“The doctor came by around eight,” said Rob, stifling a yawn. “Lacy’s burns are pretty superficial. Just his left hand and shoulder where the tier pole hit him. The doctor said it was more of a gash than a burn. They’re keeping him overnight for observation because of his age. I went in to see him about ten and they’d given him something to help him sleep.”
“What about Kate?”
“They won’t let me see her. She’s in sterile isolation with seconddegree burns on the front of her calves. The doctor says she must have gone into fetal position instinctively to protect the baby. There’re first-degree burns on her face, neck and shoulder, and her shoulder was scraped where Lacy wrenched her from under the burner. And a concussion from the blast, of course.” He kept his voice steady and unemotional as he catalogued Kate’s injuries. “She’ll be in a lot of pain when she finally comes to. They’re afraid to give her anything too strong because of the baby.”
“The baby’s okay?”
“Too soon to know. Its heartbeat was too fast. That could be temporary stress. They think so. They hope so.” Rob gave a disconsolate shrug. “What about you?”
Dwight thought of all he’d done since the call came in after lunch that one of the Honeycutt barns had exploded in flames. Three people seriously hurt and on their way to Southern Wake, he’d been told, and he had reached the hospital shortly after the rescue ambulance to find Gordon Tyrrell dead on arrival, Kate Honeycutt burned and unconscious, and Lacy Honeycutt hurt and near shock, but lucid.
While the emergency-room staff worked on his wounds, Lacy explained how he’d heard the blast as he was stepping into his old pickup and how he’d driven the truck wide open down the lane to the blazing barn. Gordon’s body had been lying across the gaping hole in the side. Flames were everywhere. He’d pulled Gordon free but there was no sign of Kate and she didn’t answer when he called, so he’d run around to the back of the barn and jerked open the rear door.
“She was laying on the ground with a burner ’crost her shoulders and I tried to yank her out, but I couldn’t budge her and then I seen she was tied to the tier pole with a gag in her mouth and I thought I won’t never gonna get her cut loose. That s.o.b. was trying to kill her, Dwight! Why’d he want to do that?”
Across the emergency room on another gurney, Kate writhed in pain just below consciousness. “James,” she muttered, as doctors and nurses treated her injuries, “. . . no, James . . . don’t . . .”
Dwight had looked at the third gurney then, at the still form abandoned to death, and he began to understand.
“The SBI checked his fingerprints with the army and they confirmed it—he was James, not Gordon.” Dwight pulled the tab on the juice can and inserted a straw. “We searched his rooms at Gilead. Had to jimmy the lock on his desk, but we found Sally Whitley’s earrings. And Jake’s Vietnam things.”
“Somehow Kate must have recognized him.” Rob rubbed his eyes. They felt bloodshot and full of grit.
“Smart lady,” said Dwight, studying his younger brother. It had been a long day for him, but an even longer one for Rob. “You’re getting right attached to her, aren’t you?”
Rob shot him a wary glance, expecting the needle. It wasn’t there.
“You going to marry her?”
“If she’ll have me,” Rob said humbly.
Dwight finished his juice. “Oh, I imagine she’ll have you. Don’t you get everything you ever go after?”
“What?”
“Well, look at you. You took all the looks in the family. You’re educated. You know how to dress. Women always notice you while I look like the Durham bull in a pea jacket.”
Tired as he was, Rob had to laugh. In Dwight’s voice, he heard the flip side of his own jealousies.
“I always thought you and Nancy Faye got the family beauty,” he grinned. “I sure as hell knew who got all the athletic talent.”
“And how much good did it do me? You finished college, got a law degree. I’m just an ex-jock and ex-married cop.”
“A damn good cop,” said Rob. “And you’d have hated law school.”
Dwight smiled ruefully and for a moment their faces mirrored each other’s. “I know, but every once in a while . . .”
Rob nodded. “Me, too,” he confessed.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her first conscious thought was an awareness of dulled sheets of pain layered upon her body. Then the smell of antiseptics, the blip of electronic monitors, and the sound of moans.
