Rising Waters

by Chloe Garner

  Sarah licked her lips and glanced at Thomas, who gave her the tiniest of shrugs.

  “I’m not going to say I was the victim, but she went for it because she believed. I just hope it was worth it.”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Dumber than fish on the moon,” she muttered. “I’m takin’ the buckboard up to the station to catch the train. You can see it home?”

  “I’ll do it,” Thomas said, and she nodded, glancing once at Rhoda and wondering what it was that the woman saw in her that made her so sure it was going to be worth the inevitable loss, then Sarah turned for the door.

  Jimmy was still puttin’ up with Lise, outside, and Sarah weren’t in no more mood to stand by.

  “Gonna test the offspring for which brother it belongs to, or just go with the charade that you ain’t a whore?” Sarah asked, just loud enough to make Lise stiffen. Jimmy gave her a hard look, but Sarah didn’t relent. “You ain’t comfy in your prize of a house, you get your husband straightened out and make him build you somethin’ more suitin’ to your tastes. Far as I can see, Jimmy provided more than Little Peter has, and yet you come gripin’ to him when the bits don’t work the way you like.”

  “I belong in the Lawson house,” Lise said. “As I am a Lawson and I am carrying the most important of the Lawsons.”

  Sarah opened her mouth to speak once more, but a flicker of motion, just a tick in Jimmy’s little finger silenced her. Lise gave her a smug look.

  “Enough,” Jimmy said quietly. “You and Petey can move back into the house for the duration of time that Sarah and I are in Preston. You will leave the staff here to tend to the rest of the family and the houses, but you may move back in. When I return, you will depart from the house and you will find your own lodgings.”

  Lise stared at him. Sarah tried not to look smug back at her.

  Okay, tried was way too strong a word.

  She tried not to look ugly smug.

  “How long are you going to be gone?” Lise finally asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “A few days out to the coast, a few days of meetings, a few days back here. Not very long.”

  “The generator had best be working again by then,” Lise said. Jimmy shook his head.

  “You misunderstand. Sarah’s right. If you’re going to hold up that child as the Lawson heir, Petey should play a part in caring for it. He has his share of the take from the claim auction; that’s plenty of money. I doubled the size of the town in less time than we’re talking about. He can find a new place for you to live, where your concerns and complaints go to him, rather than me.” He touched the point of his hat. “Good day.”

  “But… Jimmy,” Lise said. “He can’t do that.”

  “Su’prise, su’prise, su’prise,” Sarah said. “You picked the wrong brother.”

  Jimmy closed his eyes as he walked.

  “You aren’t helping.”

  “Did I say I was tryin’?” she asked.

  “I need my brother,” Jimmy said. “And the child she’s carrying is a part of my family, whether or not you like her. If I’m not mistaken, you’re still completely opposed to the idea of bearing children of your own, so it’s likely that that child, being the first of the next generation of Lawsons, will be the leader of the family after me.”

  “Terrible thought,” Sarah said. “Her kid having any manner of power, ‘round here.”

  Jimmy shrugged.

  “Show me a better option when the time comes, I’ll be glad to discuss it.”

  They both headed for the driver’s seat on the buckboard and she stopped, raising an eyebrow at him.

  His nostrils flared, once, and she closed her eyes.

  “Dammit, Lawson,” she muttered, crossing in front of him and climbing into the buckboard on other side. The mare stepped daintily as Jimmy stroked her nose on the way past, gathering up the reins and gliding into the seat next to Sarah. She gave him a warning look.

  “I ain’t gonna put up with…”

  “You got a cigarette?” he asked and she threw her hands up.

  “When you gonna start carryin’ ‘em for yourself?” she asked.

  “Never,” he said with a humored tone. “I have you, now.”

  He flicked the buggy whip once over the mare’s back, the noise all she needed to get started, then he put the whip into its slot and Sarah leaned back over the seat back to get her rifle.

  “Don’t tell me you’re bringing that,” he said as she pulled papers out of her jacket and started rolling a pair of cigarettes.

  “I ain’t gonna be in a duster and boots,” she said. “How else you s’pect ‘em to recognize me?”

  He snorted and shook his head.

  “You are not bringing that to the restaurant.”

  “Watch me,” she answered.

  --------

  The train had air conditioning.

  It hadn’t been that many weeks since it hadn’t come to Lawrence at all, and now it had air conditioning and private suite cars with running water and curtains.

  Of course, that was what Jimmy had reserved for them.

  Sarah took clothes into the bathroom and changed there, brushing out her hair and leaving it full and down her back, putting her hat back on, and her boots, but leaving the duster in the bathroom. Jimmy was reading on a screen when she came back out, smoking his cigarette wordlessly.

  She didn’t have any mind to watch that much red sand go by if she didn’t have to, so she closed the curtains and went to see what there was to read on the other screen.

  “You don’t have to hide away to change your clothes,” he said. “Just saying.”

  “Don’t like the look in your eye when you watch me change,” she said, and he put the screen into his lap, tipping his head to look at her.

