Carried Away (Montana Miracles Book 1)

by Grace Walton

  “You know, I bet I could just set this thing on the porch and he’d empty it and deliver it back clean as new.”

  Carrie was horrified at the thought of Gage doing something so personal for her. It was bad enough, this stranger had to help her in that way.

  “No! Leave it, I’ll empty it. Just tell me where and how.” She dragged herself out of the bed and slid to the floor. Grabbing the bed covers she steadied herself.

  Grace shook her head and made a few clucking sounds. “Get back in the bed right now. I was just joshing you Child. I’ll take care of it. After all the Good Book does say ‘As you do to the least of these, you have done unto Me’. You don’t want to cheat me out of a blessing, do you?” She smiled her toothless grin and was gone.

  Carrie lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. OK, so Grace was one of the religious nuts who called the Conclave home. That was pretty obvious. But where were the girls? Were they Ok? Where was Gage? And why was he keeping such close tabs on her? Maybe it was because he had to bring some kind of physical evidence back to the one who’d hired him. Evidence that proved he’d done his job, like a body part. Carrie swallowed a sick lump in her throat.

  Grace was bustling back into the cabin. She stirred the fire and lifted a black frying pan from its hook. She began heating it over the fire. She gathered a trio of brown eggs from a basket in the pie safe before asking.

  “You want some breakfast? Lord knows I do. Let’s have us some eggs and such.” She didn’t wait for an answer. In a few minutes the eggs were cooked and served to Carrie on a tin plate.

  “I’m sorry it’s so poor. But I don’t have the sody to make biscuits and I’m out of side meat.” She handed Carrie a fork and then settled herself into the room’s only chair. “We better pray over this.” With that as her only preamble she launched into the strangest prayer Carrie had ever heard.

  “Lord you know it’s me, and you know I love you. So I don’t really need to say it, but I like to, right on. Please bless this food and please bless this young woman and all the poor little girls that dad-blamed Donnie stole from their mamas. You know I could take a stick to him, right now, but I won’t cause that wouldn’t be loving and besides, I’m leaving him and the rest of the knuckleheads in this town to you. Help me show your love and light to my visitor here, cause Lord, I can just tell she don’t have no idea who you are. In Your Precious name, Amen.”

  With that, she dug into her plate. Carrie prodded the pile of fluffy eggs on her own plate with a tentative fork. They looked like regular eggs, but nothing out here had been regular so far. She was afraid to eat, for fear something alive would crawl out from the food.

  “It’s OK. They’re just eggs the way God made um.” Grace nodded with her mouth full. “They’re better than any from your high fangled grocery store.”

  Carrie took a careful bite and found Grace was telling the truth. The eggs were light and fluffy, seasoned just right.

  “They’re good,” she said in surprise.

  Grace cackled. “Told you they would be.”

  Carrie discovered she was ravenously hungry. She polished off her entire portion quickly and smiled at Grace. “Thank you, for everything,” she said shyly.

  “Aw, it weren’t nothing. As the Good Book Says, ‘Take every opportunity to do good, for we live in evil times’.”

  “Where are the girls?” It was the foremost question on her mind.

  “They’re fine, they’re at Sadie’s. She’s got the biggest cabin. She’s taking right smart care of them. They’re all cleaned up and fed good. We pitched in and washed their clothes and such.”

  “The men haven’t?” Carrie didn’t quite know how to ask that question of one who obviously was a member of the Conclave. She was relieved when Grace shook her head.

  “No, dearie. Us women, we’re all working to get those little girls back to their families where they belong. I don’t know whose hare-brained idea it was to steal a bunch of kids, probably that little windbag Beasley. Oh Lord, now I’m gonna have to repent, I reckon. Anyway, none of the men have seen hide nor hair of them girls. Just so’s you know, most of the women here are good souls. Course we got one or two I’d like to be shed of. The others well, some are here cause their husbands decided to join up with this mess and now they‘re stuck with it. Some are here cause they ain’t got nowhere else to go. This life, as rough as it is, is a sight better than what they had. And me, well, I was here first. This ain’t always been the Conclave, you know. It used to be a right nice little town called Eden. We had a school and a church and everything. Then the mines played out and the railroad stopped coming. Then long about 1947 that new highway they laid, well, it just right up and passed us by. ”

  “Why do you stay?” Carrie couldn’t fathom why anyone would stay in a place like this, with people like this by choice.

