A swirl of cold air filled the room, giving me sudden clarity. I turned my head to the door, visible past Leland’s broad shoulders hunching over me.
I could have sworn that there, wrapped in scarves and a man’s coat, was Dorie Armitage.
No. Surely I’d passed out from the pain, and now I was just hallucinating. She couldn’t . . . Why would she . . . ?
The throbbing in my leg intensified, and I closed my eyes.
Her voice. She was saying something, but what? Something important. I heard Sarah Ruth’s name.
Which, all things considered, wasn’t the worst choice for the last thing I heard before passing out.
CHAPTER 38
Dorie Armitage
January 26, 1945
All I could think of as Jimmy led Leland and me through the driving snow was Gordon, pale and wrapped in bloodstained sheets, lying back at the lookout.
Where we’d left him. Alone.
Everything in me had protested, but Leland assured me he’d be fine.
“How can you say that?” I’d demanded.
“Because I went through four weeks of Advanced Tactical Division Training, and I know the difference between a glancing flesh wound to the leg and somebody shot through the stomach.”
That sounded convincing. And yet . . . “He’s unconscious.”
“Because of shock, exhaustion, and blood loss, which I’ve stopped.” He explained it as calmly as he’d listened to my story about Sarah Ruth’s fall. “Trust me, Dorie. We’re not going to leave him long . . . but we have to leave him, or that woman out there hasn’t got a chance.”
Still, I had stood, eyes fixed on the bloodied bandage. “Jack never woke up.”
A pause, and when Leland spoke again, his tone had been less clinical. “I’m sorry. Sorry Jack didn’t know what he was doing, sorry we couldn’t find a way to warn him. Sorry he had to die because of this awful war.”
It wasn’t his fault, and yet, in that sharp-looking uniform of his . . . maybe he represented something that was to blame. I didn’t know anymore.
Jimmy had urged us on, told us we had to hurry. He’d wanted to leave Leland behind too, but Leland insisted on coming, partly because he knew we might need three to rescue Sarah Ruth, partly because he didn’t want Jimmy “out of his sight for one moment.”
Neither of them had explained what happened, except for Leland’s Dick-and-Jane simplification: “There was a struggle. One of the guns went off.” It would have to do for the moment, although my imagination did a fair job of filling in the details.
I tried to focus on the next snow-slick step in front of me instead. Bring them to Sarah Ruth. If Gordon was really going to be all right, that’s what mattered now.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I called to Jimmy, who claimed he could find the path amidst snow and could tell one patch of trees or rocky outcropping from another. The wind had died down, or maybe it was just that following the two men sheltered me from it more than struggling through alone.
“As long as you were on the path,” he replied.
We had been . . . at least while Sarah Ruth was leading.
But then we got to a place where the path narrowed by a stand of three scrappy pine trees. “There!” I shouted, and Jimmy and Leland stopped. “Down there. That’s where she fell.”
Instantly, Jimmy knelt down on the ground, not waiting for Leland and me to come over with our army-issue flashlights. “Sarah Ruth! Ruthie!” he bellowed over the wind.
And when a thin voice called back, “Here,” I felt like I could give God a pass for all of the selfish childhood prayers he’d declined to answer. She was still alive.
Leland knelt in the snow, taking out the coil of rope we’d brought from the lookout. “Is it just one leg that hurts, or both?” he called.
“Just . . . the right one.”
“Good,” Leland muttered, which seemed overly optimistic to me. Did he hear how weak her voice was?
“Hang on, Sarah Ruth,” Jimmy called, “we’ll get you up.” But the confidence in his words didn’t follow through to his face, drawn in fear.
I’d seen enough adventure sequences in Westerns—people falling down mine shafts and wells—to know how it was supposed to work. “So,” I said as soon as Leland stood to join the huddle we’d formed against the mountain, “will all three of us haul her up?”
Jimmy shook his head. “Won’t work. Look at the angle.”
“You mean straight down?” With outcroppings jutting here and there, it wasn’t quite as sheer as a manmade wall, but it was no gently sloping incline either.
