by Jo Goodman
“So am I, Mr. Coltrane.”
“Did it happen here at the Pennyroyal?”
She nodded. “In the saloon. At the same table you were sitting at last night. I wasn’t there; neither was Ellen. Adam spared us that. Howard Wheeler came upstairs to find me. Witnesses to the shooting swore the cards were on Adam’s person. They also found a Remington derringer in his boot, and the Burdicks claimed he went for it. I didn’t challenge anyone because it did not matter. Knowing Adam as I did, I am confident he arranged his own death.”
Kellen picked up his boots from where they rested beside the stove and carried them to one of the trunks. He pushed aside the damp towels spread out across the lid and sat. “Did you think of returning to California?”
“No. Not for a moment. This is home.” She hesitated, looked away toward the window. The view from where she was sitting was an endless expanse of sky. “I think about going places,” she said quietly. “St. Louis maybe. Chicago. I think I would like to see New York.” She pulled her gaze away and returned to Kellen. “But I know that no other place will hold me forever. This place will always call me home.”
Kellen wondered how much of that call came from the graveyard. Adam and Ellen were buried in the shade of a young cottonwood. All the graves were neatly tended, even the ones outside the cemetery proper marked with crude wood stakes that labeled the deceased as scoundrels and no-accounts. It was a serene setting, where the contemplation of life was more in keeping with the purpose than ruminating about death.
“Where else did you go this morning, Mr. Coltrane?”
Kellen finished pulling on the first boot before he answered. “Kellen. I got a horse from Mr. Ransom, who must be your waitress Emily’s father. I thought I might get the lay of the land. I followed the river for a while. Went into the hills.”
“That’s what the boys thought you probably did. Finn and Rabbit saw you at first light. They can see the livery from their bedroom window.”
“They’re observant.”
“They’re nosy. I’m sure they almost killed each other trying to get to the attic window. That’s how they followed your progress.” She waited, but when he didn’t say anything, she added, “They told me you had your guns. Were you target shooting?”
He nodded. “I thought I was far enough away to fire some rounds without being heard.”
“You were. At least no one who’s come in here today mentioned it. The boys figured that’s what you were going to do. They have it in their minds that you’re a shootist. It was part of my arrangement with Mr. Church that discretion would be observed, and now there are two young boys who can barely contain their excitement that there is a shootist in our midst.” Raine let the coat fall off her shoulders, but she still kept it close. It smelled faintly of horse, saddle soap, and the man…Kellen. “I just can’t help but think Mr. Church would be handling this more discreetly.”
“Mr. Church is dead.”
Raine’s head jerked back. “Forgive me. I forget that he was your friend.”
Kellen’s voice was flat. His wintry blue-gray eyes bore into her. “He wasn’t my friend. He chose me to help him. We weren’t friends.”
“But he—”
“I’m going to learn who killed him, Raine. Our arrangement doesn’t much matter to me. You can end it anytime, but it doesn’t mean I’m leaving. I’m not giving up my room to the next man you hire. I’m staying put and seeing this through.” He jammed his foot into the second boot and stamped the floor hard. His heel slipped solidly into place. “What do you want to do?”
“The Burdicks killed Nat Church.”
“Prove it.”
She couldn’t. She didn’t say anything.
“What do you want to do?” he asked again.
“I want you to help me.”
“Very well,” he said, getting to his feet. He tilted his head toward the door. “You need to go. I can handle the boys. I’m not so sure about you. Discretion is not precisely your strong suit. Your staff is going to wonder what’s become of you.”
Raine pursed her lips at this rebuke. The effect was prim righteousness. She shed the coat as she stood. “If my staff think anything at all about me being in your room, they’re thinking I’m still haranguing you for flooding my floor and almost causing Mrs. Sterling to have a conniption.”
“So you’re here putting me in my place and assessing damages.”
“Yes,” she said. She started to cross the room but stopped abruptly in front of him. “What do you mean that you can handle the boys, but you’re not so sure about me? What have I done to make you think I require handling?”
“Not what you’ve done,” he said. “What you will do.”
“Oh? And what is that?”
“This.”
