A Touch of Flame

by Jo Goodman

  Remington kept his palm in place, fingers splayed, until he felt the baby kick. “He’s restless.”

  “He’s always restless.”

  Ben said, “You’re not really going to name him Winchester, are you?”

  “No,” said Remington.

  “It’s still under discussion,” said Phoebe.

  “There’s no discussion,” said Remington.

  “Winnie if she’s a girl,” said Phoebe.

  Ben asked, “What about names that begin with E? Did you ever think of that? Probably lots of good names there.” He was saved from having to address their identically incredulous looks when the Philistine in one of the cells shouted that the doctor was killing him. The accusation was followed by a mild reprimand that made them all smile.

  Remington said, “Now that’s amusing.”

  Ben pushed away from his desk and stood. “Sounds as if she got the bullet. Maybe she’ll let me look in on her now.”

  Colt stopped swinging his legs and sat up straight. “I want to see.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Ben. “But no.” Ben looked over at Phoebe and Remington and asked with a perfectly straight face, “That’s the right answer, isn’t it?”

  Remington pointed in the direction of the cells. “Go before you lose uncle privileges.”

  “If you two name that baby Winchester—”

  “We’re not,” said Remington.

  “Winnie if she’s a girl,” said Phoebe.

  Ben stared at them, shook his head. “Never mind. I’m going.” He was fairly certain they were exchanging grins as soon as his back was turned. Under his breath, he said, “Name that baby Winchester and he’s going to need this uncle’s protection. That’s a fact.”

  Ridley’s head came up as Ben walked in the back. She eased up on the pressure she was applying to her patient’s wound. “What’s a fact?” she asked.

  Ben stopped at the cell’s entrance. “Would you name a child of yours Winchester?”

  She blinked. “It’s all right with me if you don’t always say what’s on your mind.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I suppose if the baby’s father is named Remington, and the first child is Colt, Winchester is not out of the question.”

  “Winnie if she’s a girl.”

  “Well, I’d have to draw the line there.”

  He nodded. “I suggested they think of names that begin with E.”

  “Did they look at you as if you had gone slightly mad?”

  “It’s like you were there.”

  “Can you hold this pad in place for me? Mr. Gordon’s wound is clear. The blood flow should be slowing soon.”

  Ben stepped up to the cot where Tom Gordon lay with his injured leg elevated on the pillow meant for his head. Ignoring all of her patient’s protests, Ridley had cut away one leg of his trousers and drawers to expose the wound. Ben placed his hand over the pad so Ridley could remove hers. She wiped her bloody hands on a towel she’d wrapped around her waist.

  “Where’s Hitch?” asked Ben. “You didn’t want me back here but you let him help you. So where is he?”

  “Let me say I know why that young man will never be a butcher.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I can tell you all about that later. He’s out back. The blood made him queasy.”

  “It made me queasy,” said Tom Gordon.

  “Shut up,” said Ben, and then to Ridley, he added, “I didn’t hear him leave. You should have called for me.”

  “He only walked out a few minutes ago, and I insisted. He’d done enough.” Indeed, it was Hitch who fetched everything she needed from the surgery so she could operate in the jail rather than transport Mr. Gordon to her home. “You made a good choice when you hired him.”

  “I got lucky. It wasn’t exactly a thoughtful decision. I chose him because Jeremiah Salt told me not to. We should keep that between ourselves.” He looked down at Tom Gordon. “You repeat that and I’ll put another bullet in you.”

  “Repeat what?”

  “Good. We have an understanding, then.” Ben turned his head to the adjoining cell and regarded the man lying on the cot. He was turned on his side facing the opposite wall. Two wool blankets covered him to his shoulders. “How’s your other patient?”

  “Resting. I gave him some codeine to ease his cough. He’s exhausted. He’ll sleep well into the evening and shouldn’t cause you any trouble.” She began to clean her instruments in the water bucket that the deputy had fetched for her. “I’m still confused about what happened in Mr. Washburn’s office. Have you had the whole story from him?”

