by Lynda J. Cox
“I never did.” Too late, Jon realized his mistake.
Without a word, Knight poured one drink, replaced the decanter, and gestured to two wing-backed chairs near the cold hearth. Jon shook his head, managing a step backwards, closer to the wide, pocket doors. “I don’t even know why I bothered you, Doc. I’ll see myself out.”
“Jon, I know.” Knight gestured again to the chairs. “Abigail knows.”
“What are you talking about?” Bravado seemed to be his only recourse.
“I know you’re not Jonathan English. The day she released you, Victoria talked to Abigail first. My wife swore that I would be the only one she told, and both my wife and Victoria made me swear to secrecy.” Knight sat in one of the chairs, settled his glass on a small table at his elbow, and then deftly eased the baby off his shoulder to cradle her in his arms. “I can imagine it hasn’t been easy being someone you aren’t.”
Iverson, the doctor, and the doc’s wife...Jon pulled shaking hands through his wet hair. “Does everyone in town know and they’re making a laughing stock of Victoria?”
“To the best of my knowledge, just Abby, Victoria, you and I are the only people who know you aren’t Jonathan English.” The baby stirred, her tiny face scrunching with a mewling cry. The doctor paused to run a slow and calming hand down his infant daughter’s back. “Unless I had been told otherwise, I wouldn’t have known one way or another. I never met the man, though from what I’ve heard, I wouldn’t have thought much of him.”
Jon sank into the chair across from Knight, a broken, unamused laugh rippling from him. “It would be safe to say I don’t think much of him.”
The infant sounded a louder, angrier cry. Knight patted her back, and the baby calmed again. “You knocked on my door for some reason.”
A shiver raced over Jon, and he wasn’t entirely certain it was just because he was soaking wet and chilled. He let his gaze skip over the ostentatious room. “Yeah, I guess I did.” He cleared his throat but still couldn’t find the words he needed. A section of the brass footrail on the bar drew his sight and held it.
“Ask for a friend.”
Jon snapped his gaze back to the doctor, his sight again drawn to the sleeping tiny baby cradled to the man’s chest. “For a friend?”
Knight nodded, a half-smile twisting up a corner of his mouth. He lifted his so-far untouched drink. “Had a lot of men during the war who wanted to know all sorts of cures for a ‘friend’ who had been someplace that friend shouldn’t have gone.”
“That isn’t my...friend’s problem.” Jon looked away from sleeping infant. “When I...when my friend was a child, he would sleepwalk.”
“Is your friend experiencing episodes of somnambulism, again?”
Jon didn’t know how to answer that. He was certain he had no idea what the doctor asked him.
“Is your friend sleepwalking?” Knight leaned into the tall back of the upholstered chair, stretching his legs and crossing them at the ankles. “It’s been a trying few days with this little one so colicky.”
“Yeah. Doc, the sleepwalking is a problem, but that I might...my friend might...hell, Doc, we both know I’m talking about myself.” Jon leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. “Could I do things while I’m sleepwalking that I wouldn’t do if I was wide awake?”
Knight’s relaxed attitude didn’t alter. He sipped his drink as if contemplating his answer. A slow shake of his head accompanied the return of the glass to the side table. “During the recent unpleasantness, I saw men who found ways to silence the voice of their conscience. It’s the only way to explain the deliberate inhumanity I observed and was subjected to. I refuse to believe those men were that cruel and vicious in every aspect of their lives. I also saw men who bolstered their courage time and again with alcohol and laudanum. Just last year, the biggest braggart in Brokken puffed himself up with so much laudanum he felt brave enough to point a gun at several of us.”
“I’m not drunk, and I’m not using laudanum. I’m sleepwalking, which is worse, because I don’t remember anything when I do.” Jon stood, unable to sit any longer. “Can I do things while I’m sleepwalking that I wouldn’t even think of doing when I’m awake?”
“What things?”
