He took two steps past her, then stopped and opened a door with the arch of one brow.
She felt her face flush as she realized he’d thought she had stopped so he would open the door for her. She hesitated before passing through. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I just realized I didn’t know where I was going and…” She let the words trail off, weariness, seemingly bone deep, weighed down her shoulders.
His frown said he didn’t understand why she was apologizing. Her shoulders sank a little farther. So maybe he hadn’t been thinking anything close to what she’d assumed.
In how many ways could she continue to make this day worse? “I thought you thought…” She sighed. “Never mind. I’d really just like to go to my room.”
When she would have started forward, he touched her elbow, and she stalled once more. “My granddad use to say, ‘Every sunrise comes with a new perspective.’”
She nodded. “Yes. Some rest will definitely do me some good, Sheriff. Thank you.” She stepped inside.
A dark-haired woman stood behind the counter. She smiled prettily. “Good evening, Sheriff.”
“Dixie.” He swiped his hat from his head and swept it in a gesture toward Charlotte. “This here is the new schoolteacher, Miss Charlotte Brindle. Miss Brindle”—the hat swung back the other way—“Miss Dixie Pottinger.”
Surprisingly, the woman’s smile grew when it transferred from the sheriff to her. Normally, in the presence of a handsome man, eligible women grew all muddleheaded and flirtatious. But apparently not Dixie. Charlotte liked her immediately.
“You must be exhausted. I’ve a room all prepared for you.” She lifted a key from the back wall and held it out.
Charlotte took it, and a wave of gratefulness washed through her.
“Would you like a plate of dinner before you go up?”
Charlotte shook her head. “I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
The sheriff plunked several coins and a few bills onto the counter. He replaced his hat and tugged the brim in her direction. “Good evening to you, Miss Brindle. Dixie.” With that, he exited, leaving the bell above the door clanging the news of his absence.
Dixie tucked the money away in a box before she stepped from behind the counter. Lifting her skirts, she nodded toward a set of stairs along the back wall. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to your room.”
It wasn’t until Charlotte was standing in the middle of her room with the door finally shut on all other human interaction that she realized she didn’t have even one of her bags. Even her traveling case had been abandoned aboard the coach when Mr. Waddell had kidnapped her.
The reminder brought a fresh wave of tears, and this time she didn’t suppress them.
She flounced to the bed and collapsed atop it, hugging the pillow like it was a long-lost friend. She used it to at least partially muffle her anguish. Oh, whatever in the world had made her think she could survive, much less make a difference, in the wide, wild west? This certainly couldn’t have been the leading of the Lord, could it?
“Lord, when will I ever learn to truly hear Your direction?” This had obviously been a big mistake. She would just go back home. Mother and Father would forgive her for running off half cocked. And they’d already promised not to push a suit with Kent further. Decision made, she relaxed a little. “I’ll be home by this time next week.”
They were the last words she snuffled before the oblivion of sleep claimed her.
Either the cold or the pain woke him, and Patrick Waddell couldn’t tell which. The ground beneath him felt stony, and from the way he was shivering, it had likely been sucking the heat from him for several hours. His clothes, still soaked from his encounter with the river, weren’t doing anything to help him stay warm.
Something dug painfully into his cheek that was pressed to the ground. He brought his hands toward his chest and tried to push himself up, but his right arm screamed pain from every quadrant. He cried out and let it go limp. He waited for the waves of agony to subside a little.
When he felt like he might be able to move without blacking out, he gingerly used his left hand to push himself upright. So this was what misery felt like. He winced and gasped and groaned his way to a sitting position, then he sat as still as he could with his eyes closed, concentrating on banishing the pain roiling seemingly through every pore of his body. He cradled his right arm against his chest.
He was a blamed fool. That arm was broken, certain sure.
Cocky, that’s what his ol’ pappy would have told him back in the day. You only get caught when you get overconfident. He should have taken that money from the bank heist and gone back east. Set himself up with a pretty little plantation in Virginia, or maybe the Carolinas. But no. Not him. Because he’d gotten too smug thinking he was insignificant enough and the land big enough to hide him. But someone must have spotted him. Someone who knew who he was. Someone who’d reported him to not only his old gang but to the law as well.
