Rain Forest Rose

by Terri Farley

  It was late afternoon when Cade showed up.

  He emerged from the rain forest so silently, he was in the middle of Darby’s camp before she noticed him.

  Had he gotten over feeling guilty about this place where Ben died? Darby wondered. Or maybe he’d gotten over his sadness.

  It wasn’t like he was a suspect, Darby thought, but all the same it was relief that made Darby blurt out her news before Cade said a word.

  “Megan’s horse isn’t dead. I found her. Well, saw her. At least, I’m pretty sure I did.”

  Cade went so still, he could have passed for one of the rain-forest trees.

  “A rose roan,” Darby rushed on, “about fourteen hands high, with a little”—Darby pinwheeled her index finger on her forehead—“twirl in her hair, here.”

  Cade carried a rifle. Darby blinked, amazed she’d just noticed.

  Everything about the young paniolo was meant to blend in. His pullover shirt was a shade between buff and faded green. His tanned face was a close match for his brown hat. His short, vaquero-style braided hair, which would have looked startlingly blond, was tucked up, out of sight.

  His arms hung at his sides. He held a packet of something that smelled delicious and was undoubtedly for her in his right hand. But he gripped a rifle in his left.

  “That horse skull wasn’t hers,” Cade muttered, and Darby had been so distracted, it took her a few seconds to remember the rumor of Cade’s stepfather having a horse skull nailed up on a barn wall.

  She thought of the tales of the Shining Stallion, too, a horse Jonah had reportedly shot, and Cade’s comment didn’t make much sense to her.

  “Why would the skull be hers? Didn’t it show a bullet hole?”

  “Forget it.” Cade gave his head a quick shake. “How long ago?” He pushed the food parcel at Darby. “I’ve got to go get her.”

  “Let’s do it together,” Darby said, and though she took the parcel, she ignored the aroma of chicken and sesame.

  “I lost her; I’ll catch her,” Cade snapped.

  “You lost her?” Darby asked. “Were you riding Tango?”

  Cade looked right at Darby, but his eyes lost focus. She had the feeling he was reliving that day.

  He looked almost bewildered. But just for an instant. Then his expression hardened and he said, “Megan wasn’t riding Tango and neither was I. Ben was….”

  And Ben died.

  “But I lost her.”

  With Cade standing right in front of her, Darby couldn’t find the solution to the mystery. If Cade said he’d lost Tango, he probably had. But why had Ben died?

  “Well, I saw Tango about three hours ago,” Darby estimated. “So you might as well keep me company while I eat.”

  Cade started to refuse, but then he lowered himself to sit on the sleeping bag she’d dragged out of her hut so they didn’t have to sit on the dirt.

  “Is that why you didn’t want to come out here?” Darby asked.

  Cade frowned, then shook his head. “I was helping Kimo fix the idiot water heater.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Darby didn’t expect Cade to be a chatty dinner companion, and he wasn’t, but she was too busy unwrapping the package of Auntie Cathy’s spring rolls to interrogate him any further.

  Her mouth watered with sudden hunger and when Cade motioned her to go ahead and eat, she did.

  For a second, Darby considered unearthing the chocolate bar she’d hidden.

  Feeling guilty and a little greedy, she didn’t, but she did offer him her last coconut cookie—which he accepted—before she bit into her spring roll.

  “Mmm,” Darby said. “Thanks for bringing this.”

  Cade gave a half smile. He sat cross-legged with the rifle across his lap. Darby trusted him to be careful, but the weapon made her uneasy.

  “Why didn’t you leave that on your saddle?” she asked.

  “In my scabbard,” he corrected.

  “Okay,” Darby said, biting her lip for a second. “Or why didn’t you just ride in here?”

  “You’re not supposed to ride in this forest. Jonah and your tutu don’t allow it. And there’s no way I’d leave my rifle unattended,” he said. The way he stroked a hand over his polished wooden stock made Darby think he was proud of it, but he added, “Besides, what’s the sense in carrying a rifle if it’s out of reach?”

  Did he mean Joker could spook and the rifle could fall? Or did he think he might need a gun?

