Heartbreaker (33 page)

With every shadow that shifted across the road Lynn felt the weight of time passing.

“Come on, you!”

Wheezing now, Lynn pulled harder, trying to keep the burro from following its unmistakable intention to slow into a walk. What she was doing wasn’t running, she decided. It was the kind of hard labor appropriate for convicted felons.

“Ah-ooo-gah!”
A horn blasted deafeningly behind them. Lynn started, then went wide-eyed with delight as she glanced back to see an ancient truck skidding to halt in the gravel.

Motorized
transportation was the thought that ran through her mind.

The burro, unfortunately, was not so delighted by the truck’s advent. Galvanized by the sound of the horn, it leaped forward, knocking Lynn to the ground even as she glanced back at the truck. The lead whipped from her hand as the animal took off.

Sprawled on her stomach in the grass, Lynn could only watch with horror as burro, cart, and Jess rocketed past her, heading at a mad gallop down the road.

“Whoa!” screamed Jess, clinging to the bucking cart like a rodeo rider to a crazed bronc as they careened over ruts and rocks and ridges. “Whoa!”

“Yahweh save him,” Louis muttered piously.

“Jess!” Lynn scrambled to her feet and gave chase. Running, she watched open-mouthed as the cart, with Jess still grimly hanging on, hit a rock and was suddenly airborne, flying forward in what looked like an insane attempt to leapfrog the burro!

W
HEN LYNN CAUGHT UP
with Jess he was lying flat on his back on top of a crushed snowball bush, cursing a blue streak. Broken harness still attached, the overturned cart rested on the roadbed nearby, its wheels still turning sluggishly. Of the burro there was not a sign.

A steady string of well-enunciated profanities had reached her ears before she actually caught sight of him, assuring her that he wasn’t dead.

“Are you hurt?” she asked as she approached him, trying hard to control a wayward twitch of her lips.

“It’s a damned miracle I didn’t break every bone in my body,” he said, from which she deduced he wasn’t. “I
told
you to hang on to that lead.”

“Ride ’em, cowboy,” she said, unable to hold back any longer, and giggled.

The look he gave her was withering. Groaning, he got to his feet, removing a mesh bag of potatoes from his chest in the process and dropping it to the ground. Lynn noticed that the area around the bush was littered with groceries, and giggled again.

“Was that a truck?” He felt his shoulder, grimacing.

In all the excitement Lynn had almost forgotten the truck.

“Yes!” She turned back to look up the road. A bend hid the truck from sight. But she was just in time to see Louis run into view, arms and legs pumping as he pounded toward them. He was yelling something, though Lynn couldn’t understand the words.

Right behind him came a slender young woman in a cream-colored nightgown, hair flying behind her, a stout stick raised above her head.

“Theresa!” Lynn exclaimed as Theresa took a swing at Louis. The stick missed him by what looked like mere inches, and Louis spurted ahead. Lynn was amazed at how fast the man could run when he had to.

“What now?” Jess groaned, and stepped into the roadbed to intercept Louis. “Hold it!”

“Don’t stop me!” Louis screeched as Jess grabbed him when he would have run past.

“Murderer! Murderer!” Theresa was upon them within seconds, beating Louis about the head and shoulders with her stick as Jess yelled at her to stop. Louis, cowering, tried to fend her off with an upraised arm.

“Help! Help!” Louis cried, darting behind Jess, who with only one good arm was unable to both hold on to him and grab for the weapon. He lost his grip on Louis.

“Ow! Dammit!” Jess wrested the stick from Theresa with a quick twist of his wrist, in the process apparently catching a blow intended for Louis.

“He killed my family! Murderer!” Disarmed, Theresa pummeled Louis with her fists, kicking him, tearing at his hair as both Louis and Jess tried to hold her off. She looked like an avenging fury, with tears pouring down her face all the while. “He killed my family!”

“Theresa, don’t!” Heart aching for the girl, Lynn caught her arm, trying to get her attention, to distract her from the attack. Theresa turned on her, a wild look in her eyes, her lifted fist threatening. Lynn braced herself for the blow. The girl, though slender, was several inches taller than she and beside herself with anger and grief. But the lifted fist never fell.

“He was one of the men who killed my mother,” Theresa said pitifully, looking into Lynn’s eyes. The fight drained out of her and she fell to her knees, her head dropping onto her hands as she dissolved into paroxysms of sobs.

