Thirty-Three
Sam floated in a nightmarish dreamscape haunted by confusion and terror, her life broken into small, vivid pieces—rubies that glowed like eyes, hard walls pinning her inside the antique trunk when she was a child, looms that clattered like gnashing wooden mouths, the lonely years when Jake was in prison, reluctant wakings into empty mornings when she had to acknowledge, before she opened her eyes, that he wasn’t beside her.
She floated up through that crowded black land into a cloud of agonizing pain. It jolted her eyes open and made her gasp for air. A small part of her mind focused on small details—the crushed sheath of the cockpit clutching her legs and folding her forward, the sticky red splotches on her outflung arm, the hard, bumpy surface of the mangled control panel beneath her cheek. She stared out the shattered side window at a steep slope of rock and earth and broken trees shrouded in a ghostly gray mist.
Turning her head required all her willpower. Every inch of movement brought a fresh wave of pain. She concentrated on little details to subvert the torture. Wispy, fading light. The bizarre discovery that one of the plane’s shattered wings lay across the nose. The startling canopy of trees beyond the broken windows. Trees were not that fully branched at ground level. She was gazing straight out into their crowns. That made no sense, and her bewilderment nearly segued into hopeless panic. Think, she chanted silently.
Creaking nails-on-chalkboard sounds caught her attention. The protests of metal shifting against metal. The unmistakable tremor that went through the plane’s carcass. The lopsided tilt of her body, and the narrow band of the seat belt digging into her hip. She added up those details a dozen times, until they produced an answer.
The wreckage was balanced on rocks and broken trees, high on the side of a steep ridge.
She refused to concentrate on that frightening image. Sam shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and twisted her head to the other side in one wrenching motion. She rested her cheek on the weirdly upthrust panel of gauges and struggled not to black out. When the pain and darkness receded, she opened her eyes and slowly raised her head.
She met a startling barricade of pine branches. A limb of a massive tree had snagged the delicate plane, piercing the cockpit’s windshield. Sam was dimly aware of lifting her left arm. Every muscle in it seemed to be tearing away from the others. She pawed the smaller branches. Her strength gave out and her arm sank limply atop them, pressing them down. Her fingertips grazed chilly skin and wet fabric.
Alexandra was trapped inside the hard claw of the tree. Her head was tilted back on the seat; her eyes were closed. She looked eerily composed, as if she’d fallen asleep. Except for the bloody splatters on her pale gray jacket.
Sam dragged her fingers across the material until she found the edge of a lapel, then the softer fabric of the blouse beneath. She pressed her forefinger to the center of Alexandra’s chest. The slow, thready heartbeat made Sam curl her hand away.
Alexandra’s eyes flickered. She stared at Sam. With her head flung back and her eyes half shuttered, the gaze seemed imperious. Her mouth worked. A raspy whisper finally escaped.
He won’t find you this time.
“This is goddamned crazy!” Jake heard the helicopter pilot’s shouted words through a headset but didn’t respond. His attention was riveted to the darkening blanket of fog around them. Trees, not far below, appeared and disappeared as if manipulated by a master magician. He had tried to quiet every thought and let intuition take over, but the bleakest fear he’d ever known kept racing through him. He felt they were headed in the right direction, but it might have been the fear disguised as a desperate wish. Hoke laid a hand on his shoulder. Jake ignored it.
“I said I’d take you as far as I could before the fog closed in,” the pilot continued. “This is it. I didn’t survive two combat tours in ’Nam to end up scattered all over a mountain at home.”
“We got to turn back,” Hoke said. He shook Jake lightly. “I’m drawing a blank, and I think you are too.”
“No. I might not be close, but I’ll get there.”
“You got nothing to work with, boy. Not a scrap of your wife’s clothes, no jewelry, nothing.”
“Let me out. Find some kind of a clearing—there. Over there. That hilltop.”
The pilot cursed loudly. “You mean that jumble of rotten logs? The pine borers would have to chew on that hilltop for another twenty years before I could set this chopper down.”
