by Robyn Carr
He laughed loudly. “So what do you do to come to a peaceful place about those horrible people?”
She lifted her head and looked into his eyes without mirth. Her green eyes were warm and soft. Her smile was gentle. “We accept them as they are. And if we can’t love them like brothers, maybe we can understand and let them be their own problems. Holy Christ, isn’t that enough of a challenge? Accept him as he is, Ian—a miserable old son of a bitch who was hardly happy a day in his life, and it really had nothing to do with you.”
Though he fought it, he felt his eyes glisten with tears. Long seconds passed in which she met that clouded gaze fearlessly—not afraid of his roar, his rage or his tears. “How does someone so young and bad and wild get wisdom?” he asked in a whisper.
“Wisdom? What I get is struggle. I haven’t had it as bad as you, as hard as most people. I just do my best, that’s all. But I want to tell you something. I didn’t love you with just my body, Ian. My heart got in there. I hope you know that.”
“I know that.” He touched her lips briefly. Then he asked, “So, what’s wrong with him? My father? You said he was sick.”
“Not critical—but his maladies will get him sooner than later. He’s being treated with chemo for prostate cancer, he has Parkinson’s, had a mild stroke and I believe some dementia is settling in. But, be warned—he could have years.” Then she grinned.
“You—are—amazing.”
“You could come home with me, Ian. For Christmas.”
He was quiet for a moment. “No. I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not? Will the good people from the towns around here be without firewood? Would the cabin get snowed in?”
He smiled at her. “Baby, I’m not going to kid you—you changed my life, and all in ten days, but not enough to clean me up and take me back to Chico. Listen to me,” he said gently. “This is nice, you and me. But I think it’s a tryst that might never be anything more. This thing that happened between us—it wasn’t supposed to.”
“But you’re not sorry,” she said.
“You know I’m not sorry. I’m grateful.”
“I think if I stayed a little longer…”
“What? You’d get through to me? Transform me into some other kind of guy? Pluck me out of my run-down cabin and make a civilized man out of me?”
She shook her head. “Nothing like that ever occurred to me. You’re more civilized than most of the men I know. But lately I’ve been thinking if I stayed longer you’d laugh more. You’d sing to people instead of just to wildlife. You’d probably ask that librarian out for drinks.”
“Yeah,” he laughed. “After I found a way to convince her I’m not an idiot savant.”
“If I came back here to see you, would you lock me out and make me sleep in my car?”
He laughed and shook his head. “No.” But he thought, she might come back once, maybe even twice. Then it would stop, because he and this place wouldn’t change much. And he didn’t deserve her; she should have so much more than some beat-up old marine with issues who’d stuck himself in the woods.
“Since you won’t come back with me, I’m staying till Christmas Eve. I won’t leave at the crack of dawn, but I’ll get home in time for dinner. It’s just a few hours away.”
“Erin isn’t going to like that,” he said. “She’s ready for you right now.”
“She’ll have to wait. I’m doing the best I can. I don’t want to leave you. Ever.”
Instead of talking about it anymore, he asked her, “Is it too soon to make love again?”
“No,” she said, smiling.
He pulled her against him. It was better this way, he thought, that he not add the words I love you to the mix. This was hard enough on her. Instead, he kissed her as well as he could, his hands running over her body in a way that promised more loving.
In the morning when she woke, he had gone. He left a note. “Sweetheart. Selling wood, plowing some roads. I won’t be too long. Ian.”
“Sweetheart,” she whispered to herself. She folded it in half and quarters and found a safe place in her wallet to preserve it. Forever.
Fourteen
I an unloaded his entire supply of firewood in short order and took delivery orders for three more half cords, which would take him another day to load, deliver and unload, giving people their cozy fires for Christmas. And his supply of cut and cure wood was running low, which was the plan. He’d cut and split and cured all spring, summer and fall and then, with luck, sell off his wood in a matter of weeks.
