FORTY-FOUR

Whitman’s screams had stopped by the time Jonathan wrapped Mary’s shoulder in a bandage. “Do you think he’s dead now?” Mary asked as they huddled together in the sudden, strange silence.

“I hope so, for his sake. Can you imagine getting hit by a dozen snakes?” Jonathan grimaced. “Too bad the fall didn’t break his neck.”

“At least that awful screaming has stopped,” Joan said.

Jonathan unfolded himself from the ground. “I’m going to check out what Whitman brought with him. He might have something we can use.”

The three women watched as Jonathan walked over toward the cabin, then suddenly, Alex began to cry.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” she sobbed, tears rolling down both cheeks. “This was supposed to be a fun weekend. Now every time I open my eyes there’s some man in fatigues with a gun!”

Joan put one arm around Alex’s shoulders, while Mary crawled over and sat on the other side of her. They held her while her huge wet sobs gave voice to all the rage and terror that she’d kept hidden from Henry Brank. As her tears finally subsided into a low, inarticulate weeping, Jonathan reappeared.

“Hey,” he called. “Guess what I found? Whitman had a VHF radio in his backpack. I called the Santoah Ranger station. Most of the law enforcement officers in western North Carolina and east Tennessee will be landing here in about an hour.”

“Will they take us home?” Joan’s voice rose with hope like a child’s.

Jonathan nodded. “They’ll take you to Robbinsville or Tellico Plains, anyway. Until then, you might enjoy some of these.” From his own backpack he dug out a red plaid blanket, a handful of candy bars and a carton of Virginia Slims.

Snuffling, Alex took the blanket and candy while Jonathan offered Joan the smokes. She looked at them a long time, then shook her head.

“No thanks,” she said, touching the swollen mass of her nose. “It sounds crazy, but after all that’s happened, just breathing plain air is good enough, you know what I mean?”

Jonathan smiled. “Actually, I do.”

Suddenly Alex spoke. “Are there telephones in Robbinsville?”

“Yes.”

Tears welled again in her eyes. “Then I’d like to call Texas. I’d like to ask my mother if she’s put up any Mayhaw preserves.”

Mary started to laugh. “I don’t think that will be a problem, Alex.”

Jonathan helped Mary stand and the four of them hobbled over to the cabin. They sat on the porch and stretched their legs out in the late-day sun, letting the warm light bathe their cuts and bruises and soothe their exhausted muscles. Jonathan brought Homer out from the woods, and soon the dog lay sprawled at their feet, his tail thumping the ground. Alex held him close, burying her face in his soft coat and feeding him peanuts from her candy bar.

They sat like that until the distant hum of a rotor floated in on the breeze. As they watched, a North Carolina police helicopter came into view and lowered to the meadow, flattening the weeds as it landed. Two men with a gurney jumped out, followed by the sheriff and half a dozen patrolmen. Alex and Joan scrambled to their feet as a second chopper full of Tennessee state troopers landed nearby.

“Come on, Mary,” Alex urged, wrapping the blanket around her. “Let’s go home.”

Mary smiled. “You two go on ahead. I’ll catch up in a minute.”

She watched as Alex and Joan limped eagerly toward the waiting officers, Homer bounding after them. In that moment, she had never loved any two people so much in her life. Joan, who had managed to kill Ulagu when she could barely walk, and Alex, who’d taken on Henry Brank so that Mary could crawl out of a snake pit. What terrific friends they were. War Women, both of them.

“Mary?”

She turned away from Joan and Alex, now safely in the care of the troopers. Jonathan sat beside her, grinning despite his split lip and blackening eye. “I’m just fine,” she told him, reading his mind as she always had. “How are you?”

He rubbed his bruised jaw and chuckled. “Hoping the next guy I fight is some old, ninety-eight-pound geezer who’s terrified of guns.”

Mary smiled. “You did okay, Jonathan. In fact, you did better than okay.” She gazed into the sunny meadow, watching as a Monarch butterfly bobbed on a bloom of Queen Anne’s lace. “I’m awfully sorry about Billy,” she added softly. “He was a good friend.”

Jonathan shook his head. “I still can’t believe he’s dead. I’ll have to go back up to Atagahi and bring him home.”

“I’ll call Tam as soon as I can. I’m sure there’s something I can do to help,” Mary said.

Jonathan smiled at her, then they sat in silence, watching as the police jabbed at a topo map and argued over whose jurisdiction this was. After a while the Tennessee cops got back in their helicopter and flew off, leaving the North Carolina troopers to take statements from Alex and Joan and to haul Mitchell Whitman’s body from the snake pit. Only then did Jonathan speak.

