Prairie Moon

by Maggie Osborne

  She glared down at her hand as if striking him had soiled her palm. Then she crawled off the bed and ran to her own room, slamming the door behind her. He heard the lock snap into place.

  He didn’t attempt to follow. Right now, she’d welcome the devil sooner than she would open her door to James Cameron. She needed time. He’d go to her in the morning, because he knew she’d have more questions.

  But in the morning, she was gone.

  After he broke down the connecting door, he discovered she had left behind the dinner dress and anything else that he’d bought her. Fragments of burned paper lay in the hearth ashes. Kneeling, he was able to make out a few words and realized that she’d burned the journal she’d been keeping.

  Walking to the window, he leaned on the sill and gazed outside, wondering where she would go. He was a hunter, he’d find her. What worried him more was . . . then what?

  She’d hailed a cab and directed the driver to take her to a hotel on the far side of town, something clean and respectable, but cheap. Fifty cents a night including breakfast didn’t sound cheap to Della, but the cab driver swore that it was. For another nickel the driver carried her small trunk to the room she rented, then left her sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed because there was no side chair. She had only a dim idea of where she was in relation to the train station. Not close to the River Manse, that was the important thing.

  After the driver departed, Della locked the door, then emptied her drawstring purse and counted her money out on a plain white bedspread. She had left Two Creeks, Texas, with ten dollars. As Cameron had insisted on paying for everything, she’d spent only a dollar seventy-five during the journey. For the life of her she couldn’t remember what she’d spent it on. Then she’d paid the driver fifteen cents to get her to this hotel and she’d given him a gratuity to cart her trunk upstairs since there were no bellmen. She had paid three nights in advance for the room, which left her with six dollars and fifty-five cents.

  That was enough to carry her for a few days while she decided what to do next.

  But first . . . she removed her hat and placed it atop a time-scarred bureau. Then she hung her traveling suit in the armoire and placed her shoes beneath her suit. Stockings, drawers, corset, and shimmy went into a bureau drawer, then she donned her oldest, faded flannel nightgown. The nightgown should have gone into the rag bin long ago, but when the world fell down around her ears, this was the item she reached for. She didn’t know why she’d packed it, but she had and she was glad.

  Della pulled down the window shade, shutting out the sight of a cold, dry day. Then she climbed into a bed almost as hard as the floor, slid beneath the covers, and pulled the pillow over her head.

  And then she gave herself up to the damp-eyed confusion that battered her mind. The man she was beginning to love had killed her husband. And everything she thought she knew about Cameron was wrong. He wasn’t a Southerner; he hadn’t been Clarence’s friend. He had deliberately deceived her.

  Della did not emerge from her hotel room for twenty-four hours. She paced. She raged. And occasionally she fell into an exhausted sleep, only to waken with fury in her heart and wisps of bad dreams darkening her mind.

  She had fed Cameron and washed and ironed his laundry. She had teased him and laughed with him. She had admired him. Once or twice she had let herself admit that she might love him. And the worst, the very worst: she had climbed into his bed and all but begged him to make love to her. The son of a bitch.

  When she thought about making love to Clarence’s killer, she felt wild and crazy inside, wanted to scream and tear her hair, wanted to smash furniture and claw down the walls. She wanted to buy a gun and shoot James Cameron straight through his black heart.

  On the morning of her second day alone, she stood at the window and watched snow drifting past the window panes. It was a light snow that melted as soon as it reached the ground, not the raging blizzard that her heart longed to experience.

  The intensity of her anger made her stomach cramp. An hour ago she had summoned a maid and requested tea and toast. Now she felt sick and wished she hadn’t eaten.

  But it wasn’t the toast that made her ill. She should have pushed harder for the missing information. She had sensed it, had felt it, but she hadn’t pressed. Something in her hadn’t wanted to know.

  Cameron had not lied outright, she gave him that. But he was guilty of the silent lie. Of letting her draw false conclusions and not correcting her when she assumed he was Clarence’s friend. Or when she asked his opinion about Clarence. He was guilty of letting her iron his shirts when he knew she would not have if she’d known who he really was. He was guilty of letting her climb into his bed.

  She glared at the snowflakes. There was no escaping the admission that she’d been a fool. If she had paid closer attention, she might have noticed Cameron’s evasions. Sometimes he hadn’t even needed to evade a direct question, because she refused to hear the truth.

  Last night she had remembered asking him where he was from. He had answered, Winthrop. And what did she do? Instantly she had decided there must be a Winthrop, Georgia, instead of recalling the Winthrop outside of Boston, even though she had visited there as a child.

  Turning from the window, she pressed the heels of her palms against her eyelids. He should have told her the truth at once.

  Now she would never know for certain, but she believed she could have accepted the truth if he’d told her that first night. She might even have admired him for facing the widow of a man he had killed. It was even possible that she still would have invited him to sleep in her barn. Naturally she would be curious about him.

  But Cameron had chosen to deceive her. He’d used her badly.

