Нора Робертс - The Perfect Hope

“He was born last, died second. They were brothers.”

“How can you—I can’t make out the names.”

“Light’s going,” he said as she dropped down to her knees to peer closer.

“Oh God. Billy Ryder. They didn’t put his formal name on his grave. Just Billy. March 14, 1843, to September 17, 1862.”

“And Joshua, earlier that same year. Charlie, twenty-two years after. Three brothers.”

“It’s Billy.” It was all she could think at first. Here. They’d found him. “Is she here?” Hope’s head came up. “How could she be here?”

“It’s not her.” Understanding, Ryder gestured. “Honeysuckle. It’s about buried the wall behind these graves.”

He turned, looked at his mother. As their eyes met, he didn’t have to call out to her, to speak. Hers filled as she started toward him.

“You found him.”

“Time’s dulled the carving, but you can make out the name. He died the same year as Lizzy. The same month, within the same day.”

Owen stepped to his mother, slipped an arm around her waist, kept Avery’s hand in his. Then Beckett with Clare, and the boys miraculously quiet. And Willy B, patting Carolee’s back when she let out a little sob.

The sun slid into twilight, and the air stirred the thick scent of honeysuckle.

Hope traced the name with her finger, then laid it against her heart.

“We’ll bring flowers next time.” Justine leaned her head against Owen’s arm, touched Beckett’s, touched Ryder’s. “It’s time we remembered them. We’re here because they were, so it’s time we remembered them.”

On impulse, Ryder took out his pocketknife, cut through honeysuckle vines. He laid it down.

“That’s something anyway.”

Inexpressibly moved by the simple gesture, Hope rose, took his face in her hands. “That’s perfect,” she said, and kissed him.

“It’s cooling off. You’re going to get cold,” Beckett told Clare. “I’m going to swing by, pick up the dogs, take Clare and the boys home.”

“We need to tell her.” Clare looked at Hope. “I feel like we should all be there when you tell her.”

“It can wait until tomorrow. You get pale when you’re tired.” Beckett trailed a finger down her cheek. “And you’re pale. It can wait until tomorrow.”

“Maybe that’s better anyway.” Avery lifted her hands. “We can think about how to tell her. I mean we found him, here he is. But what does that mean? It seems almost cruel to tell her he’s buried out here, miles away from where she is.”

“In the morning,” Justine agreed. “Let’s say about nine. Yes, it interrupts your day,” she said to Ryder before he could speak. “But it’s before Clare and Avery open, before Hope and Carolee have anyone checking in.”

“Nine’s fine.”

“Will you come, Willy B?” She turned to the big man with the little dog in his arms. “Can you take the time?”

“If you want me, Justine, I can be there.”

“I’d appreciate it. I want to know which of these is their mama. She lost two of her sons, maybe the third, too, before she died. That’s a cruel thing.” Justine’s voice thickened before she breathed deep to steady it. “I want to know her name and remember her.”

“It’s getting dark.” Willy B patted her arm, stroked it. “Let me take you home now, Justine.”

“All right. Let’s all go home.”

But Ryder lingered as the others started away. He made himself step back from the trio of graves when Hope touched his arm.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“That there are three of them. Like you and Owen and Beckett?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “It hits home, I guess. He’s my mother’s. He’s ours. She’s yours. I’ve got his name—the last of it for my first. And—” He shook his head as he wanted to shake this feeling away. “Let’s go.”

“What? And what?” she insisted as he drew her away.

“Nothing. It’s just weird, like I said.”

He didn’t tell her he’d known, the minute he’d stepped inside the low stone wall, where to find Billy. He’d known where to walk, what he’d find.

Imagining things, he told himself as they got back in his truck. Just that graveyard at dusk deal.

But he’d known something, felt something still, like a shiver just under the skin. As he drove away, his gaze shifted to the rearview mirror. He took another long look at the stone wall, the markers and the madly thriving honeysuckle.

Then he turned his eyes to the road ahead.

HE KNEW THIS LAND, THE RISE AND FALL OF IT, THE spread of the fields, the rough shoulders of rock that jutted out. He knew the stone walls that kept the fat cows grazing on the green. His hands had helped build some of them, with his uncle’s patient tutelage to guide him.

