Chapter 29
Riley drove reluctantly into the heart of her early childhood. What she expected to find there she didn’t know. But she knew this was a crucial errand—for herself, anyway. She braced herself at the idea of seeing her father. Yet she knew she needed to face him.
Sloping all around her were the Appalachian Mountains, far to the south of her recent investigations. The trip down here had been a tonic in some ways, and with the windows down, she was beginning to feel better. She’d forgotten how beautiful the Shenandoah Valley was. She found herself steering upward through rocky passes and alongside flowing streams.
She passed through a typical mountain town—little more than a cluster of buildings, a gas station, a grocery store, a church, a handful of houses, a restaurant. She rem
