Printer in Petticoats

by Lynna Banning

  The sound tore into his gut. “It’s all right, Jess. You’re all right. You’re safe. I’m taking you over to the Lark office.”

  A group of locals had gathered and were starting to tackle the flames. Cole stopped a bystander passing buckets of water to the blaze and asked him to let the sheriff know what had happened. But he said nothing else until he climbed the stairs up to his bedroom and pushed open the door. “I’ve got nowhere else to take you, Jess, so I hope you understand.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice breaking. He set her down in front of the window overlooking the street, and together they watched tongues of flame lick away at the inside of the Sentinel building.

  “My newspaper,” she sobbed. “Everything I’ve worked for is gone. What will I do now?”

  Cole stood at her back, holding her shuddering body against his chest. “Rebuild,” he said after a long minute. “In the meantime, you can use my press to print your newspaper.”

  Something exploded inside the flaming building across the street, and in that instant Cole knew what had caused the fire.

  “What was that noise?” Jessamine choked out.

  Cole groaned. “That was a crude incendiary device. In Kansas we called them Quantrill Cookies. They’re made out of whiskey bottles and rags.”

  She looked at him sharply. “How do you know that?”

  “I know. Quantrill burned down my house in Kansas City. My wife died in the fire.”

  “Oh, my God.” Her knees buckled. “That’s horrible!”

  “Yeah,” he said shortly. “It was.”

  She peered again out his window. “I can’t believe this is happening. I just can’t believe it.” Tears sheened her cheeks.

  “Those bastards,” he muttered under his breath. “Probably working for Arbuckle. Should have shot them when I had the chance.”

  An ache lodged deep in his chest. He walked her over to his cot, sat her down and lifted her legs onto the quilt. She wore nothing but a long white nightgown, and he wrapped the blanket about her shoulders and eased her back until she lay quietly on his bed. Then he stretched out full length beside her.

  “I want you to stay here tonight.”

  She nodded without speaking.

  “Don’t think about it anymore, Jess. Try to get some sleep.” He wrapped his arms around her and tugged a second quilt over them. “In the morning we’ll look at the damage.”

  This was a damn sorry way to take a woman to bed, he thought irrationally. A familiar pain bloomed under his breastbone and he tried not to think about Maryann.

  In the morning, Cole left Jess sound asleep, curled up on her side with one hand folded under her chin, and slipped downstairs to the sheriff’s office. He sure hoped Jericho Silver would catch up with whoever did this. Arbuckle was probably behind it. The sheriff agreed but said he needed proof.

  Back in front of the still-smoking Sentinel office, Cole found Eli pacing up and down on the boardwalk, disbelief on his lined face.

  “What the hell happened?” the old man asked.

  “Place was firebombed,” Cole answered.

  “Huh? Why’d anybody wanna do that?”

  “Revenge, maybe.”

  Eli snapped his bearded jaw shut.

  When the old man dragged himself off to the restaurant for some coffee, Cole scrabbled through the burned-out debris and found Eli’s font case, melted into a blob of twisted metal. To his surprise Jessamine’s once shiny Adams press was soot-stained but intact.

  The staircase was partially burned away, but he picked his way carefully up the steps to her bedroom. Maybe he could find some of her books or a dress or two. Smoke blackened the painted walls, and everything smelled so bad he gave up the idea. The books were scorched, and the clothes…she’d never wear them again.

  At the mercantile he talked Carl Ness out of half a dozen apple crates, loaded up the contents of Jess’s scorched file cabinet and lugged them across the street to his office. Then he arranged for Eli to work at the Lark office, where he could set type for Jessamine’s Sentinel stories alongside Noralee.

  That afternoon the ashen-faced editor of his rival newspaper went to stay at Ilsa Rowell’s boardinghouse, and the next morning Jessamine arranged with Ike Bruhn at the sawmill for a carpenter and enough wood to make repairs. With steely resolve she forbade herself to think about the fire, or the possible reason for it, and focused instead on salvaging what she could of her shattered life.

