Wanting to put as much distance between him and herself as possible, Lilly took a step back and discovered that her back was against the wall. A quick glance told her that Erin had edged from behind her to the narrow space between the bed and the wall. Neither of them was in a good place.
This wouldn’t do. Hoping to get him away from Erin and herself out of an impossible spot, Lilly once again surged to the right. He followed. He was strong, but she was fast. The next few moments were spent doing an awkward, deadly dance of pursuit and evasion. The dangerous waltz continued for several seconds. Lilly was at the foot of the bed and closer to the door.
Don’t wear yourself out. Make him do the work. Cade’s voice again.
She planted her feet and leveled the gun at him. “We’re leaving, Elijah,” she said. “And you’re going to let us, or I’m going to shoot you.”
“I don’t think so.” And with that, he once again sprang at her. His arm swung to the side, knocking the gun from her hand. It went sailing through the air and landed on the floor near the window. Then he backhanded her with his other hand.
Pain exploded in her head, and she wondered if he’d broken her jaw. Timothy’s blow had been nothing compared to this one. She staggered, and her shoulder hit the armoire, sending another wave of pain radiating throughout her body.
Once again, they stood staring at each other, both breathing hard. Lilly wanted to clutch at her aching head and rub at her throbbing shoulder, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing that she was in any pain.
Once again, she tried to recall everything Cade had told her during their practice sessions. She knew that if Wilkins ever got hold of her, she would suffer the same fate as Erin. That could not happen. Was not going to happen.
She glanced at the bed and saw that Erin had picked up the derringer and was looking at it with tortured eyes. Dear, sweet heaven! Was she thinking of using it on herself?
“Erin, no!” Lilly screamed, hoping that the sound of her voice would bring the broken woman out of her stupor.
Something in her voice must have alerted Wilkins that he had another threat. He glanced toward the bed and, seeing that Erin had the gun, turned and started toward her.
It was the break in concentration Lilly needed. She forgot everything Cade had told her about trying to escape and spent no time looking for a weapon. Instead, screaming out her fury at the top of her lungs, she shoved away from the armoire and launched herself at Wilkins, hitting him in the back with the full force of her slender body. Her momentum sent him toppling over the footrail and onto the bed.
While he cursed and fought to free himself from the tangle of covers, Lilly ran around the end of the bed and grabbed both of his feet. She fixed her scuffed boots on the wood floors and yanked, sheer determination and adrenaline giving her the strength to pull him off the edge. His head made a satisfying thud as it hit the floor. She landed on her rear.
Roaring with rage, he scrambled to his feet. With murder in his eyes, he swung a booted foot toward her. The sound of a gunshot mingled with her scream....
* * *
Cade was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, gauging the best way to gain entrance without giving away his presence. As Lilly had, he was making a visual survey of the house. He was about to peek into the window of the first room when he heard Lilly’s scream and the pop of a small caliber gun coming from the back of the house.
All plans for a stealthy entrance fled. He leaped onto the porch and burst through the rickety door with ease, heading toward the place where the cry had originated.
The scene in the room made his blood run cold. Erin was on her knees in the middle of the bed, a derringer in her hands, looking at it as if she wasn’t certain what she’d just done. He needed to let her know he was there. The last thing they needed was for her to shoot him as well.
“Erin?” he said sharply. “Are you all right?”
She looked up, a dazed expression in her eyes. “Fine,” she said. She looked anything but.
Lilly was lying on the floor, Wilkins’s prone body on top of her. Cade’s vision blurred. For a second or two, he was incapable of thought. If someone had asked, he would have sworn that his heart had stopped beating, yet blood thundered in his ears. A panicked refrain ran through his mind. Not again. Not again. Not again.
Then he saw Lilly’s fingers twitch, and his heart resumed its beating. Wilkins groaned. How badly they were hurt remained to be seen. Able to reason, Cade put his gun back into his pocket. Then he went to pull Wilkins off Lilly. From the looks of his shirt, Erin’s shot had hit him in the shoulder. As Cade dragged him off Lilly, Wilkins muttered a curse. He’d live.
