“Father is no ordinary man,” Lloyd insisted. “Over time, I’ve come to think like Mom. She says she has felt Jake with her, and so have I.”
Randy looked up at him. “Lloyd, what happened?”
Lloyd nervously began smoothing Katie’s hair away from her face, his voice broken from the pain in his heart. “I heard his voice.” He held his chin high, his jaw flexing from a struggle not to completely break down. “Last night. I was dead asleep, and someone called my name, clear as a bell. I actually grabbed my gun, because I thought someone was in the room. I love you, son, he said. I got up and turned on a light, but no one was there. Katie slept right through it.”
Evie raised her head and looked at him. “I heard him too!” She wiped at tears. “I didn’t say anything, because I was afraid you’d all think I was losing my mind—or letting prayer give me false hope.” She turned and looked up at Brian, who stood behind her, grasping her shoulders. “Brian, I couldn’t sleep. I went downstairs to heat some coffee, and I could swear he was standing right behind me. He whispered in my ear. My angel, he said.” She jerked in a sob. “As God is my witness, someone spoke to me. I turned, and no one was there.”
Jeff shook his head. “I’d like to think you’re right, but from what we heard and what we saw where he was left…the condition he must have been in. There’s no way he could have survived. Not on his own. It was obvious the don is a powerful and ruthless man. He would not have allowed Jake to live.”
“I hate to say it,” Brian told them, “but an untreated broken leg goes wrong terribly fast. He wouldn’t have been able to walk on it, and lying out there in that kind of heat… Even if he somehow lived, he’d lose that leg to infection.”
“I’m so sorry to say this,” Peter said, “but hearing his voice—it could be his spirit talking. From someplace else. Evie, maybe you simply prayed him to heaven. We searched all the surrounding villages, and no one knew of him. Believe me, we did everything we could to try to find out what might have happened to him if he didn’t die. But it would have been virtually impossible for any man to survive what was done to your father. And maybe”—he squeezed Randy’s shoulder—“maybe coyotes or whatever did drag his bones away. Besides that, the desert sun can turn bones to dust.”
Lloyd turned away. “Not right away,” he insisted. “It takes years.” He leaned against a doorjamb and held on to it. “Pa! It can’t be this way! It can’t be this way! He should be buried here on the J&L, up at that line shack, where Mom wants to be buried beside him. It can’t end this way. Not for a man like Jake Harkner.”
“I don’t even know what to report to the newspapers,” Jeff told them. He swallowed and sniffed. “The man made me famous. That book earned me a writing award. Little did I know how unfinished it was when I had it published. Jake Harkner, The Legend and The Myth. Now the legend is—what the hell really happened to the man?”
“All we can do is pray for his soul,” Evie told them. “We have to behave as though Daddy were gone. He always said he’d have a hard time getting into heaven because of the life he led, but I’ve never feared for one minute that God would turn him away.”
“We should have some kind of ceremony,” Katie told them, rubbing at her now-growing belly. “And we need to remember that Jake Harkner isn’t dead. He lives in Lloyd and Evie and all his wonderful grandchildren and the one I’m carrying now. Jake never thought he would end up with such a big, loving family, so he…he died a happy man. That’s the only way we can face this and live with it.”
Lloyd turned from the pantry doorway and looked at his mother. “Somehow, we have to put this to rest. We need to go on as a family.”
Peter kept rubbing Randy’s shoulders. “Jake was definitely one of a kind,” he offered. “And he most certainly lives on. He’s standing right in front of us over there in that pantry doorway.”
Lloyd shook his head. “No. There’s nobody like my pa.” He turned and walked out. Katie quickly got up and ran after him.
Randy could hardly feel her own body. How was she going to go on? How? She’d never even slept in their bed in the loft since that last night they made love before Jake left for Mexico. Jake! You promised you would come back! You promised!
This wasn’t real. It simply couldn’t be. Her whole life had been centered around Jake Harkner. Who was Miranda Hayes Harkner? She’d melted into a man named Jake all those years ago in the back of a wagon, and she’d never emerged as just Randy since then. It had always been Jake and Randy.