Guarding the Soldier's Secret (21 page)

She heard Mom say, “Oh, Hunt, I can’t marry you.”

Laila made a sound—she couldn’t help it. She clamped her hand over her mouth to keep the sound inside.

“Do you love me?” Akaa Hunt said.

“That doesn’t—”

“Do...you...love...me.”

“Yes! Oh, yes, I do love you...”

It seemed to Laila that was a very happy thing. But why was Mom crying? And why did Laila feel so scared and sad?

“What I said in the barn—that hasn’t changed,” Mom said. “I can’t let you do this anymore, Hunt—not to me and certainly not to Laila. Never knowing when you’re coming, when you’re going, whether you’re alive or dead—”

“What if I stopped all that? The coming and going, the dangerous missions. What if I quit Special Ops? What if I quit the army? Got out of the service altogether?”

Mom was shaking her head. “Oh, Hunt.” She laughed a little, even though she was still crying. “What would you do? Work in an office? Here, on this farm?”

“I don’t think those are the only options—”

“You’d be miserable away from the action—you know you would. That wouldn’t be good for either of us or for a marriage, and certainly not for Laila.”

“What about you?” Akaa Hunt’s voice had gotten louder, and he sounded kind of angry. “You miss being where the action is. You told me that. So, you can do it but you think I can’t?”

“I didn’t say you can’t. I said you’d be unhappy.”

“And you’re not?”

“It’s what I need to do right now. It’s where I need to be. Laila needs a parent that’s going to be—”

“She needs
both
her parents,” Akaa Hunt shouted. “Dammit, Yancy, she’s my
daughter
. When are you planning on telling her? When she’s...”

Laila didn’t hear any more. There was a noise inside her head, like the wind blowing. And it was saying the same thing, over and over:

She’s my daughter...my daughter...my daughter...

Now she could hear that Mom was saying something.

“When she’s ready, Hunt. We’ll tell her when she’s ready.”

“And who decides that? You?”

“I’m her mother, and I know her better than you do, so...yes. But...when the time comes, we can tell her together.”

Akaa Hunt—no, but she couldn’t remember the word for
father
in her old language—turned away from Mom. His face looked angry and upset. Mom touched him on his arm. Mom’s face looked— But it hurt Laila to see her mother’s face, so she closed her eyes as tightly as she could.

“Hunt, I do love you. I have loved you for such a long time. I will always love you. But for right now... I think it would be best for all of us if you go.”

No!

She wanted to run into the courtyard and scream at them.
No, no, you can’t go! Please don’t go!

She wanted to run away. Far, far away, where nobody, especially not Mom or Akaa—not
Hunt
!—could find her.

I hate them! I hate them. How could Mom lie to me? How could
they
lie to me? Why is Mom making him leave?

She was trembling. But she had to get away before they saw her. They mustn’t know she’d heard.

She backed up until she felt the bedroom door against her back. She opened it and closed it as quietly as she could. She ran down the hallway and through the kitchen, not stopping even when Josie called to her. She knocked over a chair as she ran across the patio and didn’t stop to pick it up. The dogs came and wanted to play with her as she ran down the driveway, but she ignored them and turned blindly toward the meadow. She crawled on her stomach under the barbed-wire fence and didn’t even care that the grass was wet and she was all muddy now. Across the meadow she ran, with the dogs bounding along beside her, thinking it was all a lot of fun.

She had a terrible pain in her side, but she didn’t stop until she came to the creek. It was the place she’d been to before with Mom and Sam, the place where she liked to wade in the shallow water and look for pollywogs. But today she didn’t want to stop there. She splashed across the creek to the other side, where there was a rock she liked to sit on sometimes and dangle her feet in the water. She climbed up on the rock and pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them and rested her forehead on them.

She wanted to cry. Oh, how she wished she could cry. But she was too angry to cry. All she could do was rock herself back and forth and wish she could just disappear. Like magic. And they would all wonder what had happened to her. They would be sorry.

After a while, she noticed that her bottom was wet. The water in the creek was all the way covering the rock!

She had a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.

