“Put him down, LeCroix, before you kill him. Let him go, you hear me, boy? If you push this any further, I’ll have to take you into custody and I got no place to lock you up.”
Noah heard the constable’s voice through his anger and fought his way back to the edge of reason, trying to surface. Finally, he managed to loosen his hold on Betts. The man dropped to his feet with a heavy thud and grabbed at his collar. His lips had gone almost blue.
Shaking his head as if he had just broken the surface of deep water, Noah stared at Betts, then at Ern Matheson, trying to remember where he was, what he was doing. Noah stared at Betts, watched the man’s bug eyes staring back at him, saw his fear, felt himself ease off. He had no argument with this man, no clear idea why he had overreacted. His mind was befuddled. He felt as if it were filled with dense fog, the kind that hovered in the low-lying grasses and reeds in the dips and hollows along the riverbank.
“Mind telling me what’s going on here?” Ern gestured to the crowd to get back to whatever it was they were doing before the altercation.
“He was asking me about Darcy Lankanal, the gambler I came up here with on business. I told him I didn’t know where Darcy was and he went crazy.” Telford Betts’s voice sounded gravelly, ill used.
Noah watched the sweat trickle down the man’s temple. Betts was shaking, gasping for breath like a dying fish pulled from the river. Betts’s earlier words came back to him in a rush.
“He went out looking for a little whore.”
Lankanal and Olivia. They were together. Somewhere.
“LeCroix?” Ern Matheson’s hand was still on his shoulder. He gave Noah a shake. “LeCroix?”
Someone handed Noah his rifle. Betts was looking at the floor between them. Noah turned to Ern, trying to put the words together, but everything was a jumble now. He had to get out of the tavern, out into the street where the air was not heavy with the scent of too many bodies in a room, where it was free of tobacco smoke and the odors of stale food and whiskey.
“I’m sorry.” Noah shook his head. He didn’t mean the words—they were hollow and empty as his soul—but they seemed to be expected of him and so he said them.
“Why don’t you take yourself out of here and lay off the whiskey. You know you people can’t handle it.”
Without trying to discern what Ern meant, Noah looked at Telford Betts. The man had gone down on one knee and was bent over, fumbling, one hand on the floor. Noah dismissed him and turned to go. The crowd parted like the Red Sea as the Prince of the Ohio walked away.
Noah went straight to the river, his feet and his heart taking over now that his brain had ceased to function. It wasn’t until he stood on the edge of the Ohio, was back in his element again, that some of what had happened to him that evening began to come back in a rush of sensation and a blur of pain.
Olivia in the woods, desperate to touch him. He had taken her standing up; she had not fought him. She had even made him believe she had enjoyed it until—
“Thank you very much, Noah. I got what I wanted.”
He had told her he loved her.
He had proposed marriage.
“Darcy is a far more experienced lover. He can give me everything.”
Noah put his hand to his scarred temple. His head was throbbing. He longed for the sounds of the river to soothe him, the whispering voices to calm him, but the water was silent. She had run from Lankanal, had escaped him in New Orleans. She had feared the man. Her year with him had given her nightmares that had never ended. Yet now, after seeing him in town, she had chosen to go back to New Orleans with him again.
Had she been lying to him about her relationship with Lankanal all along?
“There’s nothing to understand. Your safe little world isn’t for me, Noah.”
She was leaving Illinois with Darcy Lankanal in the morning. It was over. All of it.
Heat lightning cracked in the distance. There was a ring around the moon, a sure sign of rain. The air was thick with humidity. Noah started to walk along the muddy riverbank. His mocassin slipped in the ooze. He sat down hard beside the water, laid his rifle down beside him and shrugged off the pack. The water was deep and dark, rushing headlong toward its confluence with the Mississippi and on to New Orleans.
He should have listened to his gut and never left the swamp. Never come out among people again. Instead, he had fallen in love and played the hero for Olivia, brought her back, listened to the words of praise and songs about his skill on the water. He had fallen for the glamour of being a legend on the river.
It made the humiliation all that much greater, knowing it was all a lie. He was no hero, not to Olivia, not to anyone. He was a fool who heard voices in his head, a half-breed with a scar over half his face, that was all. A man who could not even pleasure a woman well enough to keep her.
He hadn’t felt this low since the day Hunter had pulled him out of the river and he had realized he had lost his eye. He had wanted to die that day, to give up on life and living.
But tonight, death seemed too easy. It would be a more fitting end to have to suffer living out his life knowing what a fool he had been to ever love at all.
Darcy lay in the dark in Betts’s room with his hands stacked beneath his head, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the occasional sounds of horses going by on the street outside, the drone of conversation from the dining room below, and the not very discreet, distinct sounds of two people making love in the room next door.
He lay there rock hard, wondering if he was going to have to waste a perfectly good erection. The thought of finding a whore to service him had entered his mind—surely the town had one someplace—but then he reckoned that if the looks of the room and the sparse, bare necessities in the other establishments in town were any indication, he decided he’d rather stay randy. Besides, he had waited months already. Tomorrow he would have Olivia again and he was willing to wait one more day. She knew what he liked and how to satisfy him better than anyone.
