The Drifter

by Susan Wiggs

  As the tall fir topmast responded to the ropes and pulleys, she caught her breath. Jackson experimented with hoisting the sails, and with an unexpected thrill, she took heady satisfaction in the majestic loft of the canvas. She felt a curious tightening inside her, a sort of breath-held anticipation. Then, when the sail unfurled against the sky, the sensation uncoiled with a sudden warmth that made her part her lips to utter an involuntary sound of pleasure. How had she missed the excitement of seafaring when she lived right at the edge of it?

  Shading her eyes, she admitted the answer. She missed everything important because she was an outsider. It took a stranger on the run to show her the wonders right under her nose.

  She lowered her hand to find him eyeing her curiously. The sun glinted off the sheen of sweat on his shoulders.

  “Is something wrong, Mr. Underhill?”

  “You liked that, didn’t you?”

  “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I did find it...diverting.”

  “I mean you really liked that.”

  “Indeed. But how can you tell?”

  He briefly touched the back of his hand to her cheek. “You look like a woman who just made love.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She turned her back on him. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be doing this, feeling this.

  Yet her fascination with him grew each moment, became harder to cope with each day. Jackson T. Underhill was at once mysterious and seductive, shadowed by the weary indifference of a rootless drifter. She should keep a cool distance from him. Should keep her mind on his wife. Instead, she caught herself thinking forbidden thoughts, remembering dreams she had abandoned years ago, then despising herself for doing so.

  * * *

  “You say you did business with this Jack Tower?” Joel Santana spread the Wanted poster on the shop counter. With quick, furtive movements, the chemist swept the poster out of sight, glancing around to be sure the other customers hadn’t seen it.

  Ratlike, his nose twitched. “I never said that, Marshal.”

  Joel rested his elbow on the counter as a great wave of weariness overcame him. He’d tracked Tower across Texas and into New Mexico where the Santa Fe wind blasted a man’s face with red dust during the day and chilled him to the marrow at night. “Look, mister, if I say you said it, then you damned sure did say it.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t like your kind.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Indian sleeping on the boardwalk outside. “I don’t like the stuff you sell.”

  The rat nose narrowed haughtily. “I assure you, my medicines are all of the highest—”

  “Horseshit. I’m not real fond of selling folks stuff that makes them stupid, keeps them coming back for more.” Squinting, Santana scanned the shelves behind the counter. Peyote, powdered psilocybe, laudanum, morphine crystals and Lord knew what else. Jail cells without bars, as far as Santana was concerned. They robbed a person of freedom, dignity and eventually life.

  Reaching past the chemist’s shoulder, he knocked over a stoppered bottle. The glass shattered, and a pungent herbal smell tainted the air. “Oops,” he said. “I’m just a bull in a lady’s parlor.”

  “Hey, what the—”

  “Just trying to read this here label.” Joel’s hand shoved another bottle off the shelf. “Damn! I don’t know what’s got me so clumsy all of a sudden.”

  A matron who had been perusing an array of sleeping powders scuttled out the door.

  “Now, how about this one?” Joel stretched his arm toward the shelf.

  The chemist stepped back, spreading his arms, trying to protect his wares. “All right,” he snapped. “I sold him something!”

  Santana lowered his arm. His shoulder burned, the bursitis kicking in. Too damned many cold nights under the stars, he thought. The quicker he found Jack Tower, the sooner he could retire. A place where the weather was mild, the scenery pretty. Find a woman who’d put up with an old saddle bum’s foibles.... Before his mind wandered too far, he stuck his thumb into his gun belt and regarded the chemist, waiting.

  “He got me up in the middle of the night,” the man said. “Woke me right out of a sound sleep.”

  Joel clucked in mock sympathy. “So what’d he want?”

  “I couldn’t even hear him at first. The woman he was with—his wife or whatever—was screaming hysterically.”