A roil of anger so strong it was almost able to warm him surged. Someone had betrayed him. And that was why he’d be staying around even when the smart thing would be to take this second chance and hightail it to a region that knew nothing and cared nothing about one Patrick Waddell.
Taking a fortifying breath, he cracked open first one eye and then the next. The light pinched some at first, but it only took him a moment to adjust. He was in the middle of a rocky shelf that stretched toward the wood from the riverbank. He didn’t remember crawling out of the water, but he must have, because the river lay below him a good few feet.
Cautiously, he felt of himself all over. Thankfully, the only thing that seemed to be broken was his right arm. There was also a nasty gash at the side of his skull—probably where he’d cracked his head against a rock when he was tumbling down the river rapids.
He’d somehow maintained possession of his one glove and both boots. But all his other gear was gone, including his hat. He cursed. He’d liked that hat. It made him look dignified. Despite that, it was the least of his worries.
He squinted toward the sky. The sun hung low in the late-afternoon position. If he was going to survive the night, he needed a fire, and he needed to shuck these wet clothes and get into something warm.
But how was he to accomplish that without his things? No matches. No dry clothes to change into. He’d been forced to abandon his bags on the stage when that fool of a schoolteacher had shocked him with her temerity.
A crooked grin tipped up one side of his mouth as he haltingly lurched to his feet. Cursing, he froze and let the throbbing subside.
While he waited, he concentrated on the pretty picture that schoolmarm had made sitting all prim and proper across from him in the coach. He chuckled then. She’d been even prettier, green eyes snapping at him, when he’d yanked her head back to gag her.
He stumbled a few steps forward, and that was when he realized that he must have whacked his leg a good one too, because it was aching to beat the band.
He was in trouble, and that was the truth of it.
Charlotte Brindle bolted upright in bed, hoping beyond hope that yesterday’s nightmare had been nothing more than exactly that. But one glance around the boardinghouse room confirmed that the nightmare was indeed reality. She flopped back on the bed and stared at the water stain that marred the ceiling.
She had to think hard to remember anything that had happened after her first glimpse of the town yesterday evening. She very vaguely recalled arriving in the foyer and meeting the proprietress, though she couldn’t recall the woman’s name at the moment. Charlotte would need to find her and offer payment for the room. Wait. She had a hazy image of the sheriff plunking some money onto the front desk and the pretty proprietress scooping it into a box. The sheriff paid for my room.
“Oh!” She lurched upright on the bed and covered both cheeks with her hands, her face heating at the impropriety of that!
She would make amends for that oversight on her part first thing this morning! But l
ast night the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind.
Slowly, she scooted to the edge of the lumpy mattress and settled her feet against the rough planks of the wooden floor.
She would take care of her morning’s necessities and then decide what to do first about tracking down her bags and also about Mr. Heath’s deceptions. But a quick scan of the interior of her room proved that Wyldhaven was going to fail to live up to Mr. Heath’s promises in yet another way. This was the 1890s! Any town billed as a “little piece of New England blooming on the wild frontier” ought to at least have modern amenities like indoor plumbing!
Oh, whatever in the world had possessed her to abandon the beautiful water closets of Hyde Park for employment, however philanthropic it might be, on the wild frontier? Why oh why hadn’t she listened to Father when he’d urged her to reconsider? Her disregard of Mother’s warnings, she could easily forgive. But Father was a levelheaded man. She always listened to Father. Well…almost always. She groaned and rose to commence her search.
She found the water closet—a shared one—down the hall, and after finishing her ablutions, she stepped out onto what should have been the boardwalk in front of the hotel. Had she even noticed the evening before that there was none? In addition to the cobbled streets and picket fences and small stone cottages, Mr. Heath’s brochure had clearly shown boardwalks lining the streets.
But now as Charlotte’s kidskin boots sank into the mud in front of the hotel, and she surveyed the main street of Wyldhaven, her mouth gaped. Only years of finishing school reminded her to snap it shut again.
