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The Miracle Tree

By Davalynn Spencer

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CHAPTER ONE
Laura Bell took a fast left onto faded asphalt. The county road stretched long and lean into the foothills, threading a tight S-curve at the top of a small rise. Her steel-blue Z4 convertible hugged the road the same way her black pencil skirt hugged her.
Across from a tight row of mailboxes, she hooked a sharp right onto a private lane, slid to a stop, and waited for the dust to settle. That’s when she saw him—reined in near a scrub oak about twenty feet from the boxes.
Wonderful. A Monday morning audience.
Defensive about her stirring arrival, she set the emergency brake, opened the door, and swiveled her legs around. Planting her stilettos firmly, she stood and tugged her skirt down.
The cowboy’s forearms crossed on his saddle horn, reins hanging loosely from his fingers. With his head tipped slightly forward, a wide-brimmed hat hid his eyes but not the edge of a black eye patch or his scruffy jaw.
His shoulders bounced once as if he’d laughed and held it inside.
She pushed her sunglasses tight against her face and raised her chin. He may not know it yet, but he did not want to laugh at her.
She spiked her way through the weeds toward a realtor’s “For Sale” sign, ignoring him. With one perfectly manicured hand around each side, she yanked.
It wouldn’t give.
She pushed against it with her hip and tried again. Didn’t move.
Frustrated, and feeling as graceful as an elephant on ice, she bent the sign back and forth to loosen the stakes and pulled. Nada.
A leathery squeak, and she glanced at the cowboy stepping from his saddle. Long strides brought him to the sign, and with a hand firmly gripped around each stake, he tugged.
Nothing.
She folded her arms across her pink silk blouse and angled one pointy-toed heel in front of the other, privately pleased that the Lone Ranger couldn’t get the sign out either.
He continued to pull. No lunging or pushing, just a steady upward tug that flexed the muscles in his tanned forearms. She could imagine what his biceps looked like under that rolled-up-sleeve work shirt.
The sign surrendered with a dry wheeze as he pulled it free of the earth. He handed it to her with a sober blue-eyed look. The black patch glared.
Annoyed at her ineptitude, she took the sign and looked away. “Thank you.”
In her hurry to leave, she spun on one foot, snapped a heel, and nearly fell.
He caught her by the arm.
“Thanks,” she mumbled.
“No problem.”
At the humorous note in his voice, her grip on the sign tightened.
She limped to her car, leaned over the driver’s door, and hit the trunk release. The sign fit in the back, and she took off her ruined shoes and tossed them in with it.
Roadside grit gathered between her toes as she walked on the balls of her feet to the door.
The cowboy stood next to his horse, thumbs hooked in his jeans. Something about him seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
Too embarrassed to acknowledge him further, she slid behind the wheel, released the brake, and eyed the lane that looped up and around the hill. That narrow climb had been the road home for the first twelve years of her life. The best years.
The last twelve? Not so much.
The horseman disappeared from her rearview mirror as she rounded the first curve. A half mile later, she parked at the top, next to the house, and looked out over a steep drop-off.
Memory had failed her.
Beyond her property line two acres to the south, Hawthorne pastures spread across the valley like a green quilt. Oak trees and granite boulders knotted the landscape, and red pipe fences still trimmed the ranch. Black angus cattle grazed. Near the center of it all, east of the ranch house and barns, the guest house and lawns, lay the pond—a gray-blue jewel. Canada geese squatted along one side, and mallards paddled beneath the shady arms of an overhanging oak.
Blinking away memories, she got out and gingerly walked to the edge. The summery perfume of wild grass and oak leaves tightened her throat at the frightening possibility of what if.
What if the place had sold?
These twenty acres of hill and lowland bordering the beautiful Hawthorne Ranch were all she had left of her family. California’s sketchy real estate market wasn’t so bad after all. Selling could have been a horrible mistake. As horrible as marrying Derek Stone.
She sat on a granite boulder, snagging her designer skirt, and didn’t care one bit. She didn’t plan to wear it again anyway. Not ever. It belonged to a life she’d left behind, a life of Derek’s reshaping, fashioned to fit into his metropolitan mold, complete with his insistence that his wife drive a BMW. Against his “better judgment,” she’d chosen the roadster model and customized the color.
Now, gazing down at the quietly rippling reason, she felt vindicated.
She took off her sunglasses, drew the pins from her chignon, and shook her hair free.
