What did that matter? she wondered. She wished she were dead. All she could think about was how her father had looked that final night, winking at her from across the campfire, bewhiskered and grinning, wrinkled as an old shoe. After the holdup the following morning when he didn’t return with the others, Burl threw it in her face that her father had been stupid and gotten himself shot dead. She hadn’t believed it. She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t going back home. That was certain. Desperate, she had followed Burl and those hated, mangy Rikes to that mountain cabin.
Now she was gunshot and too weak to think straight. She felt like she was going to bust open.
“How old are you?” the lad asked again.
“Twenty in the summer,” she mumbled. It was a lie. She had turned eighteen the fall before.
He extended his hand but realized she didn’t have the strength to shake it. He gave her a sympathetic smile. “My name’s Hobie Fenton. I’ll be sixteen come summer. Fell out of the barn loft when I was four. Broke my arm. I ain’t never been gunshot. Does it hurt?” He craned his neck to view her wound. It was covered with a bandage.
The marshal pinned Hobie with a ferocious frown.
“Yes’r, Marshal?” Hobie straightened with a hint of embarrassment in his rosy cheeks. A gust of snowy wind ruffled his badly barbered hair.
“When you get back from Munjoys, sweep out the north cell. I’ll put Miss McQue in there.”
Hobie’s mouth fell open to reveal crooked teeth. “Uh, but…uh, y—yes’r.”
Jail? Jodee fought to sit up. She wouldn’t go. He couldn’t make her. She hadn’t done anything. Didn’t he understand that?
Taking off at a run, Hobie disappeared into a nearby store bearing the ornate signboard, Photographs. Moments later a man in a blue vest trotted out carrying a wooden box camera on long spindly legs. Hobie followed, carrying a T-shaped contraption on a stick.
A stocky man strolled from the nearby restaurant, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He wore a deputy’s badge but had weasel eyes like Burl’s. “I kept the town buttoned up for you real tight while you was gone, Marshal.”
The marshal stepped closer to Jodee, almost as if protecting her. “Prop the outlaws’ bodies over there, Hicks. For photographs.”
“You did a bang-up job, all right, bringin’ ’em back alive.” Hicks sauntered away. “I’m real impressed.”
The marshal watched the man, his eyes narrowed to slits, his lips white.
Jodee watched Hicks prop the bodies against the jailhouse porch. There lay old man Rike, his long grey beard fluttering in the wind. And his three mangy sons, ugly as butchered hogs. It was too much to comprehend. She wasn’t sorry the Rikes were dead, not a whit, but it was jarring to see men she had known for two years frozen in eternal sleep like that, all four of them. Stiff as cord wood. The photographer stuck his head under a black drape on the back of the box camera with legs. A blinding explosion came from the contraption Hobie held. Townspeople closed in for a better look at the dead outlaws.
“Show’s over, folks,” the marshal announced. “Go on about your business.”
A portly man with a handlebar mustache pushed forward from the crowd. He shielded his eyes from swirling snow. “Hungry, Marshal?”
Pressing a hand to his belly, he looked disgusted at the thought of eating. “But get a meal together for Miss McQue here, if you would. She hasn’t eaten in two days or more.”
When he turned back to scowl at her, Jodee averted her eyes.
“Is it true you’re T. T. McQue’s daughter?” he asked with disbelief.
Forcing herself to meet his dark stare, Jodee told herself she must never trust him because she couldn’t gauge what kind of man he was. If he knew her fear, he might use it against her. Even abuse her, maybe.
She studied the way his tanned skin lay so smooth across his cheekbones. His chestnut hair tossed in the wind. She felt like she was drowning in those coffee dark eyes. It took her breath away to have him stare at her like maybe he could read her thoughts easy as print. Something akin to heat lightning went through her body. But he was taking her to jail. He hadn’t even asked if she’d done anything to deserve it. He had to be a bad man. She had to expect the worst from him.
“Can you stand, Miss McQue?”
Determined to get away by whatever means possible, Jodee used all her strength to swing her legs over the edge of the travois. They felt like logs. She would dash to that alley over there, run into the shadows—but her muscles betrayed her. They felt like jelly. She struggled to push herself upright, frightened by her weakness. Her knees wouldn’t hold.