“Just get close enough for me to jump.”
“Oh, man, you’ll break your damned legs.”
“Do it.” Jake twisted toward Hoke. “Go back and see what kind of help you can send. The north edges of the Etowahs. Tell ’em the plane went down somewhere between here and Mount Gibson.”
“That’s thirty miles of rough territory,” Hoke answered. “A dozen peaks. A hundred little coves and hidden ridges and—”
“I’m not going back without her, Hoke. She’s alive. That’s the one thing I do know.”
“I doubt I can get you much help before the fog lifts. That’ll probably be late tomorrow morning.”
“Do the best you can.”
Hoke slumped. “Take this bird to that hilltop, Andy. The man’ll jump out from up here if you don’t.”
“All right. They’re his bones to break.”
As the helicopter swung toward its destination, Hoke pressed Jake’s shoulder a final time. “God bless you. You’ve come too far to lose everything now.”
Jake tossed his headset aside, then slid his arms through the straps of a backpack the pilot had provided. A flashlight, matches, a blanket, a small coil of rope, a canteen filled with water, a hunting knife, and a pistol. The copter dropped slowly over the hill, the ethereal white mist surrounding it. Jake pushed his door open and studied the clutter of fallen trees.
“You got about a twenty-foot drop,” the pilot yelled. “That’s as good as it’s going to get!”
Jake crouched on the rim of the door, found a patch of clear ground among the chaos, and jumped.
He hit the soft ground with a force that buckled his legs and sprawled him sideways. Dazed, he lay still for a few seconds, the wind from the copter’s blades whipping him, then rose unsteadily. He looked up at the helicopter. Hoke scrutinized him from the still-open door.
Jake raised one hand, signaling good-bye. Hoke gave him a thumbs-up.
The helicopter rose and was swallowed by the fog. Jake stood a minute on the lonely, ruined hilltop, lost in the mist and gloom and the whisper of evening currents curling through vast forests.
He emptied his mind as best he could, let himself become a human compass, and hoped that the deep, faithful pull of Samantha’s heart would show him the way.
Clara watched from a hard folding chair in a corner, keeping her own somber counsel, absorbing the chatter of official-looking people as busy as bees in a hive. They scurried around the hot, cramped space of the airfield office, carrying their opinions, like specks of pollen, from the wall maps to the telephones. She wished she could produce a sprig of bright-red bee balm to quiet them down. Especially Charlotte, who followed first one person and then another, asking questions that had no answers.
“What do you think?” Joe whispered to her. He was old and wise, like her, and he sat cross-legged on the floor by her chair, away from the traffic.
Clara bent her head toward his. “Jake’ll find Sammie. No one else is meant to.”
He sighed. Charlotte’s voice cut through the room’s noisy buzz. “There must be something you can do tonight!” She latched on to the shirt of a big man wearing a ranger’s uniform.
The man shook his head. “We can’t send any planes out in this fog. All we can do tonight is organize search teams and map out the most likely crash sites. By morning we’ll have a couple hundred people and a dozen planes ready to go.”
She jerked at his sweat-stained shirtfront. “You could send out professional trackers and their dogs tonight.”
“They’d need to be a
irlifted into some of the rough spots we’re talking about. And not even a professional tracker is going to risk stumbling over a waterfall or a cliff in the dark.”
“My brother-in-law is a tracker—the best one in the state—and he wouldn’t be sitting here thinking up excuses.” Charlotte jabbed a finger toward the door. “He’d be out in the mountains with his dog, no matter what the weather was like.”
“Well, there isn’t anybody else like Jake Raincrow. And since we don’t know where he is or if he even knows his wife was in that plane, what he’d do about it is a moot point. I’m sorry to put it that way. You’ve got a right to be scared and mad, but all you can do is wait for morning, like the rest of us.”
“Charlotte.” Ben slid off the edge of a desk, clear-eyed but hunched with pain, and put his good arm around her. She leaned against him with tearful defeat. The look on his face said he’d take on her pain too if he could. “I can’t believe Jake hasn’t heard that she and Alexandra are missing. You know he’s looking for them.”
