“I am dead at that school! They’ll all laugh at me! You always ruin everything. I hate you. Why didn’t you die instead of Daddy?” She threw the door open wide, stormed out and slammed it behind her.
Charlie folded as though she’d been punched in the stomach, but she couldn’t just let her go. “Sarah, come back in here.”
“Make me!”
Charlie charged into the house and up the stairs after her. She knew Sarah’s door would be locked, so she banged on it. “We’re going to talk about this, whether you like it or not.” Did all parents speak in clichés? She heard her father’s words in her mother’s voice. “This boy lied to you, Sarah. He’s been convicted of driving drunk. He was expelled because he assaulted a girl....”
“He never assaulted anybody. That girl is the liar. She got him expelled because he wouldn’t date her.”
“You knew about that?” Charlie leaned back against the wall beside Sarah’s door. “Did you know he was nineteen?”
Pause. “Of course.” Charlie felt certain Sarah had not known, but she’d never admit that now. “I knew you’d never let me go with him if you knew he was that old.”
“You got that right, Sarah, please open the door.” Charlie tried to sound reasonable, even cajoling. She was discovering that the Sarah she thought she knew no longer existed.
Oh, Steve, why did you have to go and leave me with this mess? I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.
All at once she imagined Jake’s face. She wanted to leave Sarah locked in her room—preferably for the next twenty years—run to Jake, throw herself into his arms and ask him to take over. She needed his strength, his wisdom, his gentleness.
His unwillingness to make decisions annoyed her, but here she was longing to turn her problems over to someone else. Sarah was her responsibility, not Jake’s. Not the colonel’s, either, come to that.
“I am never opening this door again and I am never speaking to you, or Mickey, either.”
“I’ll tell Vittorio you won’t be at lunch, then.” Charlie thought her voice sounded pretty good considering she was a nanosecond away from morphing into Hulk-Mom and tearing the door off its hinges. “Sarah, I love you. Please believe me, I’m doing this to protect you.”
“Yeah. From life.” The heavy thud of a book hitting the door made Charlie jump.
Her adrenaline exploded. “That’s enough of that, young lady. And you can forget about the swimming party—if it exists.”
Holding the morning newspaper open to the crossword puzzle, her father waited for her at the foot of the stairs. Charlie was in no mood. If he did an “I told you so” or “She’s just like you”....
She pushed past her father and out the door, across the short distance into the common room. “Where’s Jake?”
The others were clearing up after breakfast. “What’s wrong?” Mary Anne asked.
“Don’t ask!” Charlie ran into the barn and down to Molly’s stall. Of course that’s where Jake would be, so Mary Anne could take a break. He’d be in with Flopsy and Mopsy, Mary Anne’s names for the babies.
His back was propped against the stall while Molly nibbled hay. Both foals nursed happily from opposite sides of their mother’s belly. Flopsy, the big filly, had learned to duck under to nurse, while Mopsy, the little stud colt, could still reach straight up.
“They don’t seem to mind sharing,” Jake said with a broad grin. His eyes widened. “Charlie?” He was out the door in an instant and caught her hand.
Now the tears came. Great, just great.
“Tell me.”
She did. The entire stupid, ridiculous, dangerous story. “She hates me, and I don’t blame her,” Charlie said. Sarah was not Jake’s problem, but at the moment, she’d be willing to take parenting advice from Molly who seemed to be a whole lot better at it than Sarah.
Jake dropped his arms and turned away. “You’re asking the wrong person. I give bad advice.”
Maybe she was still angry from her confrontation with Sarah. Whatever it was, she exploded. “Jake, stop it! Get over it! People need you. I need you.”
His face went blank.
She took a step toward him. She knew she sounded whiny, but she couldn’t seem to help it. “I mean it. Somebody has to tell me what to do.”
“Not me.” He brushed past her and out the barn door. “I killed eleven men. I don’t do advice.”
Her adrenaline flared up again without ever having settled. She ran after him and grabbed his arm. “Not another single person is running from me today, Jake Thompson. You come back here right now.” She hauled him around to face her. “How did you kill them? Did you stand them up against a wall and machine-gun them?”
“Of course not.”
“Daddy told me the bare bones, but I want to hear it from you.”
“Not now.”
“Yes, now.” She felt certain he’d pull away from her again.
Instead, he sat on Mickey’s bench beside the door and dropped his head in his hands. She sank onto the bench beside him and said softly, “It’s okay. I’m scared and I took it out on you. You don’t owe me an explanation.”
After a long moment, he lifted his head but didn’t turn to look at her. When at last he spoke, he sounded almost casual. “You never act on a single source of intelligence. It’s like the old newspaper saying, ‘Your mother says she loves you, but check it out.’ Theoretically, my twelve-man team served in a strictly humanitarian capacity, but we also kept our eyes and ears open for valuable intel. We’d had a pretty good rep in the villages for bringing medicine, water trucks, food. We weren’t dumb enough to think they liked us, but they tolerated us.
