Free Falling

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

What kind of nightmare am I living?she wondered.

  “I’m sorry, missus,” Donovan said. “We’ll be able to leave as soon as it gets dark. They’re pretty done for. I wouldn’t expect any trouble from them soon.”

  “Except they’re not all of ‘em,” Gavin said from the window. “Or even the worst of ‘em. You know that, Da.”

  “Shirrup, Gavin,” Donovan said, frowning at the boy. He turned back to Sarah. “What is your interest in them?” he asked gently.

  Sarah looked at him with eyes so full of pain and sadness it was all he could do not to look away.

  “I thought they might have information about my husband,” she said. “They had his horse. Plus, I…I wounded a gypsy that came to my place to steal my horses.”

  “Cor, Da! She’s talking about Finn. She’s the one shot him.”

  Mike ignored him. “Is that true?” he asked.

  “I killed one of them,” she said, staring directly into Mike’s eyes. “He tried to hurt my boy.”

  Mike nodded.

  “Do you know them?” she asked.

  “The man you wounded is the leader of this miscreant band of thugs,” Mike said. He sighed heavily. “His name is Finn. He’s been a worthless piece of shite from the beginning. Lived with his extended family around these parts as gypsies do—under bridges, in caravans and tents. Been involved in petty theft stuff and some senseless killing of dogs and cats.

  “Been in prison for some years recently for robbing a dairy with a weapon, I heard. But since the blackout, he’s taken advantage of the situation. Come in to his own, you might say. A natural leader is our Finn. And he’s found a following of scum just like him.”

  “Three of his gang tried to kill Seamus McClenny yesterday,” Sarah said, watching her horse. “They acted like they’d done it before and it was no big deal.” She looked at Mike. “One of ‘em said this guy Finn was looking for me. I guess to get revenge for shooting him.”

  “And for the other.”

  “The other?”

  “I think the one you killed was Finn’s brother Ardan.”

  Sarah stood up and set her mug down. “I have to get back,” she said.

  Donovan held out a hand as if to restrain her. “Whoa, missus, that is not a good idea.”

  “Stop!” Sarah put her hands to her head as if she’d just experienced a terrible headache. “Stop…calling me ‘missus.’ My name is Sarah Woodson.” She moved past him to where Dan was dozing.

  “Look, Sarah, you can’t leave.” Donovan moved quickly to put himself between her and the horse. “I don’t have to tell you, I’m sure, how dangerous that lot is.” He gestured in the direction of the window.

  “They’re a murderin’ lot, they are,” Gavin added helpfully and received a glower from his father.

  “I have to get home to my son,” Sarah said. As she said the words, a terrible fear seized her and her sentence finished in a near shriek. “I have to get to my boy.”

  He’s all I have left.

  “Sarah, please,” Mike said. “I’ll be asking you to take a breath and think for a moment. Going out there now is not the most direct route to your getting back to your son.”

  “Not a-tall,” Gavin said, shaking his head. “But it looks like they’re packing up, Da. They’re leaving the one poor bastard just lying there in the road.”

  “Likely dead,” Mike said. He turned back to Sarah. “Give them ten minutes to clear out and then you can be on your way. Gavin’ll go with you.”

  “I will?” Gavin said happily. “Great.”

  Sarah didn’t care one way or the other. She wanted to be on her way home so bad it was all she could do not to mount Dan right there in the store.

  “Fine,” she said between gritted teeth.

  Donovan moved over to the window to look out.

  “Take her home,” he said to the boy, “and wait for me. Understand? Bunk down in the barn or wherever she has an extra place but don’t leave until I get there.”

  “Really?” Gavin frowned. “When are you coming, then?”

  Donovan looked back at Sarah who had Dan’s reins in her hands now and was checking his girth.

  “Take the wagon and keep up with her the best you can. You got the rifle?”

  His son nodded.

  “I’ll get back home and get your uncle and a few others.”

  “Uncle Aidan won’t leave without Aunt Mary and the girls.”

