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splitter’s ax, trying to open me up.
    I hear Lily Clarette take in a breath. She flashes me a wide-eyed look. I wish I were as positive about this as she seems to be. Hope and dread are like Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots having a grudge match in my stomach.
    “Hello?” Lily Clarette calls before we’re very close. The use of mountain etiquette is completely natural to her. In Appalachia, you never approach a stranger’s house unannounced. You’re liable to get shot that way. “Hello in the Discovery Girl ?”
    The metal pings stop. No one comes out. Lily Clarette repeats her greeting, but this time we’ve stopped just a few feet away. I feel the dock rocking beneath my feet, or maybe that’s the world shifting off center.
    A silhouette bisects the sunlight at the base of the open cabin door.
    Lily grabs my hand, but I barely feel it.
    My mind stumbles through time, then loses its balance and tumbles end over end as a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt emerges. A shadow hides her face until the muted sunlight slips beneath the red bandanna tied over her dark hair. Other than the clothing, she’s almost exactly as I remember her.
    I see my mother.
    I know it can’t be her.
    I have a feeling the woman on the water is thinking the same thing.

CHAPTER 6
    Clouds boil across the sky and thunder rumbles, not so distant now. We’ve been here on the dock, talking, forever. With the sun hidden in a thick blanket of clouds, I have no idea what time it might be. Other than finally sitting down, none of us have moved. RC is propped on an overturned bucket on the boat, and Lily Clarette and I are cross-legged on the dock. It is as if we are three dreamers, afraid to move. Each of us fearing she’ll wake and the other two will vanish into thin air.
    But this woman’s life is hardly the kind of thing I would conjure, even in my worst nightmare. I doubt if Lily could have imagined that pasts like Rebecca Christine’s exist. My little sister is getting an education in the sort of darkness that lives far off the beaten paths in the backwoods. By comparison, our twisted upbringing among the Brethren Saints seems routine, strangely sane, and almost cosmopolitan.
    Where our half sister grew up, among my mother’s family and actually just a few hours from our hometown, drugs were a staple and food was an occasional visitor. The ragged cabin in which my mother birthed her first baby without the aid of a doctor was home to any number of relatives and “business associates” who came to flop, hide out, or trade for drugs. One of those visitors was probably the man who got my mother pregnant at barely thirteen, but RC has no idea who her biological father is. She grew up thinking that my mother was her older sister and didn’t learn the truth until years after Mama left the household.
    As RC reached adolescence, she might have shared the same fate as our mother, if not for the intervention of an aunt who didn’t do it out of concern for her niece’s future. In reality, the aunt saw RC as romantic competition   —she’d caught her husband peeping at RC, just twelve years old, in the outdoor shower. The aunt then spirited RC away, drove her down the mountain, and dropped her at a group foster home.
    “That’s when I found out who my mama really was,” RC says as matter-of-factly as if she were reporting the weather forecast from twenty-five years ago. “Robby tried real hard to get me out of the foster shelter. He even tracked down your mama and asked her to come talk to child welfare and tell them she was my mother. He thought he could get me out that way.”
    “I remember the day Robby showed up at our farm,” I admit. I was little then, but the encounter is still clear in my mind. I was old enough to be shocked that my mother had a brother, and then to wonder what my daddy would do if he came home and caught Mama with a teenage boy there. Likely as not, I figured, it wouldn’t be good. “Mama sent us out of the house before I