After the Thunder

by Genell Dellin

  He pulled back, gave her a little shake, and she stared up into his blazing eyes.

  “You belong to me,” he said again. “Promise me you’ll never forget it.”

  Then his hands tightened on her arms.

  “I don’t mean that after I’m gone you shouldn’t love someone else, sometime … I mean …”

  “I never will,” she said, and she knew in that moment that it was true. “You’re the only man I’ll ever love, my Shadow.”

  His eyes filled with agony.

  “But it’s so selfish of me … I shouldn’t have said that to you. Yet, I can’t help it, I mean it …”

  She laid her finger across his lips.

  “You have to believe in me,” she said simply. “You won’t be gone. You didn’t kill Jacob, and you aren’t going to die for it.”

  “I may have killed him.”

  “No. I’ve jumped to a lot of conclusions, I admit,” she said, looking straight into his eyes, willing him to feel the confidence she was feeling. “And I’ve led us on a lot of wild-goose chases since Jacob died. But you have taught me much, my Shadow, and I know who did this murder now. I know it with my earthy instincts and with the spiritual strength you’ve helped me find.”

  He didn’t say a word, only looked deep into her soul, that same way he had looked at her that day on the Texas Road.

  Finally he spoke, in that rich, low voice that sounded like a song.

  “All right. This search has helped you to grow, just as I realized that night at the cabin, and this decision is the result.”

  “The search made me grow only because you came with me,” she said. “But now that you’ve taught me, I can finish it alone.”

  All she could do was look at him. At his wonderful, gorgeous, hard-chiseled face.

  “I’ll see you soon,” she said. “Shadow, I love you.”

  He gave her a smile so wonderful, so full of love that it would be burned into her memory forever.

  “I love you,” he said. “Cotannah, I’m standing here handing you my heart.”

  Those words struck her soul like a thrown lance and lodged there. They hollowed her out and then broke the shell of her into pieces, so that she couldn’t leave him.

  But she had to go so that she could save his life, so she could keep him with her for all her life.

  He saw it in her eyes. He pulled her closer, bent his head, and kissed her once, hard and fast, but deep, as if branding her as his, and then he let her go.

  “Ride safe,” he said.

  She turned and ran for her horse.

  Chapter 18

  Just before dusk, Cotannah rode into the yard at Tall Pine numb with exhaustion from traveling so fast, yet with the peace in her heart never wavering. Tay and Emily both came out of the house to meet her and, when she refused to rest or eat until she had talked to them, they stayed in the privacy of the yard listening to her reasoning that Peter Phillips was the murderer.

  “You know that the strength of the incantations is always in the thought,” she said. “Walks-With-Spirits doesn’t have a bad bone in his body, so his curse did not kill Jacob. I know in my heart now that Peter Phillips did, and I’m going to search his room and the mercantile to find out how he did it.”

  “I agree that Walks-With-Spirits never meant Jacob to die,” Emily said, “and I really don’t believe that the curse killed him.”

  Then she added gently, “But ’Tannah, what happened to him? There wasn’t any wound.”

  “I’ve thought about it all the way back here,” Cotannah said. “Maybe Peter stabbed him in the heart or the temple or another really vulnerable spot with a tiny awl—there were tools at the store—or a hatpin or something that left an unnoticeable hole.”

  “’Tannah, darling, please don’t make yourself sick, now,” Emily said, searching her face with huge brown eyes full of worry. “You look so tired.”

  “Don’t try to distract me!” Cotannah said. “Don’t you think it could’ve happened like I just told you?”

  “It could’ve happened,” Tay and Emily said, speaking at the same time.

  “It could,” Cotannah said eagerly, ignoring their worried looks. “Or maybe Peter told him something that made him so angry he had a heart attack. I just know that Peter was the person in the store whom Jacob was calling to over his shoulder.”

  “I think you may be right,” Emily said.

  But Tay threw her a glance that said, don’t encourage her, as he stood up and held out his hand to Cotannah.

  “Better come in and rest now,” he said, teasing her gently as she let him pull her up from her chair, “’Tannah, remember how sick you were when we got you back from the bandidos. We can’t bear to go through that again.”

  The thought of that horrible time when she felt so low in her spirits that she didn’t want to live gave her a moment of sharp insight into how far she truly had come, how much she had changed. And all because of Walks-With-Spirits. She would not let him die.

  “Don’t worry about how I feel,” she said, “and don’t worry that I’ll be hurt more if I try this and fail. I won’t fail. I know it.”

  “All right,” Emily said. “We believe you. Let’s all go into the kitchen, and while you eat something and Rosie pours a hot bath for you upstairs, we’ll talk about the best way to go about looking for evidence against Peter.”

  “Maybe we can search his room now,” Cotannah whispered, as they climbed the steps to the porch.

  “No, he’s in it,” Emily whispered back. “He went up early tonight.”

  “Then I must see him at breakfast,” Cotannah said. “Wake me up early, and I’ll ask him if I can go into town with him. I intend to make him believe that I’ve given up on Walks-With-Spirits and that I’m turning to him as my new romantic interest.”

  “Be careful,” they said in unison.

