by Dinah McCall
There was a general round of good-natured ribbing about the quality of her coffee as the group filed out, but it was with a far better attitude than when they’d come in. Dead and dying passengers were common at a crash site, but it was rare that they went missing. Knowing that the trio were no longer at the mercy of the elements made everyone feel a lot better.
Once the RV was quiet, Tony dug through the mini-kitchen for some coffee to make a fresh pot. There was none. Cursing the situation in general, he followed the others back outside. Bonnie’s coffee wasn’t all that great, but it was better than none.
It was the lead news story on all the morning talk shows and the perfect lead-in to USA Morning’s already scheduled feature on holiday miracles. With only days until Christmas, what could be more miraculous than to survive a plane crash, get lost in the Appalachians during a snowstorm, then be found alive and well? The names of the missing passengers had been on everyone’s lips since the crash, and pictures were everywhere of Senator Wilson at work on Capitol Hill, Molly Cifelli in her college graduation cap and gown, and Johnny O’Ryan in his most recent school picture. A couple of news crews had even done their research and found out that Johnny O’Ryan was the son of an American soldier, fresh from the Iraqi war, then gone on to learn that Evan O’Ryan was only the latest in a long line of O’Ryans to have served their country in fine military fashion. When the story hit the news that Johnny O’Ryan was the son of an American soldier who’d been given an honorable discharge due to extensive injuries, teddy bears began showing up at the sheriff’s office in Carlisle—all for a little boy who’d gotten lost on his way home for Christmas.
Everyone wanted an interview with the survivors, but their location was still vague, and the prediction of another storm in the area limited the possibilities of getting to them.
Wally Hacker had the presence of mind to go to the motel where Evan had taken a room, and he notified Thorn that not only was his family safe, but that his great-great-grandson had been found.
Thorn thanked the sheriff profusely, and once he was alone in the motel room again, wept tears of relief. He tried to call James personally, but the call wouldn’t go through. Still rejoicing in the good news, he went into the bathroom to shave.
The mirror kept fogging over as he dragged his razor through the shaving cream and stubble on his face. If he squinted, he could almost pretend the years hadn’t marked themselves so drastically upon his features. Not that he minded getting older. It was just difficult to believe he’d lived eighty-five years, when he still felt young inside. The blessing was that there was a comfort within him now that had nothing to do with knowing the men in his family were still intact. It came from the bond he’d had with his wife. Even in death, she had just proved to him that she was never far away.
He rinsed the razor beneath the small flow of hot water, then took another swipe on his cheek as the steam continued to rise between him and the mirror. When he was done, he wiped his face free of any remaining shaving cream, then spoke, as if his wife were standing right beside him.
“So, my darling Marcella, once again I am humbled by your diligence,” he said softly. “Thanks to you, our little Johnny has been found.”
At that point he finished dressing, then grabbed his coat and wallet. For the first time in days, he felt hungry. It was time to get something to eat.
Darren Wilson was unaware of the news. In fact, he was so damned miserable that he would have welcomed being found just to know he would also be warm. Even if it was in a jail cell.
Instead he woke up alone, still hungry, still freezing—and still in a butt-load of trouble.
He pulled what was left of the energy bar from his pocket and took a small bite. He chewed three times on one side of his mouth, and then, although it hurt like hell, three times on the other side before he swallowed. He kept going until he’d eaten another third of the bar, leaving him with one third left to go. He folded up the paper around it and put it back in his pocket, repeated the mouth-rinsing technique that he’d used the night before, then got up and peed—marking the white snow in three places with urine. Only then could he relax.
His spirits were low when he resumed his hunt, but his attitude changed when he soon found tracks. Something deep in his brain registered that there were too many tracks for only a woman and a child, but all he noticed was that he was no longer the only person alive on this mountain. It was enough.
He locked onto the trail, and despite the fact that it led upward, he followed the footprints relentlessly. Whatever happened later was beside the point. He just needed warmth and food and shelter.
Farley Comstock woke up and groaned, thinking of the trip he had to make up to Deborah’s place. Even though she gave him milk and cream in return for firewood, the thought of having to hike through the snow to milk that damned cow was enough to send him back to bed.
On a good day, he didn’t like to milk. On a day when the weather was so miserably cold, he would have tried to talk his wife into making Kool-Aid for his nine kids to drink. However, his wife was close to giving birth again, and when she got like that, all her mothering instincts kicked in. She would have given him hell for even suggesting Kool-Aid, although he didn’t know why. He’d grown up drinking it, and it hadn’t hurt him none.
He made a face in the mirror as he finished shaving, ignoring the two missing teeth in front on his lower jaw, and slapped some after-shave on his skin to close the pores. He would much rather have grown a beard in winter to keep his face warm, but his wife didn’t like facial hair any more than she liked Kool-Aid. Still, she was a good wife and a good mother, and if the worst thing she demanded of him was to shave and make sure her kids had milk to drink, he considered himself a lucky man.
He wiped his hands on a towel, then quietly exited the bathroom and tiptoed down the hall. If he was lucky, he would get the fire going good and maybe get in a cup of fresh coffee before everyone woke up and he had to head out to see to Deborah’s cow.
