Return to Me

by Rosemary Rogers

  “He ain’t the boss of me.” Lacy rose. “No man is ever gonna tell me what to do.” She turned on her bare feet and started up the stairs again.

  “Where are you going, Lacy?”

  “Upstairs to get dressed and get my ridin’ boots.”

  “You are not going anywhere, young lady!”

  “I am unless you plan to tie me to a bedpost. I’m goin’ to hunt for Aunt Cammy. You comin’?”

  Taye contemplated the outrageous idea for only a second and then grabbed her skirts and ran up the stairs after her charge.

  Jackson stood beside Cameron’s abandoned carriage, the crumpled note in his hand. He was so angry that he could not speak.

  Falcon stood in silence beside his friend, knowing the black mood well.

  Thomas paced back and forth in the weeds, coughing and wiping his mouth. “Perhaps we should do what they say, Jackson, go back and get the cash,” Thomas suggested.

  “Look at this note. The bastard can’t spell her! How long do you think she’ll be safe with a man—” Jackson glanced around, noting the weeds that had been trampled and the number of hoof prints. “Men like that?” he demanded.

  Falcon squatted in the grass beside the hedgerow and pushed at the weeds, studying the many hoof and footprints in the moonlight. Picking a set, he followed them to the roadway and glanced up thoughtfully. “Men too foolish to even cover their tracks,” he mused aloud as he walked to his horse and mounted. “We’ll follow them.”

  Jackson leaped into his saddle, urging his horse forward before his boots were in the stirrups, leaving Thomas to catch up when he could.

  Taye and Lacy rode quietly toward Elmwood, cutting across a field to avoid Noah’s checkpoint. Lacy knew the area well and seemed amazingly comfortable in the saddle.

  “What if she’s not at Elmwood? What if the men have already been there and she’s not there?” Taye asked. “Then where do we go?”

  “Don’t know.” Lacy stared out into the dark, overgrown fields, studying every movement of the trees overhead with a keen eye. The moon had risen full in the sky, and it lit their way like a pale white beam of lamplight. “Mama always said ya got to go by instink. And I’m tellin’ ya, my gut says go this way.” Lacy pulled back on the reins, settling in her saddle. “Hey, you see that?” she whispered.

  “What?”

  Lacy eased her horse back until she was right beside Taye. “Right there—that ole tree?”

  Taye stared hard into the darkness. “Yes?”

  “You see that limb stickin’ out kinda funny from the trunk?” Lacy looked at Taye. “You know any tree limbs stick straight out of a big ole oak tree like that?”

  “No, but so? It’s dark. In the darkness, your mind can play tricks on you.”

  Lacy eased out of her saddle and dropped to the ground as she dropped her reins, leaving the horse ground tied.

  “Where are you going?” Taye whispered.

  Lacy lifted her thin finger to her lips as she eased slowly across a small ditch, heading toward the oak tree.

  Taye watched as Lacy moved through the darkness, seeming to glide on the night shadows. She was nearly to the base of the oak when Taye saw sudden movement, and Lacy set off at a dead run, chasing the shadow.

  “Lacy!” Taye cried, sliding off the mare just as Lacy hit the running form full force with her body and they both fell hard in the fallow field.

  Taye took off at a run. “Lacy, please!” She crossed the distance between them quickly and halted, letting her skirts fall from her hands.

  Lacy straddled a woman, her fist cocked back threateningly. In the moonlight, Taye could see that it was Efia.

  “Where is she?” Lacy demanded.

  “Where’s who?” Efia struggled.

  “My aunt Cammy!” Lacy drew her fist back farther.

  “I don’ know what yer talkin’ ’bout, crazy girl. Get offen me!” Efia looked up at Taye, wild-eyed. “I don’ know what she’s talkin’ ’bout. I swear I don’.”

  Lacy sat back, crossing her arms over her stomach, still keeping the slight Efia pinned to the ground. “It’s the middle of the night. Ain’t nobody walking alone on this road in the dark except people up to no good.”

  Efia shook her head emphatically. “No. It ain’t like that. I…I got nowhere to go’s all. I was just walkin’. I swear it.”

  Taye noted Efia’s bare feet and the fact that she was dressed in nothing but a thin, sleeveless dress. “Miss Cameron is missing, Efia. Have you seen her?”

