Windmaster's Bane Read Online Free Page A

sometimes.
    Big Country, maybe—or U-2? No, that wasn’t quite what he wanted. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? Close, but maybe something a little older. Ah—he knew just the thing.
    A moment later, the Byrds’s recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man” pulsed and jingled through the car. David found himself singing along as he paid token obeisance to the stop sign at the end of the gravel road and turned left onto the long straightaway that passed through his father’s river bottom on its way from Atlanta to the resorts of western North Carolina. His tires chirped softly, leaving twin black streaks as he accelerated off toward MacTyrie. He frowned. There was a buzz in one of his new rear speakers.
    He had already forgotten the funeral.
    *
    Seven minutes later David slid the car to a halt at the intersection that marked the effective center of downtown Enotah, where the MacTyrie road ran into Georgia 76. Twin signs pointed west toward Hiawassee and eastward to Clayton. To his right a hundred-year-old courthouse raised crumbling Gothic spires. The only traffic light in Enotah county blinked balefully overhead. Abruptly the car’s engine stumbled. “Damn,” he cursed as he glanced down at his gas gauge. It barely registered.
    Fortunately he was in sight of Berrong’s Texaco, where he had worked the previous summer pumping gas. A moment later he pulled in by the self-service pump, got out, and unscrewed the cap between the taillights. Behind the pyramid of oil cans in the station’s plate glass window David saw chubby Earl Berrong nod and give him a thumbs-up sign. He grinned in turn, unhitched the nozzle, and inserted it into the car, drumming his fingers restlessly on the red paint as he watched the numbers roll by. Always something when he was in a hurry; he’d never make MacTyrie in twenty minutes now.
    A Loretta Lynn song blared from a tinny speaker in the litter-strewn parking lot of the Enotah Burger across the highway, mingling discordantly with a car radio playing heavy metal—Def Leppard, maybe?—and the voices of the several youthful loiterers lounging by the service window.
    One of the crowd laughed loudly, and they all looked in David’s direction. A female voice called out something, but David couldn’t catch it, and then the view was blocked by the bulk of a familiar black Ford pickup that pulled into the lane beside him.
    His face lit up when he saw who it was.
    A slender, red-haired girl stuck her head out the passenger’s window. “Well, hello, David Sullivan, how’re you a’doin’?” she drawled, her slightly pointed features sparkling with amused self-mockery. It was the way she always began a conversation with him.
    “Well, Liz Hughes! I ain’t seen you in a bear’s age!” David took up the ritual greeting in his best mountain twang. He was at once delighted to see a friendly face, especially Liz’s, and a little uncomfortable about the proximity of the group across the street—who might get ideas he was not quite ready for them to get yet. Liz had been a recurring theme in his thoughts lately, and David found that a touch unsettling. She’d always been a friend, but recently…
    Beyond her, David could see Liz’s mother talking animatedly to a red-faced Earl Berrong, who looked as though he would like to escape soon but didn’t dare.
    “What’s up?” David asked after a moment’s pause.
    Liz answered promptly. “Oh, nothing much. What’re you doing?”
    “Going camping with Alec tonight, up on Lookout Rock.” He hesitated. He and Liz had been good friends since elementary school, but her parents had separated the previous spring, and she had spent most of this summer with her father in Gainesville, which was fifty miles away. David was thus not quite certain how things stood or where to direct the conversation.
    Liz solved the problem for him. “Gonna take me to the fair?” she asked abruptly, her eyes twinkling.
    David glanced at the gas pump: eleven gallons. “I