  Joel’s blood chilled. Even though he already knew the answer, he took out the photograph the sheriff of Rising Star had given him. “This woman?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s her.”

  “And what’d you sell them?”

  “A tin of tobacco, Underhill Fancy Shred, I think...and a whole case of this.” The chemist brought down a box of patented medicine called A Pennysworth of Peace. The label made outlandish claims of its restorative powers. The user could count on everything from a good night’s sleep and regular bowel movements to perfect spiritual contentment. Joel cracked open the blue bottle and sniffed. A mixture of low-grade corn whiskey, molasses and opium, he judged.

  The chill in his blood moved into his heart. Jack Tower didn’t know about Caroline Willis. Didn’t know what she’d done in the past, what she was capable of.

  But Joel Santana knew.

  He had first heard of Caroline a few years earlier in the aftermath of a fatal fire in New Orleans. One of the more notorious French Quarter cribs had burned to the ground. The victim had been a local preacher who, it turned out, had a taste for dangerous games. At the time of the fire, he’d been dressed in leather chaps and nothing else. He’d been spread-eagled and bound to the bed with leg irons. And there, on a sweltering July night, he’d come to understand the true meaning of burning in hell.

  The preacher had been Caroline’s client.

  “Where’d they go after they left your shop?” Joel asked the chemist.

  “Took the train straight out of town, swear to God. That’s all I can tell you,” the chemist said, clearly ready for the interview to be over. “Honest to Pete, that’s all.”

  Joel lifted his hand to the brim of his hat. The chemist cringed, probably anticipating more breakage. “Mister, you’re a pretty nervous fellow,” Santana said. Spurs clinking, he walked to the door and cast an eye at the rows of potions. “You ought to take something for it.”

  * * *

  Troubled and restless, Jackson sat on the front porch of the big house and stared up at the night sky. He’d been studying the stars because a good skipper used them to navigate by. He took out a tin of tobacco, rolled a smoke, and lit up, watching the lazy strands of gray mist weave in and out of the moonlight. He’d tried to interest Carrie in astronomy, showing her the drawings in the tattered book he’d found on board, but Carrie wasn’t interested in much lately.

  A small, forbidden whisper passed through his mind. Leah Mundy would be interested.

  He shouldn’t be thinking about her, not in that way, yet he felt his gaze stray to the wing of the house where her surgery was.

  A light burned in the window.

  He gripped the arms of the rocking chair, willing himself to stay put. But part of him wanted to go, wanted to see her, to find out why she was sleepless, too. He moved quietly across the lawn, craning his neck to see into the lighted window. What the devil was she doing up so late?

  * * *

  Leah held a slim glass tube up to the gaslight. Crystals formed high on the tube; lower down she discerned a layer of inert substances. Her titration had worked this time even though it was a tricky business. She was lucky she’d gotten some results at last, for the bottle of Carrie’s tonic was almost empty.

  Using a sterile rod, she extracted some of the crystalline substance. Now she knew for certain, but the knowledge didn’t ease her mind. She had to figure out a way to tell Jackson what she’d discovered.

&n
bsp; Four

  “Mr. Underhill, if you hold that cup any tighter, you’ll break it,” Leah Mundy said.

  Jackson glanced down at his hand, saw that the knuckles had gone white. He stood in the doorway of the parlor, watching Carrie, and he hadn’t heard Leah approach him. He forced his grip to relax and turned his attention back to the parlor.

  Two weeks after Carrie’s illness—he’d trained himself not to think of it as a miscarriage—she appeared to be recovered. Surely she was feeling much better, for she had taken to holding court each afternoon in the parlor of the boardinghouse.

  Holding court was about the only way he could describe it. She liked to put on her prettiest dresses—she had a lot of them and wanted a lot more—and sit by the window on an old-fashioned fringed chaise and talk with the people who lived at the boardinghouse.