  Darby didn’t ask, and Cade shifted the topic to her homework from Jonah. She was supposed to write down twenty-five things Hoku did tomorrow.

  “Anything?” Darby asked. “Like scratching her neck on the fence?”

  “Yeah,” Cade said.

  Darby thought about this as she chewed her spring roll and drank gulps of water. She could see the sense in Jonah’s assignment. Observing Hoku’s sounds and movements was something Darby did instinctively, but she’d probably think about them more carefully if she wrote them down.

  With her stomach full, Darby noticed the thoughtful way Cade broke a piece off his cookie. He popped it into his mouth, but Darby didn’t think he savored it.

  He’s still brooding over Tango, she thought, but then Cade began talking about something totally different.

  “In the old days, when paniolo were just getting started, they’d find bulls in the forest. They were too wild to herd back to the ranch, so they’d rope ’em and tie ’em to a tame ox overnight. The calm creature soothed the rough one, yeah? And when a rider came back out in the morning, he could lead ’em both home.”

  Cade took a breath and looked at Darby to see if she understood.

  What in the world did this have to do with Tango? Darby wondered, but she nodded, encouraging Cade to go on.

  “Just for a little experiment, me and Ben tried that….”

  Darby felt chills, thinking Megan’s dad must have been a kind man, to work with the abused boy Cade had been when Jonah first adopted him. In just a few words, Cade had implied that Ben had taught him paniolo ways and treated him like a partner.

  “Ben was nice to you,” Darby said.

  “Ben was nice to everybody,” Cade snapped, but he looked a little confused. “The only thing anyone could fault him for was being a little too thrifty.”

  “Thrifty?” Darby asked.

  “Pani said when they were sharing the bunkhouse, before Ben married Cathy, the biggest fight they ever got in was Pani refusing to wash plastic wrap and reuse it.”

  Normally Darby would have laughed, but Cade didn’t. He just swept his hat off and looked steadily at its woven crown.

  Now that she had him talking, Darby wanted Cade to stop. She could tell the memories hurt him.

  “Yeah,” Cade said, finally. “Ben was nice to me, and yoking the cattle together worked better even than we figured. Other cattle had come crowdin’ around here”—Cade gestured at the clearing—“waiting for us to bring ’em food.

  “What happened is, we were taking ’em up, hadn’t reached the lava rock yet, and there were pigs on the path. How could I not know that it’s always open season on pigs?” Cade sighed. “Anyway, the cattle would have walked on by, but a piglet got separated from its family and started squealing. The sow answered. The boar charged Tango.”

  The sounds rang in Darby’s imagination. Pigs squealing. Men shouting. A horse screaming.

  “Tango was broke, but still green. Ben sweet-talked her in Hawaiian—sounded like singing—but the boar ran right between her front legs and she reared. She went over backward on Ben.” Cade’s hand fisted, turning the rest of his cookie into a shower of crumbs.

  Darby sat motionless, waiting for Cade to go on. When he did, she had to lean forward to hear his voice.

  “He told me to go after Tango.” Cade looked over his shoulder as if watching his younger self gallop into the forest after the terrified mare. “Must’ve been fifteen, twenty minutes before it hit me. Something wasn’t right.”

  Cade gave
a dry laugh and slapped the stock of his rifle. “Yeah. Something. I came back and Ben’d already, you know, passed over.”

  Darby tried to see the scene with Megan’s eyes. Cade left Ben Kato alone and dying. But Cade wasn’t to blame, Darby thought.

  Ben Kato had been a paniolo. He’d told Cade to go after Tango, and Darby could absolutely imagine Jonah, Kit, or Cade himself putting the welfare of his injured horse above his own.

  Hoku pawed in her corral.

  “Fed your horse lately?” Cade asked.

  “Not lately enough, according to her,” Darby said.

  The joke was weak, but feeding Hoku would give Cade a few minutes alone. The dark red of his face said he needed them.

  As she tossed hay to the delighted filly, Darby thought of Tango’s scars. The rose roan had been gored under the belly and down her hind legs, but she’d survived. Tango must have learned lessons from her wild ancestors that had kept her alive, without human help.

