True believer - Nicholas Sparks [47]
“Okay . . . there,” she said, pointing.
She was right: it wasn’t much of a road. Gravel and rutted, kind of like the entrance to Greenleaf, but worse. Exiting the main road, the car began to lurch and bounce. Jeremy slowed even more.
“Is Riker’s Hill state property?”
She nodded. “The state bought it from one of the big timber companies—Weyerhaeuser or Georgia-Pacific or something like that—when I was a little girl. Part of our local history, you know. But it’s not a park or anything. I think there were plans to make it into a campground at one time or another, but the state’s never gotten around to it.”
Loblolly pines closed in as the road narrowed, but the road itself seemed to improve as they moved higher, following an almost zigzag pattern to the top. Every now and then, a trail could be spotted, which he assumed was used by hunters.
In time, the trees began to thin and the sky became more noticeable; as they neared the crest, the vegetation looked more weathered, then almost devastated. Dozens of trees had snapped in half; less than a third still seemed to be standing upright. The incline grew less steep, then flattened out as they neared the top. Jeremy pulled over to the side. Lexie motioned for him to turn off the engine, and they stepped out of the car.
Lexie crossed her arms as they walked. The air seemed colder up here, the breeze wintry and stinging. The sky seemed closer as well; clouds were no longer featureless, but twisting and curling into distinctive shapes. Down below, they could see the town, rooftops clustered together and perched along straight roads, one of which led to Cedar Creek Cemetery. Just beyond the town, the ancient, brackish river looked like flowing iron. He spotted both the highway bridge and a picturesque railroad trestle that rose high behind it as a red-tailed hawk circled overhead. Looking closely, Jeremy could just make out the tiny shape of the library and could even spot where Greenleaf was, though the cottages were lost in their surroundings.
“The view is amazing,” he finally said.
Lexie pointed toward the edge of town and helped him zero in on where to look. “See that little house over there? Kind of off to the side, near the pond? That’s where I live now. And over there? That’s Doris’s place. It’s where I grew up. Sometimes when I was little, I’d stare toward the hill imagining that I could see myself staring down from up here.”
He smiled. The breeze tossed her hair as she went on.
“As teenagers, my friends and I would sometimes come up here, and we’d stay for hours. During the summer, the heat makes the house lights twinkle, almost like stars. And the lightning bugs—well, there are so many in June that it almost looks like there’s another town in the sky. Even though everyone knew about this place, it wasn’t ever too crowded up here. It was always like a secret place that my friends and I could share.”
She paused, realizing that she felt strangely nervous. Though why she should be nervous was beyond her.
“I remember this one time when a big thunderstorm was expected. My friends and I got one of the boys to drive us up here in his truck. You know, one of those big-tired things that could make it down the Grand Canyon, if need be. So we all came up here to watch the lightning, expecting to see it flickering in the sky. We didn’t stop to consider that we’d put ourselves at the highest spot in any direction. When the lightning started, it was beautiful at first. It would light up the sky, sometimes with a jagged flash, other times almost like a strobe light, and we’d count out loud until the thunder boomed. You know, to see how far away the lightning was. But the next thing we knew, the storm was on us. I mean, the wind was blowing so hard that the truck was actually rocking, and the rain made it impossible to see anything. Then the lightning started striking the trees around us. Gigantic bolts came down from the sky so close that the ground would tremble,