Fatal Harvest (26 page)

“I realize you just made a five-hour drive, Penny.” He was speaking more gently now. “I’m not going to be at the house for several days…. I can’t tell you where I’m going—Because—”

Jill thought about turning on the radio. She felt like a Peeping Tom, listening in on his conversation.

“All right.” He rolled down the window and let the breeze blow through his hair. Then he rubbed his eyes, still speaking to his fiancée. “Jill Pruitt is driving me to the airport…because she was there. Penny, please don’t read into this. Don’t get this way. You can’t—All right. Yes…I understand. I do.”

He nodded a couple of times as Jill switched on the radio and tried to find a signal. How odd to think that Penny was envious of her presence in Cole’s life—especially when she’d done nothing but be available to give him a ride.

“Me, too,” he said. “Yes, I know. I do, too. I need that…. Okay.”

He pressed the button and set the phone on the car seat. Jill located an oldies station and turned the volume up a little. Maybe some bebop-a-loo music would make her feel lighthearted and goofy. She couldn’t allow herself to care about Cole Strong and Penny Ames. They belonged to each other, and she was on her own. Single and happy. Yeah-yeah-yeah.

“Penny okay?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“That’s good.” She yawned. “Wow, I’m tired. I need caffeine or a few ice cubes down the back. We’ll stop in Vaughn and get something to drink. I need gas anyway.”

“Let me take the wheel, Jill. The Advil ought to kick in, and I’ll feel better soon. Besides, you made a long drive last night, and I slept most of the way.”

“Are you sure? You look like you’re in a lot of pain.”

“I’ll be all right. I want to do this, Jill.”

She slowed and pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. Relieved, she stepped out of the car and walked around the back. There were no other vehicles in sight, and she would doze for a few hours before they hit Albuquerque. She watched Cole unfold himself from the passenger side.

He stood tall before her, the only light coming from his open door. Pausing, she heard her breath catch in the back of her throat. He reached out and touched her shoulder. She swallowed. It was time to think of something light to say. He was her Christian brother, Christian brother….

“Jill,” he began, running his hand down her arm. “I know you think I’m a stubborn mule. A dried-up stump of a man.”

“No, Cole.” She shivered, though there wasn’t a wisp of cool air. “That was before. I didn’t know you when I said those things. Now I see that you’re a caring…wonderful…father to Matt.”

His hand closed around her arm, and he pulled her closer. “Jill, I’m not just a father. I’m not just a rancher.” His hand slipped behind her back and urged her so close she could feel his breath. “I’m a man, Jill. And I’ve tried a lot of ways to think of you as anything but a woman who is beautiful and good and perfect.”

“I’m not—”

“Yes, you are,” he said, and just as she had hoped and feared, he bent his head and brushed his mouth across her lips. A gentle kiss, barely a touch.

“Oh, Cole,” she murmured.

“Sometimes it seems like you’re all I can see anymore, Jill. When I was lying in that mangled car. When I was riding my horse like a maniac down Catclaw Draw. It was your face
that kept me going. You, Jill. Your crazy hair, your bright eyes, your pretty smile.”

He kissed her again, this time longer. She let herself be drawn into his arms, and he wasn’t her Christian brother or Matt’s father or an unfeeling rancher anymore. He was an amazing, disturbing and potent man who crushed her close and woke every hidden flicker of desire inside her heart.

“Cole, I—” She let her eyelids drop shut as his mouth caressed hers and his embrace cradled her.

“Listen, Jill, there’s a lot to be said between us. And we’ve got time.” He stepped back. “I’ll drive and you rest awhile. Then we’ll talk.”

“But, Cole, you have to hear me right now. I don’t feel right about this. About what’s happening here. This isn’t how it should be.”

“I know. And we’ll talk.”

“I can say it right now. I’m…I’m a teacher, and I have a whole life that really needs to be solitary, you know? And you. You’re marrying Penny. She loves you. She told me that, so you can’t be kissing me out here in the middle of the desert.”

The shrill beep of her cell phone intruded. Jill reached for the car door. “I’ve got to get that. It might be Matt.”

