Her Kind of Cowboy

by Charlotte Douglas

“They were honeymooners. They’d want to be alone.” She could see his smile out of the corner of her eye.

  Caroline nodded. “In her entries, Eileen wrote often about how much she loved him. And she said that Calvin liked seclusion. He insisted he wanted to keep her all to himself.”

  “I know what he meant,” Ethan said.

  Caroline stopped and stared at him. “You do?”

  His hazel eyes, filled with promises, locked with hers, but his words contradicted the promise in his gaze. “I know how he felt about seclusion. I like it, too. It’s good for my work.”

  Feeling off balance and disoriented, which was becoming her natural state around Ethan, she followed him into the cool dimness of the barn. In the center of the packed-earth floor, a tarp covered an object more than ten feet high and about the circumference of a child’s wading pool.

  “Let me turn on the lights.” Ethan plugged in an extension to a spotlight, hung on a rafter, that centered on the tarp. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he jerked off the covering. “Well, what do you think?”

  Caroline was speechless. Tortured columns of steel and rebar reached toward the ceiling of the barn like twisted skeletal fingers. Barbed wire and scraps of polished metal as honed as sharpened blades twined among the girders, a tangible representation of devastation, destruction and pain. She could almost hear the metal screaming.

  “It’s very powerful,” she finally managed to say. “Almost overwhelming.”

  He nodded with grim satisfaction, apparently pleased by her assessment. “It isn’t supposed to be pretty.”

  The image gripped her, like a train wreck. She wanted to look away but couldn’t. “What does it represent?”

  He gazed at the sculpture, his expression a strange mixture of pride and revulsion. “It represents the past. My past.”

  Caroline wanted to ask more, to inquire what horrible experience had precipitated the work before her, but Hannah skipped into the barn.

  “I’m ready to go,” the girl said.

  Not wanting to discuss the origin of Ethan’s sculpture in front of Hannah, who’d had enough trauma in her own life, Caroline took the child’s hand.

  “Okay, sweetie, let’s go. We’ll see you at supper, Ethan.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I’ve cleaned up. And thanks for your help, ladybug.”

  * * *

  AFTER SUPPER, when Ethan had returned to his place and Hannah was asleep, Caroline couldn’t get Ethan’s disturbing artwork out of her mind. What horrible experience had caused him to create such a frightening image?

  Unable to sleep and hoping to banish thoughts of Ethan, she grabbed a stack of Eileen’s journals and curled into a corner of the parlor sofa to read. Picking up where she’d left off the night before, she skimmed through a few more months of Eileen’s newlywed bliss. She was almost ready to stop reading and go to bed when the next entry brought her wide awake.

  Tonight Calvin hit me. I’d scorched the front of his favorite shirt with the iron, and when he saw it, he slapped me so hard, I fell to the floor. He was immediately repentant and gathered me up in his arms and cried, claiming he’d had a bad day, begging me to forgive him, and swearing it would never happen again. I’ve never seen that side of him before, and it frightens me.

  Caroline skimmed ahead a few months and shuddered to read of Calvin’s continued abuse and his attempts to convince Eileen that she deserved his ill treatment. Caroline picked up a later journal and found the entry made the day Calvin left for the war.

  Other wives are crying and despondent, but I feel only relief. The man who walked out that door was not the sweet, considerate man I married. He’s become an unpredictable monster who can turn on me out of the blue, without warning. If I had family or close friends to turn to, I would have run away by now, but I have no family and Calvin hasn’t allowed me to become friends with anyone in the valley. Nor have I any money of my own. As a result, I have nowhere to go. People in the valley wouldn’t believe me if I told them how he beats me. To the neighbors, Calvin is a model citizen. I hate to admit it, but I’m grateful for this war. If he hadn’t gone away, I fear he would have killed me. Now, at least, I have time to contemplate what to do, how to escape before he returns.

  Sickened by what she’d read, Caroline put down the journal, went to the secretary, and rummaged through the notebooks on the shelf until she found the notebook dated 1945. She wanted to know how Eileen had reacted to Calvin’s death as a hero.

  She opened the 1945 journal and began to read. During the war, Eileen had started picking blackberries and making jelly. She was saving the money from her jelly sales to fund her escape from the valley. Caroline grimaced at the irony. She’d discussed escaping the valley herself many times with Eileen, never knowing of Eileen’s earlier escape plan.

  Caroline turned the pages and continued reading. Words jumped out at her from the page and took her breath away. She dropped the book and ran to the phone. With shaking fingers, she dialed Ethan’s cell phone.

  “Hello?” His voice was groggy.

  She’d wakened him. Glancing at the clock on the mantel, she realized it was almost two o’clock.

  “Caroline? Is everything okay?”

  “No…I…” Her voice shook as hard as her body. “I can’t tell you on the phone.”

