Willow: A Novel (No Series)

by Linda Lael Miller

  Devlin frowned as Charlie Hennings, the blacksmith, threw open the door and erupted into the office. “What the devil?”

  Charlie was pale, but excitement glimmered in his eyes, too. “He got ’em,” he said, sparing a brief glance for Willow and then stepping back onto the threshold at the expression on her father’s face. “By God, Tudd got ’em!”

  Willow felt as if the floor had disappeared from beneath her; she was in free fall.

  “Who, damnit?” demanded the judge hoarsely, though he must surely have known the horrible answer as well as Willow did.

  “Your boy and them two what rode with him, that’s who,” Charlie said, and then he must have thought better of staying, because he turned and fled back down the stairs.

  Devlin bolted after him, only to pause in the open doorway. “Willow?” he rasped, remembering, looking back at her. “Are you all right?”

  Willow sat upright in her chair, breathing deeply. She had known this day, this moment, would come, but knowing had not prepared her for the shock of it. The room shifted and swayed around her and the tears clustering in her throat and spilling down her face were scalding hot. She dismissed her father with a motion of one hand.

  He understood and clattered away from her.

  Willow remained still, certain that if she moved a single muscle, she would fall to pieces—pieces that would not ever fit together again.

  She heard nothing, she saw nothing beyond the images spinning at the forefront of her mind. Hand over hand, she made her way from one heartbeat to the next.

  She sensed Gideon’s presence long before he spoke to her. He took her hand. “Willow?” he whispered. “Sweetheart?”

  A tremor went through Willow. She didn’t look directly at Gideon, though she knew he was crouching in front of her chair, their fingers interlaced.

  “Steven?” she asked dully, barely breathing the name.

  “I’m sorry,” Gideon said. “He’s dead, Willow. So are the others.”

  Willow swallowed hard, still unable to meet Gideon’s gaze, knowing that if she did, she would probably tumble head over heels into helpless grief.

  “Coy and Reilly,” she said. “Their names were Coy and Reilly Forbes. My half brothers.”

  “Let me take you home,” Gideon said, straightening, but never letting go of her hand. Instead, he pulled her up with him, gathered her close against his chest. She could feel his heart beating, strong and true.

  But Steven’s heart, Coy’s and Reilly’s—they were forever stilled.

  Suddenly, Willow’s control splintered. She tore herself from Gideon’s arms, ran for the door, started down the steps, and nearly fell because she couldn’t see for her tears.

  Gideon was close behind, but he didn’t try to stop her.

  A hot breeze blew, and dust devils whirled along the street. A crowd had gathered, and yet the silence was profound, and it was dense, and it thudded against Willow from all sides, like it would smother her.

  Three horses stood wearily at the hitching post in front of the jailhouse. And over their saddles lay the lifeless bodies of Coy, Reilly—and Steven.

  Devlin stood with his forehead resting against the side of Steven’s horse, one hand on his son’s back. Sickness burned in Willow’s throat as she forced her way past the spectators to reach her father’s side.

  “The hood,” Judge Gallagher choked out, when he’d straightened again, possibly for Willow’s sake, tears slipping down his face as he took in the cloth bag that covered Steven’s head.

  Vancel Tudd looked quietly apologetic. “I’m right sorry about that, Judge. Right sorry. Bullet hit him right between the eyes, though, and it seemed the only decent thing to do; you wouldn’t want to see . . .”

  Willow cried out and started toward Steven’s body, only to be restrained from behind. Gideon’s arms were like steel bands around her waist and she didn’t have the strength or the spirit to break free.

  “No,” he whispered into her hair, and the sound was raw and hoarse, like a sob. “No, Willow, don’t. It’s over. Please—let me take you home. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  “Where’d ya hit this one?” a drifter asked Vancel Tudd, pointing to Coy as though he were a game animal instead of a human being.

  “Through the heart,” said Tudd, chewing on his tobacco. “Same with the other ’un.”

  “Fine shootin’,” remarked another man, and something broke within Willow, something that gave her the impetus she needed to tear herself loose from Gideon’s grasp.