  On Friday morning Cole’s Lark newspaper came out, and on Saturday, Jessamine’s Sentinel was typeset, printed on Cole’s Ramage press and distributed as usual by Billy Rowell and Teddy MacAllister.

  Jess tried hard not to think any further than one day ahead. She tried even harder to forget about the night she’d spent on Cole’s bed, wrapped in his arms while she wept. He’d offered to sleep on the floor, but she had clung to him. She’d needed his strength that night, and even now, despite the impropriety of the situation, she wasn’t sorry.

  That night she’d sensed his own fear as well as hers. She wondered if Cole had been shaken at the thought of losing her in the same way he had lost his wife back in Kansas.

  On Sunday, Sheriff Silver rode back into town, and the jail had three new inmates. That same afternoon Cole went looking for Conway Arbuckle.

  He found the man cowering in his hotel room behind his wife’s chifforobe. Without a second thought, Cole laid him flat with one punch.

  Chapter Eleven

  For the next week Jessamine worked at the Lark office, close enough to Cole to read over his shoulder as he wrote his editorials. Trying to compose her own news stories felt like working in a fishbowl where her every sharpened pencil, every scratched-out word, every move she made was visible to him. The arrangement, she decided after the very first day, could never work. They were like two bumblebees trapped together in a jam jar.

  It made her nervous being so near him. Hour after hour she found her attention straying across to his side of the room, which was more than a little embarrassing. Eli was watching. Noralee, too. She didn’t want either of them, and especially not Cole, to know she was interested enough in what he was doing to surreptitiously watch him.

  Then why are you?

  She had no answer to that. At least not an answer that made rational sense. She liked looking at him while he worked writing an article. A little frown would appear between his dark eyebrows, and when he was thinking about something, or when he was stuck, he rolled his pencil back and forth between his fingers.

  Cole Sanders was extremely handsome, she admitted, with his unruly dark hair, firm jaw and piercing blue eyes. She wished she could concentrate on her work the way he did, but she liked looking at him too much.

  She spent one whole day across the street in her burned-out office, scrubbing the smoke residue off her rolltop desk. The next afternoon she talked Whitey Poletti and Noralee’s father, the mercantile owner, into muscling it across the street into the Lark office.

  The next morning she washed every single smoke-smudged windowpane in her ruined office and swept out the mounds of sawdust left by the carpenter as he worked repairing the stairs leading up to her bedroom. When he was finished nailing the last plank, she ventured upstairs to inspect the damage.

  The room still reeked of smoke. For a moment she felt physically sick knowing that someone had tried to burn down her newspaper. She would have died if Cole hadn’t come for her.

  She knew she would never forget that night. She still thought about it a lot, how he had held her in his arms for hours while she sobbed, and when she finally fell asleep on his cot, how he had wrapped her in his quilt. She’d stayed there with him all night, and even now when she thought about it she felt her cheeks burn. It was a shocking thing for her to do, really, but to this day she wasn’t sorry. She was touched.

  She threw the scorched window blinds in the trash and bundled up her smelly bedding and a few items of clothing for Ilsa Rowell to launder.

  As the days passed, sha
ring the Lark office with Cole continued to make her more and more uneasy. She tried to conduct her newspaper business as usual, monitoring her news beats and writing articles, which Eli set in type twice a week, but things just felt different.

  To her surprise, Eli and Noralee Ness were becoming fast friends.

  “I like the way Eli smells,” the girl confessed. “Like peppermint.” Jess had to laugh. The old man devoured bags of peppermint drops from Uncle Charlie’s Bakery.

  Eli confided that Noralee was “whip smart and has fingers so quick on them fonts I kin hardly keep up with her.” Besides, she was a girl, and Eli had always liked females of any age, especially smart ones.

  Every afternoon Noralee’s long, slim neck bent over her type stick, which brought Eli’s avuncular approval. “She’s not too purty, but she kin set type faster ’n lightning, and she kin shore make me chuckle.”