With the dead weight off her, Lilly drew in a shuddering breath, and her eyes fluttered open. The confusion he saw there turned to anger. Or at least irritation.
“What took you so long, McShane?”
The memory of her saying the same thing to him when he’d found her in the Purcell attic brought a wry smile to his lips. “Ever the grateful one,” he said, bending over and drawing her to her feet.
She grabbed him at his waist, and he kept one arm around her as he guided her to the bed. Then he took Lilly’s little pearl-handled derringer from his sister, and the two women fell into each other’s arms. Erin was sobbing uncontrollably.
Wilkins pushed himself to his knees. Cade grabbed him by his upper arm—on the side Erin’s bullet had hit—and hauled him to his feet while the captive muttered dire threats beneath his breath.
“You’re not going to do anything where you’re going,” Cade told him, and without another word, he drew back and gave the mad man a satisfying punch in the face. Wilkins crumpled onto the floor.
Seeing that Lilly and his sister were looking at him in question, he shrugged and said, “I didn’t have any handcuffs.” He hefted the fallen man over his shoulder. “I have a buggy outside,” he told the women. “Lilly, can you help Erin so I can make sure this piece of rubbish doesn’t decide to make a run for it?”
“I’ve got her.” Supporting each other, Lilly and Erin preceded him down the short hall while Cade followed, giving the unconscious man hanging over his shoulder no more thought than he would a bag of grain.
CHAPTER 24
Cade stopped by the doctor’s office and waited with Wilkins while the female physician—a rarity—put Erin in a small room and gave her a thorough examination.
Twenty minutes later, the stocky, no-nonsense woman returned and announced that his sister was battered and bruised and had been poorly used, but that she would be all right in a matter of days. Physically. Emotionally, what she’d been through would likely haunt her for years to come.
Torn between relief and sadness, Cade asked if the doctor would look at Wilkins’s wound. She agreed, and they followed her to another small area where his blood-soaked shirt was cut away. When Cade informed the doctor that the wounded man was the one who’d assaulted Erin, the woman gave Wilkins a hard look and began to probe the bullet hole without benefit of any sort of spirits to help dull the pain. His moans, curses, and threats had no visible effect on her.
By the time she pulled a small fragment of fabric from the wound, Wilkins was sweating, and Cade was smiling.
“Tell me, Doctor Potter,” he asked, while she bandaged the injury, “is the young girl who was kidnapped and attacked still here?”
Potter glanced up from her work. “She’s made great improvement over the past few hours, but yes, she’s still here. Why do you ask?”
“Though it’s only a guess on my part, there’s enough similarity between her case and my sister’s that I feel this man is responsible for her abduction, too. If it’s all right with you, I’d like for her to have a look at him.”
“Be my guest.”
The confrontation between Wilkins and the adolescent was excruciating for Cade to observe; he couldn’t imagine what young Carrie must be experiencing as she faced her captor with tears and shame bordering on hysteria. Mome
nts later, carrying a signed statement confirming that Wilkins was indeed the culprit who had taken her, Cade informed Lilly he would be back for her and Erin as soon as he turned over their prisoner to the authorities.
Wilkins sat silent and sullen on the way to the jail. There was no ignoring the pointing and staring that accompanied them. Seeing the familiar scoundrel sitting in a rented rig, shirtless, handcuffed, and bandaged must be quite a sight. Cade could almost hear the whispers following them. And there was no doubt that the onlookers who darted inside one business or the other were telling what they’d seen and speculating about what was going on.
When he pulled Wilkins off the buggy and shoved him through the door of the jail, he found the sheriff ’s deputies playing some sort of card game in one of the cells and the sheriff, an aging man with a heavy white mustache, cocked back in his chair, reading one of the lurid tales from an old copy of National Police Gazette. The sheriff straightened and laid the magazine aside when the two men entered the small room.
