“Well, since you’re such a bright and witty young man, I’ll have you teach class for the day.”
A flood of heat seared Adam’s body and scorched his ears. He would answer any question MacEnroy asked, but he couldn’t stand in front of the class and talk. His voice would squawk like a chicken. He couldn’t go up there.
“Come along.” MacEnroy clasped the back of Adam’s neck and herded him toward the door.
Adam wasn’t going inside. The instant MacEnroy released him, he would sprint away. He would tell Faith that MacEnroy kicked him out of school for being disobedient. Faith would be angry, but she would let him off the hook until the new school year began. Sheriff Grayson wouldn’t be pleased, but facing the sheriff was better than facing a room full of children who were only going to laugh at him.
MacEnroy jerked Adam to attention outside the schoolhouse. “You find yourself a seat inside and keep that wise mouth of yours shut while I’m instructing class. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
With that MacEnroy yanked open the door and shoved Adam inside ahead of him. While the teacher strode to the front of the classroom, Adam eased into the one and only empty chair in the room—right next to Melissa Archer.
“You’ll be sorry,” she hissed.
He already was. This would be his first and last day in this wretched place. He wasn’t coming back. He could learn more from books anyhow.
He sank low in his chair and looked for Rebecca, wanting to signal that he wasn’t coming back after their lunch break. He sighted her two desks away, smiling at him like he was the most handsome and daring man on earth.
Chapter 13
Saturday evening Faith stood outside the bathhouse door, listening to Claire Grayson and her friend Anna Levens laugh uproariously as they frolicked in the tub with three other women. The three lived with Anna in a home Claire and Boyd Grayson provided to women who were desperate for a refuge from heavy-handed husbands. Claire said she and Anna had opened the home five years ago after Anna’s husband Larry Levens was sent to prison for murdering two men.
Faith didn’t have to ask if Anna had been one of those beaten women. If the scar on Anna’s shoulder wasn’t proof enough, the wariness in her eyes was. The woman was petite and pretty, and so sweet Faith couldn’t imagine any man wanting to hurt her. But apparently her husband had beaten her unmercifully and even threatened to kill her. Thank God the beast was in prison.
The bruises on the other women who were staying with Anna broke Faith’s heart. The bath had brought the ladies so much pleasure, Faith had invited them back for a second complimentary treatment.
The Grayson women had done such an amazing job of promoting her business, the female residents of Fredonia swarmed into Faith’s greenhouse. Some came to buy herbs and salves and teas, but she suspected most of them came to get a look at Iris. The more adventurous ladies accepted their complimentary bath and massage. Afterward, they raved with such enthusiasm, the customers poured through the door faster than Faith could service them. She and her aunts worked from morning to night, and still they had to ask several ladies to return the following week.
Dr. Milton and the apothecary owner, Wayne Archer, had stopped in to caution Faith about giving the ladies harmful treatments and selling toxic herbs. Faith had listened politely, but Aster and Dahlia marched the snobbish men right out the door in front of several customers. Faith had feared the women would follow the men out, but they’d only laughed and applauded.
Several other men had stopped in during the week, pretending to want herbs or flowers, but they never left without stating their desire to court Faith or one of her aunts. Dahlia refused all offers without considering them. Iris flirted and left the men guessing. Aster and Tansy said they were too busy now and asked the men to stop back in a month or so. It was a relief for Faith to tell the men that she had accepted the sheriff’s suit. He hadn’t returned from his trip to Mayville, but Faith thought about him constantly, about his shoulder, about his kisses. Every minute she wasn’t working or thinking about work, she would think about Duke and wonder if he would kiss her again.
She carved out time to take her meals with Cora and Adam, and to read with them at bedtime. But each night she had fallen asleep beside them, exhausted, with a few pennies added to her money jar.
Tonight, though, she was so fatigued she could barely manage to massage oil into the ladies’ backs. When she finished, Claire and her friends gave her a warm hug before leaving the greenhouse.
