Gunsmoke and Gingham

by Kirsten Osbourne

  Morgan’s father had told her as much, back on the town green, but there had been so much blood. Pandemonium. Terror. Screaming women and crying children. People running in every direction.

  Elizabeth held the damaged skin together, and working quickly, stitched the edges together.

  If Mr. Hudson had stood differently, if the shooter had aimed a little to the left, Mr. Hudson would’ve been gut-shot. A death sentence.

  Dead.

  Murdered by gunfire. In the street.

  Just like her own father.

  In a fit of hysterics, Mother shrieked. “George! Why would you do such a thing?” She dropped to her knees in a pillow of skirts. “You know I can’t live with another shooting. You know I can’t…”

  Elizabeth ignored her mother, concentrated on the job that had to be done, and pulled another stitch through skin.

  “Woman—” George clenched his teeth, obviously in pain. “I hit what I aim for.”

  “I won’t have you engaging in gun-play, Mr. Hudson.” Mother’s panic rose, frantic.

  “What did you think, when I told you I’m a gunsmith? I’ve been around guns since I was a child. Did you think I’d not know how to handle one of my own make?”

  The battle continued for three more stitches, then four.

  Morgan turned from the range, his jaw set. He plunked down the pan of steaming water he’d boiled. In one glance, Elizabeth took in his anger. He held onto his temper by a thread.

  Morgan turned to go, but whirled back. To her utter surprise, he picked her up by the waist and set her aside. “I’ll do this myself.”

  He took up the needle and with precision and accuracy—why did he know how to sew?—whipped the stitches into place. Good stitches. Even stitches. “Take your mother upstairs.”

  Elizabeth washed her shaking hands in the kitchen sink. She lathered with ample soap, washing George Hudson’s blood away, but the ghost of Father’s blood remained. Deep in the creases of her palms, clotting beneath her fingernails. The shakes intensified and she knew from experience it’d be a good long while until they subsided.

  With her back to the room, she clung to the sink, Morgan’s rejection stinging.

  She stared at her hands. Forced herself to see they were clean.

  But clean wasn’t good enough, was it?

  Mother’s voice rose until she shrieked. “I lost my husband, George Washington Hudson.”

  Mother had wailed that same thing at every creditor who came to the door, at both sons, and at Elizabeth.

  She’d grown so weary of that excuse—

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Tight as they’d go. But nothing could block out the horror in Mother’s voice or the memories. Nothing buried the memories.

  The pungent odor of blood struck Elizabeth with the force of a locomotive at full speed. Salty, tangy, metallic. Her gorge rose and she fought to hold it back. She couldn’t move if she wanted to—couldn’t run for the back and the necessary—not with memories nailing her feet to the floor.

  Mother caught her breath. “The father of my children, my beloved Elijah Speare.”

  This had to stop. Mother had to stop. Elizabeth forced her feet free, turned, and caught Mother by the shoulders. “Stop. This is not Mr. Hudson’s fault.”

  Tears streamed down Elizabeth’s face, tears she couldn’t control, but she didn’t care. Morgan must have finished the stitches. He stood back two steps, his hands red with blood.

  But Mother didn’t stop. “He bled out,” Mother accused. “Into the dirt of a St. Louis street. He died because of a bullet.”

  Mr. Hudson, kind and gentle man that he was, stood, clutching an arm to his injured side. He took Mother’s hands, and waited until she met his eye. “I’m sorry, Zee, for all you lost.”

  “You don’t…understand.”

  “I know a thing or two about burying a spouse. I’ve lived through that nightmare myself.”

  “Did she die by a gun?” Mother was in high form now. Her voice raised, her tone shrill.

  Elizabeth risked a glance at Morgan. He’d folded his arms, standing behind his father as if guarding his back.

  Maybe he was doing just that.

  “No, Zee. Cancer. You remember. I wrote you. Told you she lost her life to cancer.”

  “My husband, father of my sons and daughter…” Mother screamed. “Men drew and fired—and my dearest Elijah was between them. He took a bullet,” she sobbed—a sound so ugly and so filled with pain— “and he died.”