Raine blinked, but it was her only reaction as his right arm struck with the speed of a bullsnake. It wrapped itself around her waist and hauled her in. Once he had her, his grip didn’t ease. Like the predator, he held her fast, surrounding her as though he might crush her.
He took the breath from her instead.
He gave her time, a long moment to think about it as he slowly lowered his head. It was important to him that she knew she had a choice. It would be important to her.
His mouth touched hers, lightly at first, so lightly that the touch could be imagined more clearly than it could be felt. He cupped the back of her head in one hand, held it still, and pressed his mouth against hers with more purpose.
With more passion.
She moaned softly. It tickled his lips. He drew back a fraction, waited. Her mouth parted, and she closed the distance. Their mouths found a different slant. They kissed and parted, kissed again. He felt her try to raise herself on tiptoe. He loosened the arm around her waist. She stayed flush to his body as though she might climb it. Her heels lifted. Her mouth caught the corner of his. She pushed herself hard against him. He turned his head. The kiss deepened.
His fingers pressed against her scalp. Pins fell from her hair. The coil at her nape unwound so that when he moved his fingers, her hair cascaded over the back of his hand. He wound it around his fist. It was as soft and liquid as her name.
Raine. He whispered it against her mouth. The tip of his tongue touched her upper lip. He felt her knees give way. He pulled her up, held her there, and took her mouth for the delicacy it was. The scent. The heat. The damp.
Her mouth was honey. Her mouth was a drug.
Kellen lifted his head before he died of wanting it.
Raine wanted to put her hand to her mouth, seal the stamp of his lips on hers. Her heart thrummed against her breastbone and blood still roared in her ears. She couldn’t hear the sound of her own breathing, couldn’t feel the intake of air.
A shiver seized her. She gasped.
Kellen smiled and tipped his head. He rested his forehead against hers. “Well,” he said softly, “that was—”
“Unexpected?” she whispered.
His chuckle was deep, resonating from the back of his throat. “The opposite,” he told her. “Everything it’s supposed to be.”
“You should let me go.”
“I should.” His arm did not relax. The hand at the back of her head stayed where it was. He lifted his head a second time and searched her face. “I will.” His hold on her eased, and she came down off tiptoes. Up or down, she still fit neatly against him.
“You knew this about me?” she asked.
“I knew it about you and me.”
“Oh.” The word was merely an expulsion of air.
Kellen’s hands fell to his sides. When she did not step back, he did. A faint smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “You should go.”
“I should.” She closed the distance between them, clutched his vest, and pressed a kiss to his mouth. “I will.” She danced away before he could catch her. At the door, she said, “Look suitably abashed when you come to the dining room. You did cause a mess, you know.”
He nodded, and then she disappeared into the hall
way, closing the door gently behind her.
Raine hurried to the end of the hall and secreted herself in the stairwell that led to the kitchen. Her hands shook. She raised them to her mouth and kept them there until the trembling passed.
Ridiculous. It went through her mind that she was being ridiculous, silly actually. No kiss deserved so much excitement attached to it. Her breasts were swollen, the nipples tender. She hesitated then passed her palms over them, more as an exploration than a caress. Still, it should have been his hands touching her. She was damp between her thighs. Uncomfortably warm. She pressed her legs together and waited for the sensation to pass. She felt herself contract. The shiver that had seized her when she was in his arms seized her again, this time from the inside. She leaned against the wall and sank her teeth into her lower lip. It was enough to silence the moan that rose at the back of her throat.
From downstairs she heard raised voices in the kitchen. A moment, she thought, just a moment longer. A door opened. Closed. Footsteps pounded across the floor and another door opened, this one to the outside. She heard Mrs. Sterling yell for Walt.
Raine Berry did what she didn’t think she could. She pushed every thought of Kellen Coltrane from her mind and started down the stairs.
