Rosie methodically slid four cups into the rinse water. “Sammy know what he wants. He will fight.”
Marianne plucked out a teacup and dried it. “We will fight, too.”
A smile flitted across Rosie’s features, but she merely nodded and went back to scrubbing an egg-encrusted plate.
On her way out, Marianne stopped in the dining room for a cup of coffee and some information. “Rita, are there many people in town who object to an Indian family in Smoke River?”
The waitress smoothed her apron over her stomach. “Not so’s you’d notice. But folks like that tend to lie low and not say much. I heard what happened at the horse race, Miss Marianne. How you got hurt.”
“I think Mrs. Ridley wanted to injure Rosie more than me,” Marianne said quietly.
Rita nodded. “Lots of folks were real upset a few years back when Uncle Charlie moved to town ’cuz he was Chinese. One night ’is niece Leah MacAllister, she’s half-Chinese, gave ’em all what-for at a town meeting that nobody’ll ever forget.”
“Have you ever overheard any dinner-table talk about Rosie Greywolf and Sammy not being welcome in town?”
“Not for more’n a dozen years,” the waitress said. “Most folks don’t pay them any mind. Say, honey, you want some fresh peach pie?”
Peach pie! Her mouth watered at the thought, but she couldn’t afford it. She shook her head. Maybe Mr. Ness would let her have some overripe peaches from the display in front of the mercantile. She could bake a pie for dessert tonight.
*
Ness’s mercantile was jam-packed. Townspeople clogged the aisles buying brooms and boys’ shirts and hoes and everything from ripe tomatoes to strawberries. The peaches on display were so ripe they were mushy.
“My, you are busy today, Mr. Ness.”
“We’re always busy on Saturday when people come into town to pick up their mail in the back room. Guess you’re here to pick up yours, too.”
Marianne blinked. “Mail? Collingwood Boots hasn’t gotten any mail for the past few weeks.”
Mr. Ness’s pale eyebrows went up. “Huh? That’s not right, Miz Marianne. Collingwood Boots gets more mail than anybody in town! Your mail slot is stuffed plumb full every day.”
“But I check our mail every single day and the slot is always empty.”
“Can’t be,” he insisted.
“It most certainly can be!”
The mercantile owner stepped away from the counter. “Come with me, Miz Marianne. Just yesterday I shoved five letters in your mail slot. Are you sayin’ you never found them?”
Marianne folded her arms across her waist. “That is exactly what I am saying.”
“Well, now, that’s real strange.”
A sudden suspicion glimmered in Marianne’s brain. “Mr. Ness, could someone else have taken our mail?”
“Well, um, yeah, they could, all right. But that’d be illegal, ma’am. Takin’ somebody else’s mail is a crime.”
Marianne leaned toward the mercantile owner and spoke quietly. “Have you noticed anyone besides me who comes in to pick up their mail every day as I do?”
He scratched his chin. “Now that you mention it, there has been someone. All these years she’s never been in to check her mail more’n once a week. Fact is, she never got much mail before, but a few weeks ago she started comin’ in every day. Usually around suppertime.”
“Eugenia Ridley,” she murmured.
The mercantile owner nodded.
“Mr. Ness, thank you very much for telling me this. I will be back at suppertime.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Lance, I have a surprise for you.”
Lance looked up from the kitchen table. “Peach pie, right? I’ve been smelling it for the last hour.”
“Well, yes. Eventually.”
He frowned. “Huh?”
“I… I have to go to the mercantile for something.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Before supper.”
“You want me to go instead?”
“No,” she said quickly. “This is something I need to do alone. And I need you to watch what’s in the oven. Keep my pie from burning.”
Lance studied his wife. “What’s the surprise, Marianne?”
She sent him that sweet smile that always melted his insides. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Marianne…?”
“I will be back in an hour. Or less.”
Lance stared at her. She was keeping something from him. Another secret. The back of his neck began to itch. Well, two can play at this game.
