Wanton Angel

by Linda Lael Miller

  At one o’clock that afternoon Bonnie put Katie in charge of the store and went out. Northridge’s one and only bank was well down the street, toward the smelter works.

  Mr. Swendenborg, the president, gave her an embarrassing lecture when she asked for her funds, but Bonnie stood her ground. When she left the bank, the draft was neatly folded and resting in her handbag.

  She walked down the hill, passing Earline’s rooming house on her right and the undertaker’s establishment on her left. A vivid memory of the day of the flood made her shiver.

  “Cold?” a masculine voice called.

  Bonnie turned, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand, and looked up to see Eli leaning out of an upstairs window of the rooming house. Was that Earline’s room? She found herself hoping that he would fall and crack his hard, miserable skull. “On a day like this?” she replied guilelessly.

  Eli frowned. “Is the store closed?” He actually consulted his pocket watch. “It’s the middle of the day.”

  Bonnie longed to rankle him. “Some of us can’t afford to languish in our beds the whole day through,” she replied. “But to answer your question, the store is open. Katie is minding it while I pay a call on Forbes.”

  To Bonnie’s enormous satisfaction, Eli bumped his head against the window sash. A string of muffled curses rent the air.

  “What business could you possibly have with that—that rounder?” Eli demanded, once he’d finished swearing.

  “I thought I might ask for my job back,” Bonnie answered, without missing a beat. “I rather miss dancing the hurdy-gurdy.” Having said this, the Angel went merrily on about her business.

  “Bonnie!” the devil yelled after her from the second-story window. “Damn it, come back here!”

  Bonnie walked faster.

  The famous warped billiard tables were about to be replaced with new ones, Bonnie noted, as she walked boldly into the Brass Eagle Saloon and approached the bar. Indeed, she was probably paying for the set being carried in through the side doors by four red-faced and puffing laborers.

  Forbes was supervising, but he turned away when he saw Bonnie, an insolent grin stretching across his face.

  “You brought my money,” he stated happily.

  Bonnie hated handing over her hard-earned profits, and at that moment she hated Forbes, too. And her irresponsible father. “You’re not getting a dime until you hand over those markers,” she answered. “Furthermore, I want your written promise that there are no more debts.”

  Forbes offered a gentlemanly arm. “Shall we discuss this in my office?” he asked.

  Bonnie’s chin jutted out, but she took Forbes’s arm and allowed him to escort her up the stairs and into his office. On the second floor there was very little evidence of flood damage. Forbes was a man who liked his personal comforts, and this part of the building had undoubtedly been repaired first.

  There was laughter behind the doors they passed; it seemed that the Brass Eagle was doing brisk business in areas besides dancing, gambling and liquor.

  “Human lust never ceases to amaze me,” Forbes remarked, as he opened one of the double doors leading into his office.

  “Or fatten your wallet,” Bonnie added. She swept inside ahead of her escort, unable to resist a little revenge. “There are rumors that you and Lizbeth Simmons are fond of each other, you know. Of course, I don’t believe a word of it.”

  Forbes actually flushed, but he was quick to hide his discomfort by setting his back to Bonnie and striding toward his desk. “Why don’t you believe it?” he couldn’t resist asking.

  Bonnie sighed dramatically, as she had seen many a road-show heroine do. “A teacher has—well, you know—a certain standing in any community. Certainly Lizbeth wouldn’t be foolish enough to involve herself with a—with a—”

  Forbes was red in the face, and this time he was making no effort to hide the fact. His brown eyes snapped and Bonnie noted that his hands, resting on top of his desk, had closed into fists. “With a what?” he demanded.

  Bonnie could not have been more delighted. It was almost worth five thousand dollars to see Forbes lose his legendary composure. “Why, with a saloonkeeper,” she answered in sunny tones. “A procurer, if you will.”

  “I am not a procurer!” Forbes roared.

  Bonnie pretended to be startled and stepped back, one hand to her throat. The dramatics did not extend to her voice, however. She spoke bluntly. “What is your word for it, Forbes?” Bonnie gestured toward the hallway. “Aren’t there women behind those doors, being paid to please men?”

