When You Call My Name

“Rootless?”

For a moment Wyatt was silent, and then he nodded.

“Exactly. I feel rootless. And…I feel like leaving here will be taking a step backward in what I was searching for. I know it’s weird, but I keep thinking that I was this close to the end of a journey, and now—”

Toni broke the moment of confiding as she came into the room.

“You’re all checked out!” When Wyatt started toward the door, she held up her hand. “Don’t get in too big a hurry. They’re bringing a wheelchair. Lane, honey, why don’t you pull the car up to the curb? Wyatt, are you all packed?”

Both men looked at each other and then grinned. “She was your sister before she was my wife,” Lane warned him. “So you can’t be surprised by all this.”

Toni ignored them. It was her nature to organize. She’d spent too long on her own, running a farm and caring for aging parents, to wait for someone else to make a decision.

“Why don’t I go get the car?” Lane said, and stole a kiss from his Toni as he passed.

“I’m packed,” Wyatt said.

“I brought one of Justin’s coats for you to wear. The clothes you had on were ruined,” Toni said, her eyes tearing as she remembered his condition upon their arrival right after the accident. She held out the coat for him to put on. Wyatt slipped one arm in his brother’s coat, and then the other, then turned and hugged her, letting himself absorb the care…and the love.

“Now all I need is my ride,” Wyatt teased, and pulled at a loose curl hanging across Toni’s forehead.

On cue, a nurse came in pushing a wheelchair, and within minutes, Wyatt was on his way.

The air outside was a welcome respite from the recirculated air inside his room. And the cold, fresh scent of snow was infinitely better than the aroma of antiseptic. Wyatt gripped the arms of the wheelchair in anticipation of going home.

Just outside the doors, Toni turned away to speak to the nurse, and Lane had yet to arrive. For a brief moment, Wyatt was left to his own devices. He braced himself, angling his sore leg until he was able to stand, and then lifted his face and inhaled, letting the brisk draft of air circling the corner of the hospital have its way with the cobwebs in his mind. He’d been inside far too long.

A pharmacy across the street was doing a booming business, and Wyatt watched absently as customers came and went. As a van loaded with senior citizens backed up and drove away, a dark blue pickup truck pulled into the recently vacated parking space. He tried not to stare at the three people who got out, but they were such a range of sizes, he couldn’t quit looking.

The older man was tall and broad beneath the heavy winter coat he wore. A red sock cap covered a thatch of thick graying hair, and a brush of mustache across his upper lip was several shades darker than the gray. The younger man was just as tall, and in spite of his own heavy clothing, obviously fit. His face was creased with laugh lines, and he moved with the grace and assurance of youth and good health.

It was the girl between them who caught Wyatt’s eye. At first he thought she was little more than a child, and then the wind caught the front of her unbuttoned coat, and he got a glimpse of womanly breast and shapely hips before she pulled it together.

Her hair was the color of spun honey. Almost gold. Not quite white. Her lips were full and tilted in a grin at something one of the men just said, and Wyatt had a sudden wish that he’d been the one to make her smile.

No sooner had he thought it than she paused at the door, then stopped completely. He held his breath as she began to turn. When she caught his gaze, he imagined he felt her gasp, although he knew it was a foolish thing to consider. His mind wandered as he let himself feast upon her face.

So beautiful, Wyatt thought.

Why, thank you.

Wyatt was so locked into her gaze that he felt no surprise at the thoughts that suddenly drifted through his mind, or that he was answering them back in an unusual fashion.

You are welcome.

So, Wyatt Hatfield, you’re going home?

Yes.

God be with you, soldier.

I’m no longer a soldier.

You will always fight for those you love.

“Here comes Lane!”

At the sound of Toni’s voice, Wyatt blinked, then turned and stepped back as Lane pulled up to the curb. When he remembered to look up, the trio had disappeared into the store. He felt an odd sense of loss, as if he’d been disconnected from something he needed to know.

Bowing to the demands of his family’s concerns, he let himself be plied with pillows and blankets. By the time they had him comfortable in the roomy backseat of their car, he was more than ready for the long journey home to begin.

