The Miracle Man

by Sharon Sala

  He tossed the note back onto the table. That, he supposed, was the confirmation of his appointment time; the lack of everything else had to be the sum of what his departure meant to her. Absolutely nothing.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair in frustration. How did she expect him to act? They’d known each other less than a week. Granted, the circumstances surrounding their meeting had been more dramatic than most. And it was true that you get to know a person real fast when you spend the night handcuffed together. That was a fact that Toni could claim. His situation was a little bit different, though. He had the feeling that if he could remember it, too, then he would be a lot better off.

  How, he wondered, did that old Chinese proverb go? If you save a man’s life, then he will be in your debt forever?

  That didn’t help his guilt. So he owed her his life, but that didn’t mean he had to give up the rest of it for her, did it? Surely she hadn’t expected him to just toss off fifteen years of law enforcement and try farming, Tennessee-style.

  “What the hell am I doing?” Lane asked himself. “She hasn’t asked a damned thing of me. Why am I reading so much into what she doesn’t say?” But there were no answers forthcoming, and no tall, dark-eyed woman to deny what he thought.

  Lane walked outside to the back porch and looked up into the hills beyond the house. A haze hung above the treetops, filtering the heat of the sun just enough to give the less cautious a dangerous burn. He stood at the edge of the top step, gazing intently into the tree line, watching for something, anything, that might tell him where Toni had gone. He heard nothing, and saw nothing but a lone turkey buzzard riding the air currents far above the house.

  As he watched, it dawned on him that this was part of her everyday life. She came and went to suit herself, and she knew that when she came home, no one would be standing on the porch watching and waiting for her to arrive.

  A slow, sick feeling settled near the center of his belly. Now that he’d met her, how could he leave, knowing that she would be alone? He’d seen the longing in her eyes for more than life had seen fit to give her. He’d sensed the emptiness with which she lived, although she would have been the first to deny it, especially to him.

  “Ah, lady, why did this have to happen? You deserve a whole man, not one who’s been crippled by life.”

  But admitting that he wanted to stay would be admitting the reason why. And Lane Monday wasn’t ready to face the fact that he was falling for the woman who had saved his life.

  “I'll get back to Tallahassee and this thing that I feel between us will fade,” he told himself.

  Relieved to see her coming out of the trees, Lane knew that he’d been lying. To himself, and to her, ever since the day that they’d met. He didn’t want to leave Toni Hatfield, but he would. And it would be one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. Maybe even harder than the day he’d buried his wife.

  And then he realized that Toni was running and he forgot to breathe. He could tell by the way she was moving that something was wrong.

  * * *

  The last thing Toni had expected to find when she left the house was a dead calf. And she knew that she wouldn’t have found it for days if the mama cow had not kept bawling.

  She’d heard it earlier when Laura and Judy were in the garden and she was on the porch with the baby, but she’d thought little of it. Cows bawled all the time.

  But later, after confirming Lane’s appointment, she’d stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air, hoping to clear away the misery of knowing that he would soon be gone. The first thing she’d noticed was the distant, but steady, bawl of a cow. Without thought, she’d struck out across the back lot, heading for the repetitive sound.

  She’d gone farther than she’d meant to on foot. If she’d known she was going to go this far away from the house, she would have taken the ATV. But the longer she’d walked, the sillier it would have been to turn around and go back to get the vehicle. Any minute now, she expected to find the cow and see that she’d worried for nothing.

  But that hadn’t been the case.

  When she walked into the clearing and saw the cow in the corral on the opposite side, she sighed.

  “Well, bossy, how did you get yourself stuck in there?” she muttered.

  And then the cow lifted her head and bawled again. Toni could see that her udder was tight and swollen with milk. It was clear that the calf hadn’t nursed at all during the day. It was then that Toni had started to worry. It was odd that the cow had gotten herself caught inside the corral, but even stranger that the calf was not right there, on the other side of the fence, bawling to get in to its mama.

  “I'm coming, girl,” Toni said softly, and started walking across the pasture.

  The cow lowed again. Toni imagined she heard sadness in the cry, although she knew that it was just her sympathetic heart working overtime again.

  “Do you hurt, girl?” Toni asked as she neared the cow. “It'll be all right. We'll get you out of there and find your baby for you, and you'll be good as gold.”

  Her hand was on the gate when she saw the calf at the edge of the trees. She’d expected it to be nearby. But she hadn’t expected to find it dead, or in its present condition.

  The left hind leg was gone from the carcass. She knelt and held her breath against the gory sight, needing to see, yet unwilling to touch.

  It hadn’t been dead for long. The blood was still red and fairly fresh, although the edges of the wound were already starting to curl and dry. If she could only see the...

  “Oh, God!”

  She jumped to her feet and staggered backward before slowly turning in place. She searched the surrounding tree line with a sharp gaze. The calf’s throat had been cut. Someone, rather than something, had killed it. And it was then that she realized the leg hadn’t been torn from the body; it had been butchered instead.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered, thinking of the Sumter family and the missing father. This was worse than before. She could understand starvation, but she could not suffer wanton waste. If they were hungry, then why on earth hadn’t they taken the entire calf?

