LEGEND

by Jude Deveraux

  All along the way, people stopped what they were doing and waved at her, making Kady smile and wave back. “I guess I’m famous,” she said, laughing. “I guess I’m the woman who fed the town.” As she rode she wondered if someday she’d be written about in one of those tourist brochures that you purchase in ghost towns.

  But she didn’t like to think of Legend as a ghost town, so she put that thought out of her head and concentrated on the scenery.

  Once the town was behind her, in the distance she saw a carriage, a lovely thing with a roof on it and a man unhitching the horses. On the ground, sitting on a white tablecloth, was an elegant-looking woman surrounded by all the accoutrements of an old-fashioned afternoon tea. There was a silver teapot and cups so thin that even this far away, she could see the sun shining through them.

  She dismounted some distance from the picnic, tied the horse in the shade near a grassy spot, and went forward to meet her grandmother-in-law.

  Chapter 16

  WHAT APPREHENSION KADY FELT ABOUT MEETING THE ONLY living relative of a man she was coming to care a great deal about was soon gone when Ruth Jordan put out her hand in warm friendship. She was a tall, thin woman, wearing an exquisite white dress with big sleeves and a slim, sleek skirt, showing Kady just how out-of-date the big-skirted fashions of Legend were. As the older woman smiled, Kady saw that her eyes resembled Cole’s. What else she could see in those eyes was pain, and Kady remembered too well the horrible tragedy that had befallen Cole’s family. In a very short time this lovely woman had lost everything, and from the look of her, she still hadn’t recovered from her losses.

  “Here, my dear, you must sit down and tell me everything there is to tell about you and my grandson. I want to know everything,” she said graciously, motioning toward the cloth on the ground.

  As Kady took her place and Ruth poured the tea, for a moment or two there was an awkward silence between them. Then, as Kady picked up a teacup, she smiled.

  “Does my choice of china amuse you?” Ruth asked stiffly.

  “No, of course not,” Kady answered quickly. “I was thinking of the story Cole told me about Tarik and him stuffing all the sandwiches and cakes into their mouths at once. Was he really such a horrid little boy?”

  As Kady watched Ruth—for some reason she could not think of her as Mrs. Jordan—the older woman’s face turned pale, as though she were on the verge of fainting.

  Quickly, Kady put down her cup and reached out her hand, but Ruth pulled away. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said softly, looking at Kady in an intense way that was exactly like Cole. “My grandson must love you very much if he mentioned his friend to you. He does not usually speak of . . . of Tarik.”

  “Cole and I talk a great deal, really. He has a lot to say about everything.”

  Ruth put her hand on Kady’s. “I am an old woman, and I have not seen my grandson in many years, so please, tell me everything. From the beginning.”

  At that Kady laughed. “You would not believe me if I told you.”

  The woman’s eyes were as intense as those of the eagles Cole had saved. “Yes I would,” she said. “You must trust me that nothing you tell me will shock me or make me disbelieve you. I must know everything.”

  It was on the tip of Kady’s tongue to say that if she wanted to know more about her grandson, then she should swallow her pride and visit him. Or, better yet, live with him. With us, she corrected herself.

  But as Kady looked into the woman’s eyes, she couldn’t bring herself to give advice. Besides, who was she to judge a woman who had been through what this one had?

  Kady took a deep breath. “I was born in nineteen sixty-six.” As she said this she watched the woman to see if she was going to scoff, but when she did not so much as blink, it was as though a dam were released inside Kady. She had no idea how much she’d wanted to talk to someone about what had happened to her.

  Once Kady started, she couldn’t seem to stop, and she must have talked for hours. Ruth was the best listener in the world, graciously refilling Kady’s plate every time it was emptied and never once losing a look of interest so strong that it seemed to consume her. Once in a while she’d ask a polite question, such as, “Mavis Benson?” then smile at the answer. She had to suppress laughter when Kady told her of Juan Barela, as though she knew something Kady did not.