  Cotannah laughed.

  “You two and Walks-With-Spirits should form a little choir,” she said. “But none of you should worry. I can deal with Peter Phillips just fine.”

  The truth of that gave a lift to her heart as they went into the house. She might be so tired that her legs were trembling and her head was swimming, but she’d never felt so strong in all her life.

  The next morning while getting dressed, Cotannah imagined a dialogue in which she, Emily, and Tay asked such clever questions at breakfast that Phillips slipped up, then broke down and confessed. She recalled every suspicious statement the man had ever made. At last, on her way down the stairs, she closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind and heart as she had learned from Walks-With-Spirits. The most important thing was that her spirit be open to listening to Phillips’s.

  She had chosen a new, dusty gold-colored day dress that Emily said made her eyes and hair black as midnight. It had a high neckline, because it was made for fall and for daytime, but it fit so snugly at the waist and over her breasts that it would definitely draw a man’s eye. Phillips would notice her and be doubly glad that she wanted to flirt with him.

  And he was.

  “What a delight to see you!” he said, as she entered the dining room.

  Hastily, he scraped his chair back and stood up to hold hers for her.

  “What are you up to, this fine morning, Miss Cotannah, my dear? Did your friend return to Tall Pine with you?”

  In other words, Are you still defending the medicine man and searching for a killer?

  “No,” she said, flashing a smiling glance up at him as she slid into her chair, “now I’m all alone.”

  “Ah! That won’t last,” he said, jovially, as he sat back down and picked up a platter of bacon and eggs. “A woman as beautiful as you will never be without an escort for long.”

  “I hope not,” she said, tilting her head in her best coquettish manner. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Phillips, I was hoping that you might be my escort today.”

  He beamed at her and then, with a sketch of a bow, took the liberty of serving her plate.

  “It
would be my distinct honor to serve as your escort, my dear girl,” he said. “Do you have a destination in mind?”

  She batted her lashes at him, then cocked her head and gave him a long look right in the eye that brought even more color into his ruddy cheeks.

  “I never did get my own personal, private tour of the new mercantile,” she said slowly. “Do you think today would be a good time for that?”

  He barely glanced at the table when he set the platter down.

  “Today would be perfect, my dear Cotannah. Absolutely perfect.”

  She was so excited that she could barely eat, and her hand shook each time she tried to drink her coffee, but Peter Phillips took that to mean that she was enormously eager to be alone with him and winked at her several times while he ate to let her know that he understood. Finally, the meal was over, and he handed her into the buggy that he had ordered brought around.

  “I didn’t want us to go horseback today, since you rode so many miles just yesterday,” he explained, as he climbed in and took up the lines. “And, wouldn’t you agree that it’s much more pleasant for us to sit together?” He scooted over on the seat close enough for his thigh to rest against hers. “What do you say to that, Miss Cotannah?”

  She smiled up at him brightly, then reached out and touched his arm. “I thank you for your consideration, kind sir.”

  They bantered and talked and flirted all the way into town, arriving at the mercantile an hour or so before the time that he usually opened the door to customers. A clerk, working in the front of the store, was already there, which she hadn’t counted on, but Phillips immediately sent him away on an errand that would take a good, long while.

  “I don’t intend to share your company,” he told her when the man was gone, “not when I’ve finally got you all to myself.”

  He touched her hand as he said that and he held her elbow as he showed her around, from one section of the store to another, and he let his arm brush the side of her breast as he encouraged her to choose a ribbon from the ribbon case to go with her dress. She began to get desperate. Nothing had looked the slightest bit suspicious yet, and she’d tried to glance into every corner of every room of the mercantile. But the storage room that ran across the length of the back of the building was huge and filled with thousands of different items, and the store itself held thousands more.

  While Phillips tied the ribbon in her hair, she took several deep breaths and tried to think. Anything incriminating would be hidden from the eyes of the clerk. Anything incriminating would probably be in Phillips’s private office, which opened off the main store by a door he had pointed out in the back near the double doors to the storage area.

  “You haven’t shown me your office yet,” she purred, turning around to take the mirror he was offering for her to look at the effect of the ribbon’s satiny color against the darkness of her hair. “You only showed me where it is. Do I get a tour of it, too?”

  He leaned so close to her.

  “You get anything you want, you beautiful creature. You only have to give me a hint.”

  She fought down a little shudder of revulsion.

  “I’d love to explore your own private place,” she said. “I know it’ll tell me so much about you.”

  He straightened his back and offered her his arm in a dramatic, exaggerated gesture of gallantry.

  “Come with me, Miss Cotannah.”

  She clung to his arm and let him lead her to the doorway of his office and then into it, across the polished threshold. Just as they entered the spacious room, she cried out, stumbled and made an exaggerated show of holding on to him.

  “Ooh, it’s my ankle!” she said, gasping, pretending to be in great pain. “I’ve hurt myself. Oh, Peter, I turned my ankle.”

  She sucked in her breath as if the hurt was almost unbearable and reached feebly with her other hand toward the big swivel chair in front of the desk, whimpering pitiably all the time.

  “I don’t know how I did that,” she said, as she sank into the chair. “But it’s hurting so much I feel I may have broken it.”

