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The Stone Forest
By Karen Harper MIRA
Copyright © 2006 Karen Harper
All right reserved. ISBN: 0778323242
April 22, 2000
A baseball bat in one hand, thirty-year-old Jenna Kirk hung fifteen feet up in a tree. She'd climbed the self-rigged rope with the intention of checking the solidity of the upper trunk of a big hickory, where she was planning to build a prototype of a children's tree house. But the balmy breeze, the clear open sky and sun of the late April Saturday had lured her into enjoying the ride. Secure in her seat harness, she pumped her legs back and forth and surveyed her little kingdom.
From this height she could see the edge of the cemetery and the rims of the abandoned quarries that hemmed in her four acres of land to the west and north. The one filled with spring water was Green Eye; the dry one, which was much newer, had been dubbed The Campus by the high-school kids of her era, partly because many of the massive blocks used for Midwestern college buildings had come from its depths. Mostly, though, the name came from the fact that it, along with Green Eye, had been the best hangout, make-out, or cut-school location around. She sighed as she swung more slowly. The high school she had attended -- We are the stone-men! -- had been closed and students were now bused to a consolidated school in a larger town. So much had changed.
Her view was especially spectacular today since the leaves werejust starting to emerge. It was the best month to build a tree house. You could clearly see the structure and strength of limbs, and the weather was reasonable. In the year she had been back in Ridgeview, living in the house on these grounds her maternal grandmother had left her, Jenna had begun her own business, Out On A Limb, through which she designed and oversaw the building of luxury adult tree houses.
More than once she'd told herself that she should have started the business building smaller houses for the children's market and expanded from there, but it had taken her this long to even think about tree houses for kids. Living and playing and dreaming aloft was for happy times, and the two tragedies of her childhood had made her memories anything but happy. Yet she was now ready for this new step -- branching out, no longer up a tree, she thought with a grin.
She twisted around to look at the old Victorian home she so loved, her shelter in childhood and this past year. It needed a lot of work, as it hadn't been repaired since Dad died. But she was skilled with tools and was making progress with renovating the place. Like many houses in this hilly region of south-central Indiana, the long porch and wooden eaves were adorned with ornate gingerbread called carpenter's lace.
Only the wealthiest homes, like Kirkhall where she had grown up, were constructed mostly of cut stone. Yet even the poorest local dwellings boasted fancy bird baths, urns, or other decorations carved by the old stone-men of the once flourishing area. The woods that surrounded her home were filled with so many charming, unique statues, carved by her long-deceased grandfather, that it was known locally as The Stone Forest.
Jenna noticed a large black car, creeping down the crushed limestone road which shone stark white in the spring sun. A chauffeured government car, distinctive and recognizable. Her mother's car.
Since she'd taken quite awhile in rigging a safe climb up here, Jenna hastily finished her task, knocking the bat against the trunk to make certain it was solid this far off the ground, where the umbrella supports for the main floor would go. It sounded good and looked good, this venerable hickory. She patted it like an old friend, then heard the metallic slam of the distant car door and shouted, "I'm out here, Mom!"
Dropping the bat to the ground, she let herself down slowly, her lower hand controlling the speed of descent and her upper guiding the rope through the brake bar rig. She savored the bird songs and sweet soughing of the wind as her mother made her way down the crushed-stone path into the forest. Her mom's driver stayed by the car, leaning nonchalantly against it. For once, it seemed, Cynthia Kirk, the lieutenant governor of the great Hoosier State of Indiana, had ridden the fifty miles from Indianapolis to Ridgeview alone. She'd probably been on her cell phone or dictating letters. Lt. Gov. Kirk had never been one to waste time, effort or purpose.
"I didn't know you were coming!" Jenna said, hastily unfastening and stepping out of her harness.
"Or you'd have baked a cake instead of climbed a tree," her mother said. "You looked like Peter Pan soaring around up there."
Jenna clapped dirt and bark from her hands before she hugged her mother, even though the black outfit Cynthia wore wouldn't show marks. Platform heels and a sleek pantsuit with shoulder pads -- Cynthia Kirk was a pioneer of power dressing, even in a forest.
"Speaking of Peter Pan," Jenna said, "I've just added a quote from Peter Pan to the new children's page on my Web site. Something like, "I shall live with Tink," said Peter Pan, "in the little house we build for Wendy. The fairies are fixing it high up beside their nests in the treetops.""
"Mmm," her mother said, rolling her dark blue eyes.
"Swiss Family Robinson and Christopher Robin lived in trees, too. I'm starting to think you should have gone into elementary teaching instead of high school English and then that environmental education office job. I still can't believe you're sticking to all of this," she concluded with a sweeping gesture at the surrounding trees, especially the one that held Jenna's small but lofty office and the three oaks that shared the weight of her masterpiece tree house.
"Mother, I'm just starting to build my dreams here. Surely you understand that."
"But who's going to come traipsing to Ridgeview to see your models?" she demanded. "I only want what's best for you, and to protect you."
"First of all, most sales will be from the Web site. But if clients want to see these models -- and some already have driven in from as far away as Chicago and Columbus -- this isn't Outer Mongolia."
