For a moment Rachel was speechless. She stared at him in surprise, then very deliberately turned and placed the supper tray on her bed. Slowly returning to the bars, she asked, "What did you say?"
"I said I'm not sure you did what they say you did," Newcomb replied. "For some reason I can't believe that a lady like you would...would kill anyone."
Rachel said nothing for almost a full minute. The long, uncanny silence made Newcomb uneasy, but he was even more uncomfortable under the penetrating gaze she fixed on him. He tried to meet her eyes squarely as she searched his face.
Finally, she said quietly, "I think I believe you, Mr. Newcomb. I'm not sure how you reached your conclusion—"
"Neither am I, dear lady," he cut in earnestly.
"—but you are correct. I didn't kill anyone. I wouldn't kill anyone, not unless it was to save someone else's life. I'm not sure I could do it even then."
"But all the evidence at the trial...?"
"Was certainly damning, but entirely circumstantial," Rachel insisted. "If you're interested, you can go over to my newspaper office and read a complete account of the trial in our back numbers." She smiled. "I've read my associate's stories in the paper. They're quite accurate."
"I'm sure they are," Newcomb muttered. His frown deepened. This visit to the jail, rather than reassuring him that he would be doing the right thing by carrying out the sentence of the court, had only increased his doubts.
He had questioned Rachel Coleman's guilt. Now he was certain that she was innocent. What could he do about it?
She must have sensed his distress, because she said sincerely, "I'm sorry if this makes it more difficult for you, Mr. Newcomb. I'm a law-abiding woman, and I will go to the gallows as the court has decreed. But I will go protesting my innocence every step of the way."
Newcomb had trouble finding his voice. After a few seconds, he said, "Of course." Then a thought occurred to him. "But perhaps something will happen. I know that your brother-in-law is in town. He struck me as a very competent man. Maybe he can discover some new evidence—"
"I'm praying for that," Rachel said. "But I don't have a great deal of hope, Mr. Newcomb." She shook her head. "I'm afraid that miracles happen only rarely."
Newcomb took a deep breath, then gestured at the tray on the bed. "You'd best eat your supper while it's still hot, Miss Coleman. You need to keep your strength up. You never know what will happen between now and Friday morning."
With that, he nodded, turned, and walked out of the cellblock. The young deputy looked suspiciously at him as he reentered the office. "What was that about?" he demanded.
"You didn't eavesdrop, did you?"
Jeremy flushed. "Of course not. A prisoner's got a right to have visitors, and I don't reckon a man like you would do anything stupid, like try to pass her a gun."
"Let me give you a little advice, son. Never think you've got a man completely figured out. Soon as you do, he'll come up with something to surprise you."
"You didn't give her a gun, did you?"
Newcomb laughed. "No, of course not. I just had some personal business to discuss with the lady."
"Do I tell Sheriff Dedrick that you came by and talked to Miss Coleman?"
"No reason not to. I don't have any secrets from the sheriff."
At least not yet, Newcomb thought. But he had made a decision, a decision with which he had had to struggle. This visit to Rachel had been the last factor in determining his course of action.
Lucas Flint wasn’t the only one who could investigate this case, Newcomb thought as he left the sheriff’s office. For the first time in his career, he was going to poke around in a criminal matter himself. If any evidence had been overlooked, K. W. Newcomb was going to find it.
Anabel Yeager felt very alone these days, even though a cook and an Irish maid lived in the house with her, and an old man, who served as handyman and carriage driver, stayed in rooms above the carriage house. Ever since her father died, things had not been right. The grief was still fresh, of course; she didn’t expect to be over that for quite a while. But the loneliness of her life surprised her.
It was strange, she thought. Her father had not spent much time at home when he was alive. The business of running the town, along with managing the holdings that he and Lance McGill had accumulated, kept Mayor Yeager away from his house most of the time. Anabel was lucky to share two or three meals a week with him.
But that time together, limited though it was, meant more to her than her father probably knew, more than she herself was aware of. She had not realized how much she would miss him until he was gone.
But there was no turning back the clock. He was gone, and she had to look to the future. Even if that future included Lance McGill.
She only wished that her feelings toward him were the same as his were for her. He had watched her grow from an awkward child into a woman, and sometime during those years, he had begun to look differently at her. No longer was he content to be Uncle Lance, her friend and occasional confidant, the man who had taught her how to ride a horse.
He wanted to marry her. And Anabel saw no other way that her own future would be secure.
But she was in love with another man, and there was no getting around that fact...
She had picked at her supper, finding the well-prepared meal tasteless as she had found everything since her father died, before retiring to the parlor to try to read. It was difficult to concentrate on the words. She kept thinking about her father's death and Rachel Coleman and that man Flint, who had come to see her the day before. She had never doubted that Rachel was guilty. She knew how much trouble the woman had given her father. Every time there had been an unfavorable editorial about the mayor in the Cheyenne Eagle, all of Anabel's protective instincts surged to the fore. Her mother had died when Anabel was barely out of her childhood, and since that time she had been taking care of her father. Naturally, he thought it was the other way around. But when he really needed her, she wasn’t there. He died on the side of the road by himself.