  “You vultures!” she screamed, to the town in general. “You filthy vultures! They never hurt any of you—the railroad wanted them alive.”

  Gently, Gideon caught her elbow, turned her. His face was ravaged. “Willow, please, don’t. Don’t do this to yourself.”

  Willow remembered then that this man—God, he seemed a total stranger now, for all their intimacies—had taken up the badge, had sworn to find Steven, and all for his blasted railroad. She began to kick and claw, screaming hysterically.

  And Gideon made no move to defend himself. He just looked at her, his broken soul reflected in his eyes, enduring the assault in silence. It was the judge who finally restrained her.

  From somewhere in the pulsing fog of horror and utter desolation surrounding Willow in those moments, Vancel Tudd said, “I reckon I don’t qualify for that double bounty you offered, Marshal.”

  Double bounty? Willow struggled in her father’s firm embrace, wanting to attack Gideon again, wanting to kill him. When the judge wouldn’t let her go, she spat at her husband’s feet and gasped, “I’ll see you in hell for this, Gideon Marshall!”

  Gideon’s face contorted; he extended one hand and muttered her name.

  “Not now,” interceded the judge coldly, and even though Willow could not see her father’s face, she knew that his gaze, like her own, was fixed on Gideon. “We’ll look after our own.”

  Men were lifting the three bodies from the backs of the horses and carrying them away. And as Devlin tried to guide Willow toward home, she glared back at Gideon, and spat again, cursing the man with her eyes and her heart and her whole being. “Judas!” she cried in parting.

  * * *

  Gideon knew that Willow, his wife, was there, in that house. A primitive part of him wanted to rip the place apart, wall by wall, with his bare hands, to uncover her and gather her to him and comfort her.

  Another, wiser part counseled him to keep his distance, leave well enough alone, at least for now. Willow was in her room upstairs and, as distraught as she was, she was safe there.

  So he concentrated on Daphne, who sat trembling and white as the first snow of winter, on a settee in the Gallaghers’ seldom-used parlor. Maria hovered nearby, weeping silent tears and wringing her hands.

  She started for the stairs, stopped, stood in the parlor doorway again.

  “No!” cried Daphne, looking small and broken, like a bird with an injured wing. “No, it can’t be true, Gideon! You’re lying to me. You’re only saying that Steven is dead because you want me to go home. You’re—”

  “Steven is dead, Daphne,” Gideon insisted, casting one glance at a very distraught Hilda, who sat straight-backed beside Daphne, one arm around her cousin’s waist, trying to be strong. “There’s nothing you can do to change that. Get your belongings together, and I’ll take you and your cousin to the depot. You can still catch the afternoon stage to Helena if you hurry, and catch a train in the morning. You belong in San Francisco, not here.”

  Hilda, who could have made a mud fence look good, especially with her eyes swollen from sympathetic weeping and all the color gone from her face, nodded in helpless agreement.

  But Daphne wasn’t so inclined to be reasonable.

  “No,” she objected, shaking her head. “I’m supposed to meet Steven tonight.”

  Gideon took her shoulders in his hands. “Steven is dead,” he said, yet again. He’d seen the body and yet he would have had to admit, if pressed, that he,
too, found it hard to believe.

  He had encountered Steven only briefly, in the peddler’s disguise, but he remembered how vibrant Willow’s brother had been—like he was just a shade more alive than everybody else.

  At Daphne’s statement—she still expected to meet Steven—Hilda began to wail, a heartrending sound, reminding Gideon of an animal in pain.

  “Daphne,” Gideon said.

  “Leave me!” Daphne cried, slapping away his hands when he reached for her. “I won’t listen to your lies! Steven Gallagher loves me, and he is not dead.”

  “Hilda,” Gideon said, encircling Daphne with both arms, holding her by force as she struggled, “get the trunks ready, please.”

  Hilda hurried away and Daphne gave one cry of pain and protest and then seemed to collapse against Gideon’s chest, sobbing wretchedly. It was horrible to hear. He held her, though, until the first storm of grief had passed.