  It was late afternoon by the time Kady finally wound down, and when she looked at the empty dishes, she was embarrassed. “I seem to have eaten everything, and I’ve taken all your time when you must be anxious to see Cole.” She said this as though she didn’t know that Ruth Jordan had vowed never again to set foot in Legend.

  Ruth did not move but instead sat on the white damask cloth with her hands folded on her lap, her head down, her eyes hidden from Kady’s view. When she did look up at Kady, her eyes were so full of anguish that Kady instinctively pulled back.

  “I believe you,” Ruth said after a moment.

  At that Kady smiled. “I don’t see how you could. Time travel is not something that actually happens to a person. Except that this time, it did.”

  Ruth waved her hand in dismissal, rings flashing in the sun. “Your traveling through time is the easy part to believe. What is difficult to accept is believing that you met my grandson.”

  “But why is that difficult to understand? Oh, I see. It is difficult to believe that out of all the people throughout history I could have met, I came back to your grandson.” She leaned toward Ruth. “I have puzzled over that, too. Why Cole? I have never met anyone who needed me less than he does. He is rich and gorgeous, and he has women dying to love him. He is, after all, very easy to love.”

  “And did you love him?”

  Kady looked down at her hands. “Is it possible to love two men?” Her voice lowered. “Maybe even three of them?” When Ruth did not answer, Kady looked up to see that the woman was smiling.

  “Oh, yes, I can guarantee you that,” Ruth said, eyes twinkling. “I am living proof that a woman can love more than one man.”

  For a long moment, Ruth looked deep into Kady’s eyes. “You are so young, my dear. So very young and so very innocent. When I look into your eyes, I see no pain. Nothing or no one has hurt you so deeply that your soul has been damaged.”

  Frowning, Kady said, “I have lost both my parents and—”

  Ruth cut her off. “Natural deaths. No one has ever been taken from you who should not have been.”

  “If this is a competition, I hope I lose,” Kady answered, still frowning.

  Ruth didn’t say anything for a moment, then she turned and said loudly, “Joseph!” From out of the shadows of nearby trees stepped a tall man, gray hair at the temples, wearing a silver gray uniform. “The brandy, please, Joseph.”

  Within seconds a silver flask and two tiny silver cups were handed to Ruth, and she filled one, then handed it to Kady.

  “No thank you,” Kady said. “Drinking in the afternoon either puts me to sleep or gives me a headache.”

  “I want you to drink this because you are going to need it.”

  Instantly Kady was alert. “Has something happened to Cole? No, of course it hasn’t. I just left him, and no one has come to tell us anything.”

  “I want you to drink this,” Ruth said more forcefully.

  Kady leaned away from her. “What is going on? I’ve told you everything about me, so I think you owe me the courtesy of telling me whatever it is that makes you think I’ll need a shot of brandy to be able to stand the news.”

  As though for courage, Ruth took a few deep breaths before she spoke. “The year now is eighteen ninety-seven. My grandson died when he was nine years old. In eighteen seventy-three.” She looked hard at Kady. “My grandson has been dead for twenty-four years.”

  At first Kady was puzzled; then she smiled; then she began to laugh. “That’s very funny. I think that whoever told you your grandson died told you a great whopping lie. I left your grandson about three hours a
go, and I can assure you that he was very much alive.”

  For a moment Ruth sat there, the tumbler of brandy in her hand; then she downed it in one gulp. “All right, my dear, shall we go?”

  “Go where?” Kady asked.

  “Why, to visit my grandson of course. The invitation to dinner is still open, is it not?”

  Kady hesitated, not at all sure that she wanted to go anywhere.

  Standing, Ruth held out her hand for Kady. “Come, my dear, we’re going to visit my grandson.”

  Kady stood, but she stepped away from Ruth Jordan. Maybe the tragedies years ago had left the woman insane. Quite suddenly, the only thing that seemed important to Kady was to return to Cole. To Cole the man, not a nine-year-old boy.

  Turning, Kady ran past the Hanging Tree to the grassy area where she’d tied her horse. But the horse was not there.

