Adella's Enemy

by Jacqui Nelson

  His gaze sought her often, but each time he looked away just as quickly…until he caught her contemplating him in return. “’Tis good you finally decided to photograph the farm widows for real.”

  She’d seen too many women suffer during the war and had never held the power to help them. Her guilt for failing the widows had hounded her all night. As had her fascination for Cormac. She couldn’t do anything about the later except try to camouflage her ardor with shrewish comments.

  “It’s good that you’re familiar with horses,” she replied, “and won’t slow me down.” Her lack of sleep should’ve helped sharpen her tone. Instead, her voice sounded unaccountably pleased.

  He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I come from a family of tenant farmers.”

  His humble description breached her defenses. She laughed. “You know more than the backside of a plow horse.”

  A smile curved his mouth, making her feel like a family of grasshoppers danced around her belly. “Back home—when it rained and the landlord’s children stayed snug in their home—me and my sister borrowed their ponies and raced across the moors.” A frown twisted his brow and the joy vanished from his lips. “There were many rainy days in Galway.”

  Cormac must miss his family. Even though he’d visited Ireland only a few months ago, it’d be a long time before he could make a return trip. He might never see his family again. A shared sadness tightened her chest.

  She tried to infuse her voice with lightness. “You and your sister were a pair of rapscallion children.” She knew the kind well, but only in memories. Luckily those particular memories were good ones.

  “Molly was three years older than me and wise beyond measure.” Cormac’s tone was subdued. “I did everything she told me to do, until she was twelve.”

  Unease, chill as a north wind, froze her. “And after that?”

  “We had no more time for games.” Cormac nudged his horse into a canter.

  Adella did the same. His pace left no room for conversations but wasn’t so fast it put either her or her camera in danger. Had his sister taught him that?

  Land covered in stubble turned brown and brittle from the winter, stretched around them as far as the eye could see. Liberating after the muddy town, the earth here held the promise of new life, of change. But the wind, briskly pushing the ever-present clouds overhead, warned how unsettling change might be.

  On the horizon a dot grew larger, turning into several dots: a farmhouse, barn and chicken coop. From the house came a tall figure with white-blonde hair contrasting starkly with the brown earth and the gray sky.

  Cormac slowed his horse to a walk. “Your photographs might help Helga.”

  Adella’s hands tightened on her reins. She hadn’t come to New Chicago for photographs. Cormac knew that now, but he continued trying to save her and everyone else around him. “Your sister taught you well,” she said. “To ride and to do what’s right.”

  “That didn’t stop Molly from dying. I didn’t do anything right then.”

  His sister had died? Cormac’s words at the worksite came back to her. I won’t let anyone else die because of me. Good God, he believed he’d caused his sister’s death? How?

  Before she could ask, Helga called, “Isn’t this a merry surprise, the two of you visiting me together?”

  They rode the remaining distance in silence. Cormac greeted Helga politely, then dismounted and unstrapped Adella’s camera from his saddle.

  With his back turned, Helga cast Adella a questioning glance.

  She busied herself climbing down from her horse.

  “Never expected to be in so many pictures,” Helga said. “A body could get famous this way.”

  “Or infamous,” Cormac replied. “I’m sure Miss Willows has the ability to make either happen.” With her camera under one arm, he turned to face Adella. “Well, have you made up your mind?”

  She blinked in confusion. All she could think about was his sister. “Made up my mind about what?”

  He gestured in a broad arc that encompassed the farm buildings. “About what backdrop you’ll choose for your next picture.”

  She turned to Helga. “I’d like to keep things as homey as possible. What were you planning to do before we arrived?”

  “Got a basket of washing that needs hanging.”

  Adella nodded. “A full laundry line with the house behind will do nicely.”

  Helga took the camera from Cormac. “We ladies have things in order. I could use some more wood chopped, though.” She thrust her chin in the direction of the house.