  He was all solicitous attention and concern, wanting to see the injury for himself and do something about it, but she screamed each time he reached for her ankle.

  “Peter, please run to Mrs. Smoke’s boardinghouse and see if she has any ice,” she begged. “Or at least some cold water from her springhouse. We must keep the swelling down so this won’t ruin our whole day.”

  “Of course, of course, but my dear girl, I do hate to leave you alone.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll sit right here, and I won’t even try to move around. Please, Peter, just try to get me some ice.”

  Finally he was gone and she dropped both feet to the floor and swung around to begin going through his desk but first she ran a thorough glance over every shelf, every table, every item sitting out in plain view. Of course she saw nothing that looked like an instrument of murder. If he still had it, wouldn’t he have hidden it in a drawer somewhere?

  Her heart sank at the next thought.

  Or wouldn’t he have put it back on the shelf in the store among other tools of its kind? If that were true, she’d never find it.

  She shook off the panic pulling at her and opened the lap drawer of the tall, rolltop desk. Pens, paper, business forms and correspondence.

  She began opening the other drawers, the ones down the right side, looking in the cubbyholes as she did so, and then glancing into the drawers, moving their innocent contents around a bit and then moving on. In the bottom one, a glint of sunlight off glass caught her eye immediately and she moved the envelopes that lay half across on top of it.

  A white skull and crossbones shone up at her, a small skull and crossbones in the middle of a small, dark brown glass bottle with a cork stopper in the top. Her blood stopped running.

  Poison!

  In a large, bold script the narrow label beneath the skull and crossbones proclaimed, Monkshood.

  For a long heartbeat she sat there staring at it, then she snatched it up in her hand and opened her drawstring bag with the other, thrust the bottle deep into it, and pulled the strings tight again. Poison. Phillips could have poisoned Jacob if the two of them had been eating or drinking together early that morning. She looked in the drawer again. There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey there, too.

  Quickly, she rifled through, but nothing else in the drawer interested her. Her head was whirling and she could barely breathe, much less think, she was so excited but she kept the presence of mind to close the drawer and slip her bag back onto her wrist before she swiveled the chair around to face the door where Peter would reappear. Her heart beat so hard and fast she thought it would break her ribs.

  Why, why in the name of heaven hadn’t anybody thought of this before? Poison, of course.

  She herself should have thought of it the instant she first heard someone say that it had to be the death curse that killed him because Jacob was young and strong and healthy. Young and strong and healthy and dead, just like Ruffy Sloan.

  After all, she had been at Las Manzanitas when Ruffy, one of the white vaqueros, had poisoned himself with too much medicine. With her own eyes she had seen him laid out in the parlor for the funeral, looking exactly as if he had fallen asleep, and with her own ears she had heard, over and over again, how impossible the death must be because Ruffy had been young and strong and healthy and too mean to die. The very same could be said of Jacob.

  She froze in the chair, her mind racing. She’d tease Peter Phillips, all right, but in a different way from what she had planned. She would taunt him with her knowledge, and she’d drop enough hints to let him know that his bottle of poison was missing and she’d torment him into confessing that he was the guilty one. She would start at dinner, and he would have to respond in front of everybody. Maybe she could even lure him into her room to try to get the poison back and she and Emily and Tay could catch him doing it.

  It was all she could do to restrain herself,
but she remained seated in the chair until he returned with a handful of ice chips in a handkerchief.

  “I got some,” he called happily from the front door of the store. “Mrs. Smoke said for me to carry you to her house if you’d like to lie down.”

  “No, no, I just want to go home,” she said, making her voice tremble a bit. “I want Emily and Aunt Ancie. I know you must open your store now, Peter, but if you could have someone drive me home …”

  She let the sentence trail off and took the ice from him, bent to take off her slipper and apply the ice to her ankle. Suddenly, she held the ice with only one hand and reached for the handle of drawer that had held the poison with the other.

  “If you have another handkerchief here anywhere, I could tie this pack around my foot …”

  “No!” he cried, and his hand shot out like a snake’s striking head to stop hers. “No, not in there. Here, I have another handkerchief in my pocket.”

  She kept her eyes lowered behind her lashes but she felt him look at her sharply. Good. Now he would surely look into the drawer and see that the bottle was gone before he came back to Tall Pine for dinner, and his nerves would be on edge.

  After much pretended pain and after sitting with her foot propped up on a stool for several minutes until she could declare the hurting was much less, he finally went out into the street and found Mud Martin and his wife, Beuly, who were heading out toward their own farm, which lay just on the other side of Tall Pine.

  “This way, you’ll have the buggy to come home in,” Cotannah told Peter Phillips as he carried her out to the Martins’ wagon. “Don’t be late for dinner, now, because I’ll feel bad that I’ve been the cause of delaying the start of your workday like this.”

  “No, no,” he assured her. “Not at all.”

  But he settled her into the seat next to Mrs. Martin and went back inside the mercantile without any more flirting or a lengthy good-bye, with only a cheery, “You take care of yourself, now, Miss Cotannah!” thrown over his shoulder as he left her.