Jon walked to the teak bar. An intricately worked starburst pattern delineated the exact middle of the graceful curve, flanked by smaller yet just as detailed starbursts. Someone had spent a lot of time and he assumed money to create such a beautiful piece of work. He pressed his palms onto the bar, covering the largest rays on the right and left of the center star. “I think I—the night Lavender’s dogs were killed, I came back late from the Brokken Arrow. I fell asleep in the saddle and woke when my horse crossed the west bridge. I don’t remember how I got outside of town, it’s completely out of my way home, and my horse was muddy and wet, as if it had crossed the creek.”
“You think you did that to those little dogs?” A slight change entered the doctor’s voice, an underlying tautness.
“I don’t know.” He continued to stare into the depths of the intricate wood pattern. “If I did, I can’t remember it. And, if I did, Victoria made a huge mistake by not sending me back to the prison I escaped from, because if I did that while I was sleepwalking, I’m afraid I’ve done much worse.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Sheriff!”
Victoria stopped under the overhang in front of the Brokken General Store, waiting for Kyle Levinson the telegraph operator to join her. Would this rain ever stop? A fourth day of continual rain gave everything in town a sodden, gray, weary appearance. Even the new false façades looked tired.
Kyle shook the rain off his head like a dog emerging from a pond. Victoria leaped back. “I’m wet enough, thank you.”
Levinson had the grace to appear chagrined. “Sorry, Sheriff.” He reached into an inside pocket of his sopping wet coat and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper. “It’s still dry. It’s for Jonathan.”
“For Jonathan?” A chill she couldn’t define clawed the length of her spine. “From whom?”
“That Colbert fellow he made me send a telegram to last night.”
The chill clawing her spine became a knife thrust into her heart. Levinson extended the missive to her. “Will you give this to your husband?”
“He sent a telegram last night...when?” Victoria stared at the small piece of paper in Levinson hand as if it was a rattler coiled to strike.
“Sometime around two in the morning.”
It couldn’t have been Jon. They’d bid each other a good-night around nine or nine-thirty, and when she woke at three, unable to fall back asleep, he was sound asleep on the chesterfield, securely wrapped in a quilt as if it was a protective cocoon.
Irritation added a sharp edge to the telegrapher’s voice. “Woke me up out of a sound sleep and insisted I send that telegram immediately. I tried to tell him it would have to wait until morning because no one would be awake to get it. He threatened me. Said if I didn’t send it, he’d arrest me.”
“What did the telegram he sent say?” Victoria’s constricted throat made her force the words out.
“It was short, so it didn’t cost the sheriff’s office a lot. Just said ‘Andrews in Brokken, Texas.’ Only cost two bits. I gotta ask, though. Who’s Andrews?”
Victoria stared across the street at the jail, the building blurring in and out of focus through the sudden driving rain. “No one you have to worry about, Kyle.”
Levinson shoved the return missive toward her again. “You gonna take this or do I have to go deliver it?”
“I’ll take it.” She closed her hand around the telegram, the blade she was certain lodged in her heart twisting so fiercely she couldn’t draw in a breath. Levinson turned and trotted away, his head ducked into the rain.
Victoria slowly opened the folded page and scanned the few words. Her hand crept to her mouth, unable to stop the small whimper of “Oh, no...Jon, what have you done?” when the world reduced to the few
sparse words of Colbert’s response.
Arriving Brokken in two days.
The jail again drew her gaze. The wind and rain drove the smoke from the small chimney to a right angle, carrying it away from town. She glanced at the telegram, her fingers closing into a fist, crumpling the page as surely as her heart crumbled.
With a squaring of her shoulders, she stepped off the boardwalk. She barely felt the chill in the rain, or the cut of the wind. Her heart ached too much.
The aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the jail. Without a word, Jon stood and poured the steaming brew into her cup. Victoria halted in the center of the floor. The agony in her heart should be fatal.
“When were you going to tell me about this?” She continued to clutch the crushed telegram. “When he showed up?”
Jon extended the cup toward her, his brow knitting with confusion. “What am I supposed to tell you? When who shows up?”
“Don’t do this.” Her voice broke with her struggle to keep from screaming with the pain. “Just tell me why you did it.”