Chapter Five
Raine saw Kellen at dinner. He sat alone again, which meant that the newcomer, Mr. John Paul Jones, sat with the couple from Springfield on their last night in Bitter Springs. Mr. Benjamin Petit of Virginia, a naturalist and photographer of stereographs, and Mr. Alexander Reasoner, late of London and touring the American West, shared a table with the whiskey drummer. Emily Ransom hovered at the tables like a hummingbird, flitting this way and that, flying off when she sensed the nectar was sweeter somewhere else. Raine let her go. It was necessary to keep peace in the kitchen. Mrs. Sterling was thoroughly out of sorts because her piecrusts had been a casualty of what she was now calling the great flood. Her reaction was out of all proportion to the actual event, but there was no consoling her when she spiraled downward into one of her dark moods. Even good-natured, hardworking Walt had been on the receiving end of the cook’s sharp tongue.
Raine took it upon herself to work beside Mrs. Sterling and spare everyone else. She did, however, save one slice of the burned apple pie before the cook threw it away. It gave her a certain perverse pleasure to carry it into the dining room and place it in front of Kellen Coltrane.
She did not see him again until he arrived in the saloon. He came in through the front doors, not from the hotel side, which meant he had been out again, not in his room as she supposed him to have been. Since Walt was helping her at the bar, she assumed Kellen had been on his own. Her fist closed tightly around the bar rag she was holding when Eli and Clay Burdick followed his trail.
Kellen came up to the bar while Eli and Clay took their usual table close to the stairs. Tonight, no one had to vacate the table to give the Burdicks what they wanted, so there was none of the tense silence that could occur on those occasions.
Kellen found a place at the bar between Howard Wheeler and Jack Clifton. He knew from talking to Walt that the two friends regularly ate breakfast at the hotel and frequented the saloon three or four evenings a week. The pair had been at a table a few nights earlier and looked as if they might have been on the verge of leaving when Eli came in and took a seat. Now Kellen understood that remaining behind had been purposeful. They were two members of the jury that had convicted Isaac Burdick.
“What will you have, Mr. Coltrane?” asked Walt.
“Three beers.”
Walt glanced past him to where the Burdicks were sitting. He looked doubtful. “Eli and Clay usually take a bottle of whiskey.”
“I know, but I have some questions for them. Beer to begin.”
“Right away.”
Kellen caught Raine’s eye. “Excellent pie this evening.” He was careful not to grin when she pretended she didn’t hear him and turned and walked away.
Jack Clifton said, “I thought you must be Coltrane.”
Kellen turned his head. Clifton had a lean, leathered face and dark eyes. He wore his Boss of the Plains Stetson tilted back on his head and sported a mustache that hid all of his upper lip.
“I am. You are…”
“Jack Clifton.”
They exchanged nods, not hands. “Good to meet you, Mr. Clifton.” Kellen reached across the bar to take the first beer Walt put out for him.
Howard Wheeler inserted himself into the conversation. He was broader and sturdier than his wiry friend, and he had a nose with a hook large enough to hang his hat on. “Couldn’t help overhearing what you said about asking the Burdicks questions.”
Kellen pulled the second beer toward him. “I’m writing a story for my paper,” he said. “The New York World.”
Howard frowned. “I recollect reading that’s Mr. Pulitzer’s paper.”
“Just an expression, gentlemen. It’s not my paper, but I work for it.”
“So what’s your business with the Burdicks?”
“My business,” Kellen said, scooping up the third beer, “is none of yours.”
He turned and left the bar, heading for Eli and Clay’s table. Before he had set the beers on the table, he could see Clifton and Wheeler putting their heads together in one corner of the saloon.
Clay Burdick pulled a beer toward him.
Kellen passed a beer to Eli. The brothers sat close enough at the round table to prevent a third person coming between them. On a clock they would have been at five and seven. The arrangement suited Kellen. He nudged his chair to twelve o’clock and sat.
Clay took a deep drink and wiped the damp from his mustache on his sleeve. “Eli says you’re some kind of newspaperman.”
“That’s what I told him,” said Kellen. Clay’s mustache was not as aggressively large as Jack Clifton’s, but it was definitely a source of pride. At a glance it was the feature that differentiated him from his older brother. Beneath their Stetsons, Kellen imagined they parted their hair on the same side. They dressed similarly, but not so different from anyone else. Their vests were cut from more expensive cloth, but it was the same cloth, a blue and green stripe with gold-colored thread separating the stripes and holding the buttons in place.
