Willow: A Novel (No Series)

by Linda Lael Miller

  * * *

  Hilda stood blubbering in Virginia City’s tiny depot, overcome by her second devastating experience in the West. “Please, Daphne,” she wailed, over the steam whistle of the approaching train. “Don’t make me go back to San Francisco all alone. What if there’s another robbery along the way? What if—”

  “Hush,” Daphne broke in, quite gently, squeezing her cousin’s plump hands in an attempt to reassure her. She was calmer, Daphne was, now that she knew it was impossible.

  Steven Gallagher could not possibly be dead.

  She loved him too much for that to be true.

  “You’ll be perfectly safe, Hilda,” she told her cousin.

  “Not when your father finds out that I left you here, I won’t!”

  Daphne sighed, too spent to argue. “Godspeed, Hilda. And please tell Papa that I’ll be all right in Virginia City.”

  “All right!” prattled Hilda, her color darkening to a mottled red. “Daphne Roberts—”

  “All aboard!” shouted the train conductor.

  Steam from the great, coal-fed engine billowed around him.

  “Good-bye,” insisted Daphne firmly, kissing her cousin’s moist cheek. “God go with you, Hilda.”

  Knowing that she would be left behind if she continued to plead, and that such pleading was entirely in vain, Hilda reluctantly boarded the outbound train, a handkerchief pressed to her face.

  Daphne watched as the train pulled out, waving long after she couldn’t see Hilda anymore. Then, slowly, she turned back toward the main part of town.

  * * *

  His sobs, deep and dry and raw, tore at Dove Triskadden like the claws of some merciless beast. What words could she offer Devlin, now that the inevitable had finally happened, now that his only son was dead?

  There were none, of course. Dove could do nothing more than hold her man in her arms and share his pain. And as great as that suffering was, she would have borne it gladly, if Devlin could have been spared.

  He pulled away from her, just far enough to brace his head in his hands, and Dove stroked his broad, heaving shoulders with tender hands and looked deeply into his tormented eyes.

  “He was wearing a hood—shot in the face,” he mourned.

  “I know, Devlin,” Dove murmured, stroking his hair. “I know.”

  “They’re glad. All those leering, gutless squirrels are glad it happened, glad Tudd shot my boy.”

  Dove knew he was referring to the townspeople. “No, Devlin,” she said. “Not the ones who matter.”

  “Evadne would have been glad. She hated Steven—”

  “Shhhh,” Dove said. She continued to soothe this man she loved more than she could have loved herself or, God forgive her, a child they conceived together. She felt the muscles in Devlin’s powerful shoulders begin to go slack as, almost against his will, he began to give up the fight. “You don’t mean that, Dev. You know you don’t. Evadne was doing the best she could to get by, just like the rest of us.”

  “I looked for my son for years. Did you know I looked for him, Dove? And he didn’t believe I cared. Steven—my own son—didn’t believe I cared.”

  “He knew, sweetheart.”

  “No! He died thinking that his own father didn’t give a damn what became of him.”

  Dove drew back on Devlin’s shoulders and he came to rest against her generous bosom like a child, broken by his loss. “Shhh,” she said softly. “Shhh.”

  * * *

  The room was shadowy and, because of the heat, beginning to smell. Willow passed Coy and Reilly, having said her fare-thee-wells to them, to stand beside the hooded figure that had once been Steven—her beautiful, errant Steven. God in heaven, what would the world be like without her dashing, chivalrous brother, without his friendship and his laughter and his love?

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  It didn’t bear facing.

  Tears misted Willow’s eyes as she took Steven’s limp hand in her own, smoothed the cold, rock-hard flesh repeatedly with her thumb. Something quickened within her, inexplicably, and she looked down at the bloodied hood that hid the dear, handsome face, then at the hand she had been holding.

  “Thunderation,” Willow whispered, and, after tossing one glance toward the outer office, where Gideon and the undertaker were waiting, she slowly unbuttoned Steven’s soiled shirt.