Though he’d traveled some distance from this land, its rise and fall, he’d always planned to come back to it. To make his home near some bend in the creek that ran over rocks and cooled its water under the shade of the woods.

He loved this land as he’d loved no other his feet had trod upon.

But today on this September morning, it was a landscape of hell. Today, his sweat soiled his uniform and the ground beneath him. His sweat, but not his blood. Not yet.

Today he fought, and lived as he had on other days since some deep-seated need drove him to enlist. And today, he wished with all of his heart, all of his soul, that he had carved out that need and crushed it under his boot.

He’d thought he’d find honor, excitement, even adventure. Instead he’d found despair, terror, misery, and questions he couldn’t begin to answer.

The sky that had dawned beautiful and blue turned to a dirty haze under the sooty smoke of cannon fire. Mini-balls sang on their vicious journey, ending in a crescendo of flying earth, destroyed flesh.

Oh, what an insult to the body and soul was war.

The sound of men’s screams assaulted his ears, his guts, until he heard little else, deaf even to the blast of cannon, the endless screech of shell, the hail-on-tin-roof patter of bullets.

He lay a moment, fighting to chase his breath that seemed just out of his reach. The blood on his uniform had been inside the friend he’d made on the march—George, a blacksmith’s apprentice, a jokester with hair the color of cornsilk and eyes as blue and happy as summer.

Now the cornsilk ran red, and those eyes stared out of his ruined face.

He knew this land, Billy thought again as his ears rang and his heart beat like the battle drums. The quiet road that wound through it divided the Piper and Roulette farms. His parents were friendly with the Pipers.

He wondered where they were now, now that this meandering border sunken into that rolling land served as a line of blood and death.

Hill’s Rebels dug into that sunken road, and they used that concealed position to blast off murderous volleys, burning through the advancing troops like a lighted match on dust-dry brush. In that first volley, a musket shell had torn away half of George’s face, and laid low the good Lord knew how many more.

Artillery thundered, shook the ground.

It seemed like hours he lay there, staring through the smoke to the blue of the sky, listening to screams, moans, shouts, and the endless, incessant, world-filling clatter of gun and cannon.

Minutes only in reality. Only minutes to breathe, to understand his friend was dead and himself alive by inches.

His hand trembled as he reached inside his uniform, carefully took out the photograph. Eliza. Lizzy. His Lizzy with hair like sunlight and a smile that opened his heart. She loved him, despite all. She waited for him, and when this hell was over, they’d marry. He’d build her a house—not so very far from where he lay now. But the house would live with love and joy, with the laughter of their children.

When this hell was over, he’d go back for her. He’d had one letter, and only one. Smuggled out of her house, to his mother, and passed on to him. He’d read her despair at being locked in on the night they’d planned to elope, and her unwavering faith that they would find each other again.

He’d written her only the night before, carefully forming the words while restless in camp. He’d find a way to get the letter to her. No man could live through hell and not believe in heaven.

He’d have his with Eliza. They’d have forever.

He heard the shouted orders to regroup, to advance again on that damned sunken road. He closed his eyes, pressed his lips to the image of Eliza, then slipped her carefully away again. Safe, he promised himself. Safe against his heart.

He got to his feet. Breathed, breathed. He would do his duty to his country, trust in God, and find his way back to Lizzy.

He charged again, the murderous hail of bullets flying from both sides.

He lived again as bodies, torn and rent, littered the once quiet farmland. Hours passed like years—and somehow like minutes. Morning into afternoon. He knew by the sun he’d lived another morning. He never wavered in duty, shouldered beside others who’d vowed to serve.

He moved forward, climbing fences, through an apple orchard where windfalls scattered over the ground and bees half-drunk buzzed over them. And on the rise looked down at the men in that old road. Finally the high ground served, and they ripped through a gap. He stood near the bend of the road, looked down into horror.

So many dead. It seemed impossible; it seemed obscene. They lay stacked on each other like cordwood, and still those who survived fired, fired, determined to hold that bloody ground.