The Perfect Hope (25 page)

“I guess I’m a little nervous that we won’t find anything, and a little nervous that we will.”

He took one hand off the wheel, reached over to take one of hers in a gesture that surprised her heart into thudding. “Stop, and relax.”

Because the abrupt order struck more in line with what she was used to, she did just that.

“This was all farmland,” he told her as he turned onto a winding road with homes spaced wide enough for some decent elbow room, for sloping lawns, shady trees.

“It must’ve been beautiful. All fields and rolling hills.”

“People have to live somewhere. And they didn’t crowd them in, so that’s something. We got some work out here during the boom. People adding on, remodeling.”

She leaned forward. “Is that—”

“Yeah, the old Ryder farmhouse. The developer was smart enough not to tear it down, to put some money into it—and I bet he got plenty out of it.”

“It’s beautiful, the stonework, the gingerbread. And it’s big. Pretty gardens and trees. They must’ve added on that solarium, but it’s well done. It’s a nice spot.” She looked at him as they drove past, turned again. “Have you ever been inside?”

“We did some work in it about three years ago. Updated the kitchen, two baths, added on a bonus room over the garage. And that sunroom you liked.”

“How did it feel?”

“At the time? Like a job. A good one. Now?” He shrugged. “I guess I get what Mom was talking about. Maybe we should’ve paid more attention to this part of us, had more respect for it. My grandfather pretty much hated the farm, and it was clear he didn’t get along with his old man, so I never thought much of it.”

He turned yet again, onto a narrow gravel lane.

“Is this private property?”

“Maybe. Might be Park Service. We’ll deal with it if we have to.”

“They fought here? North and South, boys and men.”

“All over hell and back,” Ryder confirmed. “See there?”

She saw the little pond he’d spoken of, its water dark and deep in the lowering light. Cattails crowded around it with their brown velvet heads, and ferns green with summer formed a verdant carpet.

Beyond it, before the trees thickened, stood a low stone wall. The sort, she thought, Billy Ryder might have built. Headstones tilted in its center. Hope counted sixteen—small markers, pocked by time and weather, some tipped in the rough ground.

“It looks lonely. Sad and lonely.”

“I don’t think dead’s a party.”

He parked, got out with the dog scrambling behind him. When Hope simply sat, he walked around, opened her door as the rest of the family convoy pulled up.

“He’s here or he’s not. Either way, we are.”

She nodded, stepped out beside him.

It felt less lonely with people, with voices. With boys running and dogs sniffing. Still, she felt unsteady enough to reach for Ryder’s hand, to be grateful when he linked his fingers with hers.

More than sixteen, she realized as they approached. Some of the markers were hardly more than a stone set flush with the ground.

Not all had names, or if they had once, time had erased them. But she read those she could. Mary Margaret Ryder. Daniel Edward Ryder. And there a tiny one, marking the grave of Susan—just Susan, who’d died in 1853 at the tender age of two months.

Someone tended to the grass here, she mused, so it didn’t grow wild. Still, there was that sense of wild. To offset the infant, she found the grave of Catherine Foster Ryder, who’d lived from 1781 to 1874.

“Ninety-three,” Justine murmured beside her. “A good, long life. I wish I knew who she was to me.”

“You’ll get the Bible, then you’ll know.”

“How come they can’t stay at the inn like Lizzy?” Murphy asked her. “How come they have to stay here?”

“Lizzy’s special, I guess.” Justine lifted him up, pressed her face to his throat as Hope turned.

She’d thought Ryder stood beside her, but saw now he’d walked off, to the right, stood alone by a trio of graves.

She walked toward him, realized her heart began to thud as she did.

“He’s the middle one.”

“What?” Her hand trembled as she reached out for his again.

“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.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

H
E 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.

For what? For what? For what? he wondered in some grieving part of his brain, but he heard the order to fire and obeyed. He thought of George, and obeyed. Robbing another mother of her son, another woman of her love.

Taking another life that, like him, only wanted home.

And he thought of Lizzy, pressed against his heart. Lizzy who loved him, despite all. Who waited for him.

He thought of his mother weeping over his brother Joshua, dead at Shiloh.

He couldn’t fire again, could not stop one more heart, drive one more mother to weeping. This was slaughter, he thought. Hundreds dead and hundreds more to die. Farmers and masons and blacksmiths and shopkeepers. Why didn’t they surrender? Why would they fight and die in that depressed earth surrounded by their dead brothers?

Was this honor? Was this duty? Was this the answer? Exhausted, heartbroken, sickened at the carnage below, he lowered his weapon.

He didn’t feel the first shell punch into him, or the second. He only felt suddenly and terribly cold, and found himself once more on the ground, looking up at the sky.

He thought clouds had rolled over the sun. Everything grayed and flattened. And all the noise, all the hell of it dimmed into an almost peaceful quiet.

