The banshee didn’t respond to that in the slightest. In fact, she seemed to have been thrown into a tizzy as she yelped and sent a bunch of heavy objects smashing to the floor. By the time Clint made it to the front room, he found her climbing back to her feet after tripping over a footstool.
Sucking in a breath, Clint pushed as much of it as he could behind his voice. When he spoke, his words sounded almost as feral as the wild woman looked. “I put my gun away. See?” he held out his hands to show her they were empty.
The banshee looked at him and froze.
FIFTEEN
As she stood there in front of him, the banshee seemed to be contemplating whether she was going to bolt for the front door or take another run at Clint.
“My name’s Clint Adams. Are you Lylah?”
The banshee’s head pulled back and she studied him carefully.
Clint nodded, but didn’t take a step toward her and kept his hands away from his holster. “Madeline Gerard brought you here, didn’t she?”
Now that the young woman didn’t have her hackles up, she looked less like a wild animal. Her eyes widened a bit so they were no longer angry slits. Although they were very pretty and very, very green, those eyes were still frightened.
“Did Madeline tell you about me? Did she mention that Clint Adams might be coming here?”
The woman’s eyes darted from Clint’s face, to the holster strapped around his waist, and then to the Colt that hung at his side.
“Don’t worry,” Clint assured her. “If I didn’t shoot you after you kicked me in the stones, I won’t shoot you now. Why don’t I just put this away?” When he slowly inched his hand toward the Colt, Clint could see her eyes widen.
“I’m not going to shoot,” he said again. “I’ll just toss my gun away so you won’t have to worry about it. Would that make you feel better?”
She wasn’t about to answer the question. The woman was staring at the gun so intently that she didn’t even seem to hear what Clint was saying. The terror in her eyes didn’t ease up in the slightest until Clint finally took his hand away from the holster altogether.
“All right,” Clint said. “I’ll leave the gun where it is. But see for yourself,” he added as he held his hands up high. “I’m not going to shoot you.”
The woman’s brow furrowed, but her shoulders dropped as if she’d just let out a breath that she’d been holding.
Patting the air in front of him, Clint said, “That’s better. Why don’t we both just sit down and stop all this running?” Knowing there was a chair behind him, Clint reached back for it and sat down. When he bent at the waist, a fresh batch of pain shot through his groin to give him the impression that blood might be trickling down his leg. Getting hit in the family jewels wasn’t exactly a fun experience, but it wasn’t a new one either. He clenched his jaw and lowered himself onto the chair, praying the pain would let up sooner rather than later.
The woman watched him carefully. As Clint shifted to try to find a comfortable spot in his chair, she flinched with what might have been a touch of sympathy pain. Well, as sympathetic as any woman could get, considering the situation.
“See?” Clint grunted. “We can relax and have a friendly talk. I’m Clint.” When he didn’t get a response from her, he stretched out his hand.
The woman twitched and backed away.
“Go on and shake it,” Clint said as he waggled his hand a bit.
It took a few seconds, but the woman eventually approached his hand the way a curious mouse might approach a piece of bread that had fallen onto the floor. When she reached out to grab his hand, she still looked like a mouse snatching that same crumb.
There was strength in her grip, but the greeting was short-lived. “There,” Clint said. “Nice and friendly. Are you Lylah?”
The woman’s eyes brightened when she heard that name.
“That’s you, isn’t it? Hello, Lylah.”
Hearing the name again soothed her, telling Clint that the name was something more than just another word to her.
“Has anyone else been here?”
No response from Lylah, but Clint picked up on something in the way she studied him. She watched his mouth when he talked and scowled as if she were trying desperately to see something that just wasn’t coming through. Considering the tussle they’d had and how well she’d darted from room to room, Clint doubted she had any trouble seeing. That left one other obvious alternative.
