The Rowan Tree: The Family Tree, #2

By Cynthia Rinear Bethune

The Rowan Tree is the second book of The Family Tree series. When 12-year-old Iris Gibson met her grandparents as a result of a 7th grade genealogy assignment, she discovered a family tree as big as a Scots pine. She also discovered the strange ability she's always had has a name – An Dà Shealladh. In Iris, this gift of Two Sights is not so much about seeing as feeling. Feeling an anxious dread sparking along the axons of her solar plexus, she knows when something is wrong but never quite what it is or just how she can help. She still questions herself … and worries about looking like a lunatic if she gets it wrong.

Iris has been in love with Daniel for four years and if there is one feeling she's always had about him, it's certainty. But now that dread is nagging at her again, about Daniel. But if she warns him, will he even believe her? The Rowan Tree is not only a symbol of Iris's love for Daniel and his belief in her, but a beacon towards a safe haven when it means the difference between life and death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cynthia Rinear Bethune
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223807100

Cynthia Rinear Bethune

Cynthia Rinear Bethune was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has been a freelance feature writer, ghostwriter, and is currently working on her next two novels, Brendan’s Cross and You Belong to Me. Visit: facebook.com/authorTheFamilyTree/#

Book preview

Prologue

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RESTING HIS CHIN on his hand, Andrew gazed over the familiar panorama beyond him. He didn’t always know why he was granted these visits. Today he did. He knew that his nearness somehow sharpened and focused her Sight. Some change was coming, and his daughter would need to believe. Believe in herself and in her gift.

He was present for Iris in these moments, moments of need or transition, but caught behind that veil of the afterlife.

The old place. Home, he thought, and sighed as he surveyed the vista before him.

The place was bordered by the road on the south side, rough forest on the west, a stream was to the east, and along the north side was the forgotten meadow and pond .

The house was what his Grandpa had called country farmhouse Victorian, with its wide porches, deep bay windows and just a bit of fancy millwork. No turrets, a detail his mother often lamented, but with steep, peaked gable roofs with windows beneath each that allowed light into the old attic. Both house and barn had been given a fresh coat of paint, Andrew noted, the house a slate gray, with a dark pine green trim and with white on the bits of decorative trim and Victorian millwork. The barn and outbuildings were the same dark green and white.

Surrounding the base of each building and gardens were the excavated remains of all the granite boulders from around the farm, most during the initial clearing for the house and then the orchards. Some whole and round just as they’d been found, and others sledge-hammered or blasted into manageable sizes. Just decorative grayish stone, now, though, and showing no indication of the blood, sweat and tears it had taken to move and set them in place.

The sun set over the foothills as his gaze focused on the little family grove of trees. They had planted them together when he’d just turned twelve, each choosing their personal favorite from the seedlings that grew on their hundred-acre wood as Alexander had called it. At four, his favorite book had been Pooh, so they let him call it that even if their farm was shy by a few acres.

Some might include them all in the word tree, but each species had its own shape and varying shades of green, from Alex’s frosty-looking silvertip, his father’s bright green and long-needled Scots pine, his mother’s cedar tree, with its dark, fern-like boughs, and his own choice, the sturdy noble fir. And there was Iris’s blue spruce, planted so many years later, and so small nestled in beside the others.

He could say he looked forward to these times of vision into his lifetime world, a place so familiar and a daughter he had never met, at least in the corporeal sense, but that wasn’t quite right for this experience. Acceptance was. Need called him to this time and this place once again. Acceptance... maybe not completely, or otherwise, why would he feel that pulse of profound loss surge through him, a body with no heartbeat, no warmth, no substance?

Dead. Suddenly, violently, and only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was in the panic of dying he had prayed for these moments. Lord, let me help them when I’m needed was all he could think as his consciousness faded.

A colorful flit of movement towards that group of trees caught his attention.

Too red for deer, and too large for a red-capped woodpecker, he teased himself as he watched his daughter walk slowly past their family trees towards the row of impressive sequoias, the sparkle of the golden highlights in her bright hair catching that hazy evening sunshine.

That shabby old, insulated jacket...so familiar, Andrew took in the details, recognizing it as one of his father’s that Andrew had worn countless times. He could remember the smell of his father’s sweat and aftershave, along with, as his mother always teased, low notes of evergreen and sawdust, chainsaw fuel and coffee.

