But it was enough.
Enough so that Sara felt its heat as well as the blast wave from across the room.
And it was enough to knock Jeff back off his feet and onto the steps, where he rolled like a bowling ball to the bottom.
He was immediately doused in a mixture of oil and gasoline and his clothes were on fire.
So was the carpet padding he’d stapled to the ceiling above the landing a few days before, as well as the wall adjacent to the steps.
When he rolled to the bottom of steps and onto the basement floor Sara was waiting there for him, the softball bat hovering over her head and ready to strike.
She’d been worried about this part of the plan. If the explosion had extinguished the flames she’d have had a hard time finding her target in the dark.
But fate was kind to her on this particular day.
As kind to her as it was unkind to him.
The flames on and above the staircase gave her plenty of light to give her an aiming point as his burning body thrashed about in agony.
Her first swing was true and caught the side of his head.
He went down and while not quite stilled was barely moving.
The second blow caught him across the back of his neck.
The third hit him almost exactly where the first blow had.
He wasn’t moving.
But Sara was.
She threw the softball bat aside and fairly flew up the stairs.
She was conscious that some of the steps were burning now.
And that they were almost certainly covered with shards of glass.
But she could not wait. To wait would be to die, for it was likely mere seconds before the stairs were fully engulfed.
And not long after that the house would be as well.
She knew she had but a small window of opportunity to run through that curtain of flames and out that door.
Or she’d die.
She didn’t want to die today. She had too many things to live for.
Too many people to live for.
-43-
Back at Anne’s house Tom was finished taking photos.
He was in no hurry to leave the crime scene.
As he saw it, there was no hurry to leave. The damage had already been done. His men and the volunteer searchers continued to sweep across the county in pursuit of their elusive killer.
His hurrying away from here likely wouldn’t contribute much to that effort.
And it sure as hell wouldn’t bring back his Sara.
Nothing would.
He walked into the house Anne once kept neat as a pin, without bothering to kick the dirt from his boots. There was already a long line of dusty footprints leading from the back yard and through the kitchen.
Tom didn’t even know whose house this was. He hadn’t bothered to look it up. If he had he might have taken a bit more care, for he knew Anne from her days at the library and liked her.
He wondered whether the killer had entered the house when he came back. If perhaps he’d been watching Tom from a window while he was doing his thing in the back yard.
It was a sobering thought, and one which could have cost a very careless Tom his life.
For if he had been he could have easily killed the big man.
As that thought ran through his mind, Tom had no way of suspecting how close he’d come to dying. Not from a shot from the house, but rather the woods in the complete opposite direction.
He had his handgun out as he walked through the house.
And while he knew deep down inside God wouldn’t approve, he prayed anyway.
Prayed that the killer was hiding somewhere in the house, so Tom could blow him away.
Confident the structure was empty, he left through the front door and crawled inside his Ford cruiser.
He reached down with his left hand to start the old Ford and as he did he caught something in the corner of his eye.
He turned his full attention to his left and had something he’d describe later as an out-of-body experience.
Tom was a young man during the Vietnam War years. And like every other American in that era he was horrified when magazines of the time published a Pulitzer-award-winning photograph. A photograph of a tiny Vietnamese girl running naked from a village being napalmed.
He hated that photograph and hadn’t seen it in many years.
But his mind instantly went back to that day, when he was a pimple-faced Texas boy barely becoming a man.
For the scene before him was so much like that image it was almost scary.
Before his very eyes was unfolding a scene in which a slight woman, naked from head to toe, was running down the road toward him.
The Vietnamese girl had been badly burned; the flesh had been peeling from her body.
This woman was covered in blood.
The Vietnamese girl appeared to be in a daze, moving only from habit.
Or perhaps motivated by fear.
This one shared that look.
It was obvious that both of them were in agony, yet running from something they viewed as a much-worse threat.
Lastly, their respective terrors were captured forever in that moment.
The face of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc became an indelible photograph that became a painful icon of a dreadful war.
And Sara’s Harter’s equally haunting image would be forever seared upon Tom Haskins’s memory. Until the day he died he’d be able to close his eyes and recall this scene in agonizingly minute detail.
He moved by instinct and habit alone.
Later, as he recounted the scene for the dozenth time, he’d claim he didn’t even remember opening the car door. Didn’t remember stepping out and running toward Sara.
Didn’t remember drawing his duty weapon and searching in vain for the sadistic monster who must certainly be in hot pursuit of her.
The next thing he remembered, he’d say, was catching Sara on a full run, wrapping his arms around her and picking her up off the ground.
Even as he half-dragged, half carried her toward the cover of the nearest tree he scanned the horizon behind her for whatever threat had caused her to be in this state.
