Adobe Palace

by Joyce Brandon

  “Well,” she said, stretching luxuriously, hoping he would look at her body, not her face, “if you’re ever in San Francisco, let me know. I don’t mind cheating on Hal with you. ‘Turnabout is fair play,’ they say.”

  “Thanks,” Lance said. “Your generosity sickens me.”

  Lance went directly to Stern’s office. The male secretary tried to stop him, but Lance opened Stern’s door and stalked into the room. Stern looked up, frowned.

  “Don’t bother to redo those papers,” Lance growled.

  “But you said—”

  “Forget what I said.”

  “But we have to have proof of desertion and adultery—”

  “You’ll have it. As soon as I can get it for you.”

  Samantha got sick. She stayed in bed for two days with fever, chills, and headaches. Juana diagnosed it as influenza. At first every time Samantha woke up and remembered the Indians’ dying, she cried, but after the second day she started to get control of herself, mostly because she didn’t want to be a constant reminder to her son, who shouldn’t be dwelling on death or dying.

  The basement they had moved into was separated by canvas to give the illusion of privacy. At first Nicholas came periodically and slipped into bed with her. Juana would find him there, get him up, and give him something to keep him busy, so Samantha could have her privacy, but Nicholas peeked in at her every few hours. Finally the afternoon of the second day he caught her awake. She welcomed him into her bed and held him close.

  “I was worried,” he said, his slim body tense.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I got sick.”

  Nicholas burrowed against her, pressing his face to her breasts the way he’d done as a baby. “I wanted to see Young Hawk before they buried him. I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “I know you did, but…we couldn’t wait. We had to bury them right away.”

  “But I needed to say good-bye.”

  “There was no time, Nicholas.”

  “Why did they die?”

  Samantha was ready for his question. “An Indian disease. I don’t know the name of it.”

  Nicholas leaned away from her and looked into her eyes. “Did they cough a lot?” The question was phrased so innocently. As if he had no stake in the answer.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  His blue eyes watched her with solemn regard, weighing whether she had just lied to him.

  “Have you been reading your lessons?” She kept up a steady barrage of questions until he tired of trying to answer them and wandered outside.

  The next morning Steve sent two dozen men, a dozen wagons, and Juana and Tristera down the mountain to supervise moving the furniture up to the new house. They managed it in one trip.

  That night Nicholas couldn’t get to sleep. She read him a story, which usually worked, but this time it didn’t. He started to cry when she tried to leave him.

  “Don’t go,” he pleaded.

  Samantha sat down on the side of his bed. “I’m only a few steps away. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Nightmares?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you forget how to chase off monsters?”

  “It doesn’t work anymore,” he said accusingly.

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought about it a moment. “The monsters are okay, but now I have wolfess.”

  “Wolfess? What are wolfess?”

  Nicholas bared his teeth and made a mean dog face.

  “Wolves?”

  “Yes, wolfess.”

  “Tell me about these wolves. What do they do?”

  “They ate Young Hawk and his family, and now they’re going to eat me.”

  That chilled Samantha. They were only dreams, but panic seized her. “That’s nonsense,” she said.

  Nicholas waited for her to show him what to do about his nightmare wolfess, but her mind refused to function. She couldn’t think of anything to do. “I’ll read you another story,” she said.

  Steve hired Nicholas to sweep up after the carpenters and pick vegetables from the cook’s garden. The boy was such an enthusiastic worker, Steve had to give him additional assignments to keep him busy. When Nicholas ran out of other work, he pulled nails out of the scrap lumber, his thin arms straining against the big hammer to get the square iron nails out of the boards. When he had a bagful, he delivered them to the blacksmith to have them weighed and tallied on his worksheet. When he didn’t have anything else to do, he watched the blacksmith melt and repour the nails.

  To keep him motivated, Steve paid the boy at the end of every day. Each night Nicholas brought his coins to Samantha; she watched him proudly count them and write the amount in a logbook Steve had given him.

  “A dollar twenty-seven. Steve says if I save my money I’ll be richer than Midas,” he said proudly.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. That’s as much as my cowhands make in a day.”

  “It is?” Nicholas’s eyes were round. “Wow.”

  Whenever Nicholas had spare time, he followed Steve around. Steve showed him how to drive a nail, saw a board, use a level, and finally how to inventory building supplies, a daily chore to make certain the workmen didn’t run out of some critical piece of building material.

  It gave Samantha enormous pleasure to look out the window and see Steve and her son sitting on a stack of adobe bricks, ledgers in hand, Nicholas so slender and serious, Steve so sturdy and patient.

  Between following Steve, harvesting vegetables and nails, and sweeping, Nicholas was so busy he stopped asking about his dead friend.

  It became clear to Steve that something had changed between Samantha and himself. He waited to give her time to recover from her ordeal and then he caught her alone on the hillside behind the house.

  “Wait up,” he called after her.

  Samantha turned, surprised.

  Steve climbed the remaining distance between them. “You’ve been avoiding me lately,” he said.

  “Have I?” she asked, stalling for time.

  “So, what happened between you and Lando?”