She stood up on the rock and looked across the creek, and it seemed like it was much farther away than it was supposed to be. The dogs were over on the other side, and they were running back and forth, splashing in the water on the edges of the bank and barking.

Laila got down on her stomach on the rock and lowered her feet into the water, but it was much deeper than before and running very fast. It pulled on her, and the rocks under her feet were slippery. Before she could even catch her breath or cry out, she wasn’t standing up anymore. Instead, she was being carried away by the water, and she couldn’t stand up, no matter how hard she tried.

Laila had never been so scared in her life.

The trees and bushes that were supposed to be on the edges of the creek were right in the water, and they were going by very, very fast.

Somehow, she managed to grab on to a tree branch, and she wrapped her arms around it and held on as tightly as she could. She could still hear the dogs barking. She breathed hard for a few minutes until she could catch her breath, and then she began to yell as loud as she could.

* * *

It didn’t surprise Sam much that the kid didn’t want to ride with him this morning. He guessed she was disappointed her daddy had let her down. Well, hell, wasn’t that what daddies did—let their children down?

He was in a pretty black mood himself, to tell the truth, and when he felt like that, the high country was where he wanted to be. So instead of unsaddling Old Paint and turning him out to pasture, he turned him toward the north and gave him his head.

About the time he was running out of meadow, he noticed how black the clouds were, up there in the mountains, and he could hear the thunder rumbling off in the distance. And something else, too. Much closer by, he could hear the creak running high and fast.

Sam hadn’t gotten to be as old as he was by being a fool, and he knew darn well the high country wasn’t any place to be during a thunderstorm. So he turned his horse around and headed back to the barn.

He was about to let himself into the corral when he heard the dogs barking down by the creek. Really going at it, too. He’d never heard them make such a ruckus. Even that old hound dog of J.J.’s was sounding off. That was pretty unusual, so Sam figured maybe he ought to go and see what all the fuss was about.

When he got close to the creek, he could hear the sound of water running in flood. And something else. Something that made his old heart quiver inside his chest.

The little girl was hollering. Hollering for her mama and her daddy.

It wasn’t often Sam would ride a horse at full gallop across a muddy meadow, with footing that wasn’t sure. Not too long ago he’d done it because somebody he loved was in terrible danger, and he did it again now. With a wild yell he kicked his heels into the pinto horse’s sides and rode across that field like the hounds of hell were nipping at his behind.

When he got to the creek, the dogs were running back and forth along the edge of the water, whining and whimpering and carrying on. He couldn’t see the kid at first, but he could hear her, and that was all he needed. He untied the roping lariat he kept tied to his saddle—not that he’d used one in more years than he could even remember—and bailed out of the saddle. Old Paint was a cow pony, and he knew what he had to do. When Sam dropped the reins to the ground, the horse stood like he was tied. Sam hobbled to the creek bank, unreeling the rope as he went, and the horse kept some tension on it, just like there was a bucking calf on the end of it instead of a crippled-up old man.

The creek was in flood, and the little girl was out there in the middle of it. He could see her a ways down, hanging on to a tree branch for dear life. Sam stepped into the water and let it take his legs out from under him and carry him downstream, while he held on to the rope and reeled it out, and the horse kept taking up the slack. When he got to where the kid was, his old heart was a-pounding like a freight train, and he thought,
Oh, Lord, don’t let me die now!

The little girl had quit hollering, and when he got to her she latched on to his neck, like to choke him, and he could feel her shaking.

“Hush up—I got you,” he told her. “Just hang on now.”

And then he lost the rope.

Silently cussing old age and arthritic fingers, he watched the end of it riding the current like a snake. He wasn’t nearly strong enough to risk trying to grab for it, and anyway his hands were stiff from the cold water and he probably wouldn’t be able to tie it. So he did the only thing he could. He wrapped one arm around the tree branch and the other around the kid, and he started praying.

* * *

Yancy stood on the curving front steps and hugged herself as she watched the taillights of Hunt’s rented SUV wink on before it made the turn at the bottom of the driveway. She wouldn’t cry. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t. But every part of her body
hurt
.

She kept hearing the last thing he’d said to her, her spirits reeling drunkenly between hope and despair.