The scene was chaotic by anybody’s standard.
Sara was wounded, was out of breath, and was desperate to convey to Tom it was all over. That the man who’d killed Katie and taken her hostage was dead, that certainly he couldn’t have recovered in time to make his way up those burning stairs before they collapsed beneath him.
She wanted to; she just couldn’t mouth the words when her lungs were screaming for air.
Tom was an old man who felt he’d aged an additional twenty years in the few short days since Sara’s disappearance.
He, like Sara, hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since.
He, like Sara, was bordering on exhaustion.
He, like Sara, was out of breath.
But he was something Sara wasn’t.
He was in borderline shock; he was half-convinced he was halluicinating.
Sara was dead. He and John had found her body. They’d buried her.
He’d bawled his eyes out.
He thought he’d lost the woman he considered a daughter.
How could…
Oh, hell. It didn’t matter. They’d get it all sorted out later.
Snapped back to reality, he tried to assess the threat.
“Honey, is he after you? Did you get yourself free?”
She couldn’t speak, so she did the next best thing.
And it just made matters worse.
He asked contradictory questions. The answer to the first was no. He wasn’t after her. She was in no danger.
She furiously shook her head no.
The answer to Tom’s second question, though, was yes. She had indeed gotten away.
In mid-stream her “no” became a “yes.”
And once again Tom didn’t have a clue what it all meant.
Finally she mustered a fe
w short words.
“He’s dead. I’m okay.”
And all was right with the world once again.
-44-
This time his question was more direct; less confusing.
“Are you sure, honey?”
This time her answer was less confusing as well.
“Yes. I’m okay.”
They locked eyes for a short second.
The moment they shared was priceless. Both would try to describe it later on. But both would fail. There was simply no word in the English language powerful enough or sufficient to describe what both of them felt.
Tom returned his pistol to its holster and carried her to his car. He held her next to the back door and she grabbed the handle and opened it.
He placed her gently on the back seat and stood, once again looking behind him to make sure the threat was gone.
He still wasn’t operating at full capacity.
She’d tease him later when she recounted his instructions to her.
“Now, I’m going to get a blanket out of the trunk. Don’t you run off now, okay?”
She somehow managed her first smile in days when she assured him, “I won’t. I promise.”
He moved like a flash, never taking his eyes off the road where she’d come running.
He was still half dazed; still only half believing she’d survived.
And still not believing at all that it was over.
In Tom’s mind, this was all too easy. They’d spent days searching hundreds of square miles. And now Sara just appears out of nowhere and flies into his arms?
No. Fate doesn’t work this way.
Fate is a sick and evil wench.
Fate teases you; fate makes promises she can’t keep.
Fate dangles victory in front of you and then snatches it away.
Tom had had some very bad experiences with fate during his lifetime.
He didn’t like the way it had hurt him.
He certainly didn’t trust it.
No, in Tom’s mind this was all a sick dream. Or, even worse, fate was teasing him. Fate was making him believe Sara could still be saved.
And at any time, something would happen to take her away from him again.
Sara was a bit confused when, instead of comforting her, Tom merely draped the blanket over her and hopped back into the old Ford.
He cranked the engine and jammed the vehicle into gear, then roared away from the house.
As he did, a flash appeared in his rearview mirror.
Then, a split second later, a muffled explosion.
The fire had made its way through the basement and to all that gasoline in the generator room.
The explosion seemed to bring Tom back to reality.
“What was that?”
“That was the house where he was holding me. I knocked him out and set fire to it before I left.”
“Are you sure he was still in the house?”
“He was when I left.”
Tom’s hands were shaking when he picked up his radio and called the compound.
“Linda… Becky… Hannah… somebody, please come in.”
Linda, working the security console, sensed the desperation in his voice.
“Tom, are you okay? What’s the matter?”
“Linda honey, I’ve found Sara. Or rather she found me. She’s alive. By God in heaven she’s alive.
“At least I think she is. I hope this isn’t just a dream.”
Linda was stunned.
She didn’t know what to think. Tom wasn’t in his normal state.
Becky was standing over her shoulder. She asked, to no one in particular, “What in hell is going on?”
Linda asked, “Tom, where are you?”
“I’m working my way back to 83. On Winston Road. I’ll be back home in about twenty minutes or so.
“Sara is hurt. But not bad I think. She’s walking and talking a bit. And she’s covered with blood but it’s all superficial I think.”
“Tom, are you okay?”
“Oh, hell yes, I’m okay. I’m better than I’ve been in a very long time. I’m not crazy, if that’s what you mean.
“At least I don’t think I am.”
It was the last few words which worried Linda the most.
All over that part of Kerr County men were at a loss for what to do.