“Go on in,” Aster said. “We’ll clean up and be in shortly”
“Bless you, Aster.” Faith pumped the faucet handle, washed her hands, and dried them on her apron as she hurried to the house where Cora and Adam lay on their pallets reading.
Thank goodness tomorrow was Sunday. Fully dressed, she flopped down between them and gave them both a hug. “I love you two. Thank you for being so helpful this week.”
Cora hooked her arms around Faith’s neck and plastered her cheek with an exuberant kiss. “I miss you, Mama.”
She kissed Cora, then leaned to kiss Adam.
Braced on his elbows, Adam ducked his head and focused on his book.
His avoidance made Faith’s heart bleed. She hadn’t even had time to ask him about his first week in school. She tweaked his side. “Does that look mean you’re getting too old for my hugs and kisses?”
He lifted his head, leaned over and pecked her on the cheek. “You look awful.”
“Thank you,” she said with laugh. “I feel awful.”
“Want me to tell you a story tonight?” Cora offered.
“That would be wonderful, sweetheart.” Faith’s eyes were so blurred from fatigue, she doubted she’d be able to read a single sentence.
Cora sat up and studiously placed the book they were reading in her lap, as if she were going to read it. Faith stretched out on her stomach between them and warned herself not to fall asleep.
“Once upon a time there was a girl who was so small she could dance on the top of a thimble,” Cora said, imitating Dahlia’s best storytelling voice.
Faith grinned into the pillow.
“The little girl was beautiful, and she was the best dancer in the whole world. But she was very, very sad,” Cora went on, lowering her voice to sound ominous.
“Why was she sad?” Faith asked.
“Because she didn’t have a daddy.”
A spear of pain shot through Faith’s chest. Cora had started asking why she didn’t have a daddy, but Faith had been skirting the question because she honestly didn’t know how to answer. She knew how painful it was to wonder about a father who was absent, but Cora would never understand the truth. And Faith would never tell her.
“One day,” Cora continued, “the little girl caught a beautiful pony, and when he let her ride on his back, she went looking for her daddy . . .”
Two strong hands settled on Faith’s shoulders, startling her from her somber thoughts. She peeked up to see Adam sitting beside her, his long fingers gently kneading her tense shoulder muscles. For all his acting tough and disinterested in her affection, Adam was a tender, thoughtful boy who needed her love as desperately as she needed his. The two of them had spent years together living with fear and loneliness, having only each other for company during those long evenings and miserable nights while their mother worked the brothel. They’d cried together and laughed together. And Faith had mothered Adam from the day of his birth. He was her brother by blood, her son by possession, and she loved him as fiercely as she loved Cora.
“Adam, that is absolute heaven.”
Cora paused. “Do you want me to rub your back too?” she asked, her desire to please shining in her eyes.
“No, sweetheart. I want to hear about the tiny girl and her pony. What did she name her pony?”
“Dandelion.”
“That’s not a pony name,” Adam said.
“It is too,” Cora insisted. “Her pony has white fluffy spots on him that l
ook like dandelion puffs.”
Adam’s laugh cracked into a falsetto, which set them all off, and Faith basked in their shared moment of happiness. They’d been so heartbroken over her mother’s death, and so panic- stricken afterward in their rush to escape Judge Stone, they hadn’t shared a family moment like this in nearly two months. Cora hadn’t noticed the upheaval so much, but Adam bore the weight of needing to be a man while still a boy. Faith lifted her hand and stroked her fingers over Adam’s bony knuckles. He paused, a question in his eyes. Her own misted, and she gave him a smile that said she loved him. The needy boy in him returned her smile.
Adam’s tender consideration and Cora’s sweet little voice warmed Faith, and she closed her eyes to savor the moment.
o0o
She woke at dawn the next morning, still dressed and aching in every muscle. Cora and Adam were burrowed in their blankets, but they had laid a blanket over her. They took care of her that way. But they shouldn’t have to. Knowing she’d fallen asleep on them made her eyes flood with tears.