He nodded. “We’d smash her against the mountain if we tried that. Even if she’s strong enough to hold on, she’d get all cut up.”
“At least she’d be alive.” To me, that seemed like the priority of the moment.
“No,” Leland said slowly, staring over the edge and running the rope through his hands. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We tie that rope to a tree trunk,” he pointed to the three pines, “and I climb down and hoist her to my shoulders. She can grab the rope, then the two of you pull her a few feet until you can grab her arms and haul her the rest of the way.”
“Why do you get to go down?” Jimmy demanded.
“Because I’m a head taller than you, and I have emergency medical training.”
That sounded convincing to me, and even Jimmy hesitated, worry curving his eyebrows down. “You . . . you don’t think she needs it, do you?”
“She might. And this way, you’ll be pulling her up at the top.”
Jimmy looked doubtful, and I wanted to shout at him, tell him we were wasting time, that he couldn’t let his precious ego interfere with his sister’s rescue.
Let them handle it. Whatever had gone on at the lookout, it hadn’t created trust. So for once in my life, I held back, though I had to bite the inside of my lip to do it.
“I’m gonna have your sister’s life in my hands at one end or the other,” Leland pointed out.
The way Jimmy and Leland sized each other up, they might have been boxers circling in the ring. Finally Jimmy, clearly unable to think of another way, nodded. “I’ll pull her up.” He snatched the end of the rope from Leland, stalking toward the tree.
“We’ll do it together.” I wouldn’t add much—tinkering with jeeps and typewriters hadn’t exactly given me Rosie-the-Riveter muscles—but it was something.
Choosing the thickest trunk of the lot, Jimmy wrapped the rope around the pine, his hands moving and twisting the rope so much I expected to see a half-woven basket instead of a knot when he stepped away.
Leland gave it a yank. “That’ll hold.”
“Of course it will.” Jimmy punched a warning finger in Leland’s face. “If anything happens to Sarah Ruth—”
“James, I promise, if there’s anything I can do to keep your sister safe, I’ll do it.” And the way he looked just then, swear-on-a-Bible serious, I would have believed anything he said.
Jimmy grunted—if not satisfied, at least accepting the inevitable.
Pushing off the mountain with his feet, his arms tight with effort, Leland edged down the rope. He angled his head at the ground to land next to Sarah Ruth, huddled in a half-slumped position. Despite the wind, I could hear him pass on the instructions, calmly and clearly. Then I saw her nod and reach out for his hand, putting all her weight on her left leg as she stood.
Leland took his hands, with those long, strong fingers clasped together, and held them at stepstool height. Sarah Ruth stepped on, gripping his shoulder for balance as he hefted her up.
Beside me, Jimmy was tense and still, never taking his eyes away from the two of them. “Come on,” he whispered, nearly in my ear.
Her hand stretched out for the rope, and she tugged on it, getting enough leverage to step on Leland’s shoulder.
And as she did, I watched in horror as a fist-sized rock broke loose, stirred up by the rub of the rope, headed right at them. Jimmy and Sarah Ruth
cried out at the same time, but I barely had time to draw in a breath before Leland, eyes pointed up, grabbed on to Sarah Ruth to steady her and twisted away.
The rock thudded against his opposite shoulder, and he grunted in pain as it glanced off and fell down the mountainside. I aimed the flashlight at him. “Are you all right?”
“We’re fine.” Which could be anywhere at all on the spectrum from lie to truth, but I saw him wince as he shifted Sarah Ruth back into position. “Try again. Just watch for anything loose before pulling.”
In my flashlight beam, Sarah Ruth looked about as capable of following complex instructions as the average GI Joe rushed into the base hospital, but she reached out and grabbed the rope again. This time only a clod of snow shook loose.
“Ready?” Jimmy asked, and she nodded, bracing herself. “Then hang on.”
We pulled together in slow, steady tugs, until Sarah Ruth’s head appeared over the edge of the outcropping. Then I held the rope taut with everything in me so Jimmy could wrap his arms around his sister and help her scramble up. Once she was resting on the ground, he stood, stripping off his coat.