  * * *

  The loud crash jolted Gideon right down to his raw, aching soul. He bounded out of his desk chair and pushed past the undertaker to enter the room where the bodies had been laid out.

  Willow was lying on the floor in a faint.

  Gideon gave an involuntary cry and knelt to draw her into his arms. “Water,” he rasped, to the gaping undertaker. “Get some water.”

  She stirred against him, whimpering softly. “Steven,” she said.

  And Gideon let his face fall to her hair, weeping into its softness. It was over now, it was over. And he had lost her forever.

  “Marshal? Here’s the water.”

  Gideon sniffled, lifted his head, then took the dipper with a shaking hand. “Willow?” he nudged her lips softly with the brimming cup. Then, pleading, “Willow!”

  She opened her marvelous golden-brown eyes slowly and smiled, just as though her world hadn’t ended. As though she didn’t hold her husband personally responsible for the death of all three of her brothers.

  “Gideon,” she said, as though surprised to see him. Or was she simply surprised that he was showing her even a modicum of kindness?

  Shame gnawed at him.

  “Drink this,” he urged, in a gruff voice, still holding the ladle to her lips.

  Her head cradled in the crook of his arm, Willow sipped the cold water obediently, as if to indulge him. “C-could we go home now, please?” she asked in a voice more like that of a child than a woman.

  Knowing that his face was wet with tears and not caring, Gideon nodded.

  She blinked. “Will you hold me, Gideon, until I sleep?”

  A sob ached in Gideon’s throat. “Yes,” he said, and then he set the dipper aside and stood up, lifting Willow in his arms.

  The buggy ride back to their house, the house Gideon had bought with such high and unfounded hopes, was a quiet one, and it seemed endless to him. Willow, perched beside him, her back straight and her shoulders rigid, stared into the distance, her eyes dry.

  Once they’d arrived at home, she allowed Gideon to carry her inside, up the stairs, into their bedroom. Such a short time before, they had made love there, with all the restraint of savages, but now they simply lay together, holding on, despairing.

  They slept finally, and Gideon was swept up in a howling nightmare that became real when he awakened to the thick darkness of the night.

  Willow was gone.

  14

  At first, Gideon thought that Willow had left him, once and for all. After a few sleep-drugged seconds of helpless grief, however, he heard the distant, tinkling chimes of a music box.

  The room was black-velvet dark, but Gideon did not pause to light a lamp; instead, he groped for his trousers, wriggled into them, and made his way out into the hallway. The sprightly tune of the music box drew him toward the steep rear stairway leading down into the kitchen.

  Willow sat alone in a pool of platinum moonlight, her toasted-gold hair trailing down over her back and shoulders, a strange half smile curving her lips. Gideon knew a moment of paralyzing, unaccountable fear, and he stood very still, waiting for the feeling to pass, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

  After a few seconds, he could see quite clearly. Willow wore a white nightgown, and the hem was darkened by dampness. She had been outside, walking in the deep, chill grass, wandering.

  Unsafe. Vulnerable to a world where mercy was often in short supply.

  Gideon ached to speak to his wife, to touch her and comfort her, but he was afraid. There was an ethereal look about Willow, as though she might dissipate into a shimmering fog if he startled her.

>   His attention caught on the music box. It was not the one he had bought for her but another that he had never seen before. Atop its round silver base, a tiny lady turned, her satin dress imprisoning stray beams of moonlight. Distractedly, Gideon wished that he had given her his gifts—the mechanical monkey and the piano music box—but they were still wrapped in their brown parcel and tucked beneath the seat of his buggy.

  Cautiously, Gideon crept back up the stairs. At the top, in the shadowy hallway, he braced both arms against the wall and buried his face in them, breathing deeply, raggedly. Then, resolute, he found a lamp, lit it, and made as much noise as he possibly could on his way back down the steps.

  “Couldn’t you sleep?” he asked, with forced cheer, when he reached the kitchen again.

  Willow smiled, not even looking up from the music box. “Steven gave me this,” she said dreamily. “Don’t you think it’s lovely?”