  Grace got up with some difficulty and walked over to the pie safe. Bending down, she pulled open the only drawer. Rummaging around inside she smiled as her fingers felt what she was looking for. Taking it, she shut the drawer and walked back over to sit by the bed. With slow, methodical movements she rubbed its surface before handing it over to the surprised girl.

  “A spoon? You’ve stayed here all these years because of a spoon? I don’t get it?”

  “Not just a spoon child, a silver spoon.”

  “I realize there must have been a silver mine around here somewhere, way back in the day. But that was then and, this is now. It’s just a cheap spoon, Grace. If I get out of this alive, you’re coming with me. And once we’re back in the real world, I’ll buy you a whole set of the finest silver spoons you’d ever want to see.”

  Grace shook her head, but the sweet smile never left her face. “This is the real world Carrie, my real world. You’re missing the whole point.”

  Carrie rolled her eyes. “Then tell me.”

  Grace settled deeper in the straight backed chair and nodded. “I was there when this here spoon was made. I watched the blacksmith hold a rough piece of ore over the fire again and again. It got cleaner and more shiny each time he heated it up, cause the bad stuff in it was getting burned away. I sat there all day watching him melt that ore over and over again. Being a kid I sort of lost patience and finally asked how in the world he would know when the stuff was pure and ready to pour into a spoon mold. You know what he said Carrie?”

  Puzzled the girl shook her head.

  Grace pointed to the spoon and continued, “He said it was right easy to tell when the silver was ready. All he had to do was just keep refining it till he could see his own face in it.”

  “So?” Carrie was lost.

  “I’m like that raw ore Carrie. And God is like the blacksmith. And He’ll keep refining and purifying me till he can see Himself in me. Malachi 3:3 says: ‘He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver’.”

  “That doesn’t make sense Grace. And it doesn‘t sound like something a loving God would do.” Carrie could be stubborn when she wanted to be.

  Grace laughed softly. “It makes perfect sense child. And it’s because He loves me so much that He keeps refining me and never gives up on me. No matter what nasty stuff gets brought to the surface during the firing. Don’t you see? Living here, loving these poor folks- that’s my very own refiner’s fire. It’s what the Lord has chosen for me. If we’re truly His, we want His plan for our lives not our own. I want Him to see His own reflection when He looks at me, Carrie. And I can’t make that happen in my poor meager strength. He has to do it in me. By refining me”

  Carrie was silent for a minute. Her eyes began to fill. “That sounds like something my mother would have said.”

  Grace nodded and leaned back in the chair. “She must have been a wise woman.”

  Carrie wiped a tear from her face and shrugged. “I guess, but I don’t believe the way she did.”

  Grace nodded as if that statement didn’t bother her. “What do you believe?”

  Carrie frowned and thought for a moment. �
��That’s a tough question,” she admitted.

  “It sure is,” Grace agreed. “And it’s the one question only you can answer for yourself, ain’t it? Nobody else can answer it for you, can they? Oh, they can try. And they surely will. But, in the end, you’re the only one who really truly knows what you believe.”

  “I guess.”

  The old woman smiled her response. “So when you do figure it out, you let me know, OK?”

  Carrie was intrigued and humbled by the whole idea. Had she been living her entire life based on only the faint idea of what she didn’t believe, having no idea at all about what she did believe? That was a sobering thought. It was so easy to say ‘this’ or ‘that’ was wrong, but what was right? Most of the stuff going on in the world today was right, wasn’t it? It was really all relative, wasn’t it? She’d always just assumed that conventional wisdom was the truth. Now she wasn’t so sure. In her life as a celebrity model, she’d seen it all. The Range of the Strange, Sid, her agent, called it. And it’d all been fine, hadn’t it? Anything goes. Everybody’s OK. Whether they lie, cheat, steal, or sleep with whomever. There was a way to rationalize it all, right?

