Deborah Smith - Crossroads Cafe Excerpts

The Crossroads Cafe

Crossroads Cafe Excerpts

Hello --

Welcome to chapter one and two of The Crossroads Cafe, my new novel, which will be published in August of this year by BelleBooks. Each month until the publication date I'll post another excerpt from the book's opening chapters . If you're a bookseller, librarian or reviewer you can receive a review copy of the finished book, available by June. Just drop me a note at with your business address.

I hope you all enjoy this "experimental" promotion for the novel. If you like what you see, tell your fellow readers to sign up for the free reading experience, too! If this works out well, I'll do the same promotion for my next book. Thanks so much for your interest and support!

Deborah Smith

The Crossroads Cafe

Prologue

Crossroads, North Carolina
The Blue Ridge Mountains

Before the accident, I never had to seduce a man in the dark. I dazzled millions in the brutal glare of kliegs on the red carpets of Hollywood, the flash of cameras at the Oscars, the sunlight on the piazzas of Cannes. Beautiful women don't fear the glint of lust and judgment in men's eyes, or the bitter gleam of envy in women's. Beautiful women welcome even the brightest light. Once upon a time, I had been the most beautiful woman in the world.

Now I needed the night, the darkness, the shadows.

"Put the gun down," I ordered, as I let my bra and white t-shirt fall to the ground. Behind me, a full, white moon hung in a sky of stars above the summer mountains, silhouetting Thomas and me. Frogs trilled in the forest. Beneath my bare feet, the pasture grass was soft and wet with summer dew, glistening in the moonlight. There were no bright lights in our world, not the pinpoint of a lamp in some distant window, not the wink of a jet high overhead. There might be no other souls in these ancient North Carolina ridges that night. Only Thomas, and me, and the darkness inside us both.

"I'm warning you for the last time, Cathryn," he said, his voice thick but firm. He wasn't a man who slurred his words, no matter how drunk he was. "Leave."

I unzipped my jeans. My hands trembled. I couldn't stop staring at the World War II pistol he held so casually, his right arm bent, the gun pointed skyward. Thomas had been a preservation architect; he respected fine craftsmanship, even when choosing a gun with which to kill himself.

Slowly I pushed my jeans down, along with my panties. The scarred skin along my right thigh prickled at the scrape of denim. I angled my right side away from the moon, trying to illuminate only the left half of my body, my face. Half of me was still perfect. But the other half . . .

I stepped out of my crumpled clothes and stood there naked, the moonlight safely behind me. The night breeze was a tongue of embarrassment, licking my scarred flesh. My hand twitched with the urge to cover my face. How badly I wanted to hide the awful parts. Thomas watched me without moving, without speaking, without breathing.

He doesn't want me, I thought. I said quietly, "Thomas, I know I'm no prize, but would you really rather kill yourself than touch me?"

Not a word, still, not a flicker of reaction. I could barely see his expression in the shadows, and wasn't sure I wanted to. The uglies came over me like a cold tide. A festering wave of withdrawal – shyness and anger multiplied times a thousand. Me, who had once preened for the world without a shred of self-doubt.

I turned my back to him, trying not to shiver with defeat. "Just put the gun down. Then I'll get dressed, and we'll forget this ever happened."

I heard quick steps behind me, and before I could turn, his arms went around me from behind. His hands slid over my bare skin. I twisted my head to the pretty side but he bent his lips to the other and roughly kissed the rivulets of ruined flesh

No matter what might happen to us later, I saved his life that night. And, for that one night, at least, he saved mine. Hope is in the mirror we keep inside us, love sees only what it wants to see, and beauty is in the lie of the beholder.

Sometimes, that lie is all you need to survive.

Chapter 1

The Day of the Accident
16 Months Earlier

The Four Seasons Hotel, Beverly Hills, California

The Face of Flawless, the posters scattered around the hotel's penthouse suite said, beneath a smoky, film-noir close-up of my face. I looked both innocent and come-hitherish. A dark-haired Grace Kelly for the 21^st century. The princess next door who wears thong panties. Timeless beauty. Ageless perfection. From Cathyrn Deen. Because every woman deserves to look like a star.

That kind of hype sometimes made me blush a little. Or pretend to, at least. A southern beauty queen is trained from birth to be charmingly self-deprecating. But let's be real, here: I was the most beautiful woman in the world. People Magazine said so. And Vanity Fair. And even Rolling Stone and Esquire, those cynical, sex-obsessed boys.

I had been told I was the most beautiful girl in the room – any room, anywhere -- since the time I was old enough to gurgle adorably as my father wheeled me around Atlanta's finest ballrooms and boardrooms in an emerald-green stroller custom-designed to match my eyes. I'd be paid twenty-five million dollars for my next film, a remake of Giant, co-starring me in the Elizabeth Taylor role, Heath Ledger in the James Dean part, and Hugh Jackman in the role Rock Hudson played.

I'm the new Liz Taylor, I thought, gazing at myself happily in a huge, lighted mirror of the Four Season's penthouse suite while my personal stylists worked on me as if I were a life-sized Barbie doll. Take that, Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz.

"We make fifteen-year-old girls look twenty-five and thirty-five-year-old women look twenty-five," Judi, my hair girl, was saying to the others as she fluffed a long strand of my mocha-black mane. "So the pornography culture will want to fuck us."

"The pornography culture?" I said, smiling as I watched them primp me. "It's just human nature for girls to flirt and boys to appreciate it."

Randy, my make-up boy, chuckled wryly. His soft sable brush flicked across my forehead. His dark-skinned hand moved like an artist's. A poof of Flawless Ivory Cream Foundation Powder floated before us. Randy waved his brush at Judi. "Personally, I've got nothing against looking pornographic. Or younger."

Judi grunted at him. "You're a guy. It's not the same for you. Men are still considered desirable even after they turn into fat, wrinkled prunes with penises. When you're a crusty old queen you'll still get a lot of action."

"I do hope so!"

"The porno culture?" said Luce, my wardrobe girl. "Let me tell you about the time I managed wardrobe for a triple-X producer. It was all leather corsets and high heels. And that was just for the livestock in the cast." She hooted as she tugged a silky silver dress over my plunging silver bra. I slid my arms into lacy shoulder straps and Luce smoothed the bodice over my boobs, bending down to peer at them. Checking for nipplage, as we called it. "Perky nipple on the left, Boss."

I nodded. Even my boobs were proud of themselves. "Get the Band-Aids. We don't want the press to stare at my headlights when they're supposed to be listening to my brilliant and witty thoughts about my new cosmetics empire."

Randy clucked his tongue. "Boss, you could put on a burka and spray yourself with camel musk, and men would still stare at your tits."

"Camel musk? Maybe I should add that to my perfume line. Judi, I'm only thirty-two. What is that in camel years? How long before camels won't whistle at me on the street? Does the porno culture include camels?"

"Oh, Boss, you know what I'm saying," Judi went on. "Women are sex objects. After decades of feminism, that's still all we are. If we're not young and hot, we have no value."

"I plan to be sexy even when I'm a hundred," Luce growled. "As long as there's KY and vodka, I can get laid."

