Free The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter by Sharyn McCrumb

and bad times had a way of sliding in and out, so that you couldn't really separate them into two piles.

    As she looked at the swirl of familiar faces, already receding to snapshots in her mind, one feeling came unbidden to the orphaned Maggie Underhill. Above everything else, she missed Josh.

CHAPTER 5
    Ril Sams climbed Hanlon with his hounds last night, but when they winded something below the top, and wouldn't go beyond the lantern light, and trembled on the lead, then he came home. I trust the hounds; they know what made them stop, what waits there in the mist on Hanlon's top.
    —JIM WAYNE MILLER,
    "Hanlon Mountain in Mist"

    Taw McBryde remembered the Dixie Grill from his youth, and although the food did not equal his rapturous recollections of it, he continued to eat there a couple of times a week. Maybe nothing was as good as he'd remembered it being, he told himself. Memory is a selective thing, and an eighteen-year-old's appetite and lack of sophistication could account for much of the cafe's former glory.
    He sat in the back booth, farthest from the jukebox, and studied the typed menu of "Today's Specials" while he waited for Tavy to show up. He had about decided on the $3.25 all-vegetable plate (mashed potatoes, green beans, stewed tomatoes, and fried apples) when a shadow fell across the page. Taw looked up over his reading glasses, and saw his dinner companion looming above him. He smiled and started to say hello when he saw Tavy's gray face and drawn features, staring at nothing. Taw's grin faded, and he gripped his friend's arm, pulling him into the booth.
    "Tavy!" he whispered. "It's not your heart, is it? You look god-awful."

    "Don't call the doctor, Taw. I already been today. And, no, it ain't my heart."
    Taw set aside his menu, his appetite gone. "Tell me."
    Tavy picked up the glass of water beside his place setting and poured it out across the polished pine tabletop, watching impassively as Taw grabbed napkins and tried to stem the tide rolling toward his lap. "What the hell's wrong with you, Tavy?" he demanded, sopping water and ice cubes away from the table's edge.
    "Cancer."
    Taw stopped mopping, and stared openmouthed at his friend, oblivious to the trickle of water dripping onto his khaki work pants. "What?"
    "Thought it was an ulcer," said Tavy, tracing circles in the wetness. "I'd been feeling poorly. Having some pains in my gut. So I went to the clinic in Johnson City to have it checked. They called me in today to tell me the results. They won't tell you news like that over the phone." He smiled bitterly. "Maybe they think you'll kill yourself. As if it mattered. It's in my liver, Taw, and spreading out from there. There ain't a damn thing they can do about it."
    Taw heard all the words clear as day, but he couldn't seem to string them together to get any sense out of them. He looked at the gray man in the shiny blue suit who sat across from him, and thought that somewhere trapped inside that husk was little Tavy Annis, a towheaded kid with a possum-skin banjo and an unbroken yardage record for quarterbacks at Hamelin

    High. The boy mechanic who could fix any car with a wrench and a screwdriver. What was he on about now?
    "You're sick?" Taw said stupidly.
    "No. I reckon I'm dead. They laid it all out for me: the odds, the expense, and the methods of treatment, which they as good as said wouldn't do no good. And I told them they could keep their pills; I was going home. But that ain't the hell of it, Taw. You know what else the doctor said?"
    "What?" The words spun past Taw's head, and before he could seize one topic, Tavy was on to the next one.
    "The doctor—some kid in a white coat; couldn't have been more than twenty-eight, twenty-nine—looked at my chart, and he says, 'I see you're from Dark Hollow over in Wake County. That's near the Little Dove River, isn't it?' I allowed as how it was, but so what?"
    "The doctor asked you about the river?"
    "Yeah. And then he starts talking about what