Farley liked his quiet times. There just never were enough of them anymore to suit his ways.
He laid a couple of logs on the fire, then turned up the thermostat on the floor furnace and headed for the kitchen. The last thing he expected was to see a half-frozen and bloody-faced stranger standing there, eating fistfuls of jelly sandwiches like they were going out of style.
“Hey!” he yelled out. “What the hell do you think you’re doin’?”
Darren Wilson turned abruptly, a half-eaten bite of sandwich still dangling from the corner of his mouth. As a politician, he’d always been concerned with presenting a good face to the public. He would have been horrified had he been able to see himself through Farley Comstock’s eyes.
But he was starving and in trouble, and at the moment, he couldn’t have cared less what he looked like. He grabbed the rifle he’d found hanging above the back door and pointed it at Farley.
“Sit down and keep quiet,” he mumbled, while chewing his food in alternating sequences of three.
Farley dropped into a chair, his mouth open, his eyes wide with shock. He couldn’t get past the fact that there was a man in his kitchen stealing food.
“If’n you’re hungry and all…then eat what you want,” he said. “There ain’t no call to pull a gun for the food.”
Darren felt guilty for the act, but sometimes a man had to do what a man had to do.
“Just shut up,” Darren muttered, and stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.
Farley watched the man eat, noticing that he was particular about the way he chewed, and tried to figure out how to get the gun away from him before the first of his nine kids woke up. After that, there was no telling what might happen.
There were days when Farley himself considered shutting all nine of them up in the chicken house just for an hour’s peace and quiet—and he loved his kids. No telling what this stranger would do when faced with Farley’s nine offspring. Whatever he did, it wouldn’t be good—not when he was ho
lding a gun and eating all the bread and jelly. Farley, knowing his kids, figured they were gonna ignore the rifle and take offense over the fact that their bread and jelly was gone.
Darren had come upon the farmhouse by accident. Earlier, he’d been blindly following the tracks he’d found, stumbling and falling and cursing the world in general, when he realized that the forest had gone silent.
The birds he’d been hearing, the off-and-on complaints of squirrel chatter, even the occasional shriek of a hawk overhead, were all suddenly gone.
It was then that he’d stopped and looked—really looked—at the land in which he’d been walking.
At first he’d seen nothing except the thick growth of trees and snow as far as the eye could see. He was still looking around when he caught movement from the corner of his eye. When he realized it was a mountain lion, and that the lion was looking back at him, he all but lost it.
He remembered once reading that if confronted by a bear in the woods, the worst thing you could do was turn and run away. He didn’t know if the same applied to mountain lions, but he wasn’t going to take a chance and be wrong, only to be eaten.
Slowly, he looked around for something that would serve as a weapon and saw a large branch that had fallen from a nearby tree. Without taking his gaze from the lion, he walked slowly over to the branch and picked it up. The moment he had it, he held it over his head, giving the animal the false impression that he had suddenly grown several feet taller.
The mountain lion watched, its belly growling audibly from hunger. Then its eyes narrowed nervously as it hissed a sharp warning.
Darren saw the mouthful of sharp teeth and shivered.
“Get!” he yelled, and swung the limb in a large circle above his head.
The cat’s eyes caught the movement. Its ears went flat against its head as it slipped a couple of steps backward. Again it hissed, and then growled.
Darren was so pissed off to be in this situation that before he thought, he growled back.
The cat went flat, then, seconds later, leaped up and ran away. The moment it showed its back to Darren, Darren peed his pants. It wasn’t something he was proud of, but it was either cry or pee. His bladder won out.
As the warm urine ran down the inside of his leg, it occurred to him that it was the first time he’d felt warmth since the plane had gone down. He began to curse as he stared in the direction the cougar had gone, making sure that it didn’t decide to come back.
And while he wasn’t giving up on trailing the woman and the kid, he had no intention of following that damned mountain lion up into the trees, even though the tracks he’d been following led the same way, so he was forced to take another direction.
He soon found himself on a snow-covered one-laned road and only a few yards away from a small frame house. Relief swept through him as he headed toward it with single-minded intent. There was a thin spiral of smoke coming out of a chimney, and the early-morning sounds of a bunch of chickens waiting to be fed coming from a small red shed out behind a barn.
Smoke meant warmth. Chickens meant food.
At that point, he didn’t care who saw him. He just needed to eat and get warm—maybe get some dry clothes and some medicine for his aches and pains.
It never occurred to him that he would wind up taking a family hostage. But when the morning began to take a turn in that direction, he was already too far in to pull back.
Now that he’d been confronted by the owner of the house, he felt backed into a corner. He swallowed the last bite of sandwich and shifted the rifle to a more comfortable position, which happened to coincide with a line right toward Farley Comstock’s head.
Farley was sweating right down to his socks, but when the man reached for the bread and jelly again, Farley felt it only fair to warn him.
“Say, mister…if you’re hungry…you might think about letting me wake up the wife. She’d be happy to cook you up some eggs and biscuits, maybe a little sausage and gravy to go with ’em. But you don’t want to be eatin’ up all the bread and jelly. The kids won’t like it.”