They were past the boundary of Larner’s Mill, heading out of Kentucky and toward Tennessee, when Wyatt’s thoughts wandered back to the girl he’d seen on the street. And as suddenly as he remembered her, he froze. His heart began to hammer inside his chest as he slowly sat up and stared out the back window at the small mountain town that was swiftly disappearing from sight.

“Dear God,” he whispered, and wiped a shaky hand across his face.

“Wyatt, darling, are you all right?”

His sister’s tone of voice was worried, the touch of her hand upon his shoulder gentle and concerned. Lane began to ease off the accelerator, thinking that Wyatt might be getting sick.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” he muttered, and dropped back onto the bed they’d made for him in the backseat.

There was no way he could tell them what he’d suddenly realized. There wasn’t even any way he could explain it to himself. But he knew, as well as he knew his own name, that the conversation he’d had with that girl had been real. And yet understanding how it had happened was another thing altogether. He’d heard of silent communication, but this…this…thing that just happened…it was impossible.

“Then how did she know my name?” he murmured.

“What did you say?” Toni asked.

Wyatt turned his head into the pillow and closed his eyes.

“Nothing, Sis. Nothing at all.”

Chapter 2

Clouds moved in wild, scattered patterns above the Hatfield homestead, giving way to the swift air current blasting through the upper atmosphere. The clouds looked as unsettled as Wyatt felt. In his mind, it had taken forever to get back his health, and then even longer to gain strength. But now, except for a scar on his cheek and a leg that would probably ache for the rest of his life every time it rained, he was fine.

Problem was, he’d been here too long. He leaned forward, bracing his hands upon the windowsill and gazing out at the yard that spilled toward the banks of Chaney Creek, while his blood stirred to be on the move.

“The grass is beginning to green.”

The longing in Wyatt’s voice was obvious, but for what, Toni didn’t know. Was he missing the companionship of his ex-wife, or was there something missing from his own inner self that he didn’t know how to find?

“I know,” Toni said, and shifted Joy to her other hip, trying not to mind that Wyatt was restless. He was her brother, and this was his home, but he was no longer the boy who’d chased her through the woods. He’d been a man alone for a long, long time.

She could hear the longing in his voice, and sensed his need to be on the move, but she feared that once gone, he would fall back into the depression in which they’d brought him home. Her mind whirled as she tried to think of something to cheer him up. Her daughter fidgeted in her arms, reaching for anything she could lay her hands on. Toni smiled, and kissed Joy on her cheek, thinking what they’d been doing this time last year, and the telegram that Wyatt had sent.

“Remember last year…when you sent the telegram? It came on Easter. Did you know that?”

Wyatt nodded, then grinned, also remembering how mad Toni had been at him when he’d interfered in her personal life.

“In a few weeks, it will be Easter again. Last year, someone gave us a little jumpsuit for Joy, complete with long pink ears on the outside of the hood. It made her look like a baby rabbit. The kids carried her around all day, fussing over who was going to have their picture taken next with the Easter Bunny.”

Wyatt smiled, and when Joy leaned over, trying to stick her hand in the pot on the stove, he took the toddler from his sister’s arms, freeing her to finish the pudding she was stirring.

Joy instantly grabbed a fistful of his hair in each hand and began to pull. Wyatt winced, then laughed, as he started to unwind her tiny hands from the grip they had on his head.

“Hey, puddin’ face. Don’t pull all of Uncle Wyatt’s hair out. He’s going to need it for when he’s an old man.”

Joy chortled gleefully as it quickly became a game, and for a time, Wyatt’s restlessness was forgotten in his delight with the child.

It was long into the night when the old, uneasy feelings began to return. Wyatt paced the floor beside his bed until he was sick of the room, then slipped out of the house to stand on the porch. The moonless night was so thick and dark that it seemed airless. Absorbing the quiet, he let it surround him. As a kind of peace began to settle, he sat down on the steps, listening to the night life that abounded in their woods.

He kept telling himself that it was the memories of the wreck, and the lost days in between, that kept him out of bed. If he lay down, he would sleep. If he slept, he would dream. Nightmares of snow and blood, of pain and confusion. But that wasn’t exactly true. It was the memory of a woman’s voice that wouldn’t let go of his mind.

