by Martha Hix
Jon Marc wouldn’t worry his wife with the honest-to-God truth. But if rain didn’t fall and soon, their herd wouldn’t survive the winter.
Without a word of comment to the mother of his daughter, Hoot Todd, gracing Terecita with a glare, warmed his thorny hands above the stove. In a tone contrary to his abrupt arrival, he inquired, “Anybody miss me?”
“Why, yes.” Beth set her cup on the floor. She had one of those conciliatory looks that her husband had come to understand more than well. “How have you been?”
“Sick as a dog.”
“What is wrong?” Terecita, forgetting aggravation, rushed to her man to try to offer comfort.
“Dad gum it, get away! Don’t need no woman-problems.”
When Todd grappled to free himself of his lover’s clutching fingers, Stumpy got the wrong idea. The dog leapt from Liam’s lap and took a hunk out of the bandit’s thumb.
Which, of course, caused Todd to bring his knee up hard beneath Stumpy’s chin. The dog tossed from his master’s lap, landing on his ear to howl. Liam thrust off his blanket, took hold of a fire-poker, and tried to whap it upside Todd’s head.
Bethany went for the already-crippled dog.
Jon Marc caught the poker short of its mark.
Terecita stepped between Todd and Jon Marc, but Stumpy got the wrong idea. He chomped into her ankle. Blood spurted. Which rubbed Todd the wrong way.
“Friggin’ dog,” he yelled and connected his fist to Liam, instead of his intended canine target.
The postmaster flew backward, the Indian blanket soaring against Beth’s middle. She threw off the restraints to bind her arms around the canine and shush him with her own brand of charm, not inconsiderable.
“Enough!” Jon Marc shouted.
Everyone went still.
Stumpy then laved Beth’s ear.
A visage as woebegone as Stumpy’s worst countenance swept over Todd’s face. “Can’t even get no respect in my hometown. I’m leaving. For good.”
“You are leaving? Ha!” Terecita accepted the clean handkerchief Jon Marc provided, and began to wrap her ankle. “You will not be the first to leave.” Terecita lifted her nose toward the ceiling. “I am leaving. I will take my daughter and my talents with the piano, and find a more appreciative audience.”
“What about Sabrina?” Beth asked, her voice not disguising her concern. “Where will you take her?”
“Mexico City, perhaps. I will find an adoring man—a true protector!—to pay for my daughter’s education.”
“Terecita, I told you, be patient.” Standing, Beth had a worried look. “My husband and I will help.”
“I am out of patience.” Terecita swept out the door, leaving it open to let cold air in.
“Well, god—” Hoot, eyeing Beth, bit off his curse. “Dad gum it, you just cain’t trust women to love on you when you need it. Always gotta think of theirselves, women. Dad gum it.”
If not for his wife’s woeful, downcast face, Jon Marc might have chuckled at Todd’s view of himself as he related to women. What a contrast in view versus action.
“I won’t want her to take Sabrina away,” Beth whispered, all eyes.
Moving his line of inquiry from one person to the next, Todd wanted to know, “Anybody got any idea what Robin Hood is?”
“He ain’t you.” Liam grabbed Indian blanket and snaggletoothed dog. “You ain’t nuttin’ but a saddle sore, pure and simple.”
Beth closed troubled hazel eyes. Her shoulders hunching, she crept closer to her husband, whispering, “I love that little girl. I don’t want to be without her.”
As if the weather weren’t enough to worry about, Jon Marc had to consider his wife’s feelings. Poor Beth. He nestled her cheekbone against his shoulder. She hadn’t been quite herself here lately, no doubt because no sign of a babe had come their way.
It worried Jon Marc, too, the reason their many matings hadn’t brought what they should have. This wasn’t the moment to worry about young O’Briens. He couldn’t let Terecita hare off with the little girl who meant so much to his wife.
“I’ll go after her,” he said and went for the door.
“What did you say?”
Jon Marc asked that question in Santa Maria Church, the reason for this visit falling away. He sat on a pew beside Terecita, who sobbed into a rag.
“Chico has not been the same.” She blew her nose into the white confines. “Not since your señora filled his head with ideas of legend.”
