Page 44 of Grounded (May Hollow Trilogy #1)

Annie finished cleaning the sink, locked the doors downstairs and went up to her bedroom. She rubbed the back of her neck, trying to work out the knotted muscles. Jake wanted to be her boyfriend in high school. Is that what he was telling her?

She sat looking at herself in the mirror of her dressing table, her face washed and her hair pulled back in a headband. Jake had said, “When you chose Brett Bradshaw.”

Her eyes fell on the silver cross lying in her jewelry box. She reached for it and the cross felt cold in her hands, the silver chain soft and delicate. Annie held it up and let it shimmer in the reflection of her ceiling light.

Jake gave it to her the night of her sixteenth birthday.

Her grandmother had made a cake with butter cream icing and pink writing that she squirted out of an aerosol can.

It was a family dinner that included Evelyn, Charlie and Jake.

Her grandfather gave her a hundred dollar bill, with his chuckle.

Her grandmother had looked at her sternly and advised that she use it for clothes and not music.

Her grandfather had said, “Now, Beulah, it’s her birthday—and she can spend it however she wants.

” His eyes twinkled. Annie hugged him, feeling his whiskers scrape the side of her face and smelling the tobacco from his pipe.

Later, she and Jake had walked to the crossover. It was nearly dark, the April days not as long as the days of summer. When she opened the package from Chaney’s Jewelry store, she held her hair up and let Jake clasp the chain around her neck.

“It’s beautiful. I love it.” Annie reached over and hugged Jake as tightly as she could. “Jake, will we always be best friends, even when we’re older?”

“More than best friends,” he said, smiling at first and then getting a serious look on his face. “Do you want to go to the homecoming dance with me?”

“Sure. Who else would I go with?”

But two weeks later, Brett Bradshaw started hanging around her locker between classes.

He was on the football team, and she had thought he was cute since the summer before when she saw him at the pool.

Never would he have looked her way, she thought, but making the cheerleading squad had changed everything.

It was as if a whole new world was opened up to her with the cool kids.

She was invited to their parties and included in their circles before school, at lunch and after school.

When Brett asked her to homecoming, she had to calm her voice before saying yes so she didn’t squeak it out like a rusty hinge. She was still smiling when Jake came by a few minutes later. Jake wouldn’t mind, she told herself. He didn’t even like dances; he’d told her that.

But he had seemed to mind. When she told Jake about Brett, he seemed disappointed in her. She thought it was because he didn’t like Brett very well and he was being protective. Now she knew it was more, and in truth, she had known it even then.

Annie lay in bed, unable to sleep. Like letters unread for years, she kept turning memories over in her mind, each one a new revelation in light of what Jake had said.

Their friendship had changed after she started dating Brett. Never before had she realized when the rift started. She’d never really thought about it.

Jake started hanging around the baseball players and a girl named Emily. He became a standout on the baseball team and earned a scholarship to college. In his free time, he worked on the farm with his dad.

Annie hung around a different group in high school where her social life was filled with late-night field parties after the football games.

Bourbon mixed with Coke and hooch flowed freely, and everybody felt young and invincible.

Her grandmother only let her spend the night with a couple of girls, screening the parents as one can only do in a small town where everybody knows everybody’s relatives and they knew who watched their kids or not.

But they had their tricks and learned how to sneak out of the house without a soul knowing it. For some like Annie, there was a tree near an upstairs window, a creaky window pushed up earlier in the day, a car waiting on the country road.

Jake and Annie saw each other on breaks during college, caught up on what they were doing and news of mutual friends, but that had been the extent of it.

Jake had always been an important connection to her past, but never did she think he could be part of her future.

Their lives had long ago taken different roads.

“Who called this morning?” Annie set the risen dough in a bowl in front of Beulah. The phone had rung early while she was still in bed.

“Joe saw that woman out by the creek again. He said she was sitting there staring into the water as if she were half-asleep. He watched her for nigh about half an hour before he had to go check the cows,” Beulah said, turning out the dough on the biscuit board.

“I’m calling Jeb again. How hard can it be to run plates? It should take seconds.”

The call went immediately to voice mail. Annie left a message and then decided to call the sheriff. The sheriff was on vacation and his deputy was reticent to get involved since the state police were already on it.

“They’re not exactly on it,” Annie explained. “Jeb is a friend who agreed to help us, but he’s too busy with another case. We just need somebody to run plates.”

“I’m sorry,” the deputy said. “We’ll have to talk to Jeb first. We’ll contact you as soon as we talk to him.”

Annie hung up the phone. “Good grief,” she said aloud. All roads ended with Jeb Harris and he was down in some hollow in Eastern Kentucky.

Annie took baskets out to the garden and worked row by row picking beans, and even zucchini and squash. The garden was coming in earlier this year, her grandmother had said, partly because she had planted earlier and partly because there had been good hot days and plenty of rain.

Beulah was seated at the kitchen table when she came in, ready to start breaking beans, her coffee cup full beside her.

“That’s a nice mess,” she said. “At least two cannings.”

Annie was amazed at how her grandmother could judge by looking at the pile of raw vegetables.

Sure enough, a few hours later, fourteen quarts of beans sat on the counter, the heat emanating from the jars.

As they cooled, the lids would start popping, which was music to Annie’s ears.

It meant the canning took, but would need another several hours of cooling before she moved them to the cellar.

The phone rang as Annie was drying the canner. She handed the phone to her grandmother before going back to the sink.

Annie took the empty baskets to the back room so they would be handy for the next harvesting.

It would be awhile longer on the next round of green beans, but peppers, onions, squash and zucchini would keep her busy.

Sweet corn and tomatoes would be ready for picking soon.

And now, Annie could be here to see it all come in if she would only make that phone call to Bob Vichy.

But somehow, her courage faded when she picked up the phone.

There was no way to go back once she placed that call.

She had made so many mistakes in her life. She was afraid of making another.

That night, Annie tossed and turned, twisting the bedcovers into knots.

By midnight, she gave up fighting the covers and went downstairs for a cup of hot tea.

She put on a kettle of water and set a pot of chamomile to steep.

She sat with her robe pulled tightly around her, waiting on the tea and anxious for the steaming comfort of the warm brew.

Jake was never far from her thoughts. The few weeks of recaptured friendship had been such an unexpected gift. How could she have known this friend from her childhood could turn into this kind of man …? But she was in a long line of women and men who had learned that lesson the hard way.

It wasn’t meant to be. She had to hope he would forgive her immature actions with Camille, hope they could have some sort of relationship as neighbors, if not friends.

She would tell him how wrong she was and that she would do everything in her power to make Camille welcome.

God would give her the strength to do it and to even grow to love Camille.

Who knew, they might be as close as her grandmother and Evelyn someday. Weren’t all things possible?

Finally Annie felt she might be able to sleep. She washed out her cup and emptied the tea kettle. She was about to turn off the kitchen light when the shrill sound of the wall phone cut through the night’s stillness.

“Hello?”

“Annie? It’s Betty Gibson. The old stone house is on fire! Joe was out with Jake pulling a calf on Evelyn’s farm when they saw flames in the second-floor window. He called the fire department and they’re on their way over there right now.”

“Oh no!” Annie said. “I’ll wake Grandma.”