The cavernous building was silent as Faith pulled the blanket off and laid it over Adam, who’d sacrificed it to keep her warm. Her aunts slept a few feet away on their own pallets, looking as exhausted as she felt.
Faith quietly left the pallet she shared with Cora, then gathered clean clothes and slipped out to the greenhouse. In the bathhouse she lit a lantern, lowered the wick, and shed her dress and petticoats. Shivering in the predawn coolness, she laid a towel on the edge of the steaming tub, then lowered her body into the soothing hot water with a long sigh. How could the sheriff not like the water this warm? It felt divine to her, and it was her only comfort.
Tugging the metal stool beneath her, she leaned back and rested her head on the rolled-up towel. No matter what happened, she wasn’t budging from this tub for at least an hour.
The soft airy hiss of the gas burner beneath the tub was her only company. An occasional drop of condensation fell from the cold iron faucet into the water with a quiet blip. The light scent of lavender, chamomile, and almond oil wafted from the bath. She soaked for several minutes, then stood to lather her long, dripping hair. The feathery caress of soap bubbles trailed down her body like stroking fingertips. Goosebumps speckled her flesh, and her nipples puckered in the steamy air. She shivered with a soul-deep loneliness she’d felt since childhood.
From the age of five, she’d spent most of her time alone with her books in a one-room shack behind the brothel. As she grew older, she’d played in the greenhouse surrounded by plants that became her only friends.
At two o’clock each day, Faith and her mother and aunts had shared their main meal in the brothel kitchen—the only room Faith was allowed to enter in the big house until she started giving massages. Faith loved that hour of laughter and attention, and the two hours afterward when she and her mother would go to the greenhouse to tend her mother’s roses.
But when the clock struck five, Faith’s happiness changed to dread. Her mother would fix a sandwich for Faith’s supper and see her safely back inside their shack. Before going to work, she would remind Faith about the bell hanging from a string in the corner of the room that she was to ring only in an emergency. The rope ran between the brothel and the shack with a bell at each end, and her mother used it to check on her. She would tug her end, making the bell at Faith’s end ring. Faith would tug back to ring that she was fine. But if Faith rang the bell without her mother’s prompting, it meant she had an emergency.
She was five years old the first time her mother left her alone during the evening. Faith rang the bell because she was lonely and frightened. Her mother raced into the shack with two of her aunts, fearing that one of the male customers had strayed out back. When her mother realized there was no emergency, she grew furious and slapped Faith. Then she broke into tears and sank to her knees, rocking her child in her arms and promising they would have a real home someday with a big porch and lots of roses.
It was winter, and her mother tucked a blanket around Faith, then stoked the stove before going back to the brothel to continue an endless night of work. Faith huddled alone on her pallet in the silent room, nibbling her sandwich, her hand clinging to the bellrope, desperate to pull it, knowing she didn’t dare.
She’d been twelve when Adam was born, and learned how to care for an infant. Her mother made frequent visits to the shack to feed him, but seemed unable to give him anything more than her mother’s milk. So Faith had been the one to give Adam the love he needed. The two of them clung to each other, spending years alone in that shack, day after day, night after night, waiting like prisoners for their mother to come and dole our their daily sustenance.
Her mother had wanted to protect them from the ugliness of her life, but in doing so she’d kept herself away from them, depriving them of her mothering and love, and imprisoning them in a world they didn’t understand.
And that’s why Faith hated her. She could bear her mother’s neglect. But Adam and Faith had needed the woman in their lives more than three hours a day. Was it too much to ask for a mother’s love? For a little of her attention and time?
That would have been enough for Faith. That’s all she herself had wanted from her mother.
And that’s what Adam and Cora needed from Faith. But her debts and expenses were pulling her away, stealing her time and forcing her to make choices as destructive as her mother’s had been. And God help her, Faith couldn’t bear another day of seeing Adam and Cora’s desperate faces as she dragged herself inside and fell asleep without tucking them in.
