Going Gone, Book 2 of the Irish End Games (18 page)

That had never been a sure thing while the storm lashed them. She plucked downed twigs and branches from where the horses stood and checked to see that the falling limbs hadn't hit them. While they could use a bag of oats about now, Sarah knew there was enough grass in the pasture to keep them going. And the travel, while relentless, wasn't arduous. It helped to be out in the night air, listening to the nickering and murmurs from the three horses. It helped to put her hand out on a sturdy flank and feel the reassuring strength of the beasts. She remembered, as a horse-crazy teenager in a northern suburb of Atlanta where she grew up, turning to her own horse many times in the midst of some silly teen angst. She knew now what she knew then, that there were few more comforting friends than a kindhearted horse that you loved.

She thought of her horse, Dan, back at the cottage and how she had been so afraid of him when she and David and John first came to Ireland. In her adult life, Sarah had suffered from a fear of horses after a nasty fall had ended her young career as a hunter-jumper. When she thought of Dan, so big and so fearless, and how she had allowed him to renew her strength and carry her through so much in the last year, she felt a sudden longing for the beast that nearly rivaled, for a moment, her need to see John again. She hadn't ridden Dan in months, what with one thing or another. There hadn't really been a need. Her life was comfortably centered around her husband and her child and trying to make a home for them in the new world order.

She tugged on the mane of Papin's pony and smiled sadly. This little guy had surely been the mount of some little rich girl, she thought. He was probably used to hot mash and fresh flakes of hay and his own little stall, cleaned and tidied on a daily basis, with his name in a plaque on the stall door, and ribbons in his mane. And now he was the new best friend of an orphaned gypsy girl who had seen more horror in her thirteen years than many urban police do in a career.

David.

The name and the image crept into her thoughts like a silent thief. This is why she refused to stop and reflect, to observe and to think. When she slowed down, the image of him came back to her and the unthinkable grief began to regroup to tear her down and weaken her. And she couldn't stop yet. She couldn't give in to the sadness. Not yet. She turned away from the horses to head back to the tent, noting that the rain had finally stopped.

It was at that moment that the surrounding world of peaceful pastures and sloping Welsh fields was pierced with an abrupt and ungodly wail.

L
ater
, given that she had lost everything and the world was disintegrating in front of her very eyes, Sarah would realize that she, of all people, should have been prepared for the world to change in one drastic and terrible moment.

She ran back to the tent to see Papin shaking Evvie and whimpering. “Wake up, Granny! Wake up!”

Oh, God, no.

Sarah ripped back the tent flap and went to Evvie.

“Sarah, make her wake up! She don't look good at all.”

Sarah put her fingers against Evvie's throat to catch the pulse—the pulse that would never be caught again.

She looks so peaceful
, Sarah thought.
Her brow free of creases, the lines of her mouth relaxed…she's with her Mark now
.

“Sarah, please…” Papin still gripped Evvie's sweater in her attempt to awaken her.

Sarah sighed and put a hand on Papin's arm. “Come away, Papin,” she said. “Evvie's gone.”

“Noooooo!” Papin looked at Sarah with horror and then back at Evvie. “She can't be! I need her!”

It struck Sarah as she fought to put away her feelings that it seemed that for a very long time now every instinct to mourn or grieve was trumped by a greater need to address an immediate threat. She pushed back the sadness, the incapacitating sadness, and closed her eyes to the sight of her dear friend lying by the campfire in her last sleep. She pulled Papin into her arms.

“She was old, Papin. She was tired. She's with God now.”

“I want her to be with
me
,” Papin sobbed.

“I know, sweetie. I know.” Sarah pulled back and made Papin look her in the eye. “Today's ride would have been terrible for her. She was exhausted—”

“We could've rested! We shouldn't have been riding so hard. We could've camped here for awhile…”

Sarah winced. The girl was right. It was
Sarah
who had set the pace and insisted they move as quickly as they had. It was Sarah who had pushed Evvie beyond her endurance.

“She picked the wrong person to travel with,” Sarah said. “It's because I have bad people chasing me that she died. We couldn't travel normally on the road with everyone else. It's because of me.”

Papin shook her head and eased back in Sarah's arms, her shoulders limp with resignation. “Don't say that,” she said. “You're all I have now.”

T
he day's
ride was harder than Sarah could ever have imagined. It began by dismantling the teepee and fashioning a litter that could then be dragged behind Evvie's horse. A litter with Evvie's body on it. Sarah had intended to take Evvie's sweater but Papin wouldn't hear of it.
“She was always so cold!”
In the end, they wrapped the body in remnant blankets and dragged it behind the horse until they found the river they'd come upon the day before.

