Three
A thousand times, Jackie had prayed the past never happened.
No reconnaissance flight. No capture of Charlie Team.
No soldier on the radio, victim to her failure to warn them soon enough.
Over and over again, no matter how hard she tried to forget, the past had replayed in her mind like a broken film reel.
Now the past was standing right here in her yard.
Archer, Beckett J.
Broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, and solid as the Nebraska Sandhills.
Alive. Dear God, he was alive. Safe in America. Home. Free.
She couldn’t breathe from the immensity of it.
He stood a few yards away, watching her. His face was bronzed from the wind and sun. Shadowed from the brim of his Stetson. Square-jawed, rugged. Appealing.
And he was waiting for her to do something. Say something.
He couldn’t know how she’d failed him.
Not yet.
She couldn’t bear it.
“Now that you know my name, guess it’s my turn to know yours,” he said.
Her brain focused on his voice. Low, manly, not unpleasant. Different than it’d been on the Army’s radio when the few words they’d exchanged had been marred through the wire from distance and static.
Unrecognizable.
But today, now, he handed her a lifeline. Her name. She had to give at least that.
He’d extended his hand, but she couldn’t touch him. Not yet.
“Jackie Sinclair,” she said finally, hugging the bread and jam against her.
There. The words were out. She held her breath. Would he recognize her name? Had he tried to learn who she was from that day? The pilot in the eastern valley who had failed him and his men?
But he merely pulled his hand back, hooked a thumb in the hip pocket of his Levi’s, and inclined his head with a small smile. “Nice to meet you, Jackie Sinclair.”
He didn’t know her. Didn’t show a reaction, not even a flicker of recognition or suspicion.
Relief swarmed through her, thick and heavy, leaving her practically weak-kneed.
She wasn’t sure she could say the same about him, that it was “nice to meet him.” Someday, she hoped she would and the words would be the truth.
“Thank you.”
For now, she settled for that.
Beckett J. Archer—could she think of him as anything but his full name, imprinted on his dog tags?—lifted his glance across the pasture, then back at the windmill, and finally at her.
“Takes a certain kind of person to start from scratch out here,” he said.
Her chin lifted; her grip on the bread and jam relaxed. “I’m up for the challenge.”
“Anyone who can fly a plane like you can, I imagine would be.” With a slight chin nod, he gestured toward the white stakes and fluttering ribbons. “Mind giving me a tour of what you got planned here?”
His interest seemed genuine enough, and if he had any inkling about the yellowed document that Tom Caldwell had brought her, he didn’t show it.
Could she be spared both? His discovery of how she’d failed him in Korea and her buying the land meant for him, gifted by his grandfather?
She’d never been a coward, but for now, she felt like she was exactly that.
She couldn’t refuse him his tour, though. She had to spend the time in his company, at his side. Walking, talking, like any two people who had just met.
“I’d be happy to,” she said, keeping her tone polite.
After Jackie set the wrapped bread and jar of jam down on the porch step, she led the way across the yard, tucking breeze-tossed strands of her hair behind her ear. Beckett fell in beside her, his long legs keeping pace with her stride.
“It’s not much yet,” she said. “I’ve just staked out the strip. I haven’t even had a chance to put up a windsock yet. As soon as the land is graded, I will. Then I’ll get to work on renovating the barn.”
“That’s where you’ll keep the plane?”
“For now. Should work well enough until I get a proper hangar.”
Beckett stopped, hands settling on his hips. “Seems to me the barn will make a fine hangar. It’ll keep your Piper Cub out of the weather and ready to fly.” He surveyed the stakes again. “That little plane of yours can get in and out of something this short?”
“She can if the pilot does her job right.”
Beckett’s glance landed on her, and for the first time, Jackie caught the piercing blue of his eyes, so close to the color of the Nebraska sky it made her breath hitch.
“I reckon she’s got a good one,” he said in his low voice.
His compliment washed through her, warm and lingering, making the truth she carried feel even heavier. For the life of her, she couldn’t think of a response, and without one, she could do little less than stand beside him while he surveyed the area around them. Property that was both his and hers.
“You’re close to the timber,” he said, finally. Had he been thinking of the fire yesterday, of how it could so easily have raged out of control? “Makes for a short flight, coming from Thedford.”
“Even shorter when I can hangar my plane right here at home.”
Especially if she happened to see smoke again, God forbid.