Before she collapsed, the lawman swept her into his arms. Her shoulder went molten with pain.
Despite her feeble protests, the marshal drew her close to his chest, closer than need be, she thought, fighting him. She felt one strong arm behind her back and another beneath her knees. She wanted to lay her cheek against his shoulder, but she held herself stiff as a plank while he carried her inside out of the wind. The jailhouse smelled of gun oil and wood smoke. She struggled to be set on her feet, but the marshal ducked through an iron doorway and maneuvered her inside a small cell.
“I didn’t do anything.” she whispered, pushing at his chest. “I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry if I’m hurting you, Miss McQue, but you can’t stay at the hotel, and I couldn’t see leaving you to freeze in the street.” Gently he lowered her onto a canvas cot against the rear stone wall.
“I’m not an outlaw.” She twisted away. He mustn’t see her tears. They were blinding her now.
“Hobie,” he called, watching as she tried to get off the cot. “Fetch that knapsack from the travois. Then fetch a blanket and pillow from the hotel. What I have here won’t do.”
Looking reluctant to miss the marshal’s interrogation, Hobie plodded out. When he returned with her knapsack, Jodee tried to snatch it away but couldn’t reach it. She felt faint. What was going to happen to her? Without her father to protect her, she didn’t know how to act. She watched the marshal lift the knapsack’s frayed flap and pull out a battered book from inside. Brows furrowed, he turned it over as if he had never seen a book before.
“Freestone Third-Year Speller,” he read the title.
“I found it.” Her voice sounded far away. She’d found that book alongside a road, she thought, years before. East Texas, maybe. Did that count as stealing? Did that make her a thief? Every stitch of clothing she was wearing—the shirt, the snug britches—she’d snatched from some farmwife’s wash line because her old clothes had worn out. And the boots—
Tarnation…she was a thief! There was no more fooling herself about it. She gasped for breath. He thought she was bad because she was bad. She was every bad thing folks had ever thought of her.
Opening the speller, the marshal read the name scrawled on the flyleaf: Jodeen Marilee Latham McQue. She’d been playing schoolhouse the day she wrote that. She’d been, what, thirteen years old? How foolish that seemed now.
“This is your name? Jodeen?”
“Jodee for short,” she said softly.
Putting the book aside, the marshal rummaged and pulled out a folded white handkerchief from the depths of the knapsack. Jodee tried to take it from him, but he held it out of reach, scowling suspiciously. Inside the folds was a round gold locket with a broken chain. “Is this yours or taken during a robbery?” His eyes drilled holes into her soul.
“Don’t think to keep that,” she warned in a gruff tone. “That’s mine.”
If only she could slap him, she thought, shivering with rage. What right did he have to go through her things? But she wasn’t stupid. She watched him pry open the locket with his thumbnail and peer closely at the tiny likeness framed inside. That was her private memento, she thought bitterly. Her breath came hard and fast, making her dizzy.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me this is your mother.”
Her throat tightened. “Yes.”
>
If she had her pistol she would’ve shot him dead—except she’d never shot at a man. Not even Burl Tangus. She balled her fists.
“Let me get this straight.” He cocked his head and looked hard at her. “The outlaw T. T. McQue was your father. That makes you an outlaw’s daughter in possession of a real gold locket that you claim isn’t stolen.” He raised his brows in question. “You’re certain this is yours? Not something bought with stolen money?”
“I was wearing that when—”
She bit back her reply. She didn’t have to tell him anything. Her father said never to talk to the law. Lawmen assumed things, same as everybody she had ever known.
With a sigh of exasperation, the marshal snapped the locket closed. After a downcast moment he slipped it into his shirt pocket. He reached inside the knapsack and dragged out a wad of threadbare muslin. He held it up like a rag. “Yours, too?”
She looked away, overwhelmed with shame.
Putting the knapsack out of reach, he straightened to his full looming height and shook out the fabric. It was a torn, stained bed dress about the size a child of twelve would wear. For years she wore it under a shirt of her father's until it became so snug it gave way under the arms.
