Silk and Stone (75 page)

Ravenmocker
.

Chapter
            Thirty-Three
 

S
am floated in a nightmarish dreamscape haunted by confusion and terror, her life broken into small, vivid pieces—rubies that glowed like eyes, hard walls pinning her inside the antique trunk when she was a child, looms that clattered like gnashing wooden mouths, the lonely years when Jake was in prison, reluctant wakings into empty mornings when she had to acknowledge, before she opened her eyes, that he wasn’t beside her.

She floated up through that crowded black land into a cloud of agonizing pain. It jolted her eyes open and made her gasp for air. A small part of her mind focused on small details—the crushed sheath of the cockpit clutching her legs and folding her forward, the sticky red splotches on her outflung arm, the hard, bumpy surface of the mangled control panel beneath her cheek. She stared out the shattered side window at a steep slope of rock and
earth and broken trees shrouded in a ghostly gray mist.

Turning her head required all her willpower. Every inch of movement brought a fresh wave of pain. She concentrated on little details to subvert the torture. Wispy, fading light. The bizarre discovery that one of the plane’s shattered wings lay across the nose. The startling canopy of trees beyond the broken windows. Trees were not that fully branched at ground level. She was gazing straight out into their crowns. That made no sense, and her bewilderment nearly segued into hopeless panic.
Think
, she chanted silently.

Creaking nails-on-chalkboard sounds caught her attention. The protests of metal shifting against metal. The unmistakable tremor that went through the plane’s carcass. The lopsided tilt of her body, and the narrow band of the seat belt digging into her hip. She added up those details a dozen times, until they produced an answer.

The wreckage was balanced on rocks and broken trees, high on the side of a steep ridge.

She refused to concentrate on that frightening image. Sam shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and twisted her head to the other side in one wrenching motion. She rested her cheek on the weirdly upthrust panel of gauges and struggled not to black out. When the pain and darkness receded, she opened her eyes and slowly raised her head.

She met a startling barricade of pine branches. A limb of a massive tree had snagged the delicate plane, piercing the cockpit’s windshield. Sam was dimly aware of lifting her left arm. Every muscle in it seemed to be tearing away from the others. She pawed the smaller branches. Her strength gave out and her arm sank limply atop them, pressing them down. Her fingertips grazed chilly skin and wet fabric.

Alexandra was trapped inside the hard claw of the tree. Her head was tilted back on the seat; her eyes were closed. She looked eerily composed, as if she’d fallen asleep. Except for the bloody splatters on her pale gray jacket.

Sam dragged her fingers across the material until she
found the edge of a lapel, then the softer fabric of the blouse beneath. She pressed her forefinger to the center of Alexandra’s chest. The slow, thready heartbeat made Sam curl her hand away.

Alexandra’s eyes flickered. She stared at Sam. With her head flung back and her eyes half shuttered, the gaze seemed imperious. Her mouth worked. A raspy whisper finally escaped.

He won’t find you this time
.

“This is goddamned crazy!” Jake heard the helicopter pilot’s shouted words through a headset but didn’t respond. His attention was riveted to the darkening blanket of fog around them. Trees, not far below, appeared and disappeared as if manipulated by a master magician. He had tried to quiet every thought and let intuition take over, but the bleakest fear he’d ever known kept racing through him. He
felt
they were headed in the right direction, but it might have been the fear disguised as a desperate wish. Hoke laid a hand on his shoulder. Jake ignored it.

“I said I’d take you as far as I could before the fog closed in,” the pilot continued. “This is it. I didn’t survive two combat tours in ’Nam to end up scattered all over a mountain at home.”

“We got to turn back,” Hoke said. He shook Jake lightly. “I’m drawing a blank, and I think you are too.”

“No. I might not be close, but I’ll get there.”

“You got nothing to work with, boy. Not a scrap of your wife’s clothes, no jewelry, nothing.”

“Let me out. Find some kind of a clearing—there. Over there. That hilltop.”

The pilot cursed loudly. “You mean that jumble of rotten logs? The pine borers would have to chew on that hilltop for another twenty years before I could set this chopper down.”

“Just get close enough for me to jump.”

“Oh,
man
, you’ll break your damned legs.”

“Do it.” Jake twisted toward Hoke. “Go back and see what kind of help you can send. The north edges of the Etowahs. Tell ’em the plane went down somewhere between here and Mount Gibson.”

“That’s thirty miles of rough territory,” Hoke answered. “A dozen peaks. A hundred little coves and hidden ridges and—”

“I’m not going back without her, Hoke. She’s alive. That’s the one thing I do know.”

“I doubt I can get you much help before the fog lifts. That’ll probably be late tomorrow morning.”

“Do the best you can.”

Hoke slumped. “Take this bird to that hilltop, Andy. The man’ll jump out from up here if you don’t.”

“All right. They’re his bones to break.”

As the helicopter swung toward its destination, Hoke pressed Jake’s shoulder a final time. “God bless you. You’ve come too far to lose everything now.”

