Spring in New England; trees and flowers and grass, all with their own distinctive scent, a scent that had been denied her for two endless years.
“Here it is, I was beginning to fear that someone else had bought it.”
Melanie knelt down and plucked the tiny yellow flower from the cactus, heedless of the blood dripping from her fingers, as a multitude of thorns imbedded in her skin.
“What do you think? … no! I won’t! … You’re so mean … I shall ask papa, he gives me anything I want! … I will not wear a fichu like some old woman or that flat-chested Letta! I am a young lady, and it’s time I allow the evidence to be seen! … She’ll be so jealous, my bosoms are so much fuller than hers … “
An unearthly laugh filled the silence, floating up and away as insanity grappled for supremacy of a mind eager to relinquish the harsh realities of life.
The sun began its descent, but was no less fierce than before. Wherever it touched, it relentlessly burned skin unaccustomed to exposure. Melanie’s dress hung in tatters, shredded by contact with the cruel thorns of the cacti. The tender skin on her arms and face was slashed and badly burned, but her madness had driven her past that knowledge, far past the realization of the deadly game she played.
“It’s so warm in here … Letta, dear, how lovely you look … my but that fichu is such a lovely addition, and so concealing … no, dear, I’m not chilled, in fact I was just commenting on the heat … a stroll in the garden, Mr. Walters? How lovely, yes, let’s find a breath of coolness … I expect you to remember that you are a gentleman . . . “
There was no witness to her twirling dance of insanity. No one to stop her from falling into the arms of the giant saguaro or tripping over the smaller cholla, which left its silvery spines in her skin.
With the lowering of the sun, the life- threatening dehydration was lessened, only to be replaced with the very real possibility of hypothermia. The spring nights were still cold, making a coat a welcome addition. Without one, Melanie was in as grave a danger as she had been in during the burning sunlight.
“It’s so cold, Mama,” she muttered, her little- girl voice quivering. She folded into herself as much as her oversized stomach would allow. “Burr… it’s dark! I’m scared … light a lamp, Daddy … please, don’t leave me in the dark! … my belly hurts … I’m sorry I was bad… Mama, don’t be mad …”
A barely visible sliver of moon drifted slowly on its journey across the dark sky. Stars, like diamonds thrown from a giant’s hand, twinkled merrily. The rustle of unseen night creatures and the lonely cry from a far off coyote were her only companions as the darkness, and madness, lingered.
“Damnit, you couldn’t have watched the house all day, or you’d have seen her leave!” Jim rubbed at the muscles tightening the back of his neck with tension. He was exhausted and dirty, irritated by the necessity of the long ride back to the house.
After a day filled with one problem after another, it had been well past midnight before he had gotten back to the house. The front door had been slightly ajar, alerting him almost immediately that something wasn’t right. Irritation had slowly turned to a gut-wrenching fear, when his initial search for Melanie had proved fruitless.
Now, more than three hours later, every room in the house, every closet, every cubbyhole, had been thoroughly investigated. The barns and all of the outbuildings had received the same vigorous inspections. A lantern had even been lowered to the bottom of the well. He didn’t suspend the search for his wife, until he was finally forced to accept that she was gone.
“Been right over there by the bunkhouse all day,” Hank defended himself. “Ain’t moved ‘cept to get a bite to eat now and again, and to make water.”
“Been there beside him. Played a couple of games of checkers, took a little snooze midday, been sitting like a broody hen waitin‘ on her chicks to hatch,” Woods added, pulling up his drooping galluses. He and Hank had been sleeping soundly, when Jim had come into the bunkhouse and roused them out of bed to help in the search.
“Didn’t you think to check on her this evening, when there wasn’t a light showing from the windows?” Jim asked in disgust. His answer came from the startled look that crossed the faces of the old men, confirming that neither of them had given it a thought.
“It weren’t like Miss Melanie wanted company,” Woods stated. “If ‘en we’d a’comed up on the porch, she’d have chased us off with a broom.”