And he remembered, felt, the embrace of the old jacket against his skin, and now, the connection between their three generations suffused his being with warmth.

He saw Iris reach out towards a bough of that noble fir on her way, felt her love with that slight touch. Almost seventeen years old now, he thought, watching as she paused to aim her camera at the leaves or the boughs of long needles or clusters of cones, at songbirds, wildflowers, and trees along the way. She stopped at the edge of the driveway and raised her camera towards the tops of those sequoias. They’d grown to nearly eighty feet, their bright green heads and solid redwood columns striking against the deep blue sky.

Almost the anniversary of his death seventeen years ago, as well. In life or in death, he did not possess his mother’s gift of two sights.

In death, he only knew that his daughter needed him.

Chapter One

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IRIS GIBSON LAY on her back in the middle of the dusty driveway, aiming her camera high towards the tops of the tall sequoias that bordered the eastern edge of her grandparents’ Christmas tree farm. The hazy heat of the day had cooled, and now the setting sun was golden on those columns of red wood, their frothy evergreen heads against a background of sharp blue northern California sky.

Her grandfather had planted them forty years before, and they’d become an impressive border which divided their farm from the neighboring tract of public land, along with the old, weather-grayed rails that provided a more effective fence to the deer or occasional recreational hiker.

It was only three days before, and five hundred miles south at her high school in Pasadena, that Iris had learned that something was wrong with her grandmother. Not through her recently discovered powers of the Second Sight, but while eating lunch in the noisy cafeteria and scrolling through Facebook. One of her gran’s old friends had messaged in a regular post for all to see, I hear you’re laid up, Adele! You be sure to call if you need anything!

Iris had been on the phone demanding answers before she had finished reading the dozen other comments that followed.

Hi, Gran! What happened?

Grandmother was Gran now, because early during Iris’s second visit, she insisted that Grandmother was simply too formal, and they’d laughed their way through options until they decided Gran fit best.

Of course, Gran tried to laugh off her injury.

It was all the dog’s fault. One of his prized sticks was underfoot and I didn’t see it and stumbled, that’s all.

Iris knew Darby, her uncle Alexander’s old Cairn terrier mix. He’d been the first to greet her the night she showed up, unexpected, at her grandparents’ farm. He loved his sticks and was always bringing them into the house.

Your grandfather took me down to see the new doctor and I’m fine, dear, it’s really nothing to worry about—

Iris heard Grandpa grumble in the background. It’s a bad sprain, Adele. Sit down. It must be bad if Grandpa had been the one insisting on a trip to the doctor, Iris thought.

He’s making lunch for us today, too. Charles, she said, and then Iris could hear the phone shift, Gran’s voice suddenly muted, you may want to turn the burner down, dear, just a bit.

It was just like Gran, Iris thought, listening to the exchange, to be tactful even when her own lunch was at stake.

Iris recognized the sound of a chair scraping across the wooden floor in their big, open kitchen and dining room. And put your foot up. The sound of a smooching kiss punctuated the command just before Gran said, Fran’s bringing up dinner later—you remember my friend Fran, don’t you? Don’t worry, dear. We’re fine.

––––––––

Instead of worrying, Iris left the cafeteria and headed to the Counselor’s Office.

Everything at school had been so boring lately. Predictable. Keeping up with homework was easy. Volleyball season was over, and even her best friend Ashley was busy dating a different guy each week and annoying Iris about not dating. The only interesting thing to happen was the new guy who started a few weeks before, the tall, blond Australian. Even if Iris had been interested in Jake, she would have had to elbow her way through a crowd of too many others to stand a chance.

After reviewing her grades, schedule and upcoming assignments, she got the all clear from her counselor, who knew Iris very well and took the question about taking a week off school in her stride. That was the easy part. Now you just have to convince your mother!

Iris agreed, rolled her eyes, and bit her lip in a playful grimace. Her mother had relaxed in the last few years and didn’t worry quite as much as she used to. But the counselor was right, and Iris planned to have her arguments in order before she broached the subject at dinner that night.

