by Lori Austin
CHAPTER 26
You wanna hand that over?” The marshal indicated Annabeth’s gun with a tilt of his head.
“No,” Annabeth said.
The members of the posse murmured; their horses shifted, revealing their unease. They were townsfolk, not lawmen, and they weren’t sure what to do.
“Beth,” Ethan murmured.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t hand it over. Just that I didn’t want to.”
If things went badly—and considering the posse, she wasn’t sure how things wouldn’t—she’d do whatever she had to do to save Ethan. Without her pistol, that was going to be more difficult than she liked, but she didn’t see any way to keep it.
Annabeth reached for her Colt.
“Easy,” the marshal cautioned, laying a hand on his own weapon.
Did he really think she’d risk a shoot-out on the prairie with Ethan in the way? The posse might be made up of amateurs, but even Sadie would be able to hit them out here where the only cover was the town of Freedom, which lay too far away.
She tossed the gun to the ground, and a young man she’d never seen before, which only made him the same as the rest of the group, dismounted, snatched up the Colt, and carried it to the marshal.
“You’re gonna come back with us; then we’ll talk.” Eversleigh urged his horse toward Freedom.
Annabeth considered kicking their mount into a run, but that would leave Ethan exposed to over half a dozen guns. She couldn’t do it. Then the posse surrounded them, and the opportunity was lost.
Ethan’s breath brushed her ear. “You did not kill Cora.”
“How would you know?” she whispered.
“Because I did.”
“Stop saying that!” She glanced between the men on their right and those on the left. No one was close enough to hear them over the movements of the horses.
“I’ll say whatever I have to say to keep you safe,” he murmured.
“So will I.”
They remained silent the rest of the way to town. The marshal stopped in front of the building marked SHERRIF, dismounted and indicated they do the same. Annabeth glanced longingly at the building labeled DOCTER. Would she ever step foot in it again?
The posse dispersed, taking Ethan’s horse with them. Eversleigh swept his hand in an exaggerated flourish toward the door.
“Made yourself right at home, I see.” Annabeth turned the knob and walked in.
Ethan followed, Eversleigh on his heels. “I couldn’t leave with people dying all over the place.”
“Sure you could.” Annabeth took the chair in front of the desk. Ethan stood behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders.
The marshal leaned against the desk, boots only inches from Annabeth’s own. His gaze touched on Ethan’s hands, then Annabeth’s face. He removed his hat, tossed it onto the desktop, lifted a brow. “I’ll assume, Doctor, that you’ve remembered . . .” He paused, waiting.
“I have,” Ethan agreed.
“Where have you been?”
“We were on the hill . . .” Annabeth’s quick glance at the lawman revealed he knew what else was there. “Someone shot at us again.”
Eversleigh frowned. “Did you see who it was?”
“Didn’t wait for them to come out of the high grass; just got on the horse and left. How about you? Didn’t anyone hear shots?”
“Shots on the prairie?” He shrugged. “Hunters. Outlaws. Indians. No one goes looking. Maybe if you’d come back right away, we might have found something. Why didn’t you?”
“Because, apparently, I murdered Cora Lewis,” Annabeth muttered at the same time Ethan blurted, “Twister. Came between us and Freedom.”
“We were lucky it missed town,” the marshal said. “But that was days ago. Pert near a week.”
“We were lost.”
Eversleigh snorted. “Gossip around town is that Mrs. Lewis was in a family way.” Neither Annabeth nor Ethan said a word. “Did that come as a shock to you, Mrs. Walsh?”
“Why would it?”
“As your husband is rumored to be the father, I’d say it might.”
“Rumors? Gossip? I don’t listen to either one.”
“Then why were you and Mrs. Lewis arguing on the street? Why did she say you’d struck her?”
“Because we were and I did.”
“Why?” the marshal persisted.
“I don’t like her.”
“Did you dislike her enough to kill her?”
“She didn’t do anything,” Ethan said. “It was me.”
