He wasn’t the handsomest man Althea had ever seen—he still had the proportions of a scarecrow. Even so, she felt a low, humming vibration jitter through her whenever he was around. It was a sensation like none other she’d ever experienced. His powerful physical presence went beyond his long, rawboned body and clear green eyes. And the pull she felt, something she barely understood, was so strong it frightened her. The memory of measuring him for his shirts had never left her. If he called her it would be so easy to go to him—and yet so difficult.
“Olivia is a grown woman. Don’t you think she’d learn to manage on her own?”
She turned and stared at him. “Why, she’s hardly more than a girl. And you saw yourself that she cannot manage on her own.” So undone by his suggestion and all it implied, she began to sputter. “It—it would be like abandoning a child.”
Jeff had looked straight into Olivia Ford’s eyes when she’d demanded that he leave. What he saw was a woman who knew exactly what she was doing, one who’d been spoiled and coddled all of her life. “Maybe it’s time you let her grow up.”
“You make it sound as though my sister chose the life she has, and that I’m forcing her to keep it.”
“No, I don’t mean that.” Jeff sighed. Olivia wasn’t the one he was concerned about. There were old ghosts and secret hurts hiding in Allie’s heart; he could sense it and everything pointed to it. A mother who’d committed suicide, a cold, humorless father, a sickly, clinging sister.
But what did he care, anyway? It was none of his business—how many times did he have to remind himself of that? And he was in no position to give advice, that was certain. He leaned against the porch upright and hooked one boot over his knee. “I wonder if anyone’s life turns out they way they expect it to when they’re young. I sure as hell never thought I’d be where I am now.”
“Do you mean working off a sentence for breaking into a hen house? Or are you referring to the damage you’ve done to yourself?”
She could be painfully direct—there was no beating around the bush with Althea Ford. But she spoke without malice or an underpinning of sarcasm. Obviously, she expected an answer to her straightforward question. Hunching forward, he rested his elbows on his thighs and stared at the dark shape of the barn.
“I guess I have that coming.”
“You have the chance to walk away from the last two years and start over. When you leave here, will you go back to filching eggs or will you go home?”
He threaded his fingers through his hair. “I don’t make plans anymore. I found out the hard way that planning can set a man up for a big fall.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s a notion you can change.”
She made it sound so simple. But it wasn’t simple at all. Without intending to, Jeff began talking about the shadows that lay on his soul. “I had big plans once. Decker Prairie is usually a quiet, peaceful little town, so I figured I’d be the sheriff for a few years. But what I really wanted to do after that was farm full time. I was going to grow the best crops in the valley with my hundred acres. I’d stand at the end of the rows and burst with pride every time I looked at the tall, green corn, and the carrots and beans and squash. I’d have a wife who carried my child in her belly just as I carried them both in my heart. There were going to be kids underfoot and dogs in the yard. The seasons would come around like the hands on a clock, and I’d go to bed every night thanking God and fate for giving me a good life. A man couldn’t ask for more than that.”
“No, I suppose not. Except that isn’t what you got.”
“Nope. I came close, then I lost it all.” Funny—he’d never talked to anyone about this. Not even to Len Deardorf, the barkeep at the Liberal Saloon, and that man had heard just about every customer’s troubles. Jeff felt the need to tell it now, though, as if the story were a rotten tooth that had to be pulled.
“Sally and me—I guess we were married for about four years. We hoped for children but I figured we had lots of time. Or at least I thought we did. After I shot Wes, everything started to change between us. I wanted to go to her, to talk about what I’d done. But when I tried, she didn’t understand how I felt. She thought that shooting people was part of a lawman’s job, and that I’d have to accept it. I couldn’t talk to her—I couldn’t talk to anyone. The people in town, well, they just stared and whispered every time I walked by. So I crawled inside of myself and stayed there.”
Jeff knew he shouldn’t tell the prim woman sitting next to him about his nights back then. That when sleep wouldn’t come, he had turned to Sally, looking for the solace in her arms and in their bed that eluded him everywhere else. He shouldn’t discuss something so personal with this virginal tabby, yet, despite her innocence he sensed that she would understand.