  For once Forbes was at a complete loss. He sank into his chair and sat glaring at Bonnie, as though he’d like to see her hanged or even burned at the stake.

  Bonnie opened her handbag and took out the bank draft, which represented nearly every cent she had. “The markers, if you will,” she said, approaching Forbes’s desk. “Along with your disclaimer, of course.”

  Forbes sat back in his chair, his fingers making a steeple beneath his stubbly chin. Even when the bank draft was within grasping distance, he didn’t reach for it, and his brown eyes were pensive. “Lizbeth would probably never agree to marry me,” he reflected, and Bonnie was taken aback. She even felt a measure of sympathy.

  She recovered quickly enough. After all, she was about to turn over nearly everything she had. “You’re probably right,” she said. “What decent woman would want to wed herself to a whoremonger?”

  Forbes’s eyes shot coffee-colored fire as they climbed over Bonnie’s bosom to her face. “My God, we’ve gotten selfrighteous in recent weeks, haven’t we? May I remind you, Mrs. McKutchen, that you used to be one of the biggest draws this place had?”

  “I merely danced,” Bonnie said airily.

  “Yes, you ‘merely danced.’ With any man who could pay the price.”

  Bonnie blushed. If she lived to be nine hundred and ninety-nine, she would probably never hear the end of her stint as a hurdy-gurdy. “I needed the money, Forbes.”

  Incredibly Forbes smiled, but his eyes were still dark with annoyance. “And you still do, don’t you?” The smile broadened measurably. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Angel. If you’ll come back to the Brass Eagle and dance, I’ll agree to discharge the bills your father ran up.”

  Coldly furious, she slapped the draft down on Forbes’s blotter. “I wouldn’t do that to save ten thousand dollars, or a hundred thousand, or a million!” she said, hoping that she would never have to eat those lofty words.

  Forbes produced the markers from a desk drawer, along with paper and pen. “You’ve made your point, Angel,” he said with a ragged sigh. “You’ve made your point.”

  Five minutes later Bonnie left the Brass Eagle Saloon minus five thousand dollars, but she still had her pride and her self-respect, and she had Forbes’s written word that her father’s debts had been paid. In no mood to deal with any more males, she passed Earline’s place on the far side of the street.

  When Bonnie entered the store, Eli was waiting for her. He was pretending to examine a display of sheet music, which of course didn’t fool Bonnie in the least. The man couldn’t carry a tune, let alone play an instrument.

  “What do you want?” she demanded, snatching off her straw hat and flinging it away. It sailed over the counter and landed with a plop on the floor behind it.

  Wide-eyed, Katie gathered up a fussing Rose and vanished up the stairs.

  “Is that the way you greet all your customers, Mrs. McKutchen?” Eli asked, smiling.

  Bonnie realized that she’d given him the upper hand and could have kicked herself for it. She yanked her white apron from its peg and slipped it on, tying the sash with wrenching motions of her hands. “Do you always waste entire days lolling about your bedroom?” she countered. Oddly enough she was more irate over Eli’s place of residence than over having to pay five thousand dollars for her father’s drunken pleasures.

  Just then Webb bellowed something upstairs, and the sound of running feet—
probably Susan’s—clattered overhead.

  “Speaking of lolling about in bedrooms,” Eli said and, though his smile was still in place, his eyes looked distinctly angry, “how is Hutcheson?”

  “He’s almost fully recovered,” Bonnie answered, bending her head to hide the smile that was suddenly pulling at the corners of her mouth. So that was it, she thought. Eli was staying at Earline’s and stirring up as much gossip as he could because he was jealous of Webb’s position in Bonnie’s home.

  “There is a lot of talk about you and Hutcheson, Bonnie, and I’m not sure I like it.”

  I’ll bet you don’t, Bonnie thought, but she managed to keep a straight face as she met his eyes. “That’s nothing new, Eli,” she said guilelessly. “People have been yammering about Webb and me from the first.”

  Eli did not look appeased. “Is he still in your room?”

  Bonnie wondered how Eli could have known about that and then remembered that he’d been with the men who brought Webb here the day he was beaten. “Of course,” she said sweetly. “Where else would he be? The only other bed in the place is Katie’s, and he’s much too big and muscular to lie on my rickety little settee.”