“You’ll freeze,” I said.
“She needs it more.” He knelt down beside Sarah Ruth, tucking the coat backward around her.
“Jimmy,” she said before getting cut off with a cough.
“I’m here, Ruthie. I’m right here. We’ve got you now.”
“You came.” Her drawn face managed a smile, which then faded as she looked at the two of us, blinking. “Where’s Gordon?”
To his credit, Jimmy didn’t try to give a half-truth answer like “He stayed at the lookout.” Instead, he looked away and said nothing, face flushing with shame.
Letting them have privacy for their reunion, I stepped over to the edge again. Leland was climbing the rope hand over hand, the strain clear on his face.
When he crawled onto the path, I reached down as if he might need help standing after scaling a small cliff. He looked over at Jimmy and Sarah Ruth huddled together and lowered his voice. “That’s no sprained ankle. I’d bet my last buck on a broken leg. We’d better get a splint on that as soon as we can.”
I tugged off my gloves to join Leland at working out the knot. Once it was free, I looped it back into a neat coil. “You, sir, are going to have quite a bruise.”
He gathered a handful of snow and pushed it under his coat to rest against his shoulder. “All that movement, it was bound to happen. It’ll heal.”
“Mm-hmm.” I knew bravado when I saw it. I also knew bravery. “You know, the Triple Nickles—heck, the army in general—should be proud to have you as an officer.” He looked up, surprised. “I’d follow you into combat any day, Lieutenant.”
He smiled wryly. “I think you just did, PFC Armitage. But it’s not over yet.” He raised his voice and turned toward Jimmy, who had stood silent, watching our exchange. “Come on. We’ve got to get her back to the fire tower and warmed up.”
That tiny lookout stove never sounded so good.
Wait a minute.
It didn’t take long to do that math. Two treasonous ranger’s children, the army officer who wanted to arrest their father, a WAC running a long con, and a wounded pacifist. All trapped during a blizzard in a 225-square-foot tower with a dead phone line.
It was going to be a long night.
CHAPTER 39
Gordon Hooper
January 27, 1945
Someone was humming.
My eyes flickered open, and I saw the lookout, lit faintly orange in the dull glow of the stove and the brighter glow of the lantern set by the window.
I frowned, my thoughts cotton padded and vague. Had I forgotten to put out the lantern before drifting off to sleep?
Got to get to it. Could start a fire.
I tried to roll off the cot, but my leg stabbed me with a thousand needles of pain.
Now I remembered all of it. The documents—still in the observation log as far as I knew—the shouting, the pistols, the wound.
That’s when I saw Sarah Ruth Morrissey, stretched out on the floor only a foot away from the cot, her ankle elevated and her auburn hair loose around her head, the tips of it wet and clumped. But why . . . ?
When I braved the pain to shift slightly, I could see Dorie slumped in a chair, her head tilted to the side, snoring slightly, as if she’d tried to stay awake and failed.
So I hadn’t been hallucinating.
Jimmy was curled in a heap close to the stove, while the lieutenant sat on the bench by the door, his weapon safely holstered, watching the snow blow past the windows.
It didn’t take much conjecture to figure out the basic plot. Somehow, Dorie had worked out what Jimmy bringing Leland here would mean, and she’d dragged Sarah Ruth into coming with her to stop him. Impulsive, as usual.
As I watched, Sarah Ruth’s eyes twitched, then opened, blinking a few times and catching me staring before I could pretend to be asleep. “You’re awake,” she whispered. Her voice sounded softer in that register, or maybe it was just the flickering lamplight on her flushed face.
“You’re hurt.”
“Just a sprain,” she said, which didn’t convince me, because she’d probably say the same if she lost her foot to a rusty bear trap.
“Listen, I wanted to say . . .” It wasn’t exactly the time, with her brother and Dorie asleep nearby and the lieutenant standing watch, but I’d learned from Jack that you didn’t always get a second chance. “I was wrong to yell at you like I did. About giving the recruitment brochure to Jack. You were only trying to help.”
