Travis Alden could easily recognize the sights and sounds of hell: the bared teeth of predatory inmates, the sharp clicks of metal handcuffs, and the profanity-laden screams that echoed against the concrete walls of a six-by-eight cell.
But this place—whatever it was—held none of those things.
Cautiously, Travis stepped closer to the edge of the mountain overlook, his worn tennis shoes crunching on loose gravel, and looked down at the peaceful landscape. Evergreen trees and pines stood proud above the thick brown foliage that hugged their massive trunks. Distinctive outlines of leaves, trees, and bushes melded as his gaze roved further out, scanning the rugged mountain range that sprawled for miles in every direction.
The Great Smoky Mountains slumbered beneath a blue morning mist. The high peaks in the distance gradually grew clearer as the sun’s orange glow lit up the eastern Tennessee sky, its slow ascent above the mountaintops burning off the misty shroud one sleepy inch at a time.
Despite the bright warmth of the approaching sun, a thin plume continued to thrive on one distant peak. The gray plume billowed upward, obscuring the streaks of orange, pink, and purple coloring the sky, and cast a thin shadow over the mountain from which it rose.
A swift mid-February breeze pushed across the landscape, swept past Travis’s ears on a high-pitched whistle, bringing with it the pungent scent of smoke. The skin on the back of his neck prickled. The uneven terrain before Travis—a slumbering giant—seemed to breathe and stir. Almost as if it sensed his presence, that darkness within him, knowing he didn’t belong.
Travis jerked back onto the graveled path and raised his head, squinting up at the sun’s glow instead of studying the steep drop below.
“You in God’s country, son.”
A grizzled man, wearing a brown jacket and jeans, stood ten feet away by the entrance of a hiking trail. He carried a fishing rod in one hand and a large cooler in the other. The old man’s blue eyes surveyed Travis. Then he raised one arm and pointed the fishing rod in the direction of the mountain range Travis had studied. Orange sunlight glinted off the metal tip of the pole.
“That there’s the park.” The man’s gray mustache lifted with his slow smile. “But Paradise”—he swept his raised arm toward a large mountain jutting up high behind him—“is that way.” His smile widened. “Paradise Peak, that is. That what you’re looking for?”
Travis gripped the frayed straps of the backpack on his shoulders and swept his gaze over the other man’s form, searching for the bulge of a weapon in his jacket, along his waistband, or tucked beneath the hem of his jeans. The action was automatic—a distasteful, but necessary, habit Travis had formed during his twenty-year stint in prison. He’d been forced to defend himself on more than one occasion over the years.
Finding nothing suspicious on the man, Travis relaxed his hold on the bag’s straps and nodded. “Can you tell me how many miles it is into town?”
“Only seven or eight, but it’ll feel like thirty on account of the climb.” The man glanced at Travis’s shoes and frowned. “You been hitching?”
“I tried.” Travis looked down, cringing as he recalled the suspicious stares he’d glimpsed through windows of cars and trucks as drivers had sped past his raised thumb. He didn’t blame people for not trusting a nomadic stranger, and after three days with no success, he’d stopped asking for rides. “I started in Franklin ’bout three weeks ago.” He studied his mud-caked shoelaces and the loose stitching along the seams of the soles. “Mostly on foot.”
The wind picked up, gusting between them, and the man asked, “You walked two hundred miles across these mountains during the tail-end of winter?”
It sounded like a perplexed statement instead of a question.
“Two hundred and thirty-three,” Travis said.
He’d counted every one. Each night, as he’d huddled beneath canopies of trees for warmth or stretched his aching frame out on a bed of dead underbrush and stared up at the stars, he’d calculated every step, added the estimated mileage that lay ahead, and subtracted the hours of sleep and periods of rest he’d need when the climb became too painful.
The man whistled low. “What you come all that way for?”
Margaret Owens. Absolution. To save his—justifiably—damned soul. Travis hesitated as he met the man’s narrowed gaze, not wanting to lie, but unsure of how much to share with this stranger. In his experience, most people weren’t all that understanding. Or forgiving.