  “Would you like the brandy now?” Ruth Jordan asked Kady softly; when Kady didn’t respond, she held it to her lips, forcing Kady to drink.

  “No,” Kady said, turning away, gasping for breath and trying her best not to look at the ruins of what had once been the thriving town of Legend, Colorado.

  Ruth, in her carriage, had caught up with Kady as she was running toward the town and defiantly, Kady had climbed into the carriage behind the driver. And as they rode into the town, the horror had begun. Only a few hours earlier Kady had ridden out of a pretty little town full of people who had waved to her, called her by name. But now there was only a ghost town full of rickety buildings that had never been solid to begin with.

  The first place they passed was the Amaryllis Mine, but now the collapsed, boarded-up old mine had a broken sign that said The 9 Mine. “But that’s the Amaryllis!” Kady exclaimed.

  “Amaryllis was the name of Cole’s little sister, who was killed on the same day he was,” Ruth said softly.

  Quietly, Ruth had her driver go down one lane after another, and Kady saw that everything in the town was different. Every street, every house, every building had changed. There were more crumbling saloons than anything else in the town, and over them were what had unmistakably been brothels. The school wasn’t the pretty building Kady had seen but a ramshackle shed. There was no sports field, no ice cream parlor. The lovely Palace Hotel was a thin-board shanty that she doubted had ever had glass in the windows. There were no boardwalks and no vacant lots, as every inch along the streets was covered with what looked to be one house of iniquity after another. To guess from what she could read from the faded signs, gambling was the major industry of Legend.

  Too stunned to speak, Kady just sat in the carriage and looked, her mind too full to comprehend what she had been told and what she was seeing.

  At the end of the town, on a road that she had known as Paradise Lane but now with a sign declaring it as Damnation Avenue, was a disintegrating stone wall that seemed to separate this section of the town from the other she had just been through. A nice hedge had been growing there a few hours before.

  “The Jordan Line,” Ruth said softly, then tapped Joseph on the shoulder and told him they would walk from here. Ruth seemed to sense that Kady was too shocked to speak, but also that she needed comfort, for when they were on the ground, Ruth took Kady’s arm tightly in hers.

  “Legend was a horrible place,” Ruth said. “Worse than you can imagine. In 1867 my husband and my only child, Cole’s father, found silver here. They were good men and were determined not to allow to happen to this place what had happened to other silver towns in Colorado. They didn’t want a cesspit of brothels and saloons; they wanted families and churches and schools.”

  “Idealists,” Kady whispered, holding on to Ruth’s arm as though she might fall without it. In front of her should have been a library, a church to her left, but instead there were a couple of makeshift buildings and open land.

  “They were very much idealists, and since they were going to be very rich men, they thought they could carry out their schemes. All they had to do was refuse to sell the land or the mines, then they’d have control.” For a moment Ruth paused, sighing as she looked about the empty, decaying town. “We should have known that nothing was going to work when the mine workers renamed the town Legend. My husband called the town Acropolis, but some wag said it ought to be called Sink Hole, Colorado, then someone else said the glory of the place was a legend in Adam Jordan’s mind and nowhere else. The name Legend stuck.”

  “It never happened,” Kady said softly, trying to comprehend what she was seeing and hearing. Somehow, she could accept that she had gone back through time, but now she was to understand that she had gone back to a dream, to a place that never existed. She had met a man who had never grown to manhood.

  Ruth was looking at her sharply. “I think you’d better sit down. I’ve had years to deal with this, but you, my dear, haven’t had time to recover or even to comprehend.”

  Leaning heavily on Ruth’s strong arm, Kady allowed herself to be led up a path that had once led to the mosque. But Kady didn’t have to ask to know that no mosque had been built in memory of Cole’s dead friend. In its place was an old house that was surely the most substantially built structure in town. It had once been a nice house with a big porch and windows and . . .

  “You lived here, didn’t you?” she asked Ruth.