The idea of dumping poor Evvie's body in the fast-moving river was the least terrible idea in a long list of terrible ideas. Considering Papin's history, Sarah wouldn't even mention the possibility of fire, but they had no means by which to bury the body. They couldn't get it up in the trees and they couldn't just leave it. It made Sarah sick, too, to be standing on the riverbank and considering slipping her sweet friend into its unwelcoming waters.

But what else was there to do?

Papin had not stopped weeping since she had discovered Evvie unresponsive. Sarah glanced at her now as she held her hands to her face, her shoulders shaking, and worried she might not recover from this.

Oh, Evvie
, Sarah thought, her own heart fractured in a thousand places at the loss of the dear old soul. She knelt next to the litter and touched Evvie's hands, placed together over her chest. “Pray with me, Papin,” she said without looking up. Papin's sniffles answered her.

“Lord God, please look upon your servant, Evvie, who was a loving, caring soul to everyone she touched.” Papin's weeping increased.

“And please bring her to yourself and give her the comfort and care that she rarely found in this world. And Lord, please help Papin and myself to have the courage we need to finish this journey safely and get back to our family. In Your name we pray, and in Your name we commend the spirit of our dear friend, Evvie.”

Sarah stood and unfastened the belt she'd tied to the back of the horse's saddle to connect to the litter of branches and blankets. She knelt quickly and kissed Evvie on the cheek. “I'll see you again one day, Evvie,” she whispered. Then she stood with the end of the litter in her hands and tipped the body into the river as Papin's cries rose higher and higher on the wind.

T
hey reached
the outskirts of the ferry town of Fishguard by nightfall. Sarah knew Papin was distraught during the long day's ride, but she couldn't believe stopping was going to help her. When they saw the flickering lights of the town in the distance, Sarah stopped and dismounted.

The plan was simple, but that didn't mean a hundred things couldn't go wrong with it. Neither of them had eaten all day—or felt like it—but Sarah worried that their hunger would weaken them.

She led Evvie's horse and Papin to an empty feed shed in the nearest pasture to the town. It had long since stopped being used as any place to store grain or hay, although by the looks of it travelers had used it as a place to bunk down against the wind and the cold at night. Sarah loosened the girth on her saddle. She checked to make sure that all saddlebags were empty and that any grain or crumb of food had either been transferred to her backpack or eaten on the spot. She put Declan's tin cup and her flint, wrapped in the two thin blankets they had, in her backpack.

She handed the knife to Papin, who accepted it listlessly. “We can wait ‘til morning if you'd rather,” Sarah said.

Papin shook her head.

“Okay. Let's run through it.”

Papin sighed, then seemed to force herself to sit up straight and shake off her dispiritedness. “I go to the ferry master,” she said. “I find out when's the next crossing and will he take two horses for two tickets.”

“Good. What else?”

Papin frowned. “I look around to see if there's anything suspicious like. If so, I say I only want one ticket. Why is that, Sarah? Why do I buy only one if we're both going?”

Sarah put her hand on Papin's knee from where she stood on the ground next to her on her pony. “If you see someone looking at everyone going on the boat, they might ask the ferry master how many tickets you bought.”

“Oh, right. If I say two, then he knows someone else is hiding in the shadows. You.”

“Exactly. And then?”

“If he'll sell me the tickets, I come back here making sure first nobody sees me.”

“Good girl. It's light enough by the moon, but you'll have to be careful of anyone who might want to drag you from your horses.”

“I know. I have the knife.”

“Can you use it?”

“If I have to.”

Sarah wouldn't send her at night if possible, but the chances of slipping by Angie's people—who almost certainly were somewhere near—would be greater under cloak of darkness. It wasn't just thieves and miscreants who chose to slink about in the dark, she thought bitterly. Tonight, the darkness was her friend—and Papin's.

“All right, sweetie,” she said, her voice soft and full of pain to have to send her on this mission tonight of all nights. “Go now and come back to me safely.” She patted Papin's leg.

“Sarah?”

Sarah looked up questioningly.

“Is it okay if I call you Mum, do you think?”

Sarah put her arms around Papin's waist as she sat on the little pony and squeezed her hard. She felt Papin lay her head on her shoulder for a moment. “I would be honored if you would, cherub,” Sarah said to her. She looked into Papin's eyes, her own shining with unshed tears. “You're my girl, now. I adopt you in the name of everything holy and good and right. You are my daughter.”

Papin smiled and nodded, her face relaxed for the first time since Evvie died. “Okay, good,” she said, then took a long breath. “I'll be back in tick.” She turned her pony toward the road.