  “M-missing? What’cha mean?”

  Lacy narrowed her green Campbell eyes. “What she means is, if ya don’t tell us where my aunt Cammy is, I’m gonna pound ya into the dirt!”

  Efia managed to free one hand, and she drew it up to protect herself. The fear in her eyes touched Taye, even after all that Efia had done to her.

  “Lacy,” Taye said gently. “Let her up.”

  “Not ’til I pound the truth out of her,” Lacy muttered, raising her fist again. “I’ll make her spill what all she knows.”

  Taye grabbed Lacy by the shoulders and dragged her off her captive. Instead of getting up and running, Efia just lay there, streaks of tears on her dark cheeks.

  “Clyde put you out, didn’t he?” Taye asked.

  Efia sat up, wiping her damp, dirt-streaked cheeks, and nodded.

  “And you’ve got nowhere to go?”

  Efia shook her head.

  Taye only hesitated for a moment. “Get up and we’ll take you back to Atkins’ Way. It’s not safe for you to be out here alone at this time of night.”

  “Ya…ya mean that?” Efia stared at Taye as if they were not speaking the same language.

  “Of course I mean it.” Taye couldn’t bring herself to smile at the pathetic woman, but she still felt sorry for her. “Maybe we can find some work for you, at least get you something to eat and some decent clothes.”

  Efia kept staring at Taye as if she were a specter or maybe an angel. “Ya would do that?”

  Taye nodded.

  Efia looked to Lacy and then back at Taye. After a moment, she spoke haltingly. “What she talkin’ ’bout? What happen to Miss Cameron?”

  “We don’t know.” Taye offered her hand to Efia and pulled her to her feet. “She left town around seven-thirty and she was supposed to be going to Atkins’ Way, but she never reached there. No one knows where she is.”

  Efia turned her gaze on Taye, trembling in obvious fear. “I…I got an ide’ where she might be.”

  “You should let me go now,” Cameron said, eyeing Clyde in his sack mask. “You let me go now. Let me walk out of here. Better yet, let me take my horses with me.” She raised her voice; just the thought of leaving her well cared for animals with this man was abhorrent. “You do that and you just might survive the night.”

  Clyde tilted a crock to his lips and drank deeply.

  “If you don’t let me go, my husband is not just going to kill you when he gets here,” Cameron went on. Honestly, she had no idea where Jackson was. Still in Alabama, for all she knew, but Clyde didn’t know that.

  “He’s going to torture you first before he kills you,” Cameron warned. “He’s going to pull down your trousers and—”

  “God a’ mighty, woman! Don’t ya ever shut the hell up?” Clyde shouted, spraying her with spittle and alcohol.

  Cameron closed her eyes against the onslaught. Most of the other men were asleep or passed out drunk. If she could only get loose, she thought she had a good chance of escaping. If she could get out of the chair, she might be able to wait until Clyde fell asleep, then walk out, taking the horses with her.

  And then what? Cameron wondered. If she survived the night, what was she going to do with the rest of her life?

  Earlier this evening, when she’d left the hotel, she’d made up her mind to divorce Jackson. As she drove the buggy, her anger, her pain, had eaten at her until all she wanted was revenge, even at the cost of her own happiness. But then a couple of hours ago, a
ll that had changed, changed the moment Clyde wrapped his filthy hand around her wrist. She knew then that she wanted to survive. She wanted her baby to live. She wanted Jackson. The truth was, she still loved him. If Jackson was willing to try to recover the trust and love they’d once felt for each other, if he’d give up Marie and come back to her and stay faithful, she’d have him. She was willing to take him back because she’d loved him since she was seventeen and she knew she would never love as fiercely and deeply as she did with Jackson. No other man would ever come close to being what he was to her.

  Cameron wiggled her hands behind her, determined to free herself. She would not die here.

  Jackson, Thomas and Falcon followed the hoofprints. According to the Cherokee, there were eight horses in all, two riderless, one carrying double.

  Several miles outside the town of Jackson, the tracks led off the main road. When the search party spotted what appeared to be an abandoned farmhouse in the distance, they dismounted.

