Dottie had confided to Serena that she’d hoped to purchase the land once she cashed in some of her stocks in the next year or two. She’d been killed only a month later, before her vision was realized.
Serena blinked back tears and stared at the wall. Did Winnie really have red-and-green printed toilet paper?
The Christmas spirit that had entered her heart when she walked into Winnie’s home blew away in a puff of coldhearted truth.
She couldn’t bring Dottie back, and now it looked like she might not ever get the land, either. Jonas Scott might be the best kisser. But he played dirty.
She could, too. And it wasn’t really dirty. He needed to understand that she and Pepé were the farmhouse’s rightful owners.
She and Pepé were also the farmhouse’s future, connected to the past by blood. Once she found out more about who her grandparents had been, she’d show Jonas what legacy meant. The first aspect of her research would be the World War II tree ornaments.
Maybe she had some Christmas spirit after all. The ghost of Christmas past.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Remote island off Thailand
January 1942
FLYING TIGER HENRY FORSYTH sucked the juice out of the coconut he’d foraged from the jungle floor hours earlier, before the sun made its daily pilgrimage to the perch that bathed the tiny island in hellish heat. He let the murky liquid wash over his tongue as he lost himself in memories.
Sarah.
Dottie.
He’d see them again. He’d get home. It was only a matter of when.
He was on a dot of land somewhere off the coast of Thailand, his P-40 single-engine propeller aircraft the victim of a Japanese army air force “Oscar” machine gun. That damned Ki-43 had come out of nowhere, just when he’d finished his mission and was on his way back to home base in Burma.
It’d been well over a week since he’d been hit. He sat on the mat he’d made from palm fronds, up against the fuselage and under the starboard wing of his P-40 Warhawk. He squinted against the hot sun as he broke open another coconut. His fingers were rough and scratched his skin when he rubbed his eyes.
Ragged marks into the side of one of the metal tiles on the plane indicated it was his tenth day missing in action. Had he been reported home in a telegram as MIA? Or worse? By his calculations it was January 12, and even if the Japanese surrendered today, it would take the Marines weeks to find him. Followed by another month-long boat transit across the Pacific to Hawaii, where he’d await new orders. He’d never be flown from Hawaii to the States—he was too junior and he wasn’t injured badly enough to be discharged. His cuts were healing and the rib he figured he’d cracked in the landing would stop bothering him eventually.
Besides, he didn’t want to go home now, when the fight was just starting. He couldn’t wait to see Sarah and Dottie again, but he refused to go back without knowing the Japanese had surrendered.
He wanted to return to the fight so badly it made his teeth hurt. Or maybe that was from chewing through too much coconut.
He grinned at the jungle around him. It was tough not having the guys with him to laugh at his crazy thoughts. They were all just as nuts as he.
The tendons at his wrist still complained when he went to move his left hand, but the swelling had receded from the softball-size lump.
“I haven’t lost all my luck. I’m still alive.” He might find himself gone cuckoo if he kept having these conversations with himself.
The pile of gnarly dried branches he’d collected caught his attention. He’d picked them up on his walks to and from the beachfront. Without a working radio, and out of range even if his batteries hadn’t failed, he had no way, other than the stars, to be sure of where he was. His vision got clearer every night, at the same rate that the pounding in the back of his head and sides of his temples subsided. From the amount of dried blood on the back of his cockpit seat when he’d awakened, he must have taken a doozy of a crack to his noggin.
He wanted to have the comfort of a fire at night but even with a foggy brain he knew it could get him captured. It wasn’t worth it.
Sarah. Visions of her, naked on their bed, would give him all the consolation he needed.
Christmas. He’d missed it. Their first Christmas apart. He’d been granted a week of leave after his flight training, right before he got on the boat to Burma. He and Sarah had tried to make it a good week, like Christmas, but it wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be.
He didn’t have a gift for her this year, hadn’t sent her or Dottie anything, but he could make them one.
After his afternoon snooze he’d get himself a solid branch and create something using the knife that had made the trip in his flight vest.
* * *
HE ENJOYED MORE than a nap—when he awoke it was dark. The nights out here were darker than any he remembered. He knew that wasn’t really true but it was lonely out here. Whidbey Island got dark in the winter but as long as he could see the stars or the moon he never felt alone. Reality was that his solitude and vulnerability were closing in on him. He missed home.
Whidbey Island.
Funny how quickly Whidbey had gotten into his blood. At first he thought it was because of Sarah, as did his family back in West Texas. They thought he’d get tired of the long gray seasons and bring his wife back to the town he’d been raised in.
It hadn’t happened. After five years as a resident of Oak Harbor he belonged in the Pacific Northwest as much as he belonged with Sarah. Once Dottie came along, their family was complete, and he had no doubt they’d give Dottie a little brother or sister.
It had to wait until after the war, but he was going to see Sarah’s belly swollen with his baby again.
He would get back to them.
He wrapped his fingers around his pocketknife and he itched to make something for them now. Even if they never got it, just making it would bring them closer. At least it would feel that way....
