Storming

Five

THE BUZZ OF the engines began to fade back out. The girl dropped her waving arm to her side and watched the planes until they were specks on the blue horizon.

“Now get back down here,” J.W. said. “Before you fall off and break your durn neck.”

Whether she understood or not, she lifted her shoulders in a sigh, then swung around the lightning rod to face them.

“Careful!” Matthew said. He looked at Hitch. “Maybe one of us should go up and help her.”

Hitch gave a little groan, but took a step anyway.

If the girl was aware of their gallantry, she didn’t seem too flattered. She dropped to the seat of her pants and slid down the steep roof as unconcernedly as she’d gone up.

Hitch lunged to the porch railing. “Hold on!”

She caught herself on the eaves and swung around until her bare toes found the tower windowsill. Half a minute later, she’d scrambled back down to the porch railing. She stood on the balustrade and looked them all over, eyebrows knit. She was probably wishing she’d kept the knife. But a little of the wild look from before had faded. Her eyes shone, as if the sight of the circus had filled her up with both adrenaline and joy all at once.

She definitely wasn’t scared of the planes.

“Well,” Matthew said. “Since we’re all still in one piece, how about some breakfast?”

“Good luck getting her to stay,” Hitch said.

She cocked her head. “Brakk fast?”

J.W. looked at Hitch. “Thought you said she didn’t speak English.”

“I think she understands more than she can say.” Hitch imitated forking food into his mouth and chewing. “Breakfast. You know, food you eat in the morning.” He offered her a hand down.

She contemplated his hand for a moment, then gave him a good hard look. Considering she’d only just gotten over thinking he was a threat worth knifing, her distrust made a fair amount of sense.

“I don’t bite,” he promised. “And I’m sorry about the scuffle.”

She grunted. Then, ignoring his hand, she hopped the remaining five feet to the ground as if it was nothing.

He took a step back to get out of her way.

At first glance, she hadn’t seemed like much to look at. Pale, almost transparent. But up close, she was pretty enough. She had high cheekbones, a sloping jaw, and a straight nose that might have looked harsh on someone else. But on her, it was tempered with an overall softness—a buoyant sweetness.

Of course, that sweetness was less than convincing in light of his throbbing shins.

She raised an eyebrow at his scrutiny, practically daring him to go on looking.

He gave her a wink and stepped out of the way.

Matthew turned back to his house. “C’mon.”

“Hold onto yourself,” J.W. said. “What gives you the right to go hogging the company?”

“The fact that I already have the skillet on. Mind your tomatoes, why don’t you?”

J.W. snorted and stayed where he was.

Inside the sun-washed kitchen, Matthew propped his shotgun against the stove and set about cracking eggs, frying sausages, and flapping jacks. “Have a seat and tell me where this girl comes from. Where you come from, for that matter.”

Hitch let the screen door bang. “Heard this big flying circus was coming to town. Decided it was time for a visit.” He left it at that and held a chair out from the table for the girl. “As for her…”

She settled gingerly onto the edge of the chair and sat with her back straight, her fists knotted in her lap. She darted quick glances around the kitchen. When she caught both Matthew and Hitch watching her, she jerked her gaze down to her hands, then right back up: fear followed by defiance.

“I am having knowledge about you,” she said. “Groundsmen. I am having knowledge how you are treating each other—even your people who are related.” She jerked her head toward J.W.’s place.

Hitch took a chair across from her and turned it around so he could straddle it. “So you do speak English?”

“Ingleesh?” She leaned forward, as if trying to read his lips. Then she touched her mouth. “This?”

“What we’re speaking, yeah.”

“Um, yes. The _Sobirateli_—the… Foragers. They are where I am hearing from.” She knit her eyebrows and stared at him. Maybe trying to ask if he understood her.

“And who are the Foragers? They’re… Groundsmen?”

“Nikogda. Never.”

He tried a different tack. “But they taught you English?”

“No. Teaching they are not.” Her eyes flashed. “Being allowed to be knowing this Ingleesh is not for me. Just hearing them, and reading.”

“You mean you read books in English? Taught yourself to speak it?”

She nodded. “Yes. But—” She tapped her ear. “Different from how—” She pointed to her eye.

He had to think about that for a minute. “It sounds different from how it looks?”

She nodded again.

Matthew put a pan lid over the crackle of his eggs and sausage. “Takes a heap of brains to do that.”

If anybody knew about brains, it was Matthew. He’d always been the sort to read books most other folks had never even heard of. He was smart enough to have been more than a farmer—just not rich enough. Or maybe brave enough.

Matthew brought the first plate of flapjacks over to the table and set them next to a small blue ceramic pitcher of maple syrup. “Here you are, my dear.”

“Tonk you.” She looked at the plate, then picked up one of the flapjacks. It was so fluffy it compressed by nearly half between her fingers. She tore off a piece, glanced questioningly at Matthew, then dunked it in the syrup pitcher.

