by Sharon Sala
Their errands had taken longer than she’d expected, and she’d told herself more than once during the day that if she’d known all her father had planned to do, she wouldn’t have gone. She leaned over the side of the truck bed and lifted the nearest sack into her arms.
“Right on time,” Rafe shouted, and motioned his son to the sacks of groceries yet to be unloaded from the back of their truck. “Hey, boy, give us a hand.”
J.C. came running. “Daddy! Look! I found another arrowhead today.”
Both Rafe and Glory turned to admire his latest find. Collecting them had been J.C.’s passion since he’d found his first years ago. Now he was an avid collector and had more than one hundred of them mounted in frames and hanging on the walls of his room.
“That’s a good one,” Glory said, running her fingers over the hand-chipped edge, and marveling at the skill of the one who had made it. In spite of its obvious age, it was perfectly symmetrical in form.
“Groceries are gonna melt,” Rafe warned.
J.C. grinned and winked at his little sister, then dropped the arrowhead into his pocket. He obliged his father by picking up a sack and then stopping to dig through the one Glory was holding.
“Hey, Morning Glory, did you remember my Twinkies?”
The childhood nickname made her smile as she took the package from her sack and dropped it into the one he was holding. But the urge to laugh faded as quickly as the world that began to slip out of focus.
Common sense told her that she was standing in the yard surrounded by those who loved her best, but it wasn’t how she felt. She could barely hear her father’s voice above the sound of her own heart breaking. Every breath that she took was a struggle, and although she tried over and over to talk, the words wouldn’t come.
Struggling to come out of the fugue, she grabbed hold of the truck bed, desperate to regain her sense of self. Vaguely, she could hear her brother and father arguing over whose turn it was to do the dishes after supper. When sanity returned and she found the words to speak, they were at the back porch steps.
“Daddy! Wait,” Glory shouted, as her father slipped the key in the lock.
Even from where she stood, she knew it was going to be too late.
“Hey, look! I think I just found your keys!” J.C. shouted, laughing and pointing at the puppy, coming out of the barn behind them.
It was reflex that made Glory turn. Sure enough, keys dangled from the corner of the pup’s mouth as he chewed on the braided leather strap dangling from the ring.
And then it seemed as if everything happened in slow motion. She spun, her father’s name on her lips as she started toward the house. In a corner of her mind, she was vaguely aware of J.C.’s surprised shout, and then the back door flew off the hinges and into the bed of the truck. The impact of the explosion threw Glory across the yard where she lay, unconscious.
When reason returned, the first things she felt were heat on her back, and the puppy licking her face. She groaned, unable to remember how she’d come to this position, and crawled to her knees before staggering to her feet. Something wet slid down her cheek, and when she touched it, her fingers came away covered in blood. And then she remembered the blast and spun.
She kept telling herself that this was all a bad dream, and that her brother would come out of the door with one Twinkie in his mouth and another in his hand. But it was impossible to ignore the thick, black coils of smoke snaking up from the burning timbers, marking the spot that had once been home.
Still unable to believe her eyes, she took several shaky steps forward.
“Daddy?” He didn’t answer. Her voice rose and trembled as she repeated the cry. “Daaddee! No! No! God, no! Somebody help me!”
Something inside the inferno exploded. A fire within a fire. It was then that she began to scream.
Terror. Horror. Despair.
There were no words for what she felt. Only the devastating knowledge that she’d seen the end of those she loved most and had not been able to stop it.
She fell to her knees as gut-wrenching tears tore up her throat and out into the night. Heat seared her skin and scorched her hair as she considered walking into what was left of the pyre. All of her life she’d been separated from the crowd by the fact that she was different, and the only people who’d accepted and loved her for herself had been her father and brother. If they were gone, who would love her now?
And while she stared blindly at the orange and yellow tongues licking at what was left of her home, another image superimposed itself over the flames, and Glory found herself straining toward it, unable to believe what she saw.
A man! Walking through their house, running from room to room. She saw the backs of his hands as they hovered above the stove. Saw them twist…saw them turn…saw them kill. And then he ran, and all that she saw was the silhouette of his back as he moved out the door. The hair crawled on the back of her neck as a reality only Glory understood suddenly surfaced.
Oh, my God! This wasn’t an accident!
It was a gut reaction, but she spun in fear, searching for a place to hide. In the dark, she stumbled, falling to her knees. Still in a panic to hide, she crawled, then ran, aiming for the dark, yawning maw of the barn door. Only when she was inside did she turn to look behind her, imagining him still out there…somewhere.
Why would someone want us dead? And no sooner had the thought come, than her answer followed. It wasn’t them. It was me who was supposed to die.
She slipped even farther inside the barn, staring wide-eyed out into the night, unable to believe what her mind already knew. The guilt that came with the knowledge could have driven Glory over the edge of reason. But it didn’t. She couldn’t let her father and brother’s killer get away with this.
But who…and why? Who could possibly care if she lived or died?
Instinct told her that it wasn’t a stranger. But instinct was a poor substitute for facts, and Glory had none. The only thing she knew for sure was that she needed a plan, and she needed time.