“Can you hear me?” he asked. He got the same amount of nothing from her, so he lowered his voice and kept from moving his lips very much when he spoke her name again. She perked up and studied him closer, which told him that she’d heard his voice well enough to pick out her name.
“Can you understand me?” Clint asked.
She watched him carefully, but only seemed to become more confused.
“Lylah, if you can understand what I’m saying, just tell me. You can stop me at any time, but we need to go.” To test the waters a bit more, he added, “I’ve got friends coming by to burn this place down and then take our banana peels into the waterwheel caboose.”
She continued to study him with the same amount of intensity as she had before.
Clint cursed under his breath, realizing that she didn’t comprehend much of what he was saying. Leaning forward onto the edge of his chair, he clasped his hands and spoke a few simple phrases in Spanish, French, Chinese, and a few Indian dialects he’d picked up throughout the years. He wasn’t exactly fluent in all those languages, but he knew enough to say howdy to folks who were. Unfortunately, none of those languages struck a nerve with Lylah. In fact, the more languages he tossed out, the more confused she got.
“All right, we’ll stick to English. Do you know Maddy?” When he saw the vague hint of a spark in her eyes, Clint asked, “Madeline. Do you know Madeline?”
Suddenly, Lylah nodded.
Clint felt as if he’d just discovered the wheel. “All right! Now we’re getting somewhere. Where is Madeline? Where . . . is. . .Madeline?”
It didn’t take long for Clint to feel like an idiot for thinking she would comprehend his language better if he slowed it down. She didn’t understand him before and the speed of his pronunciation didn’t help matters any.
She pulled her hair away from her face and blinked quickly, as if trying to clear some dust from her eyes. Now that she wasn’t snarling at him, Lylah was actually pretty. Her skin was lightly colored, but not enough to make her lineage clear. She had the rounded nose and lips of an Indian but the narrowed eyes of an Asian. The lines of her face were smooth and elegant, leading to a slim neck and narrow shoulders. Her trim body was wrapped in a buckskin dress that hugged pert breasts and slender hips. Judging by the muscles of her legs, she probably walked more than she rode a horse. Either that, or she just happened to have very nice legs.
Having spent some time with a few tribes who didn’t speak his language, Clint locked eyes with her and used the only tools at his disposal. “Madeline . . . where?” When he said that last word, Clint raised his eyebrows, held up his hands to either side, and turned back and forth as if he was looking for something.
“Madeline?” Lylah asked.
Clint nodded, but raised his eyebrows more. “Where?”
She scowled, but not in an angry way, when she asked, “Clint Adams?”
Clint nodded earnestly. Then, he reached into his pocket and took out Maddy’s letter. Showing it to her, he said, “See?”
Lylah’s eyes widened and she smiled for the first time. It was a very pretty sight. She dug into the pocket of her dress and spoke in a steady flow of words that made as much sense to Clint as his words had made to her. He listened to her carefully, however, to see if he could narrow down what sort of language she was speaking. It sounded Asian, but not Chinese. It wasn’t Japanese, either, but that was only going off a few encounters he’d had with people from that area. Lylah’s words had an Asian lilt with a bit more of an edge to them. Before Clint could
figure out more than that, he was presented with another letter.
She handed it to him and Clint took it. No comparison was necessary for him to recognize the handwriting as Maddy’s. It read:Wait for Clint Adams. Go with him. Hide until he gets there.
The note had been hastily scribbled and, by the looks of it, had been crumpled up more than once.
“Go where?” Clint asked. When he saw the confusion start to spread on her face, Clint pointed to the second sentence of the letter and made the same exaggerated shrug he’d made earlier. “Go . . . where?”
It seemed Clint’s efforts had paid off. Lylah understood him well enough to answer with some gestures of her own. Pointing toward the door, she started to wave in a series of several shooing motions.
“Go away from here, huh? That’s not a bad idea.”
Suddenly, footsteps rattled upon the front porch and someone started knocking upon the door. Hearing that, Lylah swung her hands toward the back door and waved furiously toward that exit instead.