I laughed. Sex appeal was just another of life's lucky gifts, and I'd been gifted more than almost everyone else on the planet. I couldn't imagine being anything but beautiful. At least I was gracious about my fortunes. Don't hate me because I'm perfect. I'm a nice person, too, I thought.

My people – I thought of my employees the way old southerners talk of servants, as if I owned them – my people always liked me. Daddy and all my southern aunts – those golf-playing, country-clubbing doyennes of the Atlanta social scene – had trained me to be a kind and generous New South plantation mistress. I turned to peer at Judi from under a lock of my hair, which she held out like a glossy chocolate rope as she teased the underside. "Judi, is this discussion going to segue into your ‘witches versus engineers theory?'"

"Isn't that a new reality show on Fox?" Randy asked. Luce chortled.

Judi scowled. "Laugh if you want to. But there are jerks out there who say women are witches – I mean wiccans, not bitches -- and men are engineers. That women represent emotion and sex – the dark arts -- versus men representing logic and intellect – the progressive sciences. That women have no purpose other than breeding. And thus, that it's women's job to stay desirable until they hit menopause. After that, women are supposed to just fade away."

I wagged a finger at her. "Not me. When I'm eighty years old I plan to plaster my face with Flawless Anti-Aging Spackle and promenade in public with no shame at all."

Everyone laughed. They gathered around me, their ordinary faces gazing into the mirror with my extraordinary face in the middle, like the center of a flower. Judi sighed. "Boss," she said, "You will never be ugly. I can't even picture it."

My gaze fell on the mirror image of an elegant hotel platter of raw fruit and fat-free yogurt among the make-up kits, curling irons and other clutter. Suddenly, I saw instead, a blue-willow china plate filled with my grandmother's biscuits. Covered in gravy. Cream gravy. With flecks of pure pork sausage in it.

I don't mean I thought about biscuits and gravy. I mean I saw biscuits and gravy. Right in the mirror. I made myself breathe calmly.

Granny Nettie.

Suddenly I remembered every detail of my mountain grandmother's weathered face, her green eyes almost frightening in their wisdom, her gray-black hair poking from beneath a tractor cap that seemed as exotic to me as the turban of a sultaness. She had died when I was twelve, on her farm in the wilderness of western North Carolina, a world as different from my Atlanta life as any foreign country, and just as lost. Her daughter, my mother, had not lived to raise me, and Granny Nettie had not lived to see me grown.

"Eat, girl," I could hear Granny say rebelliously. "Every time life gives you biscuits and gravy, eat and rejoice." Outside her magical, stained-glass windows, sunlight and shadows draped smiles on layers of enormous, blue-green mountains. This is no place for skinny sissies, they whispered to me. The scent of Crisco, milk, sausage, flour, and butter filled my senses. Oddly comforting. Everything will be all right, if you find what you really want.

A shiver ran up my spine. Sometimes I . . . had visions. In mirrors.

While checking my hair in a make-up booth backstage at the Oscars, I'd seen Daddy's face. It replaced mine for just a second. Peaceful, handsome, classic, sternly loving, silver-haired. The father who had been my biggest fan and toughest critic. The very-patriarchal southern daddy I adored. I was so startled by his image in the mirror I flubbed one of my lines a few minutes later, as I read the best actress nominees on camera. Millions of people watching, worldwide, and I said Merle Step instead of Meryl Streep. I turned Meryl Streep into a male country-western singer.

When I walked back into the wings, one of my assistants ran up to me. "There's an emergency call from Atlanta," she said. "It's about your dad." He had died of a heart attack during his Oscar-night party at the club. He threw parties just to watch me give awards to other people.

For months after that, mirrors made me nervous, something I never confessed to anyone at the time. The irony of a life spent looking in mirrors was that sometimes they looked back.

Like now.

I blinked, feeling dizzy. "Boss, are you all right?" Judi asked. "Do you want something to eat? You're staring at the kiwi and broccoli as if they might bite you."

I took a deep breath, laughed, and fluttered a hand to my heart. "Why, I don't dare eat before a press conference. If I gain so much as one ounce the porno culture will revoke my membership card."

More laughter. I took another breath. I'm just hungry, that's all, I told myself. It means nothing. Sometimes, a biscuit is just a biscuit.

A pair of double doors burst open. Six-foot-three inches of elegant California business mogul strode in, dressed in gray Armani.

My husband, Gerald Barnes Merritt (never just ‘Gerald Merritt,' that was too plain,) was thirteen years older than me, rugged, brilliant, rich, and yes, wildly sexy in his own right. We'd been married for less than a year. He had two ex-wives, three grown children, and several successful empires in real estate, computer technology, marketing, and now, me. Thanks to him, I would head my own cosmetics empire. Flawless, by Cathyrn Deen. Actually, Gerald ran everything. He was the CEO. But hey, I was the face.

"Ready to announce your new business venture to the press, my gorgeous girl?" Gerald boomed, scattering my entourage like a rottweiller in a rabbit pen.

I preened in the mirror and avoided looking toward the mystical food platter again. A vision of biscuits. Right. Just my imagination. "Oh, I don't know. Can you see anything about me that needs a little more perfecting?"

He slid his arms around me from behind, angling his head to look at me in the mirror, but careful not to muss mounds of hair and the unblemished masterpiece of my Flawless face. I felt the ridge of his penis lightly teasing me.

"You couldn't be more beautiful. I am married," he said softly, "to the girl every man wants."

Another strange little shiver went through me. Beauty is fleeting, but biscuits are forever. I smiled and shook off the silly thought.

I was the most beautiful woman in the world. Surely, I always would be.

Thomas

That Same Afternoon
Crossroads, North Carolina

Grief steals all the beauty in the world, then gives it back one piece at a time until you see more hope than sorrow in your life, if you're lucky. So far, I'd only reclaimed a shred here, a fragment there, hanging onto those small bits with my fingernails. My desperate cache of beauty could all be found in one place: a small cove high in the remote mountains of western North Carolina, where an old paved road and an even older, unpaved one intersected in front of a former farmhouse, a former log cabin, a cluster of whitewashed sheds, and a pair of gas pumps under a tin awning. All of it known by one name that summed up the spirit, the sustenance, and the turning points of the lives that met there.

The Crossroads Café.

I was not necessarily an upstanding citizen of the Crossroads, but I had earned the respect of the people who mattered. Or, at least, their tolerance.

It's never a good thing when you wake up at sunset with a hangover in a sleeping bag in the rusty bed of a sixty-year-old pick-up truck you saved from a junkyard, parked under one of the café's giant oak trees full of squirrels, who are cheerfully showering you with rotten nut shells as they do their spring housecleaning, and when you open your bleary eyes the first thing you see – and smell -- is a small, shaggy, white goat who's hopped up in your rusty outdoor bedroom and is now eating your new cell phone.

But I was used to it.

"There goes another one," I grunted. I brushed shells out of my beard. "Tell the concierge I have some complaints about the wake-up calls in this hotel. Can't a man sleep all day without being disturbed?"

Crack. Banger, the goat, looked at me with my cell phone disintegrating between his teeth. Fragments of the casing dribbled from his hairy white lips. I sighed. "I didn't want that phone, anyway."