“I’m lost.” Jon placed the tin cup on the stovetop. “What am I not supposed to do? Better yet, what did I do?”
She threw the wadded paper onto the desk, and then deliberately smoothed it. “Are you telling me you didn’t wake Kyle up last night to send a telegram?”
Something shifted in his expression. He glanced over her shoulder, tilted his head down, eyes narrowing. An undercurrent of something she couldn’t quite define colored his words. “Not that I remember.”
Frustration threaded through the searing pain. “You don’t remember sending a telegram to Colbert?”
His head snapped up. “No. I didn’t send...I wouldn’t...Kyle said I woke him up to send it?”
“Said you threatened to arrest him if he didn’t send it immediately.”
Jon stumbled a step backwards, hunched into himself. He stumbled another step, falling into the chair next to her desk. “I don’t remember.”
She’d never been forced, in all her time she had served as sheriff, to shoot a man down. Jon’s reaction was what she assumed a man taking a bullet to the gut would be like. “How can you not remember that?”
“I can’t.” He shook his head, every vestige of color drained from his face. “I said good-night to you about nine. At midnight, I remember that I was by the saloon. I don’t remember how I got there, or why I was there. I remember seeing a lantern lit at the telegraph office.”
“Let me get this straight. You got up, got dressed, walked in a pouring rain, and you don’t remember it?” She slapped her palms onto the desktop. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know it doesn’t.” Jon deliberately removed the deputy’s badge from his shirt and set it down on the battered desk dominating the small jail as carefully as if it were made of the finest bone china. He stood and lifted a pair of manacles from the pegs behind him and extended them to her. “Maybe, I did send that telegram. Maybe, some part of me knows that even if I can’t remember it, I did things that should keep me behind bars...Put these on me.”
“No.” She swallowed, certain a pound of ground glass slid down her throat and lodged where her broken heart had been. “Jon, I don’t understand. You escaped. No one was seriously questioning if you were Jonathan.”
He lowered the manacles to the desk but wouldn’t look at her. After several long moments that felt more like an eternity, he drew in a long breath.
“I sleepwalk, Vic.” The pain in those words was palpable.
She wanted to demand what that had to do with anything, but she bit her tongue. Somehow, that fact meant a lot to his reasoning for as much as signing his own death warrant.
“I did it a lot as a kid. I thought I’d stopped sleepwalking.” Another deep breath, though this one wasn’t as steady as the previous. “And I don’t remember what I do when I sleepwalk. That woman up in the Indian Territories...I think I never back-tracked to that house, but I can’t be sure.”
A chill whispered the length of her spine. Surely, he couldn’t believe he had killed that homesteader’s wife. “You didn’t kill her. I know in my heart—”
“I’m not certain of that. I’m not certain of anything, any more. The night you found me pacing on the back porch, I had to have been sleepwalking. I don’t remember getting dressed, going outside, not even how I scratched the back of my hand.”
“That doesn’t mean you had anything to do—"
He cut her off again. “The night Lavender’s dogs were killed, I fell asleep in the saddle. I woke up when the horse went across the west bridge into town. I wasn’t leaving town when I woke up.” He lifted his head to finally meet her gaze. “I’m not even sure anymore if it was Jonathan who killed those soldiers in their sleep at Tullahoma.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Victoria fought the urge to shake him.
“I was covered in blood when I woke up after that grapeshot exploded.” He dropped his head to study the floor at his feet. “My bedroll and jacket were gone, but so was my horse. I couldn’t swear that I was in the same place as I was when that cannister exploded. When I finally woke up, it was after the men in my regiment had been butchered.”
“You said a cannister of grapeshot exploded, knocking you and Jonathan from your horses and leaving you unconscious. You were in the middle of a battle, for heaven’s sake. Of course, you’d be covered in blood.” Victoria gripped his lower arm. “You didn’t kill those men. You didn’t kill that homesteader’s wife. You didn’t kill either Landry or Lavender’s dogs.”
“Has anyone seen your husband since Tullahoma? For all I know, I killed him, too.” He flung off her hand. His slow steps carried him deep into the cell, his back to her. “I could have taken his identity.”
