DANCING ON ROCKS: A NOVEL

by ROSE SENEHI

Winner of the 2014 Indie-Reader Award for Popular Fiction

“Fans of Nora Roberts’ novels should pick up Dancing on Rocks. Every good novel has a secret and this one has a doozy-what really happened the night Georgie’s sister disappeared?”

“The vivid characters come together in a heart-wrenching, down-home story of family, and the ties that bind us all together.”

“Dancing on Rocks manages the rare feat of being a page turner as well as a satisfying exploration of the human heart” —Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine

“I just finished reading this wonderful book by author Rose Senehi. The town of Chimney Rock, NC, is beautifully depicted in this cross genre piece. While the book has a literary feel, there’s mystery and romance to keep the reader engaged. The characters are believable, but just quirky enough. Think Twin Peaks without the otherworldly strangeness. The charm of the town literally drips from the pages. It is obvious that Ms. Senehi adores this place and has made it a part of her soul. And when an author does that, you know that the book is going to deliver. I highly recommend this read.”

The Set-Up:
Simmering beneath the skin and hiding around every corner are a family’s painful memories of a child who disappeared in the middle of the night 25 years ago.
Nursing her mother back to health wasn’t all that drew Georgie Haydock back to the mountain tourist town of Chimney Rock. The summer roils as her mother thrashes in her bed, insisting that the strange woman stalking her store downstairs is Georgie’s missing sister. Georgie aches to reunite with the hometown boy she never forgot; yet, she fears all the summer’s turmoil will force her to unveil the secret she’s been hiding since she was six. Naturalist Ron Elliott doesn’t care what Georgie did all those year back. She’s the one creature he’s always yearned to possess.

