Two Brothers

by Linda Lael Miller

  The semblance of a grin touched his mouth. “No, ma’am,” he said.

  She wanted in the worst way to ask where he was going—speaking of improper questions—but she managed to hold her tongue. She could admit to herself, if not to him, that he was one of the reasons she didn’t want to leave Prominence.

  He leaned forward slightly, resting one arm across the pommel of his saddle. His eyes might have been windows on the sky itself, they were so blue. “How have you taken to storekeeping?”

  The memory of Mr. Kyle’s disturbing visit struck her with a visceral impact. “I’m sure I’ll be very good at it in a day or so,” she answered, because if there was one thing in the world she was sure of, it was her own ability to master almost any job. It was in the midst of that thought that she saw the marshal’s gaze move back over her shoulder and fix on someone standing behind her.

  After the briefest hesitation, he tugged at the brim of his hat. “Cornelia,” he said, by way of a greeting.

  “Shamus,” Cornelia affirmed, in slightly brittle tones. “You and I must try to find common ground. Mama and Papa would be sorely grieved by our estrangement. Perhaps you might come to supper this evening?”

  Shay’s eyes narrowed for a moment; his surprise and suspicion were clearly visible. Then, bright as lightning on a dark day, and just as deadly, the grin flashed. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he answered.

  Chapter 7

  SHAY AND TRISTAN SAT FACING EACH OTHER, their horses dancing skittishly, in the midst of a copse of birch trees, a hundred yards off the road. They would be visible to any passerby who took the trouble to look, but Shay didn’t reckon that his brother cared about that any more than he did.

  “It was Billy Kyle who robbed and killed those people,” Shay said, bending to pat the gelding’s neck.

  Tristan leaned forward to rest one arm across the pommel of his saddle. His hat was pulled down low to protect his eyes from the glare of the midday sun in the same way as Shay’s, and their clothes, while not exactly alike, were similar enough that they might have purchased them together. “That rancher’s kid?”

  Shay didn’t bother to answer or even nod. The question, he knew, had been rhetorical.

  “Well, it makes sense, I suppose. But why would a rich man’s son take a chance like that? He’ll hang for sure if he’s convicted, and it’s a rare jury that will countenance the murder of women.”

  Shay resettled his hat, but it still ended up at precisely the same angle as Tristan’s. No need of mirrors; he could probably shave without cutting himself just by looking at his brother’s face, and come out dapper as any dude. “If he admits what he did, or I find solid proof, I might not wait for a jury.”

  Tristan controlled his agitated horse with an expert, barely perceptible motion of the reins, which lay lightly in his left hand. “That wouldn’t be the right thing to do,” he said. “Still, it would be easy to forgive. All the same, you’re not taking justice into your own hands if I have anything to say about it.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I figure different,” Tristan said calmly. “That was my stagecoach, my money.” Maybe he’d intended to let that information slip, and maybe it had gotten past him in an unguarded moment. Either way, it was one hell of an announcement.

  Shay gave a low whistle, and both horses pricked up their ears, did some sidestepping, then settled down again. “Why, brother, I believe you lied to me. You said you worked for the man who owned the line.”

  Tristan’s grin was mildly cocky. “I do. I’ve always worked harder for myself than for anybody else, except maybe my pa, when I was still at home on the ranch.” The sparkle faded from his eyes and his mouth took on a somber shape. Therein lay a tale begging to be told, Shay surmised, but it wasn’t the time to dig for it. Tristan would talk about his adoptive family when and if he felt the need to do so.

  As if in afterthought, he turned, opened one of his saddlebags, pulled out a small book bound in a tattered cloth cover and held it out to Shay. “Here. This will tell you a little something about our folks, the Killigrews. I’ve read it through a hundred times, so you can keep it if you want.”

  Looking down at that little, dog-eared volume, lying where Tristan had placed it on the palm of his hand, Shay dealt with separate and violently conflicting urges. He wanted to devour it, page by page, word by word, but he knew its contents, framed in careful feminine handwriting, had the power to change his most basic conceptions about himself and his life. His desire to fling the book into the brush or shove it back at Tristan was equally strong.

