A Shadow on the Ground Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  copyright

  Dedication

  Other Titles by Rebecca Lee Smith

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  A word about the author...

  Other Books You Might Like

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  A Shadow

  on the

  Ground

  by

  Rebecca Lee Smith

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  A Shadow on the Ground

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Rebecca Lee Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Kim Mendoza

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Crimson Rose Edition, 2013

  Print ISBN 978-1-61217-981-0

  Digital ISBN 978-1-61217-982-7

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For John Lee, the best of brothers,

  destined to be born the year I turned five.

  Thanks for knowing how to put life in perspective

  in twenty-five words or less,

  for always seeing the big picture when I'm lost

  in the details,

  and for still making me laugh until I cry.

  Other Titles by Rebecca Lee Smith

  A Dance to Die For

  available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Chapter 1

  Morgan Maguire slid the phone in her back pocket and tried to kick the fertilizer clumps off her work boots without gagging. She hated manure. It was right up there with blue mold rot and apple maggots. Her brother was an incurable optimist, but the sooner he realized she would never be cut out for farm work, and could serve the cause more efficiently by living in the city—any city—and sending him a monthly check, the better off their lives would be.

  Her life, anyway.

  She fastened the fencepost latch out of habit even though the five dogs belonging to her step-grandmother Opal had long since run away or died. Opal had flown the coop too. All the way to a one-bedroom suite in the town’s new assisted living wing, where she had all the gossip she could handle, a ten minute walk to the Dairy Queen for her daily Blizzard fix, and never had to look at an apple tree again.

  Tonight. I’ll tell Sean tonight.

  She couldn’t keep putting it off. She had to tell him she was moving back to Nashville. He was her twin, for God’s sake. He was supposed to want the best for her. Why couldn’t he understand that the bucolic life he cherished ate away at her soul like rust on an iron pipe?

  “Crystal!” Morgan called. The little girl's head bobbed up from her comic book. “Get in the truck, honey. Ethan Spannagel just called. His dad didn't show up for his doctor’s appointment, and we need to find him. Come on, this is serious. Move your little butt. Quick, quick!”

  “Can I bring the cookie bag?” Crystal asked.

  “Yeah, just don't tell your mother.”

  “My mom says this old farm is on its last legs.”

  Morgan laughed. “Well, that’s actually kind of...true. But don’t worry. Mr. Spannagel has a plan to make it all better.” She didn't even try to filter the sarcasm out of her voice. “He and Sean are meeting with some hotshot business consultant tomorrow who's going to tell us all the things we're doing wrong.”

  Crystal carefully bit a chocolate chip out of her cookie and blinked her huge blue eyes. “What's a hotshot?”

  “Someone who thinks they know everything. And gets paid for it.”

  “Will you and Sean still make apple butter? I like to eat it on my toast.”

  “Me, too. But if it were up to me, I'd level this dump. Then set fire to it.”

  Morgan’s grandfather was probably turning over in his grave at that blasphemy, but she didn’t care. Sean was the one who loved the farm, not her. Well, he can have it. Every scrappy, backbreaking, weed-infested acre of it.

  She adjusted her straw hat in the rearview mirror and guided the old pickup around potholes left by the recent rain. Tall weeds whipped against the running board and side mirrors, filling the truck with the pungent smell of damp hay. Mr. Jenkins’ cows nudged their huge brown faces through the fence openings and eyed her suspiciously. Cows were one of the few things Morgan liked about living in the country. They weren't the smartest beasts in the barn, but they had a way of rolling their eyes and looking at a person sideways that caused many a man to glance down and make sure his fly was zipped.

  She pulled into the Spannagel's yard and parked behind Harlan's mud splattered Chevy.

  “Stay here, kid. I just need to make sure he's okay.” She swung out of the truck and waved to Mrs. Cowden across the road without looking. Morgan didn't have to look. The old bat spent her days spying from the upstairs window, wispy gray hair flying around her fat face, binoculars resting on her nose like a giant pair of fly eyes.

  “Harlan!” Morgan rapped on the door. She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered through the slanted window. “Harlan, it's Morgan! You in there?”

  If he was asleep, he'd never hear her. He rarely wore his hearing aid, and turned the volume down out of spite whenever his son Ethan made him put it on. The thought of Harlan napping troubled her. At the orchard, he rarely took a break, preferring to hang around the barn, whistling a tune and taking bets from the hired hands that his seventy-four-year-old muscles could still heft two bushels of Stayman Winesaps. Of course, that was back when they employed hired hands for him to impress.

  “Harlan!” She jiggled the metal knob. The door clicked and swung open. A moldy smell, clammy and thick, rushed past her as if it were trying to escape the airless room.

  Morgan hadn't been inside the Spannagel's house in over twenty years. Not since the Christmas Eve Mrs. Spannagel invited some of the Riverbirch children over for hot chocolate and reindeer cookies, bid them a cheerful goodbye, then went upstairs and blew her brains across the room with Harlan's old Winchester. Ethan had stayed with Morgan's family that night, bedded down on the parlor sofa, wrapped in one of her mother’s handmade quilts, his muffled sobs lulling Morgan to sleep as they echoed through the silent house.