When the door opened without warning and light from the hallway illuminated the silhouette of the man that filled the doorway, Darcy lunged to a sitting position, rose to his feet and backed into a darkened corner.
“Lankanal?”
The pent-up air rushed out of him when Darcy recognized Betts’s voice.
“Get in here and shut the door,” Darcy ordered as his heartbeat settled back to normal.
“Why are you sitting here in the dark?” Betts shuffled in and fumbled with the lamp. There was a sound of glass upon glass, the smell of sulfur and a flare of light. As Betts replaced the chimney and turned the wick down, Darcy settled himself on the bed again.
“Well?”
“You almost got me killed, Lankanal. It’s time you pay up,” Betts told him. The man’s color was worse than ever, his face pale, his brow and upper lip coated with sweat. His hand shook as Telford reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a rumpled kerchief and mopped his brow.
“You found LeCroix?”
“He found me. He was looking for you. I think the man’s mad,” Telford said, pouring himself a glass of water from a pitcher standing on a listing chest of drawers near the only window in the room.
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Betts told him. He set the empty glass down, rubbed his hand across his midriff, and then began to pace the room. “He had murder in his eye when he grabbed me.”
“He accosted you?”
“Hell, yes. In a room full of people at the tavern. He didn’t care who saw it. He nearly choked me to death. If one of the locals hadn’t walked up and stopped him when he did, I’d be a dead man. No one else in the room took it upon themselves to stop the damn Prince of the Ohio from killing me.”
Darcy threw back his head and laughed.
Telford Betts turned on him and paced over to stand at the foot of the bed.
“You think it’s funny, Lankanal? I’ve had it. I’m telling you, pay up or else.”
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Darcy got to his feet again in one swift, fluid move. “Or else what, Betts? I’ve a good mind to choke you myself. You bring that out in a man, you know.”
He expected the land agent to back down. Instead Betts stood there quivering like a huge mass of jellied consommé, his eyes bulging, his pallor gray.
Darcy walked over to the chair where he had carefully folded and draped his coat. He reached into an inside pocket, withdrew a folded wad of bills, peeled off the agreed-upon amount and handed them over to Betts. The land agent’s gaze greedily followed the extra money as Darcy repocketed it.
“Don’t get any ideas.”
“This will keep me happy,” Betts said, rolling the notes and opening his coat to put them away. “Look at this, will you?”
As Darcy waited, Betts drew a long, lethal-looking knife from inside his coat. Darcy had seen plenty like it before; the “Kaintucks” and backwoods men who came down to New Orleans all carried skinning knives with fine-honed blades that could slice the flesh right off a man before he knew it was gone. This one had a highly polished bone handle with a fierce-eyed wolf’s head carved on it.
“Where’d you get that?”
“That’s the best part,” Betts smiled, but the expression looked pained. He rubbed his midriff again. “It’s LeCroix’s. I must have kicked it loose in the scuffle. Saw it before anyone else knew he lost it and bent down to get it right away. I figure somebody might be willing to pay a pretty penny for a knife that once belonged to the Prince of the Ohio.”
Darcy liked it a hell of a lot better than the one he kept hidden in his boot.
“I need a whiskey,” Telford said, his voice weakening. “I can’t believe the shit I had to put up with tonight.”
“You look like hell.”
Once again, Betts wiped his forehead with his kerchief. He started toward the door with LeCroix’s knife in his hand. Then he suddenly stopped and turned around again. Facing Darcy, Betts opened his mouth to speak but only a strangled gurgle escaped. He reached for his throat, tugged at his collar, then his eyes rolled up in his head and he pitched forward and hit the floor.
“Betts?”
Darcy jumped to his feet and rolled Betts over.
“Betts? Get up.”
The man had hit the floor like a dead weight. His nose was bleeding profusely and his eyes were open and unseeing. Darcy quickly unfastened the button at Betts’s collar, felt his neck for a pulse, and then laid his head on his chest. There was no heartbeat, nothing to indicate Betts was alive.
Darcy sat back on his heels and stared down at the land agent’s body for a moment before he reached inside Betts’s coat pocket and pulled out the money he had just paid the man. As he started to stand, the handle of the skinning knife on the floor beside the body caught his eye. The snarling wolf’s head stared back as the sharp blade caught the light and reflected it back. Darcy reached for LeCroix’s knife, thumbing the honed edge of the blade.
Deadly sharp, the knife would go through a man’s flesh like a whisper through the air. Maybe, Darcy decided, there might be a way to turn Betts’s death to his advantage. He stared at the body again and thought of using the half-breed’s knife to cut Betts’s throat, but there would be too much blood, too much of a mess. He hated to risk staining his fine clothes.
He turned the knife over and over in his hands, slowly formulating a plan as he stared down at Telford Betts’s corpse. A crowd in the tavern had seen LeCroix attack Betts. Now, the land agent was dead and LeCroix’s knife was in his possession. Darcy rolled the blade over again, took the carved bone handle in his palm, measured the weight.
