Page 59 of The Hermit on the Hill

Where was that damn bobcat when I needed him? I'd take any excuse to avoid having this conversation with Jenna right now. "Couple years ago, the owner hired a shit chef. People stopped eating there, and it looked like they were going to have to close the restaurant. I helped them out in return for an interest in the business."

"How much of an interest?"

I hesitated, but I couldn't lie to Jenna. "Fifty-one percent. I don't have a say on menu changes, but I offer advice at a marketing and accounting level." I did more than offer advice with a fifty-one percent share in the business, but Jenna could figure that out for herself. She didn't need me to spell it out for her.

"So, you have a degree in business?"

"An MBA."

She glanced back at me, the question clear in her eyes.

"Stanford." There was no way around answering this question or the shit it would stir up.

She stopped and turned to face me. "That's… Sam, that's amazing, but you could work anywhere in the world. Why are you using a business degree from Stanford to help a restaurant in Catalpa Creek? That must be really boring for you."

"Got to keep moving. I didn't bring enough food for lunch."

She stared me down for a long moment before she turned and started walking again. "You want me to trust you, Sam. You need to share."

"Don't know if you've noticed, but talking isn't my favorite pastime."

Her answering silence felt weighted and dark, and I spoke despite reason and good sense. "I did work for a large international corporation for seven years. It was exciting and fast-paced, but it was also long hours and stress and too much damn concrete and steel. I'd always planned to move back to this mountain, and I did as soon as I'd made enough money."

"That had to be an enormous culture shock."

She had no idea. "It was good to come home."

"So Maryland never felt like home to you?"

"My aunt is great, and she tried, but I never fit in there." Had never fit in with the kids at school who saw me as a redneck mountain man or the girls who'd flirted only because I was exotic to them. "We lived in Baltimore, in a small apartment. It felt claustrophobic." And I hadn't even had baseball, which I'd just started getting into the year before my grandmother died. I hadn't been able to make the team in a school with over a thousand kids, many of whom had been playing since they could run the bases. "This is where I belong. It's the only place that's ever felt like home."

She glanced back at me. "It looks good on you." She stumbled over a root, but caught herself before I had to, and focused forward again. "So you just own the one building in town?"

This was not the way I wanted to have this conversation. I was opening my mouth to suggest we table the discussion for another time when a flash of white just over the next ridge caught my eye. "Straight ahead and up. Might be daisies."

Jenna picked up the pace and moments later, we were standing next to a ten-foot by four-foot cluster of daisies right at the edge of where forest turned to field and about twenty feet from the edge of my property line if I was reading the map correctly.

Jenna beamed at me. "This has to be it, right?"

"I sure hope so. Look around for any green plants with clusters of red berries or R O carved into a tree or painted on a rock."

"R O?"

"Rose Oakley. My grandmother. Those initials have been near every charm bag I've found."

We walked in ever-widening circles around the daisies, but didn't find any plants that looked like ginseng. I was about to call it done and suggest we go home and start over the next day with a better plan when Jenna shouted.

I sprinted to her, half worried she'd bumped into the damn bobcat, but she was bent over a green plant with a cluster of red berries. I stepped up next to her and saw about twenty more ginseng plants in the same area.

"I'm surprised they're still thriving," I said.

"And that no one has poached them."

"People are likely still afraid of the evil eye from Nana. It'll probably be another generation before anyone touches these plants, assuming they're still living."

"I don't see any initials," Jenna said.

We spent the next twenty minutes looking for a clue as to where the charm bag might be.

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