  * * *

  Willow’s head ached and there seemed to be a hollow place where her soul had been. The bright summer sun, always such a joy to her, seemed garish now. It was midafternoon, and Steven and Coy and Reilly had been dead for one full day.

  She entered the undertaker’s establishment with her chin held high.

  “I would like to view the bodies,” she said, dry-eyed and empty.

  The undertaker was a heavy, balding man, and the front of his shirt was sweat stained. “Right down the street, Mrs. Marshall,” he said, shuffling papers on his desk and keeping his eyes averted.

  “Down the street? What?”

  “They was outlaws, ma’am,” the mortician reminded her, in tones that were at once whiny and dismissive. “You wanna see them, that’s just fine. They’re in front of your husband’s office.”

  Sick, Willow turned on her heel and hurried back outside into the cruel sunshine and the breeze that failed to comfort. She had forgotten, in her shock, the gruesome custom of putting the bodies of transgressors on public display.

  The wages of sin, she thought.

  Sure enough, Steven, Coy, and Reilly were strapped to boards and propped up on the wooden sidewalk outside the marshal’s office—Gideon’s office—facing the street. Coy and Reilly, whose heads had not been covered, stared blankly into eternity, their faces bloated and grayish blue.

  Heedless of the bustling photographer who was setting up his huge box camera a few feet away, Willow calmly approached her dead brothers. Tenderly, she reached up and closed Coy’s eyes, and then Reilly’s.

  She had not been close to them, these children her mother had borne Jay Forbes, between Steven’s birth and Willow’s own. But they had no one else in the world to mourn them; she and Steven had been their only kin.

  They would have followed him anywhere—and here was the proof.

  Both of them were dead.

  “Willow?”

  Like a sleepwalker, Willow turned to see who had spoken to her. Norville Pickering stood at her elbow, looking like the newspaper editor he was, his pencil and notepad in hand, his face shaded by the green visor he wore.

  “Are you writing everything down for your father’s newspaper, Norville?” she asked, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “Have you made space in this week’s edition for an accounting of their sins—Steven’s and Coy’s and Reilly’s?”

  Norville sighed and reached tentatively for her arm but drew back at the look of warning the motion brought. “I thought your father took you home,” he offered miserably, his Adam’s apple jumping up and down in his throat.

  Was it possible that he felt sorry for her? It would have been easier somehow, Willow thought bleakly, if he’d gloated instead of showing sympathy.

  “He did,” answered Willow, in that same lifeless voice and with a lift of her chin. “But that was yesterday. Obviously I didn’t stay put.”

  “Let me take you back there now, please? You don’t belong here, you shouldn’t see—”

  “What shouldn’t I see, Mr. Pickering? That the wages of sin is death?” She paused, the wind ruffling her skirts, and then went on. “Are you going to write about me, my deepest personal thoughts—especially in my sorrow? After all, they’ll every single one, the people of this dreadful town, come to stare at the bodies and shake their heads and say that God is not mocked.”

  “Willow!” rasped Norville. “Please—let me take you home. Right now.”

  Gideon had said virtually the same thing the day before.

  Why did everyone seem to think that going home was the answer?

  Would that undo her loss, her father’s loss? And Daphne’s?

  “Step aside!” grumbled the traveling photographer, a fat man sweating in a too-tight suit, from the dusty street. “I have pictures to take, and the light will be gone pretty soon.”

  Willow whirled on the man, suddenly alive again, and crackling like a bolt of lightning. She lunged toward the rotund stranger and overturned his camera, a great black box supported by a wooden tripod, stomping on the lens with one foot and then the other, knowing enormous, broken satisfaction as the apparatus caved in.

  “Stop that,” bellowed the photographer. “Damnit, that’s an expensive piece of equipment!”

  Willow ground her heel into the last gleaming shards of the lens. The glass made a crunching sound and then spread into a veined web.

  And changed nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Steven was still gone.

  Coy and Reilly, too. Any chance they’d had of turning their lives around, of marrying and having children and living like decent men, was lost for good. And they’d had that in them, her stepbrothers, the capacity to change.

  At a word from Steven, they would have forsworn their outlaw ways.