There was no way of knowing how long she’d been unconscious, but neighbors were bound to see the fire and could be arriving any minute. A sense of self-preservation warned her that she must hide until she found someone she could trust. Within a day or so, the killer would know that two, not three people, had died in the fire, and then whoever had tried to hurt her would come looking again.
“Oh, God, I need help,” she moaned, and then jumped with fright as something furry rubbed up against her leg. She knelt, wrapping her arms around the puppy’s neck, and sobbed. “You’re not what I needed, but you’re all I’ve got, aren’t you, fella?”
A wet tongue slid across her cheek, and Glory moaned as the puppy instinctively licked at the blood on her face. She pushed him away, then stood. Her eyes narrowed above lashes spiked with tears, her lips firmed, her chin tilted as she stared at the fire.
Daddy…J.C…. I swear on Mother’s grave…and on yours, that I will find him. All I need is a little help.
No sooner had that thought come than an image followed. A man’s face centered within her mind. A man who had been a soldier. A man who understood killing. A stranger who, right now, Glory trusted more than friends.
If I knew where you were, Wyatt Hatfield, I would call in a debt.
But the fantasy of finding a stranger in a world full of people was more than she could cope with. Right now she had to hide, and there was no family left alive to help her.
Except…
She took a deep breath. “Granny.”
The puppy heard the tone of her voice, and whined softly from somewhere behind her, uncertain what it was that she wanted, yet aware that a word had been uttered it did not understand.
Granny Dixon’s house sat just across the hollow as it had for the past one hundred years, a small shelter carved out of a dense wilderness of trees and bush. As a child, Granny had been Glory’s only link with another female, and she had often spent the day in her lap, lulled by the sound
of her voice and the stories she would tell.
Glory took a deep breath and closed her eyes, imagining she could hear her granny’s voice now.
When you tire of them menfolks, child, you just come to old Granny. We women hafta stick together, now, don’t we?
Her saving grace was that Granny Dixon’s cabin was just as she’d left it. Its presence could be the answer to her prayer. She was counting on the fact that few would remember its existence. Rafe had promised his mother that he wouldn’t touch or change a single thing in her home until they’d put her in the ground. In a way, Glory was thankful that Granny’s mind was almost gone. At least she would be spared the grief of knowing that her only son and grandson had beat her to heaven.
And while the cabin was there, food was not. Glory made a quick trip through the root cellar, using the light from the fire as a guide, she ran her fingers along the jars until she found what she wanted. She came up and out with a jar of peaches in one hand and a quart of soup in the other. It would be enough to keep her going until she figured out what to do.
And then she and the puppy vanished into the darkness of the tree line. Minutes later, the sounds of cars and trucks could be heard grinding up the hill. Someone had seen the fire. Someone else would rescue what was left of her loved ones. Glory had disappeared.
Chapter 3
The scream came without warning. Right in the middle of a dream he could no longer remember. Wyatt sat straight up in bed, his instinct for survival working overtime as he imagined Toni or the baby in dire need of help. In seconds, he was pulling on a pair of jeans and running in an all-out sprint as he flew out of the door.
He slid to a stop in the hallway outside the baby’s room and then looked inside. Nothing was amiss. He sighed with relief at the sight of the toddler asleep on her tummy with her blanket clutched tightly in one fist. She was fine, so Toni hadn’t screamed about her. That meant…
Fearing the worst, he crept farther down the hall, praying that he wouldn’t surprise a burglar in the act of murder, and wondering why on earth Lane Monday wasn’t raising all kinds of hell in response to his wife’s screams.
More than a year ago, Lane had taken down a man the size of a mountain to save his sister’s life. He couldn’t imagine Lane letting someone sneak up on them and do his family harm. Yet in Wyatt’s mind, he knew that whatever had made Toni scream couldn’t have been good.
The door was ajar so Lane or Toni could hear the baby if she cried. Wyatt pushed it aside and looked in. Lane was flat on his back and sound asleep, with Toni held gently, but firmly, within the shelter of one arm. Even from here, Wyatt could hear the soft, even sounds of their breathing.
“Thank God,” he muttered, and eased out of their room the same way he’d come in, trying to convince himself that he’d been dreaming. But it sounded so real.
He made his way through the house, careful not to step on the boards that creaked, and headed for the kitchen to get a drink. He wasn’t particularly thirsty, but at the moment, crawling back in that bed did not hold much interest. His heart was still pounding as he took a glass from the cabinet and ran water in the sink, letting it cool in the pipes before filling a glass.
The water tasted good going down, and panic was subsiding. If he stretched the facts, he could convince himself that his heart rate was almost back to normal. It was just a bad dream. That was all. Just a bad dream.
Wyatt.
“What?”
He spun toward the doorway, expecting Toni to be standing there with a worried expression on her face. There was nothing but a reflection of the outside security light glancing off the living room window and onto the floor.
Wyatt…Wyatt Hatfield.
His stomach muscles clenched, and he took a deep breath. “Jesus Christ.”
Help me.
