by Lisa Plumley
Jack looked. A powerfully built woman strode between the assemblage, clad in reformer’s clothes with a badge pinned to her chest. Her gray hat was massive, her hair a matching color, her parasol an efficient instrument to prod slowpokes. The group parted to allow her passage, several women ducking their heads.
“It’s Heddy Neibermayer,” Grace said. “She’s early!”
Four familiar women parted from the group, all of them dark-haired but with wildly varying dress. They clustered around Heddy, obviously explaining something in eager terms. They waved those peculiar papers, but Heddy didn’t linger to confer.
She marched directly to the saloon doorway.
Her firm knock echoed all the way upstairs.
“Jack Murphy, come out at once!” came her gravelly voice.
Behind her, the women in the crowd cheered.
“We have not come all this way for you to ignore us!”
With a dreadful jolt, Jack realized what those papers were.
They were catalog images of his newfangled corsetry creations. He’d thought—he’d hoped—never to see them again.
“We have money!” cried one of the ladies, holding a coin.
“We want fittings!” yelled another. “A personal one for me!”
“An autograph!” shouted a third, earning herself a bushel full of giggles from the women around her. “Come out!”
Downstairs, Heddy Neibermayer rapped soundly again.
Beside Jack, Grace froze.
“Mr. Murphy!” Heddy exclaimed. “Do stop cowering. We’re only a handful of women. We’re nothing to fear, and we present an excellent opportunity for commerce regarding your designs.”
“Yeah, Murphy,” came an amused masculine voice. “Come meet your lady admirers.”
From the crowd, Thomas Walsh stepped forward, wearing his bowler hat and glasses, his notebook in hand. “Mr. Murphy,” he called, cupping one hand around his mouth. “If I might have a word about this startling development—”
Jack couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. How could this be?
He cast a bewildered glance to Grace, who’d drawn away from the window. She gazed back at him, clutching her blanket.
“Well, this is good news,” she announced astoundingly. “Now everyone knows you’re more than a saloonkeeper. More than a—”
“More than a saloonkeeper?” he echoed. Her vaguely guilty expression made his belly tighten. He didn’t understand what was going on—what had caused the uproar outside—but all at once, Jack felt dismally certain Grace had had a hand in it.
“Well, you’re also an artist, aren’t you?” She clutched her blanket, her eyes wide. She sounded skittish…but proud. “An inventor, a creator, a designer of wonderful drawings and schematics. I’ll admit this is more than I counted on though.”
“More than you counted on?” More shouting reached him from outside, but Jack couldn’t listen. All his thoughts were filled with Grace—with Grace and the realization that his past had, unbelievably, come home to roost in Morrow Creek. Complete with newspaper reportage and multiple overbold women. Damnation. It was all he could do to keep a level head. “You did this?”
She raised her chin, confirming his worst fears.
“I only sent a few of your drawings to Heddy,” Grace explained. “Just so she could see how very talented you are, Jack. Just so she could see why I’m proud of you.”
Heedless of her pleading tone, hearing only that he had—once again—trusted someone in error, Jack clenched his fists.
He cast another beleaguered look at the ruckus outside. Women clamored for his novel undergarments exactly as stridently as they had in Boston. Perhaps worse. Men yelled slurs about his “seamstressing.” The whole occurrence was a nightmare.
“I couldn’t have known this would happen!” Grace waved her arm toward the window. “Jack, I—I don’t understand. It was only a few drawings. I still don’t know where all those papers—”
“You wanted this.” Even as he said it, Jack realized the horrible logic of it. “You wanted to make me as ready a joke here as I was in Boston, and when you found those drawings—”
“In Boston?” Grace touched his arm. “No, I don’t even—”
“You wanted to have your way at any cost. Even this.” Bitterly, Jack grabbed his britches. He tugged them on, then reached for the rest of his clothes with jagged movements. “I should have known. I should have known the renowned Grace Crabtree would not accept defeat, nor share this space forever.”