“Marianne, you know what we’re going to do tonight?” She spun toward him. “What?”
“Tonight,” he repeated. “In bed.”
“I cannot imagine.” But her cheeks were getting all pink. “What are we going to do?”
He took her shoulders and deliberately turned her toward the door. “Guess you’ll have to wait and see.”
She gave him a look he had to interpret as Very Interested, and in the next instant stepped out the door. He smiled to himself. Let her wonder. In the meantime, he corralled his eagerness for her return and bent to peek at the pie in the oven.
*
Marianne marched over to the mercantile at such a fast pace that when the bell over the door chimed she found she was short of breath. She gave Carl Ness a brief look and then moved quickly toward the bank of mail slots at the back of the store where Carl distributed the mail every day. She stationed herself in the fabric aisle and settled down behind the bolts of denim and flannel piled on the shelves to watch.
She didn’t have long to wait. The bell over the door rang once more, and she heard Mr. Ness greet his customer.
She waited.
An agonizing minute passed while she desperately tried to calm her racing heart, and then a figure moved toward the back of the mercantile and the bank of mail slots. Marianne held her breath, counted to sixty and moved forward to observe the person.
She watched Eugenia Ridley run her forefinger along the third tier of wooden slots. She paused on the fourth slot from the left, the one belonging to Collingwood Boots, and her plump hand flicked out to gather up a small pile of letters.
Marianne stepped forward. “Mrs. Ridley.”
The woman jerked, and the mail spilled on to the floor. “Oh! You startled me.”
“I intended to,” Marianne said. She leaned over and scooped up the envelopes. “These are addressed to Collingwood Boots,” she said, her voice hard. “Not to you.”
“Oh, well, it’s simply an oversight, dearie. I accidentally reached into the wrong mail slot.”
Marianne just looked at her. “No, you did not, Mrs. Ridley. I hope you are aware that stealing mail is a crime.”
“Well!” the woman huffed. “I am certainly not stealing—”
“Yes, you are,” Marianne said quietly. “And if all those letters addressed to Collingwood Boots are not delivered to the shop within an hour, I will notify Sheriff Rivera that you are committing mail theft.”
The color drained from the woman’s face. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“Try me,” Marianne said calmly.
“I’ll say… I’ll say it was just a misunderstanding.”
“And I will prove that it wasn’t.”
Carl Ness appeared at her elbow. “And I will be here to back up Miz Burnside.”
“Oh. Well. I—I will return home and see if I have accidentally taken any of your mail.”
Marianne said nothing. Carl Ness took Mrs. Ridley by the elbow and walked her to the front door. When the woman had disappeared, Marianne’s legs turned to jelly.
“Thank you, Mr. Ness.”
“You did the right thing, Miz Burnside. And you did it real direct and quiet-like. Good for you.”
“Let’s hope it will be good for Collingwood Boots,” she said. “We are just a breath away from going broke.”
The proprietor stepped away and returned in a moment to press a bag of fresh apr
icots into her hand. “Go on home, Miss Marianne. In an hour I predict you and your husband are gonna be opening a whole lot of mail.”
Marianne was so relieved she practically floated out the door and down the street to the shop. Lance met her at the top of the stairs.
“The pie’s done,” he announced. “So, what’s the surprise?”
She threw her arms around him. “I’ll tell you in an hour. In the meantime…” She kissed him, laughed happily at his puzzled expression and kissed him again.
They dawdled over supper while Marianne struggled to keep a most unladylike grin off her face and Lance worked to keep his impatience under control. After slices of peach pie and coffee, he carefully settled her on his lap and buried his nose in her hair.
“Where’s my surprise?” he murmured.
“It’s coming.” She kissed his cheek and wound her arms around his neck, then kissed his other cheek.
A minute later they heard the shop door open downstairs and Abe’s surprised voice. In the next minute his footsteps pounded up the stairs, and Lance opened the door to find him setting a large cardboard carton of letters on the landing.
