ADVERTISEMENT
The residents of Red Hollow first noticed the smoke as a thin, ghostly thread rising from the barren ridge beyond the town’s edge. It was too steady to be an accident and too faint to be a brush fire, yet the townspeople largely dismissed it. After all, the hillside was a wasteland—steep, dry, and abandoned. “There’s nothing up there,” was the common refrain. But Mrs. Hargrove, a woman of sharp intuition, couldn’t shake the feeling that the hillside held a secret. She watched that gray ribbon every evening, wondering what kind of life could possibly exist on a ridge that everyone else had written off.
