by Kay Hooper
“Yes.” After a frowning moment, Jesse nodded. “He asked about my home, I remember. And he seemed—kind. Interested. I told him all about the family and Regret, where it was, and that it would come to me even though I didn’t want it. I told him I was worried about Tory.”
Tyrone reflected that that would have likely been enough to rouse Morgan Fontaine to sympathy. But, would he have gone to Regret? With all his plans in splinters, the group of powerful men to which he belonged at each other’s throats? Probably. He was an unusually kind and caring man, as Tyrone himself had cause to know. And the woman’s name…Dammit, everything fit! Still, he wanted one last fact to be certain. “Jesse, what did your sister look like?”
It was a moment before Jesse answered, and then his voice was rough and a bit unsteady. “Like me. But her hair was more golden, and her eyes were lighter. She was more delicate, of course. Her features were finer. But we were only three years apart in age, and people had mistaken us for twins more than once when we were younger.”
It told Tyrone all he needed to know, really; he was virtually certain. “You went back there to the plantation when we returned to Charleston—about a month later, wasn’t it?” He waited for the jerky nod, then went on in a deliberately impersonal voice. “You said there were two new graves, that your father and sister had vanished.”
Jesse nodded, his eyes pained, but an expression of puzzlement was beginning to draw his brows together. It wasn’t like Marc, he thought, to deliberately rake up old and painful memories. Some called him a hard man, but Jesse knew from experience that there was a great deal of kindness under that tough and sometimes curt exterior.
“Yes. The house had been looted, but there were stains in several rooms. Bloodstains. None of the neighbors knew anything, but there had been violence on more than one plantation in the area. I’ve never found a trace of them, so they must have been killed. Marc—“
Tyrone held up a hand to halt the inevitable question, and then answered it. “Jesse, I don’t know what happened at Regret, but I’m positive your sister is alive. I met her less than a week ago; the resemblance is uncanny.”
And while shock held Jesse silent, Tyrone explained what had happened, finishing with, “I was about to ask her if her maiden name was Beaumont, but a telegram was delivered to her and she excused herself. When I looked for her a few minutes later, she was gone. I got the impression that she believed you were dead, which would explain why she hadn’t tried to find you before now. She said, ‘I believe you knew my brother,’ as if it were a long time ago.”
He remembered, abruptly, that Falcon Delaney had been there at the benefit too, remembered that he had seen Delaney while looking for Victoria, and that his hard face, so expressionless before then, had held shock, a grinding bitterness, and something that might have been pain.
He had felt then, Tyrone remembered, a cynical amusement that his almost-nemesis—not punishing, but shadowing—clearly had problems of his own. And he wondered now if those problems had something to do with Victoria Beaumont Fontaine. He had been with her earlier in the evening, and had shown all the signs of a very possessive man.
And if that were indeed true, the entire situation, Tyrone thought with a short inner laugh, was absurd…and dangerous. He knew only too well that Delaney was still after the gold; his wary attitude toward Tyrone, as well as the pointed visits and pleasant, veiled questions, were proof enough of that. And if he were unknowingly involved with the wife of the man who had planned the theft?
He put the speculation aside as Jesse’s voice, shaken but delighted, finally made itself heard.
“Alive? And married to Morgan Fontaine? But how in God’s name could that have come about?”
Tyrone shrugged. “You’ll have to ask your sister or Morgan about that. I assume that to be your plan? She’s not in New York; she left days ago, but her hotel gave Morgan’s ranch in New Mexico as a forwarding address.”
Jesse didn’t have to ask if his employer would give him the necessary time to find his sister; Tyrone’s attitude made his willingness obvious. And though he had never been farther west than the Mississippi River, Jesse thought nothing of possible hazards. He would, he thought vaguely, simply take a train out to the Fontaine ranch.
Tyrone could have warned him, and would have, except that his mind was somewhat occupied with speculation. He was thinking of a gold shipment that still, after all these years, had the power to haunt too many people.