Her moans.
She became aware of a presence beside her and opened her eyes.
The nurse was completely gowned and masked, but her eyes were compassionate. “How do you feel, Mrs. Honeycutt?” she asked gently.
“It hurts,” Kate whispered.
The next time she came to, the pain was still with her but somehow more bearable. She lay very still and remembered finding the pictures, realizing that Gordon was actually James, and then lying on the damp dirt floor waiting for death.
She knew she was in a hospital, though, so she was alive, but there was a growing desolation within her as she realized that the baby had not made it. There were no funny little flutters under her heart, no soft little turns and kicks. Only a small weight that lay still and unmoving.
She raised herself on one hip and physical pain shafted through her, but it was nothing compared to what she felt as her unborn infant’s body drifted to that side of her womb and she knew that the movement was due to gravity, not independent life.
James had won after all. Jake was completely dead now.
“Mrs. Honeycutt? Mrs. Honeycutt.”
Like the nurse earlier, the two doctors were clothed in sterile gowns and masks. “It’s Teresa Yates, Mrs. Honeycutt,” said the taller figure. “Your obstetrician, remember?”
Kate nodded.
“This is Dr. Yeh, who’ll be taking care of you.”
Dr. Yeh had chubby cheeks and shiny black eyes that almost disappeared when he smiled at her above his mask. His English was good, but his slight Chinese accent was filtered through Oxford by the sound of it.
“Sorry about the masks, luv, but we can’t risk bacterial infection. You are quite the lucky young woman,” he told Kate. “Your burns are much less extensive than we thought at first. They scrubbed up rather nicely and you shouldn’t even have scar tissue. You’ve lost a lot of fluids, however, and your body’s been under enormous stress. We shan’t need the heart monitor any longer,” he said, removing the leads, “but we’ll keep you on IV a few days. Make sure your fluid level gets back to normal. There’s a mild anesthetic in it.” He rattled off a chemical name that meant nothing to Kate. “It won’t take away all the pain, but we can’t risk giving you anything that’ll cross the placental barrier, can we?”
Kate closed her eyes as involuntary tears spilled down the side of her face.
Dr. Yates took her hand. “What’s wrong, Mrs. Honeycutt? The pain too severe?” “My baby,” Kate mourned. “It’s dead.”
“What?” She quickly fitted the stethoscope to her ears, laid the cool metal disk on Kate’s swollen abdomen, and listened intently.
“It doesn’t move,” Kate cried. “Not since I’ve been here.” And she bit her lips to stop the grief that threatened to spill from the very core of her being.
“Mrs. Honeycutt—Kate, listen,” said Dr. Yates. “You’ve been through an explosion. You’ve been burned, your whole system has suffered unbelievable stress. And that includes the baby. When I first examined you last night, the baby’s heartbeat was arrhythmic and speeded-up. This morning, it’s almost back to normal and he’s gotten very still. That’s completely usual in cases like this. It’s as if the body says, ‘Okay, cool it, kid. I promise you that he’ll be bouncing around like crazy again in a day or two. In the meantime, here!”
She put the stethoscope to Kate’s ears and miraculously the baby’s heartbeat was there between her own, like soft spring rain on a tin roof.
> They let her go home the day before Easter.
Miss Emily drove Kate’s car to pick her up. Lacy came along with his hand still bandaged and Mary Pat had to be cautioned against flinging herself at Kate when they tucked her into the back seat.
“My arms are fine,” Kate protested and hugged her little cousin tightly. “We just have to be careful with my legs for another few weeks.”
She was slightly disappointed not to see Rob with them. He’d been by the hospital at least once a day since the doctors allowed visitors, and he had sent a flood of flowers, books and silly get-well cards.
“He said there was something he wanted to get for dinner,” said Miss Emily. “What he wants, I couldn’t tell you. Bessie’s cooked one bowl of every food known to civilized mankind.”