  Gideon knew a brief, quiet terror, then quickly recovered himself. “Yes,” he agreed, frightened, setting down the lamp and making a great clatter with the lids of the cook stove. “When was that, Willow?”

  “Just after I came to live with my father,” she said, and it was as though tragedy had not touched her this day or any other. She seemed spellbound, almost bewitched, sitting there in the moonlight, smiling.

  Gideon lit a fire in the stove and then crossed the room to ladle water from a bucket into the coffeepot. “I’ll bet you were scared,” he prompted carefully. “Leaving everyone you knew and going to live with the judge and my mother, I mean.”

  Still, Willow did not look at him; he would have felt it if she had. “I was frightened at first, but Steven promised me everything would be all right, and Maria was with me. Your mother tried to make Maria go away, you know, but she wouldn’t.”

  His throat ached. “My mother was a trial to you, wasn’t she, Willow?”

  Willow nodded as Gideon passed her to set the pot back on the stove and spoon coffee grounds into the basket. “I was a trial to her, too, though. Every time Evadne looked at me, she must have seen Chastity.”

  Gideon sighed and the lid of the coffeepot clattered as he replaced it. “Yes,” he said. And he stood that small distance from the woman he loved and wished that she would look up from that blasted music box, that she would spring at him or call him names as she had earlier. That would have been so much better than this odd enchantment that seemed to be upon her now.

  “Sit down,” she said, finally, as though he were a neighbor come to tea and not a man she had loved into insanity in the seat of a buggy, in the lush depths of the grass, in the empty bed upstairs.

  Gideon sat wishing that she would look at him instead of through him. “You’ve been outside,” he ventured, after a long, long time.

  The coffee boiled over, making a hissing, snapping sound on the iron stove top. “Yes,” she answered as he bounded out of his chair and grasped the handle of the coffeepot. “I was.”

  The metal seared Gideon’s hand, and he gasped in pain and muttered a curse.

  Willow’s spell was immediately broken; she bounded out of her chair, insisting that he let her look at his burn. “Thunderation,” she said, sounding almost like her old self, and then she ushered him across the room to the water bucket and plunged his hand into it.

  The other muscles in Gideon’s body, tensed at the moment of the burn, went slack with relief. Even greater, though, was the relief that he had been able to draw a response from Willow.

  “I love you,” he told her.

  She stared up at him, as though surprised. “What did you say?”

  Gideon made to lift his hand out of the water and it stung as though set afire. Quickly, he submerged it again. “I said I love you,” he admitted.

  “Oh,” Willow replied, and that frightening, vacuous look was back in her eyes.

  Stung, Gideon took the offensive. “What were you doing outside, in the middle of the night?”

  “I went to the outhouse, Gideon Marshall,” Willow answered, with just a spark of the old spirit. “Is that all right with you?”

  Gideon knew that she was lying through those flawless white teeth, but he didn’t challenge her; he was too glad to see that there was still some fight in her. He only prayed that it would be enough to see her through the grim and difficult days to come.

  * * *

  The day of Steven’s funeral was picnic bright. All during the graveside service, his own grief a heavy ache within him, Devlin watched his daughter and worried.

  Willow was a brave young woman, he knew that. But there was something disquieting about the way she stood so stolidly beside Gideon—the man she had spat at and called “Judas” only a few days before—her face placidly void of all expression.

  Feeling as though he might have collapsed if Dove Triskadden hadn’t been there to hold him up, Devlin tried to shake off his own fathomless sorrow long enough to consider what it was about Willow’s firm composure that bothered him. Why wasn’t she weeping, like Daphne was? Had she accepted the fact that Steven was gone forever, or was she pretending that her brother still rode somewhere in the hills, still stopped trains and gambled with Shoshone braves?

  When the graveside service ended at last, it took all the strength Devlin Gallagher had just to leave the churchyard and cross the road to his own house. There, Maria, tearful and repeatedly crossing herself, had set out a mourners’ repast.

  She had not attended the funeral.

  The food Maria had spent the morning preparing was ignored by everyone except Willow, who went straight to the table, almost as soon as she entered the house, and began filling her plate. Devlin caught Gideon’s eye and beckoned him with a toss of his head.