Cole walked to the driver’s side as she slipped into the car and pressed the button.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Penny said into Jill’s ear. “I was upset and hurt that you left the house without me, but I’ve thought it all through, and I understand that you did what you had to do. I love you, Cole. Please say you love me, too. Please say you’ll forgive me, and we can start over on the right foot. I can’t bear the thought of life without you, not even for a minute.”

Jill handed Cole the phone. “It’s for you.”

She turned up the music and closed her eyes. Cole shouldn’t have kissed her, and she shouldn’t have welcomed
it. What she had felt in his arms was wrong. No matter how he had acted, no matter what he had said, it was wrong. He had made a commitment to Penny, and that had to be honored. She concentrated on the radio…one of her favorites—“Song sung blue, weeping like a willow…song sung blue, sleeping on my pillow…”

“N
othing here is safe.” Clotilde Loiseau’s brown eyes were fixed on Matt, who sat facing her inside the small charter airplane. “The people have AIDS, tuberculosis, leprosy,
oui?
The animals, they are wild. They will eat you. Everything is hungry in Africa, even insects. Here is the home of the tsetse fly. Here mosquitoes bring West Nile virus and malaria. Snakes are many in this country. Some, if they bite, you will die before you take three steps.

Matt clung to the armrests on either side of his seat and hoped he could survive the flight itself. He’d been nauseous ever since they left Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Billy was worse. He’d used three barf bags already. Now he lay spread-eagle in the aisle, moaning and begging Mrs. Loiseau to make the pilot land. Who cared about snakes and mosquitoes when the entire contents of your stomach were threatening to come flying out of your mouth at any moment?

“We shall arrive at the safari camp in one hour,” Mrs. Loiseau said, lighting her umpteenth cigarette of the flight. “From there, I shall put you into the hands of Moses. A good guide. He will take you by boat up the Nile River toward Sudan. Ha—funny, you see? Moses in the Nile, like in the Bible.”

Matt tried to smile. He couldn’t grasp that any of this was
really happening to him. Not the plane or the Frenchwoman or even Billy. None of it. It was like some kind of a movie where nothing was what you thought, nobody did what they were supposed to do, everything was warped and strange and unbelievable.

“Before you arrive at the border,” Mrs. Loiseau was saying, “Moses will take you by Land Rover to a secret crossing point. But he will not cross over with you. You will have to drive into Sudan alone. Do you understand this, Matthew?”

Matt understood one thing: if he could look into a mirror, his face would be green. The color of lettuce. His hands trembled, and he could barely breathe. It wasn’t just the cigarette smoke. The whole cabin felt like the inside of an oven. Didn’t they have air-conditioning? Didn’t they know people were suffocating inside this miserable little tin can?

“Matthew? Do you listen to me?” Mrs. Loiseau tapped his shin with the sharp toe of her high-heel shoe. “Pay attention!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, swallowing the warm saline liquid that seeped into his mouth. “Moses. The Nile. Land Rover. Sudan.”

“You will be alone,” she continued. “You must be careful! Everything in this country is dangerous. The people will be nice in your face, but they will hate you. They will try to rob you and take you as a hostage. You will not be safe, Matthew.”

“Okay.” He nodded, clutching the barf bag in his hands and wondering if he was going to need to use it.

Mrs. Loiseau shook her head in obvious disgust at his lame response to all her warnings. Matt couldn’t figure out why this Frenchwoman had done so much for him. She thought he was foolish and too young and destined to die a horrible death—and she told him so on a regular basis.

Even so, ever since yesterday morning, when she had
rescued him from Agrimax, Mrs. Loiseau had done everything in her power to help Matt find Josiah Karume. For some reason, she believed his idea of giving the USB key to I-FEED was a good one, and she had decided to make it happen. She had driven Matt and Billy to her sister’s house outside Paris, where they spent that night. Her husband, whom Matt never saw, ordered his private jet to fly the three of them to Uganda the next morning.

In Kampala, Mrs. Loiseau told the customs officials they didn’t need visas, because they were going on a very short safari up the Nile—which was true. To ease matters along, she handed out American dollars left and right, explaining to Matt and Billy that these were like gold on the local black market. After clearing customs, they got into this propeller-driven, roller-coaster airplane, and now they were headed for a safari camp on the river.