If my brother would just stop sending me replacements, Banger might switch to something more nutritious, like hubcaps. John was determined to keep me from becoming a full-fledged Luddite. As long as I owned a cell phone, he thought there was a chance I might not end up writing crazed manifestos by lantern light in my cabin. Or shooting myself.

I was confident it wouldn't be the former.

I stretched slowly, giving every body part plenty of warning that we were about to move as a team. Sour stomach, greasy eyes, aching head, stiff back. The rest of me was only thirty-eight, but after a few hours in the truck my back always qualified for senior citizen discounts.

While testing my joints, I realized my long, brown beard was wet. And also my head, and my ponytail, and my face, and, when I lifted my beard, the front of my vintage New York Giants jersey. Soaked. Someone had doused the legacy of hall of famer Lawrence Taylor. Sacrilege.

That's when I noticed the note tied to Banger's collar. Written in black marker on a piece of torn cardboard with a Dixie Sugar logo still visible on one edge, it said:

THOMAS MITTERNICH, YOU GET YOUR BEHIND INTO MY KITCHEN BY 6:30. CATHYRN IS DOING A PRESS CONFERENCE ON A CABLE TV SHOW THEN. YOUR SORE EYES NEED THE SIGHT. DON'T MAKE ME COME BACK WITH MORE WATER. LOVE, DELTA

Cathryn Deen. I'd never met her, but, of course, I knew who she was. Everyone knew who she was. Pygmies in the Amazon and Mongolian yak herders living in straw huts on the Russian tundra knew who she was. Even in the Crossroads, one of the most secluded mountain communities on the eastern seaboard, celebrity culture infected us via tabloids and satellite pay-per-view.

Wincing, I eased out of the truck and stood up. After a polite glance in all directions, I stepped between the truck and the oak, pulled up the water-dampened tail of my jersey, unzipped my jeans, fetched Little Thomas from his bed, and peed on the oak's protruding roots. "Take that," I said to the squirrels.

As I re-zipped, Banger dropped my ruined phone and hopped down from the truck. He affectionately stomped one hard, cloven hoof on the toe of my running shoe and butted my left knee, hooking one horn through a hole in the denim and into the tender center of my kneecap. I saw stars for a minute.

When my head cleared, I scrubbed a hand over his floppy ears. "If there is a God," I told the goat, "He appointed you to be my conscience."

Carrying a fresh Giants jersey and clean briefs – when you regularly wake up in public, it's a good idea to keep a change of clothes in your truck – I limped from under the tree. The fine, crusher-run gravel of the parking lot was a delicate material, as granite goes, yet it still managed to make ear-splitting sounds.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, bounced off the raw walls of my skull.

I tried to tiptoe, but it didn't help.

A cathedral of sky and mountain opened over my head. I took a couple of reviving breaths and looked around. Evening light cloaked the cove in soft blue shadows; the Ten Sisters mountains, circling the cove like the thick rim of a bread bowl, glowed gold and mint-green above filaments of silver mist. On a damp day the Sisters filled with white fog, disappearing like islands in a soft, white sea. There was a reason pioneers named the Appalachians of western North Carolina the Smokies.

The view could almost clear up a hangover. Almost.

"Thomas! Are you still out here goofing off?" Delta's squeaky drawl stabbed my eardrums. Wincing, I pivoted toward it. She leaned over the rail of the café's front veranda, a motherly, plump, angel of food under the whitewashed halo of a farmhouse-cum-restaurant porch, surrounded by an eclectically challenged cluster of half-barrel flower pots and rump-sprung rocking chairs.

Vintage. She and the café were vintage. As a preservation architect, I loved that. As a suicidal alcoholic clinging to every comfort I could find, I loved it even more.

GROCERIES AND MORE, said a weathered aluminum sign hanging from the café's eaves. The "more" included everything a modern mercantile in the middle of nowhere should stock. Need shotgun shells, condoms, and a fine wine selection from the Biltmore Estate vineyards over in Asheville? Delta called that "the Valentine's Day package." You could buy it all at the Crossroads Grocery.

On the café's other side stood a cheerful trio of former hunting shacks, now reconstituted as prime business locations with signs and awnings and their own parking spaces. The one with the American flag hanging from a wall-mount by the screen door was our combination post office and Delta's brother, Bubba McKellan's, pottery studio. Behind the cafe, FEED AND SEED summed up the retail mission of an old gray barn, and SWAP AND THRIFT nailed the purpose of the barn's enclosed lean-to.

In the cities, a note on a cash register change cup says, "Take a penny, leave a penny."

At the Crossroads, a hand-lettered placard on the lean-to said: "Take a chair, leave a chair."

The entire, fabulously organic café compound was fronted, on the roadside near the gas pumps, by a big wooden sign hung from four-by-four posts. The sign alerted strangers to all the wonders that could be had right there, all in one place:

Homecooking

Groceries/Gas/Diesel/Kerosene/Propane

Hardware/Farm Supplies

Camping/Fishing/Hunting Gear

Bait

Post Office

Gem Shop

Video Rentals

Camp Sites

Maps/Books/Music

At the very bottom of that list, recently nailed into place, a small sign added, AND WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS.

"Are you coming inside or do I have to take a hickory switch to your behind?" Delta called.

"I'm meditating," I called. "Banger and I are working on the meaning of existence. So far, we think it involves butting things with your head."

"Spare me your ill-tempered notions. Come on, you're gonna miss Cathyrn on TV! She's having a press conference for her make-up company! They're gonna interview her, live!"

Delta clearly believed a glimpse of her movie-star kin was always good for my jaded soul.

"If I come in, will you give me a hot biscuit?"

"Git! In! Here!" She jabbed a finger at the double front doors, where a small sign said, The Crossroad's Café. Good Food And Then Some. "I haven't got time to sweet-talk you anymore! See all those SUV's and minivans in the parking lot? I got a restaurant full of family reunioners from Asheville in here. I'm volunteering you to work as a busboy!" I gave her a thumbs-up. She went back inside.

"Don't wait up for me, honey," I told Banger, who was eating a cigar butt I'd dropped.

I walked slowly toward the café, already tired of being awake and sober. All right, I'd go inside and watch Cathyrn Deen be beautiful.

I needed the fantasy.

After The Press Conference

Laughing, I led my entourage through one of the Four Season's highly discreet exits, designed especially for VIP's. The hotel is one of the most famous celebrity hideaways in the world. Frank Sinatra sang by the piano in the main bar on his eightieth birthday. Renee Zellweger was mistaken for a cocktail waitress there, once, and good-naturedly took bar orders from a table full of businessmen. The front-desk staff speak a mysterious dialect of English, one with vaguely euro-asian accents, as if imported from some elegant little country especially to serve celebrities. On any given day you can glimpse a number of famous bodies being massaged in private cabanas around the pool. The lobby bars are a swoon-fest of Hollywood sightings, and also are rumored to be where the most expensive hookers hang out.

A pair of valets ran to get my car, nearly tripping over their feet when they saw me. Ah, the power of a clingy, white angora sweater, black leggings, and knee-high Louis Vuitton boots with stiletto heels. I looked like a wholesome dominatrix.