Marianne came to stand beside him. “Lance, just look! Who would ever dream that Christmas could come in August?”
“Is this the surprise?” he asked, staring down at the carton of mail.
She nodded. “Do you want to open them now?” she whispered.
“Let’s open just one,” he countered. “In bed.”
Ten minutes later he drew off her nightgown, and while she read aloud the contents of one letter, he pressed his lips in places she had never dreamed of. Very soon, she confided, she would be able to move without pain from her still tender ribs.
He lifted the sheet of paper out of her hand and puffed out the lamp. “That,” he said with a sigh, “will be a surprise worth waiting for.”
*
Every single letter Marianne and Lance and Abe and Sammy opened the next morning contained at least one order for a pair of Collingwood Boots, along with a bank draft.
“Jumpin’ Jiminy, Miss Marianne, we can’t begin to fill all these orders! I never seen so many people wantin’ boots all at once. Ridin’ boots. Fancy dress boots with hand toolin’. Ladies boots, even little kids boots. You’d think a thousand folks been goin’ barefoot all summer!”
“Maybe wearing boots is becoming fashionable,” Marianne said with a laugh.
“Mebbe.” His tone sounded doubtful.
Lance looked up from the pile of envelopes in his lap. “Fashionable or not, how the heck are we gonna make this many pairs of boots?”
“We could work double shifts?” Marianne suggested.
Sammy spoke up for the first time. “Golly, Abe’s the only person here who really knows how to make boots. I’m still learning the trade, and so is Lance and you, Miss Marianne.”
Abe nodded and scratched his chin. “Yep, there’s only the four of us. We’ll have to work like the devils from hell are nippin’ at our heels.”
“Do you think we can do it?” Marianne asked.
“Sure,” Abe said. “I got three good apprentices, ain’t I?”
Lance ran his hand through his hair. “And we’re learnin’ the boot-making business as fast as we can.”
“And praying,” Marianne murmured under her breath.
*
They started on the long list of orders the very next morning. Marianne cut and trimmed pieces of cowhide until her hands ached, and then Sammy took over the cutting while she practiced her skill with the tack hammer. Abe and Lance worked together over the boot lasts until past midnight every night. Then they slept three hours and started in again.
Sammy started curling up in one corner of the shop to sleep between shifts. It seemed to Marianne that Abe never slept. He cut out leather pieces and nailed on boot soles and labored over his embossing dies and made pot after pot of coffee and never seemed to tire. He swore he slept some each night, but even though he had his cot back, she was not convinced. He was always in the shop working, instructing, advising and encouraging.
Making boots was exhausting, Marianne realized. They all worked day and night, and little by little they learned. She was also discovering that making very fine boots took time.
“That’s why Collingwood Boots are known from Texas to New York,” Abe reminded her. “’Cause they’s the finest boots that ever got pulled on to a human foot.”
They filled nine orders for Texas Rangers. Ladies in Arizona wanted fancy riding boots to show off in a parade for some mayor’s birthday. So many orders poured in Marianne began to wonder if the four of them could survive at the pace they were working.
“We can never keep this up,” she groaned to Lance one night after supper. “Success is like opening Pandora’s box. What we have set in motion is more than we can handle.”
She was undressing behind the screen, but Lance was so exhausted he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Instead he lay in bed listening to her voice and thanked God for the few hours they stole each night to be together. But they were both so weary after a day of boot-making they fell asleep as soon as their heads touched the pillows.
Marianne had come close to fainting that evening, and Abe had sent them both off to rest tonight. But he was still working down in the shop.
“We wanted to own our own business, Lance,” she said after two cups of strong tea. “But this feels dreadful. We never see each other. We grab sandwiches at odd hours and we never sit down for a meal together. We hardly ever talk because we’re so tired.”
She crept into bed beside him. “We cannot survive this pace.”
He opened his eyes. “We can try,” he whispered. “God knows we’re both so tired we can’t see straight, but we’ve got to keep going.”