It was like a theme park in California or Florida, where you went on heart-stopping rides, saw strange and frightening things, and thought you might never escape. Then, when it all became too intense, you got back on the bus, went to your hotel, ate ice cream, and everything was normal. Except none of this was normal, and none of it was pretend.

Everything happening was real, and Matt could hardly believe that it had actually worked out. He knew it must be God’s hand behind the whole thing. Mrs. Loiseau really was like an angel the Lord had sent to help out—though if the rest of the angel band were anything like her, Heaven would be a pretty weird place.

“Crocodiles!” she exclaimed, waving her red fingernails around. “In the Nile River are many crocodiles, and they will attack if you fall from the boat. But the hippos are worse!”

Matt tried to get his brain to focus on what she was saying, but it was difficult. “Uh, Mrs. Loiseau—”

“
Madame
Loiseau,” she corrected as the plane made another stomach-churning lurch. “I am French—can you
not remember this?
Je suis français. Qu-est-ce que c’est?
What do you wish to say to me, Matthew?”

“Well, um…about the crocodiles and all that. Don’t worry so much, okay? I mean, God brought you to that café to help Billy and me yesterday. I wouldn’t have escaped from those Agrimax men without you. And you took care of getting us here to Africa. I never had any idea how hard it would be to fly into a foreign country. The way you’ve helped us with everything reminds me that God is watching over us, and I think we’re going to get the USB key to Mr. Karume.”

“Not everything,” she said in words hardened with anger. “I do not help you with everything, Matthew. When we arrive at the camp, I leave you to go by yourself. I do not protect you. It is because…because I am weak. Myself, I am afraid.”

“You?”

“Of course me! Who is talking to you—somebody else?” She jammed her cigarette butt into the metal ashtray in the arm of the seat. “We have been to this camp once—my husband and I. It is very nice,
oui?
Little cabanas for each guest. Delicious food. A boat ride up the Nile. Some fishing. Looking at animals. Tourist things—and always an armed guard to protect us. We have a good time. But you…it will not be like this for you. You must go into the desert. You will have no security, no safety. Sudan is a place of armies and machine guns. I cannot go there, Matthew. I let you go alone. By yourself.”

He wasn’t sure who she was mad at, but she stared out the window as though she really wished she could knock someone’s block off. “Well, I’m not by myself—”

“Don’t tell me God is with you! God does not always protect the innocent.”

To Matt’s surprise, she started crying. She reached into her fancy designer purse and pulled out a handkerchief. Dabbing her eyes, she fumbled around for another cigarette. Before she could light it, he reached across and put his hand on her arm.

“Mrs. Loiseau,” he said. “I mean,
Madame
Loiseau, the thing is—I’m not really afraid.”

“No, because you are young and foolish. You do not understand how fragile is this life. How quickly it can be taken away.” She blew her nose into her handkerchief.

“Yeah, but I’m not all that worried about my life, you know?” He wondered why she was crying and whether the things he was saying might make it worse. Despite his roiling stomach, he decided to keep talking. “See, life is like a tiny speck of time,” he told her, “but Heaven is forever. My youth pastor says if you’re a Christian, your real home is Heaven. Not earth. Earth is where you’re sent for a while to try to help other people get to know Jesus. Earth is where you do things for God, like feeding the hungry and stuff—which puts treasures in your bank in Heaven. You want your treasures to be in Heaven, because that’s where you’re going to live forever after you die. But life down here is really not all that big a deal.”

Madame Loiseau sniffed, blotting the mascara that was forming dark puddles under her brown eyes. “Oh, Matthew, you are a good boy. I don’t want you to die!”

At that, she broke into even louder sobbing. She bent over and wailed into her hands, her shoulders shaking and her breath making little hiccups. Matt wished he hadn’t said anything. It must have been the wrong thing, as it usually was when he tried to talk to people. He looked down at Billy, who seemed to have passed out in the aisle.

“Madame Loiseau,” Matt said, “I’m sorry—”

“Non!”
She shook her head. “You do not make me cry, Matthew. It is something else.”

He scrunched the barf bag as she dabbed at her eyes some more. “Well, what?”