“It’s all right,” Lynn murmured, bending over Theresa, putting an arm around the girl’s heaving shoulders. Theresa’s distress made her own eyes fill. Poor child, what had she been through? “Shh, now. It’s all right.”

“Why?” Theresa lifted her face to hiss at Louis, ignoring Lynn’s attempts at comforting her. “Why did you do it? My mother never hurt you or anyone! Neither did my little sisters, or my brothers, or any of my family! We just wanted to be left in peace! Why did you have to chase us down and kill them?”

Held now by Jess’s grip on his arm, Louis seemed to shrink under Theresa’s impassioned gaze.

“Michael Stewart always sat in the most honored position at the right hand of the Lamb, yet he turned traitor. He ran away in the dead of night, taking his family and followers with him! He was going to betray us! The Lamb sent us on a holy mission to find and destroy the Michaelites before they could reveal Yahweh’s divine plan.” Louis’s voice was almost pleading.

“The Lamb! The Lamb!” Theresa practically spat the words. “Robert Talmadge is no more the Lamb than you are! Do you know what he did? He tried to rape me! I was only fifteen years old! That’s what opened my father’s eyes; that’s why he took us away! My father meant no harm to anyone! Why couldn’t you just leave us alone? That’s all we wanted, to be left alone! Murderer!”

The fire returned to Theresa’s eyes, and she surged to her feet, fists clenched and teeth gnashing.

The wail of a baby behind them made her, and everyone else, look around.

“He started to cry,” Rory said, approaching with the screaming, squirming child held awkwardly in her arms. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“Rory!” Lynn looked at her daughter as Theresa took the squalling infant from her. She felt a great weight fall away from her heart. “Rory!”

“Hi, Mom,” Rory said, surrendering to Lynn’s hug and even returning it. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, Rory” was all Lynn could say as she buried her face in her daughter’s shoulder and held her tight. “I’m fine. What about you?”

“I was really scared, but I’m okay now,” Rory confessed. “I was afraid you might not be able to escape from those men. Is he really one of them?”

Her daughter had to mean Louis.

“Yes,” she said.

“They killed Theresa’s whole family. Except for Elijah. That’s the baby’s name.”

“I know. I’m so sorry.”

“Folks, we can sort all this out in the truck. We need to make tracks into town.” Jess, keeping one hand on Louis’s arm and a wary eye on Theresa, who was cradling the bawling baby, herded them all back down the road.

Rory, walking arm-in-arm with Lynn, broke away from her mother to snatch up an object from the side of the road.

“Look, Theresa, it’s powdered milk!” she said, holding up the red-and-white box so the other girl could see it. A glance around sent her flying after something else. “And bottled water to mix it with! Elijah can have some milk!”

“Where did that come from?” Theresa asked, looking at the items Rory held. Her voice sounded dull. Her eyes were still awash with tears, but they no longer ran down her face. It was, Lynn thought, as if she had deliberately damped down her emotions.

“We found them in a cart attached to a lost burro,” Lynn said. “Someone must have been using it to haul groceries, but it got away.”

“Was the burro tan or gray?” Theresa said, as if there were only the two choices.

“Tan.”

“Esther.” Theresa almost whispered the name. “The gray one is Ruth. My father was bringing back supplies. The burros must have run away when—” Her lip quivered and she broke off, her chest heaving as she obviously fought to regain control.

“Yahweh forgive me, I never thought of the pain we might cause,” Louis whispered, staring at Theresa.

Her head swung around, her long hair whipping through the air. She fixed him with fierce eyes. “God—not Yahweh,
God
—will never forgive you, and neither will I! You will burn in hell for what you did, you murderer!”

“Here’s the truck,” Jess interrupted.

Lynn glanced up to find that they were, indeed, at the truck. It was a blue Ford pickup with
Supercab
stenciled on the left front. Below that in flaking chrome was the designation
F-250
.

Opening the passenger-side door and pulling the front seat down, Jess said to Louis, “You ride in the back.”