He started to shake. “This isn’t happening.”
God…Oh, God…help. I need help.
He slammed the glass onto the cabinet and stalked out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, inhaling one after the other of deep, lung-chilling breaths of cool night air. When he could think without wanting to throw up, he sat down on the steps with a thump and buried his face in his hands, then instantly yanked them off his face, unable to believe what he’d felt.
His hands were cold…and they were wet. He lifted his fingers to his cheeks and traced the tracks of his tears.
“I’m crying? For God’s sake, I’m crying? What’s wrong with me? I don’t cry, and when I do, I will sure as hell need a reason.”
But anger could not replace the overwhelming sense of despair that was seeping into his system. He felt weak and drained, hopeless and helpless. The last time he’d felt this down had been the day he’d regained consciousness in a Kentucky hospital and seen the vague image of his sister’s face hovering somewhere above his bed.
He remembered thinking that he’d known his sister was an angel to have put up with so many brothers all of her life, but he’d never imagined that all angels in heaven looked like her. It was the next day before he realized that he hadn’t died, and by that time, worrying about the faces of angels had become secondary to the mind-bending pain that had come to stay.
Out of the silence of the night, a dog suddenly bugled in a hollow somewhere below Chaney Creek. The sound was familiar. He shuddered, trying to relax as his nerves began to settle. This was something to which he could relate. Someone was running hounds. Whether it was raccoon, bobcat or something else that they hunted, it rarely mattered. To the hunters, the dogs and the hunt were what counted.
He listened, remembering days far in his past when he and his brothers had done the same, nights when they’d sat around a campfire swapping lies that sounded good in the dark, drinking coffee made in a pot that they wouldn’t have fed the pigs out of in the light of day and listening to their hounds running far and wide across the hills and in the deep valleys.
He sighed, then dropped his head in his hands, wishing for simpler times, saner times. He wondered where he’d gone wrong. He’d married Shirley full of good intent, then screwed up her life, as well as his own.
And now this!
He didn’t know what to think. He’d survived a wreck that should have killed him. But if it had messed with his head in a way they hadn’t expected, then making a new life for himself had suddenly become more complicated than he’d planned.
Help. I need help.
He lifted his head, like an animal sniffing the air. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed to dark, gleaming slits. This time, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was wide-awake and barefoot on his sister’s back porch. And he knew what he heard. The voice was inside his head. He shivered, then shifted his gaze, looking out at the darkness, listening…waiting.
When the first weak rays of sunlight changed the sky from black to baby blue, Wyatt got to his feet and walked into the house. It had taken all night, and more soul-searching than he’d realized he had in him, but he knew what he had to do.
Somewhere down the hall, Joy babbled, and Toni laughed. Lane smiled to himself at the sound, buttoning his shirt on his way to the kitchen to start the coffee. He walked in just in time to see Wyatt closing the back door.
“Up kinda early, aren’t you, buddy?” Lane asked, and then froze at the expression on Wyatt’s face, grabbing him by the arm. “What’s wrong?”
Wyatt tried to explain, but it just wouldn’t come. “I need to borrow one of your cars.”
Lane headed for the coffeepot, giving himself time to absorb the unexpected request, and wondering about the intensity of Wyatt’s voice. Yet refusing him was not a consideration.
“It’s yours,” he said.
Measuring his words, along with coffee and water, Lane turned on the coffeemaker before taking Wyatt to task. “Mind telling me where you’re going so early in the morning? This isn’t exactly Memphis, and to my knowledge there’s no McDonald’s on the next corner cooking up sausage biscuits.”
“I’ve got to go,” Wyatt
repeated. “Someone needs me.”
Lane’s posture went from easy to erect. “Why didn’t you say so? I’ll help.”
Wyatt shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. Hell, for that matter, I don’t understand. All I know is, last night while I was wide-awake and watching dark turn to day, someone kept calling my name.”
The oddity of the remark was not lost on Lane, but trespassing on another man’s business was not his way.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Lane asked.
Wyatt eyed his brother-in-law, wondering if he would understand what he was about to say.
“I think, back to where it all started,” Wyatt said quietly, remembering the woman outside of the hospital and the way he’d heard her voice…and she, his. He’d ignored it then. He couldn’t ignore it any longer.
“Back to Kentucky?” Lane asked, unable to keep surprise out of his voice.
Wyatt nodded.
Wisely, Lane stifled the rest of his concerns. While he didn’t understand what Wyatt was trying to say, he trusted the man implicitly. He swung a wide hand across his shoulder and thumped him lightly on the back.
“Then let’s get you packed,” Lane said. “It’s an all-day drive.”
Wyatt had been on this road before. Last winter. And with no destination in mind. This time, he knew where he was going. He even knew why. What he didn’t understand was the pull that drew him down the road. The closer he came to the great Pine Mountain, the more certain he became that he was on the right track. He drove relentlessly, stopping only when necessary, compelled to reach Larner’s Mill before nightfall. He couldn’t get past the increasing panic he felt, or the fact that he was listening for a voice that had suddenly gone silent.