  “A man needs to know who he is,” Tristan said quietly, and Shay realized how much he’d given away, sitting there staring at that cheap remembrance book as though it had teeth sharp enough to sunder sinew from bone.

  “I know who I am,” Shay replied, but he wasn’t so sure that was the truth. Not the whole truth, in any case. In retrospect, he’d often felt an odd, disjointed loneliness, throughout his life, as if some vital part of himself had gone, leaving him bereft. Perhaps his deeper mind had held on to some primitive, wordless impression of Tristan’s presence, there in their young mother’s womb, and had remembered him after he was gone.

  Tristan let his gaze wander, giving Shay a chance to catch hold of his dignity. “You ought to take Aislinn for a wife, settle down, raise up some kids. It’s time you had a place to lay your head, little brother. You might have passed most of your life right there in Prominence, but I do believe your spirit’s been roaming the earth for a long while, looking for a home.”

  Shay cleared his throat, tucked his mother’s journal into his own saddlebag. He didn’t find the idea of setting up house with Aislinn all that hard to accept, as a matter of fact, but he had things to take care of first. “What are you, some kind of philosopher?”

  Tristan chuckled. “No,” he answered. “I’m the other side of the same coin, though, and like I’ve said before, I know about you because I know about myself.”

  That was more than Shay could claim, but then he hadn’t had the advantage of being aware that he had a twin brother somewhere. He needed time to think matters through, where Tristan was concerned, and there was a lot of sorting and assimilating yet to be done. “You got a woman tucked away someplace?” he asked, wanting to know just how closely Tristan’s inclinations resembled his own, with regard to Aislinn anyway.

  Tristan smiled coolly, and the moving shadows of the birch leaves dappled his face and frame. “No, and to answer the question you haven’t put to me, if you’re fool enough to spurn Miss Aislinn’s obvious affections, you can bet I’ll be courting her quicker than you can draw that forty-five of yours.”

  Shay set his jaw. “That mean you plan to stay around here after we get Billy and the old man? What about your stagecoach line?”

  “I like it here. In fact, I have my eye on a small spread south of the Kyle ranch—I was out there this morning, just before I ran into you. Good place to raise cattle, fine horseflesh and kids.” He let that pronouncement sink in for a few moments before adding, “I’ve got the line sold, for all practical intents and purposes, but the deal is contingent on my getting to the bottom of that robbery and murder. The new owners aren’t keen on taking over a business that can’t be insured.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The families of those murdered people had to be compensated,” Tristan explained, surveying the white, peeling trunks of the birches that stood around them like whispering sentries. “The insurance outfit settled with them and repaid the stolen money, but they won’t renew the company policies, for me or for the new owners, without some proof that justice has been done.”

  Shay frowned. “Can they do that?”

  Tristan reined his horse toward the road. “They’re doing it,” he replied, and there was a shrug in his voice. “We’re talking about a small fortune here, Shay. Insurance companies take a loss like that very seriously.”

  Shay followed his brother, left with li
ttle choice since Tristan had started out first. “How many stagecoaches have you got, anyhow?” They weren’t so alike as some folks might think, Shay reflected; Tristan had a company, while he’d never made more than thirty-five dollars a month wearing a badge.

  “Seven,” Tristan answered, as lightly as if he were laying claim to so many matchsticks. “Not counting the one Kyle wrecked, that is.”

  The scene of the disaster came back to Shay in instant and vivid detail, like some kind of mental flash flood, as it always did when somebody mentioned what had happened. Except this time there was a new and very troubling element: he couldn’t remember Grace’s face. “Did you inherit money or something?” he asked, to distract himself. “A man needs a serious stake to start up a business like yours.”

  “I’ve been working since I was sixteen,” Tristan said, gaining the road and turning to wait while Shay and the gelding descended after him, “and I’ve had as much good luck as bad. A man who puts his money by and watches out for opportunities can do real well for himself.”