  “Harlan! Where are you?”

  She walked through the dining room, past the old desktop computer nestled in a messy sheaf of papers, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. She pushed open the first door. The sour odor of unwashed socks pricked her nose. Her gaze flicked around the room, from the unmade four-poster bed to the vitamin and prescription bottles lined up neatly across the dresser. In the corner, a pair of Harlan's overalls draped across
the back of a tattered wingback chair.

  She closed the door and went across the hall to Ethan’s old room. Remnants from his youth were everywhere—plastic model airplanes, a Red Sox pennant, his collection of vintage record albums, painstakingly alphabetized from Aerosmith to ZZ Top. A stack of freshly laundered shirts lay on the bed beside a canvas toiletry bag, and she wondered if Ethan had moved back home, at least temporarily. Everyone in Riverbirch knew how worried he'd been about his father's deteriorating health.

  Why hadn’t she watched Harlan more closely? She’d known he hadn’t been himself lately, but she'd been too busy daydreaming about leaving the farm and resurrecting her old life—or any life—to notice he had left for the day.

  On impulse, she crossed to the table beside Ethan's bed, looped a finger around the wooden knob, and pulled. The last thing she expected to see was her own face staring back at her. She lifted the yellowed newspaper clipping from the drawer. Large wary eyes, dark curls bunched beneath a bridal wreath of wilting daisies, drug store makeup not quite covering the fading bruise on her left cheek. She threw the clipping back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

  Poor pathetic sap.

  In those days, she'd clung to hope as if it were the safety bar on a rollercoaster. As if it could save her. But that was all in the past. She’d spent years making sure the girl in the picture had ceased to exist. She’d taught herself not to dwell on the things her heart wanted that would never be in the cards, and she wasn’t about to start dwelling on them now.

  She went downstairs to the kitchen. On the counter sat Opal’s best ceramic cake carrier. She lifted the lid. Jam cake with caramel icing, Harlan’s favorite. Opal had had her eye on Harlan since the day she’d become a widow, taking him all the foods he loved, flirting with him shamelessly at church potluck dinners, making him dance with her at the bluegrass concert. Some of the church women sniggered at her, but Opal didn’t care. Among the over-seventy single females in town, Harlan was considered quite a catch. He’d had a few health problems in recent months, but he was still a vigorous, handsome man, with a full head of silver hair and an easy, infectious laugh. He also owned a prime piece of riverfront property, rumored to be worth a small fortune.

  Morgan let herself out the back door. She followed the path down to the Spannagel's old slaughterhouse. Patches of goldenrod filled the abandoned holding pens, pushing up and through the rusty wire fence to sway in the September sun. She'd never had the nerve to look inside the slaughterhouse, but sneaking in after dark had been a rite of passage among the teenage boys living on Milltown Road.

  She gazed up and down the valley. “Mr. Spannagel!”

  He was probably hiding. He detested doctors and lab technicians. Ten bucks said he was sitting on the bank of Deer Creek, leaning against a river birch tree, sneaking a cigarette and swigging applejack moonshine out of a Mason jar.

  The sudden tinkle of music stopped her cold.

  A perky rendition of “Dixie” trilled deep inside the slaughterhouse.

  The second ring sent Morgan racing across the soggy ground to the ramped entrance. She grabbed the wrought iron handle and pushed the heavy door open.

  She stopped, her heart pounding.

  Jagged shards of light spilled into the cavernous room. Huge meat hooks hung from ropes. Twisting black hoses and pairs of corroded chains looped down the wall from the high beamed ceiling. The sharp smell of moldering wood, mingled with a sweet metal odor she couldn't place, coated her throat until she wanted to heave.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Harlan?” Her gaze trailed along the far wall, then to the left.

  Harlan lay on his side against one of the pig chutes, a hulking, motionless heap. Dust motes swirled around his head like glittering insects, disappearing then reappearing inside a cone-shaped shaft of light. Blood had seeped from both nostrils, flooded his gaping mouth. It smeared along the metal railing beneath Harlan's hand, fanned out from his shock of silver white hair, burbled into the grid-covered drain.

  Morgan knew he was dead before she touched him. His cloudy gray eyes were fixed on the stall doors, his shiny lower dental plate balanced on bloody, purple gums.

  Saliva gushed to the back of her throat. Her stomach lurched and roiled. She forced herself to kneel and place her fingers against his neck. She mashed the spongy flesh again and again, gulping in air, willing some insignificant little beat to throb against her fingertips.

  Oh, I wish I wa-as in the land of cotton.

  Morgan cried out, which miraculously squelched her need to vomit. She spotted Harlan's cell phone lying on the ground beside the stall door. She picked it up and snapped it open.

