Chapter 4 - A Ghost in the Blue Ridge
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Seven and a half months later, the oppressive July heat of the Blue Ridge Mountains settled over the sleepy town of Haven Hollow, Virginia, smelling of sweet Georgia peaches, pine needles, and summer dust.
Inside The Honeybee Bakery & Cafe on Main Street, the ceiling fans spun lazily overhead as "Maya Brooks" wiped down the glass pastry counter with a damp cloth.
At thirty-four weeks pregnant, Tessa could barely reach the far edge of the counter anymore over the prominent, rounded swell of her belly. She paused, pressing one flour-dusted hand against the small of her aching back while her other hand rubbed slow, soothing circles over the cotton fabric of her pale yellow sundress, right where a tiny heel was currently kicking rhythmically against her ribs.
"Easy there, little man," Tessa whispered with a soft, tired smile. "Three more weeks until your due date, okay? Mommy still needs to finish painting your crib."
"Maya, honey, if I see you lifting one more tray of cinnamon rolls before you go home, I’m firing you on the spot," scolded Clara Jean, the sixty-year-old widow who owned the bakery and had rented Tessa the tiny furnished cottage behind her apple orchard back in January.
Clara Jean bustled out of the kitchen carrying a tall glass of iced chamomile tea and forced Tessa down onto the wooden stool behind the cash register.
"I feel fine, Clara Jean, really," Tessa protested gently, though she gratefully pressed the cold glass against her flushed cheek before taking a sip. "Just a slight headache since this morning, and my ankles are a little swollen from the humidity."
"Swollen ankles and a headache at eight and a half months means you put your feet up," the older woman insisted warmly, patting Tessa’s shoulder. "Did your late husband’s family ever send that forwarding package you were waiting on?"
Tessa’s smile tightened almost imperceptibly around the edges.
When she had arrived in this tiny mountain town of twelve hundred people without a bank account, credit card, or driver’s license, she had spun the only story that kept polite Southern neighbors from asking too many questions: that she was a young widow whose husband had died in a car crash back in Ohio, looking for a quiet place to raise their baby on her modest savings.
"No," Tessa lied softly, looking out the front window at the quiet, tree-lined street where pickup trucks rolled slowly past the hardware store. "He didn't have much family left."
Only the devil himself, waiting seven hundred miles north in Boston.
Not a single day had passed in the last two hundred and thirty days without Dante invading her thoughts. During the lonely winter nights in her tiny orchard cottage, while morning sickness left her curled on the bathroom floor, she had wept until her throat was raw—not just from fear, but from the devastating grief of mourning a man who was still alive.
Once, back in March, she had glimpsed a national news broadcast on the television at the local diner. A two-minute investigative segment on East Coast organized crime had flashed a photograph of Dante Castellano walking down the steps of a federal courthouse in Boston after all charges in a harbor probe were mysteriously dropped.
Even through a grainy television screen, he had looked terrifyingly changed.
He was leaner, darker, a thick shadow of stubble framing a jaw set like granite. The commentator had noted that the Castellano crime family had violently purged three rival crews across New England over the winter, tearing apart every port, airport, and rail hub from Maine to Maryland as if searching for something stolen from the Don himself.
Tessa had paid for her soup in cash and never stepped foot in that diner again.
She stood up slowly from the stool behind the bakery counter, untying her white apron with a quiet sigh as the afternoon sun began to dip behind the blue mountain ridges.
"All right, you win," Tessa told Clara Jean, picking up her woven canvas tote bag. "I’ll go home and lie down in front of the box fan."
She took two steps toward the front screen door of the bakery.
May you like
On the third step, a blinding white flash of pain exploded behind her temples, as sharp and sudden as a lightning bolt.
The sunny bakery storefront tilted sideways. A high, ringing sound filled her ears, drowning out Clara Jean’s alarmed cry as dark crimson warmth trickled suddenly down the inside of Tessa’s legs, and the wooden floorboards rushed up to meet her.
