C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

for my father-in-law, Gary Lee

(why, yes, Joanne’s Gary is named after him, in fact)

Friday, March 24, 4:15 p.m.

I came home to North Carolina just shy of a decade after promising I’d never go back.

Home was a funny word. I’d lived in Qualla Boundary during high school. That was longer than I’d lived anywhere else up until then, but in the intervening decade I’d lived exclusively in Seattle. But North Carolina still twigged as home, maybe because it was where my father had been born.

It was where he’d gone missing from, too, and that was why I was back.

Driving up from Atlanta was a slow immersion into memories. I had the windows of my rented Impala rolled down, and the rich rotting scent of winter collapsing into spring made a hungry place at the hollow of my throat. Of course, everything made me hungry right now—I hadn’t yet recovered from a week’s worth of exhaustive shape-shifting fueled by my body’s resources instead of food. But that slightly sweet smell of death begetting life had always made me hungry, and I’d forgotten that until now.

The low hills with a haze of new leaves lining the roads; the roads themselves narrowing as I pulled away from interstates; the way strangers stopped along the roadside would nod a greeting as I passed by: those things I remembered more clearly. Then again, I’d spent an awful lot of my formative years in cars, crisscrossing the country with my father. Things I could see from a vehicle were most likely to stay with me, maybe.

Like the sign welcoming the world to the Qualla. It was smaller than I remembered it. I was taller than I’d been fourteen years ago when Dad had driven us past that sign for the first time, but mostly its size was relative to its importance in my life. Back then those carved white words on a brown road sign had been the most important thing in my life. Welcome: Cherokee Indian Reservation. At thirteen, going on fourtee">

It had been, too. Just not the way I’d expected it to be.

I slowed the car as I drove into the town of Cherokee. It was equal parts bigger and better than I remembered it, and exactly the same. The main street was four lanes rolling through town, no sidewalks to mention, just road, then parking spaces, then tourist shops flush up against them. A lot of low brown buildings with statues of headdressed Indian chiefs or protective gleaming black bears in front of them, and—new to me—signs making sure everybody knew which way to drive to the casino. It had opened the year before I left the Qualla, and the bigger-better aspects of Cherokee probably had it to thank. There’d been tourism money half the year before that, and unemployment the other half. That was the Cherokee I remembered, but I was just as glad it had moved on.

I got out of my car in front of the sheriff’s station. Wind came down off the blue mountains and caught the skirt of my white leather coat with cinematic flair. For half a second I wished I was as cool as the woman reflected in the car window looked. Somebody that cool, though, probably wouldn’t have a stomach full of butterflies, and her hands wouldn’t shake as she took off her sunglasses. I’d burned bridges, mentally if not actually, when I’d left the Qualla. Coming back scared the crap out of me.

A man about my own age stepped through the station’s open front door, leaned in the frame and said, “I’ll be damned. Joanne Walkingstick’s come home.”

All the butterflies got squished as my stomach clenched. I’d Anglicized my last name the minute I left Cherokee, calling myself Walker. Excepting a handful of magic users, nobody had called me Joanne Walkingstick in ten years. I’d somehow forgotten that’s who I would be, back here.

“You haven’t changed,” the guy said, which was wildly untrue, although in physical terms he was right. I was still six feet tall with short-cropped black hair, and ten years wasn’t enough for most people to lose the youth they’d had graduating high school. I looked like me, albeit better-dressed.

The fellow in the door looked like himself, too, though it took me a good twenty seconds before I said, “Lester,” and even that I said slowly. It took another moment to finish with “You cut your hair. And you’re a cop? ”

“Who better than the local troublemaker? Figure I at least have a clue what the kids are on about. I hear you’re a brother in blue, too.” Lester Lee pushed out of the door and stepped forward to offer his hand. I shook it automatically, still trying to get past the silver badge on his chest and the tidy police haircut. Last time I’d seen Les, he’d had hair to his ass and had been smoking pot during our graduation ceremony. Other than that, he did look like himself: pleasant dark eyes, wide cheekbones, reasonably fit and about four inches shorter than I.

“I was,” I said a bit absently. “I just quit. I’ve had othe— Who told you that?”

“Sara.”

“She’s here.” Of course she was here. Sara Buchanan, now Sara Isaac, was the one who’d called to tell me my father was missing. We’d been best friends about half a lifetime ago, right up until I blew it by sleeping with the boy she liked. In my defense, she’d said she didn’t like him, and my social skills hadn’t been well enough developed to recognize the lie. Either way, the friendship had ended. But we’d reconnected, if that was the hihat wasright word for an encounter over half-eaten dead men, about four months earlier. When that case was over, I’d never expected to hear from her again.

“Lucas came with her,” Les said, watching me.

My stomach went to knots again, though I wasn’t surprised. Lucas Isaac had been the boy, back then. He’d gone home to Vancouver before my pregnancy became obvious, but he and Sara had kept in touch and eventually got married. I’d always refused to answer questions about who the father of my twins was, and had thought nobody knew. Judging from Les’s expression, if everybody hadn’t known then, they did now. That was awkward, so I ignored it.

“I’m more worried about my dad. Les, what’s going on? Sara called and said he was missing, but she wouldn’t say anything else.” That wasn’t exactly true. She’d said it was “my kind of thing,” which I took to mean it appeared to be something paranormal in nature.

“She wouldn’t—” Les broke off with a cough, then jerked his chin toward the station. “Come in and sit down a minute, Joanie. We—”

“Joanne. Or Jo, please. I don’t use Joanie much anymore.” Actually it had only just struck me in the past few days that I’d left the little-girl nickname behind, but Les didn’t have to know that.

He lifted an eyebrow. “You hated being called Jo.” With that observation he went inside, leaving me to look at the dark square of doorway with a blush mounting my cheeks.

We hadn’t been particular friends, Lester Lee and me. I hadn’t been particular friends with much of anybody, truth be told, because I’d had a chip the size of Idaho on my shoulder. I had my Irish mother’s pale skin, which made me unnecessarily self-conscious about coming to the Qualla, and the only long-term companion I’d ever had was my father. Coming into a high school of kids who’d known each other since birth made me horribly uncomfortable, and I’d mostly been a complete jerk through my adolescent years. I could not for the life of me imagine why Les knew I didn’t like being called Jo, when I couldn’t even remember talking to him more than five times in the years I’d been here. But he knew it, and I was once more smacked in the face with the realization that if I’d been less of a jackass, I’d probably have had a lot more fun in school. I sighed and followed Les inside the cop shop.