  Until this…this shooting…Mother had been deliriously happy. Overjoyed. She’d known precisely what Mr. Hudson did for a living and found it acceptable. But Mr. Hudson didn’t know Mother. Not really. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, how volatile her moods, how frantic the swings from happy to sad to happy again. He’d seen only the good.

  Now that Mother’s vitriol made an appearance, everything would change.

  The Hudsons wouldn’t want either of them.

  Liz clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle her own screams.

  Like mother, like daughter.

  “You don’t understand me,” Mother accused, wailing with grief and anger and aggravation. “I can’t wed a man who won’t understand me.”

  “Zee, darling,” Mr. Hudson, so calm, so loving, responded to Mother with patience she didn’t deserve. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t try to understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Mother wrenched free. “Come, Elizabeth Louise. Pack our trunks. We are leaving.”

  Morgan couldn’t claim to know Zylphia Speare well, but he did know his own dad. He didn’t need words to identify the panic and pain in his father’s posture and voice at the threat by his crazy, grieving, frantic bride.

  The old bat loved her dead husband more than she loved George W. Hudson—but that couldn’t be helped. No matter. Dad loved the woman.

  “Mrs. Speare,” Morgan said, in as soothing a tone as he knew how, “Please, sit. I’ll make you a pot of tea.”

  Mama had loved tea. Found it soothing, calming, just the thing whenever she’d become overwrought. Overwrought to Tildie Hudson had been a spring day compared to Zylphia Speare’s typhoon.

  Mama and Zylphia couldn’t be more different.

  Mama had never threatened to leave.

  But leave, she had. Through no choice of her own. It didn’t take a fancy university degree to see Dad’s greatest fear was that this woman would leave him too.

  “Tea?” Zee shrieked. “I don’t want tea.”

  “What do you want?” he challenged.

  Everything Lizzy had told him about her mother’s life in the orphanage, her fears of being alone, all came back to him. He didn’t want to understand this high-strung woman, didn’t want to feel compassion for her, but he tried telling his heart that, and the stubborn organ wouldn’t agree.

  Compassion flooded, overwhelmed, nearly drowned him. This woman coped, not well, but the best she possibly could in this circumstance. Who was he to expect more?

  “I want…” she paced four long strides toward the door, then four long strides back. “I want to live in peace. I want a town without gunfights in the street. I want to be safely married without a pistol or rifle taking my husband from me.”

  Dad’s shoulders rounded as he sat in the ladder-back chair at the table. The man was too young to look so old.

  “That bullet wasn’t meant for me, Zylphia.” Dad spoke loudly enough, his pacing, frantic bride should’ve heard.

  But the woman kept muttering, kept stomping back and forth, back and forth.

  Dad glanced up, held Morgan’s gaze.

  In that moment, he saw the import of what Dad said.

  What had his old man seen?

  “What do you mean?” He headed for his father, ready to resume stitching the wound, if only to better hear what he had to say.

  Whatever nervous condition Zylphia had, her daughter seemed to have grown up without the family inheritance, so to speak. Thank God for small favors.

 
; Clear as day, he knew that to be true. But now wasn’t the time to dwell on that good fortune.

  Though tension lined her cheeks, her jaw set with determination, Liz sat her mother in a chair beside Dad.

  The older woman collapsed, nearly wilted, and threw herself into her daughter’s arms.

  If Morgan had to live with drama like that, he’d just as soon remain unmarried the rest of his life.

  Thank goodness Dad had seen Zylphia with all her frantic, nervous hysteria before he put his ring on her finger.

  Zylphia opened her mouth to continue her tirade but Liz gently placed fingertips over her mother’s mouth. “It’s time for silence. Mr. Hudson has heard everything you’ve said. Now he has something of grave importance to tell us.”

  Zylphia nodded, puckered her lips as if she’d bitten into a lemon, and waited.

  Dad turned to Liz for a moment, then to his would-be bride, and took her trembling hand in his. “Zylphia, you must listen.”

  She blinked at him, her expression vacant. Seconds passed. She finally nodded.

  “That bullet was not meant for me.” Dad’s voice quavered.