  “Probably not, so I’ll be bringing them, too. Don’t look for us until tomorrow.”

  “You really expect Finn to come to her place, Da?”

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t done it before now. Let’s just pray we still have time before he gets there.” He turned away from his son to speak to Sarah. “Sarah, can you tell me how Seamus escaped the three thugs to tell the story?”

  Sarah led Dan to the door and jerked back a curtain to get a better view of the street.

  “He shot them,” she said, dropping the curtain.

  “He…shot them? All?”

  Sarah pulled out her Glock and checked to see that it was chambered and ready.

  “Yes. All,” she said.

  “And this was two days ago?”

  Sarah looked into the distance and her gaze seemed to glaze over.

  “No,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Yesterday.”

  Mike had a bad feeling about the timing of all this. He turned back to his son.

  “Go on, get going,” he said. “I’ll be there with your uncle before nightfall.”

  The ride from Balinagh normally took ninety minutes with a combination of walking and trotting. As soon as Sarah was remounted, she put Dan into a canter that spilled into a gallop before they were half a mile outside the village. She could hear Gavin’s pleas for her to wait for him but she knew he was armed and could take care of himself. As she rode, one part of her scanned the hills and the hillocks for any sign of life that might signal an ambush, but the other part was so panicked and single-minded on getting back to Cairn Cottage to see for herself that John was safe that she couldn’t really consider seriously the idea that anything would stop her.

  Her focused, maniacal determination worked to blot out the other thing.

  David.

  Sarah closed her legs firmly around Dan and urged him forward. The horse felt like a powder keg of energy and force beneath her. He broke into the gallop that carried them towards home with very little prompting, as if he’d been waiting for her all along to let him go all out.

  As she thundered down the wet main road that led from Balinagh to Cairn Cottage, Sarah never thought for a moment that the horse might slip, or that she might lose her balance. It was simply not conceivable that he should do anything but fly over the potholes and swivel around the sharp turns in the road, just not believable that she might do anything but ride him as fast and sure as if she’d been born to do it. And if, as she would later wonder, everything in her life before this moment was somehow to be seen to have prepared her to meet this spasm of incredible need, she would’ve considered it a life well done.

  The feel of the rhythmic, thundering hooves as she galloped and the cold wind stinging her bare face mixed with her conviction that she would…she must…find John safe. The ride would end with her arms around her child, holding him safely and snugly to her heart. Time enough later—much, much later—to talk to him about his Dad. For now, she had to get back to him. The intensity and the craving to see him again was as vital and elementary as the need to take her next breath.

  She was only a mile from home when she slowed Dan to a walk—just to catch her breath, and to give him a moment to gather himself for the mad gallop down the main drive of the cottage. It wouldn’t do to kill the poor horse and have to run the rest of the way on foot. She didn’t expect to be able to see any sign of the cottage from this distance. In all the times she’d ridden back from the village and strained for that first, welcoming sign—usually a thin needle of smoke to indicate a fire in th
e hearth—she had never caught a sign of it for another half mile or more.

  Which is why, when she saw the long funnel of black smoke jutting up into the sky above where she knew the cottage should be she sat up suddenly straight in the saddle, stopping her horse dead in the road.

  The house was burning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sarah dug her heels hard into Dan’s side and the horse bolted from a walk into a gallop. Sarah never saw the ground rushing by beneath her in a blur of green and brown or the two small stonewalls that she and the horse vaulted over as easily as if they’d been puddles on a street. Her eyes strained to see the house appear on the horizon over the next hill. She willed the house to materialize intact and the smoke, which grew blacker and more pronounced the closer she came, to dissipate to reveal that the cottage still stood.

  When she crested the final hill on the homeward drive to the cottage, she sucked in a hard breath. The sound more than anything startled her horse, who shied violently, nearly unseating her. And she never took her eyes off the sight at the end of the hill: Cairn Cottage, fully engulfed in flames, and the forecourt pocked with lifeless bodies scattered like sacks of grain carelessly dropped from a wagon.