  After escorting his prisoners to their cells and sending Hitch to the surgery with Ridley’s list, he left Remington in charge and returned to the bank to get Mr. Washburn’s statement. No one was more surprised than Ben when Mr. Washburn had emerged from his office unscathed. Not only was he uninjured; he also raised his arm to show he was now holding the gun that had been previously held on him. It hardly mattered that his hand was shaking. He wore an expression of triumph right up to the moment he saw Mrs. Mangold curled in a fetal position on the floor, Mrs. Frost sitting on her backside with her son just beginning to emerge from under her skirt, Ben holstering his Peacemaker, his bank tellers crouched behind the counter, the stranger laid out cold on the floor, bleeding from his thigh, his gun half drawn, and Dr. E. Ridley Woodhouse neatly folding butcher paper around what looked to be an astonishingly large soup bone. That was when the bank manager returned to the relative sanctuary of his office and politely told the robber to vacate his chair.

  He sat.

  He was still sitting in his office when Ben came back for his statement. Ben confiscated the gun that was lying on the green blotter, and once it was out of Mr. Washburn’s sight, it seemed to Ben that the man breathed a little easier. The story wasn’t hard to extract after that.

  Mr. Washburn explained it simply. When the accomplice, whose name they now knew was Michael Gordon, younger brother of Tom, began to convulse with another bout of his bone-shaking cough, the gun fired. Until then, Mr. Washburn had no idea the weapon was poised to shoot. It was only that the younger Gordon’s aim was so wildly off that the bank manager escaped injury. The bullet sank into the back of the open safe; the gun fell on the floor and Mr. Washburn was able to recover it first. It was at that point that Michael Gordon asked Mr. Washburn to kill him.

  “I’m dyin’ anyway,” he said. “And I’d rather not hang. Go on. Shoot me.”

  Ben watched Ridley’s expression as he repeated Michael Gordon’s words. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, only that she did not appear surprised. “Did he ask the same of you?”

  She nodded. “He says it would be a sin to kill himself and his brother won’t do it for him. Neither said so, but I think you’ll find out that if their robbery had been successful, they would have headed to hot, dry climes. Arizona, perhaps. New Mexico.” Her eyes shifted to Tom Gordon. He appeared to be sleeping, but she couldn’t be sure. “What I think is it didn’t really matter to them if they were successful. He drew on you because you promised to shoot him. You told him you would shoot his brother, too. What they couldn’t do, you could.”

  “Jesus,” Ben said softly. It made an awful kind of sense when he heard her say it. He applied more pressure to the pad he was holding over Tom Gordon’s wound. The man’s eyes opened wide and he growled. “Just so you know, I don’t like being used that way.”

  “Stop that, Ben,” Ridley said. “This is precisely why I asked Hitch to help me. Here. Give me that pad.” He did and she tossed it in a pail filled with other bloody cloths. She gave him a gentle push out of the way and examined the wound. “I need to clean this again and give him a few stitches. We’ll know in a day or so if it’s going to fester. I think I removed all the threads, and you were good to miss the femoral artery
and vein.”

  “Sure, because I had time to think about that.”

  She sighed audibly. “Why don’t you go outside and check on Hitch? Bring him back and you can return out front and visit with your family.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When he was gone, Tom Gordon rubbed the lump on the back of his head and asked, “You ever think of walloping him with a soup bone?”

  “All the time, Mr. Gordon.” Then she set about going to work.

  * * *

  • • •

  Hitch volunteered to remain at the jail so that Ben could accompany the others to the Butterworth for dinner. Ridley was dismayed to realize she still was in possession of Mary Cherry’s butcher order and Mrs. Rushton’s soup bone. Ben solved that problem by snagging one of Sam Love’s boys as he was leaving his father’s barbershop and giving him a few pennies to make the deliveries. Ridley wanted to take her medical supplies with her, but Ben promised that Hitch would bring them around when he was relieved of duty, and ignored all the noises she made about not being satisfied with that answer.