This was deception in its most blatant form! She fumbled for her reticule and withdrew the incriminating evidence. She smoothed the parchment against her skirt and held it up to study it as though to make sure her memory had not failed her. Her gaze snapped from the brochure to the town and back again. There was no mistake. This town couldn’t possibly be the one portrayed on the pamphlet in her hand.
Moisture started to soak through to her feet. She lifted one muddy boot and shook it slightly to dislodge a clump of red-brown muck on the underside. Lifting her skirts, she soft-footed her way to a drier patch of ground in a spot of sunshine pooling between the boardinghouse and the building next door.
Everywhere she looked, she saw nothing but brown. Brown buildings, brown watering troughs, brown mud. As if to emphasize that last, there, just down the way, were two men with their shoulders to the back of a wagon heavily loaded with tools, trying to dislodge it from the muddy ruts it had sunk into. They had obviously made a mistake when they drove their wagon off the corduroyed portion of the road.
Off to her left Charlotte could hear a river bubbling. And a rather rickety-looking split-log bridge spanned from one embankment to the other.
From across the bridge, a little girl heartily skipped toward her, her ginger-and-sunshine pigtails bouncing against her shoulders. At the end of a string, a juvenile mongrel bounded along in front of the girl. Despite the fact that it was filthy like everything else in this town, the pup was rather cute with its flopped-over ears, large black spots, and one brown patch over intelligent, alert eyes.
The child raised her arm above her head and waved wildly. “Morning to ya!” she hollered, doing her best to keep up with the dog, which kept lunging at the end of the lead.
Charlotte turned to glance behind her, certain the child must be greeting someone else.
But the child’s next words proved her certainty false. “You must be the new schoolteacher!” She gave a little bounce on the balls of her feet.
As she noted the girl’s obvious enthusiasm, Charlotte almost felt guilty for her uncharitable thoughts about the town. Yet she’d definitely been deceived. Perhaps if her expectations hadn’t been so high…
“My name be Zoe Kastain. My pa’s one of the buckers who works for Mr. Heath. We live over yonder.” She waved her hand back in the direction from which she had just come across the death trap of a bridge. “We’re right excited to have a new schoolteacher in town. None of us even knowed Mr. Heath was gonna get us a teacher!”
“Yes. Well…here I am.” Charlotte couldn’t seem to force any fervor into her sentence. Still, the child seemed thrilled to see her, and the least she could do would be to take a moment to make the girl feel cared for. “Perhaps you could show me the schoolhouse?”
“Schoolhouse?” The little girl’s freckles deepened to a shade of dark brown. “Well, I’m not sure exactly which building Mr. Heath plans on us using for the schoolhouse. We don’t got no building set aside just for school use, ya see.”
Charlotte lifted her hand to her throat. “Well, perhaps we could use…the church building for school?”
The smattering of freckles across the little girl’s nose crinkled into tight dismay. “Ma’am, I don’t mean to be impertinent, but ya sure are new around here, ain’t ya?” The child swept her hand down the street before them, encompassing the five buildings they could see. “What ya see is all there be. This here is Wyldhaven. Ain’t no other buildings in town.”
“But Mr. Heath said…” Charlotte glanced once more at the brochure. Her dread was mounting by the moment. And yes there it was as clear as the ink on the parchment. Just across the river over an arched cobblestone bridge—that obviously also didn’t exist—stood a building labeled Schoolhouse. Yet when Charlotte glanced across the river, there was nothing in that space but an empty, brown field.
Zoe’s pup, who had been sniffing the corner of the hotel, suddenly seemed to notice Charlotte, and with a suspicious woof, bounded to her side. He was larger up close than he had seemed from across the street. After sniffing nearly the entire perimeter of Charlotte’s skirt, he must have decided she was harmless and someone on whom to lavish his love, for with a happy yip and a wag of his tail, he leapt up to give her a slobbery greeting, tattooing her skirt with several gooey paw prints.
“Oh!” Charlotte gasped.