You will always fight for those you love.

Eliminating the obvious, which he took to mean his own family, exactly what did that mean? Even more important, how the hell had that…that thing…happened between them?

Toni had told him more than once that he’d survived the wreck for a reason, and that one day he’d know why. But Wyatt wanted answers to questions he didn’t even know how to ask. In effect, he felt as though he were living in a vacuum, waiting for someone to break the seal.

Yet Wyatt Hatfield wasn’t the only man that night at a breaking point. Back in Larner’s Mill, Kentucky, a man named Carter Foster was at the point of no return, trying to hold on to his sanity and his wife, and doing a poor job of both.

Carter paced the space in front of their bed, watching with growing dismay as Betty Jo began to put on another layer of makeup. As if the dress she was wearing wasn’t revealing enough, she was making herself look like a whore. Her actions of late seemed to dare him to complain.

“Now, sweetheart, I’m not trying to control you, but I think I have a right to know where you’re going. How is it going to look to the townspeople if you keep going out at night without me?”

He hated the whine in his voice, but couldn’t find another way to approach his wife of eleven years about her latest affair. That she was having them was no secret. That the people of Larner’s Mill must never find out was of the utmost importance to him. In his profession, appearances were everything.

Betty Jo arched her perfectly painted eyebrows and then stabbed a hair pick into her hair, lifting the back-combed nest she’d made of her dark red tresses to add necessary inches to her height. Ignoring Carter’s complaint, she stepped back from the full-length mirror, running her hands lightly down her buxom figure in silent appreciation. That white knit dress she’d bought yesterday looked even better on than it had on the hanger.

“Betty Jo, you didn’t answer me,” Carter said, unaware that his voice had risen a couple of notes.

Silence prevailed as she ran her little finger across her upper, then lower lip, smoothing out the Dixie Red lipstick she’d applied with a flourish. When she rubbed her lips together to even out the color, Carter shuddered, hating himself for still wanting her. He couldn’t remember the last time she put those lips anywhere on him.

“Carter, honey, you know a woman like me needs her space. With you stuck in that stuffy old courtroom all day, and in your office here at home all night, what am I to do?”

The pout on her lips made him furious. At this stage of their marriage, that baby-faced attitude would get her nowhere.

“But you’re my wife,” Carter argued. “It just isn’t right that you…that men…” He took a deep breath and then puffed out his cheeks in frustration, unaware that it made him look like a bullfrog.

Betty Jo pivoted toward him, then stepped into her shoes, relishing the power that the added height of the three-inch heels gave her. She knew that if she had had college to do over again, she would have married the jock, not the brain. This poor excuse for a man was losing his hair and sporting a belly that disgusted her. When he walked, it swayed lightly from side to side like the big breasts of a woman who wore no support. She liked tight, firm bellies and hard muscles. There was nothing hard on Carter Foster. Not even periodically. To put it bluntly, Betty Jo Foster was an unsatisfied woman in the prime of her life.

Ignoring his petulant complaints as nothing but more of the same, she picked up her purse. To her surprise, he grabbed her by the forearm and all but shook her. The purse fell between them, lost in the unexpected shuffle of feet.

“Damn it, Betty Jo! You heard me! This just isn’t right!”

“Hey!” she said, then frowned. She couldn’t remember the last time Carter had raised his voice to her. She yanked, trying to pull herself free from his grasp, but to her dismay, his fingers tightened.

“Carter! You’re hurting me!”

“So what?” he snarled, and shoved her backward onto their bed. “You’re hurting me.”

A slight panic began to surface. He never got angry. At least he never used to. Without thinking, she rolled over on her stomach to keep from messing up her hair, and started to crawl off of the bed. But turning her back on him was her first and last mistake. Before she could get up, Carter came down on top of her, pushing her into the mattress, calling her names she didn’t even know he knew.

Betty Jo screamed, but the sound had nowhere to go. The weight of his body kept pushing her deeper and deeper into the mattress, and when the bulk of him settled across her hips, and his shoes began snagging runs in her panty hose, she realized that he was sitting on her. In shock, she began to fight.