“Here,” he said, tossing a small rock in Mary’s lap. “I found this over by the snakes. Isn’t your birthday January fifteenth?”

Mary nodded. “Dunolutani. The middle of the Month of the Cold Moon.”

“Then those red flecks are your birthstones.”

Mary looked at the rock. It was a piece of quartz the size of a buckeye, sparkling with chips of blood red garnets. “I’m amazed you remembered,” she murmured, smiling.

“I remember a lot.” He leaned closer. “What do you remember?”

“Everything,” she said. “And I always wish things had turned out differently.”

“Me, too.” He took the quartz from her palm and looked down at the garnets, glittering in the sun. “Do you think things ever could be different? I mean, do you think we could change them now?”

She sensed his gaze on her face, searching, probing. Suddenly she wanted to touch him. A fountain of words and colors exploded inside her head, but when she tried to answer, her voice came out hesitant, as if she were trying to speak a language she was no longer fluent in.

“We can’t change the past.” She searched for the right word, but all her soft ones were rusty from disuse. “But the future, maybe.”

He moved closer. She could smell his skin, feel his warmth radiating toward her.

“Mary, I . . .”

“Walkingstick!” A voice boomed through the air like a cannon.

They both jumped. Sheriff Stump Logan stood at the far end of the meadow, motioning to Jonathan.

“Oh, shit.” Jonathan handed the quartz back to her. “It’s that asshole Logan. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

Jonathan strode down the porch toward the tall figure in a cowboy hat. They conferred with troopers and the paramedics, then Jonathan helped them maneuver the heavy gurney through the narrow cabin door. As the sheriff came to take her statement, a sudden chill slithered down Mary’s spine. For an instant she was eighteen again, back at Little Jump Off the afternoon her mother died.

Stump leaned over and put one hand on her unbandaged shoulder. “Hello, Mary,” he said. “I hear you’ve got a swing like Mark McGwire.”

Mary smiled as she looked up into Stump Logan’s familiar face. Time had grayed his hair and flabbed his belly, but to her he looked the same—handsome, rough-hewn features shaded by a white Stetson hat; a pack of chewing tobacco stuffed in the pocket of his khaki shirt. Though his wide mouth stretched in a smile, his gray eyes bored into her, as intense as they had been twelve years ago, when he questioned her about her mother.

“You want to tell me what happened?” he asked now, just as he had then.

He sat beside her and took notes on a little spiral pad while she told of tracking Alex and finding this cabin. The sheriff shook his head when she described what happened when Ulagu threatened her with his razor. When she finished up with Mitchell Whitman and the snake pit, he took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a big white handkerchief.

“Mercy,” he drawled, spitting a dollop of brown juice on the ground. “You gals have had quite a time.”

He put his pad back in his hip pocket and looked at her, studying her face so long it made her uncomfortable. She looked down and smoothed the jacket that was tied around her waist. Could Stump Logan possibly think she was making all this up?

Finally, he spoke, his voice tolling like a bell on the still air. “Why’d you come back up here, Mary?”

“For fun.” Mary flinched at the ludicrousness of her reply. “For a long weekend of camping.”

“Are you sure you weren’t doing a little investigating of your own?” His eyes measured her face.

Mary met his gaze evenly. Like all good cops, the sheriff was adept at hearing the unspoken; but like all good attorneys, she was skilled at cloaking the true meaning of her words. “I was taking my friends to Slickrock Springs,” she replied, using the English name for Atagahi.

“I see.” He nodded at her. “That’s good. I’d hate to think a pretty girl like you was up here nosing around a dusty old unsolved murder.”

“Actually, I had my hands full with other things.” Mary glanced at the troopers who were hauling Brank’s body out of the cabin.

“Well, I don’t think you gals need to worry about anything here. This all seems pretty much like self-defense, although the DA in Robbinsville will want to talk to you.”

“That’s not a problem,” said Mary.

Logan stood and looked down at her, his eyes now kind. “Mary, can I give you a little advice? Go on back to Atlanta. Forget about us up here. There’s a whole bunch of criminals down in the city for you to hang. Up here, you’ve got nothing but a million acres of bad memories.”

“A million acres of memories, Sheriff,” Mary corrected him. “Not all of them are bad.”

With a brief smile he said good-bye, then left her. This was the second time she’d had an official conversation with Stump Logan. Time and a legal degree of her own had not made the process any easier.