In checking for Victoria’s whereabouts at her hotel, he had also looked quietly for Delaney—who had left New York only yesterday. Tyrone had his own sources, and he had found out that a man answering Delaney’s description had indeed been seen escorting Victoria Fontaine about the city, and to at least one ball, where several others had marked his possessiveness toward her. And Tyrone couldn’t help but wonder now if an almost-forgotten crime was about to be solved by the simple mischance of a wife’s lighthearted visit to New York.
Tyrone would have been willing to bet that Delaney’s interest in Morgan’s wife was entirely personal; what if he followed her to New Mexico? What if, somehow, after all these years, that very determined man stumbled upon the principals in that long-ago plot? What if the past were to be uncovered now?
How many would be hurt?
He looked up as Jesse stood to leave, still abstracted and faintly uneasy. “Jesse, there are still people seeking that gold. A very determined man named Delaney, for one. Be careful out there.”
Jesse nodded, but he was looking ahead eagerly to the meeting with his sister; the warning went virtually unnoticed.
NEW MEXICO
It was not, Jesse discovered days later, quite as easy as he had supposed to reach the Fontaine ranch. He took the train as far as he was able, then purchased a horse, asked directions, and set out—feeling more than a little appalled.
He could, certainly, ride, but he had never in his life been forced to ride from morning until night, and he had spent little time at all in the saddle these last ten years. And he had never before cooked over an open fire, or ridden—quite literally—for days without seeing another human being.
Accustomed to temperamental seas and booming cities these last years, he found the vast and empty landscape of the West not so much interesting as unsettling. It was so damned still. Not a movement anywhere to hint at life. He did not like it. He longed, with still nights following still days, for the comforting, pulsating sea beneath his feet.
Everything was strange to him, from the hat he wore and the saddle on his horse to the raw scenery and slow-talking people he had met. But Jesse wanted very badly to find Victoria, and he rode on with the same determination that had made him crawl doggedly on after being left for dead.
He was actually on the ranch before he knew it, and found out only because three suspicious ranch hands hailed his fire one night and asked, with rather studied politeness, where he was bound. A cheerful and open man by nature, and thoroughly tired of his own company, Jesse told them readily, and was somewhat chagrined to be told that he was sitting on the Bar F, and that he would have ridden off it within a day or two, given his direction.
They asked, still with that studied politeness, his reasons for coming to the ranch, and he told them. His answer, he noted, seemed to surprise them. But when morning came and the sunlight showed them his features clearly, there were three identically startled blinks, and then an immediate relaxation of their obvious suspicions.
And then they were troubled.
“We’ve been out on the range for near a week,” Tony Bannon told him, riding beside Jesse while the other two rode ahead. He was the foreman of the Bar F, he had explained. “Con, Wade, and me, we’ve been rounding strays.” Then he fell silent for a while, frowning.
Jesse, who had missed human company recently and had rapidly gotten on a first-name basis with the hands, felt the older man’s uneasiness and wondered at it. “I met Morgan Fontaine years ago,” he said. “Before he married my sister.
Just a brief meeting, during the war.”
Tony glanced at him, then said softly, “He’s dead, Jesse. We buried him a week ago.”
Jesse remembered the man who had spoken kindly to him years before, the man who had apparently sheltered and cared for his sister, and he was saddened that he would have no opportunity to meet that man again.
His own voice soft, he said, “I’m sorry, truly sorry.” And then, more softly still, “She’s alone again.”
For an essentially expressionless man, Bannon could look fierce, and did. “No. She’s got all of us—every man jack of us on the ranch, including Morgan’s man, his servant, I guess he is—he’ll look after her too. The Bar F is her home, and she’s happy here. I watched her grow from a girl, and I know she’s happy livin’ on the ranch.”