Derek had insisted on other things, too, and she’d foolishly agreed in order to please him. She’d changed the way she dressed, the way she wore her hair, her job. And she’d relinquished her dreams of a small wedding at the country chapel and teaching elementary school.
Too pedestrian, he’d said. Her heritage didn’t fit his lifestyle, and he’d shown little interest in her past. Unfortunately, she hadn’t shown enough in his either, or she might have noticed the warning signs before she said “I do.”
Clearly, the two-word promise of fidelity didn’t mean the same thing to him as it did to her.
And then Mama died.
The decision to bury her mother next to Daddy at the Springville Cemetery had opened Laura’s eyes to the future she’d left in the past. Why not move back home? At least for a year. She could live that long on her savings, substitute at the local school come fall, get her bearings in the meantime.
After the funeral, she’d taken the property off the market and had the power and internet reconnected, in spite of her decision to go off-grid. She’d uninstalled all social media, but she still needed her phone. Hopefully cell service was better than it had been years ago.
Other life details she’d left to her attorney, along with her email address.
Movement caught her eye and she shifted perspective. The mysterious rider made his way along the road, onto the Hawthorne place, and straight to a corner gate. A day worker? Or maybe a new owner? His horse stepped in close and he swung the gate open without dismounting. Hinges moaned, then again as he closed it. Quite a hand, she admitted grudgingly.
Derek wouldn’t have known what she meant by hand, nor would he have cared to find out.
Leaving the view for later, she gathered her few things from the car and fingered through an old key ring. The lock on the house had never been changed, even during the early years when her mother rented it out for extra income. She inserted the key, turned the knob, and stepped through French doors into a wall of stale, mousy air.
Emptiness did that to a house.
Dust covered the kitchen counters and what little furniture remained. Clean square boxes of rodent poison lay scattered about, evidence that one generation had perished. But others had come. It was the country, after all. She’d get a cat.
She set her bags in the corner of her parents’ old bedroom, then turned in a slow circle.
Her sleeping bag on the floor wouldn’t do, not with the mice. She’d have to spring for a real bed, but until then the living room sofa would work.
At the window, an overgrown mulberry tree blocked her view. She toured the other two bedrooms, walked through the dining room and living room, and out onto the covered front porch that stretched the length of the house and the width of her youth. From its shady depth, she’d often watched the ranch come to life in the morning, heard horses whinnying, barn doors sliding.
In the distance a dog barked, bringing an involuntary smile as she recalled the Hawthorne’s golden retriever. Memories rushed in and drew her down the ranch lane that led to the pond and picnic area. She had run there with Eli Hawthorne III and his dog, pumping her short legs to keep up with his longer strides. He ran with two fishing poles and a tackle box, and still he beat her to the pond, claiming the best spot beneath the tree.
Annoyance niggled into the scene. Sometimes she’d resented his arrogance and dominating attitude. And sometimes she worshipped him.
At the funeral, whispers circulated—behind-the-hand murmuring that he’d been hurt in Afghanistan. She hadn’t even known he’d joined the Marines. Didn’t know anything about him, really. Not since those dozen years ago when Daddy died and she and Mama left. Eli went the way of the pond—tucked into her treasures, a piece of herself too precious to share.
“Oh, for binoculars,” she mumbled, then shook away the nosey thought. She searched for a yellow dog trailing along the pond bank and someone sitting in the old fishing spot beneath the oak tree.
The oak tree.
A dull throb began in her chest as she traced red pipe fencing to a cross-section of barbed wire. The aching intensified.
There, in the farthest corner of her father’s bottom land, stood an ancient oak, mutilated by some horrible incident but alive.
How proud she’d been to show Eli. He was always the one discovering new things and marvelous sites, but she had found the great scarred tree on her own.
The throb sharpened to a pointed pain, and she pressed the heel of her hand against it. From a distance the oak looked like the other hundred trees scattered over the hills, only bigger, as if strengthened by its suffering. A fire, Eli had declared with his irritating, know-it-all attitude.
“It’s just a heartless old tree, Laura Bell, you ding-a-ling,” he’d teased.
“No, it isn’t.” She glared at him as they stood on the summer pasture. “It’s a miracle tree. It has to be. How else could it be alive when there’s no insides?”
He continued to torment her, but she’d caught the quiet wonder in his blue eyes.
They wiggled into the cavity and barely fit—like two acorns in a squirrel’s nest, their backs against the smooth shell. Lazy afternoons often found them there, guessing what had started the fire that ate away the tree’s insides.