  Cole was growing remote as a fence post. During the day they sashayed around each other in the overcrowded Lark office, but Cole began spending most of his time elsewhere. Writing, she supposed. He kept Noralee busy setting type every day after school, and on Saturdays she spent all day cleaning ink off his overworked Ramage press.

  Jess’s nerves finally snapped when she read the Tuesday edition of the Lark. Cole had covered the fire at her office, writing with eloquence about lawlessness and violence. But the headline on the editorial page of his latest issue made her fists clench.

  Sheriff Silver Fails

  Law Exam

  Jessamine crumpled the page into a tight ball and marched down to the restaurant, where she knew Cole was eating breakfast. She tossed the scrunched-up editorial page right in the middle of his scrambled eggs.

  “What right do you have spreading lies like this?” she demanded.

  He set his coffee cup on its saucer with a crisp clink. “The right of every good newspaperman, or woman, to report the news.”

  His voice was so calm she felt like screaming. “This isn’t news! It’s not true.”

  “It is true, Jess. Sit down and have some coffee.”

  “How do you know it’s true?” She was so furious she grabbed his cup off the saucer and gulped down the contents.

  “Telegraph,” he said calmly. He signaled Rita to bring another cup. “That’s how a journalist keeps up with the news,” he said. “I’m in touch with the Portland Oregonian office, and they just ran a story on our sheriff.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she replied sharply.

  “No, it’s not. It’s journalism.”

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, poor Jericho.”

  Cole laughed. “‘Poor Jericho’ nothing. It won’t make a damn bit of difference in the election. At the debate, if you recall, the sheriff made mincemeat of Conway Arbuckle. People are smarter than you think, Jess. It’s the man they’ll be voting for, not the law degree. A law degree isn’t a requirement for a district judge, and besides, Jericho can take the exam again in the spring. And besides that, Conway Arbuckle is turning out to be a reprehensible skunk.”

  “Oh,” she said again. Cole began pressing the wrinkles out of his rumpled editorial page while Rita splashed coffee into both their cups.

  “How are the repairs to your office comin’, Miss Jessamine?” the waitress inquired.

  “Slowly, Rita. I can hardly wait—” she caught the fleeting expression that crossed Cole’s face “—to, uh, see what it will look like when the carpenter is finished. Mr. Sanders has been very kind in letting me use his press.”

  “The truth,” Cole interjected, “is that Miss Lassiter can hardly wait to get as far away from me as possible. He thumped the page he’d spread out by his plate.

  “Cole, that’s not true,” she blurted out. “It’s just that…that…”

  The waitress grinned. “I know what you mean, Miss Jessamine. You two ain’t exactly like two peas in a pod. More like two Indians tryin’ to scalp each other.”

  “Oh, no,” Jessamine protested. “We’re…well, we’re professional colleagues. Sort of.”

  “Maybe,” Cole muttered.

  “Huh! You two can’t even agree on an insult.” Rita picked up her coffeepot and headed back to the kitchen.

  “I—I’m having the upstairs painted a soft rose color,” Jess said to change the subject.

  “Yeah, I know,” Cole said. “I was up there yesterday.”

  “You were? In my bedroom? Whatever for?”

  When he didn’t answer she poked her face close to his.

  “Why were you in my bedroom?” she repeated.

  He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. “Oh, hell, Jess, I wanted to see where you slept without a lot of smoke in my eyes.”

  The truth was he’d gone upstairs to her room to see whether her bed was any bigger than his cot. It was, but maybe it didn’t matter. Jessamine Lassiter wouldn’t be letting him kiss her again if the sky rained daisies all over the rooftops some moonlit night.

  She said nothing, but her big green eyes grew even bigger and greener.

  “Maybe I’m out of line,” he said, his voice quiet, “but I just can’t help wondering…” His shirt collar was starting to feel extra tight. “Oh, forget it.”

  Forget it? Jess knew she would never forget it. Cole had held her all night long after the fire, let her scream and cry and… She bit her lower lip.

  “Jess, for God’s sake, don’t do that.”

  She blinked at him. She couldn’t help biting her lip; she’d done it ever since she was a girl.