Was it over? At last, was it over?

He reached a hand inside his uniform for Lizzy, drew her photograph out. Stared, stared as blood smeared over her beautiful face.

Then he knew.

He knew.

Pain came in a sudden, shocking flood as blood streamed out of his wounds. He cried out against it, cried out again in a sorrow too deep to bear.

He would never build her a pretty stone house near the singing creek with honeysuckle growing wild and wild as he’d promised her. They would never fill that house with love, with children.

He had done his duty, and lost his life. He tried to kiss her face one last time, but the photograph fluttered out of his numb fingers.

He accepted his death, he had sworn an oath. But he had sworn one to Lizzy as well. He could not accept that he would never see her again, or touch her.

He murmured her name as the breath and the blood ran out of him.

He thought—his last thought—he heard her call to him. He thought he saw her, her face pale, wet with sweat, her eyes glazed as if with fever. She spoke his name. He spoke hers.

Joseph William Ryder, known as Billy to all who loved him, died on the bend of the road above the sunken ground that came to be known as Bloody Lane.

RYDER WOKE COLD
to the bone, with his throat burning dry and his heart at a gallop. Beside the bed, D.A. shoved his nose against Ryder’s hand, let out a nervous whine.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. “I’m okay.”

But in fact he didn’t know what the hell he was.

Everybody has dreams, he told himself. Good ones, bad ones, weird ones, wet ones.

So he’d dreamed about Billy Ryder. They’d just found the guy’s grave. It wasn’t such a stretch to dream about him, about dying at Antietam.

A soldier who dies on September 17, 1862? Odds were pretty damn good he’d bought it on the battlefield on that bloodiest day of the war.

Billy Ryder had been on his mind, that’s all.

And that was bullshit. Stop being an idiot, he ordered himself.

He’d felt something at that grave site, and he felt it now. Something off, something he couldn’t quite get a grasp on.

Sleep hadn’t helped, obviously. He glanced at the clock, saw it was still shy of five. He wasn’t going to get any more sleep, and wasn’t sure he wanted to risk it anyway.

The dream, vivid as life—and death—left him unsteady.

He’d stood on that battlefield. He’d walked the sunken road of Bloody Lane. And though he considered himself a practical, grounded man, he’d felt the pull of the place, the power of it. He’d read books on Antietam—he lived here, after all. He’d studied it in school, taken visiting friends and relations on the tour.

But until tonight he’d never imagined it—no, he corrected,
felt
it so vividly.

The smells of it, the sounds. Stinging smoke, fresh blood, burned flesh, the raging storm of artillery fire that filled the world above the cries of dying men.

If he’d been a fanciful man he’d have said through the dream he’d lived in it, and died in it.

As Billy Ryder had.

Put it away, he told himself. Beside him Hope stirred a little, and the warmth of her layered over that cold he couldn’t quite shake. He thought about just rolling over, onto her, clearing his mind with that slim, soft body.

He considered the hour, deemed it pretty damn unfair to wake her before dawn, even though he figured he could make it worth her while.

He rolled out of bed instead, then just walked to the glass doors, pulled them open and stepped out on the bedroom deck.

Maybe he just needed some air.

He liked the quiet of this hour, and the way the slice of moon, not quite finished with the night, showed itself through the trees. He wished fleetingly that he’d gotten water before he’d come out, then just stood pulling in the peace.

All the work, stress, frustrations of the job were worth it for moments like this. Moments of utter quiet and stillness before night ended and day began. Soon, the sun would blur the sky to the east with red, the birds would wake chattering, and the cycle would start again.

He liked the cycle fine, he thought, absently lowering a hand to D.A.’s head when the dog leaned on his leg. He had what he wanted. Good work, a good place, family who not only mattered but who understood him, and if he had to be sentimental, loved him anyway.

He couldn’t ask for better. Then why, he wondered, did it feel as if something hadn’t quite clicked into place? That something hung up, just slightly out of alignment, and all he had to do was turn it a bit, and it would fall just where it should be.

“What’s wrong?”

He turned, saw Hope. Something wanted to click, wanted to shift and fall.

“Ryder?” She stepped out, tying the short little robe he wished she hadn’t bothered with.

“Nothing. I’m awake, that’s all.”

“It’s early, even for you.” She moved to him, laid her hands on the deck rail as he did. “Listen to the quiet. Country quiet, country dark. You can forget in all the busyness that there are times and places so wonderfully still.”

Since he’d been thinking nearly the same, he looked down at her. How could she be so damn perfect? It threw him off.

She smiled back at him, and the look of her, still flushed and soft from sleep, blew right through the center of him.

“I could make coffee. We could sit out here, drink the first cup of the day and watch the sunrise.”

“I’ve got a better idea.” He wanted her—too much and too often—but what was the point in fighting it? Not in the bed, he realized, where he’d dreamed of bloody death and bitter loss.