Two troopers zipped Mitch Whitman into a body bag, while two others stood jimmying long sticks, wrangling the rattlers out of the pit at Jonathan’s direction. Inadu were honored by the Cherokee. She knew Jonathan would never have left any to starve in the bottom of a pit.

Two more helicopters landed—one a medevac air rescue, the other bearing the bright logo of the Asheville TV station. The second disgorged two men carrying video cameras and one snappily dressed reporter. Mary watched as he shoved a microphone in Stump Logan’s broad face, then stood in front of the cabin himself, regurgitating what he had been told for the viewers of the evening news.

A beefy-armed state trooper appeared, holding up a blanket for her.

“It’s time to go, ma’am,” he said, eyeing the blood-soaked bandage wrapped around her shoulder. “Medevac’s waiting.”

“But I need to return this man’s jacket.” Mary looked over at the snake pit, but Jonathan was no longer standing there.

“Sorry, ma’am. I’ll see that he gets it. The DA’s waiting for you at the hospital in Robbinsville.” He offered his arm; apparently his duty was to help her to the helicopter.

“But it’s vital that I speak with him,” she protested. The trooper just looked at her, his face unmoved. Sighing, she scooped up the rock Jonathan had given her and accepted the officer’s arm. Stump Logan ordered the TV crew to stop filming as the cop escorted her to the helicopter. She searched for Jonathan, but she saw only a sea of gray uniforms topped with Smokey the Bear hats.

“Could you wait just a moment?” Mary lagged behind the officer, her shoulder throbbing with a vicious heat.

“No, ma’am. We gotta go. Sorry.”

Stump Logan yelled something as she felt the trooper’s arm gently but firmly propelling her toward the chopper. Alex and Joan were already on board—Joan was having the wound on her foot treated while Alex sat clutching Homer on her lap. The trooper directed Mary to a seat over which a paramedic hovered, anxious to take a look at her shoulder. Panic rose in her as she was nudged up the steps to the passenger bay.

Two troopers strapped her into the seat. Scanning the crowd, Mary saw policemen, the cabin, even the two body bags laid out on the front porch, but no Jonathan. Where could he be, she wondered, craning her neck to peer around the paramedic who was inflating a blood-pressure cuff on her right arm.

“One fifty-two over ninety-six,” the young man reported. “That’s pretty high.”

“Yeah, well, getting shot raises your numbers,” Mary snapped as she continued to search the crowd. Had Jonathan gone without saying good-bye?

Suddenly a tall figure pushed through the knot of troopers watching the chopper. One officer’s hat went flying; he turned and grabbed at the man who was trying to get past. Mary leaned over the paramedic and yelled out the still-open door.

“Jonathan!” she called.

“Hey!” He shook the big trooper off easily and ran up to the chopper just as the rotors started to turn with a heavy whump .

“Aren’t you coming too?” Mary called.

He backed away from the turning blades and held his hands out. He can’t hear me, she realized in despair.

“Aren’t we taking everybody with us?” Mary glared at the paramedic.

“This medevac’s full. Your boyfriend will have to ride with the troopers.”

Mary turned back toward the open door. Jonathan watched her helplessly for a moment, then he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, Mary—Would you ever think about saving my seat again?”

His words resounded inside her head. He had remembered! For an instant she tried not to cry, but it was hopeless. As the big rotors turned, tears began to spill from her eyes for the first time in twelve years.

“Yes!” she cried.

He frowned and shook his head, unable to hear her above the din.

Nodding extravagantly, she lifted her arm as the paramedic began to close the door, and gave him a thumbs-up sign.

Jonathan grinned and turned his own thumb up.

The hatch closed, the helicopter tilted to the right, and they rose into the sky. Laughing and crying, she waved out the tiny window as his face became smaller and smaller until finally it was just a bright dot on the golden meadow; then she could see him no longer. She looked down at the red-flecked stone he’d given her. Suddenly, she knew. This was the stone she’d sought for so long— the seventh stone! It lay in her palm. Finally, she was free!

The paramedic held out a disposable thermometer. “You want to do this now or later?” he called above the engine’s roar.

“Later,” she answered, the tears still flowing down her face.

She leaned her head back against the seat and looked down at the Old Men. Although they were brilliant with autumn now, by this evening the thick white mist would float up from the forest and conceal them once again. Disgagistiyi, Dakwai, Ahaluna. Though they had not given her back her past, they had offered her a future rich with promise.

“Keep your secrets for now, Old Men,” she told them softly. “I’ll be back. Crows always know the straightest way home.”