Heartbreaker (6 page)

“Shh, sweetheart,” she whispered to Elijah.

Sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor, Theresa unzipped his fuzzy blue sleeper to check his diaper—a ragged shirt she had reclaimed from the clothes pile and tucked inside his plastic pants. She nudged his mouth with the makeshift nipple, which he accepted greedily.

Crooning meaningless words in his ear, Theresa rocked him back and forth. His warm, solid little body nestled against her, and one tiny hand curled around her finger as he sucked.

The root cellar was cold and musty-smelling. The Stewarts used it to store canned goods and other staples. Earlier residents of the camp had used it to hold everything from potatoes to mining gear.

Elijah gave small grunts signifying baby contentment as he gulped down the mixture of reconstituted milk and blackberry wine Theresa had concocted for him. He had done nothing in the root cellar but eat and sleep, and for that Theresa blessed the intoxicating effects of the wine. Poor baby, she hoped it wouldn’t do him any harm. But even if it did, it couldn’t be as bad as what would happen to him if they were discovered.

They would die.

At first Theresa had been scared, so scared, that Elijah would cry and give their hiding place away. She remembered a story she had read once about a mother in the Old West who had been hiding with her children from marauding Indians. When the baby started to cry, the mother had suffocated him with her own hands rather than have him reveal their whereabouts and risk death for her and the other children.

One life sacrificed for many. It had undoubtedly been the right thing to do.

But Theresa knew she would never be able to sacrifice Elijah to save herself.

Knew it, that is, until she heard her little sisters being herded into the front room with her mother. The girls were crying. Sally said something, her voice pleading. There was the sound of a blow.

A few minutes later the screams began.

In that instant Theresa faced a terrible truth: To save her own life she would sacrifice Elijah.

Please, dear Lord, she prayed again as she had prayed every time she thought of her baby brother since confronting her own capacity for evil, please keep him quiet.

Please don’t let either of us have to die
.

June 21, 1996
10
A.M
.

B
OUNCE; THUD
.
Bounce, thud. Bounce, thud
.

The pony—Hero—trotted dutifully after his mates. On his back Lynn bounced into the air and smacked down against the saddle with a hideous repetition that made Chinese water torture seem kind by comparison.

Bounce, thud. Bounce, thud
.

Oh, God, her butt hurt. The discomfort she had experienced yesterday was nothing compared to the pain she was feeling today.

If the two extra-strength Tylenol tablets she had taken that morning were dulling anything, she didn’t even want to imagine what she would feel like without painkillers in her system.

Doc Grandview’s Horse Liniment had proved useless too—except maybe as an insect repellent. If she were a bug the odor would certainly repel her. Twelve hours after she had massaged it into her aching muscles, the smell was still strong enough to make her wrinkle her nose when the wind blew a certain way.

Worse, the slimy stuff was nearly impossible to wash off. Despite all her efforts with soap, a washcloth, and cold water, the skin of her thighs and butt still felt greasy and adhered to her jeans in a most unpleasant way.

Would somebody please wake her up and tell her this was all just a hideous, horrible, very bad dream?

“
Mother
, you’re not keeping up.” Rory dropped back to ride beside her. Collegiate had offered riding lessons, for which Lynn had been paying through the nose all year. Obviously, they had taken. One glance told Lynn that Rory was experiencing none of the difficulties that plagued her mother. In fact, except for her obvious fear of being embarrassed by her parent, the child looked to be having the time of her life. Her eyes shone beneath the wide brim of the pink cowboy hat she had insisted on buying. A rosy flush colored her cheeks. Her long blond ponytail bounced rhythmically in time to her movements. She looked happy, healthy, and at home on the same kind of merciless animal that was meting out such punishment to Lynn.

“I’m trying my best,” Lynn said, gritting her teeth against another jarring landing and summoning up every bit of her self-control to keep from snapping at her daughter. For Rory’s sake, she would wrestle alligators. She would twist a tiger’s tail. She would sleep in a roomful of rats. She could certainly be a sport about getting a little saddle sore.

A lot saddle sore, she amended with an inner groan. Would this accursed day never end?

