The Mountain's Shadow

for the summer by my mother so she could jet off to Europe with the other doctors’ ex-wives for Parisian shopping trips and get her nails done by the pool without a kid underfoot, I had been dumped by my boss and fled out here for lack of anything else to do. Rather than missing Andy—which I still did, but he was more a shadow of the past than a real person to me now—I ached for my grandfather’s calm and wisdom. I especially wanted to ask him about his studies, how close he’d gotten to a cure, and how we could get it to the people who needed it like Leo, Ron and the others. And why he had never told me of his interest. That hurt most of all, I admitted to myself.

But you were the one to cut off contact with him, the little guilt voice told me.

I didn’t cut it off. It faded away. But I knew the voice was right. Maybe he had waited for me to contact him again, or maybe we were both so busy with our work that reestablishing contact became a task for some undetermined “later”, a time that would never come now.

The path leveled out, and we had to be careful not to trip in the grooves that mountain water runoff had created in the soil. I could hear the river more clearly now and knew we must be close to the boathouse. I rubbed a tear off my cheek before the guys could see it.

“We know he started out here,” Leo said as he held a tree branch aside. The boathouse, a ramshackle wooden box with a tin roof, stood over a calm spot out of the way of the main flow of the river. The only way in was to use a rope that hung on the outside to open the garage-door-type mechanism.

The boathouse still held two kayaks, both molded and with chipping orange plastic. Their oars dangled on fraying rope beside their shelves. I noticed someone had put the canoe back, and it looked like it had been recently painted. The shiny metal oar sat in the seat where someone had tossed it after they brought it back.

“That’s all they found?” I asked.

“That and some clothes,” Ron replied. “It had rained, so any footprints had been washed away.”

“And scents,” added Leo.

“It wasn’t like him to go out if the weather was going to be bad,” I said. “Let’s go to where the canoe was found.”

We closed the boathouse back up. Sure, it wasn’t exactly secure, but no one had ever bothered it before.

We walked along the bank of the river, where the path had been partially eaten away by the landscape’s natural shifting as well as trees that had been uprooted. We sometimes had to climb over or under logs and jump over puddles. My legs ached by the time we reached a spot about a mile downstream from the boathouse. I had tried to keep up a regular exercise regimen while at Cabal, but the past four weeks of self-pity and isolation had taken their toll on my muscle tone. The two men showed no sign the trip was anything but a nice afternoon stroll.

“It was about here. They found the canoe wedged against that rock.” Leo pointed to a large, pitted, dark gray boulder that jutted into the river on the other bank. “The clothes were farther downstream on this side.”

“The theory was that whoever did this had tried to push the canoe off so it would float downstream, but it got stuck,” Ron added. “Why anyone would want to harm Charles is beyond me. Did you know him well, Joanie?”

“No. I wish I had known him better.” I wish he had told me we were working on the same problem.

We circled the spot in wider and wider arcs until we found ourselves at the edge of the woods. I sat on a log, looked around, and tried to see it as my grandfather would have. The guys continued to search, and I wished for a moment that I could see the world through their eyes and noses.

My mind drifted back to lunch at Tabitha’s. I couldn’t understand how Ron worked in a restaurant with his extra sharp senses. The trash cans must torture him. I shook my head. That train of thought wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I doubted Ron wanted me to try to empathize with him. His resentment kept him going. Leo had what? His nephew?

I brought my mind back to the present. I studied each tree and shrub and took in the texture of the bark, the spread of the branches. The water rippled and ruffled against the riverbank, and I noticed a tree that tipped out—a drunken sailor looking for a quick drink of water, my grandfather would have said. Its roots pulled from the bank, and tan mud clung to them. Lichens had sprouted along the trunk. Fairy steps. I smiled and walked over to the tree. Grandfather had always loved to turn our walks in the woods into a magical journey, and when I was here year after year, we’d visit old haunts with whimsical names like Fairyland and Smurf Hollow. I could imagine the lithe sprites tiptoeing up the stairs and pausing in the hollow that gaped toward the sky. The jagged edges of the branches had pulled away like large wooden spikes, and something green and silver winked at me from inside. I checked for snakes and biting insects, then reached for it. It took a moment to work my fingers down into the hollow and tease out the pendant on a tarnished chain. A silver cat with emerald eyes sparkled in the sunlight.

“Miskha?” I whispered.

Chapter Seven

I held the silver and emerald cat charm in my hand. I couldn’t help but remember the first time I’d seen it— also during a time of loss and grief.

Grandfather and I had gone walking in town one Sunday morning. I was still dressed in black, the dress Mother had gotten me for Andy’s funeral, and even though it had a full skirt—my favorite kind to twirl in—I wasn’t feeling up for a good twirl or laugh. Grandfather had been very patient with me that summer as though he knew what it had been like to lose my twin brother and to be the non-favorite child who survived. I didn’t know, but my parents were working through divorce proceedings while I played in the Ozarks, and my grandfather had a sense things may even be worse when I got back.

“You’re walking slow today, Joanna,” he said.

“These shoes pinch.”

“The way you’re walking reminds me of a cat. They always pad on their toes, you know.”

“I know.”

“And if you’re lucky, they wink at you.”

“Cats don’t wink.” I had read all about cats and knew their facial expressions weren’t the same as people’s.

“That’s what the books say, but they never asked a cat.”

“How would you ask a cat?”

“Sometimes you just need to sit down with them and let them tell you in their own time.”

“Cats don’t talk.”

“They usually don’t want to. They find people dull and boring.”

I smiled. I tended to find people dull and boring too. Books were much better companions.

“Now look at this little lady.” We stopped at a jewelry store window. The shop was closed, but in one of the display cases, a silver cat charm with slanted oval emerald eyes winked at us in flashes of green light. “Would you say she doesn’t wink?”

“I guess not.”

“When the store is open on Tuesday, I’ll come back and get her, and you can keep her here.”

“Why can’t I take her home?”

His brows bent as he pondered how to tell a nine-year-old her mother would always try to take away whatever she valued. “Because she’s an Ozark cat,” he explained. “She’ll get lonely in the city. She needs to be up here where there are red wolves and other wild things.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she told me. But she’d be happy to be your friend and protector while you’re here.”

“Oh. Okay.”

The following Tuesday, Mishka the silver cat came home, and whenever I visited, she would always be there around my neck on a silver chain. I hadn’t seen her in years.

“Hello, Mishka,” I said. The emeralds winked back. Other than being a little tarnished, she looked the same,