Alice felt tears stinging her eyes. “These are beautiful,” she breathed. “Mrs. Lambert, thank you so much.” Impulsively she gathered the woman into a hug.
The woman was flushed with pleasure. “Aw, they’re just dish towels, Miss Alice. It was somethin’ to work on of an evenin’. Think of us when you use them.”
“Oh, but they’re too pretty to be used. I’m going to frame them and hang them in my new house,” Alice told her, her heart full because of this woman’s gift, and all the thanks and smiles she’d garnered because she’d agreed to help Elijah with the medical needs of Boomer Town.
They headed for her tent not long after that. Perhaps now Elijah would sit outside with her and share what he’d been so obviously wanting to say the night before.
“Say, Reverend,” a voice called out, and Alice saw Mr. Johnston, one of the older men in the congregation, with his son, a young farmer, sitting on bales of hay outside their tent. “Me an’ my son were just discussin’ a bit of Scripture, and we were disagreein’ on the meanin’ of it. S’pose you could sit a spell and explain it to us? It’s in Second Thessalonians, and it’s about the Second Comin’...”
Elijah gave Alice a rueful glance. “This is probably going to take a while,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll walk you back to your tent and then come back, all right?”
“Nonsense. It’s not far,” she told him, and wished she was bold enough to ask that he stop by afterward. But dusk was already deepening, and here and there lantern lights were blooming. She knew Elijah was too careful of both their reputations to be observed coming to her tent after dark. “Good night, Elijah.”
Their conversation would have to wait for yet another day, Alice thought as she walked briskly on.
Her tent was illuminated by lantern light, too. Had she left it burning when she went to accompany Elijah on rounds? She didn’t think so; she hadn’t needed its light then. Perhaps Gideon or Clint had come and lit it, so that she wouldn’t have to enter a dark tent? How thoughtful, if that was the case. They’d all been more vigilant lately....
To reassure herself, she reached into her medical bag to touch the knife she’d placed there the other night after Mrs. Murphy had been robbed. Was it one of the criminals with the black bandannas lurking inside, waiting to pounce on her?
No, she was being ridiculous. No sound came from within the tent. There was no one inside. She’d lift the tent flap and see that everything was just as she had left it. “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?” she murmured aloud, and lifted the tent flap.
“Hello, Alice,” said a voice she’d hoped never to hear again, coming from the last person she had ever wanted to see. She froze in her tracks, dropping the medical bag with the knife still inside it. Suddenly, despite the warmth of the Oklahoma April night, she was as cold as if she had swallowed snowballs. Her pulse took off like a jackrabbit scurrying across the prairie.
“You always did like to talk to yourself,” Maxwell Peterson said. “I heard you murmuring to yourself outside.” He sat in the camp chair across from her cot, like a figment in her nightmares, dressed in the same sort of fancy pin-striped suit he always wore, his soulless pale blue eyes gleaming in the lamplight. His derby hat was perched on top of her Bible on the upended packing crate by her cot.
He stood. “Come on, how about a hug for the man who’s followed you hundreds of miles from civilized New York to the wilds of Oklahoma Territory?” Maxwell said, and before she could refuse or step back, he’d enveloped her in his arms.
He was a tall man and powerfully built, so it was like being embraced by a grizzly bear. Alice tried not to flinch or pull away as those massive arms went around her and threatened to squeeze the breath from her body. She always thought he’d liked it all the more when she struggled, so she reminded herself to be still.
He released her at last. “I was wondering if you were ever coming back to your tent. I’d begun to think these yokels had led me astray about which was your tent,” he said, making an airy gesture in the direction of her nearest neighbors. “So where were you, Alice, my dear? Out painting the town?” He threw his head back and gave a hearty laugh. “As if there was anything in this hole of a place worth painting!”
“I—I was visiting some of the townspeople,” she said, trying to stifle the tremor that threatened to creep into her voice. It wouldn’t do to show fear, just as it didn’t when facing a cougar.
“Visiting? What could you possibly have in common with the hicks I’ve seen here?” he demanded, as if asking to be let in on some joke.
“I—I’ve been...nursing the sick, Maxwell. And a lot of the people here have become friends,” she said and was sorry she’d let defensiveness into her voice—yet another weakness one dared not reveal to this ruthless man.
He ignored the last half of her statement as if she hadn’t said it. “‘Nursing the sick,’” he echoed. “I thought you’d hung up that ugly uniform and those thick, hideous shoes you wore at Bellevue forever, Alice. I told you that you’d never have to work a day in your life ever again, my dear, once you were mine. Still, I suppose you had to do something to pass the time, didn’t you?”
“What are you doing here, Maxwell? How did you find me?” she asked, wondering if she was fast enough to back out of the tent and run screaming to the Thorntons.
It was too late. Of course it was. It had been too late the moment Maxwell Peterson arrived in Boomer Town. She just hadn’t known it until she had trustingly lifted that tent flap.