  “That’s what Jonah wants for you,” Darby whispered to Hoku, but the filly wasn’t taking anything seriously except the stalks of hay, which bristled from each side of her mouth like huge cat whiskers.

  Cade blamed himself for more than Tango’s escape, Darby realized, and all of a sudden, the way Cade had looked on the night he’d come back from searching for Hoku made sense.

  Cade’s face had been dirty and maybe even tear streaked. He’d looked as if everything depended on him finding Hoku.

  That night, Darby hadn’t understood why he’d run Joker too hard, risking his own horse to catch hers.

  Now she got it. His determination to find the filly had had nothing to do with her and Hoku, but everything to do with the way he’d failed before.

  But Darby knew he was wrong. He hadn’t failed. There was nothing he could have done to save Ben, but she wasn’t good at stuff like this, talking to people about problems, so when she walked back into camp, she asked, “If a horse rears when you’re riding it, what are you supposed to do?”

  “Get on its neck,” Cade said slowly. “Put your weight forward.”

  He was sifting his words, trying not to say anything that might make Ben look bad.

  “Is that what Ben did?”

  Cade stared at the camp lantern as he pumped it up. It brightened his face, so he couldn’t hide his hard-set, misshapen jaw.

  “He was a paniolo. He did what was right.”

  “And you’re a paniolo, too.”

  “Not like him,” Cade said. He took one look at Darby’s face, and stood to go.

  “After a man is smashed by a horse, what could you do for him? What could he have done for you?” Darby blurted. It wasn’t very tactful, but she had to get the words out before Cade left. “You said you were only gone for fifteen or twenty minutes. No one could have galloped to the ranch and back with help in that time. And if you’d tried to get an ambulance in here”—Darby gestured toward volcanic rocks sharp as broken glass—“or even a helicopter…”

  “You think I feel guilty about Ben’s death?” Cade slanted the rifle over one shoulder like a fishing pole. “I don’t.”

  Oh, you do, too! Darby barely kept herself from yelling at him. Instead she wound the end of her ponytail around her index finger so tightly, it began cutting off her circulation.

  Cade put his hat back on and pulled it low on his brow, before he said, “I just lost Megan’s horse, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said, since there was no point arguing. She looked down at the black hair banding her finger and let it unwind.

  No matter what Cade said, Darby knew he blamed himself, partly, for Ben Kato’s death. And Megan’s daily hostility wouldn’t let Cade forget what had happened, either. But if things had happened the way Cade and Tutu had told her, why did Megan blame him?

  “I’ll take a look around for Tango before I ride back in.”

  “It’s almost dark,” she began, and when Cade shrugged, she added, “That’s right, you can see in the dark.”

  “Like a cat,” Cade admitted.

  “Like an owl,” Darby put in, thinking of her family guardian, the pueo.

  The correction must have pleased him, because Cade’s tone was almost cheerful when he answered, “If you say so.”

  But then Darby remembered the pig she’d heard snuffling around last night.

  “I think there are still pigs out here,” Darby said.

  “Of course there are,” Cade said. “They’re everywhere. They’re wrecking Hawaii.”

  “Could one have been at the stream? I saw tracks.”

  “Sure, and it’s nothing to worry about,” Cade said. “Things like what happened to Ben—they’re really rare. Think of the size difference between a pig and a horse. Just steer clear of family groups, or pigs with rabies, and you’ll be safe enough.”

  “Rabies?”

  Cade nodded. “Almost any warm-blooded animal can get rabies. Even horses.”

  Chills claimed Darby’s arms and she glanced toward Hoku.

  “I guess I knew it wasn’t just dogs,” Darby said slowly. “But where would a pig get rabies?”

  “From a mongoose, maybe,” Cade suggested. “And some people say foxes escaped from ‘Iolani a long time ago.”

  Darby thought of the clutter of gray cages near Hoku’s home corral. Jonah had mentioned his father’s ill-fated venture into the fox fur trade, but Darby hadn’t thought to ask what had become of the foxes.

  “Rabies is, like, an inflammation of the brain, right?” Darby asked hesitantly.

