“Fawn trusts me... she tells me things.” I fingered the tucks in my bodice, needlessly adjusted the fit of my skirt, then folded my restless fingers inside my palms. “For instance, she told me all about that poker game you won her in, and I’m wondering, how much does Sharo know? About you and Fawn, I mean?”
Quinn’s grin faded. It was like turning down a lamp in a dark room.
“I thought you liked him!” I exclaimed.
“Liking’s got nothing to do with it,” he said stiffly. “My mother was a Comanche. A Comanche’s got no call to explain anything to a Pawnee.” His jutting jaw was as unyielding as the spine of rock looming above us.
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Quinn! Both of you are half-white, too, aren’t you? Then, let your white blood do the explaining! Us white folks are good at that.”
“Too good by half,” he muttered. His chin raised up another notch. “You do it, then. I ain’t no matchmaker ... I got better things to do with my time.”
We glared at each other. Just then, a blood-chilling scream of pain sent our attention winging toward the center corral. It sounded like an animal.
Quinn jammed his hat down on his head. “It’s that no-good Jed,” he muttered.
He strode off, shouldering startled cowboys out of his path. I didn’t think to wonder how he knew it was Jed. We all knew something was bound to happen; it just happened sooner rather than later.
I pressed forward with the men. Jed, astride a beautiful chestnut that looked like a firecracker about to explode, laughed down into Quinn’s angry face. “You said no quirtin’ or steelin’ ... show ‘im, Cookie!”
Cookie, looking shamefaced, held up Jed’s quirt and spurs. “Told me to hold ‘em for ‘im. Boss.”
Quinn stroked the quivering horse with one hand, and slid his other up under its mane as if feeling for something. His head jerked up. “Usin’ a ghost cord, Jed?”
“You didn’t say nothin’ about that.”
“Didn’t think I had to.”
“What’s a ghost cord?” I asked the cowboy next to me.
“Bit of string tied to a mustang’s tongue and gums. You feed it ‘round his jaw, hold it in your hand along with the reins, and if he does somethin’ you don’t want ‘im to ... whumpf!” He jerked an imaginary string tight. “Hurts like double hell ... pardon m’language, ma’am.”
Quinn removed the offending device and turned it slowly in his long hands. “See you added a few ‘improvements’ of your own.” Murmurs of disgust arose from the men close enough to inspect it. Quinn suddenly reached up, grabbed Jed by his sweaty shirtfront and hauled him out of the saddle. Sharo darted in to lead the wheeling, jittering horse away.
“You better hope you didn’t do that critter any lasting damage,” Quinn rasped, his face no more than six inches from Jed’s. He abruptly released him. “Whew! Not only are you meaner’n a snake, you smell worse’n a saloon on Sunday mornin’.” His eyes searched the crowd, and came to rest on me. “Serena? Go on up to the bunkhouse. See if Jed’s hidin’ whiskey in his bunk.”
I stared at him open-mouthed. Why me?
Cookie lumbered up. “I’ll go up with you, Miss S’rena. Time I got that chicken pie put together.” He grabbed my arm and yanked me along.
“Why me?” I repeated aloud.
“The men can’t be ‘spected to round on a bunkmate, even one they ain’t got no use for.”
Grab holt, S’rena. I felt as if I’d plunged my hand into a patch of nettles.
Jed hadn’t put much effort into concealing his jug. I found it in one of the two gunny sacks stuffed under his bunk, along with two jars labeled White Poppy Elixir, one empty, one still sealed. At first I assumed he had stolen them from the hampers in the ruined house, but a closer examination revealed the labels as less elaborate than those on the jars Belle had intended to sell. These must have come from an older batch. Belle, mentioning this elixir by name, had said Jed always paid for what he wanted. Jed—and Bazz, too, I recalled—had hinted at a relationship of an amorous as well as business nature. I had been forced by events to accept many unwelcome differences between my twin and me, but I sincerely hoped an attraction to Jed was not one of them. Just the thought of it made me shudder.
I slipped the sealed jar into my pocket and returned to the corrals. I handed the jug to Quinn without a word. He uncorked it, sniffed, and upended it. It was hard to read the expressions on the faces of the men, but I’m sure it pained more than just Jed to see that liquor puddling in the dust.