“Then a new colonel was assigned who didn’t think we were getting enough intel fast enough. He’d met some headman for the first time at a conference and promised him medical supplies. We hadn’t gotten to know the power structure that ran the village, but Colonel—never mind his name—gave me a direct order to take my team out for what he called a ‘shake and howdy’ visit. I didn’t like it. He’d received a direct request from the elders for medicine. That never happened. Usually word was passed along until eventually it got to us. Everybody in the team thought it sounded hinky. I tried to tell the colonel that, but he refused to listen.
“It was a direct order. We had to go, but I told the guys we’d be on our guard, go in fast and be ready to leave faster.”
“And it wasn’t all right?”
“We took two trucks—five men in each plus a driver up front. Went okay at the start. We turned the trucks around in the square so we were already headed out. Made it easier to unload, too. We stacked the supplies in the headman’s house. He seemed glad to see us, offered us tea, which we declined. Usually in the villages a few kids would run out to cadge chocolate while their mothers watched. This village was nearly deserted except for some old men drinking tea on the far side of the square. They looked to be unarmed.
“I told my men to load up nice and easy while I kept chatting with the headman. Some were climbing into the truck in the middle of the square, and the others were heading for the first in line that was headed out.
“That’s when the square was hit by a handheld from one of the rooftops and blew up. It’s not like a television explosion. Hot metal, burning canvas, parts of tires fly off. If I hadn’t been across the square, I’d have been blown up or cut to pieces. That’s where shrapnel from the truck messed up my knee, not that I realized at the time I’d been hit. Somehow I made it to the driver’s door of the other truck. I had to get it out of there before they blew it up, too.
“The driver was dead, and my sergeant was lying on the other seat with blood...”
She winced.
“You don’t want to hear this next part,” he said.
She braced herself. “I want all of it.”
&
nbsp; He hesitated before saying, “Fine. I yanked the dead man from behind the wheel, hauled my sergeant up and shoved him far enough out of my way so I could get behind the wheel. I prayed some of the guys made it into the back of the truck alive, so I floored it. A second handheld barely missed and blew up in the square. I planned to put my sergeant down out of range and go back to get the others.”
“You must have known they were dead.”
He hit his knee with his fist. “You never know, Charlie, until you see the bodies. You pray. Maybe they’d taken cover and returned fire. If my sergeant and I were still alive, somebody back there might be alive, too.
“Rule number one, never leave a man behind, alive or dead. A hundred yards down the hill we ran into a half-dozen of our trucks. The colonel had received new intel that we were driving into a trap and sent out a rescue mission. I tried to go back to the village with them, but I passed out. My sergeant died on the plane to Ramstein. According to the report afterward, the others were dead before I drove away.”
There was silence.
“None of that was your fault,” she began.
“If I hadn’t led them in, if we’d pulled out earlier...”
“You couldn’t disobey a direct order.”
“I should have gone over his head.”
“On a gut feeling? They’d have replaced you and sent out the mission just the same, wouldn’t they?”
“Instead, I dropped them all straight into it.”
“What happened to that village?”
“It no longer exists.”
“Oh, Jake, those poor people!”
“They swore they got noncombatants out before they leveled the place, but nobody knows for sure. If not, that’s on me, too.”
“No, it is not. You tried to save your men.”
“Tried and failed. I left them the way I left my family. I make decisions and people suffer. Everybody’s safer if I don’t make any.”
“You’ve been making decisions since you’ve been here.”
“Yeah, it’s harder than I thought not to.”
“If you can make little ones, you can make the big ones, too.”
“How do you keep it together, Charlie?” he asked.
She laughed. “I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. What drives you?”
“That’s easy. I want Sarah to be happy and I want this farm. Never, ever to move again. You must want something, Jake. What would you choose to fight for? What do you desire so fervently that you’ll do anything to get it?”
“To go back to the beginning and make things right.”
She shrugged. “Not gonna happen for any of us. The time machine’s thrown a cog. You guard your pain as carefully as you’d guard one of the kittens. You poke at it like an aching tooth. If you start to walk away from it, you drag yourself back.”
“I don’t deserve to be free of it.”
“When will you have paid enough? Today? Tomorrow? The last breath you take?”
“There is no enough. I’m trying to limit future damage.”
“Everybody makes decisions that harm themselves and other people. I can’t begin to list the things I’ve done that come under the heading of stupid and hurtful. You could say I was such a lousy wife that I sent my husband off to be killed and deprived Sarah of her father.”
“You didn’t kill him. You weren’t there. I was. I killed eleven good young men with their whole lives ahead of them. What kept me alive when they died?”
“You obeyed an order and walked into an ambush and everybody died but you. You didn’t run from your men, you tried to save them. If you’d refused to go on that mission, you’d have been court-martialed and someone else would have led them into that ambush.”
“Then it would have been on his head. As it is, it’s on mine.”
She threw up her hands. “Have it your way. You killed them. You deprived those eleven good young men who trusted you of their lives. You made their wives widows, their children orphans, their relatives and their friends grieve for them. Maybe one of them would have found a cure for cancer if he’d lived. Does that make you responsible for everyone who dies of cancer?”
