Chapter 9
YESTERDAY
Jojo Kaufmann would have been shivering if she hadn’t snuggled up this morning in the ski jacket she’d purchased for only one reason. It was red.
Even after she’d moved away from home, was on her own, could purchase any clothing she liked, she discovered to her dismay that her closet was filled with solid colors, light blue and cream, and tan …
yeah, lots of tan. It’d been an unconscious thing.
She hadn’t realized she was doing it at the time—simple, and plain, without decoration or adornment.
She’d grown up Amish, and those grooves ran deep.
Over the years, she’d had to force herself to bring bright colors into her life—florals and plaids, rich purples and golds.
Colors her girlfriends said highlighted her ivory complexion and shiny black hair.
When she went shopping for a ski jacket, the one she liked best was navy blue, but the alarm bells had clanged—dull, bor-ing!
, and she picked one the color of the apple the Evil Queen gave to Snow White.
She hadn’t expected to need such a heavy coat so early in the season, but the temperature had plunged into single digits a couple of days ago … and the heater in her pickup truck had been declared officially dead by a mechanic who told her it would cost more than the truck was worth to fix it.
She’d purchased the 2003 Ford F-250 Super Duty 6-speed extended cab pickup truck when she’d moved back home in February.
Once a sharp two-tone blue and silver, the paint had faded and chipped, and rust had crept around the wheel wells.
The bed of the truck was dented from years of hauling farm equipment, and the rear bumper had a crease in it that bore all the earmarks of backing into a fence post. The muffler growled low from a patch job that probably wouldn’t last much longer, and the interior smelled of hay and leather.
She’d covered the cracked vinyl seats with a Navajo pattern blanket.
The heater had worked fine when she bought it.
She’d checked, turned it on, and in a few minutes, the cab of the truck was toasty warm.
In fact, it had worked great for as long as she’d needed it.
The spring had been as unseasonably warm in the Laurel Highlands as this fall was unseasonably cold.
When frigid temperatures had first hit western Pennsylvania in early September, she’d turned on the truck heater and discovered it had crossed over the rainbow bridge.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, she caught sight of Trident in the back, his ears perked, snapping his teeth at the wind. She wouldn’t let the big dog ride back there unless he was lying down, so there wasn’t a whole lot of wind hitting him in the face. But he snapped at it anyway.
She’d been surprised that Trident had so easily adjusted to the cold weather—no, not adjusted.
He didn’t just tolerate it. He loved it—raced across the frozen ground in the field behind the house, chasing crows.
When it had started snowing the first week of November, Trident had leapt around in the backyard, snapping at the snowflakes that were as big as hunks of lint from a cotton gin.
As the snow got deeper, he’d made a track around the backyard, running in circles, doing zoomies like a puppy, clearing the snow in a beaten path that Uncle Levi said looked like the track at the Indianapolis 500.
Maybe he loved the cold so much because he’d spent so many years in the frying-pan heat of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jojo remembered her instructor in the twelve-week handler and obedience course pointing out that a Belgian Malinois was a perfect canine for use by the troops in the Middle East because the dog was so tolerant to high temperatures, even carrying full packs.
Her instructor had had a soft spot in his heart for that breed, preferred it over German shepherds, hands down.
He preached about the Malinois’s superior combination of intelligence, agility, speed, and intense focus, which made them the perfect dog for high-stakes missions, bomb detection, tracking, apprehending suspects.
And they could perform complex tasks in dangerous, chaotic environments.
She’d parachuted with Trident out of a helicopter, cleared buildings of explosives and searched vehicles for drugs, and he’d never lost his cool.
She watched him now, his breath a white plume in front of his mouth.
“Is white the color air is when it’s inside you?” Jojo looks eagerly into her big brother’s face, knowing he can answer any question she asks. Liam knows everything.
“No … it turns white when you breathe it out into cold air.” He lets out a breath of white. “But it isn’t white when you breathe out in the summertime, is it?”
She hadn’t thought of that. If air was white inside you, it would come out that color every time you breathed.
“Is cold air harder to hold inside than warm air?”
He wrinkles his brow. “What?”
“You know, when you hold your breath.” Liam can hold his breath forever, like half an hour maybe. Not that long, but a long time. He learned how because he’s a Navy SEAL, and though she doesn’t really know what that means, she knows he does underwater stuff.
“Show me. Hold your breath and show me how long.”
She’d probably asked him three or four times a day since he came home on leave to “hold your breath and show me,” but he’d only done it a couple of times.
She’d been in awe when he did because he didn’t puff his cheeks out and his face didn’t turn red like hers did.
In fact, he sat very still, didn’t move anything.
She’d watch the second hand on the clock go slowly around and around, getting more and more anxious, her own chest beginning to hurt and she was breathing!
Liam laughs softly. It’s a sound that makes her insides feel good and she doesn’t know why.
“Not now, sweetheart. Maybe some other time.”
His words stab into her chest like a dagger. There is no other time.