I’m going right now because it’s what you say you want. But I’m not leaving this valley without talking to my daughter. This isn’t over.

And her reply, forced past the unbearable ache in her throat:
I do love you. I will always love you.

His reply had been silence and a look in his lion’s eyes that she feared would haunt her for the rest of her life.

For a moment, panic overtook her and she found herself running down the steps, running after the disappearing SUV. But of course she couldn’t possibly catch up with it, which she realized once the reasoning part of her brain caught up with her adrenaline-charged reflexes. And even if she did, what could she possibly say? She’d done what she had to do, said what she had to say, and nothing would change that. She slowed to a stop in the middle of the paved lane, in almost the exact spot where she and Hunt had stopped in the early-morning darkness and turned into each other’s arms, pulled by forces neither of them could resist.

Grief replaced panic. She doubled over, arms across her waist to keep the sobs from bursting forth, gasping for breath. But for only a moment. Then she straightened resolutely, grimacing with pain, and turned toward the meadow, retracing the path they’d taken, first to the garage, then to the barbed-wire fence. Fighting the pain, holding back the tears, she gazed out across the meadow, where the early-morning rain and today’s sunshine had restored the grass and erased all traces of the place where they’d made love on the car-cover bed.

With her senses dulled by pain and her thoughts turned inward to her own grief, it was a few minutes before she became aware that the horses, usually placidly grazing, had gathered closely together and were staring intently toward the distant creek. Holding her breath, she could hear a dog’s frantic barking. And then a sound that sent a shiver through her body, a sound she’d heard long ago when she was growing up in rural Virginia: the full-throated baying of a hound in full cry.

She was climbing through the fence to investigate whatever it was that had the dogs so agitated when she heard the drumming of hoofbeats. The hoofbeats of a horse in full gallop. She straightened up and looked across the meadow. And caught her breath, frozen in place by the shocking sight of a pinto horse racing flat out toward the creek, and her grandfather, Sam Malone, crouched like a jockey over the horse’s neck, his white hair blowing back in the wind.

Galvanized by a nameless fear, Yancy began to run. Her mind was blank; she ran on pure instinct.
Something’s wrong. Very, very wrong.

She was barely aware of her feet touching the ground, completely unaware of her pounding heart and bursting lungs. But as fast as she ran, she lost sight of Sam long before she reached the creek. The dogs had gone quiet, but as she came nearer to the creek she could hear the sound of rushing water. When she topped the gentle rise before the slope down to the creek, she could see the pinto, standing on what had once been the bank of the gently trickling stream, now ankle deep in swiftly running water. A rope, tied to the saddle, trailed off down the stream like a fisherman’s line.

For a few terrible moments she couldn’t see Sam. Then she did see him. And terror slammed into her, so hard she staggered. Terror unlike anything she’d ever known.

Oh, God—Laila.

She wasn’t aware of moving, but somehow she was in the water, holding on to the rope with all her strength, half walking, half swimming, mostly just carried like a piece of flotsam on the flood.

It was colder than she’d expected.

She thought she called out. Maybe it was only inside her head.
Hold on, Laila! Hold on—Mommy’s coming. Hold on, Sam. Oh, please, hold on...

* * *

Hunt rested his forearms on the steering wheel and gazed through the windshield at the road ahead. Or rather, where the road was supposed to be. The ravine he’d come across the day before, with its shallow trickle of water at the bottom, was now filled halfway to the top with a raging brown torrent. He swore aloud, but the noise of the water drowned the words. Which was just as well, he reflected, and he’d better get used to editing out the kind of language he wouldn’t want his daughter to hear.

My daughter. Laila.

Yancy.

He’d transitioned through so many stages of anger—yes, and grief, too—since his confrontation with her in the courtyard, he wasn’t even sure where he was anymore. Blind fury, helpless frustration, shock, disbelief, cold steely rage, stomach-clenching fear. He’d careened from one to the other and back again so wildly his head was spinning. It wasn’t a situation in which he was accustomed to finding himself, and he didn’t like it. Most of all he didn’t like feeling vulnerable.