  She twisted in the bed uncomfortably as the Ten Commandants suddenly whirled through her mind. Her mother had laughed when as a child Carrie had named them the ‘Thou Shalt Nots’.But Mom had made her memorize them anyway. Now they played over and over again like a broken record. They were pretty black and white. There wasn’t a whole lot of gray area in them.

  She looked across the bed covers at Grace, who seemed to be dozing. She’d be no help. Carrie looked at the old spoon in her hand. The surface wasn’t rough or pitted; on the contrary, it was smooth and shiny. She lifted it up until the fire’s light was reflected in its curved bowl. Turning it over she saw herself. Or rather she saw a very distorted image of herself. And in the stillness of the cabin she asked herself what God saw when He looked at her.

  Chapter Eight

  A gun going off in the dirt street right outside the cabin woke Carrie before dawn the next day. Even in the cold darkness, she could tell she felt much better than she had the day before. All the herbal tea, warmth, and good food had done wonders. Grace had even insisted she spend another night in the cozy feather bed. Carrie felt guilty watching the old woman make a pallet in front of the flickering fire. But in true Grace fashion, she’d replied with a Bible verse. Something about being kind to strangers.

  But at the moment Grace wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Carrie got out of the bed and pulled out the slop jar. She may have to use the dratted thing one more time, as she had no idea where the cabin privy might be, but she was determined to empty it herself. Finishing up, she looked around for her clothes. She found them laying over the straight backed chair, clean and pressed. Her socks, shoes, and under-things had been washed as well. She gratefully put them on. She was finger combing her hair and preparing to braid it when Grace pushed the door open and came in. She wasn’t alone.

  “Hey Carrie, want you to meet somebody.”

  “Sam?” Carrie was surprised to see him, but thrilled at the prospect that he was there to save them. If a sheriff’s deputy knew she was there, then the girls must be all right too.

  “Carrie?” He looked flummoxed and seemed transfixed by the sight of her hair spilling in a russet colored cascade all around her.

  She hurried across the floor of the cabin and literally launched herself into his arms. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  Grace cackled, “Well, I can see you all know each other.”

  “Oh, I know Sam. We dated back in the spring when I first moved to Burnt Hickory, didn’t we Sam?” Carrie nodded, so entranced by the clean cut lawman she was unable to see the taller scowling man standing on the porch behind them.

  “Uh, yeah,” Sam choked out. “We sure did. But you looked a bunch different back then Carrie.” He made it sound like an excuse for why he’d never called her back.

  “Where are the others? Have you already gotten the girls out?” Carrie darted to look around him and came face to face with Gage. “Sam you’ve got to arrest that man.”

  Gage’s hard eyes gave nothing away as he leaned casually against the porch railing.

  Sam laughed like she was joking. “What are you talking about? Arrest what man?”

  “Him” She pointed at Gage. “Somebody paid him a lot of money to kill me.”

  “Kill you?” Sam looked puzzled. “Carrie nobody wants to kill you. I think that hike up the trail got to you. Why don’t you sit down?” He led her to the chair.

  “You’re a deputy sheriff. You have to arrest all of them- Donnie, Leroy, Troy, and especially Harvey Beasley. He’s the one who planned the kidnapping,” she insisted.

  “Carrie, quit now, you’re starting to worry me.” He rubbed his hands nervously on the legs of his uniform.

  “What about the girls?”

  “We’re looking for the girls as we speak. That’s why I’m out here checking with the fine folks who live up this way.”

  “Fine folks?” Carrie murmured.

  “Yeah, Donnie and the boys told me they found you wandering in the woods when they were out hunting. It was a brave thing to go after the students Carrie, but not very practical. I mean, you don’t know your way around out here at all. And you’re not exactly the outdoorsy type, now are you? I’d say it was a miracle you got rescued at all.”