Finally the sand reflected a silvery glow. The moonlight was the only light he could trust. Moving around wasn’t an option, either, as he didn’t know enough about where he’d landed to make traveling in the dark worth the risk of being captured or falling prey to wildlife. There could be wild cats and poisonous snakes, but he hadn’t heard any animal noises that concerned him.
He was too close to the beach. He should have moved farther inland. His instincts had told him to get to the trees, where he could hide better, which he did after he’d crashed in a grove not more than five hundred yards from the sand. His hunger made his stomach growl so loudly. Which was more of a risk—having his stomach noises heard by the enemy or risking capture if he went out to the beach to catch a crab?
Blue light glowed over the ocean water as he checked out the beach through the forest of palm trees. He ignored the feel of dozens of insects crawling over him, and the sound of their buzzing. His skin was getting bitten to hell, but at least he was still alive, and he didn’t feel feverish or sick. Both very good things.
His memory lit on the image of Sarah’s face when she’d held Dottie for the first time. Dottie had been as wrinkled as a tiny prune, her clenched fists fighting their way out of the yellow blanket Sarah had knit for her.
Sarah’s face had been like an angel’s, radiant with her love for their newborn. The smile she gave him when she looked up at him from their bed at the farmhouse, after all the pain she’d been through, had left him breathless. Sarah was his partner for life, and Dottie his dear daughter.
He had to make it back home to Whidbey. Sarah and Dottie were counting on him.
* * *
SARAH LEANED OVER HIM, blocking his view of the blinding sun.
“Don’t forget me, Henry.”
Her breath fanned his face and his erection demanded satisfaction.
“Did you hear me, Henry?”
She kissed him and he tried to pull her closer, but his hands, his arms, wouldn’t move. He had to accept her kiss as she gave it, his consuming need for her blotting out his worry that he couldn’t move his limbs.
“Sarah—ooof.” Pain shot through his shoulder and his mobility returned at the same moment he thought his arm was falling off.
“Hey, stop it!” His yell was lost in the mayhem that surrounded him. Three Japanese soldiers stood around him, one with the butt of his rifle coming down again, this time in the middle of his gut.
They’d found him.
He’d get away. He had to.
But escape with a dislocated shoulder and most likely internal bleeding wasn’t going to happen. Not today, not on this godforsaken island at the edge of Southeast Asia.
They kept screaming at him in Japanese. He managed to stumble to his feet, his left hand clutching his right breast pocket.
He had the mini P-40 he’d carved for Dottie. Its sharp edges poked through his flight suit’s fabric. If these jerks kept hitting him, the Santa Claus he’d carved in the cockpit was going to break off.
More yelling, more shoving, as they forced him to the beach. He remembered destroying his navigation and communication equipment and maps. He allowed satisfaction to warm his cold prospects. The enemy wouldn’t get any information from him.
He stumbled onto the deep sand and saw where they were taking him—to a small launch that didn’t look much bigger than his father’s lake boat. Farther out on the horizon he recognized the silhouette of one of the Japanese imperial fleet’s many transport ships. He’d bet his life that it had the word Maru stenciled on it, an indicator of the Japanese cargo class. He’d flown a mission over one just weeks ago.
It was a floating death trap. The Allied submarines were going to take all of them out.
So this was what it came down to? He’d survived being shot down, being captured, to be set afloat in a Japanese tin can that would see the bottom of the Pacific before it got anywhere?
More yelling. He was almost relieved he didn’t know Japanese. He’d probably kill at least one of his captors with his bare hands before they drove their bayonets through him.
The swift crack of something hard on his skull drove him to his knees, bright spots floating in front of him above the hot sand that burned his skin.
He saw the carved toy airplane fall out of his front pocket, onto the sweltering ground.
“No!” His hand reached for his one link to home, all he had left for Sarah and Dottie. The wooden carving disappeared as the butt of a rifle crushed first the miniature P-40, and then came down a second time to crush Henry’s hand.
Pain made him gasp for breath and his logic fought with the primal anger that enveloped him.
“If you get taken, stay calm. We’ll come get you. Don’t give anyone a reason to kill you.”
The words of one of his instructors spoke as if from the grave.
The only thing he had to hang on to was the one place in his heart they’d never destroy.
Sarah. Dottie.
Family.
Philippines
April 1942
“THEY’RE GOING TO make us all walk to the end.” Bill Payton from Alabama was behind Henry, his words floating up to Henry from time to time as they crossed the Philippine jungle. Henry still couldn’t believe he’d survived the hellish transit from Thailand to the PI in that floating piece of crap. Once they landed he’d been relieved to be shoved into a group of seemingly thousands of Americans and Filipinos. Until he realized that the Americans had surrendered and the Japanese were intent on getting them all to one camp miles away.
Henry had only known the Philippines as a point on the globe before. Now, he felt that the Filipinos, along with all their Allies were his brothers. He’d seen what the Japanese had done to the natives when the tank ship they’d transported him on arrived to the PI. They’d slaughtered them by the hundreds, right before his eyes. He and his fellow prisoners knew it was a warning to them. Comply or die.