He was in Virgin River before noon. He parked by the bar, but he didn’t go in. Instead he walked up to that huge tree, taking a closer look at some of the unit badges. He looked around; he was alone. Then he pulled a few things out of his pocket. He’d fixed them up with short wires so they’d hook onto the branches. His unit badge—the same as Bobby’s. A Purple Heart and a Bronze Star—medals awarded for the highest bravery and valor. He fixed them onto the tree. It took him just a few moments.
“I’ll see those get back to you,” a voice said.
He whirled around and found himself facing Mel Sheridan. Her coat was pulled tight against the cold and occasional snow flurries, her hands plunged in her pockets. “I won’t be here at Christmas—we’re going to Jack’s family. But I can tell Paige—Preacher’s wife—to make sure when she rescues some of the badges that she holds on to your medals. It wouldn’t do to lose them. They’re important.”
“I’m not worried about what happens to them. I don’t have much use for them now.”
She laughed a little. “I’ve heard that before.”
“Oh?”
“My husband, for one. You guys, you’re peculiar in that way. You train to do the things that bring awards, then won’t display them. Jack—he was going to get rid of his until his father confiscated them to keep them safe. Jack said it wasn’t the medals, it was the men. So—if you can remember the men with the medals, good enough. I’ll see you get them back.”
“Thanks,” he said weakly. “I think they’re better off here.”
“For now,” Mel said. “I guess Marcie will have to head home, but in case you’re around Christmas Eve…”
“I heard,” he said. “A town thing. I don’t know…”
“Well, the town’s kind of easy—no RSVP required. If you get the itch.” She shrugged and smiled.
“That’s nice,” he said. “I have to go. There’s an old guy, neighbor of mine, who doesn’t have a plow…”
“Good of you to look out for him, Ian.”
“I don’t really, I just—”
He stopped abruptly at the sight of Jack, Preacher and Mike coming out of the bar in a big hurry, jacketed up, carrying rifles and duffel bags.
“Jack?” Mel asked.
He continued toward his extended cab truck. “Travis Goesel wandered off yesterday. Didn’t make it home. Family’s been looking all over their farm and grazing land.” He threw a duffel in his truck bed. “David’s with Brie.”
“Wandered off?” Mel asked. “Travis wandered off?”
“He was tracking a cat. Mountain lion killed his dog, so he grabbed his rifle and he went after it. Kid’s a good tracker and excellent shot. And too smart to be out all night in this snow.”
“Where’s the Goesel farm?” Ian asked before he could stop himself.
“You know the Pauper’s Pond area?”
“Sort of. The river that runs past my place feeds a couple creeks and a pond out there. I’m east of their property a few miles. That cat’s been around my place.”
“What makes you think it’s the same cat?” Jack asked.
“Aggressive one—he didn’t run off like they usually do.”
“That a fact? You must know that area. Any chance you could lend a hand?”
Ian wanted nothing so much as to get back to the girl. Especially if that cat was out there with blood lust.
“The kid’s sixteen,” Jack went on. “He’s big and strong. But I ag
ree with his father—this isn’t good. I don’t know what’s worse, the mountain lion getting him or the cold.”
“Okay,” Ian said. “If the boy’s smart, he’s not walking uphill toward my place. I can start at the base of the mountain and work west. You can start in the west and work east. Will that help? A kid that age could walk miles.”
“His father, brothers and some neighbors are all over that farm—we can work the outside acreage.” Jack pulled his duffel out of the truck bed. “Preach and Mike can go together on the west side of Goesel’s farm, I’ll go with you on the east.”
“I don’t have hardly any heat in that truck,” Ian said.
“Yeah, but you got a plow. I love the plow. That could come in real handy. I’m gonna get one of those to mount on my truck. I have myself a long road into our new house.”
Ian looked at Mel. “I left Marcie early this morning when I went to deliver firewood. She won’t know why I’m not back. If she tried to get to town in that car of hers…”
“When David lies down for his nap, I’ll run out there and tell her what’s going on. Would that help?”