SIXTEEN
Clint not only agreed with Lylah’s idea, but was already seeing it through when the knocks grew stronger and louder. He pulled himself up from his chair, grunting at the fierce pain that still lingered below his belt. Choking back the discomfort, Clint headed for the kitchen and the back door that he’d used to get into the house. Lylah moved like a cat, shooting past him and streaking into the kitchen.
“Hello?” someone said from the front porch. “Is that you, Maddy?”
Clint stopped and looked toward the front door. There was a narrow window near it, but that was covered with curtains. Although he couldn’t see who was outside, Clint could tell there was more than one person there.
“I heard a commotion in there,” the person said. “Is someone hurt?”
When Clint looked into the kitchen, he saw Lylah motioning at him to hurry up and get through the back door. He held out a hand in a way that said “stop” in nearly every language.
After he’d waited there a few more seconds, Clint heard, “I know someone’s in there. Are you all right, Miss Gerard?”
Grudgingly, Clint approached the door. He knew it was either that, or wait to be discovered by the already curious neighbors when he rode away. Lylah didn’t like that much at all, and she looked ready to bolt. Before she did that, Clint turned toward her and used one of the words from Maddy’s letter.
“Hide.”
She knew that one and scampered toward the cupboard where she’d been hiding when Clint first arrived. After the kitchen was quiet again, Clint opened the front door to find the pinch-faced old woman who lived next door standing on the porch along with two young men wearing badges.
“Oh,” the old neighbor said. “It’s you, Mister Adams.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Was there a problem? I heard a crash.” Leaning to try and get a peek into the house, she added, “Several crashes, as a matter of fact.”
Clint winced painfully, which wasn’t an act. “Yeah, that was me. I tripped over a chair.”
“Is Madeline in there with you?”
“No,” he replied, figuring it was safer not to underestimate the old woman’s nosiness. “She isn’t.”
“Who is? I thought I saw a young woman slip in a while ago. Would that happen to be another one of those poor, unfortunate souls Maddy insists on collecting?”
Clint couldn’t decide which left a worse taste in his mouth: the way the old woman spoke about Madeline as if she were a friend or the way she crinkled her nose while speaking, as if the words themselves gave off a sour stench.
“There was a young woman in here, but she’s already gone,” Clint said.
The deputy standing to the old woman’s left looked to be in his late twenties, which would put him a few years ahead of the other one on the porch. He stepped forward like a bull demanding entrance into the proverbial china shop. “Where did she go?”
Clint stood in front of the deputy, making it clear he wasn’t about to move. “I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know she’s gone?”
“Because she isn’t here,” Clint said sternly.
“How about we take a look around?”
“Now why would I allow something like that?” Although he enjoyed seeing the dazed look on the deputy’s face, Clint added, “This isn’t my house. I don’t know if the proper owner would approve of having strangers in without permission.”
The old woman let out one, coughing grunt of a laugh before saying, “Plenty of strangers drift in and out of this house and she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.”
Clint responded with, “Maybe, but they have permission.”
It wasn’t exactly what he’d wanted to say to the shriveled old prune, but it did the trick. She flicked her eyebrows up and backed away. The older of the two deputies was more than happy to stand in her place.
“Are you going to let us have a look in there or do we need to get the sheriff?”
“You go ahead and get the sheriff,” Clint said. “Maybe by the time you get back, I’ll have a nice little welcome ready for him.”
“Is that a threat, mister?”
“Not hardly. I was thinking more along the lines of some water or lemonade. I’m sure there’s something to drink floating around in here.”
“So all the commotion was on account of you tripping on something?”
“Yeah. It was a chair. If you don’t believe me, perhaps this fine lady can verify my story? I’m sure she peeks into enough windows for the odds to be good that she saw me take my spill.”
