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murmured what an angel she was, and
     how brave, and how hard it must be.
    “I don’t know how you do it,” one of the other girls whispered.
    “Oh, you’d do the same, if it was your mother,” Crystal said softly, letting her gentian eyes slowly fill with tears and looking
     away.
    When they said good night they all hugged her again and said they hoped her mother would be better soon and that they would
     look forward to seeing Crystal whenever Finch brought her home. More than one pair of eyes glistened.
    Crystal smiled shyly around at them, stopping when she came to Caroline Wentworth. There were no tears in those amber eyes.
     Instead they sparkled with what appeared, incredibly, to be suppressed mirth. Slowly she inclined her head to Crystal.
    After the good-byes and the plans to meet again and another too-hard, too-long hug from Finch’s father, Crystal and Finch
     got into the car and ghosted down the drive and back down Habersham Road. It was true dark and smelled of honeysuckle, and
     a few of the huge houses had lit windows, but the purring of the motor was the only sound that broke the sweet autumn night.
     They rode in silence until they turned back out onto Peachtree Road again and the world flowed abruptly back around them.
    “Well,” Finch said, taking her small, warm hand in his. “What do you think?”
    “About what?” she said carelessly, hugging herself in secret glee. No matter how it had started out, this night was hers.
    “Oh, everybody. You know. The house…”
    “I thought it must be like living in the Taj Mahal,” she said with a rich little hill of laughter in her voice. “What happened
     to your mother’s leg?”
    “Oh… she fell off a racing camel in Kabul. It was a long time ago. I’m still not sure where that is.”
    Crystal threw back her head and laughed, a throaty little laugh of sheer exuberance with a sort of purr in it. In a moment
     he joined in, hugging her hard. She knew he had no idea under the sun why she laughed but loved the laughteranyway. And she knew that when they got home, before they went into her father’s house, Finch would ask her to marry him.
     She knew that as surely as she knew that the sun would rise the next morning, or that the night would follow.
    And of all the scenes from the jeweled, faultless tapestry of her life that unrolled before her, this was indeed her finest
     hour.
    But she did not know that.

CHAPTER 3

    A bout an hour and fifteen minutes above Atlanta, on State Highway 575, a smaller road, Talking Rock Road, cuts east and up
     into the ragged edges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. These are old mountains, among the oldest on earth, and they have been
     gentled by aeons of weather so that their peaks, though high, are rounded, voluptuous, instead of jagged like the newer, more
     savage, and often still-smoking mountains of the West. You will not drive long before you come to Burnt Mountain, the last
     of that dying chain, a great, wild excrescence that did not go gentle into the good night as its sister hills did but raged
     against the dying of the light.
    Burnt Mountain is high, smoke blue from far away, a wild disgorged green when you are upon it. Its right flank, facing the
     distant bowl that holds the city, is gentler, the spiraling road open to wide vistas and scenic overlooks and friendly little
     lanes leading off through the woods to undoubtedly evenfriendlier places. For the first part of your ascent, the hollows and the foothills themselves are drowned, throttled in virulent
     seas of kudzu. It has taken houses, barns, cars, whole farms, a few telephone poles. Even these toy topiary habitats are beautiful,
     in a surreal way, if you don’t think of them as ever having harbored life, ever having been slowly strangled by the inexorable
     green.
    The left slope of Burnt Mountain is an almost sheer drop of shale and gravel ledges and great green cliffs to the valley floor.
     In that valley robust signs of human