  Her energy slowly seeped from her. Her nearly maniacal urgency to be at the cottage gave way to an involuntary hesitancy to confirm her worst suspicions. Was it hope or certainty that she would find him safe that fueled her on the crazy gut-wrenching miles from Balinagh? Her weight rested solidly in the saddle as she surveyed the terrible scene below. And Dan came to a halt.

  She tried to control her breathing as she watched the forecourt with the motionless bodies and the raging fire. A part of her almost believed she could feel the heat. She stared, stunned and paralyzed. A sound came from just over her left shoulder but she didn’t turn.

  Gavin was laboring up the hill with his horse and wagon.

  “Cor, Missus,” he said, gasping for breath as if he’d run alongside the horses himself. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  His words shook her out of the moment and she gathered her reins tightly in her hands and pushed Dan down the hill with her legs. Once she was moving, she allowed herself to think the impossible: maybe he was still alive. The thought galvanized her into a full gallop down the hill toward the cottage, the appalled shouts of Gavin ringing in her ears behind her.

  She dismounted before Dan even downshifted out of the canter. The closer she got to the farm, she could see that many of the lifeless forms were animals—mostly their sheep. From the looks of it, all of them.

  Sarah stepped over several carcasses, each one mottled bright red against the dirty white of their wool, and went to the dead man lying face down in the center of the courtyard. Her gun in her hand, she made a quick scan of the forecourt before touching him. She knelt and turned him over. It was Seamus, his blue eyes open and unseeing, his throat cut in a bloodless white arc. Tears welled up in her eyes. She got a flashback of Seamus walking with John across the forecourt to the barn, his gait stooped and halting, his large hand resting lightly on her boy’s shoulder. She closed his eyes and saw her hand was shaking badly.

  Sarah felt the heat from the terrible inferno at her back as she jumped up to run to the stable. She jerked open the door but the barn was empty except for the bodies of the two little goats that had helped sustain them for the weeks and months since they had arrived. The sight of the little dead goats, for some reason, triggered a feeling of blinding rage in Sarah. She left the barn and ran to the paddock. It was empty except for more dead sheep.

  “John!” she screamed, her eyes scanning the entrance to the pasture and the little back courtyard outside the kitchen door. “John Matthew!”

  Gavin brought the wagon into the forecourt but his horses panicked at the proximity of the fire and he fought to keep them calm. He leapt out, grabbed their bridles and led them to the far side of the barn, all the while looking over his shoulder at the carnage and the dead body in the middle of the courtyard.

  Sarah approached the cottage. One of John’s dogs lay dead in her path.

  Quickly, Gavin unhooked the horses from the wagon, pushed them into the barn—not bothering to find a stall—and shut the door. He ran to Sarah who was kneeling by the little dog and looking at the burning cottage, her face a mask of unreadable agony.

  “Missus,” he said, breathlessly, “they’ll’ve taken the boy.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the burning cottage.

  “This is what they do,” she said tonelessly.

  “No, they won’t have burned him in there,” Gavin said. He touched her arm gingerly. “You weren’t here when they came, so they’ll’ve taken him with them.”

  A look of hope flashed across her face and she turned to him.

  He nodded. “I’m sure of it,” he said. He looked at the burning house as a large piece of timber came crashing down in front of them, making them both take a step back. “He’s not in there.”

  Sarah looked back at the cottage and then at the dead puppy on the ground. She shook her head.

  “There’s also a woman,” she said. “Dierdre.”

  “Mrs. McClenny?” Gavin looked back at Seamus lying on the ground. “Aye, well.” He shook his head and looked at the cottage. “That’s not good,” he admitted.

  There was nothing they could do for the cottage but let it burn. They had nothing with which to put out the flames and it was too dangerous to attempt to retrieve any belongings from inside. Gavin went back to the horses, Dan included, and untacked and fed them. He put each of them in stalls, dragged the dead goats and the sheep to a small trench behind the barn, and began digging a larger trench for Seamus.