“I can’t,” she said in a shaky voice. “Never in my entire life did I think I would ever say those words, but…” She choked back a sob.
He rolled to face her. “For better or worse, remember?”
She tried to smile at him. “I thought we’d already been through ‘worse.’”
“Yeah, me, too. Guess there’s more, huh?”
“Lance, is this what a marriage really is? Just one calamity after another?”
He tucked her head under his chin. “I think this is what life is, Marianne.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “Go to sleep. We’re both too tired to make love, so I guess it’ll have to wait some more.”
“Until when?” she asked in a sleepy voice.
“I don’t know. We have thirty more orders to fill before the end of next month.”
She groaned. “I bet Mrs. Schneiderman would laugh if she could see us now. It feels like we left a peaceful pasture in St. Louis and walked right into the lion’s den in Smoke River.”
He was quiet for so long she thought he’d fallen asleep. “Yeah,” he said at last. “But we’re in the lion’s den together. I bet if Mrs. Schneiderman could see us now she’d be jealous.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The next morning Abe and Sammy went off to the railway station to pick up a shipment of cowhide, and Lance found himself alone in the shop. He was hunched over a pair of fancy riding boots, applying oil to the uppers and buffing it to a shine, when the door opened and a young woman stepped in. She was wearing a fancy-looking red print dress with lots of ruffles, and she sent Lance a dazzling smile.
“Oh, yoah just the man Ah want to see!” Her blond curls bobbed with every word.
“You need something, Miss…?”
“Moreland. Fanny Moreland.” She offered a hand dripping with rings. “Miss,” she emphasized.
He wiped his sticky fingers on a towel and awkwardly shook her fluttery ones, then found he couldn’t escape her grip. “Uh, you wanted something?” he reminded her.
“Why, yes.” She gave his hand an extra squeeze. “Mah birthday is next week, and a gentleman admirer wants to give me a pair of riding boots. Fancy ones. You know, with lots of designs in the leather.”
“Ma’am, I’m afraid we’re backed up with orders into next month, so…”
She sent him a dimpled smile and playfully wound one long blond curl around her forefinger. “Ah will be so disappointed if Ah can’t have them for a whole month. Y’all wouldn’t want to disappoint me, would you?”
Lance straightened to his full height. “Sorry, Miss Moreland. I don’t have much choice. We’ve got so many orders coming—”
She laid her hand on his arm. “Really?” She drew the word out. “Re-ahl-ly.”
“Really,” he said dryly. He moved away from her. “Best I can do is measure your foot.”
“Why, goodness me, that would be so awfully nice of you. Lance, isn’t it?”
“Burnside,” he supplied. “I’ll get some paper and a pencil to trace your foot.” He opened the top drawer of Marianne’s desk, and when he turned back, Miss Moreland had hiked up her skirt and was unlacing her high-heeled pump.
“No need to take your shoe off, Miss Moreland. You can just step on this paper, and I’ll draw an outline of your foot.”
She looked up with a slow smile. “But mah new boots will have to fit evah so close. Ah’ll just slip this ol’ pump off and…”
Before he could stop her, the black leather oxford dropped to the floor. He knelt before her and slid the heavy sheet of paper forward. “Put your foot down here.”
“Oh, surely you want mah bare foot!” She steadied herself with one hand on his shoulder and hitched her red skirt over her knees.
“No,” he said quickly. “Leave your stocking on.”
Her skirt fluttered down, but she kept her hand on his shoulder. Lance gritted his teeth, positioned her foot on the paper and hastily sketched the outline.
“Don’t y’all want to trace mah other foot?”
“No need,” he said tersely. “One foot’s the same size as the other.” Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but he didn’t really care.
“Really?” Re-ahl-ly?
He stood up. “I’ll keep your measurement in our files, Miss Moreland. We’ll get around to your boots as soon as we can.”
She made no move to put her shoe back on. “Lance, Ah do hope y’all will be callin’ on me soon. With my new boots,” she added.
Marianne's Marriage of Convenience Page 22