Sarah watched her go, leading the two horses behind her until she was gone from sight, then knelt in the feed shed and cried until she thought her heart would break.

A
s usual
, Sarah thought as she squinted through the slats of the feed shed,
it's the ones left behind to wait that have it the roughest.
She had no way to estimate time and could only guess that Papin had been gone at least three hours. If sunset was seven o'clock, she reasoned, then it was close to nine now. Even in the chill of the night, her hands were sweaty. She should have given her the gun. She should have trailed along behind at a safe distance. She should never have let her go.

By the time she heard the faint clip-clop sounds of a lone horse coming across the pasture, Sarah was seconds away from walking into town to find Papin. Seeing her come across the field, the light of the moon illuminating her path, was one of the happiest sights so far in Sarah's life.

She ran to meet her. “Thank God, you're back! What happened? Did you get the tickets? Did anyone stop you?” She could see the sheer exhaustion in Papin's face and felt a stab of guilt for being the reason for it. She helped Papin dismount and then unsaddled and hobbled the pony in the pasture of dried grass.

When she turned back to the shed, Papin was lying against the far wall, sound asleep. Sarah sat down next to her and gently pulled her into her arms, settling against the wall herself. Just holding her after so many hours of wondering and worry felt like an exquisite luxury. As she tightened her arms around the girl, she felt a large lump inside Papin's jersey that, upon exploration, turned out to be, miracles of all miracles, a fully roasted capon.

Papin slept the full night through, never once budging from Sarah's side. Twice Sarah got up to check on the pony and to listen for any noises but the night was peaceful.

In the morning, both fully rested, Sarah and Papin ate the capon and readied themselves for whatever the day would bring.

“I got the tickets,” Papin said, pulling out two crudely marked pieces of paper that Sarah studied and confirmed were probably what people were using for tickets in the post-Crisis world. “He wanted to take little Sparky, too,” she said, nodding toward her pony in the pasture, “but I said no. Problem is, we can't bring him across unless we get a ticket for him, too.”

“Trust me, Sparky will be fine. There's no end of people who would be only to happy to give him a good home.”

“Or eat him.”

“He's too valuable for that,” Sarah said, although truthfully, as small as he was, he
was
probably more valuable as food than a pack animal, and nobody larger than a child could comfortably ride him. “Did you see anybody?”

Papin nodded. “That bloke was there. The one who asked about you in Carmarthen.”

Sarah's stomach lurched to hear the words although she had been expecting them.

“He stood right at the entrance to people getting on the boat and looked in the face of every woman stepping foot across the threshold.”

Shit
. “Just the one?”

“There was another guy who came over and gave him a sandwich. But it was only the one guy checking all the people going onboard. How're you gonna get on the boat? Even
with
a ticket?”

“I don't know.”

“You could let me distract him.”

Sarah frowned at her. “Distract him how?”

“You know how.”

“No way.”

“I can do it and then follow right behind you.”

“I said, no.”

“But Sarah, what other choice do we have? How else you gonna get on that boat?”

“I don't know, but there has to be another way.”

“Look, it doesn't mean anything to me. It's just my body.” Papin sat up earnestly and put aside the half eaten piece of poultry she had in her grip. “I go someplace in my head far away while they're doing it to me.”

“Papin, nobody is ever doing anything to you again where you have to
go somewhere in your head
to escape it, do you hear me? We'll figure this out.”

“How about if I distract him without doing the dirty?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can distract him into wanting me and then I can make myself throw up. If I throw up at just the right moment, trust me, he won't want nothing to do with me.”

Sarah frowned. “Won't he be highly irritated with you?”

“Is a beating better than letting him poke me?”

“Dear God, what a question,” Sarah said, rubbing her face with both hands. “I don't know. Not a beating where you lose your hearing or a couple of teeth or…”

“It won't be like that,” Papin insisted. “He'll slap me a couple of times and then he'll want to see the back of me real quick like, what with me reeking of puke.”

Sarah looked away. How many more times would she risk Papin's safety for the sake of getting them both back to Donovan's Lot and John?

“Please, Mum,” Papin said, touching Sarah's hand shyly. “It's just playacting and I promise I won't get hurt. This time tomorrow, we'll both be safe on the other side in Ireland.”

S
eeing Jeff again
, especially in the full light of day, threatened to bring up Sarah's breakfast of stolen roast capon. In a flash, she was back in her own pasture under a bright October sun, watching her husband bleed to death while this man stood over him. Just watching him from behind the thin hedge of laurel where she and Papin both crouched made her want to pull the gun from her jeans and empty every round into his murdering, filthy heart. When she thought of his hands on Papin, it was all she could do not to call off the whole thing.