Chapter One

      She’d never make it to Chicago alive.

      Not unless she got some coffee. Stat.

      Bone-weary from driving, Gwen pulled over and parked in front of a small diner at the edge of tiny Andover. The August air felt heavy with the heat, and when she inhaled she caught the scent of the nearby Appalachian Mountains in her nose. Everything smelled so warm, moist and alive—the rich, dark soil, the beech and maple trees, the leaves taking their last breath of summer… So much life and beauty around her, and yet Gwen wasn’t part of it.

      She took her phone out of her messenger bag and snapped a quick picture of the mountains that rose up behind the town. Gwen stepped inside the diner and fifty years into the past. It looked like it had been plucked from 1960—or at least a sanitized version of 1960—with the chrome stools that sat belly-up to a white-and-red bar and the waitresses in their paper hats and white dresses. The Rolling Stones crooned “As Tears Go By” from a gleaming jukebox. She couldn’t hear the song without thinking of her father singing it to her as a lullaby twenty years ago.

      Inside the bathroom, Gwen noted the movie posters hanging in the stalls—Bye Bye Birdie and Dr. No. Conrad Birdie versus James Bond—she knew who she’d put her money on. Back out in the diner, she ordered two cups of coffee—one for here and one to go. As she sipped, she mentally calculated how far she’d come and how far she had left to go.

      That morning she’d left Savannah, Georgia, at 10:00 a.m. She’d driven four-and-a-half hours—over three hundred miles. She’d probably sleep in Kentucky somewhere tonight, which would leave about four-hundred miles to go to get to her friend Tisha’s in Chicago tomorrow night. And then…what? Try to be the best houseguest ever while she job-hunted for a teaching position. Hopefully she would get one quickly and wouldn’t have to spend the next six months sleeping on Tisha’s couch.

      “Miss?” A man who had to be in his mid-sixties sat two stools away from her and summoned the waitress.

      “What can I get you, sir?” the waitress asked.

      “Directions? Out to old Marshal? It’s been fifty years since I’ve been to the school. Forgot the way.”

      The waitress smiled kindly at him. She patted the back of his weather-beaten hand.

      “I’ll draw you a map, sir. Easy to get lost out there.” She took a pen from her pocket and doodled a map on the napkin while the older man watched and nodded. “And you’ll turn here. Be careful, because they took the old sign down.”

      “Thank you, miss,” the man said and gave her a weak smile. She handed him half a dozen napkins—white with red trim, just like the diner counters.

      “You take these with you. You might need them.”

      He nodded solemnly and put the red-trimmed napkins in his pocket.

      Gwen watched the scene. Maybe the waitress had pegged him for the sentimental type. Curious about the school, Gwen pulled her phone back out and searched for “Marshal School” and “Andover, North Carolina.” Nothing came up.

      “Don’t even bother,” the waitress said to her. “We’re in a black hole out here—no 3G, no 4G. You have to drive five