“Miss Melanie is … ah . . Trying to be as diplomatic as possible, Hank searched for words that wouldn’t offend his boss. It wasn’t necessary to point out to the man that his wife was a pampered, spoiled missy, who needed her fanny warmed. “Miss Melanie, why, she appreciated us stayin‘ at the bunkhouse.”
“Like I said, unfriendly as a bobcat with a thorn in his paw,” Woods added bluntly. “She didn’t like us none, and we did her the favor of stayin‘ out of her way.”
Jim knew that criticizing the two men was unfair. Melanie had made it plain to anyone who would listen, that she didn’t want any of the hired men around her. She also objected to the people on nearby ranches, and those she had met in town. In fact, in two years she hadn’t met anyone she felt was suitable to be a companion.
A neighboring ranch had thrown a party when she had first arrived from the East. She had complained bitterly that their welcoming friendliness had been crude and unrefined, their speech uncouth, their manners vulgar. Melanie Travis had not endeared herself to any of them.
“Wanna go lookin‘ for her tonight? We’ll saddle up.” Hank’s concern was genuine. He had lived in the desert long enough to be on first- name basis with its dangers.
“She can’t be far,” Woods offered. “Miss Melanie hates the desert almost as much as she hates us.”
Jim looked out at the darkness as he pulled his watch from his pocket. Flipping open the plain gold top, he was surprised to see that it was nearly four o’clock. The search for Melanie around the immediate area had already consumed several hours, and dawn would begin lightening the sky in another hour.
He was a decent tracker in the light of day, but knew his own limitations at night. His greatest concern was that he’d inadvertently destroy her trail in his blind wanderings, then she would be lost. . . until the circling of buzzards marked her location.
She didn’t deserve that, he thought, as anger from his own helplessness threatened to override his common sense. She didn’t deserve any of this. He should have taken her back East long ago, but he’d kept hoping she’d adjust.
But she hadn’t. Far from it, in fact. As time had gone on, she’d slipped further and further from his grasp, until he no longer even recognized the woman he had married back in Vermont.
Until he’d realized that he didn’t love her, had never loved her. Until she became a burden he didn’t have time to handle.
When he had realized how drastically his feelings for her had changed, Jim had been immersed in guilt. He knew he’d only been infatuated with the delicate girl, hardly more than a child, that he’d married and left behind.
During the years of their separation, he had worked hard to build a home for them and to get the ranch going, to make his dream into a reality. At night, when exhaustion forced him to his lonely bed, he’d dreamed of Melanie. Gradually, he had imagined her to be so much more than she really was, that by the time she’d arrived in Tucson, no woman could have matched his expectations. Gentle, refined Melanie had never stood a chance.
“Shame Breed ain’t here,” Hank said, interrupting Jim’s useless recriminations.
“He’d find her, ain’t no doubt. Yes, sir’ee, Breed can track a mouse after a stampede!” The man known as Breed was the foreman on the Falling Creek Ranch. Jim had hired him in spite of the rumors that followed him wherever he went. With blond hair and blue eyes there was no doubt that the man was fully white, but it was widely known that he had been raised by the Comanche to be a Comanche. Even though he now lived as a white man, the past still clung, making him a
formidable and intimidating presence.
If he had another name, Jim didn’t know it and had never asked. In the West, a man offered information if he wanted it known. Breed did his job well, without complaints or demands. He had an astounding ability with horses that would make him an asset to any operation. As far as Jim was concerned, that was enough and would remain enough.
“It’ll be daylight in another hour. We’ll wait.” They were the hardest words he had ever spoken, and he already knew that waiting the short time for the sun to rise would be the longest wait of his life.
“If I don’t find her by mid-morning, then we’ll send for him.”
He did not need to add that by then they’d probably be looking for a body to bury.
The desert was unforgiving.