  Needing to clear her mind, Della threw on some clothing and pulled a shawl over the shoulders of her traveling suit. There wasn’t much traffic outside the hotel, thank heaven. The wagons and gigs that did pass splashed cold mud on the boards laid down as a walkway. When Della reached the wrought-iron gates of a small park, she turned inside to escape the mud and followed a brick path set beneath bare-branched elms.

  The cold air and snowflakes melting on her cheeks were not enough to cool her anger. She had slept with Clarence’s killer.

  Cameron should have told her the truth before . . . to be fair, he had tried . . . but she had stopped him . . . she’d told him she would die of humiliation if he refused her . . . so he’d let her into his bed and then he had attempted to tell her the truth . . . but she wouldn’t hear it . . .

  Bending, she brushed a dusting of snow off the seat of a wooden bench, then sat heavily and rubbed her temples. Cameron had carried the letters and the photograph for ten long years. Why? Because he couldn’t face her knowing he had devastated her life?

  That couldn’t be entirely correct. He’d found her in the saloon but had gone away without giving her the letters and the photo. If Cameron had done the right thing then, she wouldn’t now be sitting in a snowy park in St. Louis.

  On her way to see her daughter.

  That was another deception. He wasn’t doing a kind thing for the wife of a friend. Cameron acted out of guilt and shame. He felt responsible for Claire growing up with the Wards instead of with her parents, and he damn well should. Because of James Cameron, Claire’s father was dead and her mother lived far away in a small Texas town no one had ever heard of.

  No wonder he pressed her to reunite with her daughter. Cameron was trying to reassemble the pieces of lives he had broken.

  That night she was almost asleep when she thought of something that brought her upright, clutching the sheet to her chest and blinking hard.

  James Cameron had found her working in the saloon, they both recalled that brief meeting. But he had spoken to her, then he had gone away. And shortly afterward, her monthly allotment began to arrive.

  “Oh my heavens,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.

  Every instinct shouted that the money didn’t come from Mr. Ward. It came f
rom Cameron. That’s why he hadn’t given her the letters ten years ago. She would have noticed that he brought her the letters and then the money began to arrive. She would have guessed that he was easing his conscience by helping to support a woman he’d made a widow.

  Lying back on the pillows, she stared up at the ceiling. All these years . . . it was Cameron’s money that arrived at the bank every month. Cameron’s money that had made it possible for her to quit working at the saloon. Cameron’s money that kept her alive.

  She remembered his comments about the farm. He must have believed that he was supplementing an income she received from Clarence’s father. He hadn’t known that he was her sole source of support.

  So if she telegraphed the bank in Two Creeks to wire her enough money to complete the journey to Atlanta, she would be requesting Cameron’s money. James Cameron had been part of her life for ten years, she just hadn’t known it.

  For the next few days Della awoke at dawn, dressed, then wandered the streets of St. Louis. Sometimes she actually noticed the houses or shops she passed, but mostly she traveled in the past, thinking about everything, from the day she had arrived in Atlanta as a young girl up to the evening that she’d slept with the Yankee who killed her husband.

  At midmorning of her fourth day alone, she returned to the small winter brown park and sat on the bench she had begun to think of as her own. It was time to consider finances and make decisions.

  Food and additional days at the hotel were nibbling away her money. Like it or not, she would have to telegraph her banker in Two Creeks.

  She had decided to finish the journey to Atlanta. She was almost there, and she hadn’t changed her mind about wanting to fill an empty heart with the sight of her daughter.

  Feeling overwhelmed by everything she had to do— wire her bank for money, get checked out of the hotel and get to the train station, buy her tickets—Della closed her eyes and rubbed her glove against her cheek. After a moment she felt the bench give slightly as someone sat beside her, then she inhaled the strong, rich aroma of coffee.

  She slid a look toward the man seated beside her. “You!” Instantly her shoulders stiffened and her spine went rigid. “How did you find me?” That was a stupid question, and she knew it the minute the words fell out of her mouth.

  Cameron set one of the coffee cups on the bench between them and kept the other. “Please, Della. Give me a minute and just listen.”

  Chapter 18

  “I won’t apologize for killing Clarence Ward.” Not once had Cameron’s rehearsed speech begun with words guaranteed to offend and make the situation worse. Damn it anyway.

  “I want to throw this coffee in your face,” she said, speaking between clenched teeth. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t.”

  “It was a war. If I hadn’t killed Clarence, Clarence would have killed me. Only one soldier was going to walk out of those trees.” He glanced at the steam hovering above the coffee and watched her reach for the cup. “I don’t mind dying, but I’m not going to make it easy.

  The man who puts me down has to be faster, better, and luckier than I am. That wasn’t Clarence, not that day in the woods.”

  “This is pointless.” She touched the cup but didn’t lift it. “I’m cold. I’m going back to the hotel.”

  “I’ve done three things in my life that I regret. I bought a commission and went to war. I waited ten years before I gave you what was rightfully yours. And I deceived you and took advantage, knowing you’d despise me after you learned the whole truth.”

  “Despise is too mild. You should have told me the truth immediately! Maybe nothing would have changed, or maybe everything would have changed and we wouldn’t be sitting here now. But I should have been told who you were and offered a choice about whether I wanted to spend time with you given the circumstances.” Her eyes burned and a nerve twitched in her cheek. But she stayed on the bench instead of rising.