Screw them. He’d outlive these bastards who held him captive. He’d get back home to Whidbey. In one piece.
“They need our labor. They can’t afford to let all of us die.”
He muttered the words over his shoulder to his buddy, hoping the sound of their feet dragging through the overgrown jungle would muffle their sound.
Thwack.
The pain never got easier. He’d have thought by now that he’d be numb to whatever the bastards wanted to do to him. Then he’d witness or experience another form of torture heretofore unimaginable.
Trickling dampness that flowed thicker than the perspiration that covered him from head to toe told him that his back had been sliced open. Henry knew he had to keep going, keep walking, as if he hadn’t been struck a potentially fatal blow in the dank, humid jungle.
Infection was omnipresent without running water and soap to clean up wounds.
“How much longer?” he dared whisper to the Filipino, Tommy, who marched next to him. Tommy spoke English and Japanese, but their captors hadn’t caught on that he knew the enemy’s language.
“They said something about Camp O’Donnell.” Tommy’s voice was sober, tinged with fear.
“I heard that, too.” He could make out the English words spoken by his captors amid the static of their language.
“It’s fifty more miles.”
Henry didn’t reply. One of their four guards had walked up next to them, staring at him with dark, angry eyes. Henry was willing to die for his country but no sense giving this loser a reason to take him out before his time.
Sarah.
He stumbled, the soldier’s shirt in front of him brushing his nose. The cloth was rough against his sunburned skin, and Henry imagined his face was dripping blood instead of the sweat that had been a constant companion since he crash-landed his P-40.
He kept his faith, given no other choice.
He believed he’d live to see more days.
* * *
THE THIRD DAY Henry noticed he wasn’t sweating any longer. You couldn’t sweat when you weren’t taking in any water. They weren’t allowed anything for their thirst. Stopping for a leaf, a flower, in the hope of finding a drop or two of liquid, was reason for instant execution. The most common form Henry had witnessed was decapitation.
Local Filipinos had tried to aid some of them at their own peril. Two rows of men in front of Henry, Tommy and Bill had been either bayoneted or beheaded when they broke ranks to run down to a tiny stream that paralleled their path.
Henry was surprised to see blood flow from their wounds. Who had anything left inside?
More yelling, more groans. He’d had to let his bowels go sometime during the afternoon and continue to walk on. Otherwise, he’d never get back home.
Would home still be there for any of them?
* * *
AFTER SIX DAYS they reached not where Tommy had said they were going, Camp O’Donnell, but a place called San Fernando. Henry didn’t care anymore.
He’d walked through hell and seen images he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Maimed, dismembered bodies. Men and women beheaded, cut down in the midst of a breath. Women’s bodies littered the road in some spots and had clearly been raped before their deaths. How could people do this to one another?
He was afraid to bring his memories of Sarah and Dottie to his awareness. Afraid of tainting them with the evil he walked through. Without them, he feared for his survival.
* * *
AT HIS FIRST sight of the cargo train, Henry wanted to cry with relief. Finally, a better mode of travel. No more walking through the thick heat. They’d get to the camp sooner, wouldn’t they?
His relief lasted until he was shoved into a car, not knowing
if the air could reach them once the Japanese shut the metal doors. If there’d be enough air for all of them. How many would live until the end of the train ride?
* * *
HENRY SPLIT THE pile of rocks one by one, never looking up from his task. No talking allowed. He and his fellow prisoners had to wait until nighttime to attempt communication or risk death.
His back muscles screamed but he was past the point of letting the pain stop him. Instead, it drove him, proved he was still alive.
He still had hope—hope he’d make it back to Sarah.
Camp O’Donnell had the American sign on it, but the flag with the rising sun flew over what had been American soil only days earlier.
Where the hell was MacArthur?
By Henry’s count they’d left the port with at least ninety to one hundred men. Thirty of them stumbled into Camp O’Donnell. Maybe a few more had survived, but the train journey had shoved together men from different groups.
He’d never been in a place so crowded, not even during training exercises on the ground back in California. He and thousands of his closest allies were summarily hosed down and left to dry. Exhaustion seeped from every pore, and the stink of his skin should have made him vomit on the spot. In some macabre way he was adjusting to the constant rank smells, the sight of the sore-riddled faces of his brothers-in-arms.
Henry watched his captors as they ordered him from one impossible labor task to another. Did they have families? How could anyone with a mother treat a fellow human being this way?
His stomach sank as he comprehended the awful truth. He’d probably have years to contemplate that question. If his body held out.
Watching his brothers fight alongside him, he learned that it wasn’t his body’s failure that would get him in the end. It would be the death of his spirit.
His loss of hope that he’d ever see Sarah or Dottie again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Whidbey Island
Harlequin Superromance November 2014 - Box Set 2 of 2: Christmas at the CoveNavy ChristmasUntil She Met Daniel Page 38
