Dorothy Garlock (9 page)

“What was that? I can’t hear you.”

“We should have stopped back there!” Hallie suddenly exploded; to her own ears, her voice sounded as loud as any of the peals of thunder that had rocked the countryside. “If only we had stayed in Lancaster, if only we had quit all this running, we wouldn’t be here, Pearl! We wouldn’t be caught out here in this storm!”

“I told you, girl, we needed to get as far away as possible and—” Pearl began, but Hallie wouldn’t let her.

“When is it ever going to be far enough?” she pleaded. “When are we ever going to feel that we’ve gotten far enough away from all the madness behind us? How can we ever really be safe again? All we’ve done is move from one strange place to the next and then the one after, until I just can’t bear to run anymore!”

To all Hallie’s questions, Pearl gave no answer.

“As much as I hate myself for even thinking it, I wish you’d just killed Chester, Pearl!” Hallie declared. “I wish you had shot him and that he had died! If he was dead, we wouldn’t have to keep looking over our shoulders at every turn, fearful that he’ll be there, never knowing a moment’s rest! But I know that he’s not dead and that changes everything! I know we’re doing this for Mary but I just—I just . . . can’t,” she finally concluded.

Before even the first sobs could rack Hallie’s body, Pearl was there. She pulled the younger woman to her and held her tightly.

“Hush now,” Pearl whispered into Hallie’s ear. “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with wishin’ for somethin’ we can’t have every now and again, but it just ain’t good to dwell on it.”

“Oh, Pearl,” Hallie sobbed. “I’m sorry for all that—”

“Just put it out of your head,” the older woman soothed. “You was sayin’ what you thought needed to be said, that’s all. To be honest, I can’t say I like this any more’n you do, but what’s done is done. When we get to where we need to be, then all this’ll have been worth it. We’ll put it behind us and you, me, and Mary will start livin’ again.”

At the mention of Mary’s name, Hallie’s tears stopped falling. All that had happened, all the turmoil that she and Pearl had suffered through failed to compare with what Mary had endured at Chester’s hands. Shame washed over her at the thought of her own selfishness. For Mary’s sake, they had to keep on.

“You’re right.” Hallie nodded, wiping away a stray tear. She turned on the bench to face the wagon’s rear and began, “Oh, Mary! Forgive how selfish I’ve—” but what she saw there stopped the words in her mouth.

There was no one in the back of the wagon.
Mary was gone!

Chapter Eight

H
ALLIE COULDN’T BREATHE
. In the darkness of the storm, she looked for Mary. In those split seconds, she thought the gloomy blackness was merely playing tricks on her, that her friend
was
still there. But when another splinter of lightning lit the sky, she knew that she was holding on to false hope. Panic swept over Hallie like a brush fire.

“Mary!” she shouted. “Mary! Where are you?”

“What?” Pearl screeched, a cold fear touching her voice as well.

“She’s gone! Oh, Pearl, Mary’s gone!” Hallie’s eyes searched all around the wagon for a sign of the girl, but in the inky darkness she could see nothing. The sun had almost certainly set, and the veil of night had settled like a blanket. Through it all, the storm still raged.

“Where on earth could she be?” Pearl wondered aloud.

The first thought that leaped to Hallie’s mind sent shivers down her spine; that Chester had stolen up behind them and snatched Mary out from under their noses, but she knew that the idea was only fear playing on her nerves. Even with the driving rain, she was certain that they would have heard someone approaching. Besides, Chester had a fresh bullet wound in his leg and, if he hadn’t died from it, would be in no condition to chase after them, certainly not fast enough to have already caught up to the wagon. Shaking her wet hair, she pushed the idea out of her head.

Then where is she?

“Maybe she fell out of the wagon,” Hallie said. Even though she couldn’t see more than a couple of dozen feet, she looked back in the direction from which they had come. “When we crossed from the road to here I had to hold on to the seat to keep from being jostled this way or that. Maybe it was worse in the back. She could have been thrown out of the wagon!”

Pearl pondered the idea for a moment, her jaw set tight. “You could be right,” she finally agreed. “I wasn’t pushin’ the horses
that
hard, but I can’t say for certain that I wasn’t neither. We’ll have to go back and look.”