“I didn’t take it personally.” She tried to smile. “You saw me after Willie died. I was a cold, rude mess. Pushing people away, like I always do.”
That’s not how I remembered her. Sure, she’d snapped at me a few times when I tried to offer condolences, but I hadn’t seen anger, only grief.
Maybe that’s what she saw in me too.
And maybe someday, if I stayed in Oregon, I’d tell her everything. About my father in a New York graveyard and my worn-down mother who put him there. About growing up the son of a drunk, then of a murderer and jailbird. About fleeing to the Quaker faith to keep myself from becoming like either of them.
Because something told me Sarah Ruth would listen. And she wouldn’t run away.
“You know—” she paused to yawn—“I swore once I’d never spend another night here.”
“I’m sorry you had to.” I looked at the others—her misguided but fiercely loyal brother, Dorie in all her impulsive love of justice, Leland, faithfully standing watch. “But you’re safe here now.”
“I think I am.” A smile lit the corners of her mouth, then faded as she looked over at Jimmy, who whimpered in his sleep. “What are you going to do about Jimmy?”
So. She knew he’d shot me. Or at least, that it was his fault I’d been shot.
What would we do?
I returned to the only place I was sure of, one the COs returned to whenever someone tried to argue with them about pacifism. “I don’t know for sure. But the Scriptures say, ‘Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.’”
Saying it, I realized that Mother shouldn’t have worried about my future, all those years ago. I had another Father I could imitate.
Sarah Ruth’s eyes fluttered sleepily. “He is, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said, and meant it, even if I couldn’t understand how it worked, why Jack died and I lived. “There’s always mercy if we reach out for it.”
She yawned again . . . and then stretched her hand up toward me.
I braved the pain of movement to roll to the edge of the cot and grasp it, holding it lightly as she closed her eyes, feeling her pulse tick a rhythm of peace and rest.
By the time morning came, I had eased myself up to a sitting position, clinging to the frame of the cot and ignoring a throbbing like someone was using my leg as an anvil. Thankfully, the cot was pushed against the wall, so I rested my head against it
until the dizziness passed.
I’d woken hours before the others—except Lieutenant Leland, who didn’t seem to have slept the whole night—which gave me plenty of time to think. We had to make the journey back to the camp for medical treatment, but there was no way on God’s green earth I was putting weight on my bum leg. Maybe I could get by with a pair of crutches.
I could practically hear Sarah Ruth’s mountaineering scoff. “Down a snowy mountain? Don’t you try it, Gordon.”
“Morning.” Dorie appeared at the head of my cot, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb Sarah Ruth or Jimmy. Her hair stuck out wildly in all directions, and I tried not to stare at it. “How are you feeling?”
“I can think of times I’ve been better. Any day when I wasn’t shot, for instance. Which is—” I pretended to think—“all of them.”
“Hmm,” she said, unconvinced, and poked my leg experimentally, shooting pain through me.
“Stop that,” I snapped, making Sarah Ruth stir. I lowered my voice. “Listen, we need to talk.”
“Do we?” she said dubiously, clearly judging from my expression that it wouldn’t be her favorite topic.
I let her have it anyway, all the conclusions I’d made in the predawn hours. “Once everyone wakes up, Sarah Ruth is going to need help to walk.” I gave her a moment to let that sink in. “And, unless I’m suddenly healed, the other two of you will probably have to carry me along narrow mountain trails.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, traces of smudged makeup giving them an owl-like appearance. I couldn’t wait until she found a mirror. “What’s your point?”
“I’d feel a lot better about that journey if Jimmy wasn’t trying to shove Leland off a cliff.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“You weren’t here earlier. You didn’t see him.” I remembered the crazed look in his eyes, the way his hands shook on the pistol. “He’s scared, Dorie, and a scared man can be dangerous. That’s why I need you to talk to him.”
She actually took a step back, nearly stepping on Jimmy’s hand, sprawled out behind her. “Oh no. Listen, I don’t talk things out, Gordon. I don’t reason or debate with anyone. That’s you. That was Jack and all of your CO buddies. I’m the last one you’d want to do this.”
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