  They entered the study together, Devlin closing the double doors behind them, Gideon helping himself to a shot glass full of whiskey from the decanter at the side table.

  “Willow hasn’t cried once,” Gideon said hoarsely, before Devlin could summon the strength to ask. “I don’t think she believes he’s really gone.”

  “My God,” breathed the judge, filling a glass of his own, gazing bleakly into its depths before tossing back the contents. “What has she said?”

  “Nothing,” Gideon ground out, his gaze distant. “Before we came to town this morning, Willow was setting bread to rise and humming as though none of this had happened.”

  “It isn’t healthy,” fretted the judge. His own anguish had torn him, pummeled him, humbled him, but it was already easing up—a little.

  “I know. I’ve tried to talk to her, but if I mention Steven’s death, she changes the subject. Last time I brought it up, she asked me if we could plant cherry trees in the front yard next spring.”

  Devlin sighed and set his drink down with a thump.

  “She-she wanders, too,” Gideon went on.

  “What do you mean, she wanders?” snapped Devlin, gruff in his concern.

  Gideon’s broad shoulders moved in a weary shrug. “Almost every night, I wake up to find that she’s gone off somewhere. Sometimes, she sits in the parlor and plays the piano, but once I found her halfway between our house and the pond.”

  “You must have asked where she’d been. What did Willow say when you questioned her?”

  “She told me she’d been to the outhouse.”

  Devlin poured another drink. He would have welcomed intoxication, but it didn’t come. No matter how much whiskey he drank, the hurt didn’t leave him. “People handle grief in a lot of different ways, but there’s something about this that unnerves me. It isn’t like Willow; the way she behaved when Steven and the boys were brought in was more typical.”

  “I know,” agreed Gideon, remembering. Longing for that other Willow, the one he’d found so unpredictable, so impossible to handle. “Did you hear what she did to the photographer’s camera?”

  Devlin managed a parody of a grin. It was, Gideon thought, the saddest expression he had ever seen on a human face.

  “Yes. And I’d have done that myself
if I’d been there. Destroyed that camera, I mean. Damned buzzard, wanting pictures, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s a custom I’ve never understood,” Gideon confessed. He hesitated, then finally went on. “Photographing corpses, displaying them like some kind of warning.” He paused, cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea to take Willow away somewhere, just for a while. We could go back to San Francisco—maybe even take a ship for Europe or the Far East.”

  The prospect of losing Willow swept through Devlin’s grief-hollowed soul like a bitter wind. “San Francisco,” he mourned. “The Far East?”

  “Just for a change of scene,” Gideon put in quickly. “We’d be gone a year and a half, at the most.”

  The judge shook his head. It seemed an incomprehensible length of time, a year and a half.

  And yet, if Willow would benefit . . .

  “Do you think it would help her? Traveling to foreign places, I mean? She’s always wanted to see the world, but . . .”

  Gideon lowered his head. “To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t even know if Willow would agree to leave Virginia City. But I’ve got to do something to reach her—she’s drifting away, Devlin. Like a ship that’s come unmoored.”

  Before the judge could respond to that, a soft knock sounded at the study doors. At Devlin’s gruff invitation, Maria entered.

  “There is a telegraph message for Señor Marshall,” she said, approaching Gideon, extending a folded sheet of cheap paper.

  His hand trembled as he accepted it.

  Devlin watched with distracted interest as Gideon scanned the message, wondering what it contained. In the final analysis, he didn’t give a damn.

  Steven was dead and Willow was probably going to go away, maybe never to return. Desolate, Devlin turned his back and folded his arms across his chest.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe you want to go riding, now of all times!” cried Daphne, her mourner’s handkerchief poised within inches of her puffy, reddened eyes. She was all in black, and it made a startling contrast to her white face. She watched in stricken amazement as her friend turned from the window of her bedroom, looking determined. “Willow Marshall, your brother is dead. Can you grasp that? We saw Steven buried today, with our own eyes, and there’s a wake going on in this house.”