Threatening a man’s life was one thing, but of all the underhanded things he had ever done, murder was not one of them. He stared at the heavy man’s body. If Darcy carried out the plan he had just formulated, Betts wouldn’t feel a thing and LeCroix would be out of the way for a good while, if not forever. If the flatboat pilot was arrested and hanged, there would be no chance of him ever coming after Olivia.
Darcy stood and walked over to the table, where the lamp still burned low. He cupped the top of the chimney, blew out the flame, and walked back to where Betts lay sprawled on the floor. He knelt beside the body.
As heat lightning flickered in the distance, he took the knife handle in both hands, holding on tight. When the lightning flashed again and the room was awash in silver-blue light, he raised the blade directly over Telford Betts’s heart.
Bond Homestead
Olivia knelt in the stuffy loft beside the nest of bedding where Little Pay and Freddie lay sprawled out side by side like two exhausted puppies. The little boys were dead to the world, sleeping the innocent sleep of children, the only time they were ever still. She held each of them by the hand, made circles on their baby-soft skin with her thumb as she stared down at the two towheads, memorizing every detail.
She had no tears to shed today. She had made her decision and she was determined to live with it. Everything was clear to her now that she could see there was only one thing to do. So many things were clear to her now.
Olivia held the boys’ hands a moment longer, then glanced over to the high window beneath the eaves. It was still dark out. The night had been a long, hot, miserable affair filled with thunder and lightning, then rain beating down on the roof, which was just a few feet above them. She had not slept for even a moment of it. She had heard her father moving restlessly downstairs for hours, but thankfully, an hour or so before dawn, she heard him begin to snore.
While everyone slept, she planned to be on her way before any of them stirred awake and caught her. Payson had tried to argue with her for hours, but there was no changing her mind. She let go of the boys’ hands, leaned over and gently placed a kiss on each of their foreheads with a whispered good-bye.
Crawling across the space too small to stand in, she skirted Molly MacKinnon, who lay with her arms up beside her face, her lips slack, mouth open. The Scots girl did not stir. When she reached the trunk that held her clothing, Olivia opened the lid without a sound and then sat down beside it. Folded on top was the lovely embroidered shawl. Beneath that, the soft, perfectly cured doeskin dress. She ran her palm over it and admired the suppleness for the last time. Closing her eyes, she recalled the day Noah had given them to her, then thought of the day he had decided to accompany her to Shawneetown. The beginning of the end.
If only she had known then what she knew now, would she have done anything in her power to stay with him? If she had, what of her family? Would they have survived without her and Noah this summer?
Quickly she unlaced the moccasins she had worn all summer and stacked them one atop the other. She lifted the dress and shawl and carefully laid them beneath it. Feeling around in the contents below, she touched a pair of stockings and then found some sturdy leather shoes she had worn in Virginia, pulled them out, slipped them on.
She had braided her hair sometime during the night, while sleep eluded her. She was determined to take nothing of this life with her except the clothes on her back when she went to Darcy, not even her hairbrush.
She knew him well enough to know he would not find anything she valued worthy of his suite. He would only throw her things away as he had done once before. Just as someone might do for a precious child, or doll, or puppet, he would choose the clothes and jewels she wore, down to the silk undergarments, not once asking her preference or her opinion, for he would be dressing her for his own pleasure, not hers.
Without looking at her half-brothers again, she scooted past Molly and shimmied over the edge of the loft. Her toes found the top rung of the ladder. Careful not to make a sound, she climbed down slowly, holding her breath. When she glanced over at the bed, she could see her father sleeping soundly beside Susanna. Her stepmother lay on her side with her back to the room, her shoulder rising and falling in the deep, rhythmic breath of sleep.
When she reached the floor she paused, closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against a rung of the ladder. She
took a deep breath, inhaling all the scents that would remind her of this home she had known for so short a time: the lingering aroma of beans and bacon, the hickory ash in the fireplace, the close humid air, the damp coolness of the earthen floor beneath her feet.
Olivia opened her eyes and straightened, making her way easily and silently through the darkened interior of the cabin, sidestepping the butter churn near the end of the table.
The door always creaked a bit on its leather hinges; it did so now, but she opened it quickly so that the sound was short lived. Outside, the horizon was barely tinged with light, the rest of the sky darkened by the low clouds. Far off in the distance, lightning still flickered, too far away for her to hear the thunder roll.
Darcy would be coming from the direction of town when he came for her. She would cross the muddy fields, enter the woods and hopefully head him off. There was no reason to hope he would not come. Not after what he had told her father last night, what he had threatened her with yesterday.
She did not look back at the cabin, nor did she allow herself to think of Noah at all, for if she did, she would be forced to remember the last time they made love and all of the terrible things she had said to him. It was far easier to keep her mind blank, her heart numb.
Olivia stepped away from the cabin and started across her father’s cornfield for the last time.
Susanna waited until Livvie was out of the house before she carefully slipped out from beneath the sheet and slid out of bed. She stood there with her hands pressed atop one another over her heart, feeling its rapid beat beneath her long nightgown. As Payson slept on, Susanna picked up the hem of her gown and, barefooted, ran on tiptoe across the cabin and out the door.
Blue Moon Page 22