  The subtle, breathy emphasis Bonnie had put on the words “big and muscular” had not escaped Eli. His face went ruddy and she half expected puffs of steam to rise out of his collar. For all this, he did manage to speak in moderate tones. “I believe I’ll just look in on Hutcheson, see how he’s feeling. If you don’t mind, that is.”

  Just then a timid little woman floated out of the shadows, like a specter, an onion in one hand and a potato in the other. Bonnie rang up the sale, her voice chiming just as musically as the bell on the cash register. “Mind? Why, Eli, of course I don’t mind. An injured man needs all the cheering up he can get.”

  Bonnie felt Eli’s scalding glance, rather than saw it, and she smiled as his boot heels hammered up the inside stairs to the rooms above.

  Tuttle entered the store, passing the onion-and-potato woman in the doorway, a cheerful grin on his face. Since the newspaper office had been destroyed, he’d been working full time helping to finish the new workers’ cabins, and the job seemed to agree with him. He was tanned and he’d filled out some, looking more the man and less the awkward boy.

  “Afternoon, ma’am,” he said with a polite nod. “I’ve come for my reading lesson.”

  Bonnie had returned to mourning her five thousand dollars, and her smile was gone. “Katie’s upstairs,” she answered sharply.

  Tuttle looked hurt. Night after night, for weeks now, he’d sat at her kitchen table with Katie, laboring over lessons in penmanship, grammar and reading, and the image of him working so determinedly gave Bonnie a feeling of chagrin. She made herself smile, and Tuttle immediately brightened.

  When Eli came back down the stairs, he was carrying both Rose Marie and her fancy life-size doll. “This place is a circus,” he said.

  Bonnie did not care, at the moment, what his opinions might be. “Where do you think you’re going with my daughter?”

  “Rose Marie is also my daughter,” Eli pointed out reasonably. “With your permission, I’d like to spend the evening with her.”

  A sudden and horrible thought possessed Bonnie and made her round the counter in a hurry. It had just come back to her that Eli lived at Earline’s. “You are not taking my—our—child into that—that woman’s house!”

  “I had no idea you disapproved of Genoa,” Eli said, pretending to puzzled injury.

  Bonnie subsided. “You know very well that I wasn’t talking about Genoa. I was speaking of your—paramour.”

  “My what?” The words came out of Eli’s mouth as a delighted hoot.

  “I do not intend to elaborate,” Bonnie replied with cool disdain, “in the presence of an innocent child.”

  Eli’s eyes lifted eloquently to the ceiling. “You don’t seem to mind doing other things in the presence of an innocent child. Why not elaborate?”

  His jealousy did not seem quite so amusing now. It would be just like him, Bonnie reflected, to decide that she was not providing a fit environment for Rose Marie and take steps to gain legal guardianship. “I sleep on the settee,” she said lamely, her cheeks flaring. “I was only trying to nettle you before, because of what people are saying about you and Earline.”

  “What are people saying about Earline and me?” Eli quizzed, and there was a mischievous note in his voice that might have earned him a sound slap across the face if he hadn’t been holding Bonnie’s child.

  When Bonnie didn’t answer—sheer stubbornness kept her from it—he laughed. “I’ll bring Rose back after supper,” he said, and then he just walked out of the store, bold as you please, leaving Bonnie to stand staring after him in furious despair.

  In a moment Eli came back. “Would you like to come along?” he asked distractedly, as though the thought had just descended upon him from on high. Perhaps it had.

  Bonnie wasn’t about to quibble. She was tired and she’d had to give Forbes Durrant virtually all her money and she didn’t think she could bear another evening in that madhouse upstairs. Quick as a wink, she fetched her shawl, shouted to Katie that she was going out and locked up the store.

  Walking along that way, with Eli carrying their daughter on one of his shoulders, gave Bonnie a good feeling. It was almost as though the three of them made up a family in the truest sense of the word.

  But of course they weren’t really a family. There had been a divorce, after all, and Kiley’s tragic death still stood between Bonnie and Eli, like a barrier. She was saddened, thinking of the little boy who should have been there with them.