After discovering her grandparents four years before, they had kept in close touch, although her visits to their place were infrequent and never long enough for any of them.

Iris knew her mother’s reasons for keeping Iris away from her grandparents when she was younger, and they were important—from her mother’s perspective. And even though the twelve-year-old Iris had been forgiven for striking out on her own to find her late father’s parents, and her mother now approved of the Gibsons, Jennifer was still never easy letting her leave the nest for any length of time.

Iris now knew it was the history with Jennifer’s own mother that had made her so insecure. Still, Iris was almost seventeen and would be leaving home soon anyway...right? But recently, when her stepfather mentioned universities in Northern California or in other states, her mother would argue strongly for one closer to home in the Los Angeles area.

That night, though, it was easy enough to bring up the news of her grandmother’s injury at dinner. Iris amused the family by relaying the conversation she’d had earlier, exaggerating the rough, rolling r’s of her grandfather’s Scottish brogue.

When Iris followed the news with the suggestion that she go and help out for a week, her mother countered with the expected, But school...

Iris repeated the reassurances of the counselor and promised she would keep up with her work and then it was Eric, Iris’s stepfather who scored by commenting, It’s good of you to think of it, Iris, especially since neither one of them would be likely to ask for help even if they needed it.

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Iris approached the house quietly, hoping their little canine alarm system wouldn’t give her away. She set her backpack beside the door and saw through the screen Gran sitting at the kitchen table, reading. One foot in a favorite old sandal was on the floor but the other, encased in a protective boot to support her sprained ankle, was resting on a pillow on one of the dining chairs. Otherwise, she looked the same as at Christmas, her hair in a choppy sort of pixie cut, a few more silver strands through the red, maybe. She didn’t wear dresses often, but now she wore a long, soft denim shirt dress, brightened with a necklace of colorful glass beads that Iris had given her last Christmas.

Her grandfather, his gray hair cut short, and dressed in his usual tee shirt, jeans, and worn old work boots, had one of Gran’s floral tea towels slung over one shoulder as he delivered a glass of iced tea to the table.

Gran looked up at Iris’s soft knock, her left eyebrow did that familiar haughty sort of lift before she realized who was at their door.

Grandpa’s blue eyes lit up and he reached for her as soon as she’d pulled open the always squeaky screened door.

Lass!

While enveloped in his hug, Gran recovered from her surprise.

"Iris?! Are you all right? What are you doing here?"

Laughing as Grandpa released her, she leaned down to hug Gran

I’m here to help.

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Yesterday, when she boarded the Placerville shuttle in Sacramento, Iris had wagged her finger at driver Pete Henderson, and told him not to call her grandparents this time and spoil her surprise.

She had been only twelve when she had boarded that little shuttle bus on her first surprise visit. She had run away from home, purchasing her bus tickets with the help of her best friend Ashley, a self-proclaimed computer-geek, and a piggy bank of saved up babysitting money. Compelled by a sense of urgency she didn’t understand and couldn’t explain, her bravery was thoroughly depleted ten hours later when she stood in the dark and cold in front of The Family Tree Christmas Tree Farm sign.

Mr. Henderson had called her grandparents to tell them about the lone little waif he had let off at their driveway and Iris had had to creep out from behind that sign to meet her grandmother for the first time.

Iris still had those urgent and unexplainable feelings from time to time, but only rarely as insistently as she had before coming to find her grandparents.

Most recently she had started to worry about Daniel.

She thought of him enough already, but now she had been thinking about, fretting, and worrying about Daniel—of all people, all the time!

Daniel Lazarro and his dad, Jerry, were the owners of Lazarro’s Nursery and Garden Center and longtime friends and frequent visitors of her grandparents. She had fallen in love with Daniel when she was twelve and he was seventeen.

At. First. Sight.

Now Daniel was twenty-one. She was still, for another few weeks, just sixteen.

He can drink and I can’t even vote yet.

She had forced herself to ask Gran about him the night before, risking that amused tone Gran always had when she mentioned Daniel, as she was fully aware of Iris’s infatuation.

Daniel’s fine, she’d said. Jerry mentioned he’s driving up to Golden Eagle Lodge tomorrow morning, where they’re busy rebuilding after last year’s fire. He’s picking up something for the nursery and staying overnight with his friend Sean who works there. You remember Sean, don’t you?