“Where’s Marshal Davies?” Cade asked.
“I don’t have any idea. Someone sent a telegram saying we should come and pick up a prisoner and not to let Davies have custody of him. We came over on the train.”
Good for Charlie. He’d been thinking.
“This is the prisoner, Elijah Wilkins. He acquires women and children for several of the houses in the Acre, and possibly murdered Nora Nash a few weeks back.”
“That’s a lie!” Wilkins shouted, speaking for the first time since they’d left the doctor’s. “I didn’t kill that whore.”
Cade gave him a crushing look. “Guard him well,” he cautioned the sheriff. “He has a lot to answer for.”
“And just who in tarnation might you be?” the sheriff asked, rankling at being told what to do.
“Yeah!” Wilkins jeered. “Who in hell are you?”
Cade pulled his badge from his vest pocket. “Andrew Cadence McShane, Pinkerton agent. This is a Pinkerton arrest, and Davies has no authority over him.”
The sheriff examined Cade’s badge and handed it back, looking suitably impressed. Cade tipped his head toward Wilkins. “Lock him up, and I’ll be back in a bit with my partner. Wilkins kidnapped my sister and assaulted her as well, and I’d like to see how she’s doing.”
* * *
By the time Cade walked back into the medical office, the tremendous stress he’d been under began to weigh him down. He needed to hear what Erin had to say, but already he knew what had happened. The truth of her ordeal left him feeling empty and sick.
He realized that when a man forced himself on a woman it was because he was trying to exert his power. Gain the upper hand. Show her who was boss. Erin had continually turned down Wilkins’s advances, and in the end, he’d decided to show her that whatever he wanted, he would get, even if he had to take it.
When Cade entered the room, he saw Lilly in a chair next to the bed, her cheek resting on its edge, her face turned away from him. She must be as exhausted as he felt.
Erin was propped up with some pillows, sleeping. She’d been cleaned up. There was no trace of blood on her face, and her black eye stood out against the whiteness of her cheeks. Her tangled hair had been brushed, and she was wearing a clean nightgown. She slept, one hand beneath her cheek, the way she had when she was just a girl and their lives had been happy and innocent.
Innocence. He could barely recall those days, back when his da was alive and sang bawdy Irish songs when he was in his cups, while Cade and his siblings had danced the jig and his ma had scolded Padraig for being too loud, even though the smile in her eyes said she loved every minute of it. Remembering brought tears to his eyes, but he blinked hard and forced them back.
He must have made some noise, because Lilly raised her head and turned toward him.
He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t,” she told him, matching her tone to his low voice. “I was praying.”
“How is she?”
“Strong. Stronger than you know.” Lilly stood. “Let’s go outside, so we don’t wake her.”
“She’ll probably sleep for hours if the doctor gave her a dose of laudanum.”
“She didn’t. Erin wouldn’t have it.”
“Don’t go. I’m awake.”
Erin’s voice was low and weak and just a little lost. Again, Cade was reminded of their childhood when she would beg him not to leave her to go off with his friends.
“Are you sure?” Lilly asked.
Erin nodded. “Sit, Cade. I have a lot to tell you.”
Though he was keen on hearing her story, he wondered if it was too soon, if she shouldn’t rest longer before diving back into the vile memories. “Why don’t we wait until tomorrow?”
“No. I want to tell you while it’s fresh in my mind and . . . and while I have the courage.”
He started to argue further, but she held up a hand to stop him. “I want to put it behind me, and to do that I need you to hear every ugly detail.”
Uncertain if he could stand to hear it, or could bear to hear it standing, he sat, as she’d told him to do, resting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands dangling between them.
“He came to the back door. I thought it was Bonnie, so I opened it.”
She divided her attention between Cade and Lilly. Her telling was blunt. To the point. Devoid of emotion.
“When he started to push his way in, I managed to run to my room and lock the door. He kicked it in. We fought, but it didn’t take him long to win that battle, either.”