I stepped back into the crowd; Cobby edged up beside me, carrying a saddle.
“Sorry business,” he said. “Quinn’ll set him down for sure.”
“... I don’t owe you a red cent,” Quinn was saying. “You asked to borrow against your pay to go to town, and like a fool I let you. Fact is, you owe me, but I’m willin’ to call it quits.” Jed began to protest, but Quinn cut him short. “Listen up and listen up good,” he said, jabbing a finger at Jed’s pointy nose, “you and your lead-head quirt and tiled-down spurs ain’t welcome here at Morning Star, never was for that matter, so pack up your plunder and git.” He turned on his heel.
“Which horse you givin’ me?” Jed yelled after him.
“Lordy, Lordy,” I heard Cobby mutter beside me. “I allus knew that Jed for a damn fool.”
Quinn turned back. “You already got one,” he drawled, “known as shanks’ mare.”
The men fell silent. In the center of the ragged ring they formed, Jed swayed on unsteady legs, his sagging shoulders at last admitting defeat. It was a tableau I would not soon forget. Then Quinn strode off, and the men soberly dispersed to their tasks. Cobby stepped forward to give Jed his saddle, taken from the mistreated chestnut.
“You’ll be wantin’ this.”
Jed took it without a word and slung it over his shoulder. He cornered bloodshot eyes at me as he passed by. “You best keep a lookout over your pretty shoulder. We got some reckonin’ to do.”
His voice was low, his tone mild, but I was jolted by the hate that radiated from his sidewise glance.
“Pay him no mind, missy,” Cobby said. “I’m bettin’ this ain’t the first outfit Jed’s been throwed out of. Even walkin’, he’ll be in Ellsworth by tomorrow nightfall, and too liquored up by midnight to even think ‘bout comin’ back.”
I gave Cobby a grateful smile, but my uneasiness remained. I recalled his description of Jed’s way of breaking horses. Quick and dirty, like the man himself. I knew I would not rest easy for a long time to come.
Chapter Nineteen
By the time the men came up from the corrals for dinner they were too hungry to waste words on Jed’s fate. The chicken pie was judged “good grub” by everyone whose mouth wasn’t too full to talk. I exchanged a pleased smile with Cookie over the heads of the men and told them they had earned it with the morning’s work they’d put in. Unused to compliments, they shifted uneasily on the long plank benches, although I caught here and there a sheepish grin of acknowledgement.
When the washing up was done, I was too tired to do anything more than trudge up to Quinn’s quarters to lie down for a bit before it was time to start supper. “Beans and sowbelly,” Cookie had confided as he shaped a batch of sourdough into loaves, “and as much bread as it’ll take to fill in the cracks.”
I awoke to a quiet house. I peered out the parlor windows to see Fawn, edged with gold by the light slanting in from the west, sitting at the top of the slope. Arms hugged around her knees, she was staring down into the corrals, no doubt hoping for a glimpse of Sharo. The work wouldn’t stop much before dusk, so I had a couple of hours to spare before lending Cookie a hand. Should I go up to the big house? I wondered. I knew I couldn’t put it off forever. I thought of telling Fawn, but it would only upset her, and if she followed me .… Suppose Bazz was hiding there, and suppose he saw her....
Deciding it wasn’t a risk worth taking, I closed the door quietly behind me, edged around to the side and walked swiftly, keeping first
Quinn’s quarters, then Rita’s hut and the henhouse interposed between us. As I passed the garden, I noticed leaning against the gate the hoe I had used that morning to pry carrots and onions from their earthen beds. I picked it up, intending to return it to its proper place in the henhouse, but suppose... just suppose Bazz was even half as villainous as Quinn thought him? I decided to take it with me, reluctantly, not liking myself for it, but Bazz had, after all, been ready enough to see me dead, even if not by his own hand.
I did not dally in the kitchen; decisions about the choice of utensils and remaining stores to be transported to the bunkhouse awaited Cookie’s inspection and advice. I crossed the wide front hall, leaned the hoe against what remained of the wall and knelt to open Belle’s hampers. I compared the jars to the one I had found under Jed’s bunk. The difference in the labels proved what I had suspected: Jed’s had come from an earlier batch, confirming him as an opium eater in addition to being a drunk and a mistreater of animals. I prayed Morning Star had seen the last of him.