“Tell her she’s going to want to stay in. She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like making do and not traveling to the outdoor facilities. You’d better tell her about that mountain lion, that he’s around and he’s not getting any more shy.”
“I’ll do that. You just be real careful out there. Jack!” she yelled. “You be careful!”
Jack grinned at Mel. “I’ll be back real soon, Melinda. Travis has presents under the tree—we have to get him home. You just keep that little bun in the oven warm. Come on, Buchanan. Let’s do it.”
The men left town in two trucks—Ian took Jack and Preacher took Mike. They headed out the same highway, and then at a fork that led to the farm, Mike and Preacher took their truck off to the left while Ian and Jack kept going past the farm. “How much land you have sitting under that cabin?” Jack asked Ian.
“Six hundred and sixty acres,” Ian said. Jack whistled. “It’s all mountain and trees in a restricted-logging area. So it’s a lot of nothing.”
“Nothing but quiet and pretty.”
“There’s a stream,” Ian said. “Good fishing. Good hunting. And I harvest the trees for firewood, a little here and there. I think the old man, Raleigh, homesteaded.”
“How’d you know him?” Jack asked.
Ian laughed. “I was wandering around the mountains, camping, hunting rabbit, on a fool’s mission, when winter hit the mountains real sudden. Raleigh was older than God already and couldn’t hardly chop his own wood, so he gave me a roof for some help on the land.”
“Good deal for you!”
“Yeah, the joke was on me. He got real sick and what he needed was a nurse in addition to everything else.”
Jack grinned at him. “You must’ a stuck it out if you’re in the cabin.”
Ian shrugged. “I never saw that coming—he wrote some kind of will that old Doc had to witness. If he hadn’t done that, I might’ve figured out what to do with myself by now.”
“Nothing wrong with having more than one choice, man. We should probably park along the road up here pretty soon and go back on foot.”
“There’s a road that’ll take us almost straight back around the hill another couple of miles—it’ll get us farther in there. Tell me about this boy? Why would he do this?”
Jack turned and looked at him. “Ever have a dog?”
“Yeah,” Ian said. “Velvet—a black Lab.” Velvet had been his best friend when he was a kid. The old girl made it till she was fourteen, till her back was so slumped and her hips so painful, it hurt him to look at her. But he couldn’t let go; seemed like he had a long history of that. He was seventeen to her fourteen when he heard his father’s early morning curse while he was getting ready for school and he knew—Velvet had had an accident in the night. She was tired and weary; she couldn’t always remember to do the right thing. “That dog has to be put down,” Ian heard his father say.
Afraid he might come home from school one day to find her gone, he cut school and went alone to the vet and held her while she drifted off, painless. He couldn’t stand the thought she might go alone; he wouldn’t put it past his father to take her, drop her off, leave her to die by herself. God, her face was more peaceful and rested in death than it had been for the last year of her life. Seeing that, it should have made him feel glad for her, relieved—she wasn’t going to last much longer anyway.
He couldn’t let Velvet go alone. He had needed the time to say goodbye, and he didn’t want to come home and find her gone. He needed to be with her—like Marcie had needed to be with Bobby. He swallowed hard.
But his memory drifted back to Velvet, remembering the whole loss, how it tore him up. He’d gone off to private places where he could cry like a girl, unable to let his parents or friends see he had that amount of emotion.
“That mountain lion’s been bothering their property—stalking,” Jack said. “The dogs have been running it off, keeping it away from the goats and hens.”
“How old was the kid’s dog?” Ian asked.
“I don’t know, exactly. Six or eight—a border collie, a herder named Whip. They had a half-dozen farm dogs, mostly herders, outdoor animals, but Travis raised that one himself. He picked her out of a litter and for a while she was a 4-H project. Goesel said he couldn’t keep the damn dog out of the kid’s bed. You know farmers and their dogs—they don’t get overly sentimental as a rule. I don’t know how the cat managed to get to the dog—they usually aren’t looking for that kind of a fight.”