Clenching his jaw, the marshal watched her, waiting for what he expected would be an unconvincing story.
When she finally met his eyes, she said with burning defiance, “The locket belonged to my ma.” For some seconds she couldn’t make another sound. She remembered finding it, taking it after the funeral. Finally, she choked out, “My grandmother made that bed dress. I was wearing them things when Pa came for me. I was twelve.”
It looked like the marshal was turning the story over in his mind. He tipped his head down and glowered at her as if he could pull the truth out of her with the teeth of his eyes. “Twelve years old,” he stated flatly. “What do you mean, when your father came for you?”
“I mean, I was living with my grandmother. Pa came for Ma, like he promised he would, except she was dead. He didn’t know about me, so he took me instead. Carried me away on his horse. In the night.”
She wasn’t going to tell about peeing her bed dress because she was so scared of riding away with a man she’d never seen before. She couldn't say how her father laughed about it and kissed her out of pity and affection. And washed the bed dress himself in a creek while she hid in the bushes, shivering in his shirt. The marshal didn’t need to know nothing about that.
“We tried farming for a while,” she said, “Pa and me, but the soil was bad. We rented a little spread for a couple of years. The cattle got stole. I cooked for Pa, washed his clothes. Them others, Burl and the Rikes, they came later, after we run out of money and near to starved. Two years ago, about. I couldn’t stop Pa from deciding to ride with them.” She looked away. “I tried, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Crouching again, the marshal locked his eyes with her. What now? she wondered. The black part of his eyes got bigger. Reaching into her knapsack, pausing, eyes intense, he drew out a drawstring bag made of worn, stained buckskin. At first she didn’t see what he had in his hand. She was looking into his eyes, feeling a shudder blossom deep, and steal through her body like—
From the corner of her eye she saw the bag. Rearing back, she hit the wall hard, trying to get away from it. She threw out her left hand, fingers spread, as if to ward off a blow.
“That ain’t mine!”
The marshal dangled it in front of her, the ugly old thing, looking heavy and misshapen by its contents. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at her.
“That’s Burl’s loot bag! I seen him with it a hundred times. It ain’t mine. It ain’t! I swear on my dead Pa—where’d you get it? It wasn’t in my knapsack. I wouldn’t touch the dirty ol’ thing. He kept it down his pants. Always braggin’ on it. Somebody else put it in my knapsack. You got to believe me, Marshal!”
He looked at her so hard she felt like she was falling.
She was about to launch into a tirade of hysterical self-defense when he stood abruptly, still holding the bag, and ducked out of the cell. He slammed the barred door closed with a resounding clang.
She looked after him, startled and terrified. He didn’t believe her! “I ain’t done nothin’ to be locked up for! They didn’t give me Pa’s share. I don’t have a thing. I swear it on my mother’s grave!”
He stabbed a long iron key into the square iron lock and twisted. “Until I know different, Miss McQue, I have to assume you took part in that holdup that got the Ashton-Babcock stage driver killed.”
Two
“Hobie,” the marshal barked, causing Jodee to flinch.
The lad rushed inside, his face red with cold. He’d been waiting on the porch. “Yes, sir? It’s snowing hard now, Marshal. I better get home.”
“Fetch Doc on your way. Miss McQue needs her wound tended.”
After Hobie ran out, Jodee watched the marshal pluck a printed circular from a stack of papers on his desk.
“Do you know this man, Miss McQue?" he asked, pointing to the drawing on the paper. "Burl Tangus was part of your father’s gang. Was he at the stagecoach holdup at Ship Creek Crossing? Did he shoot at Avinelle Babcock?”
Her anger gave her strength. “I wasn’t there,” she snapped back. “I never went along on holdups. I stayed in camp. Always. I cooked for Pa. I listened to his stories. I washed his clothes, but I never robbed nobody. Pa wasn’t an outlaw for most of the years we were together, not until them others came along—the Rikes and Burl Tangus. And it wasn’t Pa’s gang, not like you mean. It was Burl’s. You want to know who planned the holdups? Burl planned them.” She fell back, holding her blazing shoulder. She hoped Burl had fallen off a mountain. She hoped he lay dead in a gorge. “Marshal, I don’t feel right.”