“Please don’t go!” She hadn’t meant to say that, but it slipped out because she can’t stop thinking about it. Liam will leave tomorrow and it will be a long, long time before she sees him again. “Stay here on the farm and don’t ever leave again.”
“Jojo, honey—” Her name is Joanna. Only Liam calls her Jojo.
“Pleeease!” She throws her arms around him, holds on so tight he can’t get away.
He hugs her, kisses the top of her head, and whispers into her hair. “I’m sorry. I would if I could, but I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You’re big and strong and you can do anything.”
“I can’t do …” They’re standing together at the porch railing, and he gestures all around them. “This. All of this. This life. If I stayed here on the farm … I’d wither up like the flowers you pick and don’t put into water. If I stayed here, it’d kill me.”
And turns out it did exactly that.
Jojo’s memories of her brother were precious beyond measure.
She’d hauled each one of them out hundreds of times over the past two decades, her soul aching with loss even after all this time.
She found a way to keep him alive in her heart—by incorporating into her daily life Navy SEAL principles—the handful he had taught her and all the others she’d learned on her own as an adult.
The 40% Rule: When your mind tells you you’re done, you’re really only forty percent done. You still have sixty percent remaining, but you have to push for it.
The Three-Foot Rule: Concentrate on the immediate area around you, what you can affect—your actions, attitude and immediate next steps—rather than worrying about things beyond your control.
She practiced the breathing exercises, the calming exercises every day.
It became a ritual—like clicking the beads of a rosary, easing the pain of her broken heart by learning to do what Liam could do.
She’d discovered along the way that SEAL principles were valuable in every area of her life.
She was a better soldier, a better human being because of them.
But that part didn’t matter. She did it to stay connected to the brother she’d lost when she was nine years old, whose death had so shattered her she didn’t speak a single word for two years after she found his body.
Reaching cold fingers up to the neck of her jacket, she felt for the chain around her neck, touched his Navy SEAL pin, his trident pin. She never took it off.
Of course, not all her memories of Liam were good. There were other nightmare images, but most of the time, she was able to leave them in the dark where they belonged. Most of the time.
Running errands on her day off, she’d taken Henderson Creek Road as a shortcut home, but half a mile down it she saw that traffic had stopped in front of her, was likely backed up all the way from the intersection of McDowell Road.
She hit the brake and the clutch, downshifted, listening to the muffler rumble a protest as the engine slowed, and she pulled up behind a little blue Mazda.
It wasn’t inching slowly along behind the car in front of it. It was stopped dead.
Jojo pulled to a stop, and though it was freezing outside, she rolled her window down so she could stick her head out and perhaps see what was blocking the road and causing the delay.
That was when she heard it—a horrible sound, a screaming cry unlike any other, a sound that once you’d heard it, you’d never forget it. And she recognized it instantly. She reacted involuntarily with a groan, not just hearing the cry but feeling it deep in her bones.
“Oh, no.”
She spoke aloud, the words riding a puff of white out into the world and sat motionless for a moment.
But when the cry came again, she knew she had to do something.
She pulled upward on the handle of the door as she threw her shoulder into it—the door always stuck—and hopped down out of the pickup, feeling for the low-ride duty holster at her waist.
“Trident, come!”
The dog instantly leapt out of the back of the truck and was at her side. He had vests that identified him with various military titles including the standard “Police Dog,” but here in Somerset County, he wore a plain brown “Service Animal” vest.
Jojo ran along on the shoulder of the road beside the line of stopped vehicles until she came to the first vehicle in the line, a cattle truck. As soon as she stepped out past it, she saw what she knew she’d see.
On the road in front of her was a smashed black buggy, an Amish man standing near the back wheel, looking dazed.
The sound she was hearing was coming from the center of the road where a horse, still strapped into the harness, lay on his side, thrashing, his head whipping back and forth, his eyes wild, the whites showing all around.
She had to force herself to look at his right front leg.
It dangled in a horribly mangled compound fracture, the hoof barely attached by bleeding tendons.
Stepping closer to the animal, she pulled her pistol from its holster, spread her feet wide apart and held the Glock 19 in a two-hand grip pointed at the horse.
She took a deep breath. Of course, this wasn’t the first time she’d had to put an animal down, but she had always used a rifle—the only firearm in her uncles’ house.
With a pistol, she would have to center the bullet perfectly.
The animal thrashed his head frantically back and forth, his nostrils flared, his mouth open, wailing.
Visualizing an imaginary line from the outside corner of each eye to the base of the opposite ear to locate the horse’s brain, she pointed the pistol at the intersection of the lines, aiming directly down the neck.
She tracked his jerky movements for a second or two, getting the rhythm, aiming for the spot where his head would be … and then pulled the trigger.
Bang! The sound ushered in profound silence. The horse went instantly limp.
One beat.
Two.
Then she heard a voice behind her ringing out clear in the absolute stillness, the authority in the tone unmistakable.