  Sarah sat in the unharnessed wagon as if in a trance and watched the cottage burn. What sun there had ever been that day had long disappeared behind a cloud, not to return. She held the gun in her hands, tracing the lines, the numbers, the indentations on it like one would a treasured talisman. Her eyes never left the cottage.

  She watched the outline of the porch crumble and she remembered sitting out on those steps just three months ago with David. She remembered watching the stars from those steps, and the feel of his warm lips on hers. Her eyes travelled to the chimney that jutted from the middle of the little cottage and she remembered the nights spent sitting around its hearth, the three of them laughing, playing cards, telling stories.

  The frame around the smaller living room window in front gave way and broke into pieces on the ground. She expected to see angry tongues of flame emerge but instead, a plume of grey smoke belched out into the early evening air. As she watched, she realized she was praying. Praying for guidance, for relief from pain, for hope that her boy was alive.

  She heard Gavin speaking from around the side of the barn but she couldn’t understand his words. He must have been speaking to her, she didn’t know. She had been staring at the house for a good ten minutes before she realized it had started to rain. She’d lived in Ireland so long she hardly noticed the sudden downpours any more. She watched as the flames slowly died and the air turned to a thick, stagnant layer of black fog.

  She leaned over the side of the wagon and threw up into the bushes.

  In all her nightmares of worry back home in the States about what could happen to her child, she had never come close to imagining the terror and agony of what she had experienced in the last hour. And while she lived with hope that, as Gavin suggested, John was not in the burning house, the knowledge that that meant he was with the murderous gypsies was nearly as unendurable. She held the gun to her chest like it had the power to change things. She finished her prayers with the plea to God Almighty that He keep John safe, that He help him say and do the right things while the gypsies had him to keep him alive, and that He help Sarah navigate the rest of this unfathomable nightmare.

  Gavin spoke to her again, this time louder and closer. He was saying something about the rain and how, Saints be praised, it had come at a divine moment. Sarah couldn’t t
ake her eyes off the cottage. They were coming to a moment, she knew, when the rain would put out the fire completely and enable them to enter the cottage. And then they would know for sure.

  …And then they would know.

  “Missus?”

  Sarah dragged her eyes from the smoldering building to look at him. He looked tired and filthy. His face was black from the soot of the fire and sweat and rain and created rivulets down both his cheeks. It made him look like he’d been crying.

  “I’ve built a wee fire,” he said, indicating with a jerk of his head the backcourt on the side of the barn. “The root cellar’s not been touched by the fire so I’ll check to see if there’s anything we can use to eat. Is that alright?”

  Sarah shifted in her position in the wagon to look back at the house.

  John was hungry all the time, too.

  “Fine,” she said dully.

  “I’ve buried the old man,” he said. “And me Da will be here soon. Maybe in an hour or so.”

  Sarah didn’t respond so Gavin turned to find the root cellar.

  She bowed her head and finished her prayers. It was all she could do.

  When she heard the shout, she stood up so fast that the gun dropped to the floorboard of the wagon. Instead of snatching it up, she left it there and jumped to the ground, facing the direction of Gavin’s shout.

  Something inside her just knew.

  He came running from around the corner of the barn. In the fading light of the day, she saw him run toward her, his arms pumping at his side, his head up, his eyes locked onto hers.

  “Mom!”

  And that was when she started to weep. When he launched himself into her open arms, she crushed him so tightly to her that he squeaked and still she cried. She kissed his tousled brown hair, his filthy, tear-streaked cheeks, his sweet little-boy mouth that was talking and exclaiming all at once.

  Thank you, God. Dear Lord in Heaven, thank you, thank you.

  They found Dierdre in the house.

  John told them that Seamus had made him run and hide in the root cellar when they heard the gypsies come. He had one of the puppies with him but couldn’t find the other. Seamus told him he’d come for him when it was all clear.