“It will be impossible to find her in this storm,” Hallie fretted. “Mary could be
anywhere
. What if she slipped out of the wagon after we pulled under the tree cover? She could be wandering around in the woods right beside us and we’d never find her!”

“We’ll find her.”

“Then I’ll stay here and wait. She might come back,” Hallie suggested.

Before Pearl could offer a single word of protest, Hallie leaped from the wagon to the ground below. Her booted feet slipped on the wet grass and she fell hard on her knees in the sloppy mud. The pain was stinging, but she quickly stifled her cry. Ignoring the ache, she rose gingerly back to her feet.

“We’ll find her,” Pearl said confidently. “I know we will.”

“I pray you’re right.”

“I am.”

The older woman whistled shrilly through her teeth, snapped on the reins, and urged the horses forward. The wagon creaked and she hurried back the way they had come. Soon they were swallowed by the night. A scant moment later, even the sound of the horse’s hooves was lost.

Without Pearl beside her, helplessness descended on Hallie. For several minutes, all she could do was stand and stare, unable to move even an inch. Mary was gone and finding herself alone in the woods was frightening. Darkness closed in from all sides as the storm intensified, and the noise of the wind whipping the trees was disorienting.

The sky was suddenly lit by a succession of lightning bolts, their tendrils flickering like a serpent’s tongue. If she hadn’t been frightened nearly out of her wits, she might have found it beautiful. For what seemed like a full minute, all that was dark became light; it was as if she were under an endless barrage of photographer’s flashes.

Turning her head this way and that, Hallie used the storm’s illumination to the best of her advantage. At first, the extra light showed her nothing, but in the scant seconds offered by the very last bolt, her heart leaped with hope. There, not more than thirty feet away, was Mary. Like Hallie, she was drenched, and her clothes stuck to her body. She stood along the tree line, her body small but tense. To Hallie, it looked as if she were a wild animal, ready to flee to safety at a moment’s notice.

“Mary!” Hallie shouted. “Over here, Mary!”

Just before the lightning vanished and the darkness returned, the first roar of thunder echoing across the land, Hallie saw the other woman stiffen at her cry. Without a single word, Mary turned her back and plunged into the woods, leaving Hallie alone yet again.

Without any hesitation, Hallie followed, stumbling over the uneven and muddy ground. Even in the murky gloom of the storm, she’d kept her eyes locked on where Mary had disappeared into the trees. When Hallie reached the spot, she looked cautiously into the blackness beyond, took a deep breath, and plunged into the woods behind the fleeing woman.

“Mary!” she shouted plaintively. “Come back!”

Passing through the forest’s curtain, Hallie found herself in a world that was darker and scarier than the one she had left only seconds before. Trees of many shapes and sizes crowded together and towered above her, the stormy sky all but completely obscured by the thick shelter of leaves and branches. The space between the tree trunks was filled with choking scrub and prickly brush.With every hesitant step, Hallie held her arms before her as a means of protection, but she was soon covered with scratches and welts. Every time that she pushed aside a wayward branch or passed through some leafy undergrowth she was showered by the rainwater that had clung to it.

“Mary! Wait for me, Mary!”

While every rolling growl of thunder still startled and unnerved her, Hallie almost began to look forward to a new tongue of lightning. In each flash, she would catch a glimpse of Mary as she wove and cut through the woods. Try as she might, Hallie couldn’t seem to make up any ground; it was as if Mary were always being held just out of reach.

Whether it was fear that drove her—fear that Chester would somehow find her or fear that the two women were spiriting her away from the life that she knew—Mary seemed utterly incapable of controlling the emotion that coursed through her.
Why else was she running blindly through this nightmare of a storm?

“Mary!” Hallie called.

Before she could shout another word, she was struck hard in the mouth by a thick branch. In the scant light of the dense forest, she hadn’t seen the limb in her path and had collided with it blindly. As the copper tang of blood filled her mouth, she whimpered in pain. Still, she kept moving forward, stumbling along until she could regain her bearings.

Though she was soaked to the bone, tired from running, and aching from all the cuts and bruises, Hallie was determined not to quit the chase. Taking the easy way would be akin to abandoning Mary in her time of need, and that was something she simply could not do. She and Pearl had not been able to abandon Mary after seeing Chester strike her in the streets of Whiskey Bend and she wouldn’t do so now! She would continue until she reached her friend or collapsed from exhaustion, whichever came first.