  “Hold on.” His tone was firm, steady and reassuring. “I’ll be right there.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ETHAN SAT AT the kitchen table, his solid presence reassuring, his big hands curled around a mug of coffee. He hadn’t uttered a word of complaint about being yanked from his bed by a call in the wee hours of the morning. Caroline had made coffee as soon as she’d hung up from summoning him, and she was grateful for his speedy arrival. It was going to be a long night, what little was left of it.

  She filled a mug for herself and sat across from him at the table. Outside, katydids chattered in the woods and moonlight streamed across the lawn. All seemed peaceful and serene, unlike the horrible scenario she’d uncovered in Eileen’s journals.

  “I can’t believe it.” For one terrible instant, she feared she was going to cry and be unable to continue, but a gulp of scalding coffee doused the tears and steadied her.

  “You’d better start at the beginning,” Ethan said with appealing gentleness, “and tell me what’s wrong. Is it Hannah? Your mother?”

  She shook her head. “Mama’s fine, and Hannah’s out like a light after a day of berry picking and painting. It’s Eileen.”

  His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Eileen? You haven’t been seeing ghosts?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” What she’d read would haunt her the rest of her days. “After you left tonight, I returned to reading Eileen’s journals.”

  “More wedded bliss?” His expression turned dubious. “That can’t be what has you so upset.”

  She couldn’t beat around the bush. She had to tackle the horrible truth head on. “Eileen wrote more about how happy she was. Then things turned ugly fast.”

  “Ugly?”

  “Calvin was an abuser. He began by hitting Eileen occasionally, then immediately begging her forgiveness. But the abuse worsened and became more frequent. Eileen was a beautiful woman, and Calvin was insanely jealous. He kept her a prisoner at Blackberry Farm. The only time she went to town, to church or to shop, he always accompanied her, and usually beat her when they returned, accusing her of making eyes at the men they encountered.”

 
Ethan’s face turned dark, like a thunderstorm about to break. “He sounds like a monster.”

  Caroline clasped her mug to warm the ice from her fingers. “It gets even worse.”

  Ethan reached across the table and took her hand. His flesh was warm and comforting, and she held on tight. A lump formed in her throat, making speech difficult.

  “You don’t have to tell me if it’s too upsetting,” he said. “I can read the journals myself, if you’d rather.”

  She shook her head. “Telling is quicker, and I need your help in deciding what to do.”

  “Okay.” He gave her fingers a solacing squeeze. “I’m listening.”

  She sipped coffee and swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “When Calvin’s abuse escalated, poor Eileen was trapped. She had no job skills, no money of her own, no family to turn to, and her husband had kept her isolated from the people in the valley, so she didn’t even have a close friend to confide in. I’m guessing that writing in her journals was the only thing that kept her sane.”

  “Good thing Calvin didn’t find them,” Ethan said.

  Caroline paled at the thought of what might have happened if he had.

  “So she just gritted her teeth and took what he dished out?” The disgust in Ethan’s voice reflected the frustration Caroline had felt ever since reading of Eileen’s plight.

  “She hung on until Calvin left for the war. Then she hoarded sugar rations and started making jelly. For the four years he was gone, she squirreled away her jelly money, saving it for her escape. She planned to flee Blackberry Farm before he returned.”

  “It’s a good thing he never did,” Ethan said with feeling.

  “He did. He did come home.”

  Ethan scowled, his face scrunched in puzzlement. “Didn’t you tell me earlier that he was killed in action and buried overseas?”

  “That’s what Eileen told everyone.” Caroline took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But she lied.”

  “What? Calvin didn’t die?”

  “He died, all right. Just not overseas.”

  “What happened?”

  Caroline shivered, as if vibrations of the horror of the past still reverberated in the room. “According to her journal, Eileen received a telegram that Calvin had been wounded in action. Shortly afterward, the Japanese surrendered, and Eileen knew that as soon as Calvin had recovered, he’d return to Blackberry Farm. She began packing to leave—but she was too late. The night before she planned to disappear, Calvin returned. He hadn’t let her know because he wanted to surprise her.”

  Ethan grimaced. “Some surprise.”

  Caroline nodded. “Actually, he told her he had wanted to appear unannounced so he could check up on her. His letters throughout the war had been filled with dire warnings of what would happen to her if she even so much as looked at another man.”

  “She didn’t, did she?”

  “No, but unfortunately, Calvin observed Joe Mauney leaving Blackberry Farm as he arrived—”

  “—and jumped to the wrong conclusion?”

  “Joe had been here to check on Eileen’s sick cow. When Calvin came in and accused her of having an affair with Joe, she tried to explain, but her attempts only made him hit her harder. She was afraid for her life.”

  “So much for being a war hero,” Ethan growled between clenched teeth.

  “Unable to see out of one eye and with her shoulder dislocated by Calvin’s attack, Eileen knew she was going to die. He told her he wasn’t afraid of killing, that it was all he’d done for the past few years. He sat at this very table and demanded that she fix him a meal first. He promised he’d make her pay for her infidelity afterward.”