“How can he? He didn’t come home to get Bo, he didn’t call anyone for information about the search or the plane’s flight path—”
“Excuse me,” a wiry young man said to them. “Could I intrude for a minute?” He had slipped through the crowd from his own quiet corner with only Clara noticing. She had been scrutinizing him for a while, wondering what he was forever scribbling in a notepad. “I’m Bob Freeman, from the Raleigh—”
“He’s a newspaper reporter,” Ben interjected, drawing Charlotte closer. She and Ben traded a startled look. Clara bent down to Joe and whispered quickly, “He’s the one I told you about.”
Joe jumped. “The one Jake sent the—”
“Yes sir.”
“You think he’s figured out where it came from?”
“I hope not.”
Ben was studying the intruder shrewdly. “I recognize your name. I might be impressed. If nothing else, I’m impressed that you managed to get into this office while the rest of the media are camped outside behind barricades.”
“Hometown advantage. I was born on a tenant farm near Pandora. The sheriff’s relatives sat around a few moonshine stills with mine.”
“My sister is all I can think about right now,” Charlotte told him. She hesitated, then added, “And our aunt.”
“I understand. You’re a … close … family?”
“She isn’t in very good shape to discuss the family,” Ben said smoothly.
“It’s all right. I need to talk,” Charlotte replied. “It might help me make sense of what’s happening.” She squared her shoulders. “My aunt took my sister and me into her home after our mother died. It was the kind of experience you never forget. Our aunt couldn’t be more involved in our lives if we were her own children.”
“Had you talked to your cousin recently?”
“He dropped by for a visit yesterday. He was very depressed about his stepfather’s stroke. I didn’t have much time to listen, because I had to take my accident-prone friend here to the hospital. I feel lousy about running out on my cousin.”
“Would you say he was a moody person?”
Charlotte nodded wearily. “But he had a side to him very few people saw. He really cared what happened to my sister and me. He’d show up when we least expected it, and if we were upset about something, he’d give his ear.”
Ben coughed loudly, then winced. Charlotte turned her attention to him anxiously and helped him ease down on the desk again. “About your sister,” the reporter began.
“My sister?” Charlotte fumbled with her shirttail and stared blindly into space. “My sister”—her voice trembled—“tell your readers that my sister always puts family first. That’s why she got in that plane today. Maybe it was a foolish thing to do. But Sammie’s never turned her back on our aunt.”
“Just one more question.”
There was a small commotion outside, and the office door burst open. Clara was entranced by the sight of another black man, this one grizzled and stout and rumpled, marching into the room. There were plenty of white and red people in the mountains, but not many black ones. Now there were two in the same room at the same time. It must be a sign.
“One more question, Charlotte,” Bob Freeman repeated, glancing at the newcomer curiously. “Do you think it’s strange that your brother-in-law disappeared at the same time the wrath of God, so to say, descended on his wife’s family?”
Charlotte whirled toward him like a ferocious cat. “Every word I wasted on you is the truth. And so is this—Jake would never do anything to hurt the people Sammie loves.”
“What’s this about Jake?” the newcomer thundered. He plowed through the crowd, a towering, angry old bear of a man. “Y’all wondering where Jake’s been? He’s been with me since early last night, and any jerk-tailed man who thinks different is callin’ Detective Hoke Doop of the Durham police a liar!”
Charlotte made a hoarse sound. “Where is he now?”
Detective Doop strode to a wall and thumped a section of a topographical map where the ridge lines tangled together like threads on a twisted skein. “There. Hunting for his wife and her kin. God help him.”
Lost. The word had never had real meaning to Jake before. To become suddenly blind, deaf, paralyzed—he had always been able to imagine how those limitations would feel, but not this. He couldn’t tell if he was moving instinctively toward Samantha or only wandering.
Muddy, wet, aching from the jump and the long, steep miles, he was doing little more than pushing one foot in front of the other. He scraped against tree trunks and stumbled over the jutting crowns of submerged boulders; he had put the flashlight away to save its batteries, and even his woodsman’s skill at traveling had deserted him.