  She would never know what came over her in the next moment, but she looked right at him, straight into those blue eyes of his, and slowly, carefully, worried her teeth against her lips.

  What is wrong with me? She knew how he hated it when she did that. Why was she tormenting him? She felt like a boat that had slipped its mooring and any minute would be sucked into a whirlpool.

  I have to stop thinking about Cole Sanders. She couldn’t afford to let him distract her from working on her newspaper. If she lost sight of her mission of making a success of the Sentinel, if she wavered or let something deter her, the newspaper would suffer. And if that happened, she would lose her livelihood, everything she’d worked for. Even worse, she would be letting down Miles and their father, and his father before him.

  Chapter Twelve

  Noralee Ness watched Billy Rowell across the street as he started up one side of the boardwalk and down the other, slipping the Saturday edition of the Sentinel under doors and through mail slots. Cole studied the girl out of the corner of his eye.

  “You in love yet, Noralee?” He couldn’t resist asking; he thought she looked more than a little dreamy-eyed of late.

  “Huh? No, I’m not. Not with him,” she said indignantly. “I don’t know who I’m in love with, Mr. Sanders. I haven’t met him yet.”

  “Well, that could slow down a courtship for sure,” he quipped.

  “Mr. Sanders?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How long does it take for a girl to grow up?”

  Cole frowned. “Grow up? How do you mean, ‘grow up’?”

  “You know, wear long dresses and lace on her drawers and put her hair up. How long?”

  He swallowed. “Depends on the girl.”

  “Well…me, for instance.” She slid off the stool in front of the font case and twirled in front of him. “Me,” she repeated.

  Hell’s bells, she was flat as a frying pan in front and from the back she was straight as a two-by-four. No hips. Not even a hint of a waistline.

  “How come you’re in such a hurry about growing up, Noralee?”

  Her long, narrow face took on a wistful look. “I wanna be just like Miss Jessamine,” she said in a faraway voice. “All pretty and proper, just like a lady should be, with petticoats and high-button shoes and—”

  She stopped suddenly and looked down at the ink-smudged pinafore she wore over her plain brown poplin dress. “And perfume. Miss Jessamine always smells nice, like violets.”

  She
did smell like violets, Cole acknowledged. A little pointy dart zinged into his chest. She smelled so good it made him ache.

  “Yeah,” he said at last. “She does smell nice.”

  “Do you think she’d let me dab some of her perfume behind my ears? That’s where ladies wear perfume, you know. And on their throat, so when their skin warms up—”

  “Noralee,” he interjected, his voice inexplicably hoarse, “have you finished typesetting that story I gave you this morning?”

  She sent him an apologetic look and snatched up her type stick.

  For the next hour Cole tried not to think about Jessamine’s ears or her throat or her anything else. And he hoped she would not be wearing perfume at the next choir rehearsal. A man could only stand so much.

  *

  The next evening was the last rehearsal before the Christmas Eve performance at the church. Cole intercepted Jessamine as she walked from the boardinghouse where she was staying; when she turned toward the church, he gripped her arm.

  “Wait,” he said. “The rehearsal’s not at the church.”

  “Not at the…? Why not?”

  “At the last minute the director decided to hold the performance at the music school. Seems they couldn’t move that big grand piano Winifred Dougherty had shipped from St. Louis, so Ike Bruhn donated some planks and got a carpenter to build risers for the back row of singers to stand on.”

  To be honest, he was relieved. He hated being inside the church, even to sing a beautiful work like the Messiah. It reminded him too much of Maryann’s funeral.

  He took Jessamine’s elbow. “Come on, we’ll be late.”

  Inside, the chorus was already warming up, and after ten minutes the director called for silence.

  “Ladies, don’t forget, no corsets. Now, will the quartet, Mr. Poletti and Mr. Sanders, Mrs. Buchanan and Miss Lassiter, please arrange yourselves in the center?”

  Standing next to Jessamine, Cole could sense her nervousness; the music score clutched in her hand fluttered slightly, and she kept biting her lips. Heat flooded his groin.

  You damn fool, stop watching.