“My son,” she said finally, her lips trembling. “He was like you, just a boy. Fourteen.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“Alain was fourteen. He used the…the inline skates,
oui?
…and he skated every day near my house in Paris. One day, he made a mistake or someone pushed him…we don’t know. He fell into the street, and a car struck him. Like you.”

“Did he die?”

“Oui.”
She folded up her handkerchief and dropped it back into her purse. “Three years ago.”

“So that’s why you helped me.”

“I help because you are a silly boy…and a good boy…like my Alain. But you are different from him, also. Alain was a child, you understand? He cared about nothing important, only fun. A happy boy. You, Matthew, talk always about these matters of God.” She paused and lit her cigarette. “I rush to you in the street because you remind me of Alain. But I help you go to Sudan because you are you.”

“It’s because you care about matters of God, too, Madame Loiseau.”

“
Pah!
I am not religious.”

“But you understand that what I’m saying is true. You believe what I’m doing is right. You’d make a really great Christian, Madame Loiseau.”

She exhaled a big cloud of smoke. “Go to sleep, Matthew. You make me tired.” With that illogical statement, she pulled a little mirror from her purse and began fixing her makeup. Matt’s hands relaxed on the barf bag as he leaned back into his seat. He never knew the right things to say to people. He probably never would.

Cole tucked the blue airline blanket under Jill’s chin and gave himself permission to memorize her. Sleeping, she looked like a child—all softness and warmth, her hair drifting around her cheeks and her pearly eyelids almost translucent. Since the moment he had kissed her under the starlight in New Mexico, Cole had seen and done things he never anticipated in his life.

In Albuquerque, Jill had made up her mind to fly with him to Sudan. Though the expense would eat into her hard-earned savings and wipe out her relief trip to Pakistan in the summer, she refused to listen to Cole’s objections. She knew Sudan—the land, the customs, the I-FEED people, and even a few words of Arabic. And saving Matt’s life had become more important than any other plans she might have had.

A flight to Houston and several hours’ layover had eaten up most of Tuesday. While they waited, Jill wrote lesson plans and used her PDA to e-mail them to her colleague Marianne Weston. She briefly outlined the situation to Marianne and asked her friend to let them know of any news on Matt.

That evening, Cole and Jill had boarded a Northwest Airlines carrier bound for Germany. Arriving in the early morning, they hunkered down in an airport waiting room and tried to sleep. Around noon, Jill received an e-mail from Marianne. To their immense relief, they learned that Matt was no longer a suspect in Jim Banyon’s death.

Cole’s mother had called Amarillo police from Oklahoma City, Marianne wrote. After they drove her home, Geneva Strong confirmed that the two men in police custody had posed as USDA agents and held her and Billy against their will. She said Matt had implicated the same men in his kidnapping and Banyon’s murder.

In the afternoon, Cole and Jill had boarded this Lufthansa jet—destination Sudan. They were due to arrive at Khartoum Airport at sunrise.

Throughout the long hours, Jill Pruitt—the little blond dynamo—had stood by Cole’s side, eager to tackle every obstacle. Faith shone like a beacon from her bright green eyes. Kindness radiated with every word she spoke. And love…Jill’s entire being had been fashioned of love. Her very fiber pulsed with love.

But not for Cole. Not in the way he was beginning to desire it.

He lifted a hand and touched a gold curl near her neck. He had promised to marry Penny Ames. A commitment. A diamond engagement ring. Wedding and honeymoon plans. That was all before God had opened his eyes. His decision to marry Penny had risen out of loneliness, the belief that he ought to provide his son with a mother, and a blind and selfish urge to meet his own needs.

Did he love Penny? Not as he should. He hadn’t loved Anna that way, either. He hadn’t known how. But in just a few short days, Jill had begun to teach him the meaning of true love. It involved sacrifice, commitment, selflessness, purity, righteousness. All those times he’d read the famous love passage in 1 Corinthians 13—the verses had even been recited at his wedding to Anna—Cole hadn’t understood it. Now he longed to live it.

He rubbed his eyes and tried to pray. For Matt…
Lord, keep my son alive, keep him safe, help me find him.
For the ranch…
Guard the land, oversee the crops and livestock, give my men wisdom.
For Penny…
Help me know what to do.