"Even if you don't want to live with me anymore, at least come back to Indianapolis, darling. Get a condo in the suburbs and build tree houses there, where --""
"Where the local authorities would plague me with zoning or permit restrictions."
"Now, you know I could take care of that. A few well-placed words here and there..." Her mother heaved a huge sigh. A silence stretched between them, so familiar it was hardly awkward anymore. They had started to walk toward the house, through what Jenna had always called Rabbit Run, because of the stone faces with long ears peeking from rocks in this section, when her mother stopped abruptly. Placing her hands on Jenna's shoulders, she turned her daughter to her.
"I'm not just passing through, Jenna, though I have a meeting in Bloomington this evening."
"The day before Easter? Can you come back, then, and stay here for part of the holiday weekend? We could go to church, and could fix dinner here."
"You see, if you were still in Indianapolis, we wouldn't have this scheduling problem. But I have something to tell you, something absolutely thrilling," she rushed on, her classically beautiful face lighting.
"I'm on the short list -- the very short list -- for vice president. That's the vice president of the U.S. of A., darling, if Hal Westbrook gets the presidential nomination at the party convention this summer! So you see, I'm going to need you for another campaign. Well?"
Jenna covered her surprise with another hug. "Congratulations! Even if it doesn't all work out in the end, that's great!"
"I'll accept nothing but positive thinking," she declared, rocking Jenna slightly. "I think we could win. When Geraldine Ferraro was on Mondale's ticket in '84, the times weren't right for a woman in the second highest post. But they are now, and I'm the ticket to the women's vote, the victims' rights vote, and the conservative Midwest vote."
Sincerely happy for her mother, Jenna held to her until her mother set her back at arm's length. "So you can see, if that happens, you can't be hiding out in the woods building tree houses, luxury versions or not."
"I'm not hiding out. Actually, I think I'm finally ready to face some things."
Her mother shook her carefully coiffed head sharply. Frown lines creased her oval face, always the echo of what Mandi would probably have looked like if they had gotten her back after the abduction. After years of desperately hoping the abductor would release Mandi, or at least that her body would be found; after countless crank calls, hours of police and FBI work, and the fruitless searching of many local caves, her mother had given up and had her eldest daughter declared dead. Jenna, though, had never accepted that.
As their feet crunched along to the intersection of the path and the driveway where her car awaited, her mother said, "If you mean you're ready to face or relive the family tragedies we've shared, I don't want you trying it without at least Dr. Brennan's help."
Garth Brennan was a psychiatrist whom Cynthia used as an advisor for her victims' rights work and as a long-time family counselor. "You know he's always urged me to live my life and not look back," Jenna pointed out. "Can't you see I'm doing that now? No more single or joint sessions with Dr. Brennan."
"Jenna, after we lost Mandi, we used to be a team, you and I."
Jenna faced her talented, strong mother, who had made so much good from the bad that had befallen the Kirks and little Ridgeview. She was deeply proud of her and loved her more than her mom would ever know. But the controlling charisma that had made her what she was remained something to be battled.
"No. I'm determined to stay here and build this business and face Ridgeview and the past. That's the healthy thing, the right thing for me now."
"For Pete's sake," her mother muttered, turning away, "then I'd better get elected vice president so I can get you some secret service protection out here --" Jenna had to stretch her strides to keep up, despite the fact she wore work boots and her mother was in high heels. "You have a perfectly beautiful, four-bedroom stone home sitting empty on the edge of town, where you could at least live on the second floor, instead of in this ramshackle, hard-to-heat Victorian that wasn't even new when your grandparents bought it. Do you know how high heating bills may be next winter?"
"As usual, you have insider information? And as for memories --" she plunged on " -- I have happy ones here. Kirkhall's the place we were in before Daddy was killed, the place Mandi and I were taken from --""
Her mother stopped with a crunch of gravel, her arms straight at her sides and fists clenched. "You were taken from the dark outdoors, where neither of you would have been if you'd listened to me!" she cried. "You're still not listening to me now, not admitting that you could get hurt out here alone. Oh, I just mean fall out of a damn tree, into a sinkhole or something, or knocking around using your father's old power tools. I worry about you, baby," she pleaded. "You're all I have now."
Tears from a woman so strong she almost never cried, Jenna marveled, blinking back those that prickled her own inner eyelids. Real tears, though not enough to run the waterproof mascara that perfectly highlighted her mother's eyes. Mandi's eyes. They hugged again, while the driver, twenty feet away, pointedly looked in the other direction. Jenna saw it was Vince Sabatka, who often drove her mother and sometimes served as a bodyguard.
"Insider information aside, needless to say, what I confided to you today is embargoed information," her mother said, sniffling. Before Jenna could dig out a wrinkled tissue, her mother produced an initialed handkerchief from the pocket of her pantsuit and blew her nose delicately. "But if I get that call," she whispered, "I'll need you beside me at the convention, and I could use your help in the campaign."
Continues...
Excerpted from The Stone Forest by Karen Harper Copyright © 2006 by Karen Harper. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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