Page 2 of Running to the Mountain Man

Curious, I lean down and run my hand over the pale green leaves of the largest cluster. I recognize this. Snow-on-the-mountain. Once I notice that one, I see a dozen more.

The blooms won’t be here until late summer, but the topmost, varied leaves are already so pretty.

“Well, maybe I won’t have to kill them with my hands, necessarily,” I joke to myself. I’ll have to grab my assistant, Georgie, and teach her about this. She has all my notebooks, but this is one recipe I purposely do not have written on paper for her to find.

“I don’t think Georgie would snitch, would she?” I ask, curling my fingers around the tender stems. I smile, temporarily forgetting why I’m out here.

“What are you doing?”

The gruff female voice startles me. In panic, I clasp my hand around a cluster of the stems. “I was just, um, gathering some greenery for Louisa. For the bouquet!”

Is that the best I can come up with? Yep. Especially when Floydene Blatch’s rough hand drags me upright by the hair. A patch of soil erupts as the plants are ripped out, roots and all.

“I know you were out here with Louisa. Don’t lie to me, witch!”

I stifle the urge to cry out as Floydene clamps her hand around my jaw roughly. Her pale eyes are cold and full of contempt. It was only a couple of years ago that she was my school principal, when I tortured her by putting garden snakes in the pockets of her fancy coats. The woman absolutely hated me since the day I set foot in her school.

The battle-ax must have seen me through her office window.

“Louisa went to her house to get a comb for her hair. I was waiting to finish her bridal braid, so I sneaked out to pick something pretty for her.”

Floydene won’t buy this. But my story is plausible. I am the girl who makes tinctures from healing plants. The girl who presses weeds and flowers into textbooks.

I am also the one who sews the bridal dresses and braids hair. What can I say? I’m a sentimental girl at heart. Even if these women no longer get to choose who they marry or when they have children, I like for them to feel a little bit human. I like for them to feel special.

“Louisa’s missing, and I know you had something to do with it.”

I try to act surprised. That’s the one skill I haven’t mastered. “What are you talking about, Blatch?”

The way I say her name telegraphs it loud and clear that I mean it as “bitch.”

Her nostrils flare like an angry bull, and her thin lips stretch out in a grimace.

“You always were a terrible liar, Loch Ness Monster.”

Imagine choosing that as my nickname and thinking it’s an insult. I wear it with pride. My family, the Locks, were in the first polygamist wagon train that settled in the West. Floydene, on the other hand? Her mom was a mistress who got absorbed into the church to protect the image of a cheating elder and his scorned wives. Floydene is not the shit she thinks she is.

“Did you ever stop to think that maybe that’s because I’m a better person than you?” I say, batting my lashes.

The woman snorts like a warthog, and I let her drag me back to the compound.

“Let’s go, Nessie. And pick up those size 11 feet of yours. I don’t have all day.”

Floydene dreamed up that “clever” nickname for me the day I started primary school because I tracked in muddy water through the classroom with my supposedly big feet. That was day one. On day two, she pulled my yellow-blonde braid so hard she left a bruise.

The woman still loves to pull hair, apparently.

Truth be told, I can take this woman. I’ve got forty pounds of muscle on her, I’m twenty years younger, and this chick has never lifted a finger since she got married at 18. But here’s the thing. Ol’ Floydene is a brainwashed sister wife just like almost every other woman on this compound, and I’m not about to do her harm.

That’s not to say I make it easy for her as she marches me toward the temple.

Wait a minute. The temple? Why would we be headed to the temple if the elder has no bride to marry?

Unless…

But no. They wouldn’t.

“You’ll be lucky if Peter decides to punish you himself. With him, the consequences will be swift.”

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