Jake tossed his headset aside, then slid his arms through the straps of a backpack the pilot had provided. A flashlight, matches, a blanket, a small coil of rope, a canteen filled with water, a hunting knife, and a pistol. The copter dropped slowly over the hill, the ethereal white mist surrounding it. Jake pushed his door open and studied the clutter of fallen trees.

“You got about a twenty-foot drop,” the pilot yelled. “That’s as good as it’s going to get!”

Jake crouched on the rim of the door, found a patch of clear ground among the chaos, and jumped.

He hit the soft ground with a force that buckled his legs and sprawled him sideways. Dazed, he lay still for a few seconds, the wind from the copter’s blades whipping him, then rose unsteadily. He looked up at the helicopter. Hoke scrutinized him from the still-open door.

Jake raised one hand, signaling good-bye. Hoke gave him a thumbs-up.

The helicopter rose and was swallowed by the fog. Jake stood a minute on the lonely, ruined hilltop, lost in the mist and gloom and the whisper of evening currents curling through vast forests.

He emptied his mind as best he could, let himself become a human compass, and hoped that the deep, faithful pull of Samantha’s heart would show him the way.

Clara watched from a hard folding chair in a corner, keeping her own somber counsel, absorbing the chatter of official-looking people as busy as bees in a hive. They scurried around the hot, cramped space of the airfield office, carrying their opinions, like specks of pollen, from the wall maps to the telephones. She wished she could produce a sprig of bright-red bee balm to quiet them down. Especially Charlotte, who followed first one person and then another, asking questions that had no answers.

“What do you think?” Joe whispered to her. He was old and wise, like her, and he sat cross-legged on the floor by her chair, away from the traffic.

Clara bent her head toward his. “Jake’ll find Sammie. No one else is meant to.”

He sighed. Charlotte’s voice cut through the room’s noisy buzz. “There must be
something
you can do tonight!” She latched on to the shirt of a big man wearing a ranger’s uniform.

The man shook his head. “We can’t send any planes out in this fog. All we can do tonight is organize search teams and map out the most likely crash sites. By morning we’ll have a couple hundred people and a dozen planes ready to go.”

She jerked at his sweat-stained shirtfront. “You could send out professional trackers and their dogs tonight.”

“They’d need to be airlifted into some of the rough spots we’re talking about. And not even a professional tracker is going to risk stumbling over a waterfall or a cliff in the dark.”

“My brother-in-law is a tracker—the best one in the state—and
he
wouldn’t be sitting here thinking up excuses.” Charlotte jabbed a finger toward the door. “He’d
be out in the mountains with his dog, no matter what the weather was like.”

“Well, there isn’t anybody else like Jake Raincrow. And since we don’t know where he is or if he even knows his wife was in that plane, what he’d do about it is a moot point. I’m sorry to put it that way. You’ve got a right to be scared and mad, but all you can do is wait for morning, like the rest of us.”

“Charlotte.” Ben slid off the edge of a desk, clear-eyed but hunched with pain, and put his good arm around her. She leaned against him with tearful defeat. The look on his face said he’d take on her pain too if he could. “I can’t believe Jake hasn’t heard that she and Alexandra are missing. You
know
he’s looking for them.”

“How can he? He didn’t come home to get Bo, he didn’t call anyone for information about the search or the plane’s flight path—”

“Excuse me,” a wiry young man said to them. “Could I intrude for a minute?” He had slipped through the crowd from his own quiet corner with only Clara noticing. She had been scrutinizing him for a while, wondering what he was forever scribbling in a notepad. “I’m Bob Freeman, from the
Raleigh—
”

“He’s a newspaper reporter,” Ben interjected, drawing Charlotte closer. She and Ben traded a startled look. Clara bent down to Joe and whispered quickly, “He’s the one I told you about.”

Joe jumped. “The one Jake sent the—”

“Yes sir.”

“You think he’s figured out where it came from?”

“I hope not.”

Ben was studying the intruder shrewdly. “I recognize your name. I might be impressed. If nothing else, I’m impressed that you managed to get into this office while the rest of the media are camped outside behind barricades.”

“Hometown advantage. I was born on a tenant farm near Pandora. The sheriff’s relatives sat around a few moonshine stills with mine.”

“My sister is all I can think about right now,” Charlotte told him. She hesitated, then added, “And our aunt.”

“I understand. You’re a … close … family?”

“She isn’t in very good shape to discuss the family,” Ben said smoothly.

“It’s all right. I need to talk,” Charlotte replied. “It might help me make sense of what’s happening.” She squared her shoulders. “My aunt took my sister and me into her home after our mother died. It was the kind of experience you never forget. Our aunt couldn’t be more involved in our lives if we were her own children.”

“Had you talked to your cousin recently?”

“He dropped by for a visit yesterday. He was very depressed about his stepfather’s stroke. I didn’t have much time to listen, because I had to take my accident-prone friend here to the hospital. I feel lousy about running out on my cousin.”