“Jinx, get down!” Zoe yanked on the rope, tugging the exuberant puppy back from Charlotte. Her face turned watermelon pink as she set her heels and held the high-spirited dog in check with all her strength. “I’m right sorry about that,” Zoe puffed. Her nose crinkled at the muddy splotches on Charlotte’s green watered silk. “I guess Pa done named Jinx here rightly. He done said ‘that pup is nothing but hijinks waiting to happen.’ And it’s sort of just stuck.”
“Yes. Hijinks indeed.” Charlotte tried not to let her irritation come through in her tone, but feared she’d failed miserably. She plucked a handkerchief from her reticule and swiped it at the mud, which only succeeded in smearing it further. Her skirt was positively ruined! And she without even one clean outfit to change into. Whatever was she to do?
But before she could decide how to proceed, a sharp whistle and the crack of a whip drew her gaze down the street. Several steers pulling a triangular-shaped stack of logs taller than Charlotte would have ever imagined possible came around the far building and onto the street. Midway up the stack of logs, one protruded slightly farther out than the rest, and upon this stood the driver, a burly man holding the longest whip Charlotte had ever seen.
The leather strap cracked loudly over the back of one of the bulls, and the man yelled, “Get on now!”
A cat that had been sunning itself in a splotch of golden warmth in the middle of the street yowled in terror at the sound of the whip, shot straight up into the air, and dashed for safety down one of the alleys.
Jinx, as if to prove his owner correct about his name, darted around Zoe, wrapping the rope securely around her ankles, and then lunged after the cat.
Whomp! Zoe landed flat on her stomach in the mud. “Jinx!” Zoe let go of the leash to clamber to her feet as she surveyed her totally brown dress front with a frown of disgust.
Without so much as a backward glance, Jinx gave a happy yelp and bounded down the street after the cat, totally oblivious to the heavy load of timber and hooves rolling at a fast clip down the corduroyed center of the road.
Charlotte saw in an instant that the wagon was so heavily loaded down with logs the driver was not going to be able to stop it, and the puppy was so set on his destination that he had no idea of the danger he was running full tilt toward.
“Oh dear Lord, have mercy!” Charlotte snatched two handfuls of her skirts and tore off after the pup, giving several unsuccessful attempts at stomping on the rope trailing behind him. “Jinx, you stop this instant!” She put her very last ounce of effort into speed and, with one last pounce, felt the satisfaction of the rope beneath her boot.
Jinx hit the end of the rope with a yelp and came to a rather undignified halt. And not a moment too soon. The wagon trundled past while Charlotte still stood, panting to catch her breath.
Jinx gave a little yippy whine and settled onto his haunches, his gaze still fastened on the alleyway where the cat had disappeared a moment earlier.
“Thanks ever so much for saving Jinx’s life, Miss Teacher.” Zoe appeared at her side, tears making murky tracks down her face. “I don’t rightly know what I’d’a done had I lost him.”
Charlotte sighed, extracted the rope from beneath her foot, and handed it back to Zoe. “It’s Miss Brindle, and you’re welcome. Anyone would have done the same.”
Zoe’s blue eyes grew wide in her mud-splotched face. “No, ma’am. I don’t think ya be right on that account.”
“Well, you’re welcome then. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find the sheriff.” She folded the muddy side of her hanky in and stuffed it back into her reticule. She would have to wash everything later.
“Right. And I need to run back home and change ’fore I go to Mrs. Callahan’s to work.”
Mrs. Callahan… Charlotte felt the words like a bucket of cold water to the face.
Sheriff Reagan Callahan was married.
Chapter Seven
Charlotte gritted her teeth as she watched Zoe dash back across the bridge.
Of course he was married. Why shouldn’t he be? And yet yesterday he had seemed so…well…not. Oh, was she forever to be such a terrible judge of a man’s character? She cast her mind back over all their interactions. The man is a positive scoundrel! He had held her, and soothed her, and even paid for her room at the boardinghouse! And all while his wife waited for his return and probably fretted over his safety!
Not a Sparrow Falls (Wyldhaven Book 1) Page 8