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CHAPTER ONE
GEORGIE HAYDOCK WAS WELL AWARE of the capriciousness of the torrent
tumbling beneath her as she paused on the bridge. She watched the muddy
water race over and around the massive boulders like a raging beast ramming
its way down the gorge. Two days of rain had made the river angry.
Her body swayed to the pounding of her heart as she gazed stonily into
the distance. No matter how hard she tried, she kept seeing the thin little
hand slip away, teaching her all over again what forever meant. She closed
her eyes and took a slow, long breath. Stop it, she warned herself. You
better watch out or you won’t make it till September.
She took a moment to watch the veils of morning mist float across the
granite cliffs above, and the shadow of cynicism that had tarnished her
youth started to get its grip on her again. She knew the beauty of this
North Carolina mountain gorge didn’t come cheap. Those who lived there
understood that sometimes it had to be paid for by hurt, or more torturous
yet, by the fear of hurt.
Her ponytail felt like it was coming loose, so she took hold of it with
one hand and pulled off the rubber band with the other, and this time, wound
it tighter around the hank of long blonde hair. She swiped the back of her
hand across her forehead, already sweaty from the humidity that hung thick
in the air. She wondered how her patient, old Nannie Rae, was doing back in
Deep Gap, and hoped she wasn’t going to regret asking for this four-month
leave of absence to take care of her mother.
She kicked a pebble off the bridge with the tip of her running shoe and
continued across to Main Street with the easy kind of stride that
long-legged people fall into. Already nine-thirty and not one person in
sight. By now, as a home care nurse, she would have been well on her way to
seeing a patient, but she’d be willing to bet that half the shop owners were
still snoring in their beds. That was how it was, running a store in this
tourist town. It wasn’t as if you rose up every morning driven to accomplish
something. It was more like you got up resigned to deal with whatever life
tossed your way.
That attitude had always bothered Georgie. It seemed Chimney Rock‘s store
owners were always victims of fate as they kept busy stocking or dusting
shelves, waiting for the tourists to appear. Oddly, even though she’d been
away from this routine for thirteen years, it only took her a couple of days
behind the counter of her mother’s store to slip into the shopkeeper’s habit
of hypothesizing about the reason for another slow day. It was either too
hot or too cold, gas too expensive for a day trip, or so cheap you could
drive a lot farther than this little town.
Nursing was different. Instead of waiting around for something to happen,
you did your darnedest to keep it from happening. Four months and she’d say
goodbye to this place for the second time in her life and be back caring for
the folks who lived in the coves and hollows of Watauga County.
She strode along the jumble of store porches that served as a disjointed
walkway through the village, a mere two rows of mostly slapped-together
buildings running haphazardly for a couple of blocks. Nothing more than a
hodgepodge of mom-and-pop operations with rustic facades, yet the place
never failed to excite a tourist’s imagination when they caught a glimpse of
it. The whole town managed to tap into people’s underlying yearning to
magically escape into an earlier time.
The postmistress emerged from the lonesome cinderblock building that
housed the town’s post office. Holding a watering can, Carrie Owenby used
her foot to nudge a hefty stone she kept next to her flower pots to prop the
door open. Georgie threw her a wave before scampering up the staircase
squeezed between two stores. The noise from a kiddy show sounded as she
opened the door to the upstairs apartment where she’d been raised. Her
sister Ali’s two boys were up and watching television in the front room,
their cereal bowls on the floor in front of them.
“Grandma up yet?” she asked.
Without tearing his eyes from the action on the screen, Isaac answered,
“Yeah. Mom’s getting her dressed.”
She made her way down the long narrow hallway her nephews used as a
speedway for their miniature car races, careful not to step on any abandoned
cars. Her mother’s room was at the very end. She found her in her black
leather recliner, her injured foot propped up on a colorful folded granny
square blanket. That foot was what had brought Georgie back to town.
“Hi, Dynamite,” Georgie said.
She bent down and gave her mother a kiss. She knew it would perk her up
to hear the nickname she’d earned at seventeen. A handsome stranger had come
into the sandwich shop in town where her mother was working one summer, and
in front of a couple of locals, asked her what her name was. “Dinah,” she
had told him. “But they call me Dy.na.mite.” She had raised an eyebrow and
added, “That’s because Dinah might, or Dinah might not.” That remark was
discussed at every dinner table in town that night and she never lived it
down. In fact, the big stir it caused pushed her into finally unleashing who
she really was.
But since then, Dinah’s short, small-boned frame had arrived at the
inevitable destination of a lot of women pushing sixty-twenty pounds too
much of softening flesh. Her face had sunk into a somewhat pudgy mass, but
she had hung on to her bright smile and energetic disposition.
“Georgie, I wish you wouldn’t call Mom that in front of the kids.” Ali
was making a half-hearted attempt at putting their mother’s bed in order.
“It’s bad enough explaining why she named you Georgia, and me Alabama. Heck,
they’ve got no idea of what ‘conceived’ means.”
Dinah laughed. “Thank your lucky stars I didn’t do like old Louisa
Freeman and go and name you something like Aurora Borealis. The poor devil
went through life as A.B.”
Ali reached over and picked up the pile of scrapbooks and photo albums
strewn over her mother’s bed while Georgie got out her blood pressure
paraphernalia and fastened the cuff around her mother’s arm. She pumped it
up and read the gauge.
“Mom, your pressure’s up to 160 over 98 this morning.”
Ali, who was about to go downstairs and open the store, waved an empty
potato chip bag as she floated out of the room, telling Georgie all she
needed to know.
“And, I’m gonna tell those boys, if they run out and get you any more of
that kind of junk, they won’t be hitting golf balls over at Fibber Magee’s
again till they’re fifteen.”
She reached for one of the pillows under her mother’s elbow.
“Let me fluff everything up for you, Mom.”
Noticing her mother’s fisted hand slipping something furtively under the
book in her lap, Georgie put out her hand for the suspected candy bar.
“Okay, Mom. Let me have it.”
She studied the plaintive expression on her mother’s face, and something
told her she should just let this one go, but the trained nurse in her