“Mary! For God’s sake, Mary! Please stop!”

As she ran, Hallie became aware of a deep roaring in her ears. At first, she thought that it was just another sign of the raging storm, but the noise didn’t rise and fall in intensity as the thunder did, or whistle like the wind, but instead grew louder with each passing second. Soon, the roaring became deafening, nearly drowning out the sounds of the storm itself. It was as if she were running right into the jaws of a monster, a monster that she could not see but only hear.

Hallie ran with all her might. Though it was hard to see what was in front of her and she feared another collision, she somehow knew that the time to reach Mary was running out. She passed through a thick stand of tall elm trees; crossed a small clearing; and, as she pushed her way through the tangle of a berry-laden bush, the source of the roaring noise revealed itself to her startled eyes. There, at the bottom of the hill upon which she stood, was a raging river, its wide body swollen to flood stage by the storm. The noise had indeed come from a monster, a monster that had proven to be horrifyingly real.

Try as she might, Hallie could not pull her eyes away from the fury of the flooded river. In the intermittent flashes of lightning, she watched in horror as the roiling brown water sped by, lashing and snatching at anything unlucky enough to be within its reach. Here and there, treetops bobbed furiously in the water, victims found further upstream and now speeding to an unknown future. It was as if the river were a starving man, desperately snatching at the morsels presented to him.

Even where she stood, atop the sharp rise of a hill some fifty feet from the frenzied water, Hallie felt unsafe. A shiver raced through her.
This is the gentle river I saw in the distance earlier in the day now grown as dark as the skies above.

Suddenly, something moved in the distance, catching Hallie’s eye.
There, standing no more than a few feet from the churning water was Mary!
Amid the fury of nature exploding all around her, she seemed particularly small and frail.

“Mary!” Hallie shouted, her voice almost lost in the din of the storm.

All the fear that had gripped her seemed to vanish in the face of the danger now facing her friend. Hurrying down the slope of the hill, she managed to take only a couple of steps before one of her boots slipped in the soupy mud, sending her crashing down hard onto the ground.

“Ow!” she cried, the pain sharp and stinging.

She’d landed hard on one arm; her face struck the ground, and mud caked her blouse and streaked her cheek. With a filthy hand, she pushed her hair out of her eyes and stared intently at Mary, fearful that she would vanish into the storm. Clawing up fistfuls of rainwater and mud, Hallie pushed herself back to her feet and continued forward.

“Mary! Don’t move, Mary!”

Hallie halted ten feet from the other woman, the pain in her side hot and raw, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her heart trying to leap out of her chest. She was about to speak, to try to calm Mary, when another bolt of lightning split the sky, immediately followed by a peal of thunder that seemed to shake the very air. Even as she cringed at the sound, Hallie’s eyes never left the other woman. Mary was like a wild animal whose eyes were wide and haunches tense, desperate for any means of escape.

“Mary,” Hallie began, trying to be calm and soothing. “You need to step away from there and come back with me to the wagon. We need to go back to Pearl and—”

“There ain’t no goin’ back,” Mary cut in, her faint voice somehow audible through all the noise of the storm. Hearing her speak was almost startling; it had been days since Hallie had heard any sounds other than sobs or moans. “If I go back now, he’ll kill me . . . he’ll kill me and you and Pearl.”

“No, no, Mary,” Hallie said, shaking her head. “We won’t take you back to Chester. We’re taking you
away
from him! We left Whiskey Bend to find a new place to live, a place where we can start over, a place for all of us!”

“There’s nowhere to hide.”

“I won’t let him find you. I promise!”

Mary shook her head violently. Hallie couldn’t be certain, but she thought she could see tears streaming down the young woman’s face. “You don’t understand what kind a man he is. He ain’t never gonna let me get away! He ain’t never gonna rest until he finds me and then when he does . . .”

“Mary, please,” Hallie pleaded, reaching out her hand and taking one small step forward. “Whatever danger we face, we’ll face it together. You, Pearl, and I will take care of one another and make sure that we’re safe. That’s what friends do—they watch out for each other.”