The old woman sputtered and flapped a hand over the base of her throat. While the display was surely meant to show offense, the embarrassed flush in her cheeks and the darting of her eyes spoke to the validity of Clint’s claim.
“You’d best step aside and let us take a look in there,” the deputy warned.
Before he could think better of it, Clint snapped, “Or what?”
Both lawmen placed their hands upon the grips of their holstered pistols. “Or we’ll drag you outside the hard way.”
“What’s the cause for all of that?”
“Seeing as how Miss Gerard ain’t nowhere to be found but one of her troublemaking little stray dogs and a known gunman are in her house is cause enough. Miss Gerard has already brought fire and lead to this town, so it’s only fitting that we check up on whatever crawled into her home while she’s away.”
“I’m the only one here, Deputy,” Clint said.
“Then you won’t mind if we step in to make certain of that.”
Clint pulled in a deep breath, weighed his options, and finally decided upon the one to end the conversation the quickest. “No,” he said, hoping Lylah was good at staying hidden. “Come on in and have your look.”
SEVENTEEN
The deputies stepped into the house, eyeing Clint as if they expected him to make a move for his gun at any moment. When Clint merely let them pass, the two younger men started glancing about. Clint had already picked out the bigger of the threats and did his best to keep those sharper eyes away from the kitchen.
“So,” he said to the nosy old neighbor, “would you like me to have Maddy stop by to say hello when she gets back?”
“No. That won’t be necessary,” she muttered. Somehow, possibly due to some sixth sense acquired by an old woman who insisted on knowing everything that went on outside her window, the neighbor was drawn to the kitchen.
Acting as if he was clearing a path for the deputies, Clint stepped in front of her. “Weren’t Sam and Chen a hoot?”
“Who?”
“The boy and little girl that were here before,” Clint said. “Weren’t they a hoot?”
“I suppose so. They were certainly noisy.”
“Oh, so you heard them squabbling all the time?”
“Most definitely,” she groaned.
“And why didn’t you come knocking on her door with the law in tow back then?” Clint asked. “I suppose you peeked thr
ough a window, snuck over a fence, or otherwise stuck your nose where it didn’t belong to make sure it was warranted to bother the sheriff?”
That struck a little too close to home. The old woman glanced toward the lawmen and then cast her eyes toward the floor. “Perhaps I should just go,” she said. “It seems you men have enough on your plate already.”
“Yes, we sure do,” Clint said dismissively. “Bye, now.”
After the neighbor was gone, Clint made his way to where the deputies were. One of them was looking in the room where Clint had slept and the other was going toward the kitchen. Needless to say, Clint was more interested in following the latter.
“So, you’re looking for what, exactly?” Clint asked.
“Already told you,” the deputy replied.
“You didn’t tell me much, apart from some trouble that was caused some time ago. You think you’ll see a bunch of outlaws huddled in a corner or some child who doesn’t strike you as the kind you want in your perfect little town?”
“Yeah,” the younger deputy grunted. “That’s just what I’m lookin’ for.”
“Well, I don’t see the likes of that in the kitchen. Do you?”
The deputy stopped at the doorway leading into the kitchen. “No, but the back door’s open. Were you plannin’ on skinning out of here?”
“I was planning on leaving, yeah,” Clint admitted. “My horse is right outside. Then I heard the knocking at the front door and decided to answer it. Are you disappointed I wasn’t acting more like the bad element you and your sheriff so desperately want to snuff out?”
The deputy walked toward the back door and glanced outside to where Eclipse was waiting. All the while, Clint looked at the cupboards for any trace of Lylah. He couldn’t see anything right away. If he didn’t know exactly what to look for, he would have completely missed the subtle hint of movement to be seen through the crack of one of the bottom cupboards near the stove.
“What’s the matter, deputy?” Clint asked. “You waiting for a bribe?”
The young lawman took the bait perfectly. He stood toe-to-toe with Clint and said, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut your damn mouth right now! Got that?”
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