Annabeth lost patience. “I filed for divorce. You can check with Pryce Mortimer. There was no reason for Ethan to kill her. I was going to free him so he could have everything he wanted.”
Ethan’s sigh brushed the top of her head. She could have sworn he whispered her name in a voice that made her ache.
“But what if what he wanted, Mrs. Walsh, was you and not her?”
Annabeth frowned. “He didn’t kill her. I did.”
“If you were divorcing him so he could be with her, why would you?”
“She didn’t.” Ethan lifted his hands from Annabeth’s shoulders. She had to clench her own to keep from snatching them back. “I did.”
“You expect me to believe that you—a man described by everyone as a healer, the saver of lives and not the taker of them—killed both the mother of your child and that child?”
“There was no child.”
Eversleigh’s expression sharpened. “What’s that?”
“Cora lied.”
“Ethan,” Annabeth murmured. Both men ignored her.
“How do you know?” Eversleigh asked.
“I examined her. I’ve done the same for many women who were with child. She wasn’t.”
“So the woman was trying to ruin you.” The marshal’s eyes narrowed. “I suspect that made you angry.”
“He examined her days before she turned up dead,” Annabeth interjected. “If he was going to kill her in a rage, he’d have done it then.”
“When he examined her, he didn’t remember who she was,” Eversleigh pointed out.
Hell.
“Once I remembered,” Ethan murmured, “I wasn’t happy.”
“Hush,” Annabeth said. “I wasn’t very happy when I found out, either. I was furious.”
“You didn’t find out until I told you,” Ethan snapped. “Out on the prairie. After I’d already killed her.”
“I saw her alive before we left town,” Annabeth returned. “We were arguing in plain view of dozens of others. You were already on the hill. I killed her, came to you, and we ran.”
“I thought you ran because someone was shooting at you,” the marshal murmured.
“I lied.” Annabeth cleared her throat before the cough broke free. Ever since they’d started discussing this, her throat had tickled so badly, it hurt.
Eversleigh straightened away from the desk, looming over Annabeth. Ethan made a movement as if he would come around the chair and step between the two of them, so she stood, sweeping out her arms, a barrier to keep Ethan back.
“It wasn’t him,” she repeated. “It was me.”
“She lies.” Ethan shoved past. “She just admitted as much. And about this she definitely did, since I killed Cora Lewis.”
“Enough,” Eversleigh snapped. “I’ll solve this argument. How did she die?”
Annabeth glanced to her right, where Ethan hovered. His forehead creased, and he glanced at her. “Shot,” he said, at the same time she chose, “Strangled.”
They turned to the marshal. His gaze narrowed on Ethan. “Shot where?”
Damn! She should have picked shot, but strangled—considering Cora Lewis—was so damn appealing.
“In the . . .” Ethan drew out the words, narrowing his own gaze on the marshal. But Eversleigh was smart. He gave away nothing, merely waited for Ethan to finish. “Head?” Ethan frowned. “Um, chest. Neck?”
“Neither one of you did it.”
R
elief flowed through Annabeth, and she reached for Ethan’s hand just as he reached for hers. Their fingers tangled; their palms met, held.
“You rode out because someone shot at you, stayed away because of the storm, and then didn’t come back because you were lost. That about right?”
“Yes.” Annabeth squeezed Ethan’s hand. It would not do for the marshal, or anyone else, to discover Ethan’s penchant for laudanum. Lord knew what he’d be accused of then.
“Convenient that you would disappear when the woman who’s made your life hell is killed.”
“I thought we’d just established that neither one of us did it.”
“If you were smart, you’d work together. Spy and a . . .” He shrugged. “Spy. You could lie right to my face, and I’d probably never know.”
He was right, but Annabeth wasn’t going to say so.
“You might purposely tell me the wrong thing, confuse the issue.”
“We might,” Ethan agreed. “However, being a spy and a . . . spy, as well as a physician and a nurse, we certainly wouldn’t kill anyone in a way that could be construed as murder. If we were smart.”