  “Did Ben ride roughshod when he was a ranch hand?” Phoebe asked Remington as he held out a chair for her. “I’m not recalling.”

  “Always had a gentle hand,” said Remington. “Even as a deputy under Jackson Brewer.”

  Phoebe eyed Ben. “So this is a consequence of your newly elected position?”

  “It’s not that new,” he said, sitting down on Ridley’s right.

  “How like you to remark on the least important part of my question.”

  “How like you to point it out.”

  Colt sat on his knees in a chair squeezed in between his parents. His attention shifted between his mother and his uncle and then came to rest on his father. “May I have pancakes?”

  Remington cocked an eyebrow at Ben and Phoebe. “The boy knows what’s important. Are you done?”

  They spoke in unison and unapologetically. “No.” It was Ben who added, “But we can certainly make peace over pancakes.”

  Colt clapped his hands and grinned in a way that showed off almost all of his baby teeth.

  Ridley wanted to join him; she was enchanted. “How old are you?”

  He held up four fingers.

  “So many?”

  “How many pancakes can you eat?”

  Now he put up both hands and spread his fingers.

  “Oh, my. Won’t you get a bellyache?”

  He shook his head, looked pointedly at his mother’s belly, and patted his own. “I’ll get a big belly. Like Mama.”

  Ridley’s eyes widened a fraction.

  “Don’t worry,” Phoebe said. “He knows there’s a baby in here, not a stack of flapjacks.”

  “Winchester,” said Colt. “Winnie if she’s a girl.”

  Ben gave a shout of laughter. Ridley smiled. Remington looked at Phoebe over their son’s head. “See? This is your doing.”

  Before Phoebe could respond, Colt said, “I hope she’s a boy. Horses whinny. Papa says so.”

  Phoebe turned to meet Remington’s eye. “And that’s your doing.”

  “Right,” he said. A waitress was wending her way toward their table. “I think we should order.”

  They did. Only Colt and Ben ordered pancakes. Everyone else asked for chicken and dumplings. No one wanted to talk any more about the events at the bank, but the same was not true for the diners around them. They buzzed like worker bees and stole glances at the table.

  It was not until their meals arrived that Ridley dared to ask, “Do you suppose they know about the soup bone?”

  Phoebe laughed with genuine amusement. “Oh, Dr. Woodhouse, you can depend on it.”

  Remington agreed with his wife. “Frost Falls is growing steadily but it’s still a small town where word of mouth is as important as the weekly paper.”

  Ridley released a long sigh. “Boston wasn’t so different. It’s probably the same everywhere. What do you imagine people are saying?”

  Ben said, “You’re probably being compared to Felicity Ravenwood.”

  Ridley found his boot under the table and set her heel hard on his instep.

  “Ow!”

  Phoebe didn’t have to ask what that was about. She regarded Ridley approvingly. “Good for you, Dr. Woodhouse.”

  “Ridley, please.”

  “Ridley. Good for you. He’s not wrong—we all love Felicity—but he shouldn’t have said so. People will respect you for what you did. You can trust that’s what they’re saying. But honestly, you should be prepared to receive more soup bones than your housekeeper can use in a year.”

  “It’s a tribute,” said Remington.

  “I’m telling you,” Ben said, “queen of the Frost Falls Festival.” He quickly moved his foot out of the way.

  “Is there going to be a festival?” asked Phoebe.

  “Only in his mind,” Ridley told her.

  “And you’re the queen?”

  “Again, only in his mind.”

  “Ah.” Phoebe stopped eating to cut more pancake triangles for her son. She also nudged the little pot of syrup out of his reach. “Well, I think it sounds like a good idea. Once I have this baby, I might be moved to organize it.”

  Ridley could not decide if Phoebe was serious and hoped to God she wasn’t. “When is the baby coming?”

  “Doc told me it would be after Christmas, but probably before the New Year.”