  Morgan’s fists tightened at his sides. He wanted to leap into the conversation, demand information, ensure his dad said it all. They didn’t have time to waste on a woman with the vapors.

  But Dad waited.

  He loves her. Dad, despite the love-of-a-lifetime he’d had with Ma, Dad had fallen in love with this frantic wreck of a woman. Based on today’s disaster, he’d obviously give his life for her.

  “I saw him aim, Zee,” Dad stated plainly. “You were right between him and me. I saw him raise his weapon, take careful aim at your back—”

  Liz sucked in a great draw of breath. She clamped a hand over her mouth, as if to stifle a scream.

  The flood of compassion he’d felt for Zylphia extended more than far enough to encompass Lizzy Lou. How could he resist? He pulled her to him. Her little frame shook with panic, with the news no one could bear to hear.

  She smelled of sunshine and roses. That fragrance he’d forever associate with her.

  “Who, Dad?” Who would shoot a woman—this woman—in the middle of Mountain Home, with hundreds of people around?

  “I don’t know him.” Emotion choked Dad, the most pain he’d heard in the old man’s voice since Ma died. He must’ve been frantic, watching a gunman shoot his beloved…

  Had that been his Lizzy, why—

  Morgan clutched her tighter, pressed a kiss to her hair, praying and cursing, grieving and relieved.

  The cacophony of emotions stirred up sediment he didn’t want to revisit. Old muck at the bottom of a personal riverbed that needed to stay put. Nothing—nothing—troubled him as much as the inability to act, to fix things. To correct the course life had taken.

  “I don’t understand.” Liz’s voice, muffled against his chest, prompted him to release her, but not all the way.

  “You must be mistaken, Mr. Hudson.” She shook her head, vehement denial—the most frantic he’d seen Lizzy, ever. Compared to her mother, she was as calm as a summer’s day. Composed. Contained. “Why would anyone shoot my mother?”

  “That’s what I want to know.” Morgan held Liz at arm’s length. A glimmer of something flashed through her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Secrets. Damning secrets.

  Shadows had flickered through Arrah’s gaze in those last weeks before she’d left him, sending her engagement ring and a vague note to the house. She’d pulverized his heart, shattered it against the cold, hard reality of secrets she’d kept.

  Did he have the right to demand answers of Lizzy? She wasn’t his bride, hadn’t agreed to wed him. They’d only begun.

  But if they were to have a future, he had to ask.

  “Mrs. Speare,” he turned to her neurotic mother. “Why would someone want to shoot you?”

  The old woman’s eyes rounded. She clung to Dad’s hand with the kind of fear that couldn’t be feigned. “I don’t know!”

  “We four will figure this out.” He’d had enough skirting the issue. Enough secrets. Enough.

  Dusk was beginning to fall. Before long, the fireworks show would begin—if anyone dared attend after that supposedly random shooting—and the firecrackers popping could cover a whole lot of shooting going on elsewhere in town.

  Morgan shut the curtains in the kitchen. He’d not have anyone looking through the windows into the lit room and watching them.

  Liz was quick to see the need, and within thirty seconds, the windows were covered, the panes shut against listening ears, and four chairs pulled up, around the kitchen table.

  Morgan was the last to take his seat. He held Dad’s eye, nodded in solidarity. Dad wanted this solved too. He wanted to know who’d shot at his bride as badly as Morgan did.

  “No one leaves until we put our heads together and figure out who and why someone intended to harm you, Mrs. Speare.” He fought for calm. He ignored Elizabeth’s little hand as it settled on his forearm. He flexed, reacting too strongly to her touch on his bare skin.

  “Who wanted you dead badly enough to come to Mountain Home and risk shooting in front of a potential hundred witnesses?”

  Mrs. Speare’s mouth worked, but nothing came out. She turned to her daughter. “I—I don’t know.”

  “Mother, it’s time to admit Papa may have been shot by his business partner.” She turned to Morgan, all reticence and secrets banished. “I saw him in town. Earlier today.”

  “Who?” Dad asked. “Your father’s business partner?”