  “The girls are here. I saw them being led off to a house,” Carrie said.

  “You think the girls are here, in town?” Sam seemed surprised. “I haven’t heard anything about that Carrie. And I just got off the radio with the sheriff, he didn’t say anything. As far as I know everybody, including local volunteers, is still searching the woods for them.”

  Carrie looked around frantically. “Ask him, he’ll tell you.” She pointed to Gage.

  Sam turned to him and questioned him. “Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?”

  Gage’s eyes bore into those of the deputy, but he said nothing. Carrie suddenly wondered if she was going crazy after all. Then she pivoted on one foot and pleaded with Grace.

  “Tell him Grace. Tell him, we talked about the girls yesterday. You said you and the other women were trying to get them back to their parents, remember?”

  Grace smiled serenely but shook her head. “Child, there ain’t no girls in this here town.”

  “But that can’t be, we walked up here all the way from the school, it was so cold, then one of the girls got sick. What was her name? Ashley, her name was Ashley. And then…” Carrie’s head began to spin. She saw tiny dots dance in her peripheral vision. She held out one hand to Gage in a silent plea and started falling towards the floor. From somewhere far off, she heard Sam yell a warning that she was passing out. On her way to the floor something caught her. She didn’t know what, but it was warm and steady. And it smelled faintly like cloves and cinnamon.

  Later, swimming up from the darkness she felt deep rumbles against her cheek and snuggled toward a lovely comforting heat. OK, it was fairly obvious she’d been having a whale of a nightmare. But wasn’t her bed cozy? Must be a thunderstorm rolling in, that accounted for the rumbling thunder she heard spasmodically. What a wild nightmare. Kidnappers, lost children, a villain named the Prophet. For Pete’s Sake- how crazy was that? And the guy, how in the world did the surly guy from the elevator at the trial get into her dream? She was sure she was more grounded than that. Who knew one Ho-Ho snack cake could do this to a person? Well, she knew better now. No more Ho-Hos, or any other two syllable high fat treats for her. Junk food was poison. They said so on all those public TV channels all the time. Wait till she told Ruthie.

  “You can open your eyes now,” a deep voice suggested.

  She did, immediately. Her face crumpled. “This is not just a horrible junk food induced bad dream, is it?”

  Gage’s rich chuckles jounced her up and down. “Fraid not.”

  She tried to sit up and found that quite difficult as he had
her cradled in his arms. She slumped back. Then became irritated with herself because she found this position so… right. He was sitting in the chair. She was sitting for all intents and purposes in his lap wrapped in a quilt.

  “Am I crazy then?” she asked bleakly. She had to admit she felt off balance. Maybe she’d had a breakdown. It was possible. At this point she’d believe anything was possible.

  “No,” he answered.

  “But Sam said, I mean he’s the deputy.”

  “I know.”

  “And Grace said,”

  “I know.”

  “And you even.” She looked up at him as he started to open his mouth. “Do not say I know,” she ordered.

  “OK”

  “Sam’s really a nice guy. We only went out the one time. But I could tell he was a nice guy,” she rambled.

  “Only once?” It was a soothing rumble.

  “Yeah, I mean well, he didn’t call me back.”

  He pulled her closer into his embrace and whispered into her hair. “He must be blind.”

  The compliment brought a quick flood of tears to her eyes. “Don’t do that. Don’t be nice. I can’t handle it right now. Not when I know you’re taking money to… ” She felt his arms tense around her, but he remained silent. “Just don’t be nice. It’d be totally out of character for you.”

  “But not for good old Sam, huh?” His words were hard and felt like ice raining down into her cozy world.

  “He is good. He sings in the choir at the Baptist Church, Gage. He coaches Little League ball, for goodness sakes. He,”

  “Walks on water?” Gage got up, easily lifting her, and strode over to the bed. He laid her down, then swiftly tucked the quilt around her. He began to turn to walk away, but changed his mind. Settling on the edge of the bed, he planted his forearms on her pillow and captured her face between two big hands. He made her look in his eyes. The fire in them scared her.