  Now, they would never get that chance.

  Livid over the destruction of his equipment, the portly photographer made a grab for Willow, only to be forestalled by a most unlikely champion—Norville Pickering. Trying to hold back the furious daguerreotypist and keep Willow away from the camera at the same time, he bellowed, “For God’s sake, somebody go fetch Judge Gallagher or the marshal!”

  “Get that little she-cat off my camera!” screamed the photographer.

  Willow bunched her skirts in both hands and jumped up and down on the already shattered black box in much the same way she’d jumped on beds as a child.

  “That cost a hundred dollars!” came the outraged protest.

  Suddenly, one strong arm encircled Willow’s waist, held her tight against a rock-hard hip. She kicked and struggled and shrieked, but to no avail. This time, Gideon wasn’t going to let down his guard for so much as a moment.

  His narrowed eyes were fixed on Norville and the nearly apoplectic man he was trying to restrain. “I’ll pay for the camera,” he said evenly.

  “Well and good!” roared the photographer. “But what about my pictures of the Gallagher gang? How the hell am I supposed to get my goddamned pictures?”

  A crowd had gathered by this time; probably, the townspeople had been watching the drama unfold for several minutes already, but Willow hadn’t noticed them until now.

  Without even glancing at the wife he was holding prisoner with one arm, Gideon answered coldly, “I guess you’re just out of luck this time.” His gaze sliced to the two men who stood nearest. “Get these bodies in off the street. Now.”

  “But, Marshal, we always—”

  “Get them in,” Gideon ordered.

  Looking petulant, the men moved to do as they were bid, and the mob of onlookers began to disperse. Norville bent to pick up his spectacles, which had fallen off during the scuffle, and the photographer blustered, “I’ll be by for that hundred dollars, Marshal!”

  “Fine,” answered Gideon, and the thwarted picture taker went off, grumbling, toward the nearest saloon.

  “Let me go!” Willow finally managed to sputter. Her feet were still well off the ground, and Gideon’s arm felt like a giant steel manacle circling her waist.

  Gideon held her easily,
seemingly paying her no attention at all. “Norville?”

  Norville straightened, his spectacles crooked on his nose. He blinked several times. “Yes?”

  “Thank you,” Gideon said. “Thank you for looking after my wife.”

  Norville glanced at Willow’s flushed, furious face and smiled sadly. “You’re welcome, Marshal,” he said, and then, embarrassed, he turned and sprinted back toward the newspaper office.

  “Take your hands off me, Gideon Marshall,” Willow seethed.

  Coldly obliging, Gideon released his hold, and Willow nearly collapsed, her legs were so bloodless, so weak.

  “Go home, Willow,” Gideon said as she turned on him.

  “Don’t you tell me what to do, you, you wretched, bloodthirsty . . .”

  Gideon’s eyes never left Willow’s face, but his hand rose to the star-shaped badge on his coat and deftly unpinned it. “You will go home,” he bit out, “and you will stay there, Mrs. Marshall, until I come for you.”

  “The hell I will!”

  “The hell you won’t. Move your bustle, my dear, before I forget everything you’ve been through today, haul you into my office, and turn you across my knee!”

  Something in Gideon’s eyes gave Willow pause, and she bit down on the rebellious words that sprang to her lips. “My brothers are dead,” she said woodenly, without intending to.

  “Yes,” Gideon replied, his gaze still locked with hers.

  Neither one moved, or spoke, for a long moment.

  Then Willow said, “T-thank you for making those men take them inside, Gideon. It isn’t right, everybody looking at them.”

  Gideon didn’t respond. He just nodded. But everything he felt—the despair, the regret, the pity Willow didn’t want—was in his eyes.

  “I want to see my brothers.” Willow threw the words into the silence and they seemed to crackle in the weighted air, with its strong scent of blood and death and, already, decay. “Please. Just once, before—before they’re buried.”

  He extended one hand. “All right,” he said, and then he ushered Willow inside his office, where Steven, Coy, and Reilly lay now on the floor of the marshal’s office. They were still strapped to their wooden slabs.