He was missing a piece of the puzzle; there was a blank space in his mind’s eye.
The fog and darkness made an impenetrable screen at the end of his outstretched hands. He read the land solely by the slope under his feet—climbing, descending, flattening into narrow plateaus and fading into thin valleys, where he heard the gurgle of small creeks and felt them pouring over the toes of his boots.
He reached another crest, hesitated to take one reviving breath, then lifted a foot to make the next step. Suddenly pain shot through his leg, shooting, burning into the bone, spreading up that side to his arm. It brought him down like a sledgehammer, and he curled into a tight ball, gasping and half conscious.
This was what Samantha felt.
The realization made him groan. He had done this to her. His secrecy and revenge had sent her out, alone, to punish Alexandra.
Alone and unsuspecting.
No hard lesson had taught her to keep what she knew to herself. She didn’t understand that ravenmockers killed the ones who recognized them.
The pain was ripping him apart. His hands convulsed against his thighs. The ruby made a hard kernel inside a leather pouch tied to a belt loop of his jeans. His fingers closed on it as recklessly as they had when he was a boy. He tore the pouch free and raised it in his shaking fist. Take me, he said aloud. Take me and save Samantha. That’s all I want.
The pain vanished.
A new, calm strength flowed into him. He sat up, shook the ruby into his palm, and breathed the miracle of redemption.
The fog and darkness still surrounded him, but he wasn’t lost anymore.
And he knew how to find Samantha.
The plane’s wreckage shifted again. Sam moaned helplessly as the vibrations jarred bone and muscle. The netherland between sleep and shock was her only refuge. Her brief periods of consciousness were filled with silent battles. She argued against faith, hope, and survival.
Jake won’t find you this time.
I have to believe he will.
Don’t think like that! You did the right thing. It has to end this way.
She couldn’t see anything, and sounds seemed magnified in the eerie void. She was forced to listen to the wind, the creaking of tree limbs, and the slow, raspy his
s of Alexandra’s breath. When nightmarish panic won out, Sam imagined a hideous, hungry thing watching her patiently from its lair.
This plane was on the verge of tumbling down the mountain. Sam accepted that fate. She hoped the fall would kill her before she felt the nightmare creature’s hot breath on her skin.
It was coming toward her. Sam tried to lift her head. The effort made her dizzy, but through the sickly ringing in her ears she heard twigs snapping under its feet.
Alexandra would eat her alive, then slip away in the mist. Sam had failed at the only act of love that could set Jake free.
Grief and defeat made her cry out.
“Samantha.” Jake’s answer, a hoarse and exultant shout. Light crept over her face. She struggled to look up. His dear and familiar hand followed the light, frantically exploring.
A gust of wind rocked the plane. Sam moaned. “Get away, it’s too late.”
She hurt too much to notice whether he answered. Every bone seemed to be grating against its neighbor. The light went away. She knew when he took his hand from her face; the loss upset her.
She heard the metallic creak and scrape of metal, felt Jake’s arm brush against her as he reached inside the broken, crumpled door. He lifted her left hand and pressed something into the palm, then gently pushed her fingers shut over it. The unknown gift was oddly comforting. “Hold on to that,” he told her.
She did. Even when he jerked violently on the door frame, and pain washed over her in blind sheets.
The next thing she knew, his arms were under her, and he was easing her legs from the mangled cockpit. “I know it hurts,” he said hoarsely. “You’re almost out.”
But there was a popping sound. Pine branches brushed her face; the limb that pierced the cockpit had cracked. The wreckage slid a little, then stopped. “You’re almost out,” Jake repeated. Her head bobbed against his chest. “I’m sorry, I have to pull hard now.” He had both arms under her.
“No. My hand,” Sam said. “She’s got my hand.”
Alexandra’s icy grip tightened like a claw. Jake uttered a soft, furious sound. Sam realized he couldn’t let go of her to pry Alexandra’s fingers away.
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