  A sense of profound violation crept into her soul. Someone had come onto her property and taken something belonging to her, something that had depended upon her for food and care. Rage for that injustice overwhelmed her. She doubled her fists and resisted the urge to scream. And the moment she thought it, she felt a different sense of urgency. What if they were still here? That might explain why the calf was dismembered. Maybe they’d heard her coming and been frightened away from finishing the job.

  The cow lowed and moved toward the back of its pen. Toni paused in the act of turning around and cocked her head just a bit toward the tree line.

  But she saw and heard nothing. And that was when her anxiety turned to fear. Subconsciously, she’d noticed what her conscious self had not; there was a complete and overwhelming absence of sound. Not a bird. Not a bug. Not one thing was moving, not even the cow she’d just put in the pen. It stood, with its head lifted and ears up, looking into the woods behind her. The flesh crawled beneath her hair. It felt as though someone were blowing on her neck. She shuddered and clenched her fists, trying to regain some of her earlier anger.

  She told herself that she was imagining things. Then something popped behind her, a familiar sound she’d heard all of her life. It was the sound of twigs breaking beneath the steps of someone’s feet.

  “Oh, no, they're still here,” she gasped, and remembered that Samuel Sumter’s three oldest boys were in their twenties and nearly as big and worthless as their daddy.

  She turned in the direction of her house. Lane was near. Only minutes away. But she had the terrible feeling that he would still be too far to help her.

  Without looking back, she bolted from the corral, ran across the clearing and deeper into the woods, dodging trees and jumping rocks as if her life depended upon it, certain that they were coming after her.

  She ran unti
l her legs were shaking and her heart hammered in her eardrums. She ran until the stitch in her side was in danger of becoming a real pain, and she never looked back to see if she was being followed.

  She was out of the trees and coming down the hillside toward the house when she saw Lane moving toward her. Unaware that he’d already sensed she was in trouble, Toni wanted to shout, to somehow warn him that someone might be in pursuit, but there was no breath left in her body to talk, only enough to run. Until she ran straight into his arms.

  Lane caught her in midstep, bracing himself against the impact of her flight. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and held her fast against him. Even through the pounding of his heart, he felt her trembling and heard her trying to catch her breath enough to speak.

  “Back there...in the woods...dead.”

  “Shh,” he whispered, soothing her gently with the touch of his hand until he sensed that she was calm enough to make sense.

  And then he realized what she’d said. Dead!

  “Toni, calm down, honey. I've got you. Whatever it is, you're safe now. Take deep breaths and calm down so you can tell me what’s wrong.”

  The pain in her side ripped across her belly. “Oh, Lord,” she moaned, and jerked out of his arms before she doubled over, grasping her knees to keep from passing out.

  Seeing her in this condition made him crazy. He needed to know what was wrong, and she was in such bad shape that she could scarcely breathe, let alone talk.

  “Are you all right?”

  She groaned and nodded, and as she realized that she really was all right, she began to feel foolish. She’d reacted like a silly female, jumping to conclusions just because she might have heard footsteps in the woods. She hadn’t even looked to see. She’d simply assumed. Embarrassed by her behavior, there was no way she could tell Lane what she’d feared.

  “Thank God,” Lane muttered. Ignoring the dry pull of healing stitches beneath his blue jeans, he knelt at her side and cupped her face, brushing her hair away from her forehead and out of her eyes with one hand, while he cradled the back of her head with the other. The sight of tiny scratches swiftly turning red across her cheeks angered him. “Toni, sweetheart, listen to me. Did someone try to hurt you?”

  “No,” she gasped, leaning her forehead on her knees, intent on not passing out. “Just mad,” she said, and then motioned for him to be patient. When she could, she would get it all out.

  But Lane was not a patient man. “Mad at who?”

  She shrugged. How could she say who when she hadn’t really seen anyone, only heard what she thought to be footsteps in the woods behind her?

  “Wait. Wait a minute. Then I'll talk,” she said, still gasping.

  Lane had no choice but to wait, all the while seething at the thought of what had made Toni so angry.

  Chapter 7

  When she could talk without gasping, Toni groaned and then held up her hand. “Help me up,” she said, wincing as Lane pulled her to her feet. “Good grief, I won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

  “Damn it, lady, I've run out of patience. Start talking. What happened up there?”

  Toni sighed. All things considered, it seemed silly. She suspected that she’d scared herself more than anything.

  “I went to check on a cow,” she told him. “All afternoon I kept hearing her bawl. I thought maybe she’d lost her calf.”

  Lane frowned. “Why didn’t you tell me where you’d gone? I was worried.” The look she gave him was measured and cool, almost as if to ask, why should you care?

  “I was fine. I'm always fine.”

  He resisted the urge to shake some sense into her and wisely kept his mouth shut, waiting for her to continue.

  “Anyway, I found the cow locked in the corral up in the back pasture. I thought she’d accidentally shut herself in until I found the calf. Someone had killed it. I think they were butchering it when I came up.”