“That’s not all you said.” Jon Marc laid a wrist on the pew in front of them. “What did you mean, ‘By appealing to his family honor’?”
“Es un cuento largo. ”
A long story was it? Did that make sense? “What do you mean?”
“They are not really related. It was a hoax. A ploy.” Terecita buried her forehead against twined fingers that rested on the forward pew. “Your wife has been good for this place, but I sometimes wish she wouldn’t tell so many tales. She was never Chico’s sister. She lied to mold him into what she wanted him to be.”
“Is that so?”
“She is una buena mujer, su esposa.”
That Terecita couldn’t express herself in English troubled Jon Marc. She had a grand understanding of the Anglo tongue. Something had made her revert. Did it exclusively have to do with a lover who wouldn’t provide for his get and gal?
“You call my wife a good woman, but I don’t want to be sent sidetracked by nuances. Speak English.”
“She is not sister to Chico. She told him so only to get on his good side.”
“Beth got the idea to call herself sister to Hoot Todd?”
Terecita nodded. “When she called him Mortimer, it changed him. He was an hombre after glory.”
This woman’s confidences struck Jon Marc as strange. Could it have to do with suspicion at its most stark? For the past few months, since Beth had given Todd a watch, her husband harbored a curiosity, one no happily married man should have.
Once Jon Marc had gotten over the visit from his grandfather, he had a chance to think about that gift watch. Three days after Fitz left, it came to him. Aaron Buchanan decried timepieces. The Kansan claimed to be a true man of the West, telling time by the arch of the sun and the moon’s position in the heavens.
Aaron Buchanan hadn’t carried a watch.
Which, if Jon Marc thought about—not something he wanted to do—preyed on his mind. As was his custom, he found excuses. “Family honor” had to do with Beth’s campaign to curry favor with the outlaw, for peaceable reasons. Didn’t it?
“They aren’t related,” he stated without stuttering.
“Es verdad. It’s true.” Again Terecita blew into the rag. “It was all a ploy to make him think they were brother and sister, calling herself Bethany Todd. I do not know how Beth found out his name is truly Mortimer, but it worked.”
Jon Marc wrinkled his brow and studied the cuticles of his thumbs. How did Beth find out Hoot’s given name? One thing about it, she knew the truth that night in the bandit’s shack.
How long had she known it, and why hadn’t it been important enough to mention to her husband?
Jon Marc intended to find out.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“How did you know Todd’s name is Mortimer?”
Somewhat in the neighborhood of three dozen answers came to mind, yet Bethany hesitated to answer her husband. A good while back she’d vowed never to lie to him again.
Rather than make up a story, she took up the fire-poker and rearranged logs in the hearth. “We’ve been home for hours. Long enough to change into work britches and shirts, and to take care of several chores. You haven’t said one word about Sabrina. Is her mother going to take her away?”
“I don’t want to discuss Sabrina.”
“But you went after Terecita, for the very purpose of—”
“Beth, you didn’t answer my question.”
“You didn’t answer mine, either.” She rubbed her upper arms.
“Such a chill. Warm toast would be nice. I could brown those leftover biscuits from breakfast. Or shall I pour us a tot of whiskey?”
“Cut the folderol. I don’t want a servile wife. I want the truth.” Jon Marc loomed into her path. “Beth, answer me. How did you know Todd had another name?”
Nothing would be the same, ever the same, if she confessed. Her gaze ascended to her husband’s sharp regard. Trouble etched brackets at his mouth. She had the eerie suspicion that he, like any good interrogator, knew the answer before asking it.
“I’m interested in a shot of whiskey,” she said.
Somehow she sidestepped Jon Marc to make for the corner cabinet. Her hand shook as she poured a generous shot into a glass. That hand trembled even more as she brought the fiery contents to her lips. It burned down her gullet. Perhaps it was the conflagration of what was yet to come, she decided. Was there any way to avoid that fire?
She had to try.
With a wan smile plumbed from the very depths of her essence, as if she could ever smile again on her own, she said, “Before my traveling companion succumbed—” fingers moved to make the sign of the cross “—we discussed Hoot Todd. Miss Todd mentioned his given name. I believe Mortimer is Celtic for sea warrior. Quite elegant as a surname in England, I understand. ‘O, how stalwart is thee Mortimer, who sails the seas as mine heart does purr.’ ”
“That’s awful.”