  Cormac’s brows raised at the stack of wood piled high against one wall. Enough wood to last a year. He hesitated as if he wanted to say something. Then he strode toward his assignment. Had his sister taught him this as well? Not to argue when a woman requested help? What had happened to her?

  That one question filled her mind, leaving room for nothing else. She took a step to follow Cormac.

  Helga dumped the camera in her arms, halting her. “Set up wherever you like while I fetch my basket.”

  With the whack of Cormac’s axe creating an unbroken rhythm in the background, Adella assembled her camera and joined Helga in hanging laundry as white as the widow’s hair. When Adella reached for the last sheet in the basket, Helga seized her wrist.

  Another unexplainable jolt of apprehension, similar to when Helga took hold of her in the missionary tent, rocked Adella. Why did Helga affect her thus? Was it the woman’s swiftness, her determination, her blunt manner? All three made a formidable personality. Still, Adella reminded herself, Helga was not a threat. She was not her enemy.

  “Leave that for later.” Helga released Adella and set the basket on her hip.

  Exhaling slowly to steady her nerves and hands, Adella returned to her camera. She repositioned the tripod several times, before she was satisfied with what she saw through the viewfinder—a once thriving home now attended by a sole occupant. Without husband or children or even livestock to stand beside Helga, the shot took on a melancholy tone.

  “Ready?” she called to Helga. “Remember not to move.”

  A sudden surge of uncertainty held her immobile as well. Had everything she’d done since Declan’s death been meaningless? Was she living her life for the wrong reasons? Before her stood a flesh and blood person who needed her help, not a ghost who couldn’t be saved or even avenged. Not properly at least. The dead remained dead. There was no changing that.

  She took the picture in a hurry and bundled up the camera even faster.

  With her basket still in hand, Helga moved to stand beside her. “Now that that’s done, I want you to see something.” Glancing over her shoulder at Cormac, who continued chopping wood with an untiring stroke, Helga positioned her broad bulk between them. Then she lifted the sheet from the basket. Three sticks of dynamite lay underneath.

  Shock paralyzed Adella. “What’re you doing with that?”

  “If there’s no track, my farm’s worth nothing to nobody but me.”

  An image of a crater torn in the earth—blackened rails and bloodied men lying battered and broken around it—flashed before her eyes. The McGrady Gang would lie among them and Cormac too. Ears ringing and body swaying from a blast that had yet to happen, she latched onto Helga’s arm. “Please tell me you don’t mean to blow up the worksite.”

  “Thought about it, but I can’t chance hurting my supplier. Might need more of these.” Helga caressed the dynamite in her basket with a lover’s hand.

  Adella felt her jaw drop. “You’re working with someone from the Katy? Why would he sabotage his own workplace?”

  “He didn’t say. Only said he didn’t want another incident like yours at the station.”

  Astonishment robbed her ability to speak, but her thoughts raced like the clouds across the sky. Did Helga know the man who’d dumped the load that nearly killed Adella? Her blood felt like ice and so did the future. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  Cormac’s axe was sud
denly silent.

  Helga returned the sheet to the basket and said in rushed whisper, “Just wanted you to know, so you’d be ready with your camera.” Then she stepped aside so Adella saw Cormac again, and him her.

  He stood, axe in hand, frowning at them. His gaze swept over her, almost as if searching for an injury. When he didn’t find anything amiss, his stance lost some of its rigidity. He glanced at Helga, his brow lowering even further. Then he slammed his axe into a log and strode toward them. Behind him, the stack of wood had grown with freshly cut wood piled atop.

  Its size had been sufficient when Cormac started. Helga was as strong as a man. She didn’t require help splitting wood. The no-nonsense Irishman striding toward them knew this, but he’d still accepted the task. Not just out of habit from a sister’s training or out of politeness to a stranger like Helga. He’d done it to give Adella room and trust.

  And she’d used that trust to discover something that might not only harm his railroad but him. She held information that might kill him. The clammy hand of fear brushed her skin.