  “What look is that?”

  It was the one she’d seen when he’d been down in the absenta mine, but she didn’t say that.

  “I ain’t used to it, is all,” she said.

  He picked up the screen again, tapping at it for a moment with the cigarette held between straight fingers, then the put it into his mouth again as he settled to read.

  “You’re out of costume,” he said. “You may as well speak like the human being you are.”

  “What is it about my accent that bothers you so much?” she asked, dropping it more easily now, with more practice.

  “It isn’t you,” he said.

  “It’s been me my whole life,” she said. “You don’t like who I’ve always been; you like the person I learned to pretend to be while I was in Oxala, and you keep hoping that that’s who I’m going to turn out to be.”

  “My mother didn’t ever tolerate that drawl,” he said. “You know that as well as I did. She taught proper diction, and she beat my father around the house when he brought it home.”

  “Funny that I should end up speaking more like him than her, I suppose,” Sarah allowed, sitting down on the other side of the long bench where Jimmy lounged. He put the screen down in his lap, finishing his cigarette and popping the window open to toss it out.

  “Tell me about Granger’s,” he said. She shook her head.

  “What do you want to know? I killed them.”

  “I have no doubt you acquitted yourself as well as you ever do,” he said. “Why were you there? You were suggesting a bigger reason for a simple hold-up, and I’d like to hear it.”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t have any theories about the why. Just that those aren’t the type of men to take those kind of risks without someone giving them an outside incentive.”

  “Who would do that?” he asked.

  “You know that better than I do,” she said. “They’re your people.”

  “You think that one of my investors is hiring rabid guns in Lawrence? Who would have that kind of access? Why would they even do it?”

  “Again, your questions, not mine,” Sarah said. He nodded, tapping his fingers on the glass screen in his lap.
<
br />   “All right, tell me about the men. Who was there? Who ran them, before the absenta came back?”

  “You mean before you came back?” Sarah asked. “You knew all of them. Not the rabid guns, sure, but the heads of the various factions. I heard rumors that they had battles amongst themselves, when they heard someone had gotten a big score off of one of the homesteaders…”

  “How are they, by the way?” Jimmy asked.

  “Ought to ask them that for yourself,” Sarah answered, raising an eyebrow. He gave her a dour look, and she went on. “They were men that you’d recognize. Bruiser, Torn, Mable, Hoss.”

  “Mable?” Jimmy asked, and Sarah nodded.

  “I killed her maybe five, six years after you left. She was the best. Ruthless, that woman. I killed Bruiser not more than a month before you turned up. Hoss went straight, moved up far enough into the mountains I stopped hearing from any of him or his crew. Took a couple hundred cows off the Hunter clan and just… went for it. Don’t even know if they’re still alive.”

  “And Torn?” Jimmy asked.

  “There are half a dozen of them who are still around,” Sarah said. “Or they were, before there was money in Lawrence. I’d know the leaders - they haven’t got anywhere to hide - but their guys started showing up with the rest of the laborers. They didn’t turn to thieving because it was convenient. They might have been dumb, but it was the best option they saw, when the mines all dried up.”

  “So they tried to go straight when the opportunity came,” Jimmy said. Sarah nodded.

  “Stealing isn’t as easy a life as a lot of people might think,” she said.

  “Especially when you’re around,” he agreed, scratching his chin. “So let’s say you’ve got a grudge…”

  “Maybe because I happen to know that you cheated me out of my chance at the one and only proven mine at the auction?” Sarah asked.

  “No way anyone knows that, but, sure, that’s as good a grudge as any,” Jimmy said. “What would you do?”

  “What’s my goal?” Sarah asked. He shook his head.

  “Talk me through it.”

  She shrugged. Looked him dead in the eye.

  “All right. I hate you. You betrayed me, broke my trust, yeah, that’s business, but it means I have to do something about it. I can’t let you get away with it. Am I the type who does that kind of thing in private or am I the one who makes an example of you?” she asked.

  “Could be either,” he said. “We had both types come to the auction.”

  “So I find out you cheated me, I want you to pay. Publicly or privately, I’m going to make you sorry you cheated me. Is it going to matter to any of them if you make them money, anyway?”

  “Every one of them,” he said, and she nodded.

  “You do play a high-stakes game.”

  “Small stakes never wins big,” he answered. “Plus you had a contract giving that mine to Apex and Thor.”

  “Thor and Apex,” she said absently, looking at the curtain. “You didn’t want that much wealth going to one of your friends, anyway. Not when you didn’t have your own share off to the side in friendly hands.”

  “I’m sticking with the contract making me do it,” he said with the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Keep going.”

  “So I think I’m the type who wants you to know that I’m coming after you. I want you to sweat. So I send you a message. I want you to know that you aren’t safe anywhere.”

  “The wedding, I get,” he said. “How do you know to go after Granger?”

  She paused.