Now Lucas Flint was in Cheyenne to open wounds, to cast doubts so that justice might not be done. Anger flared inside Anabel as she thought about it.
A knock on the front door made her glance up impatiently from her book. She usually answered the door herself, but tonight she didn’t want to bother with it. The knock was repeated, and a moment later she heard the maid leave the kitchen and move down the hall to the front door.
Anabel listened to the murmuring voices and realized that the visitor was a man. She didn’t recognize his voice, and she tried to force her attention back to the pages of the book in front of her. Unless the visitor was someone important, Anabel was confident the maid would send him away.
"Miss Anabel, I think ye'd better be seein' this lad. He insists he has somethin' that belongs to ye."
Anabel looked up at the maid standing in the doorway of the parlor. She closed her book with an exasperated thump. "Very well," she snapped impatiently, "but this had better be important." She rose and stepped toward the doorway as the maid backed away to allow the visitor to enter the parlor.
When she saw who it was, Anabel stopped in her tracks, dumbfounded. Elijah Jones took a step into the parlor, then halted and glanced nervously around him. His arms were pressed tightly to his sides, and he kept his feet and legs together, holding himself in as if he were afraid he would break something in the room. Knowing how clumsy Elijah could be, Anabel wouldn’t have been surprised if that had happened.
In an attempt to hide her annoyance, she took a deep breath and then smiled. Snapping at Elijah was useless. It would only hurt his feelings, and he would be even less communicative than ever. "What can I do for you, Elijah?" she asked as pleasantly as she could.
He tentatively raised one arm and held out a thick sheaf of papers, bound together with string. As he thrust them toward her, he swallowed and said, "I think these are yours, Miss Anabel."
Perplexed, Anabel frowned. Like nearly everyone else in Cheyenne
, she had known Elijah for years. She knew that he sometimes got funny ideas, and when he did, it was hard to convince him of the truth. Rather than argue, it was usually easier just to agree with him.
Despite her determination to be pleasant, she found she was in no mood for him tonight. For one thing, Elijah worked at the newspaper. Rachel Coleman had taken him under her wing and tried to make a useful citizen out of him, a project that anyone in town could have told her was hopeless. Anabel disliked him because he was associated with Rachel, and also because he made her feel very strange when she passed him on the street. He was always unfailingly polite, but he was unreadable. There was no way to know what twisted thoughts crawled through his simple brain.
She stared at the papers in his hand but made no move to take them. "They're not mine," she said. "I've never seen them before. Where did you get them?"
"Found 'em at the newspaper office while I was cleanin' up," he replied. He insistently prodded the air with the papers. "They got your daddy's name on ’em."
Anabel could think of several reasons why documents bearing her father's name would have been at the paper. "Perhaps it's a draft of an editorial or a news story someone wrote," she suggested.
Elijah shook his head. "Nope. I've learned to read pretty good over to the school. Sometimes I go over at night, and the teacher helps me with my words. I think these papers was wrote by your daddy."
Anabel reached out and snatched the sheaf from Elijah's hand. "Give me those," she said. She undid the knot in the string tied around the papers and unfolded the bundle. If these were indeed her father's documents, then the newspaper had obtained them by illegal means.
Quickly she scanned the papers and saw that they were covered with writing scrawled in a familiar hand. It was her father's. Without looking further, she folded them up, wound the string around them, and began retying it.
"Thank you, Elijah," she said stiffly. "These did belong to my father. I appreciate your bringing them to me." She repressed the urge to berate him. Rachel Coleman was the one at fault, she told herself, not Elijah. Rachel had stolen these documents somehow.
"It was no problem, Miss Anabel. I don't like things clutterin' up all the nooks 'n crannies. Got to clean house ever' now 'n then."
He looked so solemn as he said it that Anabel couldn’t help but smile at him. "Well, thank you again," she said. He still stood there, not moving, until Anabel said, "You can go now."
"Oh. Thanks, Miss Anabel." He nodded and left. As she stared at the bundle in her hands, Anabel vaguely heard the maid close the door behind Elijah and scurry back to the kitchen. Frowning slightly, she carried the sheaf of papers to her father's desk, where a good-sized stack of documents was already piled on it. She decided she would add these to it. When she felt up to it, she would sit down with her father's lawyer and go through them. But that chore could wait until her mental state had improved.
She was about to lay the papers on the desk when something caught her eye. One of the sheets had become crooked while she was handling them, and part of it stuck out from the bundle so that she could read the writing on it. She noticed Lance McGill's name entered there, and after it the sum $14,328.47.
It was entirely logical that McGill's name would be on some of her father's records. After all, the two men had been partners. But if that sum represented a payment of some kind, it was a sizable one. Anabel's curiosity was stirred, and without stopping to think about it, she slipped the string off the papers and spread them out on the desk.
She had never pretended to be interested in her father's business affairs and often listened to his discussions with half an ear. Nevertheless, she had spent several years at one of the finest schools for young ladies in St. Louis. She didn’t find it difficult to decipher the jumble of numbers and make sense of the records.