“Of course I’m sharing! I don’t know what you mean.” Grace pursued him, watching as he dressed. Her panicky look did not fool him. “Tell me what happened in Boston. Maybe I’ll—” She paused. “Why are you talking that way? Of a sudden, you bandy about words like renowned? You sound like a stranger.”
Jack felt like one, too. He could not look at her any longer. Instead he snatched his shoe. He shoved it on, but only partway. “Damnation! This one is yours,” he growled.
He hurled it. It bounced from the wall, making Grace jump.
“What is wrong with you?” She waved her palm to the window, the gesture sharp and urgent. “What do they all want?”
Jack couldn’t believe she would pretend not to know.
“They want to make a laughingstock of me, too,” he said as the clamor outside continued. It seemed a hundred years since he’d awakened so happily, but in truth only minutes had passed.
“Jack,” Grace urged. “Please wait. Don’t behave this way.”
He paused. “You can meet my sisters. You wanted that, I think.” He offered a humorless grin. “They are the four who waylaid your idol, Heddy. You’ll have a great deal in common.”
For a moment, Grace honestly seemed hopeful. She stopped chasing him long enough to smile. “They are here?”
“I don’t know how, but yes.” Jack shoved his hand through his hair, then straightened. He released a gusty breath, listening to the hubbub outside. He could scarcely accept that his disastrous past was being repeated here, in Morrow Creek. Here, in his new life. “You can bring them apple fritters and ask them how they ruined my reputation the first time.”
Grace looked appalled. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
Heartsick and distraught, prodded by even more pounding from Heddy Neibermayer, Jack girded his strength. There was nothing for it but to accept things as they were. To clear up this damnable mess and get on with whatever came next.
Likely it would be his leaving town. He didn’t see how he could continue business here, with his saloon a gathering place for an entire horde of demanding women and himself a joke.
“I do mean it.” He turned to face Grace at last. He kept his fists clenched, his shoulders rigid. “Just as I mean this: Our battle is finished. You’ve won, Grace.”
“Not if you’re leaving, I haven’t!” She rushed to him, her face pale and her hair tangled. Her eyes were enormous, wet with sudden tears. “I was done fighting with you! This—this doesn’t have to mean anything. Not to us. I’ll set it right, if that’s what you want. I know—I know now that I should have asked you first. I should not have sent those drawings, only—”
With difficulty, Jack looked away. “Leave me be. Don’t come to my saloon—for as long as I still own it. Don’t come to my quarters, don’t approach me on the street, don’t talk to me.”
“What?” Grace stared, unmoving. “What do you mean?”
“This was a mistake.”
She raised her chin. “Of course it wasn’t.”
Against all his intentions, her stout declaration almost made Jack smile. It was so like Grace to not give an inch—to fight to the finish for whatever she wanted.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t really wanted him.
He motioned outside. “I have things to take care of.”
“Wait.” Grace stepped nearer. “Last night…” She twisted her hands. “Last night you said you would want me always.”
Her beseeching look sna
red him. For the merest instant, Jack allowed himself to drink in the sight of her, to remember all the ways they’d been happy together…to imagine all the ways they might have been happier still. He could not say he didn’t love her. But he refused to say he did.
“Goodbye, Grace,” he said instead.
Then he went to meet his fate without looking back.
Alone, Grace stared at the door of her meeting room.
Outside, the tumult caused by Heddy Neibermayer and her retinue—and, seemingly, most of the people in town—reached a higher pitch, complete with a rousing chant. There was no one like an experienced suffragist to stir up a crowd, she mused. Evidently Heddy was even more capable than Grace had imagined.
Thoroughly chilled, she grasped her blanket with numb fingers. All of her felt benumbed in fact, heartily willing to deny everything that had just happened. Jack’s accusations, his dawning look of betrayal, his raspy goodbye. Grace still didn’t understand any of it. She’d only wanted to help him. To prove to everyone how very far Jack had come under her tutelage.
To demonstrate just one of the reasons she loved him.