  “Wardie Ferwinckle. I can think of no reason for him to be here, none at all, unless he shot and killed my father, and now he’s here after us.”

  Chapter 11

  The moment the statement left her lips, she knew she’d made a mistake. “You must recall Papa’s partner, Wardie Ferwinckle, is not the only one that could want to see us come to harm.”

  Morgan shrugged, as if to say, I don’t see who.

  “What about your former housekeeper? Miss Dimond?”

  He waved that away, almost as fast as his father did.

  “Have you forgotten the day I interrupted her at the shop? She was beside herself—”

  Apparently, Morgan hadn’t taken the unstable woman seriously—but Elizabeth had. She’d seen enough from her own mother to know how frantic and unhinged a woman could become when her heart was broken.

  “I had every reason to dismiss her!” Mother pushed out of Elizabeth’s arms and sat upright. “Elizabeth Louise, you saw the way she looked at my George Hudson, didn’t you? I couldn’t have that woman in my house, couldn’t have her continue to work for us. Why, she’d slit my throat in my sleep.”

  “Ina Dimond wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Morgan dismissed Mother, and her fears, out of hand.

  Why had Elizabeth ever entertained a future with the man? He hadn’t a brain between his ears. “You know full well your beloved Miss Dimond loves your father.”

  “She does?” Mr. Hudson perked up. A confused smile ghosted across his lips.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth insisted, but she wasn’t happy. “She does. She’s livid that you invited Mother here, that you’ve been writing to her all this time.”

  Morgan shook his head, dismissing it all—again.

  “You’re foolish to ignore the obvious,” she told him.

  “You don’t know Ina like I do.”

  How had she ever thought this man different?

  “We’re getting nowhere.” Morgan pushed back his chair and stood. “Dad, I’m going for the sheriff. We need help to bring in Mr. Ferwinckle.”

  “And Miss Dimond.” Elizabeth insisted.

  Morgan shot her a hot glare, full of impatience. “Who held the gun, Dad? Man, or woman?”

  “Man.”

  Morgan gestured grandly as if to say, See?

  “Anybody would be a fool to implicate themselves in front of an entire town. But anyone could have hired that gunman, whomever he was, and now
he’s long gone. Probably lit out as soon as the commotion was over.”

  “Maybe.”

  Morgan might’ve been quick, just now, to admit she’d had a good idea, but she wasn’t ready to forgive. Or forfeit the win. “If you’re going to have the sheriff bring in Mr. Ferwinckle you’ll need my help. You haven’t the vaguest idea what he looks like.”

  “I don’t want you on the street. You’re in danger.”

  “So are you!”

  “I’m a man!”

  Elizabeth returned his grand, See?, and tapped her foot. She counted past ten and all the way to twenty before she stood. Sometimes she really hated looking all the way up, up, up to his much greater height. “I’ll have you recall,” she spat, too angry to keep his stupid cousin’s threats a secret one moment longer. “Miss Dimond and Mr. Ferwinckle are far from the only possibilities of who’d like to see Mother and me gone.”

  “Is that so?”

  She glared at Morgan. “How quickly you forget your favorite cousin and his misbehavior in the shop a few days ago. I refused to allow him to escort me to the events today. Remember? He approached me on the street shortly before the shooting. I had an awful feeling someone was watching me while Ray spoke to me. Was he identifying me for a shooter?”

  The smug expression disappeared from Morgan’s features. “Ray?”

  “Yes, Ray. Who else? How many favorite cousins do you have?”

  He waved that away. All pretense of anger forgotten. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “When?”

  His frustration and superiority disappeared. He looked at her with compassion and gentleness…and like he’d scoop her into his arms and hold on tight.

  Ah, now she remembered why she’d considered a tomorrow—maybe a lifetime—with this man.

  “What did he say?”

  “He apologized. Sincere enough, I suppose. But something, somebody, was watching me while Ray was right there.”

  Morgan thrust both hands into his hair, grabbed great hanks of it and tugged. When he left off, his hair stood up at wild angles—so different than that morning when, crisply groomed, he’d offered her his arm to walk out together toward the day’s celebratory events.