Linda Goodnight - The Rain Sparrow

Hayden handed over the soggy clothes and followed Carrie down a short hall behind the kitchen to a laundry room.

“That was nice of you,” she said.

“What else was I going to do? Toss the kid back out in the storm?”

“I could have woke up Julia and gotten the key to a vacant room.”

He shrugged. “No need. I’m up anyway.”

“Right.” She tossed the clothes into the dryer, added a softener sheet, clicked the door shut and hit a button that set the tumbler into humming motion and the warm humid smell of peaches swirling about the space. “So you can kill people.”

“Uh-huh.” Starting with the parents of a certain half-drowned boy, he thought with grim satisfaction.

Carrie headed back to the kitchen to finish the cleanup. A neat freak with the neurotic need to be cleaner than his boyhood, Hayden joined in.

“I know that boy,” Carrie said as she sponged down the countertop. “He comes in the library nearly every day after school for our tutoring program.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

She shrugged. “He probably doesn’t know who I am. Kids don’t notice librarians.”

He did. “What do you know about him?”

“He hangs out and plays on the computers, reads some but rarely checks out a book. He likes mysteries and adventure.” She flashed the charming dimple. “Librarians always notice reading preference. He doesn’t say much or bother anyone, but he generally stays awhile, as if he has no place else to be. We get our share of those at the library.”

“Do you know his parents?”

“He lives with his father. No mother in the picture. Brody’s one of the street kids around Honey Ridge. I don’t believe for one minute that he was lost.”

Hayden filled a coffee carafe and started another pot. “That was my take, as well. His father isn’t out of town, either.”

“Why would he lie about a thing like that? If his dad is at home, why didn’t he let us call him?”

There were plenty of reasons, and Hayden, unfortunately, knew too many of them.

* * *

Long after Carrie trudged up the stairs in hopes of a few hours’ sleep, Hayden contemplated the night’s events and stared at a blank word processor. Fueled by the cookies and strong coffee, his mind whirled, though not in the direction he’d hoped. Carrie, Brody and Dora Lee wouldn’t leave him alone.

He stretched, rolled his neck and roamed the parlor.

Finally, frustrated by the lack of progress, he grabbed the blanket and a throw pillow and flopped down on a curved, skinny Victorian sofa clearly not intended for napping. Especially by a man with long legs.

After fifteen minutes of misery, he rolled off onto the area rug, taking the pillow and cover with him. Much better.

The pillow smelled of peaches and the floor of wood polish, though a dark stain spread from the rug to the fireplace. The wood was old, likely original to the house, but he wondered why this section hadn’t been replaced.

He sifted through the memories of the day, tossed out the conversation with his mother, which was guaranteed to keep him awake and suffering from dyspepsia, and focused on the fascinating old house.

His fingers grazed the stain, interestingly cool to the touch. With a weary sigh, he closed his eyes and let himself feel the memories clinging to the fireplace and the floor, searching for that one kernel of story that would become a novel. His last conscious thought was the low vibrating rumble of a distant train.

4

It is said that some lives are linked across time, connected by an ancient calling that echoes through the ages.

—Prince of Persia

1867

Heat seared his lungs and scorched his skin. Flames leaped and clawed. His shirt melted against his back. He coughed, once, twice, as hot tears rolled down his face.

Amelia! Grace! Where are you? Their names stuck in his throat, burned shut by the hungry flames.

“Sir! Wake up. You’s havin’ a bad dream.”

Thaddeus Eriksson opened his eyes with a start. A broad black face, as dark and shiny as a coat button and most certainly not his wife or daughter, stared down at him. Thad sat up straighter, reorienting to the inside of the Tennessee passenger train. The metallic click of the tracks rumbled below him. Smoke puffed past the windows. He was on a train bound for southern Tennessee, not in the burning house in Ohio.

He dragged a shaky hand down his face. “I was dreaming.”

He’d not had the dream in weeks. The engine smoke must have set him off.

“Yes, sir. You sure was. You all right now?”

Thaddeus saw kindness in the obsidian eyes of Abram, an ex-slave, fit and strong like a field-worker, not old but old enough to be on his own on a southbound train, though from the haughty glances and grumbles, there were plenty on board who disapproved of his presence. The slaves were all free now that the war had ended and a bumpy kind of peace had descended on the country. Still, a black man alone on a train was taking a risk.

From the moment Abram had boarded the train, Thaddeus had kept a watchful eye until fatigue and the train’s rhythm had lulled him to sleep. He hadn’t intended to doze. A former Union soldier and a freed slave on a Southern train weren’t especially welcome, and he knew better than to let down his guard. He tried to keep his voice low to hide the Ohio accent, but Abram couldn’t hide who he was.

Surrender may have come, but the nation was far from being united.

Even now, a rotund man with a cigar squinted at them in hostile speculation.

The scarlet padded seat gave as Thaddeus twisted toward the friendly freedman. Abram sat behind him, but they’d exchanged a cordial conversation on the long ride. No one else seemed inclined to pass the time.

“I’m obliged you woke me.”

He’d slept for five nights on a series of conveyances on his way from Ohio to Honey Ridge, Tennessee. The train cars were noisy, dirty, and the interruptions unpredictable but the ride was still a luxury considering the miles he’d marched and places he’d slept during the war.

Like most of the South, railroad service had yet to fully recover, and the flood of Northern profiteers into the South had raised the hackles of former Confederates.

“Bad dreams can be an omen. That’s what my mama always said.” Abram’s rough, weathered hands gripped the seat back as he leaned forward, speaking low. “You were hollering out to somebody named Amelia.”

Sometimes bad dreams were reality. The hard knot of pain tightened in Thad’s gut. “My wife. She died.”

Even after a year, the words shocked him.

“Now that right there is a pure shame, Mr. Thaddeus. I sho is sorry for yo’ loss. Do you have any chilren?”

“Grace. She died, too.” He was the only survivor of the fire that had taken his home and family, and Thaddeus knew he should be thankful to the Almighty for sparing him. But after a year alone, a year of strangling grief and regret, he often wished he’d died with them. “What about you, Abram? You got a wife and children?”

“No, sir. I had me a sweetheart once, but the masta’ sold her off somewhere when the war started. My mama and brothers, too. Pappy, he died in the fightin’.”

Abram’s words were a useful reminder that others had lost as much or more in the long, painful War Between the States, a struggle he still believed was righteous.

“That’s a shame.”

“Yes, sir. I’m gonna find them, though.”

“Is that where you’re headed now?”

“Uh-huh. Chattanooga. Miz Malden, she couldn’t pay us no more after Mr. Malden passed. The war done took everything.” He laughed softly. “Even us workers, thank the Lawd. But she looked in Mr. Malden’s book, and told every one of us where our families was sold off to.”