“I’ll send Phil.” Lee smiled. “This will be like a paid vacation. Just take a few photos and we’ll pick up the tab. You’ll even have a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a chauffeur.”

I went back to my cubicle and stared at a blank screen. The only sounds in the surrounding cubicles were fingertips tapping keyboards, a mouse clicking like a telegraph key. Ten people in the room and not one talking. You would have thought human speech had become obsolete as smoke signals. I wondered how the old newspapermen would react to this muted environment. Would they be able to work without the shouting traffic of typesetters and galley boys, the background roar of presses, the smell and smear of ink?

I unsealed my coffee. Moist heat rose from the styrofoam, carrying with it the rich, dark odor that always reminded me of fresh-dug earth, not the sandy loam of the piedmont but the black mountain soil flung off shovels to open my mother’s grave.

Ghosts, I told myself, more ghosts.

CHAPTER 2

To get to Tamassee, South Carolina, you leave the interstate at the last exit before the Georgia line. You turn right at the stop sign, and suddenly mountains leap up as though they’d been crouching along the four-lane waiting for the car to turn. You follow Highway 11 into Westminster and turn left on Highway 76, and all the while the mountains get bigger, narrowing the sky until the gap between clouds and earth disappears. The two-lane road coils upward like a black snake climbing a tree. Soon you notice fewer homes and mailboxes and more cornfields and barbed wire and woods. You see the dogwood trees, and it’s like time-lapse photography in reverse. White blossoms that puddled the ground in Columbia re-attach themselves to the limbs, brighten the woods like crown fire. On the highest mountains, green buds still clinch the flowers. The homes, except for a few two-story farmhouses, are small A-frames and trailers. Then there are no houses at all, only curves with wooden guard posts jutting from the roadside. You pass a billboard that says LAUREL MIST: ANOTHER TONY BRYAN PLANNED COMMUNITY. Above the caption a fawn grazes on a golf course. On some of these curves you will see a cross made of wood or styrofoam. Often there is a vase or Mason jar filled with flowers, sometimes a plastic angel or pair of praying hands. Shrines that make the ascent like some Appalachian version of the stations of the cross.

“Looks like this is a dangerous road,” Allen Hemphill said.

“Yes, especially during the winter.”

Woods pressed close to the road on both sides now. A few weeks earlier, Judas trees would have created a scattered blush across the understory. Jessamine and silver bells would have lit up the forest as well, but now only the dogwoods bloomed.

“Have you ever been up here?” I asked.