Eversleigh lifted a brow. “Go on.”
“If I wanted to kill someone, there are ways to do it that wouldn’t get me hung.”
“For instance?”
“Don’t answer that,” Annabeth snapped. The marshal thought they were shifty; he was the same. “How did she die?”
Eversleigh contemplated Annabeth for several seconds, then stepped behind the desk. He pulled a rifle from beneath. “Ever seen this?”
“May I?” Ethan held out his hand.
The marshal passed over the weapon, and Ethan lifted it to his shoulder. “This is a sniper rifle.”
Annabeth frowned. Had Fedya left it behind? That didn’t sound like Fedya. She peered at the rifle more closely.
“That’s an Enfield,” she said, the weapon of choice for most Union sharpshooters. However, the Union’s most dangerous sniper had used a Confederate rifle—a Whitworth, the best of the best, no doubt stolen off one of his victims.
“Where’d you find it?” Ethan asked.
“Come with me.”
When they got back onto the street, folks scurried out of their way as they followed the marshal to Lewis’s Sewing and Sundry. No one greeted them; everyone stared. Annabeth was happy to duck inside, though she could still feel the brush of curious gazes through the window.
Eversleigh strode behind the counter and pointed beneath. “I think it was right about here.”
“Here?” Ethan echoed.
“Next to some buttons.”
“Walking around town with an Enfield would be suspicious,” Annabeth murmured.
“Mrs. Lewis wasn’t shot,” Eversleigh said. “She was stabbed.”
“Then why did you show us the rifle?”
“I thought you might recognize it.”
Annabeth didn’t understand what difference it could make if they’d seen it or not. Cora hadn’t been shot.
“Woman alone,” the marshal mussed, “with a business. If she hadn’t had a weapon beneath the countertop, I’d have wondered. But there was the little matter of a sniper rifle under this counter and the shot through your upstairs window.”
“Cora loved Ethan,” Annabeth said.
“Enough to lie to keep him,” Eversleigh agreed. “Enough to kill for the same?”
“It makes no sense for her to kill him,” Annabeth insisted.
“She wasn’t trying to kill him, Mrs. Walsh. She was trying to kill you.”
“Well,” Annabeth said, “that makes sense.”
Ethan rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t see the connection between a rifle under the counter to a shot through my window. If there were, the majority of the town would be suspect.”
“The majority of the town wasn’t carrying your child.”
“Neither was she.”
“I see your point,” the marshal allowed. “And I wouldn’t have thought any more about it except for her husband.”
“What husband?” Annabeth asked.
“Mrs. Lewis? Doesn’t that mean there was once a mister?”
“Not necessarily.” Annabeth spread her hands. “People come West for a lot of reasons. Change their names, change their pasts, invent a husband.”
“She didn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I looked into it.”
“Why?” Ethan asked. “How?”
“It’s my job.” The single sentence answered both questions; nevertheless, the marshal elaborated. “I’ve discovered that the motive for a murder can often be found in a person’s past.” He lifted a brow in Annabeth’s direction. “Mrs. Cantrell informed me that Cora Lewis hailed from Cleveland, Ohio.”
“She did,” Ethan agreed. “Or . . . at least that’s what she said.”
Anyone could say anything out here. Unless they were murdered and a federal marshal with a brain happened to be in town, no one would ever know the truth. It was how Annabeth had made her way the past five years. She became who she had to be, said whatever was required. As she’d been dealing with criminals who did the same, no one had been the wiser.
“I sent a telegram,” Eversleigh continued. “Asked for information about Mrs. Lewis and her husband. Hiram Lewis trained sharpshooters during the war. His prize possession was an Enfield. The only people allowed to touch it were he and his wife. The two of them practiced marksmanship together. I hear that, for a woman, she was damn good.”
“Yet she couldn’t hit me in the head with a plate,” Annabeth muttered.
“What plate?” Ethan asked.
“You said my name in your sleep. She tried to crown me with crockery; she missed.”