"You wowed everyone at your press conference today, Ms. Deen," one of the valets gushed. "You looked great."

"Why, bless your heart."

"Get Ms. Deen's car," a bodyguard ordered. The valet ran.

I was trailed by two private security men, five publicists, two assistants, and one assistant to an assistant of my agent. Everyone but me had a phone attached to his or her ear, and they were all talking, but not to me or each other. I laughed again as I signed autographs for the bellmen. My entourage chattered on without me, as perky as parakeets on cocaine.

Yes, the press conference was huge. Fabulous. Cathyrn's doing lunch with Vogue next week. Cover photos are under negotiation. Pencil us in for Tuesday, in New York.

Marty? Book Cathyrn with Larry King for the twelfth.

No, Cathyrn can't do Oprah on that schedule. She'll be in England to film a couple of last-minute scenes for The Pirate Bride. Sophia Coppola insists.

Hello, I'm calling for Cathyrn Deen. Ms. Deen wants you to find her a great, authentic voice coach to work with her on Giant. Yes, I know she can naturally do a southern accent, but Ms. Deen says a Texas drawl is very different from an Atlanta accent. She wants a coach from Dallas. No, not the old TV show. The city. Ms. Deen requires a city-southern-Texas-rich accent for the film. She's meeting with her producers and director this weekend . . .

"Women like you ruin other women's lives, bitch!"

The voice rang out as I was about to step into the open door of my Trans Am. The car was a mint condition 1977 T-Top, black and gold. I halted with one high-heel on the door rim. Several scruffy young women darted from behind the hotel's glorious palms, waving homemade signs.

REAL WOMEN DON'T HAVE TO BE FLAWLESS

CATHYRN DEEN HATES REAL WOMEN

"You're telling women to hate themselves for having ordinary faces and bodies," one of the protestors yelled. "But you're the freak, not us!"

My publicists formed a circle around me, like pioneers trying to ward off a band of angry Sioux. The protestors bobbed and weaved as the guards chased them. I was open-mouthed with amazement. "Why didn't anyone tell me these girls were out here?" I demanded. "I could have invited them to the press conference. Listened to their concerns. Offered them a makeover--"

"Never negotiate with terrorists," one of the publicists said. Seriously.

"Terrorists? Oh, come on. They're just sorority girls with bad hair. They're probably sophomores at Berkley. Maybe I'm their class protest project. " I called to the guards. "Bring them over here and let me talk to them!"

My publicists did a group pirouette to stare at me in horror. "Those girls could be carrying mace or pepper spray," one said.

"Or a hidden bomb," a second added.

I laughed. "Or iPods filled with horrifying Ashley Simpson songs, or hair brushes with really sharp bristles, or . . ."

"Please, Cathyrn. The hotel's still full of photographers. If the press catches wind of this, these protestors will make the news and that's all people will remember about the launch of Flawless Cosmetics."

That got me. Gerald's put so much work and money into this venture, I thought. I can't ruin this day for him. I blew out a breath. "All right, y'all win." They hustled me into the Trans Am. One of the publicists, a young man, put a hand to his heart as he shut my door. "Ms. Deen, I'm so sorry about this. If I ran the world, all the ugly chicks with big mouths would be sent to an island, somewhere."

I stared at him. I'd never thought of myself as the poster girl for men who thought women should keep quiet and look pretty. As I drove out of the Four Season's elegant, palm-endowed shadow, the girls glared at me from behind the phalanx of security people. They raised their hands and flipped me the bird.

I didn't know how to deal with people who weren't in awe of me.

So in return I gave them a polite, beauty-queen wave.

Thomas

Just after dark, east coast time.

I took a break from bussing tables at the café and sat down on a rough oak bench at the edge of the café's parking lot. I lit another crumpled cigar butt I found in my jeans' front pocket. In front of me, sandwiched between a section of split-rail fence and a steep hill planted in gnarled apple trees, a faded two-lane road meandered past. Gloriously labeled by its antique name, The Asheville Trace, it hinted that modern horsepower could get you to Crossroads and back to civilization without packing a lunch. Coming from Asheville, the Trace slithered out of the eastern Sisters along their foothills, bordered the vast expanse of the grassy cove, yawned past me, then wandered up a twisting route into the foothills, heading west to the county seat. During rush hour, we locals might see, oh, a car on the Trace every ten minutes.

Which suited me just fine.

I tossed the cigar butt, feeling nauseous. Hand-rolled local tobacco – a North Carolina heritage – was a smooth smoke but hard on an empty stomach. I sniffed burning hair. A fleck of tobacco smoldered in my beard. A few quick slaps, and the beard was saved. I wouldn't have to drop out of the ZZ Top lookalike contest.

More deep breaths. I inhaled the good smell of wood in nearby chimneys, the clean, springtime fragrance of earth, and the wafting aromas of dinner from Delta's kitchen. The mountains curled a breeze through Delta's cooking and carried it all over the cove. Even out at my cabin I sometimes swore I smelled her famous biscuits.

"Hey, Mitternich," Jeb Whittlespoon yelled from the café's side door. "Poker at nine. Right after the dining room closes."

I gave him a thumbs-up.

One winter, when it snowed heavily, I slip-tied an aluminum rowboat to Jeb's ATV and we did a little motorized sledding. Jeb, a young Iraq veteran, was still working out some post-traumatic stress issues at the time, so he was more than happy to careen the ATV down the Trace's snowy slide into the cove, towing me and my rowboat behind him. I jerked the slip-tie free at the precise moment when my counterweight mass and my projectile mass met in a perfect orgasm of force and release, and I and the rowboat sailed over a drop-off on the road's shoulder. We remained airborne for a good twenty yards before the boat plowed a pre-spring furrow in the southeast quadrant of the café's vegetable garden. Ten heads of winter cabbage were collateral damage.

Delta, who is Jeb's mother, forgave me. She was just glad to see her son laugh, again. I'd promised her I'd coax him out of his shell, and I did.

She even paid for my stitches.

I got up from the bench and went back to the café.

Poker at nine, drunk by midnight, sleeping with goats by dawn.

A typical Saturday night.

I bussed tables covered in red-checkered oil cloth under old tin ceiling lamps that cast warm pools of light. The café' was Mayberry, a Norman Rockwell painting, and a rerun of The Waltons all rolled into one. Ordinarily the atmosphere soothed me, but that night I felt edgy -- not just the usual blue-black mood that came on as the sun set, but something worse.

Around me, happy families visiting from the campgrounds and the suburbs of Asheville ate plates of the best southern home cooking anywhere. Delta's daughter-in-law, Becka, and sister-in-law, Cleo, hustled between the tables. Becka and Cleo flirted with me harmlessly, tolerated me endlessly, bossed me around. Cleo prayed for me. Becka told Jeb, her husband, to keep guns away from me when I was drunk.

I turned around with a pan full of dishes and found a little boy staring up at me. Gaping, mesmerized. Oh, God, I thought. He looks like Ethan. Even more than most.