  “Yeah, it’s spread by bites. Or, saliva, really. You can tell an animal’s got it when it acts all nervous and excited. But that’s not always easy.

  “Once when I was with him, over by Mountain to the Sky, Jonah shot a mongoose he thought had it. Don’t think I would have noticed. I always think of a mongoose as pretty excited, but he said it was uncoordinated, chewing on nothing and drooling.”

  “Is that what horses do?” Darby asked, but part of her didn’t really want to know.

  “Yeah, but their back legs get paralyzed, too.”

  Darby winced. “And it’s fatal?”

  “Always, if they don’t get medicine right away,” Cade said. “But hey, the pig you saw wasn’t—”

  “I didn’t exactly see it,” Darby told him, and when Cade rolled his eyes, she snapped, “Not everyone can see in the dark, Cade. But I did see its tracks. And I heard it banging around.”

  “They’re usually pretty quiet,” Cade told her.

  When his hand moved on his rifle stock, Darby tried to shut up. She didn’t want Cade to kill any animals because of her.

  “Whatever it was, it didn’t have rabies.” Darby crossed her arms once she’d decided. “Think about it, Cade. Rabies is called hydrophobia, right?” she asked, but Cade just shrugged. “Hydro means ‘water’ and phobia means ‘fear.’ I know that much, and so anything with rabies would be afraid of water. And whatever I heard was sloshing around in the stream.”

  She was totally making this up, thinking aloud as she went along, and she didn’t mind sounding bookish.

  “It’s pigs’ nature to make wallows, and roll in the mud to keep off bugs or stay cool,” Cade pointed out. “What animal’s gonna let itself die of thirst with a stream right in front of it?”

  “I’d give anything for a library right now,” Darby said yearningly.

  Cade’s tone was gruff, but amused as he said, “With a lost horse and slobbering hog on the loose, you want a library?” Cade shook his head. “One thing you’re good for, Darby Carter, is a laugh.”

  Darby deflected Cade’s sarcasm with a smile. And when she thought of how she’d hoarded her chocolate, she didn’t feel guilty at all.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning Darby and Hoku walked into the rain forest. At their intrusion, birds and insects had hushed. With no other noise to mask their movements, each step sounded as if they were crashing heedlessly through the vegetation.

  Finally, they stopped on
a wooded slope, picking an almost level spot where they had a view of the stream where the pink mare came to drink.

  Darby sat with her notebook while Hoku rubbed her neck against a nearby tree. A pudgy, watermelon-colored bird glided near enough to study them, then landed on a branch. Down below, a gold-winged bird landed near the water and fluttered, taking a bath. Then other birds called and insects hummed, as if the forest had accepted them.

  Unsettled by her conversation with Cade, Darby had stayed awake much of the night.

  She’d been wrong about Cade. Ben had been riding Tango. Ben had ordered Cade to chase Tango, but after the first reflex obedience, he’d come back without Tango to help his mentor and Megan. It wasn’t his fault that nothing could be done.

  Tossing in the confinement of her sleeping bag, Darby had felt sick over her unwarranted suspicion.

  If Megan wanted to be friends with Cade, she’d have to untangle their misunderstandings herself. Or go to Tutu.

  Great-grandmothers, especially Darby’s, had learned a thing or two about human nature, while Darby only knew about studying. And talking to horses. When she got them to talk back, then maybe she’d be a horse charmer.

  I’m out of this, she’d declared, deciding to give up amateur detecting. Only then had she tumbled into a sound sleep.

  Now Darby sat in the shade-strained sunlight, doing something she knew she could do. Homework. Hoku raised her head from inspecting a path-side plant and snorted, but her ears pointed away from the bird bathing below.

  “Don’t try to distract me,” Darby said softly.

  Jonah wanted her to list twenty-five things her horse did. As homework went, it was a piece of cake, Darby thought. Working from memory, she started writing.

  1. shivers skin

  2. is picky about grass, so she carefully looks over what’s there before taking bites

  3. is not picky about hay, gulps whatever’s close, even if she’s walked on it

  4. licks her lips, then sticks out her tongue

  “I’m not sure why you do that,” Darby whispered.