  Not ten yards from where they tied their animals in the trees, Thomas began to cough. Falcon halted, concerned that if the raiders were inside, they might hear the noise. “Maybe you should go back and stay with the horses,” he ventured quietly.

  Thomas lowered his head to the crook of his elbow, coughing into his coat. “No,” he rasped. “I want to help. I want to do this for the senator.”

  Jackson reached out and slid his arm around Thomas’s shoulder, stunned when he realized the man was nothing but skin and bone. “You have your pistol?”

  Thomas nodded, handkerchief pressed to his lips.

  “You guard the horses,” Jackson said firmly. “Because we’re going to need them to get the hell out of here. Anyone else comes down that road, you need to holler out. You’ve got our backs.” He released Thomas, and the younger man turned away, shoulders hunched with disappointment.

  Jackson swallowed the lump in his throat and fell into step behind Falcon again.

  Taye and Lacy followed the road slowly by moonlight, Efia riding double behind Lacy. When they turned off the road, Lacy insisted they dismount and leave the horses.

  “Ya have to be sneaky,” she whispered as they slipped through the pine trees toward the spot where Efia said there would be an old house Clyde used to store stolen goods until he could smuggle them elsewhere.

  When the women heard a horse nicker in the distance, Taye turned back to Lacy. “It sounds like someone is here,” she whispered, fretting with her hands. “I wonder if one of us should go back to town. Find Noah.”

  “I ain’t goin’—”

  “Am not going,” Taye corrected.

  Lacy turned around, planting her hands on her hips. “I am not going back to town,” she said, carefully enunciating each word. “I am going to find Aunt Cammy. And if those bastards have her—”

  “Lacy! Young ladies do not use such foul words.”

  Lacy screwed up her face. “Ladies shouldn’t be in the kind of predicaments that calls fer such talk, but we’re here, ain’t we?”

  Taye almost laughed. It was precisely the kind of retort Cameron would have made.

  “All right,” Taye whispered, following Lacy and Efia. “We’ll try to see if Cam’s here. But I’m warning you, if we find her, we’re going back for the men. We’re going back for a whole blessed army.”

  As the three women moved farther through the woods, they spotted three horses and the figure of a man leaning against a tree. They circled quietly around and continued through the woods, toward the back of the house, passing more horses, all hobbled.

  “Clyde’s here, all right,” Efia muttered bitterly. “I can smell his stench.”

  As they crept closer, all was quiet, but Taye spied candlelight glowing in one of the front windows. “We should go back,” she whispered. “Get the men.”

  “Mean bastard,” Efia muttered, creeping closer. “I cooked and cleaned and washed his drawers, and what did I get?”

  “Efia, no.” Taye reached out to stop the young woman, but the black girl seemed in a daze as she walked closer to the house.

  Taye caught Lacy’s hand. “Lacy, honey. We have to go back.”

  “My, my, my,” Cameron’s voice broke the stillness of the heavy night air.

  Taye and Lacy froze. Efia kept walking toward the dilapidated structure.

  “I would hate to be you, come morning,” Cameron taunted from inside, her voice strong. “I can’t imagine walking around without your necessary parts, or having them dangling all bloody between your legs. They say a man bleeds to death…eventually.”

  “Did you hear me?” a male voice came from inside. “I said shut the hell up, else I’ll shut you up!”

  Taye heard a loud slap and cringed, knowing the man must have hit her sister. “We have to go get help,” she whispered desperately.

  But Lacy and Efia didn’t turn back. At the sound of the man obviously striking Cameron, both women dashed across the clearing, through the opening where a back door had once hung.

  Jackson and Falcon had just edged into the bushes beside the sagging front porch when they heard a woman shriek. They’d heard Cameron berating her captor nonstop for the last five minutes, but this wasn’t Cameron’s cry…it was someone else.

  “What the hell?” Jackson muttered.

  “Efia, no!” Cameron screamed.

  Jackson and Falcon leaped onto the porch, then charged through the open front door. Jackson carried a pistol in each hand, Falcon a repeating rifle.

  Jackson spotted a disheveled and dirt-streaked Cameron in a chair, her arms bound behind her. A few feet away, Efia held one of the kidnappers at bay with a rusty butcher knife. It appeared to Jackson that his wife was trying to maneuver her chair behind the black woman.

