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were on built-in shelves. She liked snuggling up on the cushions on the window seat and reading and watching the action on the river. The locals called it Fort Loudoun Lake because there was a dam about twenty miles to the west. But Scout called it the Tennessee River, because the river was here before the dam and it had river barges, and barges didn’t go in circles on a lake. They ended up somewhere on a river. Point A to Point B. On one tug she’d seen Chattanooga, TN painted on the stern, and she knew that was a long way past the dam, downriver, traveling through a lock in that dam and the others. A bunch of dams on the river, each one dropping the level seventy feet. She’d researched it, and on some base, explorer level, it excited her to think one could get on the river in her own backyard and travel over six hundred miles, meandering southwest through Tennessee into Alabama, turning back north, crossing back into Tennessee, past the Shiloh battlefield, and then into Kentucky where the river links up with the Ohio at Paducah. And from there, of course, the Ohio went to the Mississippi and the Mississippi went all the way down to New Orleans and beyond there to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Gulf, the Atlantic, and from there the world.
    Sometimes Scout wondered if she ought to consider a career in the merchant marine. Or if the lure of the Mississippi was from all the Twain she’d read.
    She’d read all the Twain there was to read.
    On the far side of the river, the original rocky side (her house was on the drowned farmland side created when the dam was put up during the early 1940s by the TVA), a barge was anchored, putting in a dock for a house on the cliff. The barge was old and battered and every piece of metal on it was covered with rust, but it had a crane and a pile driver to pound the long wooden poles down into the river bottom, and lately she liked to just sit on her window seat and watch that power in action, listening to the rhythmic thud during the day.
    Her mother complained every time it was working and had already called the TVA to complain about the noise.
    As if.
    Scout likened that to people who bought a house in the flight path of an airport and then complained about the noise of the planes taking off and landing. Speaking of which, while they weren’t on the civilian flight path to Knoxville Airport, only a few miles away as the crow flies, for some reason big military planes flew overhead every day, taking off and landing. She figured the air force just had to take a different runway from the civilians, just like the Nightstalkers hadn’t been able to fit in her old gated community. The military was just different.
    Scout liked the river and overall she rated this place better than Senator’s Club, although she missed her window egress and the ability to sit on the roof and smoke. For that, she now climbed under the wood fence and then went down to the riverbank and hid behind a wooden seawall the owner of the barn had put in. It was okay, but she had a feeling once summer really hit, the mosquitoes were going to be a bitch to deal with.
    She could smell the French toast, but it was a thin smell because her mother had held back on the sugar and cinnamon, which her nana would have piled on to make the heady aroma of a real, vibrant dish. One that would draw you downstairs, just to be in the presence of its creation.
    Scout also liked the new bathroom because a bunch of the plugs were built into the cabinets and drawers so her mother didn’t complain about tangled wires or scummy electric toothbrushes out in the open. If it was hidden in a drawer, her mother was of the “out of sight, out of mind” persuasion, at least when it came to her daughter.
    Scout hit the face of her iPad and music came out of the speakers built into the ceilings, which was also a cool feature. The whole house could be controlled by iPad, and not just the music: lights, locks, garage doors…pretty much