Flailing helplessly, her hands clenched in the bedspread as she tried unsuccessfully to maneuver herself out from under him. Panic became horror as his hands suddenly circled her neck. The more she kicked and bounced, the tighter he squeezed.

A wayward thought crossed her mind that he’d messed up her hair and that Dixie Red lipstick would not wash out of the bedspread. It was the last of her worries as tiny bursts of lights began to go off behind her eyelids. Bright, bright, brighter, they burned until they shattered into one great, blinding-white explosion.

As suddenly as it had come, the rage that had taken him into another dimension began to subside. Carter shuddered and shuddered as his hands slowly loosened, and when he went limp atop her body, guilt at his unexpected burst of temper began to surface. He’d never been a physical sort of man, and didn’t quite know how to explain this side of himself.

“Damn it, Betty Jo, I’m real sorry this happened, but you’ve been driving me to it for years.”

Oddly enough, Betty Jo had nothing to say about his emotional outburst, and he wondered, as he crawled off her butt, why he hadn’t done this years earlier? Maybe if he’d asserted himself when all of her misbehaving began, brute force would never have been necessary.

He smoothed down his hair, then wiped his sweaty palms against the legs of his slacks. Even from here, he could still smell the scent of her perfume upon his skin.

“Get up, Betty Jo. There’s no need to pout. You always get your way, whether I like it or not.”

Again, she remained silent. Carter’s gaze ran up, then down her body, noting as it did, that he’d ruined her hose and smudged her dress. When she saw what he’d done to the back of her skirt, she would be furious.

“Okay, fine,” Carter said, and started to walk away.

As he passed the foot of the bed, one of her shoes suddenly popped off the end of her heel and stabbed itself into the spread. He paused, starting to make an ugly comment about the fact that she was undressing for the wrong man, when something about her position struck him as odd. He leaned over the bed frame and tentatively ran his forefinger across the bottom of her foot. Her immobility scared the hell out of him. Betty Jo was as ticklish as they came.

“Oh, God,” Carter muttered, and ran around to the edge of the bed, grabbing her by the shoulder. “Betty Jo, this isn’t funny!”

He rolled her onto her back, and when he got a firsthand look at the dark, red smear of lipstick across her face and her wide, sightless eyes staring up at him, he began to shake.

“Betty, honey…”

She didn’t move.

He thumped her in the middle of the chest, noting absently that she was not wearing a bra, and then started to sweat.

“Betty Jo, wake up!” he screamed, and pushed up and down between her breasts, trying to emulate CPR techniques he didn’t actually know.

The only motion he got out of her was a lilt and a sway from her buxom bosom as he hammered about her chest, trying to make her breathe.

“No! God, no!”

Suddenly he jerked his hands to his stomach, as if he’d been burned by the touch of her skin. To his utter dismay, he felt bile rising, and barely made it to the bathroom before it spewed.

Several hours later, he heard the hall clock strike two times, and realized that, in four hours, it would be time to get up. He giggled at the thought, then buried his face in his hands. That was silly. How could one get up, when one had never been down? Betty Jo’s body lay right where he’d left it, half-on, half-off the bed, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.

And therein lay Carter’s problem. He didn’t know what to do next. Twice since the deed, he’d reached for the phone to call the police, and each time he’d paused, remembering what would happen when they came. There was no way he could explain that it was really all her fault. That she’d ruined him and his reputation by tarnishing her own.

And that was when it struck him. It was her fault. And by God, he shouldn’t have to pay!

Suddenly, a way out presented itself, and he bolted from the chair and began rolling her up in the stained bedspread, then fastening it in place with two of his belts. One he buckled just above her head, the other at her ankles. He stepped back to survey his work, and had an absent thought that Betty Jo would hate knowing that she was going to her Maker looking like a tamale. Without giving himself time to reconsider, he threw her over his shoulder and carried her, fireman style, out of the kitchen and into the attached garage, dumping her into the trunk of his car.

Grabbing a suitcase from the back of a closet, he raced to their bedroom and began throwing items of her clothing haphazardly into the bag, before returning to the car. As he tossed the suitcase in the trunk with her body, he took great satisfaction in the fact that he had to lie on the trunk to get it closed.