wouldn’t let her. She picked up the book and froze. Staring out at her was a
photograph of a little girl with short blond hair parted neatly to the side.
Georgie remembered being six years old and clipping on the pink plastic
barrette, shaped like a ribbon, to hold her sister’s hair in place just
before her fourth birthday party.
Georgie eased it out of her mother’s hand. “Let’s put it on the dresser,
Mom.”
Ever since Georgie got back home she had braced herself for coming face
to face with the hurt that was always hiding under everyone’s skin and
waiting around every corner.
Her mother’s words resounded like a slammed hammer.
“Shelby’s not dead.”
Georgie put the frame back in its place on the dresser and stared ahead,
not seeing anything-just the scene that had played itself out hundreds of
times before. When she was a kid, she and Ali would lie silently in their
beds listening to the commotion in the hall. Shadows would flicker in the
light coming from under their door as her father struggled to get her mother
back in their bedroom. The pillow over her head couldn’t block out her
mother’s tormented pleas.
“Why? Why didn’t I lock the kitchen door? Please, God, please bring my
baby home.”
When her dad was alive, he had always been the one to deal with it. Now,
if she didn’t succeed in keeping her mother’s mind off her four-year-old
daughter who went missing in the middle of the night some twenty-five years
before, it would be her turn. Georgie couldn’t help thinking it would be
poetic justice.
The phone rang, startling her. It was Ali telling her they needed singles
in the front cash register. She looked over at her mother. She was lying
peacefully in her recliner, yet there was something in her eyes that made
Georgie wary.
“I’ve got to go downstairs, Mom. Please, don’t dwell on Shelby. It won’t
do you any good.” She went over and kissed her tenderly on the forehead and
brushed her graying hair away from her face. “Be a good girl and just
concentrate on getting better. Okay? I’ll be up later to take a look at your
foot and change the dressing.”
Georgie reluctantly left the room, then retrieved a bundle of ones from
the lock box in her mother’s office and started down the winding back
staircase to the store. She knew every slanted worn step, every gouge on the
heavily fingerprinted walls, but mostly the moldy smell that drifted up from
the shop, almost as if it were an intrinsic part of the old-timey character
of the place. She reached the storeroom and wove her way through the narrow
path between the stacks of boxes that had made their way to the airy
mountains of North Carolina from the stifling sweatshops of China.
She couldn’t believe she had come back to the same place, with the same
wound she couldn’t heal. It was bad enough when she came for a few days. She
always found the town exactly the way she had left it, except all the faces
now wore masks. She shoved aside a feeling of impending doom. Something she
was having to do more and more often. The passage from Isaiah that her
father had read to them one Sunday afternoon and was etched in her memory
kept sneaking into her thoughts: “…and what will ye do the day your sins
shall be visited upon you?”
She entered the store and started to make her way past the tables of
trinkets and toys one probably couldn’t find all together in one place
anywhere else but in this tiny mountain hamlet-rubber snakes, rustic
slingshots fashioned from thick twigs, moccasins, toy cars, and unique old
fashioned doodads of every description-all designed to suck people into the
past.
Her sister was standing at the front cash register.
“Ali, why don’t you go on up and get the kids rolling for the day. Just
plan on coming down after lunch and helping me put up the new stock.”
Ali registered relief at the prospect of getting back to her boys. As she
started to leave, Georgie put her hand on her sister’s arm.
“Keep an eye on Mom. She had Shelby’s picture in her lap.”
Ali’s face melted in dread. “I’ll get the boys to distract her.”
Georgie opened the cash drawer and put some singles under the clip and
the rest in the back of the drawer, then slid onto the smooth surface of the
stool with its familiar green paint worn off the edges. With her elbow on
the counter, she rested her chin on her fist and stared out the door she had
propped open to let in the fresh morning air.
The doorway framed the view of the Chimney Rock on the mountain with the
flag waving in the breeze wafting down through the gorge. Why was it that
every time she saw it she hoped things were different? She’d always wanted
to belong to this town, but the sight of this iconic image only filled her
with regret.
Georgie’s focus was suddenly jarred by the slight figure of an elderly
woman entering the store. Her thick cloud of snow-white hair was pinned back
in a loose bun. Her sky-blue dress sprinkled with forget-me-nots and her
easy smile made a light-hearted impression. She leaned on her cane with
every step, and a pained wince kept flickering on her smile as she made her
way over. She hung the cane on her bony wrist and leaned against the
counter, looking like she was proud of herself for having made it. She
fingered a beaded bracelet hanging on a jewelry rack and seemed to want to
say something as she eyed Georgie up and down.
“I’ve been comin’ to this here town with my Joe every spring for just
over forty years now,” she finally offered. “Joe’s not with us anymore, but
I feel like I still gotta come. It’s sort of a tradition.”
She looked around as if she were searching for someone. “Where’s the lady
who owns this place? She’s always sittin’ on that there stool and I always
make a point out of sayin’ hello and passin’ the time of day with her.”
“Oh, that’s my mother. She’s not feeling well. She’s upstairs.”
A grin of triumph suddenly surfaced on the woman’s face. The corner of
her eyes wrinkled into a squint and she pointed a crooked finger at Georgie.

“I know you. I know who you are. Heck, when you were still in diapers,
your ma used to set you right up on this here counter while she waited on
me.”
Georgie broke into a smile. This had to be the millionth time someone had
recalled knowing her as a kid. Even though she’d been home for a couple of
weeks now, she hadn’t been able to shake a gnawing feeling of estrangement.
But suddenly she felt irrevocably connected to the endless chain of people
who over the generations had trudged from store to store in that old-timey
niche in the mountains, searching for a taste of the past.
The old woman’s eyebrow raised and a slight hint of a sneer washed over
her face.
“I’m surprised to see you’re still here. I remember when you were, heck
no more than six or seven, and you told me kinda uppity like, that when you
grew up you were gonna get outta here and be a nurse.”
Georgie stared into the distance and mulled over the woman’s comment for
a moment.
“You’re right,” she finally said. “I was gonna get outta here.”