Jesse realized that the older man feared he would take his sister back east, and he quickly disclaimed that notion. “Of course she belongs here, if that’s what she wants. And since she’s been here so long—“It was an opening, an invitation to talk about just how long Victoria had lived with Morgan, how it had all come about. But they topped a rise just then, and the ranch house lay before them.
In the excitement of being so near his sister after so long, Jesse promptly forgot his questions. Eagerly, he spurred his horse into a gallop and headed for the sprawling ranch house.
—
He was, had he only known, just a few days behind Falcon Delaney.
—
Jesse had time only to realize that the Bar F was a wealthy ranch, evident from the beautiful house that was made of adobe and Spanish tiles, and stood gracefully near the bank of a stream in the shade of tall cottonwoods.
A man stepped outside as they drew up their horses, a man who was tall and stooped, with graying hair and hooded eyes and an earring in his left ear. A man Jesse dimly remembered; he was Morgan’s servant, and had been present the day Jesse had delivered the gold. And when he spoke, Jesse stopped looking at the house.
“Miss Victoria is gone.”
“Gone?” Jesse felt a crawling chill. “Gone where?” he demanded.
The hooded eyes looked at him and blinked once, the only sign of emotion. “She has, I believe, gone after her husband’s killers, sir.”
Tony Bannon emerged from his frozen stillness to grab for his horse. “Goddammit, Galen, you—“
“No.” The man named Galen spoke quietly, but with a curiously firm inflection. “She left orders. You and the men are to care for the ranch in her absence. Winter is here; it will take every man to work.”
Bannon hesitated, his jaw working, eyes anxious and undecided. “How long, Galen?”
“Days. It is unlikely that you could find her before she finds—them.”
“Why in hell did you let her go?”
Galen looked at the foreman, expressionless; it would have been impossible for anyone who didn’t know to guess that he had been fiercely devoted to Morgan and his young wife. “She did not ask my permission, Mr. Bannon.” He was, invariably, formal to the ranch hands.
“Killers.” It was Jesse’s voice. “Murdered? My sister’s husband was murdered?”
Galen looked at him, clearly unsurprised by the information Jesse had supplied; whether he remembered him or not, he did, it was obvious, know who Jesse was. “Savagely murdered, sir.” There was no inflection in his voice at all.
Jesse’s jaw firmed. He forgot his weariness, forgot his earlier, wistful thoughts of a bath and a decent bed to sleep in. “Which way did she go?” he demanded.
“When she left, she headed west,” Galen replied.
“Jesse!” Bannon knew he was too late, even as he called, even as he made a fruitless grab for Jesse’s reins.
“Let him go.” Galen stood, watching emotionlessly, as Jesse’s horse disappeared far away over the rise.
Bannon turned on him, furious. “He’s a babe out here! No more fit to take care of himself than—“
“Than his sister?” Galen shook his head briefly. “You know better. And neither of them would thank you for interfering in their affairs.”
Tony Bannon stared at him for a long, hard moment. “Sometimes,” he said in an even tone, “I wonder what rock Morgan found you under.” Then he took up his horse’s reins and stalked toward the bunkhouse.
No one saw Galen’s twisted smile, or heard the thoughts he was so adept at keeping to himself. He turned and went quietly back into the silent house, there to await Victoria’s return. He had no doubt that she would return, for he had watched his master teach her, carefully, how to survive.
He wondered briefly if Jesse would ride west steadily, or if he would somehow discover that it was not his sister’s ultimate direction. Galen could have told him that there was a place, many days east of the ranch, where Victoria would likely end up. A place in Texas.
He could have made it easier for Jesse.
That he had not done so was due simply to his loyalty to Morgan Fontaine, and the promises he had made that man. When Victoria returned, he would tell her the story only if she asked him, obeying the instructions Morgan had issued long ago. He would discharge his final duty to his master, regretting only that he was himself too old and stiff now to avenge his death.