The marshal slammed outside, leaving the jailhouse door open. Cold air swept in and blew wanted circulars all over the floor. What was he so mad about, she wondered. She was the one behind bars.
With him out of sight, Jodee didn’t have to hold back her tears. As she wept helplessly, she felt ashamed for being so afraid. Her hair was a tangle, her britches dirty, her shirt torn and bloody. “Prairie rat,” Burl liked to call her. That's what she was, all right, grinding her fists into her eyes.
“He’s a good man, the marshal,” Hobie said, closing the door against the cold and gathering up the scattered circulars. “He’s gone over to the stage office. He won’t keep you in jail long. He’s just being careful.”
Jodee had forgotten the lad Hobie was still there. She dashed away her tears.
Then the restaurant owner pushed inside, carrying a cloth-covered tray. Snowflakes stood on his freshly oiled hair. “Out of my way, boy. It’s snowing to beat the band out there.” He winked at Jodee and kicked the door closed. “The name’s Artie Abernathy. Miss McQue, is it? Knock me over with a plank. Ain’t nobody ever heard of ol’ T. T. McQue possessing a daughter. I remember hearing his name way back, ten years maybe. You’re a daughter, you say? Not a little filly friend?”
He placed the tray on the floor in front of her cell door and then stood grinning at her expectantly, his paunch straining against his apron.
Jodee didn’t like knowing her father had been an outlaw during the years he’d been apart from her mother. She didn’t like knowing they’d lived on stolen money those first few years together. And she’d told him so when she figured it out. She wished she had the strength now to climb from the cot. She wanted to kick the tray. Filly friend. Is that what they thought of her?
Realizing she was not going to respond to his humor, Abernathy exchanged a few words with Hobie and plodded outside, shaking his head.
“Thinks he’s the funniest man in town,” Hobie grumbled. He poured Jodee a cup of coffee and added several pinches of sugar from a cloth sack. Bringing it to the cell door, he set the steaming tin cup on the tray. “I make the best coffee in town. Even Ma says so.”
The savory smells tantalized Jodee. She couldn’t rememb
er when she had last eaten. Painfully, she climbed to her feet and stood a moment, trying to maintain balance. Her head spun. Did Hobie have to humiliate her like this, watching her? Then she realized her shirt was torn half off her shoulder. A strip of cotton cloth stretched across her chest and around her back, holding a bandage in place over her wounded shoulder. A tantalizing patch of pale flesh was exposed above her breast.
Hobie’s face turned scarlet, but he didn’t look away.
With her left hand, Jodee clutched her shirt closed and forced herself to focus on the food. There would be time enough to think about getting away, she told herself. She had to get her strength back.
“I’d bring the tray inside to you, Miss McQue,” Hobie said, sounding sheepish, “but the marshal would skin me alive if you got out.”
Miss McQue, indeed, she thought. They didn’t fool her. To them she was trash. From the time she had been very small, folks had considered her trash. “My name,” she said in a gruff tone, “is just plain Jodee.”
Sinking to the floor in a cross-legged heap, she waited until the explosive pain in her shoulder subsided. With her left hand, she plucked away the napkin covering the tray. Oh, she gave a cry at the sight of the food. Pan-fried chicken. A wing and a drumstick, golden brown to perfection. Smelling like pure heaven. Feather light biscuits dripping in butter. Three of them. Mashed white potatoes, swimming in cream gravy. And a misshapen sugar cookie sparkling with crushed sugar.
Jodee could scarcely breathe for the choke of tears in her throat. Like a starving child, she grabbed the chicken leg, inhaled the aroma of it and then bit, savoring the first splash of flavor flooding her mouth. Memories assailed her. The farmhouse kitchen, her pretty mother sitting across the kitchen table from her, the smell of chicken sizzling in her grandmother’s iron skillet. Jodee felt as if she were five years old again, safe and sound, with her mother’s love protecting her.
Unable to endure Hobie's rapt stare, Jodee twisted away. As she chewed, tears poured down her cheeks. It was the first decent food she’d eaten in six years.
Her Outlaw Heart Page 2