  “I can’t change what I did, but maybe I can help you have a better life than you’ve had.”

  “It’s terrible that it was you who killed Clarence.”

  “If it hadn’t been me, it would have been some other Yankee soldier.”

  “But what’s worse is that you took me to bed without telling me it was you who killed him.”

  “You’re right,” he said after a minute, staring straight ahead.

  Della clenched her fists in her lap. “What makes this so unforgivable is the deceit. You came into my home and sat at my table. You let me believe that you were my husband’s friend! What makes my stomach churn is that I was falling in love with you! I gave myself to the man who put a bullet into my husband’s heart!”

  He’d been imagining this confrontation for ten years. Her words and her expression shouldn’t have sliced him into pieces. “I want to see this journey through to its end.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you want.”

  “I think you want it, too, Della. You want to see Claire and talk to her and find out if the two of you can have a future together. I know.” He raised his hand. “You say you only want to see her, and maybe that’s where it ends. But seeing her might be the beginning of something good for you both.”

  She stared at him as if he were something loathsome. “What are you proposing? That we continue the journey as if nothing happened? As if nothing has changed?”

  “I said I’d take you to your daughter and that’s what I mean to do. You don’t have to sit beside me on the train, don’t have to take your meals in my company. We’ll continue on whatever terms you want.”

  She was silent long enough that his coffee started to ice over before she spoke again.

  “It’s you who sends the money every month, isn’t it?” When he didn’t answer, she sighed. “I thought so. Tell me something, Cameron.”

  It was Cameron again. The night she came to him, she had called him James. No one called him James.

  “I’m curious. Does sending the money and taking me to Claire, do these things balance the scales in your mind? Once this journey ends, will you put the war away and let it go?”

  “I killed a hundred men who had wives and parents and children and lives waiting for them,” he said flatly. “If I knew the names of those people, I’d do something to try to make it right. I don’t know what, but I’d try. But I only know the name and circumstances of one Confederate soldier.”

  “So you’ll go on, hunting and killing outlaws whose names and circumstances you do know.” She met his eyes. “Helping me won’t alter one minute of what you remember or what you feel or what you think you owe.”

  “Do you want me to say that you’re right? What the hell else can I do?”

  “You said that the last man you killed put a face on the enemy, do you remember telling me that?”

  Of course he did.

  She stood up from the bench and looked down at him. “Now I have a face for the enemy, too.”

  “There’s one more thing,” he said, standing and moving close enough to inhale the scent of her, “then we won’t talk about this again.”

  She stepped back, her gaze fixed.

  “I didn’t use you to scratch a momentary itch. I believe you know that or you wouldn’t have come to me. I spent ten years looking at your photograph almost every day, Della. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve loved you all of my life.” She sucked in a breath and her face went white. “That doesn’t excuse letting you come into my bed. I should have stopped you and I should have told you the whole truth right then. No, that’s wrong. I should have told you the truth the evening I rode down your driveway.”

  “You took advantage,” she whispered. The accusation in her eyes was like a knife in his gut.

  “The only thing I took from you was a memory. That’s all I wanted.” When she turned away from him, he cleared his throat, then pulled out his pocket watch and consulted the time. “We have three hours before the train leaves. Will you come, or do you want me to send you back to Texas?”

  �
�I’ve already decided what I’ll do.” Her head came up and her eyes flashed. “You owe me this trip, Cameron!”

  “That’s how I figure it.”

  She moved past him, twitching her skirt aside so the hem didn’t touch his legs, and she refused his arm when he offered.

  He watched a freight wagon rumble past the small park’s gate, then smoothed the brim of his hat. “We’ll take your trunk to the station, then we’ll have time for a light supper. We should eat something because the line we’re riding doesn’t have dining cars.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to sit in a restaurant with you. When we arrived, a man was selling hot potatoes on the platform. If he’s still there, that’s all I want. A potato.”

  They didn’t speak again during the walk to her hotel, and he waited in a small, unadorned lobby while she packed.

  He’d been watching her for two days, trying to decide when and how best to approach her. From the start he’d known there was nothing he could say to ease her pain or deflect her hatred. His goal had been to persuade her to continue on to Atlanta. Cameron could live with her hatred, that had been inevitable and he’d expected it. But he couldn’t live with her not finding her daughter.

  He sat on a horsehair chair with his hat on his knees and remembered the firelight glowing through her nightgown as she stood in the doorway. He remembered the sweetness of her mouth and the damp heat of her skin. No matter what happened in the years to come, he would always have that one perfect hour when she had looked up at him with shining eyes and called him James.

  Della’s preference was to ride in a separate car. Her second choice would have been to sit by herself. By now, however, she knew a traveler’s manner of passing time was to speculate about fellow passengers. So she sat in silence beside Cameron, her arms folded across her chest, her head turned to the window. Observers would note silence and rigid postures and would conclude the existence of difficulties, but she and Cameron wouldn’t be as interesting as they would have been if they had chosen separate seating.