I slipped the jar back into my pocket and moved cautiously into the parlor. Although the cushions were too rain-soaked to salvage, the stout, pegged wooden furniture needed little more than a sanding down of storm-inflicted gouges and scratches and a dressing of oil to restore them to usefulness. The long, wide couch could serve as a bed for me, and if the Indian rugs were hung out in a shady spot to dry, perhaps they could be folded to use as a mattress....
The sour smell of wet ashes filled my nostrils as I walked slowly through the large room, poking at this, discarding that, putting off going upstairs until I could no longer justify further delay. Debris littered the stairs and the long corridor above. Rain, wind-driven through the shattered windows in my and Belle’s rooms, had, as Sharo had said, reduced the contents to soggy junk, now fuzzed with mildew. Belle’s dressmaker’s dummy lay crushed under dislodged blocks of stone, the strawberry locks of her wig curling out from beneath them as if by the mocking intent of some malevolent spirit.
I climbed to the third floor. The roof was entirely gone; the whirling tunnel of wind had scoured Ross Cooper’s room of its furnishings, including the long, coffin-like chest and whatever gruesome mementos it contained. They would not be missed. All that remained were the pale deerskins I had seen upon his bed, torn and tumbled in a corner, damaged beyond repair.
I descended again to the second floor. Wishing I had not left the hoe in the downstairs hall, I paused to take a deep breath before easing open the door to Bazz’s room. I need not have worried; the room was quite empty. Empty of any human occupant, that is. I stepped in and looked around me wonderingly. The water-stained, heavy red velour drapes drawn across the shattered windows had apparently shielded the contents of the room from the storm-driven rain. What debris there might have been had been cleared away, and the signs of recent human habitation were evident: empty cans of beans and milk, broken egg shells, even the feathery tops of carrots. The pretty lace-inset coverlet on the bed had been neatly folded at its foot; but the pillowcase was bloodstained, and bloody rags littered the floor below.
As I stared at them, wondering how badly Bazz had been hurt, the smell of hot wax reached my nose. I whirled and gasped at the sight of the distorted reflection of my alarmed self in a large, cracked, gilt-framed mirror above an elaborately carved and painted dressing table. On its crowded top the stub of a fat candle guttered in a puddle of hardening wax. I hurried to extinguish it. Half-hidden in the litter of perfume bottles and jars of salves, I spied a pair of fancy silver combs—the ones Belle had said one of the orphan girls had taken? This could be a different pair, but somehow I doubted it. Beside them lay a small red book. Lottie Wohlfort’s herbal....
Of course! Her herbal, her dressing table, her mirror, her lacy coverlet—Bazz had gathered about him the belongings dearest to the person he had loved best in the world. Had he crept up here expecting to die in the shrine he created? Where was he now? How long had that candle been burning? A day? An hour?
As I pondered, I absently picked up the finely bound little book and began riffling the gilt-edged pages. The paper was of the finest quality; the faded handwriting, in an old-fashioned German script, various. Toward the back, however, the writing was in English, a fine copperplate script that near the end became interspersed with a rounded childish hand I recognized. As I leafed slowly through the remaining pages I realized Belle had not only contributed to Lottie’s herbal, but in the end her observations dominated it. I pushed open the drapes, sat down on the edge of the bed and began to read.
I have no idea how long I remained there after closing the covers on those final damning words, staring down at the red book in my lap as if at a viper curled to strike. But its venom had already leaked into the pages; the harm had long since been done.
Belle had described in meticulous detail the medications she had prepared and administered to Lottie Cooper, dutifully recording the dosages increased in strength and frequency. Lacking in conscience in every other respect, in this she had been conscientious to a fault: monkshood, Jimsonweed, belladonna, castor bean, henbane, briony, poppy ... her babies, Belle had called them; spawn of the devil was more like it. At the very end, beneath her notation of the date of the death she had so attentively ensured, she had signed her name with prideful flourish.
The band of light admitted grudgingly by the parted drapes had lost its earlier brilliance. I thrust the herbal into my pocket and sprang to my feet. There was little time left to do what I must. I clattered down the stairs, stopping only long enough to snatch up the hoe I had left in the downstairs hall before plunging out onto the long veranda littered with the battered remnants of the pillars that once lent it a certain majesty.