Every boy under five reminded me of Ethan. Every breath I took reminded me of Ethan. Clouds reminded me. Toys in an ad reminded me. Spatters of fake blood on an episode of CSI reminded me. I wondered if I still had half a bottle of vodka under the truck's front seat.

"Mister, are you a hillbilly?" the boy asked. His voice trembled. He was afraid of me.

The father rushed over. "He didn't mean any harm."

I could only nod. Words stuck in my throat. A glance confirmed that everyone in the diner was staring at me. Six-four, bearded, wrinkled Giants jersey, faded jeans, old running shoes, blood-shot eyes, topped with a ponytail and a long, wavy brown beard. Go figure.

Delta stepped between me and the worried customers, grinning. "Aw, this is no hillbilly," she announced. "This is just Thomas, a crazy architect from New York City." To me she whispered, "You know we all love you around here, but you've got a strange look in your eyes tonight. You're scaring kids and giving hillbillies a bad name. Take a break."

I nodded again, my throat aching. I carried the bus pan to the kitchen, then walked outside. I went to my truck, climbed in, and pulled a fresh bottle of vodka from under the front seat. I had my rituals. Open a bottle, pull down the visor, look at the pictures I'd laminated and taped there. Sherryl and Ethan on his first birthday, in Central Park, laughing for me among some flowers. And the other picture, the one from the archives of the New York Times, a picture like dozens of pictures that had been studied, analyzed, and archived.

A picture from the morning of September 11, 2001, when my wife jumped from the north tower of the World Trade Center with our son in her arms. I touched both pictures with a fingertip, then took my first drink of the night.

Ventura Highway
Five p.m., west coast time.

"Caaaathyrn!" A car full of teenage boys passed me in an open Jeep, waving and honking their horn.

I waved back vaguely, still distracted from the incident at the hotel, I zoomed along the Ventura Highway in heavy traffic, headed northwest out of L.A. The producers of Giant, a husband-wife team, owned a fabulous Arabian horse ranch outside Camarillo, near the coast. I planned to spend the weekend as their houseguest, discussing the script and meeting with the director. Gerald had kissed me goodbye at the hotel on his way to board our Lear Jet. He was headed to London to meet with some of our Flawless investors.

My right foot cramped as I pressed the Trans Am's accelerator. High-heeled, skintight ostrich leather boots are not meant for driving a muscle car. I had a garage filled with Mercedes and Jaguars, but I loved my classic, redneck wheels. Clearly, I'd inherited some fast-car genes from my Grandpa Nettie. He died young – murdered in a fight at a roadhouse outside Asheville, so I never knew him, but Granny said he'd been a bootlegger and mountain dirt-track racer in his youth. I glanced at the Trans Am's speedometer. Only 80 mph. By California highway standards, I was just coasting. "Hey, Grandpa, watch this," I said aloud.

I wiggled my foot, pressed harder, and sped up. The wind curled in through the open T-top, whipping my hair. It was a perfect spring day, the temperature in the seventies, the smog just a pretty, lavender-blue mist on the horizon. I crested a hill and grinned at a vista laced with the lime-green outlines of large vegetable fields. Some day I was going to hire someone to plant vegetables at Granny's farm in North Carolina. And send me pictures.

Other drivers waved and honked at me – mostly men and boys, smiling, putting hands to their hearts in admiration. Tractor-trailer drivers blew their deep, diesel horns as I zoomed past. I waved and smiled in return. I admit it: I enjoyed being a movie star on the freeway. What a great stage. I felt immortal.

Lights flashed in my rear-view mirror. I glanced back and scowled when I discovered a familiar blue mini-van. A hand came out of the van's passenger window, waved gleefully at me, disappeared, then returned clutching a large video camera. A shaggy, gray-blonde guy poked his head out and fitted the video cam's viewfinder to one eye.

"Damn."

Mason Angston. A jerk, even by the aggressive standards of showbiz paparazzi. We had a long acquaintance, most of it annoying to me and profitable to him. He'd videotaped me as I walked through airports all over the world, trailed me on the outskirts of movie sets, hopped out of the bushes around nightclubs and restaurants, and once snapped photos of me sunning topless in Spain, which the world could still view for five dollars per download on the Internet.

And now he intended to tape me driving on the Ventura Highway? It must be a slow week in the celebrity scandals business. Were Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight that desperate for footage?

I wasn't in the mood. Bitch. Bad role model for girls. Those words kept echoing through my mind.

And biscuits. Granny Nettie's gravy-covered biscuits. Suddenly I could almost taste them again, just as I had in the hotel suite, almost hear her ghost whispering in my ear, Take comfort, now. Rejoice. You'll live.

Strange thoughts. A chill on my skin. I shook it off, glared at Mason in the rearview mirror, and stomped the Trans Am's accelerator.

For months afterwards, I would try to remember every detail of that moment. To remember every nuance, everything I felt and did, everything I should have done differently. I would be haunted by everything I did wrong in that split-second of eternity, when my life changed forever.

The toe of my boot slipped sideways off the pedal. The boot's long, narrow heel went under the pedal and jammed there. My foot was trapped for maybe two seconds, three at the most. Just enough time for the Trans Am to slow down, just enough time to encourage the clueless driver in the lane to my left. He whipped his small, aged hatchback in front of me. I stared in horror at the car's taillights, which I was about to rear-end at ninety miles per hour.

I jerked my foot free and stomped the brake. The Trans Am hunched down like a horse trying to slide to a stop from a full gallop. The tires screamed. I was still closing in on the hatchback with no hope of not hitting it. I swung into the emergency lane. The Trans Am began sliding sideways, and I couldn't straighten it.

The rear right bumper clipped a guard rail. The car spun full-circle. I couldn't hold onto the steering wheel. The front bumper slammed into the guard rail, plowed it down, and the Trans Am went airborne, riding the guard rail at high-speed, it's underbelly ripping open. The roar and shriek of metal filled my ears. So did my screams.

The Trans Am shot off the road near a strawberry field. I didn't see the field's hogwire fence before I plowed through it. I didn't see the shallow irrigation ditch, either. The Trans Am hit it at an angle, tilted, and rolled completely over.

My head slammed into the steering wheel. Thank god for the wheel's padded leather cover. And thank god I was wearing a seatbelt. The car flopped to a halt in the ditch, upright but tilted, with the passenger-side wheels resting on the slope.

Quiet. Everything suddenly went so quiet, and so still. My head throbbed, but otherwise, I was unhurt. Dazed, I managed a few deep, shaky breaths. I heard people yelling, but for some reason, none of them came over to help me. I fumbled for the door handle. It wouldn't work. I shoved. There was no give. The door was jammed. My head began to clear, and I felt a little panicky. What was that scent?

Smoke. That's smoke. And gasoline. Get out of this car. Climb out the T-top.

I scrambled to my knees on the bucket seat. My boot heels snagged on the floor-shift on the center console behind me. I grabbed the window sill with both hands. The metal was warm. Acrid smoke flooded my nose and throat. A coughing fit doubled me over.

"Beautiful," Mason called. "Beautiful, Cathyrn. Work it, Cathyrn."

Mason stood a few feet away, videotaping me.

"I need help. Help me, you cretin!"