  Movement to the left caught Jackson’s eye. A pistol barrel flashed in the doorway. He turned sideways and fired. A man slumped to the rotten floor, dead before he hit. Jackson fired again and dropped a second man, then a third.

  “Cameron, get down,” he yelled. She couldn’t have been four yards away, yet she might have been a mile. He couldn’t reach her!

  Falcon’s rifle boomed. The thug reaching for Taye grabbed his belly, groaned and crumpled at her feet.

  “Damn ya ta hell, Clyde!” Efia lashed out and cut a deep slice in her opponent’s forearm, but he reached out and seized her thin wrist, wrestling the knife from her grasp. Sneering, he plunged it into her chest.

  “No!” Cameron screamed, finally pulling free from the ropes that bound her to the chair. She lunged forward, trying to catch Efia as she slid to the floor, her tattered dress blossoming scarlet.

  Jackson tried again to get to his wife, but three more armed raiders poured into the farmhouse. Falcon’s rifle cut down two as a lantern shattered and hot, flaming oil raced across the table.

  “Cameron!” Jackson could hardly breathe for the stench of smoke, gunpowder and spilled blood.

  “Jackson!” Cameron cried. “They have Lacy.”

  He twisted to see the form of a hooded man dragging Lacy along the floor into a back hallway. Falcon’s rifle spit flame and lead. Lacy’s assailant hurtled backward, struck the wall and slid to the floorboards, lifeless. Lacy crawled across the floor, sobbing and whimpering Cameron’s name.

  In the midst of chaos, Clyde reached Cameron, knotting his thick fingers in her hair and dragging her to her feet in front of him. “I got a knife,” he warned as he drew a Bowie knife from his belt and held the twelve-inch blade against her throat. “Anyone makes a move and I kill her.” Holding her against him like a shield, he backed out through the front door.

  “Cam—” Jackson stepped forward involuntarily and Clyde pulled the knife across Cameron’s throat. She cried out in pain.

  “Back I told ya, or she’s dead. Ya can kill me, but she ain’t gonna make it, neither.”

  Blood seeped down Cameron’s pale, slender neck and her petrified eyes locked on Jackson’s as Clyde dragged her into the darkness.

  Falcon strode soundles
sly across the room. “I will go out the back and follow them. He will not see me, Jackson. Your wife will live.”

  “No…no…” Cameron’s screams pierced the night. “Jackson!”

  “Cameron!” Jackson lunged through the door to just make out a flash of Cameron’s dress in the darkness. She was on her knees, two figures struggling above her. One fell to the ground, and Jackson’s pistol roared, knocking the other to the ground as he fled for the woods.

  “Taye!” Cameron screamed, sobbing as Jackson raced across the clearing, falling to his knees beside her.

  Cameron held Thomas in her arms, Clyde’s hunting knife protruding from his blood-soaked chest.

  Taye appeared out of the darkness to drop to her knees at Cameron’s side. “Oh, Thomas, Thomas,” she sobbed.

  Cameron gently lowered Thomas’s head to Taye’s lap. The lawyer stared sightlessly into the blue eyes he would always love.

  It was midafternoon when Cameron stirred and opened her eyes. “Hey, sleepyhead.”

  She lifted her lashes and smiled up at Jackson. “Hey, yourself,” she said sleepily. And then she closed her eyes for a moment, thinking back on the night’s tragic events. “Taye?” she whispered.

  “With Falcon in the garden. And you had better start calling her Minette. A death certificate will be issued for Taye within a few days. Poor girl somehow got caught up with a gang of thieves and murderers and died among them last night.”

  She pressed her lips together. “What about a body?”

  “No one to claim poor Efia. At least now she’ll have a decent burial.”

  “And Lacy?”

  “In the kitchen entertaining Naomi’s little one.”

  Cameron opened her eyes again, tears stinging the backs of them. “I still can’t believe Thomas is dead. I can’t believe he sacrificed himself for Falcon. Did he know Taye loved him?” she murmured, still not quite understanding.

  “Thomas was a good man. A good man who was dying. So instead of passing away in a bed somewhere, coughing out his lungs—” Jackson reached out and tenderly swept the hair off her cheek “—he died a hero’s death.”