“That’s not fair.”
Jon Marc set his feet wide apart and crossed arms over his chest. “I could mention you’ve never recited for me before now, but I won’t. Let’s leave it at: you’re awful.”
His assessment made her flat offended. She had no right to call herself a poetess, but her verse had a certain ring to it. At least she hadn’t added anything bawdy. “I’d like to hear you come up with something better.”
Her husband took the glass out of her hand to fling it to the hearth. It shattered. “You knew his name. How do you claim? As a wise soothsayer? Or as an untruth-relayer?”
“Is relayer a word?”
Smoke might as well have plumed from Jon Marc’s nostrils and ears, so incensed was he. Yet he got still. Very still. His eyes changed from fiery to as cold as the temperature outside their home. “I think I’ve been made a fool.”
“You’re not foolish. Not in the least.”
“I didn’t question you too much about why your eyes weren’t blue. Or why your hair didn’t curl. Did I call you on why you didn’t object to a ‘foreign’ priest? No. And never once did I mention anything about Aaron Buchanan not carrying a fob watch.”
What could she say, but “true”?
“Let’s don’t even discuss why you don’t eat fish on Fridays. But I do, by damn, wonder why you appealed to Mortimer’s sense of honor.”
“To make peace for us all.”
“At what price, Bethany?”
“What price is too high?”
The moment she gave that answer, she knew she’d given herself away. Her heart plummeted. Her blood rushed from her face.
Beth Buchanan would never have replied to “Bethany.”
Jon Marc looked equally as stricken. The strength seemed to leech from his formidable body, his shoulders hunching. He dropped his jaw. A lock of old-penny hair fell over his brow. “What has happened here? What did you do? What are we?”
He shoved up his gaze. And it was as if he were seeing his wife for the first time. “Who are you?”
“A good wife.”
“What I wanted was a true wife. I wanted Beth Buchanan. You’re an imposter. A liar.”
Beth whirled around to stare at the floor. How could she argue the truth? Her only hope was to throw herself on his mercy. She pivoted to face his disappointment and confusion. “I’m sorry, Jon Marc. So very sorry. All I can offer is myself. I pray I’ll be enough. Because I truly love you.”
He stood without moving, until his hands dropped to the side. “You are in fact Hoot Todd’s sister?”
“I ... I wish I weren’t.”
Jon Marc slammed shut anguished eyes and reared his head back. His lips moved silently. And then he glared at the woman who had vowed to love, honor, and obey him, until death did them part.
The distance in his eyes caused Bethany to shiver, even harder than before.
“Where is my bride?” he demanded.
Her hand went to her heart. “I am your bride. I love you, husband. I’ll always love you. Forever. And beyond. I would give my life for you.”
He retreated, the heel of his hand slicing the air. “I don’t know you. You’re a stranger.”
“That’s not so! You know me. I’ve given you my everything. I have cleaved to you. I’ll never be anything but a faithful and loving wife to you.”
“How can this be?” He shook his head, as if to clear cobwebs.
Bethany understood his stupefaction, his antipathy, his quest for honesty, yet the whole of her yearned to be everything he demanded. That couldn’t be. She hadn’t been born a Buchanan.
“My only thought was to make you a fitting wife,” she whispered. “If you’ll listen to what I have to say, maybe you’ll understand how I came to be here.”
“Nothing you can say would interest me, Bethany Todd. You’re not what I want.”
Heartstrings threatened to break. Why hadn’t she thought of how deeply she might hurt him, with this black-hearted scheme?
“But, Jon Marc, I am your wife.”
“I pledged to Beth Buchanan, not to Hoot Todd’s sister.”
“I am, for all intents and purposes, the woman you sent for.”
He wasn’t convinced. “What happened to my bride?”
Jon Marc clamped his hands on Bethany’s shoulders, as if to shake her. The seeking stare that she had once cowered from, later relished, now ate into her, leaving her without defense.
She wasn’t able to look at him, when he implored, “Tell me, wife. And I don’t want any of your stuff and nonsense. Where is Beth Buchanan?”