  Lane grabbed her by the shoulders, pinning her in place with his grip and the blaze in his eyes. His voice was barely above a whisper. “Are you telling me that you walked up on someone out there in the woods?”

  She shrugged. “Not exactly. I thought I heard something in the woods and when I saw the calf, I just assumed it was the Sumters.”

  “Even so,” Lane said, “thieves don’t like witnesses, Toni. The crime they're committing is called rustling. I don’t know what the penalty is for that in Tennessee, but I would venture to say it’s more than the thief is willing to pay.”

  She shivered, then tried to laugh. “I made a big deal out of nothing, Lane. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. But damn it, if they were hungry, why didn’t they take the whole calf? Why were they hacking it up piece by piece instead of carrying it off before they butchered it?” She frowned, and kicked the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “Even if they were hungry, I hate waste.”

  Lane spun around and headed for the house.

  “Where are you going?” Toni asked. When he didn’t answer, she ran to catch up.

  “Hey! I asked you where you're going.”

  “I can’t believe you even have to ask,” he muttered, and hit the back door with the flat of his hand, pushing it open as if it were nothing more than a piece of paper.

  Toni followed him into the hallway, and when he picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect him with the sheriff’s office in Chaney, she took the phone from his hand.

  “I can do that myself,” she said, and turned her back on him so that he couldn’t see the nervousness on her face when she retold her story.

  Even now, she could feel the danger that she’d sensed, and she wondered why her reaction had been so strong. The Sumters were capable of stealing, but nothing else—of that she was certain. Then why, she asked herself, if I'm so right, do I feel certain that I just outran the Grim Reaper?

  * * *

  Lane paced, waiting for Dan Holley to arrive. Toni tried to pretend all was well, but it was extremely difficult to concentrate on the mending she had in her lap when her fingers kept trembling too much to hold the needle.

  “When he gets here, I'm going out to the hills with you,” Lane said.

  Toni frowned. “It’s a long way from the house. Are you sure your leg is up to it?”

  Lane spun around. “Stop it!” he said, hating the fact that he was shouting at her. “Stop using my welfare to dodge the issue we have here, lady. My leg is fine. If it hurts tonight, then it hurts. It’s not going to fall off just because I walked too far.”

  “You don’t have to yell,” she muttered. “I'm not deaf.”

  “Maybe not, but you're the most muleheaded woman I've ever known.”

  Toni’s lower lip jutted mutinously. She glared, and received a similar look in return. The situation was saved by Sheriff Holley’s arrival. When Justin pulled in behind him and parked, Toni could do nothing but mutter. “Oh, good grief, just what I need, more men to tell me what to do.”

  She inhaled, then counted to ten before opening the door. There was no other way to get through what was about to occur.

  Lane heard what she’d said, although he was pretty certain that she hadn’t meant him to. He considered her quiet complaint and then frowned.

  Looking at the situation from her point of view, it probably did seem unfair. On the one hand, everyone assumed she could take care of herself and left her alone without help or company to do just that. On the other hand, let some trouble occur, and advice came from every corner, telling her how to mind her own business.

  Hindsight was sometimes an unfortunate thing. It left a person with the memory of having made a big error in judgment, and no way of changing the past. Lane knew now that he should have asked Toni what she intended to do, instead of charging to the rescue. But taking over was a habit too deeply ingrained within him for him to stop without a reason.

  However, he reminded himself, there was always tomorrow, then he stopped short at the thought. Tomorrow he would get his stitches out. The day
after that, he would be gone. For him, there was no tomorrow. At least not where Toni was concerned.

  “Damn it to hell,” Lane muttered, jamming his hands into his pockets to keep himself from putting them through a wall.

  But cursing gave him no satisfaction or relief. There was nothing he could do but play out the hand that life kept dealing; right now, that meant retracing Toni’s steps into the hills. And, he reminded himself, taking backup.

  He’d lost his gun during the plane crash, but thanks to Reese and Palmer, he now had another one. He’d never been on duty without one, and so he wore the gun out of habit. When he stepped out onto the porch and unconsciously took a stand behind the woman on the steps, it felt right to be armed. Without knowing, his heart had done what his mind had refused to accept. He was already behind her...all the way.

  * * *

  Toni leaned against the corral and watched the men combing the area where she’d found the calf.

  The animal was gone now. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised.

  I knew there was someone in the woods, and I was right. It had to be the Sumters after something to eat.

  “Calf’s gone,” Justin reaffirmed, then leaned against the corral beside his sister. “Damn those Sumters, anyway. Someone ought to run them plumb out of the country, or lock them up for life, whichever comes first.”

  Toni frowned. Men’s attitudes about things differed greatly from women’s. There was no doubt about it. The way she looked at it, using energy on hate was wasted when a more viable solution to the Sumter problem could be found, such as relocating Samuel’s family to a city where the younger children could go to school regularly, and where the older ones could find work. However, logic and reasoning did not necessarily go hand in hand with Justin’s sense of justice.

  “Yes, Justin. I know that the calf is gone.”

  “Are you going to press charges?” he asked.

  “Against whom? I didn’t see anyone. I can’t blame someone on suspicion alone.”