She needed help.
She needed love.
She buried her face in her hands, lost and alone as she’d been all her life. Her anguished sob echoed off the stones, and she couldn’t hold back the deep sorrow wrenching her heart. She wept for her mother and her aunts who’d been stripped of their innocence and driven into a soulless life of prostitution; and for Adam and Cora, two beautiful children who were deserving of a better life than they’d been given; and for herself, because she was paying for the sins of her mother. And because she was repeating them.
o0o
Duke rushed to the bathhouse with his revolver gripped in his hand and his heart pounding. Faith stood in the huge tub, her face in her hands, her glistening body convulsing with hard, wrenching sobs.
He looked around the small stone room and saw nothing wrong, no fire, no man lurking in the shadows, just Faith alone and weeping. The greenhouse was empty and silent. The only sound was her broken sobs, which he’d heard on his approach.
“Faith?”
She sucked in a breath and whirled toward the door, her face soaked with tears and misery, her breasts peeping through her wet hair.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She blinked in shock. A second later, she shrieked and sank into the water. “What are you doing here?”
He holstered his gun. “I thought you had a fire in here.”
“What?”
“I just got into town and saw a glow through one of your windows while I was heading home. I thought the gas burner had started a fire, or that somebody was snooping around in your greenhouse.”
“It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“Which is exactly why I was suspicious.”
She snatched the towel off the ledge and dragged it beneath the water. “It’s just me and my lantern, so you can leave.”
He gave her a consoling look. “Nobody with a heart could witness those wracking sobs and walk away.”
She turned her back and lowered her chin. “I’m fine,” she said, but her voice came out in a shaky whisper.
“You’re not fine.”
She swiped her fingers beneath her eyes, telling him she was struggling to hide more tears. The lantern cast a golden glow across her wet skin and the rippling water that blessedly hid her body from him. After glimpsing her breasts, he was relieved he couldn’t see through the murky bath. She needed comfort now, not a sexual proposition. A
nd that’s what he’d want to give her if she unveiled the rest of her beautiful body. He wasn’t a cad, just a man who was fiercely attracted to her.
“Wrap that towel around you so I can come over there.” Her tears wrung his heart, but he wasn’t going near that tub until she was covered, because he’d had her on his mind all the livelong, boring, tedious week he’d been away, and to stumble upon this feast for his eyes was torture. Just knowing she was unclothed, her skin slick with water, drove him crazy.
“Go away.”
“And leave you alone in the dark, crying your heart out? I can’t, Faith. I’m coming over there, so you’d better cover yourself.”
He took one step, but she lifted the sopping towel and threw it at him. It hit him in the chest with a wet splat and landed on his boots. “That badge on your chest doesn’t give you the right to trespass on my privacy, Sheriff. Now get out.”
Her accusation stunned him. “Do you think I’d use my badge to take advantage of you?” he asked, feeling the warm water soak through his shirt.
“Men who have a badge or political title can get away with that. The law doesn’t apply to them.”
“Do you honestly believe that?”
“I don’t believe it, Sheriff. I know it.”
He stared at her, insulted to the core. But she wasn’t being vicious; she was sincere. She really believed all lawmen were cut of the same cloth, that they used their power to manipulate people. Some did, he knew, and that sickened him. But he would turn his revolver on himself before abusing his position.
She crouched in the tub with her arms crossed over her chest and her shoulders and hands peeping above the water. Her hair floated around her in long black strands. But her puffy eyes were dark pools of despair as she returned his stare. Suddenly he realized how vulnerable and scared she must feel, and that somebody from the law had put that fear in her eyes.
“For whatever happened to make you believe I’d manipulate or harm you, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I disturbed you, but I’m truly relieved to know you’re safe.” He backed out of the room and pulled the door closed to keep her safe from any unsuspecting passerby who might jump to his same stupid conclusion that the building was on fire.
Wendy Lindstrom Page 12