“Erin, you don’t have to do this,” Lilly said.
“Yes. I do.” She drew in a deep breath. “He tied me up with one of the cords from the drapes, tossed me over his shoulder, threw me into the back of a wagon, and covered me with a bunch of burlap sacks. They smelled horrible.”
If the tale hadn’t been so dreadful, Cade would have smiled at that. The mind was a strange thing. She didn’t mention Wilkins’s beating her and how it must have hurt. Didn’t say anything about the fear that had to have held her in its grip, or the dread that must have filled her, knowing what was ahead. Instead, she talked about stinking feed sacks.
“When we got to his place, we had another tussle. Of course, I couldn’t win, but I swear I fought my hardest.” She found Cade’s gaze once again. This time he saw the shimmer of tears in her eyes. “I couldn’t let it happen again.”
“Again?” he echoed.
She didn’t seem to hear. “It’s my body!” she said angrily. “I should be able to give it to whomever I want, but he was just too strong, Cade. You know how strong Josep was.”
“Josep?” What was she talking about? Lilly reached out and grabbed his hand. The expression in her eyes commanded him to hold his questions. To simply listen.
Instead of looking at them, Erin was now looking at the hands she was twisting in her lap. “When he’d slapped me until my ears were ringing and I couldn’t fight anymore, he threw me on the bed, and . . . he just took what he wanted. It’s so easy for a man to just take. He told me that if I told Ma, he’d tell her that I teased him and led him on. And he said that if I told you, he’d have you shanghaied.”
Understanding crashed down on Cade, shattering his holier-than-thou judgments into a million pieces. Josep—their stepfather—had taken his sister’s virginity, her innocence, and her laughter. How many years had she lived with that betrayal?
“When?” he asked.
She looked up then. “It started soon after he married Ma.”
“And she didn’t know?”
“How could she? He’d catch me when she was gone off to work or running an errand. And sometimes his friends—”
Grief, ten years too late but gut-wrenching nonetheless, made it hard to think, hard to breathe. Not just Josep, then, but others . . . Cade held out a trembling hand to silence her. “For the love of all that is holy, Erin, no more. I can’t bear to hear anymore.”
&
nbsp; “You can!” she said in a fierce, determined voice. “And you will. I’ve lived it; you can stand to hear about it secondhand!” Yet after the outburst, she said no more.
Finally, when the silence in the room had stretched to unbearable limits, he asked, “Then why go into prostitution after he died? You were free to choose whatever path you wanted. You could have married and—”
“No,” she cried. “Don’t you see that I wasn’t free, and I couldn’t marry. Josep had taken my one gift. My only dowry. What did I have to offer a prospective husband? If I told him, he’d be disgusted. If I wasn’t honest, and one of the others said something, then what?” She shook her head. “No. I’d not shame a husband that way.
“Prostitution seemed my only option. At least I could get paid for letting a man use me. At least I’d get something out of it.” She laughed, a bitter sound that seemed to come from her very soul. “And believe me, they paid.”
Cade started to speak, but she stopped him. “No! Don’t go telling me what’s right and wrong. I know all about it.”
“No,” he told her. “I wasn’t going to say anything about that. I’ve sinned enough in my life that I’m not the one to cast stones.”
“But you did.”
“I didn’t know, Erin. I didn’t know. All I knew was that my beautiful sister had forgotten how to laugh and that she’d chosen a life that would bring the family dishonor, and no one could sway ya from it. Da always said we shouldn’t do anything to bring shame to the family name. And then, when ya tried to kill yourself the same day I lost Glenna, I thought you’d taken a shortcut to hell.”
“I didn’t try to kill myself, though I had thought about it often, and never more than the day Glenna died.”
“No?” he challenged, with a hint of anger. “Then what are those scars on your wrists?”
“They’re from a very sharp knife, but I didn’t do the cutting.”
He felt Lilly’s fingers tighten around his, his only reality in this ever-worsening nightmare his sister had sucked him into.
Murder Will Speak Page 20