father and his uncles.
Jubal lifted the rifle to his shoulder.
Cork raced forward and tried to yank the firearm from Jubal’s grip. “Let him go, Jubal,” he barked.
Jubal shoved him away as the ATV shot down the lane between the trees and was gone. He turned on Cork, his face gone red with rage, and there was murder in his eyes. When they were kids, such a look would have shriveled Cork’s heart. But he’d patrolled the streets of South Side Chicago long enough to have been glared at by men bigger and meaner and more heartless than Jubal Little could ever be. Still, Jubal was the one with the rifle, and Cork took a step back.
Winona came between them. “We need to go,” she said. “Now.” She turned to the other woman. “Oh, Petra, come with us.”
“I can’t,” Petra said, her abject misery obvious. “Go. Go before they come back.”
Winona hugged her briefly, kissed her cheek, and turned to Jubal. “Let’s go.”
They ran, following the lane between the trees where the ATV had gone. They neared the edge of the orchard with its broken-down white fence, and Cork saw the dust raised by the Jeep as Willie drove it out of the hills.
They kept running, and the Jeep hit the flat of the valley floor and bore down on them. As Willie pulled up to them and stopped, Cork cried out, “Let me drive.”
Willie slid from his seat. While he shuffled around to the passenger side, Jubal and Winona piled in back. Cork turned the Jeep in a tight arc, and they shot toward the safety of the hills. In the rearview mirror, through the cloud kicked up behind them, he caught sight of another storm of dust rising far down the valley. The approaching McMurphys. He leaned more heavily on the accelerator.
They hit the switchbacks and began to climb. Cork took the turns hard and fast, and the tires slid precariously across the dirt roadbed. Below them, the brown pickup swung into the lane that led between the trees to the ranch house.
They hit the crest of the hill and, on the other side, followed the creek with its cottonwoods as it wound its way toward the main road into Furlough. Cork’s eyes swung between the empty road ahead and the veil of dust behind him that was all he could see in the mirror now. After several miles, it became clear that the McMurphys had opted not to follow, and Cork slowed to a more reasonable speed.
“Could you stop?” Winona asked.
“I’d prefer to keep going,” Cork said. “At least until I can see civilization.”
“She asked you to stop,” Jubal said.
Cork had heard watch commanders deliver orders in that same voice, and it rankled him. But he pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine.
Winona spoke again. “Could I get out, just for a minute?”
They all left the Jeep and gathered at the side of the road. Winona held herself as if she was cold.
“Are you all right?” Willie asked. Arouaureye?
“Everything’s happened so fast, I just need to center a little.” She looked at her brother and seemed for the first time to notice him. “Oh, Willie, this was your doing, wasn’t it?” She threw her arms around him and held him for a long time, and her shoulders shook as she wept.
“It’s okay, Nona.” Willie spoke softly, with his cheek against her boyish hair.
She let go of her brother and turned to Cork.
“Is it really you?”
“Yeah,” Cork said.
She wiped tears from her cheeks. “You look so… manly.”
“I shave and everything,” Cork said.
She smiled, and her eyes went to Jubal, and what was in them was the same look that had been there the first time she’d seen him in Grant Park, when they were all hardly more than children. “It’s been a long time.”
She might as well have been a magnet, and his eyes two steel balls, because he couldn’t look away from her face. When he finally spoke, he sounded like a man in a trance. “It’s been forever.”
In the next instant she was in his arms, with her face against his massive chest. She wept and murmured, “I don’t deserve this.”
He stroked her hair and said, “No, no. It was all those years of crap you didn’t deserve. And that was my fault. All my fault. But I’m here now, and I’m taking you back where you belong.”
“Home,” she said and put her hand to her mouth as if in utter amazement.
“We should be going,” Cork said. “Just in case they change their minds about following. There’ll be time for reunions later.”
“Yes,” Winona said and stepped away from Jubal, and looked shyly down.
Willie helped her into the Jeep. Jubal held back and leaned to Cork and said in a low voice, “About that rifle.”
“What about it?”
Jubal gave him another withering look and said, “Don’t ever try to take anything from me again.” He quit Cork and joined Winona in the backseat of the Jeep.
In the months that followed, the lives of Jubal and Winona shifted dramatically. Winona returned to the rez, where she became a kind of recluse. Jubal spent that spring and summer in Aurora, mostly in the company of Winona. He changed or, more accurately, changed back. It was as if he found something in his own being that had been lost, and he became whole again. He negotiated a tryout with the Minnesota Vikings and secured a spot on their roster that fall. By midseason, he’d become their starting quarterback, a position he would hold for the next ten years. In that time, he would create for himself a lasting place in the hearts of most Minnesotans.
Cork returned to Chicago, married Nancy Jo McKenzie, and a few years later, brought his family home to Aurora.
When Cork finished his story, Rainy laid her head on his bare chest. Her breath ghosted over his skin, warm and familiar. “So the old Jubal came back,” she said.
“Not the old Jubal, although some of him was still there. He grew into someone else, the man he always believed he was meant to be, a guy destined for something great. And greatness takes up a lot of space. There wasn’t room for anyone near him who might challenge him.”
“That would be you?”
“Turned out that way. Jubal and I still had some good years ahead of us, good moments that felt like the old days. When Winona came back, he had reason to come back to Aurora, too. He spent winters here, used it as his official place of residence. Once in a great while, the old Jubal would slip out, and it would feel like it did in the old days.”
Cork stroked Rainy’s hair and finally asked the question that had been, in large part, the reason he’d come.
“Rainy, the day Jubal was killed, when I came here to talk to you and Henry, I asked if the name Rhiannon meant anything to you. Do you remember?”
“Sure. It was Jubal’s Rosebud. The name on his lips as he died. Hard to forget.”
“Did you talk to anyone about Rhiannon?”
“I asked Uncle Henry. The name meant nothing to him.”
“You spoke to no one else?”
“I’m pretty sure not. Why?”
“Do me a favor,” Cork said. “Promise me you won’t mention the name to anyone.”
Rainy eyed him with a mix of suspicion and concern. “What’s going on, Cork?”
He thought of just trying to elicit a promise without an explanation, but he knew Rainy wouldn’t let it go at that. So he told her about the threatening phone call he’d received the night before.
“No idea who it was?”
“Male, that’s all I can say.”
“Maybe the same person who set you up in Jubal’s murder?”
“Maybe. But I don’t see the connection yet. Could be it’s the other shoe I’ve been expecting to fall any minute. I just don’t know. At the moment, nothing makes much sense to me. Until it does, promise me that