“Yeah, and how many pies and cakes did you bring over?” Lacy asked her tartly.
“Well, Dwight’s coming, too,” Miss Emily said, “and he always was a big eater.”
“Me, too,” said Mary Pat, who seemed to have accepted James’s death without any real damage, as if the freedom to voice her misgivings about his identity somehow compensated for his loss.
“Am I really going to come live with you and Uncle Lacy and the baby and Aunt Susie and the kitties?” she asked Kate.
“You are if Rob can arrange it,” Kate promised. It had rained all that week and everything was lushly green. Every stem, blade and leaf was full of water and tender-fresh, and dogwoods and azaleas were at their peak for Easter. Sourweed reddened some fallow fields and toadflax made blue mist of others.
“Willy finished setting his tobacco this week,” said Miss Emily when Kate remarked on the fields of young new plants. “Bluebirds is nesting in every one of my boxes,” Lacy reported. “And I heared a chuck-will’s-widder two nights ago.”
Another season, another beginning, Kate thought, and contentment wrapped her as they drove past Gilead and turned into the lane. She found that she could look at the burned-out shell of the tobacco barn without the deep grief she’d expected. The inner scars were finally healing.
Rob and Dwight were sitting on the back porch rockers when they drove into the yard, and Bessie immediately appeared at the kitchen door to welcome Kate home and urge everybody to wash up.
“Biscuits’ll be out of the stove in ten minutes,” she warned, “though where I’ll put ’em, I don’t know. Won’t enough room on that table for an ant to walk sideways and here comes Rob with two more bowls.”
“The South’s not what it used to be,” said Rob with a perfectly straight face. “I found some frozen collards in your freezer, Mother, but I had to try six different grocery stores before I found any chit’lings.”
“Chit’lings!” Bessie said disgustedly. “Whoever heard of collard greens and chit’lings at Eastertime?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said demurely. “They certainly make a change from flowers and candy.”
Epilogue
This was where they had spent their wedding night. His best man had lent them a four-wheel drive and they’d driven it up to Bendo Falls, then backpacked the rest of the way to a high meadow lake near the Canadian border.
That was four children and a second mortgage ago. Her mother had a romantic streak just as wide as theirs, though, and for an anniversary gift, she’d offered to keep the kids so they could go back up to the lake alone.
“Just don’t bring me home another grandchild,” she’d warned. The lakeshore was as deserted now as ten years ago and now, as then, the first thing they did was cut hemlock boughs for a mattress, zip their sleeping bags together and make love.
Later, they lay entwined and watched stars come out overhead while loons called across the lake and an owl answered somewhere in the woods behind them.
“I wouldn’t mind one more baby,” she said. “Would you?”
The curve of her breast echoed the line of mountains beyond the lake. “Another baby would be fine,” he said, thinking how good the years had been and how much he still loved her.
The air was chilly, but all around them spring rustled into being and a flock of late-arriving geese circled the lake with rich melodic honks, then splashed down right in front of them.
“This place is getting too damn crowded,” he complained.
She laughed and drew him to her and the smell of her hair was like sunlight on new-mown wheat as they made love again, slower and more tenderly.
Afterwards, he lay flat on his back staring straight up into the blueblack midwestern sky with his hand tangled in her hair. He almost never thought of those nightmarish nights in Vietnam when he’d been a damnfool kid who thought he could prove he was a man by quitting school, lying about his age and running away to the army, but the cry of the loons reminded him of monkey howls and he found himself remembering the steaming jungles, the smell of gunsmoke and blood, and those guys on that bad patrol when everybody else got killed. There was one with a bushy black beard, and a tall Southerner who’d been kind to him. What was his name? Jay? Jake?
He felt his wife’s soft breaths slow and deepen; and just before sleep claimed him, too, Willie Thompson thought drowsily, “Wonder what ever happened to those guys?”
END
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Bloody Kin Page 20
