The Hidden

The Hidden by Heather Graham




For family and family trips.

Road trips!

Dennis, Jason, Shayne, Derek, D.J., Bryee-Annon and Chynna.

Ghost tours along the way…

And a precious journey through time and American history.

In memory of Shirley Dougherty, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia—one of the most entertaining and informative guides I have ever had the privilege to know.

And to ghost stories…

History isn’t so much a list of dates and times as it is the tales of those who came before us, their failures and their triumphs, and their place in the time that led us to our world today.




Prologue The Colorado Territory Fall 1870

Nathan Kendall woke in the middle of the night, aware that something wasn’t right. He tried to tell himself that he was imagining the sudden sense of danger that had roused him from a deep sleep; he had done his best to leave the past behind, to embrace his new life.

And the woman he loved.

She lay at his side, still sleeping peacefully. Jillian Vickers Kendall, whose smile truly seemed to radiate light, whose every movement was silk and grace. The miracle was that she loved him—and that their child slept in a cradle at their side.

Jillian...and their child. Fear swept over him like a tidal wave.

He was instantly alert, afraid to move until he recognized the source of danger.

He wished to hell he’d thought to get himself a good guard dog. But at first there had been no reason to fear anyone, nothing to worry about except an angry bear.

There still shouldn’t have been anything to worry about.

He lay in the darkness, listening. He felt as he had sometimes during the brutal years of the Civil War, as he lay asleep in his tent on the cold earth, where the men slept wherever they had fallen in exhaustion after retreat had been sounded.

He felt as if the enemy might come at any minute, guns blazing and bayonets ready.

All his fears then had been of the enemy, of battle, guns and swords, the sound of horses shrieking, caught in the fire, dying in the mud. The sound of men screaming, the scent of burning flesh that coincided with horrible pain and despair.

But the enemy was no longer the enemy, at least not on paper. And not according to the greatest general the United States—and the Confederacy—had ever nurtured, Robert E. Lee.

When they’d lain down their arms, Lee had urged that they all sue for peace.

It had taken Nathan a few years to truly understand the concept.

His own home had been razed in the fighting. His parents had passed away during the war years. His only brother had been killed at Shiloh.

Peace, General Robert E. Lee had said. They were beaten. No more blood, no more horror. Find peace. But for some, many of them in Nathan’s company, drawn from what had become West Virginia during the middle of the war, the war hadn’t ended. For a while he’d fallen in with them. Brian Gleason’s home at Front Royal had been burned to the ground, Jeff Bay’s wife had died in childbirth while they’d been away fighting and Billie Merton’s father had sided with the North. All had felt they had nothing left but to keep fighting, which meant stealing anything that belonged to the hated Northerners.

He hadn’t thought it such a bad thing to rob banks owned by carpetbaggers. Or even to hold up stagecoaches as they moved westward, filled with more carpetbaggers from the North. He’d had no problem joining up with a few of the other men from his infantry company to become bandits—like Robin Hood, of course, stealing from those who had descended on the broken and bleeding South like a horde of vultures.

But then they had killed someone during a bank robbery.

And Nathan had wanted out. War was one thing—it was horrible and ugly, killing men with different ideals who just wanted to go home as much as he did. But that was kill or be killed.

Cold-blooded murder was another thing, and more than he could bear at this stage of his life.

Peace.