The most horrible thing was that it couldn’t be much past ten o’clock in the morning. They hadn’t even stopped for lunch yet, and the schedule had promised an all-day ride. The prospect made Lynn want to weep.

Bounce, thud
.

They were crossing an open meadow now in a loose kind of double-line formation, having left the forest behind for the moment. Lynn was—at least before Rory joined her—alone at the tail end of the posse of vacationers, though she had a vague awareness of a couple of the outfitters, including Jess Feldman, even farther back, bringing up the rear. The sun was bright, the air was crisp, the sky was cerulean blue with fluffy little white clouds scudding across it. Snowcapped mountains formed a breathtaking horizon, stretching away into the distance like row upon row of shark’s teeth for as far as the eye could see. There were even tiny purple wildflowers blooming in the stubby green grass through which they rode. How, Lynn asked herself, could she feel so miserable in such a beautiful setting?

The answer was, she just did.

“You’re supposed to post, Mother,” Rory offered, assessing Lynn’s horsemanship, or lack of it, with a critical glance.

“Post,” Lynn echoed, hanging on to her smile as her backside whacked the saddle.

“You know, like this.” Rory demonstrated, rising and falling in her stirrups in time with her pony’s movements. “You grip with your knees. Like Mrs. Greer. And Mrs. Stapleton.”

Pat and Debbie were riding together about three horses ahead. The women seemed to have no trouble at all carrying on a conversation while avoiding being jounced to death. In fact, they looked as if they were enjoying themselves.

Pat Greer was too perfect to be believed. She could even ride a horse without suffering. But her rear was a little large—okay, a lot large. Lynn squeezed what comfort she could from that.

Maybe that was what she needed, Lynn thought—more padding on her backside to make the never-ending barrage of blows endurable.

Or horseback-riding lessons. For which it was too late now.

One of the trip requirements for the girls had been riding lessons. The adults had just been asked if they knew how to ride.

Lynn remembered checking the yes box on the form Rory had brought home. At the time she had thought it was just a little white lie that no one would ever uncover. After all, how hard could riding a horse be?

In the case of this pony, and this saddle, very hard.

Ouch!

“Don’t worry, I’m getting the hang of it,” she lied to Rory with as much jauntiness as she could muster, while every tooth in her head was being jolted loose. Doing her best to grip the accursed beast’s hairy sides with her knees—the pain that went shooting up the insides of her thighs when she squeezed was unbelievable—Lynn managed to rise out of the saddle and lower herself again in rough approximation of the other riders’ smooth styles. She did it twice, three times.

“That’s better. How can you not know how to ride? I thought
everybody
did.” Rory’s impatient superiority annoyed Lynn.

“Not everybody. Only people who are fortunate enough to have someone pay for their lessons,” Lynn answered tartly. This home truth made Rory scowl.

“And that’s why you work so hard, and that’s why you’re gone so much, and that’s why you never have time for me, so you can pay for things like my lessons, right?” Rory’s reply dripped sarcasm.

“Rory—” Lynn was already regretting her words.

“I hate you!” Rory cast her a malicious look and kicked her mount on up the line.

Left alone again, Lynn sighed. Everything she said to Rory nowadays seemed to provoke a fight.

Of course, Rory didn’t really hate her. Lynn knew that.

But, oh, how that
I hate you
hurt!

This trip wasn’t working, Lynn decided wearily. She had hoped it would draw them together, but if anything it was just pushing them further apart. She should have taken her station manager’s advice and spent her vacation on a cruise ship in the Caribbean being pampered.

Without her daughter.

But the only reason Lynn had even taken a vacation was to spend time with Rory. With all the changes going on in the newsroom, this had not been a good time to leave.

A thirty-five-year-old woman anchor was too easily replaced.

Smack!

She had lost the rhythm again. Remembering the knifelike pain in her thighs when she gripped with her knees, Lynn couldn’t summon up the strength of will to give posting another shot.

Bounce, thud. Bounce, thud
.

Oh, God
.

“Heigh-ho, Silver!”