Our battle is finished. You’ve won, he’d said. But just then, Grace could not grasp how. After years of refusing to admit how much loving someone would mean to her, now she finally had…and just as quickly, she had lost him. She’d lost Jack.
Grace refused to accept it. Defiantly, she stared at the work they’d accomplished. She gazed at the cot they’d shared, still rumpled with the aftermath of their night together. She recalled the look in Jack’s eyes as he’d held her close. It could not be that those things had ended.
She would not allow them to be ended.
With her heart in her throat, she scrambled into her clothes. She raked her hair into its knot, shoving in pins willy-nilly. She scrubbed her face, sucked in a deep breath and readied herself for the battle to come.
Anything worth having is worth fighting for, Grace always said. Now she felt battered, it was true. Confused and bereft and alone. But the time had finally come, she decided, to prove that Jack Murphy—that the love they’d shared—was infinitely worth the struggle. She would find the truth, she would learn all its facets, then she would deal with the matter accordingly.
Now more than ever, no one stopped a Crabtree woman.
Chapter Seventeen
Everywhere Jack went, things were equally disastrous.
“Sewed up any pretties?” his patrons asked him, laughing.
“Mebbe you oughtta make them corsets a mite bigger,” a cowboy remarked, elbowing his friend, “so’s you can wear ’em yourself.”
“I ain’t never seen me a sissified barkeep afore,” said another, chortling as he hefted his ale. “You wear pantalets?”
Even O’Neil had his fun when Jack ventured into the butcher’s shop two days after the whole debacle struck.
“I wouldn’t mind all those ladies comin’ round me all trussed up in their unmentionables.” O’Neil leered. “Hell, I might even take up fashion likewise. Only I can’t make me a straight stitch to save my life.” The man held up his rawboned hands. “Maybe you ought to give me embroidery lessons, Murphy.”
Laughter echoed through the shop. “Yeah, Murphy,” another man shouted. “Tell us, so’s we can have women clamoring, too.”
Jack only shouldered his way outside, guffaws trailing him.
It was bad enough to have lost Grace, but to have become the town joke, too? That was more than he could stand.
Since word had gotten round about his scandalous past, mothers looked askance at him in the street, then whispered to their curious children. Men tipped their hats with mocking grins. More than one bold female offered her services as his real-life fitting form. A few timid ladies even stopped him in secret, casting furtive glances before confiding in him.
“Bless you,” one said, squeezing his hand. “Before I found your corsetry, I was squashed fair past breathing all the time!”
“Your designs are a godsend,” said another. “I fully intend to buy two more corsets—one to send to my sister in Landslide!”
But despite Jack’s grudging nods in reply to that praise, he could not feel happy for what his meddlesome sisters persisted in calling his “proudest achievement.”
“You see?” Corinne, the eldest, nudged him. She offered a wise nod toward his departing admirers, having waylaid him—along with the rest of the brood—on his way from the Lorndorff Hotel. “You have done a great service to women everywhere.”
“We’re simply making sure women everywhere know about it,” Glenna added with her toothy grin. “It’s been so exciting!”
“Traveling around with Heddy and her retinue, seeing all the cities and towns and people.” Arleen sighed, hugging herself in the dreamy way she had. “One time a writer from a newspaper interviewed us, Jack! We could be as famous as you in the end!”
“Don’t scowl that way, Jack.” His sister Nealie gave him a no-nonsense look. “It’s not healthful for your facial muscles. Besides, you know we’re right. Everyone in Morrow Creek may have mistaken you for an ordinary barkeep—for a time—but the truth was bound to come out eventually.”
“Nobody asks questions in the territory,” Jack argued.
“Well, they should,” Corinne said firmly. “Inquisitiveness makes life so much more invigorating.”
She sounded exactly like Grace. Jack began to believe his secret past really had been doomed to haunt his future—at least from the moment Grace had trod downstairs in her dress-reform hat and starchy clothes to meet him, her new co-tenant.
“You’re scowling again,” Nealie noted in a singsong voice.