As she studied the documents, her frown deepened. If she was reading them correctly, they were a record of the profits realized by McGill and her father's partnership. What made them unusual was that the numbers were much, much larger than Anabel would have expected. A great deal of money had been flowing into the partnership; most of it came from something called the Great Plains Cattle Company in Laramie, Wyoming Territory.
Anabel frequently overheard McGill and her father discuss ranch business, but she couldn’t recall ever hearing any mention of the cattle company in Laramie. Quite a few land transactions were also recorded in these papers, indicating that the partners had been steadily purchasing large tracts all over the territory. Anabel had never heard anything about this, either.
An uneasy feeling stole over her, and she chewed her lip thoughtfully. Of course, she wasn’t privy to all the details of her father's business, nor had she been that interested, but something about these records made her nervous. Evidently there had been quite a bit that she had not known—until now.
She had every right to this information, she decided abruptly, but she wanted to examine it carefully first.
Instead of adding the papers to the others, she took a key from her pocket and unlocked the center drawer of the desk. She gathered the documents, tied the string around them, and slipped the bundle into the drawer. As she turned the key to lock it, she told herself that she would keep them to herself...until she had a chance to learn the truth.
10
Try as she might, Anabel couldn’t force her attention back to the book she had been trying to read. It was difficult before, but now, after seeing the mysterious documents written by her father, concentrating on a novel became impossible.
She got up, went to the desk, and paused with her hand resting on the center drawer for a moment. Then, sighing deeply, she made up her mind. Unlocking the drawer, she took the papers out and untied the string. As she unfolded the bundle and began to study them again, a frown creased her forehead.
She examined them more thoroughly in this second reading and found that the conclusions she had reached in her first assessment were confirmed. The partnership between Lance McGill and her father had been considerably more profitable than anyone realized, and they had used those profits to expand their holdings at a dramatic rate.
If this kept up, Anabel realized, she and McGill would eventually own the whole territory. And if they were married, McGill would control her share of the business as well.
The thought sent a chill up her spine. McGill was well on his way to becoming the emperor of his own frontier kingdom. Would he have been willing to kill to have the prize all to himself?
A knock on the front door startled Anabel from her reverie and made her gasp. The rapping was soft but insistent, and Anabel recognized it with a surge of excitement. She hurriedly stuffed the papers into the desk and went to the door. It was now late enough that the maid would have retired for the night, and besides, Anabel wanted to answer this summons herself.
She swung the door open and beamed a radiant smile at her visitor. He was a tall, handsome young man in dusty range clothes who held his hat in his hand.
Grinning rather sheepishly, Jordy West said, "Good evening, Miss Anabel. Sorry I didn't have time to get myself cleaned up. I've been riding most of the day. But I wanted to see you."
Anabel moved back from the doorway to allow him to enter. "That's all right, Jordy. Please, come in. Can I get you anything?"
"No, thanks, ma'am," he replied, shaking his head. As he stepped into the foyer, the spurs on his booted feet jingled softly and musically. "I hope it's not too late to come calling."
"Of course not. Won't you come into the parlor and sit down?"
"Well, I don't rightly know. I might get that pretty sofa of yours dirty."
Anabel waved away the objection. "Don't worry about that. I want you to sit down and tell me all about what you've been doing."
As the two young people settled down on the sofa with a respectable distance between them, Anabel's eyes glistened warmly when she looked at West. That expression was mirrored in his gaze.
Several days had passed since they h
ad last seen each other, and West began relating the details of his work on McGill's Trident ranch. Of course, half of the ranch now belonged to Anabel, but West's tone as he spoke to her wasn’t that of a hired hand talking to his employer. He talked of the little things that happened during his day, sharing his feelings and the flavor of his life with her. Anabel listened with rapt attention.
West began to seem more distracted, and after several minutes he abruptly changed the subject. "I hear that Mr. McGill came to see you yesterday." His face and voice showed no emotion.
The statement surprised Anabel. "How did you know that?" she asked.
West shook his head. "It was just something I heard. Has he been bothering you, Miss Anabel?"
"Why...of course not. Mr. McGill is my business partner now, you know. It's perfectly acceptable for one partner to visit another."
"That's why he came?" West demanded. "To talk business?"
Anabel caught her breath, and her eyes flashed angrily. Jordy West had no right to come into her house
and question her this way, no matter how he felt about her—or how she felt about him.
"What goes on between Mr. McGill and me is none of your concern, Jordy," she said firmly. "Such matters are private."
"Are they?" he growled. He moved closer to her on the sofa. "Private like that day I showed you around the ranch, and we stopped up on the west ridge?"
Anabel blushed. "All right, you kissed me, and I kissed you. That doesn't give you the right to run my life."
A grin tugged at West's mouth, and the look in his eyes softened. "You enjoyed it," he said. "And you've let me come calling on you ever since. I reckon I can understand why you didn't want your father to know about it. I'm just a cowhand on a ranch that he owned half of, but I was starting to hope that you and me... Well, things are different now, and there'll come a time when you have to decide what you want out of life, Anabel."
Rattler's Law, Volume One Page 107