  Shay polished his badge. He’d saved most of his salary, too, over the last few years, but it didn’t amount to much. Anyway, he meant to reimburse the town council for what he’d been paid after Grace died. He hadn’t rightfully earned a nickel of it, and he wouldn’t have blamed them if they asked for his resignation. Their respect for Shamus, Sr.,’s memory was probably all that had prevented them from doing just that. “Or,” he said, with some self-recrimination, “he can crawl into a bottle, curl up and wait to die.”

  “Takes a while to get over some things,” Tristan remarked. “I explained how I came to be passing through those woods back there, but I can’t rightly guess what you were doing. You have a couple of prisoners to guard, back there at the jail, don’t you?”

  Shay bristled a little, because no one had asked him for any kind of accounting in a long while, and he was out of the habit of giving explanations. “I was just trying to square some things away in my head,” he replied, though grudgingly. He might have said Tristan had no call to worry about how he did his job, but he caught himself in time. The fact was, he couldn’t make a case for himself, because he hadn’t done his job for shit. “And I left a deputy in charge of Billy and O’Sullivan.”

  “You have a deputy?” Tristan grinned. “I’m impressed. Half the time, a one-horse town like this doesn’t even have a marshal.”

  “If you think Prominence is so backward,” Shay countered, unable to keep a defensive note out of his voice, “why the hell are you planning on settling down around here?”

  Tristan pondered the inquiry for a while before giving his answer. They were riding slow and he was still taking in the countryside. “I’ve got family here,” he said, in his own good time.

  That comment shut Shay right up, and he spent the rest of the ride chewing on it. Meanwhile, Tristan turned talkative all of the sudden, spilling out plans and schemes to trap the Kyles and all their cohorts. Shay listened with half an ear.

  Aislinn supposed it shouldn’t have surprised her that Cornelia took the news of her staying at the house so calmly, given the woman’s conversation with Mr. Kyle that afternoon, in the general store, but surprise her it did. They sat, she and Dorrie and Cornelia, in the fancy front parlor of the McQuillan house, sipping tea from bone china cups. When Dorrie said she’d hired Aislinn to work for them, and given her Shamus’s old room as a part of her wages, Cornelia flushed a little, set her jaw, and smiled with all the welcoming charm of a gaping skull.

  Cornelia’s teacup rattled in its translucent saucer as she set it down on the table beside her chair. “Very well,” she said, in shrill tones that had probably been meant to be melodic. “What’s done is done. Have I mentioned, Theodora, that Shamus is joining us for supper tonight?”

  Theodora? Aislinn took another sip of spicy tea to hide her smile.

  Dorrie bent forward from the very edge of her chair, big-eyed and spindly-looking, like a baby bird perched on a branch that might give way at any moment. “You try to poison him, Cornie, and I’m going to know you were the one responsible!”

  The elder sister rolled her eyes. She really was quite beautiful, but the coldness that seemed to seep through her very pores spoiled the effect. “I’m not going to do anything of the sort, Dorrie. Don’t be ridiculous. I brought home a nice loin of pork—that’s his favorite if I recall—and it’s roasting in the oven right now.”

  Dorrie and Aislinn exchanged glances.

  “What brought this on?” Dorrie demanded. She’d wanted Shay to be restored to his rightful place in the family, but naturally she was suspicious of her sister’s motives. Aislinn could have told her that it was part of a scheme to jolly the marshal into letting Billy Kyle out of jail before he could be brought before a proper judge and jury, but she wasn’t going to do that in front of Cornelia. The woman was vicious, like a peregrine trained to tear flesh with talon and beak, but with a difference: the falcon might have felt at least a twinge of remorse.

  Cornelia squirmed a little, which indicated that she might have the suggestion of a conscience, if not the substance, locked up tight in some corner of her black soul. “We’ve been at each other’s throats for too long, Shamus and I. I will never—can never love him, as one does a true brother, but I regret—” She paused, nearly choking. “I regret that I haven’t shown more Christian charity toward him.”

  Dorrie got to her feet and smoothed the skirts of her greenish gown, which was only slightly more attractive than the brown calico she had given Aislinn. Her smile was dazzling, like sunshine on a Mexican silver hatband. “I’ll get out Mama’s good china,” she said, with touching eagerness.