Galen wondered if Morgan had realized that Victoria would do that, if he had realized that his young wife would set out on a grim trail alone, where she was likely to learn things about her husband she had not known while he was alive. Somehow, Galen doubted it. The single thing Morgan had kept from Victoria during the years they had been together, the one secret of their marriage, was the knowledge that his own actions had destroyed what was left of her family.
Morgan Fontaine would have taken that knowledge with him to the grave—had he died naturally. But he had not died naturally. Only Galen knew the whole story, and he had promised not to reveal it to anyone. Unless…
“They might catch up to me, old friend, if I live long enough. Some of them had to have survived. They don’t know where to begin looking for me, but I’ve noticed fate has a way of tying up loose ends in life. They may well find me someday. But I won’t tell them where the gold is. If something should happen…you tell Victoria the truth if she asks. I’m—not strong enough to tell her. But if I’m killed, she’ll need to know. She’ll need to protect herself from them.”
And Galen had meant to tell her, but Victoria had simply and quietly left the ranch, to avoid any protest. She had gone the day after Morgan’s funeral, leaving only a short letter of instruction for him and the ranch hands.
So he would have to tell her when she returned. When she found Morgan’s killers.
TEXAS
The trail led eastward.
Not a breath of wind stirred where she sat, immobile as a statue, on her horse. The big, rawboned buckskin blended with the arid landscape until he would have been invisible from a distance; his stillness guaranteed it. The poncho she wore covered her effectively, and hid her as well as her horse’s natural color hid him. Her flat-brimmed hat was pulled low over her eyes, shading them, and those green eyes scanned the horizon keenly. She heard the packhorse shift restlessly, and soothed him with her voice without turning. When he became still again, she continued to study her surroundings.
Her head turned only a bit, and slowly. She had already studied her back trail with cautious eyes, and had found no sign that she was being followed. No sign, in fact, of any living thing for miles. Now she was looking out over land still to be traveled, and uneasiness was growing in her. There was so little time left, and if Morgan’s killers escaped to Europe, she might never find them. But there was something else as well, something bothering her. She searched her mind for reasons and found, besides her awareness of time passing, only a niggling agitation.
She felt vaguely worried, abstracted, as though she had seen or heard something that had not been fully noticed at the time, but was now perturbing.
And she was also uneasy because instincts and senses honed to animal sharpness warned
her that a storm was coming. A day, she thought, maybe two. The air had grown steadily colder these last days, and winter was surely coming to shake an icy fist over an already barren land. Her horses had grown winter coats quickly, and that alone told her that there would likely be bad weather—and soon.
There was so little time. She would have to cut short her search soon and head toward Charleston, especially if the weather worsened; she couldn’t afford to be snowbound somewhere along the route, at least not for long.
She put aside that worry, knowing that there was little choice for her.
Perfectly still, blending easily with the calm around her, she considered the situation. She carried food for herself and grain for the horses, enough to last a couple of weeks, if need be. And if shelter could be found. She pulled memories from her mind and examined them one by one, recalling the talk of ranch hands and her own knowledge, culled from Morgan’s teachings, recalling trails and water holes and the rare empty shelter to be found. There was little enough of the latter in this rough Texas land; with range wars to the north, desert and Indians to the west, and Mexican bandits to the south, there was, in fact, little of anything that could be called safe.
Especially for a woman.
She thought little of that. The fact that she was a woman had not influenced her to this point; she would not allow it to influence her now. Instead, she concentrated on the immediate problem. Shelter. She sifted through information gathered by many people over the years and shared in saloons and around campfires here and there, her mind gradually narrowing that information to pinpoint this area.
And after a while, she remembered hearing a drifter from Tombstone mention the existence of an old homestead near here. She considered the information, examining it for potential problems. Then, with a sigh that misted before her eyes, she lifted the reins, and the buckskin moved ahead with his mile-eating walk.
She found it two hours later, just as a weak sun was at the halfway point of its daily journey. Only a charitable soul would have called it a homestead, and only an optimistic soul would have named it shelter.