Mountain Madness

A marriage unravels amid the hush of blue-ridged pines, where Enid and Jack Radnor’s brittle civility snaps like frostbitten twigs. She flees their rented lodge, stumbling into the orbit of Polly Mason—radiant, feral, half-siren, half-saint—and Martin Hale, whose gaze carries the weight of unspoken indictments. Their cabin, a clapboard chapel of secrets, perches above a gorge that swallows echoes. While locomotive whistles shriek of a gold-heist, the sheriff’s posse pins guilt on Martin; innocence must be clawed from the granite jaws of circumstantial evidence. Then Enid vanishes, her silhouette erased from the cliff-line, her body later discovered crumpled like a discarded love-letter. Matriarchal memory arrives in the form of Enid’s mother, whose past entanglement with Polly’s father—an old flame she once scorched—reignites, revealing that these mountains have long hoarded betrayals. Lovers orbit separations both fresh and fossilized until, bruised but lucid, Enid and Jack recognize the chasm between pride and perdition, sealing their reconciliation against a horizon that finally relinquishes its ghosts.