  Thunder rumbled on the horizon. “Rain’s finally coming,” Helga said.

  Adella spun to face her. “When will—?”

  “Soon. Like we discussed yesterday, it’s best to work when the season’s ripe.”

  Cormac had crossed half the distance separating them. Little time remained.

  “Tell me who you’re working with,” Adella whispered.

  “He told me not to say.”

  “Helga, please be careful. You don’t want to hurt anyone, or get hurt. This man you’re dealing with, he might be a spy for the Joy Line.”

  “He’s no threat to me. I’m stronger than him, than all of them.” Helga’s lips pressed into a hard line.

  Cormac was within hearing distance. His gaze shifted momentarily from them to the sky. “We’d better head for town,” he said.

  Adella nodded, grateful for his steady hands as he carried her camera to their horses and secured it on his saddle. Her own hands shook as she mounted her horse. She wanted to turn her horse east and run away from everyone she’d met since coming to New Chicago. Instead, she waved farewell to Helga and kept her horse no faster than a trot as she and Cormac rode west in the direction of town.

  When she glanced back and saw Helga disappear inside her house, she gave in to her screaming nerves and urged her horse into a gallop. Seemingly in response, the sky opened up and rain pelted her skin like fierce pinpricks, pushing her to even greater speed.

  Cormac was suddenly beside her. Grabbing her reins, he slowed her horse. “We won’t make it to town. Not before the worst of the storm hits. We must take shelter and wait it out.” He jerked his head to the left. “There’s an abandoned farm over that knoll.”

  They clattered across a creek rising with the rain and clambered up the slope. The rain now fell thick, obscuring her view. Their horses skidded down the other side, sliding in earth slick with puddles. Lightning lit the horizon, granting her a glimpse of a ramshackle house with its door agape and banging in the wind. Seconds later, thunder boomed. Then the heavens unleashed a bruising deluge.

  “The barn’s that way,” Cormac yelled. “Let’s get the horses inside.”

  Before the last word had left his lips, she was turning her horse blindly in the direction he’d indicated. The barn held little more than a pile of hay with two stalls opposite. After they’d seen to their mounts, it only took a few strides to stand by the door. The rain had halted, but the clouds circled, preparing for another assault.

  The sodden gingham of her dress clung to her, heavy and revealing. She wanted to run, to hide, to disappear. The storm and now the cramped barn, made even smaller by Cormac’s size, thwarted her.

  She dared not look at him for fear of seeing what his clothing revealed. Wet linen and tweed plastered to a solid, muscular body would torment her. She yearned to run her hands over him, stroke every line and swell. But she also wanted to delve deeper and discover what secrets he harbored as well.

  She released a pained sigh. Other than their one all-too-brief kiss inside her hotel room, he’d met her advances with rejection. Or worse concern and questions. And she had told him too much already.

  He moved closer. He didn’t touch her, but the heat of his body pulled at her just the same. She propped one shoulder against the doorjamb, using it as an anchor.

  “We should make a run for the house,” he said.

  “That would be trespassing.”

  “Its owner is long gone. When a railroad reaches a town, some folks pack up and hop on the train. Some say they’re heading east to a better life.”

  Adella could’ve told them there wasn’t anything better in the East. Ghosts and regrets followed wherever you went. Same with new troubles. They sprouted like thistles in a vegetable patch. The door across the yard started banging again, driven by the wind, which was rising to its previous howl.

  “We’d be better off inside the house,” Cormac said. “You’re soaked through. You’re shivering.”

  She remembered another time when she’d been drenched and watching a house in the unforgiving rain. “I won’t go inside. It’s still someone’s home. They might come back.”

  “That’s unlikely.”

  “I came back.”

  A weighty silence hung between them, amplified by the storm outside the barn, before Cormac asked, “After the war?”