Louis clambered into the spartan rear seat without argument and scooted over as far as possible. He was still the same scrawny, stooped, pitiful-looking little man he had been fifteen minutes before, but he had been forever transformed in Lynn’s eyes. Theresa’s raging grief had given an all-too-real face to the victims of the slaughter in the mining camp. From being a crank who had tried but ultimately failed to do significant harm to her and Rory and Jess, Louis metamorphosed into a monster who had participated in the murders of Theresa’s family.

“I mixed some milk for Elijah,” Rory said, offering a green plastic water bottle to Theresa. “I don’t know what we can do for a nipple though.”

“Thanks.” Theresa accepted the bottle, tilted the baby so that he was upright, and pressed the bottle’s open lip to his cheek. The baby’s sobs subsided as he eagerly turned his head in search of the promised sustenance. Theresa put the bottle to his mouth and carefully tilted it. “My mother already taught him to drink from a cup.”

There was both pride and heartbreak in her face as she watched the baby swallow.

“All right, everybody in.” Jess walked around to the driver’s side. “Louis, pass me your watch. I’m tired of asking you what time it is.”

“Almost six,” Louis said in a subdued tone, unfastening the watch and handing it over. When Rory tried to scramble into the backseat with Louis, Lynn stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Wait a minute,” she said to Rory. Then, following Jess, “I’m driving. You’re wounded, remember? Get in the back with Louis.”

“
You’re
driving?” With his left hand on the open driver-side door, he turned to look at her. Both his tone and his expression left no doubt about his feelings. Lynn narrowed her eyes at him.

“You have only one working arm, and you need to stay close to Louis, just in case. Believe me, I can drive as well as you.”

“This is a
truck
,” Jess objected. Though he didn’t say it his meaning was quite clear: Men drove trucks.

“Get in back,” Lynn said through her teeth. Jess hesitated, shrugged, then walked around the truck to join Louis in the back. The three women plus Elijah, who was hungrily gulping milk, crowded into the front.

As she started the truck Lynn remembered Louis saying it was six o’clock. They had fifteen hours to go.

She trod down hard on the accelerator. The rear tires spun, the truck jumped forward, and they were off.

“Jesus,” Jess muttered in apparent reference to her driving as the truck bumped at breakneck speed over the pitted road. His hand gripped the seat back between Lynn and Rory. A glance in the rearview mirror told Lynn his eyes were glued to the road.

“Where did you find the truck?” Lynn asked the girls, ignoring Jess.

“It’s my father’s. I knew where it was, but I can’t drive.” Theresa was busy wiping milk from Elijah’s quivering chin as she spoke.

“You can’t drive?” Lynn glanced at her in surprise. Theresa shook her head. “Then who …”

Her gaze shot to her daughter, who was sitting beside her. Rory grinned at her sheepishly.

“I’ve driven go-carts,” she said.

“Oh, my
God
.” Lynn closed her mouth and shook her head as she focused on the road again. Obviously, Rory had reserves of resourcefulness and courage that her mother had never suspected. Lynn felt a surge of pride in her daughter.

And a surge of fear as well.

Would Rory live long enough to grow into the woman Lynn had just been afforded a tantalizing glimpse of?

N
EARLY AN HOUR LATER
the truck lurched from the gravel road onto State Route 150 and, at Jess’s direction, headed west.

Though they were still high in the national forest, surrounded by towering trees with nary a soul in sight, at least the two-lane road was paved. Lynn stepped on the gas and watched the accelerator climb from 35 to 50 to 70 to 90 in a matter of about two minutes.

“Aren’t you driving a little too fast, Mom?” Rory asked, clutching the edge of the bench seat with both hands as the truck took a curve on what felt like two wheels. Lynn knew that her daughter’s opinion of her driving, often expressed, was not high.

“We’re in kind of a hurry,” Jess said, leaning forward. Lynn glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that he was watching the road intently.

By mutual—though unspoken—agreement, neither Lynn nor Jess had said anything about the nine
A.M
. deadline since they’d all piled into the truck. It was obvious from Rory’s demeanor that she thought any danger was well past.

Lynn hated to frighten her daughter anew, but there was no help for it. Briefly, she told her and Theresa the newest wrinkle in the saga.

“Can they do that?” Rory, white-faced, asked after a moment’s appalled silence.

“I didn’t know the date had been set,” Theresa said, her mouth twisting into an odd grimace, before Lynn could reply. Theresa’s arms cradled the baby, who now slept facedown across her chest.