“Sarah, stop!”
Noah shouted as loud as he could without—he hoped—revealing their positions in the corn. He’d lost sight of her, seeing only the swaying stalks where she whooshed through. He listened and was pleased when the sounds of rapid footfalls ceased. She emerged before him, clutching Isaac, whose screaming had abated.
“He don’t know what to make of all this.” She looked and sounded stunned, and held the baby toward Noah, who noted the child’s wide-eyed glances.
Even though the immense stalks sprouted a foot over Noah’s head, effectively concealing him, he motioned for her to crouch, figuring the less speaking, the better, and crept next to her. He waited for them to catch their breaths and closed his eyes to listen. Sarah, equally spent, saw him and did likewise.
“I don’t hear anyone,” she whispered through her panting.
“Agreed.”
“Now what?”
“We gotta get to my house—my family’s there.”
“I think they’re more concerned ’bout me and him.” She looked at Isaac.
They tried keeping their responses quick. Sarah, for fear that Isaac might get twitchy, opened her blouse and fed him one of her breasts.
“I don’t care if this makes you uncomfortable.”
“No, it’s smart—do it.”
Noah deliberately looked everywhere but at Sarah.
“We can’t go back to the road,” he said. “They’ll be on it. But I figure we can cut through the fields and into the forest. My house ain’t too far from here if we do it that way. Maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes, if we hurry.”
“They ain’t dumb, Noah. They’ll be waiting for us.”
“Some of them are plenty dumb, but you’re right.” Noah spoke to a woman who’d just lost her husband, but she strangely didn’t act like it. She hadn’t once made reference to him. Noah thought her cheeks would be streaked with tearstains but they appeared unblemished.
“I’m so sorry for what they did to Toby.”
She said nothing and kept nursing.
“If I could’ve stopped them I would’ve,” Noah said. “One of those guys kept lingering around the back, and I couldn’t move until he went up front. By the time he did I was on my way to the window and heard the first shot.”
“You got nothing to apologize for,” she said. “You saved my life and my baby’s. I owe you.”
“You owe me nothing, and you and him aren’t completely safe—not yet. I’m trying to figure a good place to stash you.”
Their breathing settled to normal and both felt confident nobody was anywhere near them.
“I got an idea,” Noah said. “We get to my house, get Nat and my boy—shit, we’re having company tonight, I forgot.”
Noah gritted his teeth and stood.
“All right, we aren’t expecting but two other people. One of them’s a sheriff’s deputy.”
“How do we know he ain’t in on this too?” Sarah rose, switching Isaac to her other breast.
“I can’t believe Harrison would be someone’s lackey like that.”
“Could you believe that about Clement? And the others?”
“Clement? Based on a recent conversation I had with him, yeah, I can believe it now,” he said. “But, honestly, I always felt there was something off about him. And I hardly had time around those others. Harrison’s the one I know the most about. He ain’t dirty. He ain’t.”
“I suppose we’ll find out, and soon. I’m not trusting any of those men until they can prove otherwise.”
“Fair enough. Now, after we get to my place, I’m hoping we have enough horses to get us all to town. Whatever the case, I think I can take you to the undertaker’s. He’s got an ice house.”
She eyed him with a Really? expression.
“You want our babies to freeze?”
“Dammit, you’re right. I’ll worry about all that after we get to my home. I’m open to your ideas too. Let’s get.”
This time Noah took the lead in the cornfield. He removed his hat and leapt to see where the fir treetops stood in the distance. And that’s the direction they fled with a growing urgency neither had ever experienced in their lives.