Though Lynn wouldn’t have believed it possible, bad suddenly got worse. Riding up beside her—grinning—came Jess Feldman.

“Bug off!” Lynn said through clenched teeth.

“Now, now.” He rode as if he were born doing it, on a mount that was taller and sleeker than her own shaggy steed. A horse, in fact, not a chubby pony. His tan cowboy hat and suede vest over a flannel shirt were picture-perfect. His blue eyes twinkled. His tawny hair blew in the wind. He could have posed for one of those God’s country ads that were always being used to sell Jeeps and jeans. Like his lying brochure he was all glossy superlatives—on the surface. But on the subject of men, at least she knew enough to read between the lines.

“That’s not very friendly,” he said.

“I don’t feel very friendly.” And that was an understatement if she had ever uttered one.

“You ever ridden a horse before?”

“Frequently. Can’t you tell?”

“We don’t generally encourage nonriders to come on one of these trips. I think we make that pretty clear in our literature.”

“So I lied on the form. So shoot me. Please.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse.” The word emerged sounding embarrassingly like a groan.

He laughed. Lynn shot him a look that should have blasted him backward out of his saddle. Instead of falling, he cupped a hand around his mouth.

“Yo, Owen!” he bellowed to his brother, who was near the middle of the column talking to Lucy Johnson. Lynn suddenly remembered that Mrs. Johnson was the teacher who had recommended this particular experience as something that would be “good for the girls.” The woman had to be a couple of cards short of a deck—or maybe, Lynn speculated with pain-filled venom, Adventure, Inc. paid her some sort of kickback for all the poor fools she helped rope in.

“Owen!”

Owen glanced around. Like Jess, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, vest, jeans, and boots, and rode a horse, not a pony. He looked one hundred percent at home on the range—but of course, he was a faux cowboy too. Lynn wasn’t about to forget that.

“Speed it up!” Jess yelled.

“What?”

Jess repeated himself. Lynn just managed to swallow an appalled whimper and fixed Jess with a look of burning hatred. The fiend, to deliberately torture her even more by increasing the hell-born beast’s speed, when he knew she was hurting already!

Owen’s horse pulled away from the others, galloping to the head of the group. Without any further warning the animals all increased their pace, flying across the meadow at what seemed like breakneck speed. Hero bolted along with the rest. Lynn gasped and grabbed the pommel. It was all she could do not to close her eyes.

Mountains and sky and earth formed a weirdly beautiful kaleidoscope around her as she clung to the saddle, convinced that she would be flung from her mount and thus meet her Maker at any moment.

But it didn’t happen.

And there was no bounce. No thud.

The pace was scary, but the ride was—sort of—smooth.

“Better?” Jess yelled, keeping pace alongside her.

Lynn glanced at him, found that the earth and sky and mountains were settling down again just where they should be, and nodded grudgingly.

“It’s called a canter. Gentle as rocking in your own rocking chair.”

He grinned, saluted, and left her, moving along the column until he caught up with Owen. After a few seconds of conversation with his brother, Jess dropped back to ride beside Debbie Stapleton.

Of course, schmoozing with the customers was part of the job. Lynn wondered if he was offering to rub liniment on Debbie. If he did, the tall, athletic mother of three would probably deck him. Lynn smiled at the thought.

Her smile vanished as Rory and Jenny rode up behind Jess. Watching Jess fall in beside her daughter made Lynn almost forget about the pain that, whether she was bouncing or not, seemed to have become a permanent part of her anatomy.

Almost.

By the time they stopped for the noonday meal, Lynn could barely slide out of the saddle. When her feet touched the ground her knees threatened to crumple. The hot throbbing in her thighs and rump was excruciating.

All around her, her fellow riders dismounted with apparent ease, laughing and chattering about such mundane matters as the weather and what they would be having for lunch. Nobody collapsed. Nobody complained. Nobody even groaned.

It was unbelievable.

To the remarks that came her way Lynn managed to reply with smiles and nods. If everyone else could hold up under this hellish torment, then by God so could she.

She hoped. No, she prayed.

“Need some help?”