“Leave him alone.” Arleen grabbed his arm, giving him a squeeze. “Haven’t you all heard the teasing Jack has endured?”
“Well, if he hadn’t deceived everyone,” Corinne argued, “then he wouldn’t have to endure any teasing, now would—”
“I’ve made amends, damn it!” Jack interrupted.
His sisters gasped. Nealie tsk-tsked. “Language, Jack.”
He didn’t care. He hadn’t set out to deceive anyone—only to leave his problematic past behind. Now that it had caught up with him anyway, Jack had tolerated the joking, the name-calling and the whispering. He’d let all the townspeople have their fun and, where appropriate, he’d even apologized—however gruffly—to those who were upset. He had made amends, and he didn’t want a pile of lecturing on top of that humbling task.
“It’s just as I was saying before,” Arleen chattered blithely, offering him another consoling squeeze. “You can’t hide your talents under a bushel forever. You’re far too brilliant for that, Jack.”
“That’s right, far too brilliant,” Glenna agreed. “Why, we’ve scarcely been able to keep up with the corset orders!”
“They’re ever so popular,” Arleen added, her skirts swirling girlishly. “The catalog printing has paid for itself twice over already, and we’ve hired three seamstresses in Boston. Yours is a veritable enterprise, Jack! Just like the famous Bloomingdale Brothers emporium in New York City.”
Hell. They’d been busier than he’d known. Wanting to deny that fact, Jack only frowned more deeply and strode onward. All his sisters trotted in his wake, chattering in unison. Almost since they’d stepped off the train, they hadn’t left him alone. He could scarcely keep up with the hullabaloo they engendered.
“We would garner even more orders,” Nealie said, “if you would put on a suit though. You used to look so nice in Boston.”
Fisting his hands at the sides of his plain trousers, Jack kept going. Stoically. He swore not to recall traveling this same stretch of road with Grace…and failed.
“It wouldn’t hurt if you’d speak at the rally, too,” Nealie continued. “I realize we set out—the four of us—to remedy the trouble we caused you back home, but with a little cooperation—”
“I’m not going to the damned rally,” he interrupted.
Grace would be there. Jack knew
he couldn’t bear it.
“Jack! Once again, that language is uncalled for.”
“Don’t pester him, Nealie,” Corinne commanded loudly. They all trod past Nickerson’s Book Depot and News Emporium in a colorful group of ribbons and lace—and one fierce scowl. “Can’t you see he’s still lovesick over that Miss Crabtree?”
Abruptly, silence fell. Jack stopped.
He rounded on them. “Where did you hear that?”
All four of his sisters shut their mouths. Defiantly.
“Now you decide to quit prattling? Out with it.”
Arleen glanced at Glenna, her mouth quirked. “See?” she whispered, gesturing to Jack. “He does love her, else he wouldn’t be so ferocious about hearing her name.”
“Arleen—” Jack began warningly.
“You owe me your purple ribbons, Glenna,” Arleen added in a hasty undertone. “You promised.”
Glenna disagreed. Arleen poked her.
Catching the gist of their bickering, Jack stared in disbelief at his sisters. “You wagered on me?”
“Well…it’s a long time between rallies, Jack.”
“To be honest, we learned everything you’ve been up to within a day of arriving in town. Possibly less.” Corinne sighed. “You’ve never been very mysterious, you know.”
Affronted, Jack folded his arms. “I am completely mysterious,” he informed them. “Or was—until you came here with your suffragette friends.”
Nealie cleared her throat. “Actually, Jack, the respectful term is suffragist, properly referring to persons of either gender who advocate—”
“You? Mysterious?” Corinne chuckled. “Come now, Jack.”
“I said if he married her, you won our bet,” Glenna argued, speaking over both Nealie and Corinne. “So there.”
“Pining over her is good enough,” Arleen insisted, shaking her head. “He’s clearly smitten. Anyone can see it. I do win!”
“Stop it, all of you.” Jack glared at his sisters, each of them unrepentant. “Can’t you leave well enough alone? Ever?”
