Sarah nodded.
Dierdre patted her hand.
“Sure, they’ll be fine there until we can collect them, darlin’, you’ll not be worried about that.”
“It’s not that,” Sarah said, so tired she wanted to put her head down on her arms. “One of the horses…” She turned her head as she heard Seamus and John walk across the yard toward the porch. She looked back at Dierdre.
“One of the horses was Rocky,” she said. “David’s horse.”
The next day, before light, Sarah was trotting Dan down the road toward Balinagh. After John had fallen asleep the night before, she warned Dierdre that the gypsy she had wounded seemed intent on revenge on her.
“It makes my place a little less of a refuge for you,” she said.
“Nonsense,” Dierdre snorted. “All it makes is you needin’ us here all the more.”
In any case, she and Seamus had fortified themselves inside the house and placed loaded guns by each of the windows.
When Sarah hesitated about leaving, she only needed to see John’s face to reinvigorate her conviction that she must try to find David.
Before she left, she hugged her son tightly and whispered into his ear. “Stay safe, sweetie,” she said. “God willing, Dad and I will be back tonight. Just do whatever Mr. and Mrs. McClenny tell you to do, promise? If they tell you to hide, you hide. Promise me.”
John murmured into her shoulder: “I will, Mom, I promise.”
Sarah rode out into the darkness, her saddlebags bulging with cartridges, her Glock, fully loaded, in her shoulder holster. The weather was cold but clear. It hadn’t rained or snowed in 24 hours.
Again, Sarah fought the impulse to gallop Dan across the pasture in a more direct route to town. There were too many things to help him come up lame so she held herself back. As she rode, she scanned the ditches on either side of the road for ambushers or bodies. Her fingers touched the butt of her handgun nearly the whole ride into town.
She found herself wondering when she had stopped being afraid of guns and when she had begun thinking of them as something comforting and essential.
“Da, sure isn’t that the American lady coming in to town?”
Mike Donovan looked up from the cart he was packing with firewood and squinted down the main street of town. It was midmorning and the sky had darkened and let loose with a gentle, insistent rain. He saw Sarah riding down the street on a large thoroughbred cross. Most sane people would not choose to be out in this weather, he thought.
“You’re right,” he said, watching her. “Wonder what she’s doing here.”
The town was more alive today than it had a right to be. When he and Gavin had arrived earlier that morning, it was clear that a tentful of riffraff had spent the night there drinking and fighting. Father and son had steered wide of the noise and the crowd. Donovan needed the firewood that Siobhan kept behind her store. She was long gone and everyone else seemed to forget it was even there.
The crowd of men looked to be mostly gypsies although some had a different look to them, hardened but in a city, seedy sort of way. Even from a distance, Donovan could tell they weren’t from around this part of Ireland, maybe not from Ireland at all. The foreign looking ones were quieter than the gypsies, he noted. They didn’t sing or dance, though they were drinking just as hard.
He hurried Gavin to finish the loading.
Sarah had hoped there would be another market going on. She rode slowly down the main street, keeping her eye on the group of rowdies at the end of it by a large tent. All the storefronts were either boarded up or smashed. The few cars she’d seen two months back when she spoke with Julie were now vandalized beyond any kind of value. She resisted the temptation to just pull the gun out and ride down the street demanding information.
If she didn’t find somebody to talk to about where Julie lived, how was she going to find David? Had she truly waited all this time to finally come to Balinagh—putting her son at risk back at Cairn Cottage in the bargain—and all for nothing?
The frustration coursed through her until she wanted to scream. Her eyes flitted from side to side for any possible indication that there was someone who could help her. She looked to the end of the street where the gypsies were gathered and where she felt herself drawn to.
There were only five of them. They looked like thugs and so far, they hadn’t seen her. Sarah decided to stay mounted in case she needed to make a run for it although the thought of galloping across miles of snowy pasture with fences and stonewalls hidden from view did not sound like a good plan.
She walked Dan closer to them.
Seamus had been able to get the drop on three armed men, she thought, because they did not fear him. Her greatest protection, she realized as she approached them, was their arrogance. If she didn’t take too much time to line up each shot…
“Blimey, Da. Is she barking? What the hell is she doing?”
Donovan stopped stacking and stared with his mouth open at the sight of Sarah riding down the main street. “I have absolutely no idea,” he said.
At the last minute, Sarah slid off her horse and tugged him into a small alley off the side of the street. She peered around the corner to see if they’d seen her. They gave no indication of it. Taking in a long breath, she loosely tied Dan by his reins to a stunted tree in the alley and secured her gun in the waistband of her jeans.
I can do this, she thought.
She crept out of the alley and slid forward one careful yard at a time until she was a hundred feet away from them. One of the men shouted. The rest of them laughed. A skinny redheaded gypsy boy with badly crossed eyes took a step off the wooden walkway into the street. He was grinning broadly and looked very drunk. A glazed look came over his face. He dropped to his knees and vomited down the front of himself. The rest of the men roared with laughter.
Was she really looking at this rabble as a source of credible information? They were drunk. Anything they might say would probably be useless to her.
She watched one of the men stumble backwards on the wooden steps that led to what might have been a grocery store or a restaurant a few months ago. He fell down to shrieks of laughter and rowdy insults from his friends.
Two of the men began shoving each other until one hauled off and slugged the other in the face. The rest of the group turned their attention to the grappling fighters, now on their hands and knees in the street. Sarah used the opportunity to back away a little bit since it was clear the gang was becoming more and more out of control. The nonfighting men alternately swore and cheered the fighters on. One of the fighters grabbed a piece of wood and began hammering away at his opponent with it which drove the gathered crowd wild with delight.
Sarah watched in horror as it became clear that the man intended to murder the other man, clearly inebriated, in the middle of the street. She watched the melee helplessly when, without warning, a pair of strong hands grabbed her from behind and jerked her sharply backwards. The last thing she remembered seeing before a large dirty hand clapped over her face and eyes was the gypsy she had shot coming out of the building. He was wearing the University of Florida sweatshirt she had last seen on her husband.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sarah’s hands would not stop shaking.
Even after Mike Donovan gave her a second mug of tea laced with whisky and checked the window for the third time to make sure the gypsies were still occupied, she could not will her hands to stop trembling.
“I don’t know what I was expecting,” she said, cupping the hot mug in both hands. “Dear God, I really thought I was going to find David.” She looked at Donovan and her eyes filled with tears again. “Alive. It never…it never really occurred to me—” She shook her head.