  “Yes, all my family lived here together. The wall of the Jordan Line separated that part of town from this end, and Lily and I did our best to keep the children separated from that part of town. We had our own church and school, and that tiny building there we liked to call the library. Cole and I spent hours dreaming of what we’d do with Legend someday. We were going to make it a center of learning, a place people would come to from miles around to read and rest and enjoy the hot springs. He was a child who had great plans for the future.”

  “And he wanted a big house with a deep porch and furniture from San Francisco,” Kady said.

  Ruth took a deep breath. “And did he get that house?”

  Kady looked down the road to her left, the end of which she could not see. “He built a beautiful house right down there.”

  Ruth didn’t say anything for a moment, then took Kady’s arm. “Shall we go see the site?”

  Minutes later, when she and Ruth stepped around a curve in the grassy road, Kady was not surprised to see that the site of Cole’s house was a cemetery. The Legend she had known with Cole did not have a cemetery. When Ruth started to pull Kady forward into the midst of the gravestones, she dug her heels in and wouldn’t move.

  “I don’t want to see where he is buried,” Kady said. “I don’t want to think that he never lived to be thirty-three years old and that he never . . . he never . . .”

  Ruth didn’t press her. “Let’s go back to the house and talk. Kady, there is a reason for what has happened to you, and to me, and we must put our heads together and figure out what that reason is.”

  Kady could only nod as they walked back to the house that Ruth Jordan had once shared with her family. As they mounted the steps, Kady said, “Why did you laugh when I mentioned Juan Barela?”

  Ruth smiled. “He was no more an outlaw than you or I. He was a pretty little dark-haired boy whose father worked for us in the stables, but I think he and Cole had a disagreement, so Cole swore Juan was an outlaw-in-the-making. Truthfully, I think some girl chose Juan over Cole.”

  For the first time since hearing what Ruth had to tell her, Kady smiled. “And the five Ms?”

  “All of them worked in the, ah, saloons, very pretty girls, so young and innocent, and they all teased Cole and Tarik mercilessly. Poor Cole used to blush furiously whenever he saw one of them.”

  On the porch of the old house, Joseph had set up lanterns and chairs, with lap robes ready to protect the women from the cold mountain air. As they settled themselves, it was Ruth’s turn to speak and tell Kady all that she had pieced together from hearing Kady’s story.

  Within minutes, Ruth was telling Kady of Cole’s childhood friends that when Kad
y met them were adult yet were still seen through the eyes of a child. The owner of the laundry who Cole said had six daughters actually was an alcoholic who spent every penny he pulled from the mines on prostitutes and slept in the door of the laundry because it was warmer there. Hog’s Breath was a wagon driver named John Howard who loved raw onions. Ned’s father ran one of the saloons, and Cole envied him because he was allowed to drink beer.

  Ruth talked on and on, her voice light and entertaining, her stories sometimes making Kady smile, but as the sun set Kady became aware that there was an undercurrent to Ruth’s voice. Either she was leaving something out or she was building up to something dreadful.

  Just after sundown, silent, almost-invisible Joseph served them cold chicken and salad, and Kady said softly, “What is it you’re hiding from me?”

  “I have no idea . . .” Ruth began, then stopped herself when she saw Kady’s face. “I guess I don’t have time to pretend that everything is all right, do I?”

  “No, I would say not. I think it’s too late to try to hide anything from me. For whatever reason I was chosen, I now seem to be involved up to my neck.”

  When Ruth spoke again, her voice had changed. No more was she trying to be entertaining. She told of her anger and hurt when she first received Kady’s letter, for she thought it was yet another attempt to extort money from her. “But your letter was different. You spoke of Cole as though you might like to wring his neck.”

  Kady smiled. “Yes, often. He has a way about him that causes that reaction. He tells one what to do rather than asks.” Her breath caught in her throat. “Or he did tell people.”

  Ruth continued. “There have been reports for years that Legend is haunted. The spirits of the people who once lived here seem to still be alive. Or at least alive in some way.”

  “What happened to the people of Legend after Cole and his family died?”