Temptation Road by Kimball Lee Page A

the creature might dare to climb in with her, she began to shake
violently with fear of wild things and her future, as she inched
along the perilous road. She pulled into the first motel whose sign
caught her headlights and rested her cheek against the steering
wheel before going into the office. At the front desk she asked how
far she was from Seven Devils and if there had been any incidence
of bears wandering the motel property.
    Housekeeping woke her early in the morning,
banging on the cheap metal door. She peeked out and told the maid
to give her half an hour. When she stepped into the world outside,
it was dazzling sunlight with an electric blue sky and a hundred
shades of green and pine trees that pierced the roving clouds then
reached to heaven and beyond. The mountain world was sharply green,
not only as a color but as an all-encompassing smell. It inundated
the senses, a saturated aroma of pine bark and sap and needles and
fallen cones, sprightly and scintillating. It spoke to something
locked inside her, something as old as the beginning of the very
particles she was made of. Whispering its secrets softly, beckoning
and calling wordlessly, “rest in me, here is where we all began,
come into me and exist.”
    *
    She drove down the main street of Seven
Devils and along the few side roads. It was a
‘drawing-in-a-children’s-book’ kind of town, with old storefronts,
a wee little grocery store and a café/bar called the “Snakebite.”
There was a clapboard church, signs for the Everclear Ski Area, and
more and more sky piercingly tall trees. Hydrangea bushes bent over
split-rail fences with enormous blue flower heads against shiny
foliage, yet another shade of green. The wind blew leaves and
fallen petals and old newspaper pages along the streets and
sidewalks as if in slow motion, and even though the sun was still
high, owls hooted, hidden among the tree branches.
    The Blue Ridge Mountains rose up all around
the little town and multi-colored valleys dipped and rolled down
and away. On a side street she crossed a rickety wooden bridge over
a shallow creek that was so clear she could see the lustrous
pebbles lining the bottom. The Yukon’s tires crackled on the gravel
drive that wound past a wishing well to an old log building. The
sign over the porch was a single, rough wooden plank. The painted
letters were faded and she could barely make them out. She stood on
the first porch step and peered up, her hand shielding her eyes
from the sun. The sign must have been colorful once and the letters
said, “Wander Inn.”
    The porch overflowed with ferns and ivy’s
that tumbled out of cheap plastic pots and had as many dead leaves
as living. An army of skinny cats with patchy fur skittered away
from the front door and the only redeeming fixture was an inviting
porch swing made of bent willow branches and piled with cushy
pillows.
    A woman in her mid-forties leaned against the
front desk reading a magazine, she was harsh looking in the way
that Reagan’s mother had once been. She had a hardened, artificial
look about her, as if she’d been too wild for too long and was
paying for it now.
    “Good lord above, you’re the DeLuca girl, I’d
know you anywhere,” she said.
    Reagan handed over her driver’s license and a
credit card and said she needed a room.
    “Doesn’t matter what your ID says, you’re
her, alright. There’s a picture of you in this magazine right here,
see? You’re all dolled up and going to some fancy-shmancy somethin’
or other out in Los Angeles. I got a friend who thinks the sun
rises and sets with that face of yours, he don’t say so, but
everybody knows he thinks it. I’m Dody Watts and that’s my girl
Coco, over there. You want our best room? Hell, I’m gonna go ahead
and put you in it, I’m not expecting nobody else this week. You’ll
like the view from the little deck up there; it looks out toward
Grandfather Mountain.”
    “I may need the room for several weeks, will
that be