  She shook her head, making her sodden hair tumble loose from its pins. “After the war, when the carpetbaggers overran the south, my home was long gone.” Thick locks slid down her cheeks. She left them there, using them as a shield as she peered sideways at Cormac. “This was during the war when the Yankee troops first started paying house calls.”

  He reached out to touch her, but stopped. His hand fell in a fist by his side. “The soldiers— Did they— find you inside?”

  “No. I hid in the trees like a coward and watched a noble band of Union Blue tear up the walls of my two-room house to fill the fireplaces in the plantation mansion. Squatters and thieves. To them, my home was just kindling. Although the big house didn’t fare any better two years later during Sherman’s march.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder then, pulling her out of the past into the present. “What did Helga say to you?”

  Desperation to feel something new, rather wallowing in the past, overwhelmed her. She spun to face him. “I’m tired of talking. Show me what would’ve happened in the hotel if we hadn’t stopped.”

  “You don’t really want that, lass.”

  “I do.” The intensity of her response made him draw back in surprise. It surprised her too. She was surprised she’d resisted his appeal this long.

  “What if you get pregnant?” he demanded. “I refuse to bring a child into this world that won’t be properly cared for by a mother and father united as one, not just on paper but in their hearts. Can you do that, lass?”

  The enormity of his proposal made her head spin. She couldn’t have heard him correctly. Only his first question seemed answerable. A long ago snippet of conversation gathered while eavesdropping rose to her rescue. Maybe all her listening and lurking hadn’t been for naught.

  “The men in the army talked about pulling out at the last, spilling their seed on the ground…if they had a care for a woman and she asked.”

  Swearing again in Gaelic, Cormac pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “You shouldn’t have heard that.”

  “But I did and I’m asking.”

  “You ask too much. It’d be too hard a thing to remember when I’ve got the prettiest lass I’ve ever seen in my arms.”

  She moved closer to him. She craved his warmth, his strength, his touch. She didn’t want to run from this. “I’ll remember for both of us.”

  “You could do this with any man. Why me?”

  She wanted to delay his return to the worksite. No. That was a lie, with them trapped in the barn and his men probably all hunkered down themselves to wait out the
storm. Sometimes it was easier to tell oneself lies. And sometimes it was easier to say aloud just a little bit of the truth.

  She placed her palm on his chest. “I want you.”

  The muscles in his jaw jerked taut as leather. He stomped away. Flopping down on his back on the pile of hay, he threw one arm over his eyes.

  She followed and sat beside him. She made sure not to touch him. She didn’t want him retreating again. “Is this your way of telling me no?”

  “You ask too much. I want more than a quick toss, lass. I want that child I spoke of. I want a family again.”

  The yearning in his voice made her stomach churn with apprehension. She hugged her knees to her chest and propped her chin on them. “When you went home to Ireland…” She wanted to ask if a sweetheart had been waiting for him. Her courage failed her. “You went back to start a family?”

  “No. I returned to help the family I’d left. I went back for my sister, Meghan.” He thrust his fingers deep into his hair and left them there. He stared at the roof without blinking. “I told you my sister, Molly, died. She wasn’t the only one.”

  His words chilled her.

  Shaking as if cold as well, he continued in a strangled voice, “During the two years following Molly’s death, my sisters—Muriel and Maeve and Maureen—died. Meghan only survived by a hairsbreadth.”

  Tears blurred her eyes. “And your parents?”

  “I was told my mother died when I was four. A year later, my father didn’t return from the tavern. That was one of my first memories. Not his failure to come home, but my sisters all saying it’d be easier without him. But the McGrady sisters never had things easy.” His skin had turned as white as bleached bone.

  When he’d said people died because of him, he’d meant his sisters. She didn’t believe it. “How did they die?”

  “An Gorta Mór. The Great Hunger. It took everyone I loved except Meghan.”

  Despite her sorrow for his loss, she breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t responsible for anyone’s death. He wasn’t like Levi Parsons. “You can’t blame yourself for surviving a country-wide famine that happened…how long ago?”