Ian ground his teeth. “Think I’d go after the son of a bitch, too.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Yeah, I had a dog growing up, too. Big dog—Spike, no kidding. He was almost a perfect animal. But he let my sisters dress him up. That used to make me sick, I’m telling you. The way he let himself be humiliated like that.”
Ian shot him a look and a big grin. He was picturing a German shepherd in a tutu and a disgruntled teenage boy. A laugh shot out of him.
“It wasn’t funny,” Jack said.
“I bet it was,” Ian said. Then he pulled off the road at a sharp left. “Gimme a minute here.” He jumped out of the truck, got some tools out of the box in the bed and went around to the front. He loosened up the brackets on the plow hitch, pulled the plow with all his might to angle it, then lowered it and tightened the brackets. It wasn’t the kind of plow fitting that had hydraulics inside the vehicle to move the blade, it was all manual, old and old-fashioned—but it got the job done. He threw his tools back in the box and got behind the wheel.
“I don’t see a road. You see a road?” Jack asked.
Ian laughed. “I know where the road is.”
“How?”
“I can feel it. Relax.”
Jack braced a foot against the floorboard, a hand against the dash and said, “I’ll relax when we’re not in a ditch. Go slow.”
Ian laughed at him. “So,” Ian said, maneuvering slowly, “if the kid’s smart, we’ll be looking for some kind of recent tracks, shelter, or…”
“A body,” Jack supplied.
“If he was lost, he might’ve followed the river or the road. About the time night was falling, he might’ve seen any one of several old logging roads,” Ian said. “You’re not going to see the road with the snow, but you’ll know it’s there by the tree line. Like I’m doing now.”
“I’m not convinced there isn’t a big hole right in your path, hidden by snow. You could go slower,” Jack said, tense.
“You could relax. I’ve been all over this place.” Then after a bit, he stopped the truck. “Want to head out from here?”
“Let’s do it.”
They exited the truck at the same time. Ian took a rifle out of the rack in his truck and a flashlight out of the glove compartment. Jack was digging around in his duffel.
“I only have one flare gun, but I have an extra stocking mask and a scarf—put this a
round your neck. We’ll start down this road together, but when we separate, if you find anything, just fire a couple rounds. With me?”
“Gotcha.” Ian buttoned up his jacket and thought, I didn’t have any reason for the long underwear this morning, damn it. He wrapped the long plaid scarf around his head and neck, partly covering his face. He missed the heavy beard right now. “See, I think the dog wasn’t as scrappy as the other dogs because she was a little spoiled by Travis,” Ian said, speaking as though he knew Travis and the dog. “That could’ve been working on him at the same time.”
“I know,” Jack said. “How’s your flashlight? You need batteries?”
“To tell the truth, I’m not sure.”
Jack pulled some extra batteries out of his duffel as well as a hand gun he tucked in his waist. He tossed Ian the batteries, then two bottled waters that Ian put in each pocket. They walked down the road, looking right and left, and hadn’t gone far when Jack said, “Okay, I’m going this way into that stand of trees.”
“I’ll head this way,” Ian said, and they separated.
Ian walked toward the river, eyes trained on the ground, on the landscape, and occasionally up into the branches just in case that big cat was having a little game of hide and seek. And he thought some about the kid remembering himself at sixteen; he’d been a hothead, devoted to a few things in his life, and his dog was one of them.
He’d also been pretty angry with his father in general. His dad was a passive-aggressively cruel person—he wouldn’t leave a tip, drove real slow in the passing lane, withheld affection. Every birthday card or holiday gift was signed “Mom & Dad” by Ian’s mother. Every word that came out of the old man’s pie hole was a criticism.
After Velvet, Ian had stopped pretending it didn’t matter; he was bigger and stronger than his father and got right up in his face, giving it back to him, something he soon realized was tearing his mother up. His mother begged him to lighten up, let it go, ignore being snubbed or criticized virtually every minute. “How do you stand it?” he had railed at his mother. “He should kiss your feet, and he acts like you’re his slave!”