Blinking now didn’t stop the tears, and they fell to fingers fisted against the sharp pain.
With a shaky breath, she returned to the bedroom, opened her suitcase, and found a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She’d hike down to the tree first, then see about unpacking.
~
Eli Hawthorne never thought he’d catch a city gal doing a header in a roadside ditch, but when her skinny high heel snapped off right next to him, he couldn’t stand by and let her fall.
He’d heard a new realtor had taken over the Bell place, and based on that silver-bullet car, the woman sure wasn’t a new renter.
Nor was she overly friendly. No eye contact with her quick “thank you.”
Figured. He made people uncomfortable.
After her car shot up the hill, he gathered his mail and rode Buddy down the slope to the northwest section gate, a trail so familiar he could ride it blind. Good thing. With one eye gone, he was half-way there.
They ambled across the pasture, beyond the ranch house, and into the barn where he unsaddled and brushed the gelding, then turned him out.
Goldie didn’t hear the commotion and lay sleeping on her mat near the tack room door. He rubbed the old retriever’s side and waited for her to get her bearings before he lifted her into the shallow box he’d built onto the back of the quad. She barked and fanned her thinning tail.
Loving eyes followed his every movement, and saliva dripped from her pink tongue. As a kid, he’d thought she was smiling when she looked at him like that, her mouth stretched back in a grin. The gold had faded around her muzzle, where white hairs now outnumbered the yellow, and she needed his help getting in and out of the box. No more bounding through the pastures while he pulled sprinklers or fed dairy calves.
He rubbed her ears and cupped her old head in his hands.
“Ready for a ride?”
She flicked her tongue and caught him on the nose—an old trick from an old dog that made him nearly gag at her breath as well as laugh.
A distinct screen-door slap jerked his gaze to the hill, popping memories to the surface like a fishing bobber. He squinted toward the house, but the front porch shadowed whoever stood there.
Little Laura Bell ran across his mind in her old sneakers and jeans, hair flying behind her like a horse’s tail. He’d rarely climbed the hill when she lived there, because she’d always insisted the ranch was more fun than her house. Sometimes he’d meet her half way up on a granite ledge, where they’d sit and watch Goldie chase ground squirrels. He’d shoot at the chirping nuisances with his .22, and she’d slug him and cry when he hit one.
He chuckled to himself and scoped the hilltop, down the western side to the corrals and her dad’s shop. When Mr. Bell died and Laura and her mother moved away, he’d tried to convince himself that life would be easier without that puny little pest tagging along behind him every minute.
But life hadn’t gotten easier. Just emptier.
Goldie yapped impatiently, and he climbed on the quad and glanced back at the hill.
Someone leaned over the deck railing.
He froze.
From the porch, we can see everything, Laura had once told him. The slightest movement drew the eye, she’d said, as if she was all big and bad. He squinted again, trying to make out the realtor.
The figure backed into shadow and he waited. In a moment, the person stepped off the porch and headed west, slowly descending toward the corrals and definitely not stumbling along in a skin-tight skirt.
He left the quad and walked in the opposite direction, across the yard on the east side of his house, keeping the hill in view. Whoever it was didn’t go to the corrals and instead cut back down an overgrown path that angled toward the bottom pasture.
He stopped next to a tree, confident that his dull clothing blended in with the colorless bark. The reflexive thought surprised him. Irritated him. This wasn’t Afghanistan. He stood on his own property with every right in the world to be there. But he couldn’t shake the training. He’d rather see than be seen.
The figure wore a ball cap but didn’t walk like a man. Had to be that woman—the realtor—smart enough to change her clothes before hiking across the pasture. He watched her saunter down, pause and look up toward the house, then continue on. Had to be headed to the well. Maybe checking the fence.
At the bottom, she picked up her pace and beat a straight line to the property’s southeast corner. Each silent, distant step hammered through him. Only one other person knew about that corner and the significance of what it held.
The hammering leveled off and he half crouched, waiting for her to disappear behind the great oak. The next tree downhill from him was closer to the property line. When she stepped out of view, he’d make a run for it.
Was he nuts, stalking a stranger on neighboring land? What if she saw him?
What if it was her?
“Don’t be stupid,” he muttered under his breath. No way that woman in the tight skirt and high heels was Laura Bell.
A cold snout nudged his hand, and Goldie wagged her tail. How’d she get off the quad? He reached for her, but she ducked away and limped off down the hill.
Straight for the gutted oak tree.

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