“Whoops, not like that.” Hitch reached across the table and poured the syrup over the top of the flapjacks, then handed her the fork.

She took a bite of the pancake. When it hit her tongue, her eyes lit up. “_Prekrasno._”

“You don’t have to look so surprised,” Matthew said.

Hitch hiked his chair a little closer. “So… where do you come from?”

She kept right on eating and pointed toward the ceiling.

Hitch glanced apologetically at Matthew. “She keeps saying she’s from the sky.” He turned back to her. “Meaning you work with flyers?” Or maybe just meaning she’d snorted a little too much water when she’d hit the lake last night.

Her delight in the airplanes flying over just now might not be the reaction of somebody who was afraid of them—but it also wasn’t the reaction of somebody accustomed to spending a lot of time around them.

Matthew turned all the way around and gave her an appraising look.

“What about your friend?” Hitch asked. “The trigger-happy fella from last night? What happened to him? And how come nobody taught him about not using flare guns around a silk parachute?”

She flashed a look up and clenched her fist around her fork. “He is not friend.”

“Okay.” So the guy had been trying to light her on fire. “What happened to him?”

She curled her lip and shrugged. “Everything, I have hope.”

Hitch glanced at Matthew.

But Matthew seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, shooting the girl a sideways look or two. In a moment, he put a folded towel down in the center of the table, then set the pan of sausages and eggs on top of it. After he’d pulled up his own chair, he served first Hitch, then himself.

Hitch got up and turned his chair around so he could eat.

The girl looked at each of the three plates, then at the empty fourth spot. She pointed at it, then at the door, toward J.W.’s place. “What about… gromkiy chelovek?”

“My brother prefers to eat in his own kitchen.”

She didn’t seem to quite get that, but Matthew didn’t volunteer anymore and Hitch didn’t blame him.

The Berringer brothers had been feuding for as long as he could remember. Something about a girl—Ginny Lou Thatcher, a fiery redhead of a gal. The story went that both of them had been crazy about her, but their competition to win her hand had spilled the bounds of brotherly affection. As it turned out, neither of them got the girl.

After their father died, they split the farm in two. Matthew kept his family’s old farmhouse, and J.W. built that crazy mansion across the property line. Life had been a competition ever since, although J.W. seemed to take it a mite more seriously than Matthew.

Matthew poured milk for each of them. “I’m afraid my brother and I aren’t exactly on friendly terms.”

Footsteps stomped on the porch. Rifle still in one hand and a basket in the other, J.W. loomed outside the screen door. “If we ain’t friendly, I reckon it’s because certain parties think they can hide away the pretty misses at their table. Now, what’s your name, girl?”

She stopped shoveling in the pancakes and licked a drop of syrup off her lower lip. She looked around the room, stopping to study each of their faces.

Then she swallowed. “Jael.”

“Name like that, I’d say she’s not from here,” J.W. said.

Matthew had grace enough to refrain from pointing out they’d already covered that. He didn’t invite J.W. in.

“You got any family around here?” J.W. asked. “Friends?”

She shook her head.

“You headed someplace?”

“To home.”

Hitch stabbed another medallion of sausage. “Great.”

“What’s so bad about it?” J.W. asked.

Matthew salted his eggs. “She claims she lives in the sky.”

“So what?” J.W. jutted his chin at Hitch. “You’re a birdman, aren’t you?”

“Not that good a one.”

Jael finished her last bite of pancake and ran her finger around the edge of her plate to catch the remaining syrup. She licked it off, then looked at Hitch. She hesitated, her eyes dark with something: fear, uncertainty, desperation maybe.

She pointed at the floor. “Groundsworld.” She pointed at the ceiling. “Schturming. To Groundsworld I am falling. Now I am having to go home before time is too late. Please. But you cannot be talking of this—to any persons on ground.”

Hitch cleared his throat. “Right. Well, we won’t say a word.” He glanced at Matthew and J.W. “But in the meantime, you got any place to stay?”

She shook her head.

“She could stay here,” Matthew said. “A bit of company wouldn’t go amiss.”

J.W. scoffed. “Where would you keep her in this mousetrap? I’m the one who’s got plenty of empty rooms.”

“That, J.W. Berringer, is your own fault.”

“Like thunder it is.”

Hitch swiped up a dollop of yolk with the last of his sausage. “Maybe she should stay closer to town. In case somebody she knows comes looking for her.”

Matthew thought for a second, then nodded. “You’re right. The gossips wouldn’t find it proper anyway, a girl like her staying out here with two old bachelors.”

J.W. harrumphed.

Hitch rocked his chair back to its hind legs. “Well, then, you know somebody who will take her?”

“You’re the one that found her, son,” Matthew said.

“Me?” He looked at her, then at J.W. and Matthew in turn.

“If she’s from upwards, that would certainly seem to be more your purview than anybody’s, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” J.W. said, “she’s with that fancy flying outfit that just buzzed over. You best take her over that way and see if she belongs.”