That thought had occurred to her when he first claimed Jonathan had stolen his name. Victoria closed the looming distance between them and wrapped her arms around his waist. She pressed the side of her face against his back. “Just because no one has seen him since that day, doesn’t mean he’s dead. If he’s dead and if you killed him, it was in the heat of battle.”
“How can you be so sure when I’m not?”
“You’re not a killer, Jon.” The warmth of his body against hers, under her cheek, melted the chill in her breast. “Did you do anything like you’re saying you did when you had sleepwalking episodes as a child? Did you hurt anything then?”
“No.”
“What makes you think you could be capable of any of that now?” Without waiting for him to answer, she stepped in front of him. The anguish in his gaze, darkening his eyes, tore through her. She wrapped her arms around him again and lowered her head to his chest, willing the tension and rigidity in his frame to ease. The steady beating of his heart echoed in her. “You are not a killer, Jon Andrews, no matter what that war did to you. It didn’t make you into a killer.”
He finally dropped his chin to the top of her head and eased in a long, even breath, and then enfolded her into his embrace. “What do we do now?”
Victoria let her thoughts ramble, accompanied by the sound of his heartbeat. “We have to kill you.”
“We...we do what?”
She looked up into his face. “You go away for a little while. There’s an accident, or something.”
“Or something?” His brow arched.
“You send a telegram as someone else, claiming Jonathan is dead.” Victoria continued to ramble, trying to work out the details to this crazy plan even as she spoke. “If he’s dead, Jon Andrews can reclaim his stolen life.”
Jon’s brow arched even higher. “In case you’ve forgotten, Jon Andrews is a wanted escapee with a substantial reward offered.”
“I didn’t say this was perfect.” She dropped her head to his chest again, her frayed nerves calming as soon as the sound of his heartbeat thrummed in her ear. “I’m open to other suggestions.”
VICTORIA GLANCED AROUND the general store. Her inspection of the creeks and rivers surrounding Brokken added to her
worry. Even if the rain stopped immediately, Brokken could find itself cut off from the outside world. Blueberry and Lighter Knot Creeks had already risen out of their banks, submerging the west bridge. The train tracks were less than a foot above water and the east road was, by her best guess, at least three feet under water. The rain seemed to be keeping almost everyone indoors and at home, though Lavender and Sophia were in the area of the store where Curt displayed the fabric bolts, discussing the newest fabric selections. Curt met her gaze, his brows lifting in a silent query when she didn’t move from just a few feet away from the door.
“Can I help you with something, Sheriff?” the store-owner asked.
“I need a favor.” Victoria shoved her hands into the pockets of her trousers, hoping to hide how much they trembled. So much depended on how much she could actually trust Curt. The charade she and Jon played was now a matter of life and death.
“Whatever you need, Victoria, it’s yours. What do you need from me?”
“Not here.” Victoria shook her head, noting how the other women attempted to appear disinterested. Their tilted heads, sudden silence, and feigned rapt attention to the bolt of calico Lavender held belied that indifference. “Will you meet me at the bank in half an hour?”
Curt’s brows shot up even as he slowly nodded. “The conference room at the bank?”
“Yes, that room will work.” Victoria hesitated, then asked, “Will Karl be there?” She didn’t ask about Fritz, not after the youngest Brokken had repeatedly bald-faced lied to her.
Curt’s brows rose further in surprise. “I’d assume so.” He slid a quick glance in Lavender and Sophia’s direction. “Should I find something for him to do while you and I talk?”
The Brokken brothers had trusted one another with their lives. Victoria slowly shook her head. “I’ll meet you at the bank in a little while.”
The door hadn’t even completely closed behind her when Victoria heard Lavender announce, “You have to tell us what that was all about, Curt Brokken.”
She paused just long enough to toss a practiced perusal of main street, her sight lingering for a moment on the jail. This had to work. If it didn’t, she could find herself in her own jail for aiding an escaped prisoner. Worse, Jon would lose his life. This had to work.