“You...you didn’t go terrorize my mother, did you?” she asked suddenly, sick to think of him wringing her whereabouts out of her frail, aged mother with the mixture of intimidation and threats of which Maxwell Peterson was a past master. “If you harmed her—”
“You’d what? No, silly one, I didn’t bother your old mater. Alice, when you have the assets I do, it’s no problem to hire a detective—or a herd of them, for that matter,” he said with a grin, sitting down again. “Sit down, Alice,” he said, pointing to her cot, the only other place in the tent for her to sit—as if she’d come to his dwelling, not her own. “You’ve got to be dead on your feet, tending to the poor unwashed and all that. I don’t know how you stand it.”
She complied, keeping her eyes on him all the time.
“But it wasn’t all my well-paid detectives, but my new best friend from The New York Times that did the trick, in the end.”
She could only stare at him.
“Yes, Robert Millard Henderson. I believe you met him almost two weeks ago, when he interviewed you about your nursing? ‘Florence Nightingale of the Oklahoma Territory,’ he called you. It was most impressive. And you were so modest, not wanting to give your name. Commendable—but the people you’d been ministering to were only too happy to share that bit of information.”
Alice remembered it now—the impertinent, pushy newspaperman and Abe and Nancy McNally. She’d looked back as she and Elijah had walked away, and had seen Henderson lingering with the McNallys and hadn’t thought about it past the next day. She felt the blood draining from her face as she realized how neatly she had stepped into the trap.
“You just happened to see a newspaper article?” she asked.
“No, he was among the many I’ve paid to look for you, Alice, my dear. He was merely the lucky fellow who hit pay dirt. He’s been handsomely rewarded, of course.” Maxwell was smug as a cat that had just drunk a whole pitcherful of cream.
She’d known she shouldn’t give her name! But the McNallys had given it for her, sure that she was only being self-effacing. It was all she could do to smother a groan.
She was going to die tonight—or at best, suffer a beating. Maxwell didn’t accept rejection well and hadn’t ever since he’d first tried to court her when they’d grown up together. Lord, help me! If You ever cared what happened to me, save me now!
> “So how does it feel to be the face that launched a thousand queries, my clever, beautiful Alice?” he said. Chuckling, he suddenly leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
His mercurial change of mood left her dizzy. “Cl-clever?” she stammered. She’d feared his fists would clench at any moment and make her pay for escaping him, and now he was calling her clever?
“Yes, clever. I had no idea you had such spunk, or such enterprise, either—to come all the way to Oklahoma to surprise me with a wonderful new future for us.”
“For us?” she parroted, feeling as if she was lost in a maze. What on earth does he mean?
“Yes, for us. You weren’t content to be a rich New York City aristocrat—too confining a role for you. I should have seen that,” Peterson mused aloud. “You always did like a challenge—though you would have wanted for nothing as my wife, you know. But, no, you came here instead to make this wonderful surprise for me.”
“Surprise...” Could she do nothing but parrot his words and stare at him? she thought, angry with herself.
“Yes, my spirited darling. You wanted to surprise me by getting us a homestead—not that a hundred and sixty acres would ever be enough, but it would be a start—a base of operations, while we bought up land around us and eventually owned a prairie empire, right? It was going to be your wedding present to me, wasn’t it? Please don’t mind that I’ve guessed what you were up to, Alice. It only makes me prouder of you.”
Clearly, she marveled as she stared at him, it had never entered his mind that she had come all this way to avoid him.
He’d grown a beard and mustache since she’d last seen him, and he fingered it now, vainglorious as ever. It only made him look more ruthless, she thought.
“So if any of these friends you’ve been making are gentlemen admirers, Alice, you’ll just have to tell them your sweetheart is here now, so they’ll have to go nurse their broken hearts, won’t you?” he said, grinning as if he was letting her in on the joke now. “Because I don’t share.”
The last four words hung on the air as if the threat they represented was a palpable thing.
Elijah. His image rose up before Alice suddenly—his earnest, handsome face, his kind eyes, his gentle smile—a smile that would never be aimed at her again. She could never tell Maxwell she had begun to care for this man, not if she wanted Elijah and his brothers to live.
Men who had crossed Maxwell before had been made sorry they’d done so. Alice had guessed he’d been responsible, though he’d probably only hired others to mete out the punishment. Naturally there’d never been anything to tie the retaliation to him. One man who’d resisted selling a choice property Maxwell coveted had been found riddled with bullets—and his grieving widow had been only too glad to sell it to Maxwell for a greatly reduced price. Others had disappeared, their bodies never found.
No, she could never mention Elijah’s name, or associate with any of her former friends, because she’d rather die right now than to bring any harm to him and his family.
“Where...where are you staying?” she said at last. “You can’t stay here, of course,” she added, gesturing at the tent that seemed even tinier with him inside it. “My reputation—”
“Shall remain unsullied, of course,” he finished for her. “No, it’s too small for the two of us, even if it was proper, and Caesar’s future wife must be above reproach,” he said in that grandiose way that had always set her teeth on edge. “No, I’ve got a much larger tent—I suppose you’d call it a pavilion, really—in back of your campsite, close enough for togetherness, but not close enough that tongues will wag,” he concluded, merrily waving a finger.
