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.