  Jackson didn’t know the folks too well, but they all took a shine to Carrie. People generally did. She was as pretty as the springtime, and when she was in a talkative state, people found her entertaining. Her rapt audience consisted of Aunt Leafy, who was no one’s aunt, but an avid student of everyone’s private affairs; Battle Douglas, a shrinking man terrified of his own shadow; Zeke Pomfrit, the aging vigilante and miner who made Jackson nervous; and Adam Armstrong, a timber baron who was said to be fabulously wealthy. He was a guest while his steam-powered yacht, La Tache, was being refitted at the harbor.

  Unlike Jackson, Armstrong didn’t trouble himself to do the work, but had hired a local shipwright to tinker with the engine and the wood-and-steel hull. Meanwhile, Adam spent his days wrestling with the unreliable telegraph at the post office, playing cards with the other boarders, or flirting with the girls at Nellie Morse’s dress shop in town.

  Jackson knew the type—fat on family money and not real interested in breaking a sweat over anything. He had the polished smoothness that seemed to be bred in the bones of men born to wealth and privilege. It was as if his family money and power had been applied to him like the clear oil varnish applied to a ship’s woodwork. Armstrong’s hair, lacquered by bay rum, tumbled down over his forehead in an apparently casual way, but he’d probably spent an hour getting it that way.

  Jackson shifted his gaze away from Adam Armstrong. The man didn’t interest him. There was nothing wrong with the fellow—except his unrelenting charm.

  At the center of them all, wearing an organdy gown she’d begged Jackson to buy in San Francisco, Carrie sat like a queen amid her subjects. Her eyes shone, her cheeks were flushed, and her voice had a piping, animated quality as she chattered of everything and of nothing at all.

  “...I had the most beautiful gown—it was tea rose moiré silk. And there was a woman who brought her little dog right into Antoine’s.”

  “Imagine that,” Armstrong murmured politely with a smile Jackson wanted to pound off his face.

  “I believe it was in New Orleans that I first heard ‘The Streets of Cairo,’” Carrie went on. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it was New Orleans, at the Wildcat Club. The Cairo dance was so scandalous, but it couldn’t have been too evil, because my partner that night was a preacher. They had the most marvelous oysters there....”

  New Orleans.

  That was where Jackson had picked up her trail at last. Guided only by instinct and the vague recollections of a prostitute, he had followed her to Texas. And there, in the sleepy, dusty town of Rising Star, he had finally found her.

  The memory still made him wince. He had barely recognized her in her dance-hall gown, spun-gold hair a brassy color, Cupid’s-bow lips an angry smear of carmine. She had been standing outside a saloon, but when he greeted her, she’d pretended not to hear. She went inside and took a seat with the Devlin gang, laughing as they passed her around their table in the dim, windowless saloon.

  But later that night, the laughter had stopped.

  And Jackson had found himself staring across a blood-spattered room at Carrie. Between them lay the lifeless body of the mayor of Rising Star.

  A door slammed.

  Jackson wasn’t sure why, but he vividly recalled the sound of that slamming door in the hallway behind him. The sharp noise punctuated a moment so terrible that even now he crushed his eyes shut, trying not to remember.

  But he did remember. The smell of blood and spent gunpowder. The echo of a door thudding shut. The rasp of Carrie’s breathing. Her stark need. Her voice as she said one word: “Jackson.”

  Up until that moment, he hadn’t been certain she recognized him. But the minute she said his name, he knew he had no choice. He’d grabbed her hand and started running.

  Ah, Carrie, he thought, willing himself to relax. Everything was so difficult with her. So dramatic, so unpredictable.

  “She’s doing better,” he whispered to Leah, loath to interrupt Carrie’s diverting chatter.

  “She’s certainly keeping the boarders entertained. Are you going to join them?”

  “Can’t. I’ve got more work to do on the boat. Every time I make a repair, something else goes wrong. I’m going to have to make a trip to Seattle or Port Townsend for the money. If I play my cards right.” He winked at her. “Quit giving me that look.”