"Come on, Cathyrn, you can help yourself. You can make it! You're a star, baby! And star's are always resourceful!" He crept closer, the camera never wavering. I shoved myself headfirst out the window and tumbled to the ground. "See there?" he called, laughing.

I staggered to my feet, but my left boot heel sank into the soft earth, and I tripped. I landed hard on my right side. Hair, face, right arm, right hip, right leg. Into the wet muck.

What was this slick fluid on my hands? This smell? Oh, my God. Gasoline. The ground was soaked with it. And now, on my right side, so was I.

"Hurry, Cathyrn!" Mason called. "I think your catalytic converter's about to catch the weeds on fire! Raise your head so I can get a good frontal! Work it, baby!"

I scrambled out of the ditch on all fours. At that point, my deepest desire was to reach Mason, wrap my hands around his throat and strangle him.

Behind me I heard a soft, sinister whoosh.

A fireball went up my right side.

Some victims of violent accidents say time seems to slow down. They say they felt disconnected, almost like a spectator. Not me. Imagine sticking your upper body into a hot oven. Imagine plunging your hands into the glowing coals of your backyard grill.

Imagine. That's how it felt.

You're incredible, Cathyrn!" Mason yelled. I would never forget the thrill in his voice.

I wasn't incredible. I was burning alive.

Roll. Get down on the ground and roll. I threw myself face down by the Trans Am, flailing, screaming, rolling. The heat retreated, the flames vanished. I went limp, gasping, peeing on myself, vomiting bile.

Four or five seconds. I was on fire for no more than four, maybe five, seconds, witnesses said later.

Shock began taking hold. Now, yes, I felt weirdly calm, pleasantly detached. It'll take a week of spa treatments to get this smell off me, I thought.

I heard sirens, I heard people still shouting. Some of them were even crying. One of them moaned, "Ohmygod, Ohmygod, look at her. I want to puke." Which struck me as incredibly rude.

I managed to lift my head. Mason crouched less than an arm's length from my face, breathing hard, excited. I could see him through the smoke, I could hear him gulping for air, like a man about to come. Was he giving off that nauseating scent? It smelled like burned hair, and . . . burned . . . meat. He aimed the wide, black eye of his lens directly at my face. I looked into the glassy black mirror of that eye, the world's eye, and saw a grotesque, charred, sickening reflection.

And then I realized it was me.

Thomas

That night, some gnawing anxiety drew me beyond the starlit outline of the high evergreen forests on the ridges, filled me with even more loneliness. At night, the cove and the mountains around the Crossroads turn deep-green, almost black. You can feel the potential for evil in the darkness then, the surveillance of arrogant trees, the deadly lure of the cliffs, the subversive hollows, the drowning charm of the whitewater creeks, the hunger of wild animals slipping through the shadows, just waiting for you to become their next meal.

Steadied by several deep swallows of vodka, I stood by the Trace, touched only by the faintly lit café sign there, watching the universe sprinkle its streetlights across the sky above Ten Sisters.

Bring it on, I told the evil. I know you're out there.

All those far-away worlds, unknown. But here, in the light of the Crossroads, the world was safe and familiar, an old world, an illusion like all safe places, but still. That night I felt like a hollow column asked to hold up the weight of the sky without a partner. I needed someone. And someone needed me. Who?

Come here, where it's safe, in the light. We'll fight the evil together.

I couldn't understand why those words went through my mind.

A brilliant, brief sparkle caught my eye.

Drawn down to earth, a star flashed, cooled and vanished over the western horizon.

Chapter 2

Thomas
Wild Woman Ridge

I'd been trying to buy the Nettie place for four years, since my first day in the cove. I'd arrived at the Crossroads one rainy summer morning around dawn on a big Harley I bought when I left Manhattan. Just driving, looking for the next place to spend a couple of days getting drunk. The North Carolina mountains swayed their hips and I followed that dance into their womb, seduced. I'd never thought I see valleys and vistas more intimate and breath-taking than the Adirondacks of upstate New York. My old man had been a master carpenter there, and I had good memories.

When my brother, John, and I were kids the old man took us along on jobs at the Adirondacks' grand old resorts and turn-of–the-century "camps," those rustic log mansions created by gilded-age barons like the Vanderbilts. The old man was a tough S.O.B., not given to much sentiment, but he loved the memory of our mother, who died too young for me or John to remember, he loved us, he loved his craft and he loved the Adirondacks. He taught us to fight against bullies, modern whimsies and anyone who tore down the old for the sake of a dollar; he taught us to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and peckers, and he taught us to create whole worlds with a hammer, a saw and our bare hands. He only had an eighth-grade education, so he couldn't put his appreciation for fine architecture into words, but it showed in his reverence for the old places, his attention to every detail. When I rolled into the valley of the Crossroads, I thought of him, and felt less alone.

The old dirt road that crosses the Trace near the café led me off the pavement and into the woods that morning. I was just looking for an isolated place to throw down a sleeping bag and up-end a bottle. I didn't know it then, but I was following ghosts along a path so old the earliest French explorers had written about it in the 1700's. Before that, the Cherokees had carved its trail markers on rocky outcroppings. The hieroglyphs that still remained – on boulders too big to steal -- mesmerized me, and before I knew it I was deep in a fairytale hollow, riding alongside a fern-draped stream called Ruby Creek.

Lost.

I parked the bike and hiked up a ridge to get my bearings. When I reached the top I was surprised to find an abandoned pasture. Head-high pine saplings dueled with the tall grasses. Dew gleamed on sagging chestnut fence posts, worn gray by the weather. The pasture vanished around a curve in the forest like a green river going around a bend; I couldn't resist following it.

I walked for a long time before I crested a rise and halted. There, looking back at me at the far end of an alley lined with huge oaks and poplars, shimmering in the opalescent light of the sunrise, among old gray barns and fallen sheds and the faintest hint of flower beds in a forgotten front yard, gleaming pink and gold in the magic light, was a classic Craftsman cottage.

You've seen these bungalows in movies, you've seen versions of them in every neighborhood in America; they're the strong, small, proud children of efficiency and grace. Some are elaborate and some are not; this one, hidden in the middle of a high-mountain farm, was the crown jewel of its kind.

I ran to it like a reunited lover through the weedy grass and the small pines. I bounded up wide stone steps and stood, awed, in the curving arch of the deep stone porch. I circled the house a dozen times, admiring the heavy, exposed rafters and their braces, that vaguely Asian touch that makes one think of a friendly pagoda. I caressed the thick stone chimney and foundation and pulled down a long tangle of vines that had climbed all the way to the roof and threatened to cover the wide, gabled dormer above the porch.

Shameless, I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked through the windows at the maple floors and wormy chestnut wall boards, the built-in cherry cabinets and columned doorways. I chanted, "Look at that. My God, look at that," as if all the ghosts had followed me off the trail for a house tour. Finally, dazed with appreciation, I stood back and gazed at the windows themselves. Stained glass bordered each one with intricate, geometric patterns. Sunlight glinted off coarse, pea-sized rubies and sapphires tucked in the soldered intersections. This incredible house wore a necklace of hand-made windows decorated with local gemstones.