He’d sought his wife with a need that he couldn’t define. It had been something beyond desire, that need. Maybe he’d hoped that by burying himself in her soft body, he’d be able to pour out his grief and bury it as well.
“But Sally turned me away. Night after night.”
“Oh.” The word came as softly as a dandelion puff pushed along by the breeze. He glanced at Althea. She sat with her hands clasped tightly on her lap and her eyes downcast. He couldn’t see her scarlet cheeks but he practically felt them through the darkness.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t tell you—”
She looked up quickly. “No. No, please go on. I’m listening.”
I’m listening. Those two words were a balm to his spirit.
He nodded and took a deep breath. “I started drinking. Just a little. I wanted to try and kill the guilt and loneliness I carried around with me. Sometimes I’d go to the saloon, order a bottle of whiskey, and sit at a back table.”
“Why didn’t you just go home?”
Home. When was the last time he’d imagined himself at home? “By then, I felt more empty with my wife than I did when I was alone. I don’t think there’s a lonelier feeling than being with someone who has stopped caring. So I started spending some nights in one of the cells in the office. I still loved Sally but I just didn’t know how to show it anymore. And I didn’t know how to fix that.”
“I think I know what you mean. About being lonely with someone else, that is.”
“You do?”
Althea nodded, her earlier irritation with him gone. She had never been married, or ever really been courted by a man. But she knew that hollow feeling, the emptiness that could not be filled with work, or responsibility, or dedication to duty. It made itself felt in a hundred little ways, but in the dark valley of night its pang was most acute.
Jeff sat with his chin in his hand, absently running his thumb over his jaw as he considered her in the low light. She heard the rasp of his beard, saw the dark green fire in his eyes. “Yeah, I think you probably do.” He straightened on the stool and took up his story again. “Finally, one night I decided that if things would ever be right again between Sally and me, I’d have to go to her, on my knees if I had to, and talk to her. I mean really talk.” He chuckled and shook his head. “When I got there, the place was dark and all of her clothes were gone. She’d left me a note on the kitchen table. ‘I can’t take the loneliness anymore.’ That’s all it said. Not a word of regret for what she was doing, not a word of hope or love, even if it was dead. That was it. She was gone.” He sat staring at the darkness for so long, Althea began to grow uncomfortable with the silence. It was full of the memories of heartache.
“Do you know where she went?” she whispered at last.
“I’m surprised you don’t. Everyone in Decker Prairie was blabbing about it. Someone saw her leave with a feed salesman who passed through town. I kept hoping she might come back, but a few months later I received a divorce decree from a law office in San Francisco.”
“Divorce!” No one of Althea’s limited acquaintance was divorced. She didn’t even know anyone who knew someone else who had been divorced. Humiliation and betrayal must have torn deep slashes th
rough his heart.
“It doesn’t take much account of the ‘for better or for worse’ part, does it? When I saw that decree, I yanked the sheriff’s badge off my shirt and threw it on the desk. Then I went out to the homestead with a bottle of whiskey, and after I was good and drunk, I burned the house to the ground.”
“Oh, my God—”
He tossed the grass stalk aside. “Hell, I don’t blame her anymore. It was as if all my anger and every other feeling I had went up in flames with that house.”
“Except your guilt over Wes Cooper.” Althea mourned the loss of the man Jefferson Hicks had once been, and seemed determined to never be again.
He stood and stretched his long back as he regarded the starlit sky. His drawn expression revealed a wealth of pain—a kind of pain that Althea knew all too well. Guilt. It was like a cancer that ate away at the heart instead of the flesh, but it was no less hurtful, for all that. She yearned to reach out and touch his arm, to offer him whatever comfort she could. But after the kiss they had shared, she couldn’t trust herself to pull away again.