“Uriah says he never heard of a rancher in Dakota named Pulitzer,” Clay said. “But he did know that Pulitzer owns the New York World.”
“That’s right,” said Kellen.
Eli gave him a narrow look. “You told me he owned a big spread.”
“No,” Kellen said easily. “You told me. I asked you if you knew Pulitzer, you mentioned a rancher, and I figured you knew something I didn’t, you being more familiar with the territory than I am. It was vain of me, but I did not want to show my ignorance. I never said I wrote a story about him.”
“That’s true,” Eli told Clay. “He never said that.”
Clay snorted. “You had a three-pony escort home that night. I don’t think you know what was said.”
“You did drop like a stone, Mr. Burdick,” Kellen said to Eli.
Eli merely sighed. “Sure did.” He picked up his beer and drank deeply. “I still got the head to prove it.”
“You’re not a whiskey man,” Clay said. “Stay with beer.”
Eli glowered at his brother. “I don’t need a nursemaid.”
“Uriah doesn’t agree.”
“You might want to ask yourself who’s watching who tonight. When’s the last time you rode into town without an escort?”
“When’s the last time you rode out without one?”
Except for the weapons, it was like being with Rabbit and Finn, Kellen thought. He moved his beer to one side and reached into his jacket. The brothers rounded on him at once, their wrangling stopped by what they perceived as an outside threat. Kellen held up one hand, palm out, and slowly withdrew the other from under his jacket. He showed them a notepad and pencil.
“Tools of my trade,” he said. “I thought we could begin the interv
iew.”
Raine left the saloon after Kellen pulled out the notepad. In the moment immediately preceding it, she thought the Burdicks were going to draw on him. How she managed not to shout a warning, she would never know, but in the aftermath, she recognized the danger her interference would have put him in. For now at least it seemed that Kellen was safer if she left him to manage on his own.
She told Walt to take over the bar and passed Charlie Patterson a few dollars to help him. Charlie would have done it for free because Sue was going to play again, but Raine insisted he take the money to ensure he stayed behind the bar.
She went to her rooms and read for a time. She purposely avoided the new Nat Church mystery in favor of Felicity Ravenwood’s romantic adventures, but even dear Felicity, who often startled her friends with her acerbic wit and extraordinary hats, could not hold her attention.
Raine gathered her coat, gloves, and green woolen scarf and headed out of doors. The sky was clear, with only the brilliance of the stars to distract her from her course. The air was crisp, but the wind had quieted, and the cold was tolerable because it did not go deeply into the bone.
Raine wore her scarf over her hair and wound the rest around her neck. She walked briskly, avoiding the unevenly planked sidewalks in favor of the street. A fingernail moon provided little light, but then she needed very little. She could have found the graveyard with her eyes closed.
The ground was too cold for sitting, so Raine leaned against the pale, ridged trunk of the cottonwood and faced Adam’s and Ellen’s graves. She hugged herself. Although no living person was around to hear her, and no dead person could, she spoke anyway, quietly and with feeling.
“I did not expect him, you know,” she said. “Not a man like him. I think I would not have continued a correspondence if he had been the one to answer. Nat Church, the man I hired, impressed me as steady and cautious. And older. This man is reckless and an irritant, a pebble in my shoe. He pointed out, correctly I must tell you, that Nat Church is dead, so perhaps I set too much store by steadiness and caution. And age.”
She smiled wistfully. “You would say it if you could. There’s no getting around it. The oddest thing is that he’s more like Nat Church than Nat Church. Do you understand? I don’t. Not really. Nat Church, the character, not the man, is reckless. Do you recall in the Committee of Vigilance how he nettled Mr. Billy Bragg into making a confession? It is the same with Mr. Coltrane. He nettles. I’ve said things, many things I didn’t think I would tell him, but somehow they spilled out of me like barleycorn from a split sack. That’s what he does, just niggles and nettles and you know he’s doing it, but he’s funny about it. Amusing, I mean. But real subtle about it. Cagey. Like I said, he’s the pebble in my shoe, but sometimes he makes me forget I can take my shoes off.”