  “What’s the matter, Bonnie?” Eli asked quietly, as they started down the hill toward Genoa’s spacious house. “You look as though you’re about to cry.”

  The whistle blew in the smelter yard, and somehow the sound added to Bonnie’s lonely mood. She could not answer Eli’s question honestly, though, because that would open wounds that weren’t fully mended. “I’m just tired, I guess,” she said. That was true enough.

  Eli’s next words were completely unexpected ones, and they were spoken with a shyness Bonnie would never have suspected of him. “I’d like to show you the cabins one day soon. They’re almost finished now.”

  Bonnie’s eyes slipped to Eli’s face and saw a rare expression of vulnerability there. Her seeing those cabins truly mattered to him, and she found that surprising, given the attention he’d allegedly been paying Earline Kalb of late. “I’d like that, Eli,” she said.

  They went through Genoa’s open gate and up the cobbled driveway. Rose, spotting her beloved aunt in the doorway, demanded to be set on her feet, and Eli lifted her from his shoulder with a gruff chuckle. She went barreling toward Genoa, who was laughing, her arms outstretched.

  “The union men are back in town,” Eli confided, as he watched his daughter and his sister embracing each other on the porch.

  Bonnie stopped. Mr. Denning and his men had left after the flood and she had put them out of her mind. “I hadn’t heard,” she answered. “Do you think there will be more trouble?”

  “There can always be more trouble, Bonnie.”

  “It galls me that those hooligans got away with beating poor Webb nearly to death! The marshal has gone over and over what happened, but Webb can’t remember what his attackers looked like—”

  Gently Eli’s hands gripped Bonnie’s arms. “Could we not talk about Hutcheson, please? Just this once?”

  Bonnie smiled. Eli’s touch felt as good as walking beside him had earlier. “I’m sorry.”

  To Bonnie’s complete and utter surprise, Eli bent his head and kissed her, just softly. “For what it’s worth, Bonnie,” he said, when the kiss was over and his lips were lingering a fraction of an inch from hers, “the rumors aren’t true.”

  Bonnie knew that he was referring to the gossip concerning himself and Earline Kalb. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good.”

  Eli t
ook her hand in his and they walked toward Genoa’s house. For those few very precious moments, it was as if nothing had ever gone wrong between them.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE PONY STOOD nibbling at the trimmed grasses of Genoa’s lawn, a creature of splendor in its decorous saddle and bridle. As Rose approached it, in cautious wonder, her hand in Eli’s, the animal lifted its cocoa-brown head and neighed companionably.

  Eli bent and lifted his daughter into his arms, then carried her closer to the pony. Tentatively, Rose reached out to touch the cream-colored mane, and the tiny mare nickered a greeting and tossed its head, bridle jingling.

  Rose crowed with glee and clapped her hands. “Mine!” she cried.

  Gently Eli set the little girl in the saddle. She looked both delighted and afraid as she gripped the pommel.

  Eli took the reins in one hand and began leading the pony around and around, in an ever-widening circle. He looked every bit as enchanted as Rose did.

  Bonnie stood watching with Genoa and an oddly subdued Lizbeth, and her feelings were mixed. Rose obviously loved the cocoa-brown pony, but there were other considerations—horses sometimes kicked people, or ran away with them, or threw them off into rocks or brambles. Bonnie’s own fear of the beasts made her start forward, a protest forming on her lips.

  But Genoa stopped her by extending one arm. “Rose Marie is perfectly safe, Bonnie.”

  Bonnie sighed. It was true. Eli was holding the reins while the pony followed docilely wherever he led. What could happen to Rose, with her father so near? “I believe I’d like a cup of tea now,” Bonnie said, on a long breath.

  Genoa smiled at her. They were all replete, having just eaten a marvelous supper, but one didn’t have to be hungry to drink tea. “Isn’t Cocoa a lovely surprise?” the spinster trilled, referring, of course, to the pony, as she led the way back through the garden and the French doors.

  The parlor was pleasantly cool. Genoa immediately went to the kitchen to ask Martha to prepare tea, while Bonnie and Lizbeth settled themselves in chairs.