As he backed from the garage and headed uptown toward an all-night money machine, the deviousness of his own thoughts surprised him. He would never have imagined himself being able to carry off something like this, yet it was happening just the same. If he was going to make this work, it had to look like Betty Jo took money with her when she ran. With this in mind, he continued toward the town’s only ATM.

As he pulled up, the spotlight above the money machine glared in his eyes. He jumped out of the car, and with a sharp blow of his fist, knocked out the Plexiglas and the bulb, leaving himself in the bank drive-through in sudden darkness. Minutes later, with the cash in his pocket, he was back in the car and heading out of town toward the city dump.

Ever thankful that Larner’s Mill was too small-town in its thinking to ever put up a gate or a lock, Carter drove right through and up to the pit without having to brake for anything more than a possum ambling across the road in the dark.

When he got out, he was shaking with a mixture of exertion and excitement. As he threw the suitcase over the edge, he took a deep breath, watching it bounce end over end, down the steep embankment. When he lifted his wife from the trunk and sent her after it, he started to grin. But the white bedspread in which she was wrapped stood out like a beacon in the night. He could just imagine what would hit the fan if Betty Jo turned up in this condition. He had to cover up the spread.

It was while he was turning in a circle, looking for something with which to shovel, that he saw the bulldozer off to the side.

That’s it, he thought. All he needed to do was shove some dirt down on top. Tomorrow was trash day. By the time the trash trucks made the rounds and dumped the loads, she’d be right where she belonged, buried with the rest of the garbage.

It took a bit for him to figure out how to work the bulldozer’s controls, but desperation was a shrewd taskmaster, and Carter Foster was as desperate as they came. Within the hour, a goodly portion of dirt had been pushed in on top of the latest addition to the city dump, and Betty Jo Foster’s burial was slightly less dignified than she would have hoped.

Minutes later, Carter was on his way home to shower and change. As he pulled into his garage, he pressed the remote control and breathed a great sigh of satisfaction as the door dropped shut behind him.

It was over!

His feet were dragging as he went inside, but his lawyer mind was already preparing the case he would present to his coworkers. Exactly how much he would be willing to humble himself was still in the planning stage. If they made fun of him behind his back because he’d been dumped, he didn’t think he would care. The last laugh would be his.

Days later, while Betty Jo rotted along with the rest of the garbage in Larner’s Mill, Glory Dixon was making her second sweep through the house, looking behind chairs and under cushions, trying to find her keys. But the harder she looked the more certain she was that someone else and not her carelessness was to blame.

Her brother came into the kitchen just as she dumped the trash onto the floor and began sorting through the papers.

“J.C., have you seen my keys? I can’t find them anywhere.”

“Nope.” He pulled the long braid she’d made of her hair. “Why don’t you just psych them out?”

Glory ignored the casual slander he made of her psychic ability and removed her braid from his hand. “You know it doesn’t work like that. I never know what I’m going to see. If I did, I would have told on you years ago for filching Granny’s blackberry pies.”

He was still laughing as their father entered the house by the back door.

“Honey, are you ready to go?” Rafe asked. “We’ve got a full morning and then some before we’re through in town.”

She threw up her hands in frustration. “I can’t find my keys.”

Her father shrugged, then had a thought. “Did you let that pup in the house last night?”

The guilty expression on her face was answer enough.

“Then there’s your answer,” he muttered. “What that blamed pooch hasn’t already chewed up, he’s buried. You’ll be lucky if you ever see them again.”

“Shoot,” Glory muttered, and started out the door in search of the dog.

“Let it wait until we come home,” Rafe said. “I’ve got keys galore. If you don’t find yours, we’ll get copies made of mine. Now grab your grocery list. Time’s a’wastin’.”

“Don’t forget my Twinkies,” J.C. said, and slammed the kitchen door behind him as he exited the house.

Glory grinned at her brother’s request, then did as her father asked. As she and Rafe drove out of the yard, they could see the back end of the John Deere tractor turning the corner in the lane. J.C. was on his way to the south forty. It was time to work ground for spring planting.