Chapter 10 - The Smoke on the Ridge
The spring thaw did not come gently to Laurel Creek; it tore through the hollows like a freight train with its brakes blown. By late April, the brown water of the creek was lapping against the bottom rung of the footbridge behind the church, carrying chunks of rotting hemlock and rusted oil drums down toward the valley.
Enzo Falcone stood in the doorway of the bakery, watching a wedge of Canada geese fight their way north against a grey, scudding sky. His hands were dusted with unbleached flour up to the forearms, the skin toughened and reddened by twenty days of hauling sacks of grain from the back flatbed. The rubber boots from the root cellar fit him now, molded to the shape of his calves after three weeks of slogging through the mountain mud.
The bell above the door jangled. It wasn't a customer.
A stranger stood on the threshold—a man in his late fifties with a face like tanned saddle leather and a linen coat that had seen better days in a Richmond courtroom. He didn't look like Vincent Rossi. He didn't carry a brass-cornered leather case or smell of imported tobacco. He smelled of rain and cold pipe smoke.
"You the fellow running the oven for Thomas Pike?" the man asked. His voice had the flat, dry cadence of a circuit judge who had spent forty years listening to chicken-thief lies.
"I’m Enzo," he said, not moving from the doorframe. "Thomas is upstairs sleeping off a coughing spell."
The man stepped inside, his boots leaving dark, wet prints on the fresh sawdust Clara had laid down that morning. He pulled a yellowed, oil-stained notebook from his breast pocket and laid it flat on the zinc counter. The cover was held together with yellowed masking tape.
"Name's Halloway," the man said. "I’m the county surveyor down in Marlinton. Or I was, before the state retired me with a gold watch and a pension that doesn't buy a gallon of milk." He tapped the notebook with a blunt, ink-stained finger. "Your uncle Marco was a very thorough man, Mr. Falcone. But he wasn't the first Falcone to walk these ridges."
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Enzo didn't look down at the book. "My father burned the second mill down in sixty-four."
"Your father didn't burn anything," Halloway corrected quietly. "Your father tried to stop it. That's why he had to leave the mountains before you were old enough to shave. The ledger your uncle kept wasn't about lumber rights. It was about who owned the water."