Hitch shook his head. “She’s not a flyer.” She wasn’t a jumper either, unless he missed his guess. “So when I get her out there to the pilots’ camp and nobody has a notion who she is, what do you think I’m going to do with her then?”

“Find her a place to stay.”

He laughed. “I haven’t got time for that. I’ve got to make some money. You wouldn’t know of any day jobs around, would you?”

“That ain’t the point here,” J.W. said. “The point is you found this girl, so you gotta do something about it.”

Hitch didn’t have time to deal with this. He could barely find bedrolls and meals for his own crew, much less an addled girl. “I found her in Matthew’s backyard.”

She looked at him from across the table, steadily. Who knew if she understood what was going on, but those smoky gray eyes seemed to look right through him—still fearful, still distrusting.

And that was ever so slightly irritating. Most girls thought the devil-may-care lifestyle of a gypsy pilot was the most romantic thing ever. But of course, most girls weren’t crazy.

He stared back at her. Was she crazy? Or was she smart, like Matthew said, and just as sane as he was?

Of course, Hitch’s family—and Celia too—wouldn’t have said sanity was his strongest point. He was a pilot after all.

But he’d seen enough of the world to know what crazy looked like. And this girl didn’t look crazy. Wild, like an unbroke filly, definitely. Maybe a little reckless, judging from the way she’d scaled J.W.’s house without a second thought. But if flying had taught him one thing, it was that reckless and crazy didn’t have to be the same thing, so long as you knew what you were capable of.

This girl wasn’t crazy. She was lost and she was scared. After last night, who wouldn’t be? There was no reason to think the guy with the flare gun wasn’t still around—and still trigger-happy. Reuniting Jael with him obviously wasn’t an option. But if Hitch could find the guy, that just might answer a lot of questions—and give him a lead on what he could do with her.

He thumped the chair back onto all fours. “Fine. I’ll take her with me. Maybe somebody’ll know where she comes from.” He stood and beckoned her to follow.

She stood up warily. “To where do you go with me?”

“To town. See if we can find somebody who can help you get home.”

Her eyes lit up at that, but then she bit her lip.

“Look,” he said. “You don’t trust me—that’s fine. I can spare you a little help if you want it. But I won’t make you say no twice.”

She shook her head, slowly. “You are Groundsman.”

“No, I ain’t.” He gave her a grin. “The sky’s my home too.”

“Then… you will be helping me to go to home?”

“Well, we’ll see if we can find somebody who can help. And I’ll get you someplace safe to stay in the meantime. Best I can do right now.”

She tucked her chin in a nod. “Then, yes.”

“All right.” He gestured her toward the door. “But I swear, if you kick me one more time, that’s it.”

She wrinkled her nose, confused, as J.W. opened the screen door for her.

“Hitch,” Matthew said—then paused a moment until she was out of earshot. “Wait just one second. Before you go on with her, there’s something you should know.” He pushed his old man’s bones up from the table and circled around. He dropped his voice. “I want you to understand me: wherever it is she’s from, I think she needs help. But… you’ve heard about the bodies, haven’t you?”

“Bodies?”

“Five so far, I think. Mostly out around Lake Minatare, a few in some pastures nearby. Nobody knows who they were. But ol’ Scottie Shepherd—you remember him?—he’s been swearing up and down he saw one fall.”

Gooseflesh creased the skin on the back of Hitch’s neck. “Fall from where?”

“That’s the sticker, ain’t it?” And just like Jael had done earlier, Matthew pointed a finger at the ceiling. “Now, you tell me. How’s that possible?”

The chill spread. “How should I know?”

“You’re a flyer. You know what’s up there.”

He shrugged. “Sky, clouds—occasionally me. C’mon, Matthew, people don’t fall out of nowhere.” He felt like he was parroting Earl’s rebuttals from last night. “They had to come from a plane.”

Matthew regarded him. He didn’t look convinced. “Her too?”

Hitch looked through the screen door to where she stood listening to J.W. going on about the drought or some such.

Part of him just wanted to say yes. Yes, she jumped from a plane. Yes, all these bodies had been chucked out of a plane.

But it wasn’t as if planes were exactly common around these parts. Before this week, there was no reason at all why pilots should be flying over Scottsbluff, Nebraska—much less tossing people out at five thousand feet.

He might have dismissed the whole notion of the bodies even having fallen at all—except for her. He’d seen her. And night flight or no night flight, he’d still swear up and down his Jenny had been the only plane out there.

So what did that leave? That she’d jumped off a cloud?

Obviously not. But maybe the question here wasn’t how, but why? Somebody’d been after her, that was clear. But again: why?

He looked at Matthew and shook his head. “You want answers that make sense? Don’t ask me. I gotta tell you, I ain’t ever seen anything like this one.”

But if he could find Jael’s attacker, that might put a period to a lot of questions. If the man was anything like her, he was going to stick out in Scottsbluff like a society grand dame at a county fair.