TWO
Jim paced from room to empty room in the huge house, cursing the necessity of waiting until daylight before beginning the search for Melanie. Standing in the doorway of the dining room, he remembered that there was a load of furniture waiting in town for someone to pick up. He made a mental note to free up one of the men long enough to go get it.
Melanie had spent weeks poring over catalogs in search of just the right furnishings for each room. Jim had hoped that once they were settled in the new house she would be more content, but even before the furniture had started to arrive, he’d seen that the effort had been worthless.
Nothing and no one, even, he suspected, the baby she carried, could release her from the depression that overwhelmed her.
Slamming his fist against the door frame with helpless frustration, Jim turned and walked down the long hall to his office in the back of the house. This was the only room he had in-
sisted on designing, everything else was to Melanie’s specifications.
The dark-paneled room with a door leading outside had a huge, multipane window facing the mountains. One wall was entirely of stone, with a fireplace that was more than adequate to take the chill from the room. The other two walls had shelves with protective glass doors. Each shelf was filled with leather-bound books.
A rare and expensive pleasure in a time when few homes had more than a handful of books, Jim rarely indulged his passion for reading. He looked longingly at the books, knowing that it would be months before he could take more than a few stolen minutes to gratify his favorite pastime. Melanie had seen the books as a waste of money, but had only shrugged with indifference when he had insisted on the fully furnished library.
Just another of the many fundamental differences between them, Jim thought as he sat down in the leather chair behind his desk. He seriously doubted that she had read a book since leaving the expensive boarding school she had attended.
Leaning his elbows on the desk, Jim rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hands, hoping the pressure would eradicate the pain building behind his eyes. Every bone and muscle in his body ached in needless reminder of the physical labor involved in spring roundup. His tired body reminded him that he should have been asleep hours earlier. But concern for Melanie vied with regret and guilt to keep him wide-awake.
Where was she? Could someone, perhaps a passing renegade, have taken her? Most of the Apache had been settled on the reservation, but occasionally a young buck broke free of the constraints and went on his own private warpath. Geronimo left the reservation at whim, sometimes taking several dozen people with him, and rumors of the trouble he caused grew like wildfire. But in all the years Jim had been in Arizona, he’d never seen the famous war chief.
Thoughts of Melanie lost in the desert plagued him through the longest hour of his life. She was so meek, literally scared by her own shadow. She was terrified of snakes and spiders. What would a night spent alone in the desert do to her?
He refused to let his thoughts wander to the very real fact that she probably wouldn’t survive the night. And never once did he acknowledge that if she died, so would their child.
Even before the first traces of daylight, when inactivity became impossible, Jim saddled his horse. Waiting impatiently for the final minutes of night to pass, he rolled a cigarette, struck a match against his denim-covered thigh, and inhaled the aromatic smoke.
“Want company?” Hank asked, his weathered features showing that he’d had little sleep.
“No.” Jim dragged deeply on the cigarette. “I need someone to go to town for Doc. She’s going to need medical attention.”
“It’ll be done,” the older man replied, keeping his thoughts to himself, that Melanie would be more in need of the undertaker than the doctor.
Woods came out of the bunkhouse, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. “Drink, boy. It’s gonna be mighty dry out there.”
Jim gratefully accepted the cup, hoping to derive some energy from the liquid. He was wideawake, but his eyes felt as gritty as a dust storm, and his head ached with tension.
Slowly the landscape escaped the shadows of darkness. It was time.
Grinding the remainder of the cigarette into the sand and finishing the last of the coffee, Jim grabbed the reins of his horse and walked toward the house.
Hank found the first tracks a hundred feet from the front door; shallow prints, obviously made by a feminine foot. The trail was so easy to follow that even an inexperienced tracker would have had no trouble.
Jim walked his horse for a short while, mounting when the bloody track became painfully easily to see from the back of the animal. The steps went in no specific direction, twisting and turning, doubling back on itself.
An abandoned slipper, its satin shredded beyond repair, fluttered in the light morning breeze.