“She’s dead.”
“I feel as if somebody walked on me grave.”
“Oh, Daddy, don’t be talking about dying.” Tessa O’Brien Jinnings dimpled a smile at her elderly father, not that she wasn’t approaching elderly herself. “You’re just cold. That’s all. Do you need another cup of this nice hot cocoa?”
Eugene Jinnings swallowed a groan. He didn’t want to get up and fetch Fitz’s chocolate. Truly didn’t. With the servants having turned in for the night, Tessa would likely send her husband to the kitchen.
The genie burrowed into the lap shawl, closer to Tessa’s plump side.
This was a blistering cold night in Memphis. A fire had been lain in the fireplace of the O’Brien family home, where Eugene nestled on a horsehair sofa in the drawing room with his wife, her father in his invalid chair, the latter’s feet toasting before the fire.
“I wonder how Jon Marc and his little bride are doing,” Tessa said, her mind never far from her nephews or their families, unless it was to think about Eugene. “I do hope they’ll join us at Burke and Susan’s home for Christmas.”
“A rancher is Jonny.” Fitz gave his second daughter a kindly smile. “Doona be disappointed if they canna make the journey. ’Tis a cattle drive he is wanting. Ranchers canna leave at the drop of a hat. Another time, Contessa. If we doona see them on me birthday, we will another time.”
“I can’t wait to see Jon Marc. Or to meet Beth.” Tessa got one of her stubborn looks, then turned it squarely on Eugene. Her silver ringlets bounced pertly. “I think we should visit. Daddy says we’re welcome. I have every right to see what my wish brought dear Jon Marc. I have sat still long enough.”
Not another trip to Texas. Not another! Eugene was still worn out from the last one. He’d never catch up on his naps.
The trouble with living as a non-working genie, he got older. Which had been the foremost wish of Eugene Jinnings, formerly having served as a jinn, the genie to grant wishes. How could a man live in retirement, o
r expect a pleasant death, if carriage wheels were forever bouncing his bones to pieces?
Eugene oiled a smile at his wife. “Let us not be hasty, milady. And do not despair. Jon Marc and his bride may end up in New Orleans. If we leave, we might pass them in the night.”
“I do wish they had a telegraph office in Fort Ewell.” Tessa’s diamond bracelet sparkled as she fluttered a hand. “Why, we could be in touch in no time.”
“Contessa, go be getting yer old da more of that cocoa,” said Fitz.
Her rosy, wrinkled cheeks turning up to Eugene, Tessa cooed, “Genie, my pumpkin, would you . . . ?”
“Contessa, do it yerself, please.” Fitz meant business. “ ’Tis a word I’m wanting t’ have with yer husband.”
“You men. You never want to say anything in front of me.”
“ ’Tis because ye are the next best t’ a telegraph office, Contessa. Canna have a confidence one, not with ye nosying about, passing along every word t’ yer sister.”
“Men.” Grumble she had, but Tessa laid back the covers and headed for the cocoa.
No sooner did she leave than Fitz spoke. “Eugene . . . something bad is happening with Jonny and his bride. I feel it in me bones. They ache. Same as they ached before me grandson gave back his heart t’ us.”
“You sense it in your bones, Fitz?” Eugene had his own intuition. “Or is it something you know?”
Fitz picked up one leg, then the other, to set them on the floor. “There’s something I have been meaning t’ tell ye. That postmaster lad—Liam Short, I believe is his name—said something at Jonny and Beth’s to-do. Been drinking the priest’s beer, had he, which loosens a lad’s tongue. Said he worried about Jonny. Relieved he was, Jonny being happy with Beth. Said he hoped Jonny never found out the truth about her.”
“What truth?”
“The real Beth Buchanan is dead and buried. Methinks Jonny’s bride is a woman named Bethany Todd. ’Tis my thinking, and that of the lady sleuth I sent to Kansas. You know her. Velma Cinglure of New Orleans. Used to be Velma Harken. Had her check on Beth. Velma followed Beth’s trail. And found out our gal is an imposter. Run out of a town called Liberal, Bethany Todd was. Isna good. Isna good.”