  “Dad!” Ethan shouted. “Dad, where are you? Are you okay?”

  “It's me, Ethan.”

  “Morgan? What's wrong? Why hasn't Dad called me back?”

  “He's in the slaughterhouse.” She swallowed hard. “I just found him. He's unconscious. I need to call an ambulance.”

  “Morgan! What are you—”

  “It's okay, Ethan. I'm not sure what happened, but I’m here with him. You need to come home.”

  The Maguire coping mechanism had kicked in, but she'd said all the wrong things. She should have warned Ethan to be careful driving over Blackstone Mountain. She should have had the courage to tell him his father was dead so he wouldn't break his neck getting there.

  “Morgan? Whatcha doin'?”

  Crystal.

  “Don't come in here!” Morgan jumped up and blocked Crystal's view. She couldn't let an eight-year-old see a dead body. The image of Harlan’s blood smeared corpse had already seared into her own brain, promising cold sweat nightmares for decades to come.

  “But I want to see the barn.” The little girl leaned against the doorway. Her huge blue eyes stared at Morgan from beneath a cloud of white-blond curls. Her inverted index finger hooked deep into the recesses of her right nostril.

  “Get in the truck, Crystal, now! Or I’ll tell your mother!”

  “What's that stuff on your pants?”

  Morgan didn't have to look. She could feel Harlan's blood seeping through the worn knees of her jeans. “Dammit, Crystal! Get your butt back in the truck!”

  Crystal scampered up the hill.

  Morgan dialed 911. Halfway through the call, the muscles in her legs turned to rubber. She stumbled outside and lowered herself onto a bed of chickweed.

  How was she going to tell Sean? How could she tell her brother that the one man who thought he could keep their family's orchard from plunging into bankruptcy was dead? Tears welled up in her eyes. Hot selfish tears. The kind Morgan’s mother always said would scald her soul. She should be crying for the poor man lying dead in the slaughterhouse, drenched in his own blood. Or for her brother, who had lost a trusted mentor and friend. But all she could think of was herself.

  And how she was stuck.

  Again.

  She slid Harlan’s phone into her pocket and looked up. A low cloud clung to the side of Blackstone Mountain, like a climber frozen in his tracks, unable to move up, down, or sideways.

  A quiet, hysterical laugh tried to work its way past the dry, thin pockets of air she kept swallowing. The realization of what had happened, and what it could mean for all of them, tightened in her chest. She gulped in more air.

  Harlan was dead. How could she desert Sean now? Her brother was the only real family she had left, and she could never leave him in the lurch no matter how desperate she was to cut and run. She knew Sean better than anyone. He would fight the good fight until there was nothing left to fight for. He would never give up. She had no choice but to stay. At least until things settled down.

  But the instant it became clear whether Maguire Orchard and Apple Butter Barn was destined to survive or go belly up, she was going to pack her bags, get the hell out of Riverbirch, and return to civilization.

  And this time, there'd be no looking back.

  The distant wail of a siren reverberated across the valley. Morgan to
ok a deep breath and blew it out. Then she stared at the blood on her hands and waited.

  Chapter 2

  Gage Kirkland forced himself to calm down. The raw anticipation that had burned through his gut for the last forty minutes was beginning to give him the kind of heartburn no amount of antacid could touch.

  The woman he'd found pacing the Maguire's front porch in a low-cut ruffled blouse, chain smoking menthol cigarettes as fast as she could light one off the other, was worried Morgan hadn't shown up with her kid. What was the woman’s name—Peach? Peach was sure something bad had happened to them. And who was Gage to say she was wrong? If he'd learned anything skulking around the most dangerous streets in Atlanta, it was to respect another person’s fears. Sometimes they were unfounded. Most of the time they weren’t.

  “I’m not a rich woman,” Peach wailed. “I live in a trailer park and work two jobs. I can’t afford daycare, so I pay Morgan to keep Crystal every day after school. If she takes my baby somewhere, she’s supposed to leave a note.” She gazed up and down the road, panic growing in her dark kohl lined eyes. “Being a single parent can sure be the pits sometimes.”

  “Yes, it can.”

  “I’m just glad I don’t have to worry about my two boys. They live with their father in Cherokee Bluff, so I only have to fool with them every other weekend.” She batted her thick black lashes. “Dammit! Where are they? I’ve gotta be at work at five.” She turned back to Gage. “You're not gonna leave me here alone, are you? Please say you're not gonna leave.”

  “I'm not gonna leave.”

  “We're staying?” Jeremy glanced up from a dog-eared copy of The Time Machine and scowled. He managed to avoid looking directly into Gage's eyes, a feat he'd perfected during the last two months. “Jeez! How long are we staying here? Until it's time to eat?”

  “Maybe.”

  Jeremy threw the book on the wicker loveseat. “Then can I go inside and take a—” He glanced at Peach, thought better of it. “Can I use the bathroom?”

  “Go ahead,” Peach said. “Morgan won't mind. Top of the stairs to your left.”