  Samantha had dreaded this moment. Her heart started to pound, but she would not lie to him. “Lance proposed to me.”

  “And?”

  “And I accepted, conditionally.”

  “What condition?”

  “That he get over Angie or go back to her.”

  “Well, I guess that’ll be no problem for him. Thanks for being honest with me.” Steve turned and climbed back down the hill. Samantha sat down, suddenly too weak to continue her climb.

  Samantha waited for word from Lance, but it didn’t come. And without it, all she could do was struggle with her attraction to Steve. She knew it wasn’t fair to lead Steve on. There could be no future in it, but the more she denied the attraction, the stronger it seemed to become. It grew increasingly difficult to work in such close proximity with him and not be constantly aware of how deeply he affected her.

  Steve dominated the entire mountainside. Morning, afternoon, and evening, she could hear his voice ring out, catch the sound of his laughter, the sight of his broad shoulders that seemed to taper into an ever leaner waist and hips. Her hands remembered the feel of him, her lips the taste. She felt certain he was going to drive her crazy.

  At such times she stopped what she was doing and listened. Wishing for…she knew not what. She had promised Lance. But she hadn’t expected it to be this hard. She loved Lance. She wanted to marry him and have his children, but…somehow, trying to deny her feelings for Steve seemed to make them grow. Now she was thinking about Steve all the time.

  When she could stand it no longer, she finally set aside whatever she was doing and searched him out on some pretext. Today she found him giving instructions to the carpenters building the dumbwaiter between the basement kitchen and the first-floor dining room.

  “How’s it going?” she asked, stopping beside him. He looked at her; she felt the tingle of
his glance all the way to her toes.

  “Depends on how much frustration you like in your life,” Steve said, tilting his head toward the dumbwaiter. “Let me show you how it works, or better yet, how it was supposed to have worked, if they’d sent all the parts, which they didn’t.” He explained in such detail, the cooks clanged their dinner bells before he finished. Men put down their tools, looked askance at him, and headed for the eating area behind the house.

  “Can I be doing anything for ye before I go, lad?” Ian Macready asked, stopping beside them.

  “See you in the morning, Ian.”

  “If I be living that long, the way this madman be pushing us,” Ian said, doffing his hat at Samantha.

  Mumbling to himself, Ian walked out the front door. Gradually the incessant hammering and banging and rolling of heavily laden wheelbarrows up the wooden planks ceased. Smells of chili and corn bread mingled with the aroma of beef cooking over an open fire. The house grew quiet.

  Samantha felt suddenly self-conscious about being alone with Steve. Her heart pounded. She walked to one of the window openings and looked out across the desert. “It’s so beautiful from here…”

  Steve walked over to stand behind her. Beneath the lace of her white blouse, her skin looked warm and inviting, her breasts rising and falling with her breathing.

  “What does the second floor look like?” she asked.

  He cleared his throat. “Maybe we’d better take a look,” he said, his voice still husky. He followed her up the stairs on the west side of the house to the second-floor bedrooms and bathrooms.

  Samantha stepped over nails and hammers and piles of lumber. Resiny smells of pitch pine stung her nostrils. Three walls of windows encircled the sun room. Looking south, she could see for miles. “I can’t believe I own this,” she whispered.

  “Indians don’t believe anyone owns anything. They say the land belongs to the one it wants to belong to.”

  “How quaint.”

  “Quaint?” he asked. “To me the land looks powerful enough to do anything it wants.”

  Samantha laughed. “Maybe you haven’t seen my deed.”

  “Men have fought and died to own land. But we come into this world with empty hands, and we leave the same way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, if you own the land, command it to do something.”

  Samantha laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, when you really own something, you can make it do things.”

  Samantha frowned, then a thought came to her. “Okay,” she said, facing the window. “Remain as you are,” she commanded.

  Steve walked to the window and stood beside her. As they watched, a dead tree chose that moment to fall with a loud crash and send a boulder bouncing down the mountainside.

  “The Great Spirit has spoken,” Steve whispered.

  “Bull! That was sheer luck on your part.” She decided to take the offensive. “You believe in this Great Spirit?”

  “Don’t you believe in God?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What difference does it make if we call the Creator ‘God’ or the ‘Great Spirit’?”

  “Oh. When you put it that way…”

  She’d been avoiding looking directly at Steve, feeling safer gazing out at the mountainside. Now she turned to look at him. Thumbs hooked in his belt, he looked every inch the man who had carried her to his bed those long weeks ago. Her blood punched against her throat.

  “How’s your arm?”

  “My…arm?”

  Her body burned. She knew better than to touch him, but her hand reached out and stroked his left arm. “You were shot here, don’t you remember?” She was glad his intent gaze stayed on her face. He didn’t see her hand tremble.

  His brows knit. When he scowled like that it made her heart flutter. “I may lose my ranch.” She had no idea what made her say that. Perhaps a plea for mercy from this man who didn’t look like he had any.

  “I can’t believe that’ll ever happen.”

  “I received a letter from my attorney. He’s delayed the court hearing a number of times, but it can’t be delayed again. He’s going to Washington next month.”