She shaded her eyes, perusing the north pasture toward the darker line of cottonwoods that marked the bend in Muddy Creek.
She’d been grateful she could help the Archer men and their neighbors determine the source of the fire, that she could see the fence line from the air while they couldn’t, too far away on the ground.
The men had worked hard to save the timber and their grazeland, and she could do no less that day than take one last look before flying back, just to be sure no other fire remained.
But there’d been something she hadn’t questioned at the time.
Maybe she should have.
“Do you keep cattle in the timber?” she asked.
“No.” His gaze swung to her. “The road back there dead-ends at the north fence. Nobody’s got business driving in unless cattle strayed. Far as I know, they didn’t.” He paused. “Why?”
She hesitated. “I saw a truck in the trees when I circled back after spotting the smoke.”
His brow arched. “Parked?”
“Looked like it.” Unease settled in her stomach. She was too new to ranch country to know what was normal. What wasn’t. Where cattle could stray, and what cowboys would do to bring them in.
But she hadn’t forgotten the truck. At the time, she’d been too focused on the smoke to give it much thought. Now, seeing the grimness in Beckett’s expression, its presence no longer seemed so innocent.
“What color?” he asked.
“Dark. Maybe green. Maybe black. Hard to tell from up there.”
“Could’ve been anyone,” he muttered.
“It had a stock rack, though. And the top of the truck had faded paint.” Jackie’s stance shifted from the bite of guilt that she had failed again. “I thought it might’ve belonged to one of your cowboys.”
“Not parked there.” His jaw cocked. “Do you know where it was?”
That, at least, she did. Observation and retention of details were ingrained within every pilot’s memory. No sound, no image, were too small to remember.
Jackie pointed toward the cottonwoods. “Along that bend. Maybe a hundred yards inside the trees.”
Beckett studied the area a long moment. “You mind showing me?”
Jackie’s heart made a funny blip. To ride in his truck with him when she’d only just discovered him… the weaker part of her wanted to refuse. “Now?”
“If someone was out there while that fire started, I’d like to know why.”
“You think it’s connected?” she asked.
Beckett didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he started walking toward his Ford pickup, still parked near the windmill. “Only one way to find out.” He opened the passenger door and rested a hand on the frame. “Let’s go take a look.”
He didn’t expect her to refuse. How could she, when she had the intel he needed? She hurried toward him and hopped onto the vinyl-covered seat. He slammed the door shut, rounded the truck’s front, and climbed in behind the wheel.
The engine jumped to life, and he put the vehicle into gear. The tires rolled forward, moving faster as he accelerated over the rutted ground.
Jackie had carried his name in the back of her mind, tied to a moment she wished she could forget. Now the man himself sat inches away, solid and very much alive.
She fixed her gaze on the windshield, keenly aware the small space of the pickup’s cab left very little room for the past to stay buried.
And she was very much in the present, understanding his urgency—an urgency she was beginning to feel, too.
If the truck nestled in the trees didn’t belong to anyone in the Archer outfit, and if the fire and the truck were connected, it suggested a man had watched Archer rangeland burn, and Beckett needed to find out who. And why.
When they reached Muddy Creek, he eased the pickup to a stop along the pasture road and shut off the engine. The sudden quiet settled around them, broken only by the wind moving through the cottonwoods.
She pointed toward a cluster of trees ahead. “Right there. That’s where I saw the black pickup.”
Beckett studied the spot, his eyes narrowing slightly. From the road, it looked like nothing more than a tangle of branches and shadow. But if a truck had been tucked back beneath those trees, it would have been nearly invisible outside of the timber line.
He opened the door and stepped out. He didn’t need to tell her his intent, that he needed to see what—if anything—the truck might have left behind.
Jackie slid off the bench seat and followed him across the uneven ground.
The earth here was softer, the grass thinner where the trees stole the sunlight.
Beckett slowed as they reached the edge of the cottonwoods. He scanned the ground without speaking, the way a man used to reading land might study a page. Then he stopped.
A ponderosa pine branch hung low where it had been snapped partway through, its needles still green and fresh. The broken wood showed pale against the darker bark.
“Looks like he drove through here and broke the branch,” he said.
He lifted the branch away to study two wide arcs pressed deep into the ground. Tire tracks curved off the pasture road and disappeared into the small clearing beneath the trees.
The marks were still sharp, and Jackie’s chest tightened.