keeps him from being able to do things other folks do. But we don’t look at it as something that’s wrong with him. He’s just another one of God’s beautiful creatures. And don’t you go letting him fool you. He may not be able to walk and talk like other folks, but he’s a smart young gentleman. And sweet? That boy’s sweeter than those grapes you’re eating.”
“Will he get better?” Katie asked.
“No, honey. Your aunt and her husband, God rest his soul, took Luke to doctors all over the country. They took him over to Duke University and up to the Mayo Clinic and a couple of places in between. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
As Lottie talked, she poured the sausage and egg paste from the blender onto a plate. She looked up to see Katie staring at her.
“He likes the taste of meat,” Lottie said, “but he can’t chew it himself and he doesn’t swallow real good. I’m just getting it to where he can handle it. We do the same thing with vegetables and fruit, pretty much anything he eats.”
“So he’s like a baby?” Katie said.
“I suppose he is. He’s as helpless as a baby. He wears diapers, and we give him a sponge bath every day. He don’t ever get outta that bed. But we don’t talk to him like a baby. We talk to him like any other seven-year-old boy. And those sounds he makes, he’s trying to talk, but the muscles in his mouth and lips don’t work good enough to form the words. But me and your aunt Mary can understand him. You will, too, soon enough.”
Katie took one last bite of the fruit and set her fork on the plate.
“Finished?” Lottie said.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
“C’mon in here with me. I’ll show you how to feed Luke.”
Katie spent the rest of her first morning on the farm exploring her new surroundings. To her delight, she found that the barn out back was home to a black-and-white border collie named Maggie, three calico cats named Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod, and a billy goat named Henry. There were five Black Angus cattle in a fenced-in pasture with a stream running through it and six chickens in the henhouse-five hens and a rooster named Ernie. Every animal on the property was named except for the cattle.
Aunt Mary arrived home shortly after noon and, after feeding Luke, gave Katie a tour of the outer edges of the property. Every time Katie looked at her, she saw Mother. She was there in Aunt Mary’s mannerisms, in her way of speaking, in the way she moved. The thought crossed Katie’s mind that had Aunt Mary not been such a kind and gentle person, her similarities to Mother would have been painful.
The property was beautiful-twenty-five acres of rolling pasture and five more of wooded land that bordered the national forest. The stream dissected the property from the northeast to the southwest, and the mountains rose like great sentinels all around.
“They’re spectacular, aren’t they?” Aunt Mary said when she noticed Katie staring up at the peak of Mount LeConte. They were rattling along through the pasture in an old green pickup truck that Aunt Mary had backed out of the barn.
“Yes, ma’am,” Katie said.
“But they can be dangerous, too. You have to respect the mountains, Katie.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As they topped a small ridge heading back toward the house, Katie noticed movement to her left. She looked toward a logging road that led back into the heavy woods and the mountains and saw a line of trucks heading down toward Roaring Fork Road. She counted ten of them, large trucks like those that carried soldiers in the movies, with huge tires and covered in canvas. At the front of the line was a Jeep with a star on the door and a bar of lights across the top.
“What’s that?” Katie asked, pointing in the direction of the convoy.
Aunt Mary’s face turned cold.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “If you ever see them again, you just act like they’re not even there.”
10
The immediate aftermath of Ray Miller’s public suicide was confusion, followed by the horror of realization. Numbed and silent, I moved slowly across the courtroom floor to where his body lay, and I knelt beside him. Ray had dropped straight to the ground between the prosecution and defense tables, partially on his side, his open eyes staring blankly ahead, his face frozen in a look of eternal defiance. The gun lay at his side, and a dark pool of blood spread slowly on the gray carpet beneath his head.
Judge Green emerged from his hiding place a few moments later. The first bullet had struck his high-backed chair an inch from his right ear; the second had actually caught the sleeve of his robe. But the judge was unscathed, and he soon began muttering to himself as he leaned against the wall and walked stiffly toward his