After a long moment, he glanced down at her again and flashed her a mocking grin that she knew was directed more at himself than at her. “Yeah, well, I guess a man has to do something with the time he has left on this earth, worthwhile or not. Guilt doesn’t accomplish a whole lot, but at least if gives me—” He broke off, as if his train of thought had momentarily deserted him. “A reason, I guess,” he finished in a hollow voice that conveyed just how empty he felt. “We all need a reason for being, and that’s all I really have left, Allie. Deep regret.”
That was the saddest thing she’d ever heard anyone say. If he’d been any other man, she might have suspected him of trying to play on her sympathy. But the ache in Jeff’s eyes told her he truly meant it. His life had been stripped. He was just marking time with no hopes or dreams to sustain him.
Althea understood exactly how that felt and wished with all her heart that she didn’t. To look at the endless road that lay ahead of you . . . knowing that you would never escape the deep rut in which you walked . . . and even worse, that there was no end in sight. Just day after day after day of putting one foot in front of the other, moving relentlessly ahead to go nowhere, your only companion a deep, soul-searing regret over events you could never change. Oh, yes . . . she understood very well.
“Good night, Allie,” he said softly. Then he bounded down the stairs and into the darkness toward the lean-to.
For a long while, Althea stared into the blackness that swallowed him and wished she had the courage to call him back. Only for what purpose? To tell him that she understood? To offer him the solace his wife had refused him? Her own pain ran too deep for her to hope to heal his.
Althea sighed and rose stiffly from the rocker, her gaze locked forlornly on the buttery sphere that hovered on the western horizon. That’s your moon up there, Allie. If it was hers, why did it remain so far beyond her reach? That was a question for which there was no answer, so why torment herself by asking it? Some things simply weren’t meant to be.
Turning her back on the moonlight, she went into the kitchen and blew out the lamp.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Olivia remained in bed all night and part of the following day. Althea slept occasionally, sitting up in a chair next to her. The rest of the time, she read to her sister, spooned soup into her mouth, and brushed her hair. She left Olivia’s side only to cook, and Jeff found his trays on the back porch once again. She gave him plain fare—lukewarm oatmeal for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch and dinner, made from the roast beef he hadn’t gotten to taste the night before.
Though he looked toward the house for Allie so many times he’d lost count, he never saw her, and the day seemed lonely somehow. He spent it sweating in the sun and cursing a seed drill he was trying to resurrect from near-death. It had been left out in the weather for several years.
A month ago he couldn’t have cared less about Althea Ford. In fact, he would have been hard pressed to recognize her name or remember anything about her. He’d been lost in a haze of whiskey and reliving the past, and that was where he’d wanted to stay. Now, though, he more often found himself thinking about the here and now, and looking forward to tomorrow. And he realized that whenever he did so, Allie was part of both.
Allie, with her sister bound to her as surely as a ball and chain bound a prisoner.
Finally Jeff wrenched open the screeching barn door to look for an oil can. The damned seeder was rusted solid. He’d had to hack a path through the brambles and tall weeds just to reach it. If he couldn’t make the thing work, he had a big job ahead of him, seeding the field by hand.
He rummaged through the items on the shelves, squinting in the cool, semi-gloom to make out the contents of various dusty cans and bottles. His finger, the one Olivia had bitten, ached a little. She hadn’t broken the skin but she’d left her teeth marks on him. He still couldn’t get the scene at dinner out of his mind—those blood-freezing shrieks, the plates and bowls flying off the table, Allie, gravy dripping from her hair and blackberry jam smeared on her dress, trying to comfort her sister. But by far, his most disturbing recollection of last night was Olivia’s lucid, calculating hazel eyes glaring up at him when he’d tried to restrain her.
He’d seen manipulation in his time, but Olivia Ford took the prize. The reasons for her behavior and how she’d gotten to be that way were mysteries to him. Her intentions were pretty clear, though.
Allie didn’t seem to have a clue that her sister was anything but a helpless, childlike invalid. In her face he’d seen only worry, empathy and tenderness as she’d clutched Olivia to her shoulder. The “helpless invalid” was controlling her strong, good-hearted nursemaid with a tyranny that Jeff knew would eventually break Allie’s spirit like a dry twig.
