STATUS

A Promise on Harkening Hill is the working and hopeful title of one of Timothy’s future novels. Still under construction, it was thoughtfully researched and outlined over many years.

PREVIEW

Accused of unlawfully killing a Blue Ridge Parkway visitor during a car stop, a rookie park ranger faces prosecution, loss of his dream job, and the loss of the woman he has just come to love.

Alleging the driver fired at him twice before he returned fire, the evidence did not support that claim. No gun was found and four witnesses who drove up on the scene gave incriminating statements. Park management even failed to believe and support him as did many of his coworkers.

But a young woman who ran a tiny snack bar out of her home near the Parkway did believe him. She had first hated him when he occasionally stopped in for a soda because he represented an agency that split her family’s farm in half and took much of it when the Parkway was built.

But her feelings changed one day when she saw him take $40 out of his own wallet to pay the annual pasture lease fee she was now required to pay on land her family once owned. A picnic with him later on Harkening Hill, one of three mountain peaks comprising the Peaks of Otter, cemented her love for him. That day he made a silent promise to himself about Ocie.

As the reporting deadline for his forced transfer to a maintenance position at Tuzigoot National Monument in Arizona approached, he made some more promises to himself.

He would never leave the Blue Ridge Mountains, job or not. He would never submit to arrest and prosecution for a murder he had not committed. He would not abandon Ocie. And he would eventually do all within his power to make right what the federal government had done wrong to her family.

He just needed some time and space to figure it all out. Alone.