Darren frowned.
“I don’t give a good goddamn about what your kids like or don’t like. I haven’t eaten in days. I have the gun. I’ll eat what I please.”
Farley shrugged. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Darren was in the act of slapping another spoonful of jelly on a slice of bread when he heard the first set of footsteps coming down the hall. He frowned.
Farley spoke up. “I’m tellin’ you now, mister, that if you even point that gun at one of my kids, I’ll have to hurt you.”
“You keep your kids out of my way and they’ll be fine,” Darren muttered.
As he was saying it, he kept hearing more and more footsteps—running. By now, he’d lost track of how many people he’d heard coming down the hall. He was expecting more than two, but not the herd of children still in pajamas and nightgowns that hit the kitchen running.
“Jesus!” Darren yelled. “How the hell many kids do you have?”
All nine of Farley’s kids saw the stranger at the same time that they realized he was into their bread and jelly. They paid no attention to the fact that he looked like something out of a nightmare, or that he was holding their daddy’s gun. They began to scream.
“Daddy! Daddy! That man’s eatin’ up our bread and jelly!”
Darren actually flushed, then he swung the rifle toward them.
“Get back, you brats! All of you. Get back or I’ll shoot your daddy dead.”
The two smallest ones started to wail, but not from fear they were about to lose their daddy. It was the loss of bread and jelly that had sent them over the edge.
Their wails were like nothing Darren had ever heard. He threatened, he shouted—he even fired a shot up into the ceiling, which did nothing but set the other seven children to screaming and wailing, as well.
At that point, a very pregnant Ruth Comstock came waddling into the room with a pistol in her hand.
Darren’s eyes bulged.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Ruth cried.
Then she saw the stranger holding Farley’s gun, saw the mess he’d made of her kitchen, knew he was responsible for her babies’ tears and raised her pistol. She fired before Darren could duck.
Fortunately for him, her aim was off.
The bullet shattered the wall next to him. He would have raised the rifle and shot back, but he hesitated about shooting a pregnant woman. Before he had time to reconsider his moral issues, Ruth Comstock had shot at him again.
This time the bullet ricocheted, sending a shower of wood splinters into the side of his face.
“Oh, hell! Wait! Lady! Stop shooting! Stop shooting! I only wanted—”
The third shot sailed past his waist and hit the doorjamb. At that point he realized she was lowering her aim. Fearing that the next shot would catch him right in the balls, he turned on one heel and went out the kitchen door as fast as his bum leg would carry him.
He knew she’d followed him out onto the porch, because he could hear the wails and shrieks of all those kids. The way he figured it, the only reason she stopped was because she’d finally emptied her pistol while he was in retreat. He thanked God for her bad aim and kept on running.
Farley was somewhat taken aback that his Ruthie had been the one who’d saved the day—and the bread and jelly. Ruthie, however, was so overwhelmed by what had just happened that she announced she was going into labor, and went back to bed.
Farley tried to call the doctor—hoping to talk him into a half-price vasectomy after the baby was born—but the storm had knocked out the phones. So, with all thoughts of Deborah’s cow gone from his mind, he told the older kids to mind the younger and went up to see to the birth of his tenth.
10
As exhausted as Deborah had been when she finally went to sleep, her internal body clock had gone off, even if the electric alarm had not. She sat up and then scooted to the side of the bed, feelin
g for her house shoes with her eyes still closed.
She staggered into the bathroom and came out a short time later, wide awake, teeth brushed and hair piled up on her head. She rummaged through her closet, choosing a pair of black pants and a pink cable-knit sweater. She dressed quickly, adding thick wool socks, then headed for the kitchen. She made coffee, then, while it was brewing, retrieved her hiking boots from the hearth where she’d left them last night to dry out. They were a bit stiff, but warm, as she slipped them on. An unintentional shiver ran up her spine as she thought about going back out into the cold.
She looked around for Mike as she went into the living room and glanced toward the sofa. Last night he’d threatened to sleep in here. Quietly she tiptoed closer, then peered over. He was still there—flat on his back and sound asleep, with his arms thrown over his head. In repose, his features were almost beautiful. The coals in the fireplace were still glowing a bright, fiery red, casting shadows of light and dark upon his face. She thought long and hard about leaning over and kissing his softly parted lips, then told herself she’d been alone too long.
Reluctantly, she turned away and moved toward the fireplace, walking softly so as not to wake him. Puppy, who had made her bed by the fireplace, lifted her head and looked sleepily at Deborah, who bent down and patted the dog’s head, then quietly lifted the fire screen and set it aside to lay a fresh log on the grate. The embers flared and soon caught. Satisfied that she’d set the house in motion for the day, she replaced the fire screen, gave Mike a last wistful glance and turned her attention toward the chores. Puppy followed her out of the room, her little toenails clicking on the hardwood floors as they entered the kitchen.
Mildred, the milk cow, would be waiting at the barn, as would the barn cats. So many chores. So many houseguests. At least she would be able to tell Farley she was back when he showed up.