1. Crystal

 

 

This couldn't be the right place. Could it?

Crystal Martinez stared in dismay through the windshield of her small, practical, fuel-efficient Honda Fit, which she was now realizing was as unsuited to the rural road on which she'd found herself as a herd of cattle on a college campus.

At least, she'd thought this road was bad. Now that she saw the turnoff for the family farm, she realized the potholes on the narrow gravel road were nowhere near as rough as roads around here could get. The turnoff was nothing more than a pair of tire ruts, exactly one truck wide, overgrown with grass and wildflowers. The ruts twisted off into the trees, and low-hanging branches quickly hid it from sight.

But this was definitely the turnoff for the old Martinez family farm. There was the rusty mailbox, nailed to the top of a 55-gallon barrel, just like her dad had described it when he used to talk about the farm years ago. All the paint had peeled off the barrel, and there were a few bullet holes. She had imagined how it would look, but the reality was even worse.

And she hadn't even seen the farm yet.

What was she going to do, though, get a couple miles from the farm, wimp out at the road, and turn around and drive all the way back to St. Louis? Back to her lonely apartment, back to the mountain of debt that was burying her family, without even getting a single glimpse of the farm that might be their salvation.

As if.

Swallowing, she turned off the gravel road onto the tire ruts.

The Fit wallowed on the ruts and scraped past tree branches. Maybe I should be glad I have such a tiny car, Crystal thought, cringing as she felt the car's underside grinding on a rock. No way anything bigger could've made it up this road without cutting back some of the brush.

As she crawled along, she searched her own memories for any hint of familiarity, but found nothing. She'd only been four years old when the family was last here, and even then, her parents didn't live on the farm full-time; they just came out in the summers to visit with her grandparents. Then Grandpa and Dad had argued, and her family stopped coming out from St. Louis in the summers, and that was the last she'd seen of the family farm for 25 years.

And now, here she was.

"They say you can't go home again," she murmured aloud. "Guess I'm about to find out if that's true or not—oh, crud!"

She slammed on the brakes and stopped inches from a fallen tree trunk, almost hidden in the grass overgrowing the old driveway. No way she was getting her car over that. It looked like she'd be walking from here.

She sighed, got her jacket and a bottle of water out of the backseat, and locked the car—city girl habits, she thought, wryly amused with herself. What, did she think a deer was going to steal the car, or a bear was going to break into the trunk and take her luggage? It looked like no one had been down this road since her grandfather died, 15 years ago.

She started walking. The afternoon was warm, and she got tired of carrying the jacket, so she left it draped over a bush; she'd have to come back this way, after all. It was the quiet that she found the hardest to get used to. Except for those summers on the farm as a small child, she had been a city girl all her life. She'd grown up in St. Louis, went to school in Chicago, and then moved back to St. Louis to help out Mom when her dad got sick. Her entire life, she'd had the sound of traffic and car horns and neighbors' chatter as a constant soundtrack in the background.

But the only sounds here were the murmur of the wind in the trees and an occasional distant bird call. A small, bright yellow bird swooped across the driveway in front of her, making her jump. Her first thought was to pull out her phone and look up what kind it was, but then she remembered that she'd lost cell service shortly after she drove through that last little town where she'd turned off the highway. She'd made her way up here on her phone's saved GPS data.

Maybe I could get a bird book and learn the kinds of birds. That might be fun.

No, no. She reminded herself firmly that she was only going to be here for a few days. Just long enough to find out for herself the truth of the stories her dad had told her during the last days of his illness. She'd taken off two weeks from work (two days of which were already gone, eaten up by her cross-country drive), so she had just a little over a week and a half to search the farm, find out once and for all whether there was anything to be found, and then go back to her regular life in St. Louis and list the farm with a realtor.

Her mother had made it clear that she had absolutely no interest in keeping the farm. Selling it would pay off Dad's medical bills, and right now, with the family teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, that was the most important thing. And Crystal agreed. The farm might have been passed from Grandpa to Dad, and then down to her, but she didn't want to live on it. Crystal Martinez, rancher? The idea was absurd! She had an English degree and worked in a bookstore. It didn't even look like there was a Barnes & Noble in the whole county. Or a library. Or any sort of culture, or anything fun to do.