  Steve moved to stand behind her. The heat of his body roused an answering heat in her. He didn’t touch her, but he might as well have, considering the effect his nearness had on her heart.

  “Have you heard from your…fiancé?”

  “No, but he’s never been much of a writer.” She had no idea why she hadn’t heard from Lance. Maybe he had made up with Angie. Any number of things might have happened.

  Steve could see nothing had changed there. Samantha would defend Lando with her dying breath. Unexplained rage flushed through him. He either had to walk away or do something he would regret. “Well,” he said gruffly, “my dinner is waiting.”

  Samantha watched his broad back as he strode across the cluttered floor and skimmed down the stairs. Frustration almost overwhelmed her. Her heart ached dully. If she didn’t hear from Lance soon, she would die trying to be true to a promise he might now have forgotten.

  Chila couldn’t sleep. She got up and looked at the clock. Only two o’clock. She’d awakened at midnight, at one o’clock, and now.

  She threw the sheet aside and stood up. She checked on Piney, sleeping in the spare bedroom. She had nursed him for weeks, but he didn’t seem to get any better. He would wake up every now and then and be in a lot of pain. A time or two she had helped him out of bed; he had sat on the porch in the evening cool, but if he was actually recovering, it was the slowest recovery she’d ever seen.

  She was wide-awake, and there wasn’t a blamed thing to do in the middle of the night except eat, and she wasn’t hungry. She lit a lamp and looked around for a book to read. But she knew there wasn’t a book in the house she hadn’t read. Then she remembered her sister had sent her a box of their grandmother’s things a few years ago. She’d never gone through the box because it made her feel sad. But she couldn’t feel any sadder than she did now, so she might as well open it.

  The box was in the spare bedroom under the bed. Chila carried it into the parlor. Under the first layer of newspaper she found a porcelain doll her grandmother had treasured. Ever since Chila had been old enough to understand words her grandmother had told her that doll would be hers someday. But she hadn’t wanted it. She called it the choky doll, because when she spent the night at her grandmother’s house its white face seemed to glow in the dark. She was sure it was going to wait until she was asleep, fly across the room at her, and choke her to death.

  Chila carefully set the doll aside. Its face still seemed to glow. She turned it over, so she couldn’t see its face. The next level was a set of saucers and teacups, all broken from their ride across the country. Chila set the broken pieces aside to take out to the garbage dump behind the house.

  “Too bad your face didn’t break,” she said to the doll. The third level was all books. Chila grinned. Just what she needed. She picked one up and found it wasn’t a novel at all. They were her grandmother’s diaries.

  Chila opened one.

  The best remedy I’ve found for stammering is to have the child read aloud very slowly.

  Chila smiled. Her grandmother was a great one for remedies. She must have had a remedy for just about everything. That gave her hope. Maybe there was a remedy for Piney’s gunshot wound.

  At first Chila felt odd reading her grandmother’s diaries, but once started she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She picked through them and found the ones for the years after she was born. She would start with those. Maybe her grandmother was the sort who got smarter every year of her life.

  Chila read until dawn. The kerosene lamp started to flicker, or she would have probably kept reading. The diaries would have been fairly dull to anyone else. Her grandmother had kept them instead of gossiping with her neighbors, who lived too far away.

  Chila moved to the window to see if there was enough lig
ht yet to read by. There wasn’t really, but she could make out the words. She started to close the book, but she just had to turn one more page.

  “How to kill a devil.”

  Chila blinked. “Well, Ah’ll be…” She read the page with growing excitement. A devil is impervious to bullets. That’s one way you can tell he isn’t a human being, it said.

  Chila realized the truth of that immediately. Bullets had never touched Denny. They seemed to just slip around his body. She’d sort of suspected it, though. That’s why she’d walked right into his room and held the gun against his head. But being a devil, he’d probably known she was coming and had placed a decoy in his bed.

  Chila read the remedy for killing a devil; it made sense to her. She marked the page, but she knew she wouldn’t forget what to do. Carefully she put the book away, comforted by the knowledge that the Lord had led her to the diaries just exactly when she needed them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  According to the Phoenix Gazette, that summer was the warmest and driest on record. Steve worked the men from dawn until the heat of the day; then they took a siesta and worked from sunset until dark. Samantha couldn’t tell if he did it because he was anxious to leave, or if it was only because he knew she was tired of living in chaos and wanted the house finished.

  The longer she stayed away from Steve, the more she missed him and the harder it became to play the role of aloof employer. The need to do so was real. She was engaged to Lance, and she had to live in this territory after Steve left. Besides, everyone at the work site, including her own closest allies, kept watching for any sign of a romance between them.

  Samantha tried to put Steve out of her mind, but every time she saw him, even from a distance, her mouth got dry and her heart stopped and then started again with awful suddenness. Even when it was only a man whose shoulders squared in the same way, or whose hair shone blue black in the sunlight…

  She’d never felt this sexual pull with Lance, so she had been unprepared for the way it threw her into turmoil. But the day dragged unless she could find some excuse to at least exchange a few words with him—always in plain sight of others and usually only for a moment. Each time, her heart pounded and her palms sweated, but she had to do it.