“Strong feelings can make the hands shake like leaves in a winter wind,” the marshal observed.
“True.”
Something in Ethan’s voice made Annabeth glance his way. She could tell by his expression, he was thinking of Mikey. Had he accepted, at last, that his brother had been injured due to excess emotion and trembling hands rather than a conspiracy no one knew the why of? She hoped so.
“She was angry when I left that day,” Annabeth murmured. “I said I was filing for divorce, but she didn’t want to marry a divorced man.”
“She couldn’t have it both ways,” Ethan began, then uttered a soft, “Oh.”
“Exactly.” Annabeth’s fingers clenched; she still wished she could put them around Cora’s neck just once. “No need for a divorce if I was dead.” The woman had said as much several times. “The first shot, through the upstairs window, occurred right after she found out her widowed doctor wasn’t so widowed.”
Why hadn’t Annabeth connected the dots? Because the idea of the petite and helpless Mrs. Lewis wielding a rifle was laughable. Until it was proved the truth.
“What did Cora’s rifle have to do with her death?”
“Nothing, if neither one of you killed her.”
Annabeth followed his logic. The rifle was only important if they’d known Cora was using it. Either one of them might have killed the woman to keep her from killing them or in retaliation for having tried.
“I thought we’d established that we didn’t.”
Eversleigh shrugged. Apparently, he liked to keep an open mind.
“Are you going to arrest me?” Annabeth asked. “Ethan? Both of us?”
“Not today.”
Annabeth stared at him for several seconds. “I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not.”
“Neither can I,” Eversleigh said.
“If she was stabbed, where’s the blood?” Ethan murmured.
He was right. The floor was as pristine now as it had been the last time Annabeth had been in the room.
“She wasn’t killed here.”
“Where?” Ethan asked; at the same time Annabeth muttered, “Hell.”
The marshal beckoned, and they followed him out of Lewis’s Sewing and Sundry, down the boardw
alk, into their house, then up the stairs. Once in Ethan’s bedroom, Eversleigh lit a lamp against the encroaching night. The golden glow shone off the dark splotch in the center of the bedroom floor.
“Where is she?” Ethan whispered, horror haunting his face.
How anyone could believe that a man who was overcome by the blood of a woman who’d lied, cheated, and attempted murder could kill was beyond Annabeth’s understanding.
“We buried her,” the marshal said.
It was summer. They’d had to.
“Your house, your bedroom.” Eversleigh indicated the stain. “The two of you are nowhere to be found. You can imagine what I thought.”
“Lover’s quarrel,” Ethan suggested.
“Or I caught the two of you together,” Annabeth countered.
The marshal’s sigh sounded as exhausted as Annabeth felt. “Either you killed her or you didn’t. Pick one.”
“Didn’t,” Annabeth snapped. “Who found her?”
“Mrs. Cantrell.”
“I hope she wasn’t too upset.”
“You’d have to do a damn sight more than toss a dead woman in her path to upset Sadie Cantrell.”
As Sadie had taught school on the frontier for a long, long time, Annabeth had to agree.
“Why was Cora here?” Annabeth wondered. “Looking for me? Or maybe for Ethan?” She paused. “Probably for Ethan.” When the two men glanced at her, she shrugged. “She didn’t have her rifle.”
Eversleigh snorted, then started for the door. He paused, reaching for his back pocket a little too fast. Annabeth’s palm slapped her empty holster. The marshal lifted a brow as he offered the knife he’d withdrawn hilt first. “Ever seen this?”
The blade was long and wide—a bowie. Common enough. What wasn’t were the intricate vines and flowers carved into the golden-brown wood.
“Never seen it before in my life,” Annabeth said.
And then she coughed.
CHAPTER 27
Doc?”
Ethan turned his narrowed gaze from his wife to the lawman. The marshal still held the knife in his palm. Flowers and vines trailed along the hilt.
“Nice work.” Ethan traced a fingertip over the one flower he recognized among all the others. “Roses?” How had the creator managed to shade them red?