Page 31 of Left Behind

“Aaron, where did you tell the chopper to land?” Cameron asked.

“Back pasture behind the house, but we have to get her out of the woods,” he said.

“Then let’s get moving, because one of us is going to have to go check on Ella, and you four need to be with your mom, so it’s going to be me.”

Aaron stood. “Thank you for coming to help. We’ll get her to the pickup site. Mom carried each of us for nine months before we were born. It’s our turn to carry her.”

Cameron took off at a lope, with Ghost right beside him.

When Wiley began taking off his belt, B.J. frowned.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m going to buckle her good leg to her injured leg and use it as a brace.”

“Good move!” Aaron said.

Aaron and Sean held her legs together while Wiley wrapped his belt around them, just above the ankles, then B.J. buckled it down. Once they had immobilized her injured leg, they stood. Aaron squatted down, slid his hands and arms beneath her body and picked her up, and the moment they moved her, she screamed again and passed out. It was heart-wrenching, knowing that to help her, they had to hurt her again.

“Sorry, Mama,” B.J. said.

“Let’s go,” Wiley said, and then turned and led the way. Before they reached the clearing, all four brothers had taken a turn carrying her. When they finally came out of the woods, B.J. had her in his arms, and they could hear the inbound chopper.

B.J. turned his back to the chopper to shield her from the rotor’s blast as it began to land. After that, the paramedics took over, and once Shirley was loaded into the chopper, it lifted off and headed down the mountain to the hospital in Jubilee. Her sons were not far behind.

But Cameron and Ghost were going up the mountain on a welfare check for Ella.

***

Ella Pope’s land was near the top of Pope Mountain, between John Cauley’s homeplace, and Marcus Glass’s property. It was where she’d been born, and if Amalie was right, where Ella’s life had ended.

All the way there, Cameron kept wanting to believe this would be a fool’s errand, that Aunt Ella would come out to meet him, sit him down in her kitchen with a cup of coffee and a gingerbread cookie, and before he left, impart a bit of mountain wisdom to keep his feet on the right path. But it didn’t bode well for that to happen. They had already accepted Amalie had the gift of sight and Ella had appeared with a message to “help Shirley.” The part of the scenario that didn’t fit was that Shirley didn’t have that gift, and yet she’d seen Ella, too, standing in the pasture. When he finally reached the road leading to Ella’s home, he turned north off the blacktop and stopped at the mailbox, gathered up her mail, and kept driving.

The lane was graveled and bordered on both sides by trees and bushes. By the time he got to her house, Ghost was halfway into the front seat with his head on Cameron’s shoulder.

“It’s okay, boy,” Cameron said. As soon as they got out, he clipped the leash on Ghost and headed for the porch, but before he could even knock, Ghost was whining the same way he used to in Iraq when they would find a body in the rubble. “Dammit,” Cameron mumbled, and knocked, but no one answered. He knocked one more time and then tried the door.

It swung inward.

Ghost got to the threshold, looked up the stairs, then whined and went belly down.

“Okay, boy. I get the message,” Cameron said. He tied the dog to the porch post, then went inside. He could see the kitchen from where he was standing, and there wasn’t a cup or a plate sitting out on the table or anything out of place. He left her mail on the hall table and headed up the stairs to her bedroom.

Even though he’d been expecting it, finding her like this was a gut punch. She was lying on her back, her long white hair in a braid draped across her shoulder. She was covered only with a sheet and a light coverlet, and the windows had been opened to catch the night breeze. She looked like she was sleeping, but when he checked, her body was already in rigor mortis.

“Ah, Aunt Ella, we were never going to be ready for this.” The sense of loss Cameron felt was overwhelming. The family elder—the last of her generation—was gone. He laid a hand on her forehead, then bowed his head. “Bless you on your journey, Ella Pope. You were so loved and are going to be so missed.”

He was blinking back tears as he headed back downstairs, then walked out onto the porch to call 911.

“911. What is your emergency?” the dispatcher asked.

“This is Cameron Pope. I just did a welfare check on an elderly relative and found her in her bed, deceased. I’ll need an ambulance sent to her residence. She wasn’t suffering from any disease, but she was in her late nineties. It is my understanding that in instances like this, she must be transported to a hospital for a doctor to officially pronounce her dead.”

“What’s her name and address?” the dispatcher asked.

“Ella Pope, 10085 Pope Mountain Road. Once you reach the mailbox with that address, you’ll turn north. It’s the only one at the end of the lane.”

“Yes, sir. Are you going to be with her?” the dispatcher asked.

---