It badly needed repairs. A fallen oak limb had gouged a hole in the roof. Several windows were cracked. Termites had ruined several rafters.

The house needed me.

The Nettie place, it was called. The Nettie place up on Wild Woman Ridge. Mary Eve Nettie had inherited it from her parents, who'd torn down the original pioneer-era log house in 1932 and built themselves a brand-spanking new Sears kit home to celebrate their acquired wealth as bootleggers of the best homemade rum and bourbon in western North Carolina. The Nettie's picked the kit out of a catalog and sent Sears a check for five-thousand dollars, becoming folk heroes to the entire mountain region and pissing off the Internal Revenue agents who couldn't prove the Nettie's hadn't earned the fortune panning rubies.

Sears shipped the entire three-bedroom bungalow by train from its Chicago lumber yards. Everything – including maple floorboards, mantels, cabinets, windows, doors, trimwork, and even the cedar shingles -- arrived at the Asheville depot in crates and stacks. Franklin Nettie, Mary Eve's father, carted the materials on a flatbed lumber truck to the cove, where everything was transferred onto mule wagons for the rough trail up to the farm on the ridge.

The finished house had been and still was a showplace of fine craftsmanship and detail. Mary Eve later embellished it in small, perfect ways, including the stained-glass windows. She'd made them herself, panned the stones from the creek, soldered the panes. They were one-of-a-kind creations, just as the bungalow was one of the few unsullied examples of a Sears craftsman-style kit home. A house like that, sitting empty. Uninhabited, ignored, left to rot. Sacrilege.

I was furious. Clearly, Barnard Deen, the owner, a wealthy lawyer down in Atlanta, simply didn't give a damn about his mother-in-law's mountain farm. I made a purchase offer. Deen rejected it. He wouldn't even talk with me. I got letters from some low-level assistant. When I offered to lease the house and repair it I got a very formal letter telling me no, and not to trespass. When Barnard Deen died and his daughter, Cathyrn, inherited the Nettie farm, I tracked down her business manager in California and made an offer, again. Whether my offer ever reached Cathyrn or not I don't know. I got a letter from one of her attorneys, who told me no, the farm is not for sale, and don't trespass.

"Tell Ms. Deen," I replied, "that her grandmother's house is a historic site and shouldn't be allowed to decay."

To which the lawyer said, that's none of your business. Do not trespass.

So, naturally, I had been trespassing and doing repairs, ever since. I'd spent many a night sleeping on the front porch among my hand tools and supplies. I'd watched thunderstorms roll grandly over Hogback, watched snow fall on the oaks, watched the forest turn red and gold in autumn.

Delta knew the Nettie house and I were having an illicit affair, but she told no one. In the Crossroads, man-cottage love is tolerated.

In the meantime, I moved in next door on thirty acres I bought from Joe Whittlespoon, Delta's brother-in-law. The Nettie place occupied one end of Wild Woman Ridge; the newly christened Mitternich place occupied the other end. I built a cabin, and when I wasn't drunk, I planted a vineyard. I wasn't a farmer or a winemaker, but I had a strong need to make new life take root on that ridge, including my own.

Delta's husband, Pike Whittlespoon, was the county sheriff. Gruff and manipulative, he wasn't a lovable Andy of Mayberry, no, but a pragmatic officer of the peace who could track a lost kid across the roughest mountainside or break up a meth lab with his bare fists. He and Delta had been married since they were sixteen, nearly thirty-five years, and he quietly worshipped the ground she walked on. He was a friend to their son, Jeb, a fiercely protective grandpa to Jeb and Becka's kids, and a stoic ally to his controversial older bro, Joe. At six-five and two-eighty Pike outweighed me but couldn't look over my head without craning his. You could say we saw eye to eye on the justice system. He'd never clobbered me when I was drunk, and I'd never given him a reason to.

Tommy-Son," he told me not long after my arrival in the community, christening me with both a paterfamilial relationship and an inferior rank, "if you ever get into that piece-of-shit ‘vintage' truck of yours when you're drunk, and you attempt to drive that piece-of-shit ‘vintage' truck of yours on my roads, I'll make sure you spend the next twelve months in zebra stripes, shoveling piles of Hereford shit at the county's ‘vintage' prison farm."

Which is why I spent a lot of time sleeping off hangovers under the café's oak trees.

I was outdoors at my cabin not long after sunrise that Sunday morning, sweating away my bleak Saturday-night mood and a full bottle of vodka. The twin handles of a post-hole digger felt righteous against the calluses of my hands. Blood, sweat, tears. Mother Nature's fertilizer. Blister by blister I built my vineyard, a homage to the stained-glass windows of Frank Lloyd Wright.

I had just finished setting the last trellis post in the top-right geometric branch of the middle abstract tree in Wright's "Tree of Life" pattern. The original could be seen inside a turn-of-the-century home in Buffalo, New York. My version was six-hundred feet long, four-hundred feet wide, and could be seen by small planes and hang gliders. When I was done building trellises and planting grapevines, the Nazca lines of Peru would pale by comparison.

Someone's died, I thought when I saw Pike's blue-and-gray patrol car roar out of the woods with the lights flashing. A fist closed around my chest, and for a moment I smelled terror and saw falling bodies on a Manhattan street. Doctors call this hyper-alert reaction ‘post traumatic stress syndrome.' I call it ‘smart.'

Pike slid to a stop within spitting distance of my sweat-dappled work boots. I set the post-hole diggers aside and straightened my surveyor's tripod, giving myself a few seconds to breathe. "Don't cut me any slack, Pike. Just say it. What's happened to my brother? Or his wife or kids --"

"Relax. Your brother and his family are fine. Tommy-Son, why the hell don't you get a spare cell phone?"

"Let me guess. Cathyrn Deen's business manager finally sent a personal reply to one of Delta's letters, and Delta's so shocked she wants everyone in the Crossroads to see it?"

The joke failed to register. There was something about the look on Pike's beefy, barn-board face that made me uneasy again. This was how John Wayne looked before he broke grisly news to the troops in Sands of Iwo Jima. If the Duke had to swallow his spit before he gave a hardened dog face some news, it was bad. "She was in a car accident yesterday," Pike said. "Nearly burned to death."

The blood drained to my feet as he told me the gory details. CNN was reporting Cathryn would live, but she'd be badly scarred. "A shame," Pike finished. "What a looker. She favors Delta around the eyes."

Self-preservation kicked in. Cynicism makes a good antidote for caring too much. "Why does Delta think I can do anything for her?"

"You know how to pull strings in the great wide world. Get a phone call through to Cathyrn's hospital room." Delta and Pike thought I could make miracles happen because I'd crawled out on a cliff once, up on Devil's Knob, and talked Jeb out of jumping. But when you're full of vodka and don't care about your own safety, it's easy to be a hero. I shook my head. "Pike, I'm sorry. But--"

"Look, you and me know Cathyrn Deen's fancy husband isn't gonna talk to Delta or let Delta talk to Cathyrn's doctors. But will you at least hear Delta out? She hates feelin' helpless. Hell, let's be honest. She hates not being able to meddle in her kinfolk's troubles. Even if the kinfolk live on the other side of the country and haven't visited her in twenty years."