“Of course not. You don’t understand the nature of command.”
“The heck I don’t. I’ve been around it all my life. I’ve eaten at my father’s table with more generals than you’ll meet in a lifetime.”
“They died. I lived. Why?”
“If it were anyone else in the same situation, you’d say it was the luck of the draw. Your decision to go into that village didn’t cause their deaths any more than I killed Steve. Fulfilling your dreams, being happy, living life, loving someone, having a family, working at something you want to do—that’s the way to pay for their deaths and your life. To make their lives count, yours has to count, doesn’t it? You can’t do that by opting out of life, not taking a stand.”
She could tell by his face that he was angry. He’d never forgive her, but she had to try. “Everybody here likes you and looks up to you. Why would we waste time on a man who is so dumb he’d walk away from that?”
She turned on her heel and left him gaping.
She could barely breathe. She had no right to tear into him that way. What was that old story about the mule that wouldn’t move? The farmer hit him between the eyes with a two-by-four. When the donkey began to trot, he told his friend, “First, you have to get his attention.” At least she had Jake’s attention. Being sweet and supportive would not have worked. For her it never did
“Charlie, wait!” Jake caught up with her, took her arm and swung her around.
Her face was blazing and her hair was soaked with sweat. She seldom got angry, but when she did, she went all the way to fury. The only people who could make her angry were the people she loved. Jake made her furious, and guess what that meant.
He wrapped her in his arms.
“Let go of me!” She put her hands flat against his chest and shoved. He held her fast until she stopped struggling.
“Not now, not ever. Calm down.” He propped his chin on her head. “Your father told me the same thing. I refused to hear him.”
She shoved him so hard he released her and stumbled backward. “You better hear me.”
He took both her hands and held her at arm’s length. “I asked you once who could not love you? I came out to this farm and this course as my last chance to find something to care about. When I got off that bus, I found you standing in the sun blazing like a homing beacon.”
He pulled her into his arms, and this time she didn’t fight him. “Dearest Charlie,” he whispered into her hair. “I can’t change overnight. I keep sliding back into guilt, but with your help maybe I can keep going forward.”
She lifted her face, and he kissed her. When she opened her eyes, he was smiling down at her with that smile she’d longed to see since she found him in Picard’s stall.
“You said yourself, I’m making decisions I couldn’t have made when I arrived here. I’m not copping out, but I can’t help you with Sarah. I simply don’t know how.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
SEAN KNOCKED ON Jake’s door at midnight. “Jake, open up.”
“Don’t let the cats out,” Jake said sleepily as he pulled Sean inside and shut the door after him. Mama Cat and all five kittens were curled on the foot of Jake’s bed. Mama Cat didn’t move.
“We got a problem. I just saw Sarah climbing out her bedroom window.”
“What?” Jake grabbed for his shoes. He was still wearing his jeans.
“I think she’s running away.”
“Get the others,” Jake said. “We have to stop her.”
“Meet you by the stallion stall,” Sean said.
When they convened, Mickey said, “She’s meet
ing that thug. Bound to be.”
“She’s not that dumb, is she?” Hank asked.
“Of course she is,” Mary Anne said. “She has to prove we’re all wrong and he’s Lancelot and St. Francis rolled up in one.”
Mickey watched the yard from the stable door. “I don’t see any movement. You sure you saw her, Sean?”
“Yeah. I been thinking for a while that dormer over the front porch would make for an easy shinny down. Didn’t think Sarah would try it. She could fall and get herself killed.”
“Maybe she’s stuck up there where we can’t see her,” Hank said.
“I watched her climb down the drainpipe,” Sean said. “Then I lost her in the trees.”
“Maybe she’s already out of sight down the road,” Mickey suggested.
“Not time enough,” Sean said.
“More likely she’s waiting for that boy to pick her up,” Mary Anne said.
Jake frowned. “He’s no boy. He’s betting that if anything happens to her, she’ll never tell on him.”
“She’d die before she’d let Charlie and the colonel know they were right,” Mickey said.
Mary Anne pointed. “Hey, look, isn’t that headlights?”
“Sean,” Jake snapped, “start the truck, but don’t turn on the lights.”
“Where’s Hank?” Mary Anne asked. They looked around, but he wasn’t there.
“Let me know if you can’t stop them,” Mickey said and held up his cell phone. “She’s young enough for an Amber Alert. I’ll call the cops and have his truck stopped.”
“It’s turning in,” Mary Anne whispered. “He’s cut his headlights.” A moment later the passenger-side door opened. The overhead light came on briefly. A dark figure slipped into the seat, the door slammed, but the truck didn’t start.
“Maybe they’re just talking,” Mary Anne said. The other truck roared to life. “Maybe not,” Jake said. “We have to cut them off.”
He jumped behind the wheel and put the farm truck into gear while Mary Anne and Sean piled in the back and opened the window into the cab. “Where is Hank?” Mary Anne said. “Did he bail?”
Taking the Reins Page 19