  A protest took shape in Cornelia’s mouth, but she swallowed it, with obvious difficulty, and rendered another parody of a smile. “Of course,” she said. “Perhaps Aislinn wouldn’t mind fetching a bouquet of flowers from the garden. Roses will do nicely, I think.”

  “A grand idea,” Dorrie cried. Aislinn saw the corner of the letter she’d apparently gotten from Eugenie that morning peeping from Dorrie’s pocket, and wondered if it contained tidings of Leander’s triumphant return. Since it was plain that Shay was about as welcome in that house as a long-horned steer would have been, from Cornelia’s standpoint anyway, there had to be another reason for Dorrie’s exuberance.

  Aislinn was in the garden, cutting prickly red roses with a scent that could make you drunk, when she sensed that someone was nearby and looked up to see Liza Sue watching her over the back fence. The maid’s uniform, added to her scrubbed face and tidy hair, changed her appearance so much that Aislinn took an extra moment recognizing her.

  “You landed on your feet, I see,” said Liza Sue, without rancor.

  Aislinn approached the fence, her arms full of fragrant, prickly-stemmed roses. “I have your dress upstairs,” she said. “I’ll fetch it for you.”

  Liza Sue shook her head. “Just burn it, or tear it up for rags. I won’t have no use for it after this.”

  “How’s Eugenie?”

  “Mean as a bear. She misses you somethin’ powerful, and she’d take you back if you asked her.”

  “I know,” Aislinn said, and sniffled. She missed her friend, her space in the dormitory, the satisfying work that made the days pass quickly, but it was best to move on if she could.

  “She sent me down here, Eugenie did, to watch for you and pass on a message. She’d like a visit, now and again, if you’ve a mind to be social.”

  Aislinn laughed, but the sound was part sob. Her relief was enormous; she might have lost her position at the hotel, but her friendship with Eugenie, which she valued a great deal more, was still intact. “I would enjoy that very much.”

  Liza Sue leaned over the fence a little way, and lowered her voice. “Is it true that Billy Kyle is in jail, and the marshal don’t plan to let him out again?” Her eyes were wide, and shadows of fear flickered in their depths like specters.

  “It’s true,” Aislinn confirmed. “You don’t
need to be afraid of Billy.”

  “You wouldn’t say that, if you knew him the way I do. I’ll be scared until I hear he’s dead and see him in the coffin—him and his daddy, too.”

  The mention of the rancher made Aislinn take a step nearer the fence. She heard the threatening echo of Mr. Kyle’s voice in the back of her mind, and knew that whatever Cornelia McQuillan’s romantic hopes might be, she was as terrified of him as Liza Sue was. “Tell me about Billy’s father,” she urged, in a quiet voice. It was clear by the other woman’s shudder that she’d touched a nerve, but that same sense of urgency she’d felt earlier was back again. “Please.”

  Liza Sue blinked rapidly, shaking her head. “He’s bad,” she said.

  Aislinn reached out and grasped her newfound friend by the wrist, to prevent her from running away; she was strong from three years of hard work, but she took care that her hold on Liza Sue should not be hurtful. “Tell me,” she repeated.

  Tears brimmed in Liza Sue’s eyes, and her nose reddened. “I can’t,” she said. Then, again, and more frantically, “I can’t!” Fear gave her the strength to pull away, and she turned and hurried back toward the hotel, wiping her cheek with the back of one hand as she went.

  Aislinn watched her until she vanished, then turned, with her fragrant burden of roses, and walked back inside the house. She wished she’d told Shay about the conversation between Cornelia and Mr. KyIe when she’d encountered him earlier, outside the store, but all was not lost. She’d make a point of speaking to him alone that evening, when he came to supper.

  When the dinner guest arrived, his fair hair was shining and neatly combed and he was wearing a suit and a string tie. Even if he hadn’t looked utterly accustomed to such fancy garb, Aislinn would have known the visitor wasn’t Shay at all, but Tristan. The differences were subjective ones and as impossible to pinpoint as before, because on the surface the fine features, the breathtaking blue eyes, strong jaw and sensuous mouth, the physical grace and innate prowess, even the scent of the skin, were precisely the same.