When the trail led to a large saguaro, he flinched at the bloody evidence of Melanie’s passing. Numerous pieces of material matching the dress he’d last seen her wearing clung to smaller cacti.
Before the sun had warmed the morning air, less than a mile from the house, Jim found his wife. Dismounting, he grabbed the blanket from the back of the saddle, refusing to think whether it would provide her with much-needed warmth or become her shroud.
She lay on her side with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. As he knelt, his jaw tightly clenched at the sight of her burned and lacerated flesh. Carefully rolling her onto her back, Jim felt for a pulse in her neck, surprised to find a feeble quivering beneath his fingers.
“Melanie?” Jim put the blanket over her and opened the canteen of water. Dribbling a few drops on her parched lips, he watched as it ran down the side of her face.
“Come on, Melanie, try to drink some water.” Again there was no response, and knowing it was useless, he closed the canteen.
Melanie moaned when he raised her to a sitting position and wrapped the blanket around her. There was no place on her battered body that wasn’t sunburned or lacerated by the cactus thorns. As he remounted the horse with her draped over his thighs, Jim was glad that she was unconscious. The pain would have been unbearable for her had she been awake.
By the time he’d made the short trip back to the house, Melanie was muttering hoarsely and trying to push away his restraining arms. Woods met him at the front door, grabbing the reins to the horse and holding the animal still, as Jim carefully climbed from the saddle.
“Hank took off for town right after you headed out.” Woods looked at the battered bundle in Jim’s arms and shook his head in regret. No one, even an uppity Easterner like Melanie, deserved the abuse she had taken. “I got some water on the fire. I’ll bring it up and then take care of your horse.”
“Thanks, Woods.” Jim entered the house and carried Melanie up the stairs to her frilly pink and white bedroom.
Everywhere he looked his gaze clashed with pink or white ribbons and bows, lacy flounces and fancy embellishments. As he laid her on the bed, he wondered why he’d never noticed that the room was decorated more for a young girl than for a woman Melanie’s age. If he had bothered to notice, he realized sadly, the bedroom would have given him clear evidence of her refusal to leave her childhood behind.
The
clopping sound of Woods coming up the stairs broke through Jim’s contemplation of the bedroom. He hurried out to the hallway and took the heavy buckets from the old man. Carrying them into the room, he mixed equal amounts of hot and cold water into a bowl, located tweezers, a soothing lotion, and a bar of scented soap.
A search through the bureau drawers produced a soft cotton nightdress, and clean sheets that Jim tore into more convenient size to use as washing cloths. When everything was assembled, he could no longer delay the formidable task that awaited him.
With the removal of each tattered garment, he grew more appalled. Her feet, legs, hands, and arms were slivered with embedded thorns. The tender skin of her arms, neck, and face was severely burned, and even though her dress had provided some protection, her back and abdomen hadn’t completely escaped the penetrating rays of the sun. He found himself praying that she wouldn’t return to consciousness before he was finished.
He averted his eyes from the mound of her belly as he covered her with a clean sheet, refusing to allow himself to think about the baby. As gently as possible, he dabbed at the flesh pulled tightly over her face, stopping frequently to dribble some water between her cracked, shriveled lips. In spite of the severe burn, there were no blisters, her body had too little fluid to make the welts. Dampening several rags, he layered them over her face and head, attempting to bring down her temperature.
Freeing one of her arms from beneath the sheet, Jim sponged away the dried blood, carefully removing as many thorns as possible. Most of them were deeply embedded and would require further attention later on, but for now his main concern was to examine the extent of her injuries and to make her as comfortable as possible.
Placing damp strips of cloth on her arm, he returned to her face, dribbling water into her mouth and reapplying the rags to her head. Time had no meaning as he worked unceasingly, cleaning one spot, then returning to previous areas to redampen the rags. Always, he took long minutes to dribble water between her parched lips.
Desert Angel Page 2