The sun had paused, blood-orange, just above the horizon, as if unwilling to relinquish the vibrant hue it had taken twenty-four hours to acquire. In the dooryard, the leaves on Belle’s herbs, black in the fading light, rustled; vines torn from the fallen pillars reached up blindly, sinuously searching for new support. I could no longer distinguish the crushed patch where my sister’s body had fallen. so lush was the growth in the wake of a storm that had sown such lasting devastation elsewhere.
I took a deep breath and stepped boldly into the garden. Beneath my feet, swollen stalks burst audibly; vine tendrils, slender and supple as silken threads, whipped up the handle of the hoe, around my wrist. I tore them off, raised the hoe high above my head and brought it down hard, again and again, deeper and deeper, until my rage was spent. At my feet the long, pale, many-branched root of the briony vine lay exposed, along with a number of other rootlike, harder fragments.
As I bent to inspect them, the fetid odor of the root’s split, white flesh rose to gag me. I nudged one of the objects with my foot, exposing knobs first at one end, then the other. Could it be. ... I closed my eyes, recalling to mind the minutely detailed engravings in the anatomy text Father Rogg kept in his pharmacy. Yes, it was a bone. I gingerly teased the rest out of the soil with the toe of my shoe, two ... five ... seven ... all of them bones. An animal, I told myself. Something a coyote had killed and eaten here. I tugged at a rounded edge protruding from beneath the broken root. The dark earth relinquished it reluctantly, and no wonder. It was a skull. A human skull. Those orphans? But which one? Who would know, or care?
I straightened up, sick with apprehension. The ruined facade of the great stone house, stained red by the setting sun, gaped eyeless ahead of me. It was as if the skull at my feet, bloodied and bloated to enormous size, had by some monstrous agency been transported there.
“Dear God!” I cried, my hands closing into fists as I fought down the panic that threatened to seize me. “Haven’t I had horrors enough?”
“Thinkin’ on doin’ some gardening?”
I dropped the hoe, startled by the voice that issued out of the dusk. My head whipped first to one side, then the other. Nothing. I felt suddenly dizzy ... was I hearing things now? Just then a figure emerged upon the veranda from the darkened square wher
e the shattered oak door once stood.
“I never figgered on catchin’ you so easy.”
The voice, rasping and mean, brought my heart into my throat, but it was the jangling of the spurs that identified with certainty the man approaching me through the dusk.
“What are you doing here, Jed?” I slowly bent my knees; my hand searched for the hoe. “I expected you’d be long gone by now.”
“Don’t allus do what folks expect,” Jed drawled as he slammed his boot down on the handle of the hoe. “Too dark to do any more hoein’, S’rena.” The rowels on his spur sliced through my sleeve; I cried out as he hauled me up by my arm. “Cut ya, did I?” He tsk-tsked slowly, mocking my distress.
Although shorter than I, years of bronc busting had made him as wiry as an old root. Sober now, his steady grip on my arm was too strong to even think of breaking. “Horses are out back,” he said, yanking me along. “We got a little travelin’ to do.”
“Traveling? Where? You can’t—”
“Oh, I guess I can. You see, after Cooper set me down, I moseyed up to the big house, see what the storm had left in the way of pickin’s, and guess what I find: ol’ Bazz-eel, his head wrapped up, lyin in a bed all lace and fluffs, wild-eyed, like he’d been grazin’ on loco weed.”
“You’re saying Bazz is alive?”
“Last time I seen him. He knows Quinn’ll be lookin’ fer ‘im, so seein’s how our little plan got bent clean outta shape by that twister, we struck a bargain. I hauled him down to that old line rider’s shack in the draw out yonder. Time he got there he was lookin’ like he been hit with a pack saddle.” Jed shrugged. “Thing is, he wants me to bring you to ‘im, and that’s what I’m gonna do.”
“But why?”
“Well, you see he spied on you from upstairs t’other day, and he got it in his head you’re Belle, an’ he’s past listenin’ to anythin’ he don’t want to hear. Kept talkin’ about his ma’s red book and how Belle gotta be punished, like those little orphan gals she buried for him. Can you figger that? Havin’ the stomach for killin’ but not the bury in?”
Darkness at Morning Star Page 26