Iris had looked up the word infatuation and those definitions all said infatuations were short lived. One reference even compared it with a bad case of stomach flu!

Iris wished she were only infatuated. But it had been over four years ago now, and ... well, his eyes were like dark, smoky gray crystals, and sometimes when he smiled, it was kind of just a quirk of his lips and light in those eyes. He’d sometimes thrust a hand through his dark, almost black hair to brush it away from his face, which would incite another series of tsks from Gran along with an offer to get out her hair trimmer. She knew Daniel considered her grandparents like his own and remembered how angry he’d been at the people causing them trouble and how he had wanted to run the farm all by himself when her grandfather was ill.

He had also, literally, run to her rescue when he’d heard chainsaws where he knew no one should be working, and realized she was close to danger during her afternoon walk down to the stream. Iris had already discovered two strangers destroying rows of Christmas trees and, after calling 911, had been sneaking behind the row of thick Douglas fir trees, trying to get a picture of them when Daniel had run through the trees to find her.

Finally, gasping for breath, they had fallen on the lawn beside the big barn. Iris had fumbled through her phone for the photo she had taken just as Daniel pulled her away.

She smiled, remembering their hysterical laughter when they’d seen the photo. Caught the criminals right in the act in a hilarious candid camera moment. Hilarious because one of them had been trying to flee, running with a chainsaw in one hand and attempting to hoist up his low-riders with the other. Even more than the butt crack-revealing picture, it was Daniel’s expression and how he'd said, "Geez, Iris, you are un-be-lievable!" that had made her laugh until she’d cried and had a stitch in her side.

And then that little smile again and a wink on that Christmas Eve afternoon when the farm was saved from greedy land developers. She had relived that moment in her mind, well, a few hundred times, and even now her hand moved to the place over her diaphragm where she felt that same supernova-like burst of infatuation each and every time.

At the end of that first visit, he had hugged her goodbye in front of her entire family.

Awkward.

She had seen him since, of course, each year when she came to help at Christmas and sometimes during her short summer visits, but she was too shy to really talk to him. He was almost always quiet and reserved, except when his friends or her Uncle Alexander were around, and then he did talk, smile, and laugh, and goof off like the rest of them.

But... something... changed last Christmas. She knew she wasn’t alone in her feelings anymore. Daniel felt something, too...but what?

After a busy day of selling Christmas trees out in the cold, they’d just been sitting at the table after second helpings of dessert. The kitchen was warm, and she’d closed her eyes and rested her head against the high back of the dining chair, just listening. Grandpa and Jerry were leaning on the kitchen counter and chatting with Gran about the next day. Sean, Hamid and his girlfriend, and Daniel were at the table with her, and Sean was telling some long, convoluted story about the most recent love of his life.

She couldn’t remember the story, only that she had laughed and opened her eyes and saw Daniel looking at her. He wasn’t laughing, it looked like he hadn’t been listening to the story at all, just looking at her.

Their eyes met and held for a very long moment, or at least it felt that way to Iris. She thought about her grandparents, and how they seemed to be able to carry on a conversation by just looking at one another. What would her and Daniel’s conversation be... he almost looked like he was seeing her for the first time, and saying, Hey, Iris. She knew if she could be brave enough she would say, Do you know I’ve loved you for four whole years?

As for what his next sentence would be, her flight of imagination had run the gamut from, I’m so in love with you, too, Iris! to Sean’s such an asshat, isn’t he? Leading her to dizzying heights of hopefulness to the depths of doubt and despair.

What had he really been thinking?

Now, though, the name Daniel kept coming up. In songs on the oldies station her stepdad listened to, and a famous actor was constantly in the news lately because of a liberal speech he’d given after winning some award, in Bible readings when she went to church with Ashley and her family last week, and then the main character in the novel she had read on the bus yesterday. Each time, she would feel that nagging little twinge somewhere in her chest or deep in her belly.

Tonight, as she watched the sun set, that foreboding settled in the pit of her stomach, and she knew it would stay until she understood what was wrong and what to do. It was that kind of worry, that kind of knowing that something was wrong. But what could she do?

