Skye: in the beginning — Merabeth James

Everyone wondered who she was and where she came from when Jake and his grandfather, Martin Tall Bear, brought the little girl to the sheriff's office in the tiny Appalachian town called Relief. She had been found sitting on a rock in the middle of a river way up in high country. Clearly in shock, she was unable to answer their questions as she stared vacantly ahead and hummed a tune that seemed to comfort her. The next day, the sheriff and his men retraced her trail with tracker dogs and found something so horrific they conspired to keep it a secret. The sheriff decides the best thing to do is place the little girl Jake had named Skye in the care of his daughter-in-law, Annie, in hopes that by having another child to nurture she would come to accept her own tragic loss…the accidental death of both her husband and young son. As the weeks tick by, Skye begins to recover physically though she has no memory of the past except in her nightmares. With no one her own age to play with in the remote mountain valley, she invents an imaginary friend…or so Annie thinks…until she discovers that her new playmate is her dead son, Jesse.