Still, she had to admit that she was enjoying the walk. She'd always really liked taking walks and going for day hikes in Illinois and Missouri's state parks. This was just like hiking in a park except that she was the only person here, which was kind of exciting.

A crash somewhere off in the brush made her flinch. Okay, that was the wrong kind of exciting. It was probably just a rabbit. Still, she knew there were bears and mountain lions in these woods. And some of them were shifters, from stories she remembered her dad telling her. These were shifter mountains.

Well, I guess I'd rather meet a shifter bear than a real bear. A brief thrill ran through her; she couldn't quite say where it came from.

The driveway, such as it was, came to a small creek. There was no bridge, just a series of logs placed crossways, so the fast-flowing water could run between them. Crystal hopped from log to log, and thought about the inadvisability of trying to drive her car over that. Grandpa, you could really have afforded to invest in a little bit of infrastructure ...

On the other side of the creek, the trail went up a short hill, and then suddenly Crystal walked out of the trees into the old farmyard.

The whole time, she'd been waiting for anything on the journey to give her a sense of recognition, but when it hit, it hit hard. She did remember this place, even if she hadn't been here since she was a small child. It hadn't looked quite like this, of course. Everything was overgrown; she could barely see the old fences in the long grass, and there were small trees growing all over the old pasture. The barn's roof sagged alarmingly, and what had probably once been a garden in front of the farmhouse was now a riot of wildflowers and raspberry bushes.

But the overall shape of the place was familiar. She recognized the way the mountains rose behind the farm, the march of the trees up the foothills. The house and the barn, overgrown and run down as they were, had imprinted themselves on her heart somehow.

She wasn't expecting to feel, in a tiny corner of her soul, as if she'd come home.

Quickly she got a grip on herself. She was only here for a couple of weeks. She had a mission and a plan. And right now, as much as she wanted to explore, the sun was dipping low behind the mountains. There was nowhere to spend the night out here. She had just enough time to walk back to her car before dusk—and she really didn't want to walk through those woods in the dark.

Tomorrow, she could come back with a metal detector and get to work.

She had to tear herself away from her first view of the farm, but reminding herself of all the bears, mountain lions, and God knew what else in the woods got her moving. As she walked briskly back the way she'd come, she was already making plans. With less than two weeks ahead of her, she needed to make every day count. Hopefully that last little town had a halfway decent motel. And she was going to need some other stuff, like a weedwacker and probably camping equipment unless she planned to drive back to the motel every day—

—oh right, and a chainsaw, she thought grimly as she came in view of her car in the long evening shadows and remembered why her car was sitting in the middle of the driveway.

Of course, she had absolutely no idea how to use a chainsaw. But she'd bet the neighbors did. There had been another turnoff a couple of miles back the way she'd come from, and it looked well used. The ranch next door to her family farm, it appeared, was still in operation. She hoped she could stop by that ranch and ask if one of the hired hands would be able to cut the tree out of the way for her. Maybe she could hire someone to do a little clean up around the farm while she was treasure hunting. Having the brush cut and the pasture cleared would make it easier to sell the place.

Yes, she told herself, climbing into the car with a steely sense of purpose locked securely over the fear underneath. That was a good plan.

Pretty much her only plan at this point.

She tried not to think about what would happen if the farm didn't end up being the solution to her family's debt problems. It had to be. Even if there wasn't a treasure, there was a house and a barn and a good chunk of land. Selling the farm would be her family's salvation.

Even if it was already tugging on a tiny corner of her soul ...

Be strong, she told herself. All her life, she'd felt as if she was searching for something just beyond her reach. It would be the cruelest twist of fate if she'd managed to find it here, only to have it torn away.

No. There was nothing for her here, only an old piece of family history. And in two weeks, she'd be out of here, back to—

—a cold, empty bed in a one-bedroom apartment—

—back to her real life in St. Louis.