“In back of my campsite?” she repeated. “But there were already people in back of me, Maxwell. The Carters, the Weisheimers, the Santinis,” she said, ticking the names off. “What did you do with them?”
“They’ve been paid well to relocate,” he said, as careless as if he spoke of flies being swatted.
He’d thought of everything, she thought, as hope died within her.
“And don’t worry about Race Day—or the Land Rush, or whatever they’re calling it,” he said with another airy wave. “There’s a general down here who owes me a favor—I was able to wangle his son out of some trouble he found himself in. We’ll have to get up early, of course, but we’ll be let through at the crack of dawn, so we can find just the piece of land that suits us—adjoining plots. Three hundred and twenty acres, not a hundred sixty, since we won’t be married then.
“Of course, it won’t be but a patch on the amount of land we’ll end up with, eh? And then we can be married shortly after the big day. The King and Queen of Oklahoma, that’s what they’ll call us, won’t they?” He chucked her under the chin. “How’d you like that, eh? Or maybe Senator and Mrs. Peterson—or even President Peterson and his First Lady. Mrs. Maxwell Peterson—has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
Chapter Seventeen
Maxwell had finally left her tent around midnight, after talking endlessly about “their” plans. Not only was he confident he could buy up all the land around their joined homesteads, but he planned to start a bank in the town he would found nearby, which would in a short time become the largest bank in Oklahoma.
From there he would progress to being mayor, then senator. By that time she would have given him four or five children at the least—three boys, the oldest of which they’d name Maxwell Junior, of course. He would inherit the banking business, or if he wanted to join his father in his political aspirations, he might be the Peterson to become president of the United States if Maxwell Senior did not.
They’d have a couple girls, too, little red-haired copies of their lovely mother, daughters who would make brilliant marriages some day that would enlarge the Peterson empire. Meanwhile Alice would be the social leader of Oklahoma womanhood, the jewel of his home.
Alice had listened numbly, and he didn’t seem to notice that she said nothing, since he took silent admiration as his due. At last, when she began to sway with weariness, he finally glanced at his ornately designed gold pocket watch.
“Sorry, m’dear. I’ve enjoyed our reunion so much I hadn’t noticed the time. I’ll depart for my pavilion and let you get your beauty sleep. Don’t worry about cooking me a big breakfast in the morning—I’ve brought Horst with me to double as my cook and valet. He’ll fix breakfast for both of us—though I hope you don’t insist on rising with the birds, do you? My other men are waiting back in Wichita, of course, with wagonloads of materials for our new home. Didn’t want too many of my personnel here. Figured we’d want our privacy, eh?”
He’d kissed her full on the mouth then, and it had been all she could do not to suffer at the touch of his cold, fleshy lips. But he didn’t seem to mind her lack of response.
“Still the shy little maiden, aren’t you? Good to see that these hayseeds haven’t corrupted you. After breakfast we’ll have the whole day to spend together. You can show me the sights.” He’d laughed hugely then, tickled at his own joke. “I’ve brought you a saddle horse and your riding habit, Alice, my sweet. We can go explore the prairies, eh?”
“Good night, Maxwell.” Maybe if he wasn’t expecting her to rise till late, she could sneak out of her tent and run to the Thorntons, and explain to Elijah what had happened, so he would not make the mistake of coming to look for her and bringing Maxwell’s wrath down on his head.
If only she hadn’t held back her heart from Elijah, prating about “independence.” Her insistence on independence had only left her free to have Maxwell wrap his chains around her. If she’d given Elijah the slightest encouragement, hinted that she couldn’t imagine life without him at her side, he’d have declared himself by now.
Or maybe it was best that she hadn’t surrendered to her feelings after all, she thought, staring up at the faint light of the full moon filtering into her
tent. Maxwell wouldn’t have been deterred from his goals even if she’d been engaged to marry Elijah Thornton, and the Thornton brothers might all have paid the price then. It was better for everyone she’d met in Boomer Town if she just quietly went and told Elijah why she had to step out of his life.
How would she get out of showing Maxwell around Boomer Town? She hadn’t the least desire to parade through the narrow dirt “streets,” and listen to his scornful remarks about the crude tents and its salt-of-the-earth, hope-filled populace. She didn’t want to encounter anyone she knew and see the puzzlement in their eyes as they beheld her with this stranger, and learned who he was to her. And Maxwell wouldn’t hold back, she knew. He’d be crowing to anyone who would listen as a way of marking his territory.
It would be better to proclaim herself as bored with Boomer Town as he would be and go on endless horseback rides with him away from town. She didn’t think it likely that he’d try to take advantage of her when they were alone—for a ruthless man, he was curiously inconsistent in his desire for above-question respectability. Their rides would be the only thing to alleviate a week of stifling days with him at his campsite, playing endless games of chess with the marble chess set he always traveled with, eating the gourmet meals Horst would cook.
Alice slept fitfully at last, only to wake with a start when someone’s rooster crowed the dawn. Hollow-eyed, she’d dressed, stowed the medical bag she’d dropped in the middle of the dirt floor and slipped out of her tent, only to find Horst sitting in a camp chair at the entrance.
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