Several of them, including Jordan, immediately headed back toward the compound.
Several others were worried that Tom had succumbed to the exhaustion and stress he’d been suffering for the past several days.
Perhaps he was hallucinating the whole thing.
Perhaps he had, despite his protestations, “gone crazy.”
After all they’d all seen Sara’s body. Had all attended her funeral.
Had all mourned her.
If that wasn’t Sara’s body they buried, then who the heck was it?
She can’t be alive, they said. It’s just not possible.
But it was.
Tom pulled into the compound’s front yard a few minutes later. Hannah manned the security desk, since she was still technically an outsider and wasn’t as close to Sara as Linda, Stacy and Becky were.
But she was able to watch from the window as Stacy opened the back door of the old Ford and started helping her daughter out.
They helped wrap the blanket around her and Tom picked her up, as carefully as he would a baby, and carried her into the house and up the stairs.
Hannah got on the radio and put out a general call to anybody within earshot.
“For those of you who were questioning Tom’s sanity, stop worrying. Sara is alive and back home.”
-45-
In the following hours every member of the search team, and many other residents of Kerrville and Junction who found ways to get there, came to the compound.
The wheat field was full of grazing horses, enjoying its goodies.
But nobody cared.
The general atmosphere was like a welcome-home party for a soldier returning from the war.
And in a way, it was just that.
Sara had just fought her own personal war against a very bad man.
And she’d emerged the victor.
The first floor of the Harter house was full of people. So full the crowd spilled out into the compound outside.
Scott and Linda did their best to play gracious hosts, offering water and snacks and warm beer to the visitors.
And their efforts were appreciated, but largely declined.
Nobody was there to drink three-year-old beer or stale potato chips.
They were there to welcome Sara home and to wish her well.
The trouble was, few of them had seen her.
She was upstairs, lying on her bed, holding Jordan’s hand.
Becky, a registered nurse with over thirty years experience, bent over her with a flashlight in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other.
Many of the glass shards which pelted her body when the lantern exploded were easy to find.
Easy because they’d punctured blood vessels, resulting in tell-tale streams of crimson blood which ran down the front of Sara’s body.
Others hit her but didn’t cause any bleeding.
They would eventually work their way out of her body and fall off, Becky explained.
But it was better to find them and remove them, lest they cause an infection.
“You don’t know how lucky you are that you weren’t blinded,” Becky told her as she removed glass from the back side of Sara’s forearm. “If these shards had hit the soft tissue of your eyeballs they’d have done irreparable damage.”
It was indeed mere luck, for as Sara raised her arm in anticipation of that explosion, she hadn’t even thought of the damage flying glass might do to her eyes.
She was just shielding her eyes from the brilliant flash of light.
The only company Becky had allowed to that point were the children: Christopher, Charles and Millicent.
; And only for a few minutes and only so they could see for themselves their mom was alive and (fairly) well.
Then they were ushered out again so Becky could get back to work.
Sara was excited to hear that Millicent’s Aunt Tillie had arrived in her absence.
At the same time, though, she wondered how it would affect the family dynamic.
She’d adopted young Millicent with the understanding the child had no living relatives to compete for her.
Tillie had been there for three days now.
So far everything had been cordial. She was welcomed as an honored guest and everyone fawned over her. They clamored to hear all of the stories she had to tell of her travels, and she was quickly becoming comfortable.
“One of the things I asked her was her plans for the future,” Jordan told Sara. “She said she never really thought about it. That her original plans were to move in with her brother and sister-in-law in San Antonio.
“She said since that’s no longer a possibility, she hasn’t thought any more beyond that point.”
“What if she wants to take Millicent away from us?” Sara asked.
“Can she do that? Legally, I mean?”
Becky looked up and wiped the sweat from her brow.
“Scott and I were talking about it last night. We’re both pretty sure she can’t take her legally. At least since you went through an adoption agency and everything.”
“That’s the thing,” Sara countered. “Because of the blackout, there was no legal paperwork done. They had me sign an agreement in one of their log books. It said they were representing the State of Texas and acting on behalf of the best interests of the child. And I signed agreeing to provide for her welfare and well being. And to give her a home until she turned eighteen years of age and to provide her love and emotional support.
“That’s it. I didn’t have any papers to take with me and I don’t guess they had any to send before a judge.
“As far as I know, the courts never got involved.
“And that makes me wonder, if Tillie wants to challenge the adoption, and finds a judge to hear her case, whether the adoption was really all that legal after all.”
“Let’s not put the cart before the horse,” Becky said.
Sara gave her a puzzled look and asked, “Cart? Horse? What on earth does that mean?”
It Can't Be Her Page 14