Even now, just thinking about him, the breath caught in her chest with another sharp little twist.

Chapter Two

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EARLIER THAT SAME morning ...

I should be back by late tomorrow afternoon, Daniel said, the phone tucked between his shoulder and ear while he crouched in the bed of his truck, checking for tarps and straps in the old, diamond-plated steel storage box. Because of his dad’s inability to resist a good deal, they had an excess of cheap tarps and adjustable straps in their shop and Daniel didn’t want to spend money on more by not checking his supplies first.

Yep, three of each, Daniel saw, nestled among assorted tools, ropes, chainsaw and fuel, a jug of antifreeze and spare bottles of motor oil for the old truck. He checked the caps and seals on everything before closing, but almost dropped the lid on his hand when his dad said, again, "And Hamid will cover the store? Why doesn’t he go up to the lodge?"

The line crackled and Daniel could picture his dad pacing wherever he was.

It was the third call that morning, and Daniel fought to keep impatience out of his voice.

Hamid’s got to stick close to home, remember? I told you his mom had surgery the other day—

I just think one of us should be there, Jerry interrupted, not hiding his own irritation.

Well, I didn’t know you were going to be gone, remember? And I’ll only be gone overnight, and Cheryl will be on site both days, too—remember her, your very efficient assistant manager? He didn’t mean to get sarcastic, but how many times did he have to explain?

I don’t want any problems, and all we need is to hand the city any more excuses to delay our building permit any longer.

"Hell, Dad, Hamid’s not exactly a stranger ‘round these parts and he has worked for us for years."

The delay in processing their application for a building permit had stalled the small addition to their store for several months, and they couldn’t seem to rouse action or answers from that bigot at the Building Division.

The guy better not base his approval on anything but the merits of their application, Daniel thought, but he didn’t bother saying that to his dad.

Daniel inserted the padlock through the toolbox’s heavy stainless-steel hasp and after snapping the lock closed, he sat on the toolbox to let his dad issue his reminders and talk out his worries one more time. The morning was heating up; even in the shade of the scarlet-flowered camellia tree, Daniel could feel heat radiating from the paved parking lot and smell the fragrance of the sunbaked rosemary hedge.

Beyond the hedge were rows of screen-canopied nursery stock, workshop, and storefront. And the house.

A house that lately seemed far too big for them and felt too empty to be a home.

In the background, the pulsing hiss of the sprinklers reminded him that it was time to turn off the water before the store opened. He glanced up and saw Hamid looking at him with amused sympathy. Daniel rolled his eyes but also gestured toward the sprinklers.

Hamid nodded and went to take care of it.

If everyone could be that helpful and everything could be that simple!

At Sierra Heights Nursery and Garden Center they were always busy and had been ever since his dad bought the place when they moved to Placerville when Daniel was five. But with the unusual April heatwave slowing their walk-in customer traffic to a trickle, now was a good time for him to leave for a quick overnight errand.

Besides, Daniel thought, he had told his dad about this trip days before Jerry had mentioned that he’d be estimating an extensive landscaping job over near Yosemite.

This place is pretty remote, so I’ll be out of cell range most of the time, his dad said, finally winding down.

Good, Daniel thought, standing up. Time to close off the repeating loop of his dad’s worries. He gripped his phone again before jumping down from the truck bed.

Got it. Same for me, Daniel said, slamming the tailgate, and thank God, he added silently.

Okay, son, see you in a few days.

Daniel waved to Hamid and got behind the wheel.

Don’t worry, Dad, Daniel said, before signing off, everything’ll be fine.

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Everything would be fine, he thought, pulling out onto the freeway, and heading east now that he was finally on his way. It was a long drive, up beyond the small town of Quincy and up to the remote Golden Eagle Lodge, which was, unfortunately, just inside the boundaries of the disastrous Dixie Fire. The lodge itself had survived, but many of the outbuildings like crew quarters and several small rental cabins, not to mention many of the trees and other landscaping features, had been destroyed.

Because his dad was using the new work pickup, Daniel had to drive his own eighties-era Ford. Another frustration. He loved the old truck for short drives around town and when they needed an extra, but he winced at the amount of gas the thing would guzzle over the next two days. Still, the vintage crew-cab had good tires, a new battery and it