  Still clutching her hand, Ethan said, “The chat room where I met Eileen was for people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Eileen never told us about the trauma in her life. Now I understand.”

  Caroline wanted to ask what trauma Ethan had suffered, but she needed to finish Eileen’s story first. “It gets worse.”

  “Did she run away?”

  “She couldn’t. Calvin wouldn’t let her out of his sight. Knowing that she wouldn’t live through the night, Eileen grabbed a heavy iron skillet under the pretense of cooking supper. When Calvin sat at the table, with her one good arm, she swung the skillet with all her strength and hit him in the back of the head, crushing his skull. He died instantly.”

  Comprehension registered on Ethan’s face. “Calvin Bickerstaff is the unidentified body I found at Orchard Cottage.”

  Caroline nodded. “Eileen knew she couldn’t call the police. No one in the valley had known of Calvin’s abuse, and she feared no one would believe that she’d acted in self-defense. In addition, Calvin had already been written up in the local paper as a war hero. The odds of a jury letting Eileen off for killing him weren’t good.”

  “But her shoulder was dislocated,” Ethan said. “How did she get such a big man out of here and up to the cottage?”

  “Desperation gave her strength. She reset her own shoulder—”

  Ethan winced, apparently familiar with that painful procedure.

  “And once she’d recovered from the beating Calvin had given her, she dragged the body out to her car and drove him to the cottage, which had stood empty since the beginning of the war. She dug a shallow grave beside the barn. That was all she could manage in her weakened state, according to her journal.”

  Ethan nodded. “That red clay is hard as rock.”

  “To make certain the body wasn’t uncovered by wild animals, she moved an existing compost pile from the back of the barn one shovelful at a time to anchor the grave. Several days later, she called the local newspaper and told them the military had advised her that Calvin had died of his wounds and been buried in Hawaii.”

  “And nobody raised questions?”

  “Not a one. Like Eileen, Calvin had no family and no friends. With so many men dying, his passing was just another in a long list of war fatalities.”

  Ethan shook his head in amazement. “And she kept her secret for all those years.”

  “It would have gone to her grave with her, if not for her journals.”

  Ethan still held her hand, his fingers interlaced with hers. He gave her a gentle squeeze, and his eyes, deep brown flecked with green, filled with understanding, as if he had guessed Caroline’s dilemma. “So, will you tell Lucas about Calvin?”

  “To tell would betray Eileen’s memory. I don’t want folks in the valley thinking of her as a murderer. She was a good, kind woman who never hurt a soul and helped a lot of people.”

  Ethan appeared thoughtful. “It isn’t as if Calvin has family somewhere wondering what happened to him.”

  “But I’d have to lie to the police.” Caroline shuddered. “My mama raised me to tell the truth and respect the law. I know I should keep Eileen’s secret, but not telling doesn’t feel right, either.”

  Ethan stood, rounded the table and pulled her to her feet. Encircling her with his arms, he gazed into her eyes. “That’s just one of reasons I love you.”

  His admission took her breath away. He’d kissed her, but he’d never said he loved her.

  “What?” she stammered.

  “Calvin Bickerstaff didn’t know what love meant,” Ethan said. “He should have cherished Eileen, kept her safe, made her happy.” His expression and tone softened. “That’s what I want to do for you, Caroline, if you’ll let me.”

  Part of her wanted nothing more than
to melt into his arms and give in to his promises. But her practical side held back, reminding her how little she knew of Ethan and his tortured past. He must have read the conflict in her expression.

  “You don’t have to decide now,” he said. “We have a year, and I’m a very patient man.”

  Her thoughts spun in confusion. “I…don’t know what to say.”

  Hope gleamed in his eyes. “Don’t say anything. We have plenty of time.”

  And with that, Ethan leaned down and kissed her until all thoughts of tortured pasts had fled from her mind, leaving only love.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME in three days, Caroline felt like banging her head against the wall. She’d promised herself not to get involved and yet she couldn’t stop thinking of Ethan’s declaration of love. She tried to rationalize that learning of Eileen’s horrible experience had knocked her off-kilter emotionally, which was why she’d let him kiss her. But she knew that excuse was a lie. She’d wanted to kiss Ethan, plain and simple.

  Well, maybe not so simple. She’d hoped that kiss would clear him from her system. But the result had been the exact opposite. She couldn’t get him out of her mind. He’d said he’d loved her, a statement that had taken her breath—and her capacity for rational thought—away. And the fact that Ethan hadn’t shown up at the house since hadn’t helped her regain her equilibrium. Several times a day, he drove by in his truck without slowing or stopping, so Caroline knew he was okay. But why was he avoiding her? Did he regret his declaration of love?

  The man had her spinning in circles, not knowing which side was up and unable to do a single thing to set herself straight again. All she could think of was Ethan and the sound of his voice telling her how much he loved her.

  She missed him.

  And if she missed him now, after only three days without seeing him, how would she survive when she moved to New Mexico? What in heaven had she gone and done?