  That was why she’d been out, in the sandstorm. The hunch that Granger would be in danger, after they’d hit the wedding. But Jimmy was right. The wedding had been big and public and visible. Granger, and his fundamental value to Lawrence, that was something you had to have been in Lawrence for more than three days to know about.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t see how any of them would know about Coriander. She isn’t a significant person in Intec, and even if they did manage to look her up and find out she’s Descartes’ daughter, that doesn’t mean anything to them, anyway.”

  “Was she safe?” Sarah asked. “Traveling out?”

  He put his fingers to his lips, a tell that something made him happy, a pleasant flavor.

  “More than she looked like, then?” Sarah asked. The odd woman had used Sarah as a human shield in a gunfight, and Sarah had never so much as seen her armed, but it didn’t mean everything. Her time at Oxala had certainly taught her that.

  Jimmy nodded.

  “I might be afraid of her.”

  Sarah narrowed her eyes, calling his bluff, and he winked.

  “Okay, so if no one knew about the con, who would want to send you a message?” Sarah asked.

  “You’re the one who got it,” Jimmy said. “Are you sure it wasn’t for you?”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why would anyone want to try to push me around after you came home? Anyone who knows well enough to go after Granger has to know that… has to know who you are.”

  “But they also have to know how to hire the men who died,” Jimmy said. “That takes a special set of knowledge, as well. You said the homesteaders were making threats?”

  “At you,” Sarah retorted and the corner of his mouth pulled up a fraction.

  “Yes, but they would want you to know that they were serious, hoping to change your mind about what side you’re going to be on. Hitting your own wedding and the man you counted on most while I was gone? That seems to do it.”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “They count on him just as much as I do. There isn’t a single one of them who would pay bandits to take out Granger, on the off chance that something went wrong and Granger got himself killed. He means too much to them, even now.”

  “I see your point,” he said. “Keep your eyes open, let me know what you see.”

  “You have a theory?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “It could be anyone, it could be no one. It could be simple coincidence that you guessed someone would try to hold up Granger at the same time that someone actually did.”

  “You believe that?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “But it doesn’t make it not possible.”

  “Eight years, no one held him up, and the very morning I think it might happen, it does,” Sarah said. “That would make me a supernatural being.”

  “Now there’s something to think about,” he said with another tiny smile, his eyes glittering at her. “Would explain some things, wouldn’t it?”

  “My pa dying and you running off at the first sign of trouble, among them, right?” she asked, and he smoothed his mouth across with his hand.

  “You’ve been determined to keep Lawrence a failing backwater.”

  “I haven’t done anything of the sort,” she said. “I just don’t like the gleam in your eye when you think about what you want to do with it.”

  “You do seem preoccupied with what you think my eyes are telling you,” he said.

  “Maybe if your mouth did more of the talking, for a change, I wouldn’t have to.”

  “And what would you like my mouth to say that my eyes haven’t?” he asked, his unchanged posture at poignant contrast to his tone. She almost retreated into her drawl again, but snapped herself out of it at the last moment.

  “The last time a man of your social stature looked at me like that, I left him handcuffed to a wall under the physics building,” she said evenly. Her voice didn’t give, and she was glad of it.

  He was silent for just a moment, watching her, then he shook his head slowly.

  “I gather there was a lot more to your years in Oxala than you’ve yet told me about.”

  She pursed her lips.

  “Nothing I couldn’t take care of by myself.”

  He nodded, feeling the inside of his lip with his tongue.

  “Maxim likes you. I underestimated you, thou
gh, for how fast you’d pick him out of a lineup.”

  “The eyes are the tell,” she said. “Always the eyes.”

  He laughed and turned his head away.

  “I’ll have to watch them.”

  And then she heard it.

  The thing no one else would have heard.

  The threat.

  “You leave him to me, Jimmy Lawson. I can still handle myself.”

  “Isn’t about you,” he said.

  “Jimmy,” she warned evenly, missing her drawl. She could put an awful lot more threat into that pair of syllables with the long drawl under the ‘i’, but she could tell from the way the muscle under his eye twitched that she didn’t need it. He’d heard her all the same.

  “You are my wife, Sarah. It was different before.”

  “I am my own person,” she answered. “And I know my way around these people just as well as you do.”

  He turned to look at her, expression calm, even. Shark.

  “You do not.”

  She let her mouth seal closed, holding his eye.

  “I know my way well enough to hurt him, without hurting your business prospects. Let it be.”

  He wiped the corner of his mouth down again with his fingers.

  “It’s a line, Sarah. Don’t let it go too far, or I look weak.”

  “Jimmy, that man puts a finger on me, I’ll break it.”

  He smiled quickly, a flash of genuine humor.

  “Yes. Sometimes I forget.”

  She nodded.

  “They games they play…” she shook her head. “He may be a bad man, and he may do a lot of things that hurt a lot of people, but the games are for fun. They don’t drag people into those against their will.” She remembered his eyes, looking at her wrists. “Not him.”

  “We had no idea, did we?” Jimmy asked, settling back against the wall and watching her. “When I left you in Oxala. What the people would be like.”