Across the deep-blue mountain sky, a hawk, hunting, sang its fierce and forlorn call as it glided like an angel on the high currents. No past, no future, just living in that glorious moment, suspended on thin air. Hawks were cynical, they knew the cosmic score. Cathyrn Deen's husband didn't care about her Crossroads heritage or her grandmother's old farm, and Cathryn herself might be a lousy human being who'd laugh at the idea of an obscure relative coming to her aid.

However, unlike a hawk, I had nightmares filled with regrets when I slept. Lots of karmic misery to pay back.

The hawk caught a perfect gust of air and floated, motionless, on the invisible palm of redemption.

Delta was not a crier. A woman who worked her butt off running a restaurant so successful Southern Living called it "a well-known jewel in the middle of the wilderness," who ruled over a rambunctious mountain family and a bearded drunk who slept with a goat under her oak, no, a woman like that wasn't going to break down and cry because her cousin's husband's cousin's world-famous daughter lay in a Los Angeles hospital, maimed for life. "Life doesn't settle for ‘simmer' just because you want to turn down the heat," Delta liked to say. That didn't make much sense, but it sounded profound.

"I intend to talk to Cathyrn's doctors in California," she declared. "That's all there is to it. And you're gonna help me do it, Thomas."

Delta, Pike, and the entire immediate Whittlespoon family stared at me in the crowded confines of the café's kitchen. A food-scented breeze curled around us. As usual, the wooden doors stood open and only the inner screened doors kept numerous cats, dogs, goats and squirrels from entering. A floor fan whirred even in the chill of the spring morning. Mouth-watering aromas wafted from a steam table filled with food. Cars and trucks crowded the parking lot. There were people who drove all the way from Asheville on weekend mornings, just for breakfast.

But they weren't being served, because Delta and all of her gang were all standing in the kitchen, giving me the pressure-wash of group power. In southern terms, I was being eyeballed.

"Contrary to popular belief," I said quietly, "Not everyone from New York has mafia connections or friends in show business. Delta, I can't do any more to get you in touch with Cathyrn Deen than you can do for yourself."

She shook her apron at me. "You're my only hope! When I called the hospital in Los Angeles they wouldn't even tell me how she's doing! And when I said ‘I'm family,' they told me I'm not on their list. I said, ‘Well, let me talk to Cathyrn's husband and I'll get on your list,' and they said, ‘You'll have to go through his publicist.' What kind of husband needs a publicist to handle calls from his wife's family?"

Pike sighed and draped a long arm around her short shoulders. "Baby, Cathyrn's daddy cut you and the rest of her mountain kin out of the picture twenty years ago, and since then all you've talked to are publicity people and lawyers and business managers every time you've tried to reach her. Now her husband's put up the same wall around her. This is nothing new. You can't help the girl, Baby. You just can't. She probably doesn't need or even want your help."

"But I don't know that." Delta flung a hand toward the small television attached to the kitchen's aging, beadboard wall between wire shelves stacked with pots and pans. CNN was showing a gruesome picture of Cathyrn's burned Trans Am. "She's all they're talking about on the morning news shows! A member of my family is laying in a hospital bed on the other side of the country, in terrible misery, and she needs to know she's got kin who care!"

"If it makes you feel any better," I said gently, "I doubt she's aware of anything. Doctors sedate burn victims for the first few days after they're injured. Nobody who's been burned the way she has is conscious, at this point."

"But she'll wake up eventually, and when she does, she'll need her family. Her daddy's gone, her mama's gone, all those prissy old Atlanta aunts on her Deen side are dead or senile. I'm the last root left in her family tree! Thomas, you used to be an important architect in New York, and you were married to a wife who . . . well, you had big connections. You can find some way to get me through to Cathyrn."

"I guarantee you there's an unbreakable wall of security measures around Cathyrn. Celebrities such as her are never without protection."

"If that was true, then Cathyrn wouldn't have been alone yesterday on the side of a highway yesterday burning up while a photographer took pictures of her!"

"No one will get that close to her, again. No one. I can't help you, Delta. I wish I could."

Cleo, Delta's sister-in-law, scowled at me like a brown-haired pit bull watching a rabbit. "Don't be a quitter. Jesus believes in you, even if you don't believe in yourself."

I nodded my goodbyes, turned, and walked out. I was halfway across the back yard to my truck when Delta caught up to me. Small but stubborn, she blocked my way. "You can't hide from the world for the rest of your life!"

I looked down at her grimly. "I'm not hiding. I'm just dodging. I don't want responsibility for anyone's life but my own."

"Liar! If it weren't for you, my son'd be dead! You risked your own hide to save Jeb a few years ago, when you were still just a newcomer around here. You barely knew him! You care about people so much because you torture yourself over what happened to your wife and son! I know about those pictures you keep in your truck! I've watched you look at ‘em when you don't realize anybody sees you!"

I stiffened. "I should train Banger to ‘bah' when he hears you sneaking up on me."

"You make yourself relive their misery over and over, as if, if you just mourn hard enough, somehow you'll travel back through time and change what happened to them. But you can't. You can't, Thomas. None of us can turn back time. What we can do is learn from our regrets and change the future." She grabbed my hands. "You know how it feels to be caught up in something so terrible it's like being down in a dark pit, not able to see even one speck of light at the top. That's where Cathyrn is, right now, down in a pit. Be her light, Thomas. Be her light."

I stood there, my head bowed, my shoulders hunched. The slow, steady strain on my legs became an excruciating amputation. My ankles pulled free from my feet. Bones snapped, cartilage tore, veins pulsed blood onto the soft brown clay of the yard.

Daddy and his sisters began entering me in beauty contests when I was old enough to toddle. As upperclass southerners they generally looked down their noses at beauty competitions, which they considered lowbrow and tacky, but, given my spectacular allure, they couldn't resist showing me off. "We're just honoring an old southern tradition of exhibiting our prize livestock," one of my aunts told her friends. "You just watch. Cathyrn will take more blue ribbons than a pretty sow at the state fair."

By the time I was six I was a veteran with a room full of trophies and tiaras. By the time I was eighteen I was crowned Miss Georgia. I would have competed for Miss America, but I got my first movie role and handed the Miss Georgia crown to the runner-up, instead.

You don't spend your childhood on stage, duking it out with other ambitious little girls and their vicious stage parents, without learning to soldier on, no matter what. Once, when my music and costume had been sabotaged, I sang the entire theme song from Annie without accompaniment, wearing a plain black leotard and a skirt made from my aunt's pink cashmere scarf. I won the talent competition, and I won that pageant. I was four years old.

Strong southern belle, steel magnolia, that was me. Weaned on the gilded wings of baby-boomer-new-south money and old-south charm, coddled, blessed, praised, protected, then launched into the world of movies as a full-fledged glamour girl and sex symbol. Until now. At the hospital the morning after the accident, just before my doctors induced a blissful coma, I heard two interns talking about me as if I'd died.

I can't believe this was Cathyrn Deen. Cathyrn Deen. Do you know how many times I've jerked off to pictures of her?