He put down a dusty bottle of old liniment with a thud. Damn it, he knew life wasn’t fair but sometimes it seemed that fate deliberately stepped in to crush people. To turn their lives upside down, to keep happiness just beyond their grasp, to prevent them from having any life at all.
Forget it, Hicks, just forget it, he grumbled to himself, resuming his search for oil. He’d do well to stay out of the Ford family’s problems. He had plenty of his own troubles to ponder if he wanted to give himself sleepless nights. He didn’t want to think about a smart, pretty woman shriveling up out here on this tumbledown farm, her life spent in servitude to a sister who knew exactly how to get her own way. Even if a body could get past thinking of Althea as one of the peculiar Ford sisters, it was a certainty that not one man in the whole valley would be willing to take Olivia Ford as the booby prize for marrying Allie. He sure as hell wouldn’t.
It didn’t matter that sometimes when he looked into Allie’s bottomless blue-gray eyes, he swore he saw the chance to heal his soul in their depths. And if he had just half the tenderness she gave to Olivia, he might even be able to stop thinking about Wes Matthews every single day. It wouldn’t take much encouragement from Allie to make him give up drinking for good and settle down again. If he had someone like her to come home to— He sighed and stared unseeing at the cobweb-draped shelf in front of him. If . . . if . . . Not much could be accomplished with “if.”
A glaring truth shot through his mind then and stopped him cold in his tracks. He didn’t want to be saddled with Olivia—what made him think that Allie would want anything to do with him, a broken-down drunk without a penny to his name, save whatever she was going pay him? Even his own wife had given up on him.
Until that night at Wickwire’s, he’d never thought of himself as a bad person. His mother had instilled right and wrong in all her sons; she’d stressed the value of goodness. But after he’d killed Wes, all that might have been good in him drained away, as sure as that boy’s lifeblood had drained from his gunshot heart.
Jefferson Hicks didn’t deserve a woman like Allie Ford, and realizing that made the hope for tomorrow wither in the pit of his stomach. At one time, he
would have been worthy of her but not now, and probably not ever.
He touched his shirt pocket where a keepsake lay furled. Giving in to the urge, he withdrew it. Sometime during the fracas of Olivia’s tantrum, amid the flying peas and gobbets of jam, Allie’s ribbon had come loose from her hair. He hadn’t even realized he’d taken it until he was back in the lean-to and found it wound in his fingers. It was such a simple thing, a bit of delicate femininity in a world that had been hard and unforgiving of him. He lifted it to his nose to inhale the faint scent of her hair. Soon the pink satin would take on the smell of his sweat and his own body, but he would savor her fragrance while he could.
After harvest time, he’d go back to his old way of life, his whiskey and its blessed forgetfulness. If Will Mason harassed him, he’d move on to another town. But somehow, the idea of sleeping in doorways and hayricks wasn’t as tolerable as it had been just a month ago. He’d gotten used to his little arrangement in the lean-to next to the barn. Well, he would just have to give it up when the time came. He stuffed the ribbon back into his pocket. There were some things a man couldn’t change no matter how much he wished for them.
When Jeff at last put his hand on an old oil can, he carried it to the barn door and oiled the thing so it didn’t screech anymore. Allie hadn’t wanted him to bother fixing it, but that high-pitched scraping of metal against metal set his teeth on edge. He slid it back and forth on its wheels until the lubricant coated the mechanism and it ran smoothly.
Satisfied, he held a faint hope that the farm tool outside would be as easy to fix, but it was in far worse shape. He’d turned to go back to it when he became aware of an insistent cheeping. Looking up, he saw the mud-and-feather nest of the barn swallows anchored to a corner formed by a beam and the wall. A doting parent, dressed in steel blue and chestnut plumage, flew through the open barn door and clung to the side of the nest. Eager babies bobbed up in unison with beaks open wide to receive their breakfast. Jeff chuckled.
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