  “So only a few weeks, then.”

  “Yes,” said Remington. “And she got it in her head this morning that she had to take advantage of this break in the weather to come to town.”

  “Presents,” Phoebe whispered. “I ordered things months ago for everyone at the ranch, and maybe”—she winked at Ben—“a person or two right here in town.”

  “Phoebe,” said Ben. “You don’t—”

  “Oh, do be quiet. You’ll spoil my fun.”

  “Yeah, but now I have to get something for you,” he said, injecting a modest amount of whine into his voice.

  Remington caught Ridley’s eye as Phoebe and Ben continued to poke at each other. He spoke over the bickering and directly to Ridley. “It’s better if you ignore them. Ben and I grew up together, but the way these two carry on, you’d think they were siblings.”

  “Anyway,” Phoebe was saying, “that’s why I was at the bank. I had a substantial withdrawal to make.”

  “Substantial?” asked Remington. “This is the first I’m hearing of it. This morning it was just a withdrawal.”

  Before the conversation went sideways again, Ridley asked the question that had been on her mind since she identified Phoebe Frost in the bank. “Why is this the first I’m meeting you?”

  Phoebe cast her eyes at her son’s plate and began cutting more triangles. “Hmm. I don’t come into town often. I think I mentioned that it was several months ago that I placed orders.”

  “Yes, you mentioned that. I’ve been here months.” Ridley’s gaze moved to Remington and settled there. He had a dark, steady stare, and he didn’t look away as Phoebe had done. He looked nothing at all like Ben, with his coal black hair and slanted eyebrows. “I’ve known about the Frosts nearly from the first. People like to talk about you. Most people. Ben hardly ever says a word. I bet you’ve been to town on more than one occasion. The sheriff’s introduced me to almost everyone around. I’ve been to a few of the outlying ranches. It strikes me as curious that you and I have never crossed paths.”

  Remington nodded, glanced at Ben, and said, “The easy answer is that we embarrass him, or maybe that he’s embarrassed by us.”

  “I don’t believe you. What’s the not-so-easy answer?”

  Phoebe said, “We set him on fire.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Ben pushed his plate away. “For God’s sake, Phoebe, you
did not set me on fire.” He darted a sidelong look at Ridley. Her eyebrows had climbed her forehead. “They did not.”

  Remington’s expression was wry. “This is how embarrassment becomes a factor.”

  Ridley didn’t think Ben looked embarrassed. He looked annoyed, perhaps on the verge of getting riled. She said quickly, “I shouldn’t have asked. Obviously there is a lot I don’t understand. I didn’t mean to corner you, or rather I did, but I didn’t expect it would be so uncomfortable. Forgive me.”

  The look that Phoebe gave Ben was mildly reproving. “There is nothing to forgive,” she told Ridley. “In fact, I would be quite relieved if you agreed to attend me at Winchester’s birth. It would mean coming out to Twin Star.”

  Ridley did not have to think about it. “Yes. Of course.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ben and Remington exchange looks that she could not interpret. “What is it?”

  Remington said, “Agreeing now to being at the birth doesn’t commit you to being there when the time comes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The weather,” said Ben. “Remington can’t be certain that anyone will be able to ride in to get you if the weather turns. It’s also possible that you could be snowed in after you arrive. You wouldn’t be available to your patients here in town.”

  Phoebe wiped Colt’s sticky face with a napkin she dipped in water and removed the spoon he was tapping on the tabletop from his equally sticky hand. “Take him, please, Remington. It’s your fault I don’t have a lap.” She dropped the damp napkin on Colt’s empty plate and pinned Ben back in his chair with a brilliant emerald green stare. “Do you have reservations about Dr. Woodhouse coming out to the ranch?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then you do,” said Phoebe. “If you have to qualify ‘no,’ then you have reservations.”

  “Did you not hear me say that the weather could be an obstacle to her getting there or getting back?”

  Ridley said, “And it could be no problem at all. It’s my decision and not your concern.”