  “What look?”

  “The ‘you’re pond scum’ look. You do it all the time, Doc.”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “So what’s twisting your pantaloons today?”

  “Mr. Underhill.” She spoke quietly and brought her fingers to rest lightly on his arm. She had graceful, competent hands that bore the calluses of hard work. “May I speak to you in private?”

  He felt a cold lick of warning somewhere deep in his chest. “Yeah. Sure.” He nodded in Carrie’s direction to excuse himself, but she took no notice as she laughed at some remark Armstrong made, then launched into a new tale of adventure, claiming with certainty that she had danced with the Vice President. Anything but the truth, Carrie love, he thought. Anything but the truth.

  “That Leah Mundy!” Carrie’s voice followed them out into the foyer. “Plain as a pigeon feather in that old-fashioned dress, isn’t she?”

  He hoped Leah hadn’t heard. One glance at her tight mouth and the proud set of her chin told him she had. “She didn’t mean anything,” he said.

  “No offense taken.”

  They went through the foyer and out onto the porch. Like the ribs of a whale’s skeleton, a white railing grandly wrapped itself around the front and sides of the boardinghouse. In the distance, down the expanse of a lush, sloping lawn, the waters of Puget Sound sparkled in the late-afternoon light.

  This was a place he had thought existed only in dreams. A gleaming white house on a hill, distant islands scattered like emeralds on a sapphire sea, snow-covered mountains against a hard blue sky.

  He leaned against an ivory pillar and studied Leah Mundy. She wasn’t a beauty, not in the eye-popping way Carrie was, yet in Leah’s even features and deep brown eyes dwelt a calm serenity that he liked. Liked a lot. He caught himself thinking of the day he’d hoisted the sails on his boat. She had looked rapt. Enchanted. The way a woman should look when a man made love to her... Jesus. He had no call to be letting himself think about a woman like Leah Mundy.

  “Mr. Underhill,” she said.

  He liked her voice, too. Low and soft. Carrie, on the other hand, was given to long, brooding silences and even longer recitations of rapid, babbling speech that said nothing.

  Jackson shook himself. There was no reason for him to be standing here like a hayseed at a barn dance, drawing comparisons between women.

  “I wanted to speak to you about your wife,” Leah continued.

  “She’s doing a lot better, Doc. I guess I owe you—”

  “That’s not what I want to discuss.” Leah smoothed her hands down her sides and walked slowly to the porch rail. “In my estimation, she has recove
red from the miscarriage.”

  When should he tell Leah the truth about the baby? he wondered. Never, came the answer.

  “I do believe,” Leah went on, “that perhaps the miscarriage was secondary to another condition.”

  Damn, but this woman was cautious. She was like a soldier picking a path through a minefield, each tentative inch forward hard-won and followed by a long hesitation.

  “Truth to tell,” he prompted, “she seems better than she’s been in a long time.”

  Leah turned, her hands still holding the rail. In addition to the dress Carrie had made fun of earlier, she wore a clean white apron. Jackson noticed that her breasts were high and full, her waist narrow. And he caught himself remembering the time he’d held her, helping her down into the boat. No corset. By God, the woman didn’t wear a corset.

  “Mr. Underhill,” she said, “what I’m trying to say is that I fear your wife suffers from...another affliction.”

  Her voice stayed calm in that low, serene way she had, so at first the words didn’t sink in. He repeated them. “Another affliction.” Spoken by his own tongue, he felt each one like a hammer blow. And for some reason he couldn’t name, he wasn’t surprised. The news wasn’t unexpected. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Leah’s glance flickered to the door, then back to Jackson. “Please understand, I have very little experience with this sort of thing—not nearly as much as I’d like—but the symptoms are quite clear to me.”

  “Just say it, Doc, for Christ’s sake.” Apprehension buzzed through him, unpleasant, inescapable.

  “I quite believe your wife is an addict.”

  “An addict.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean like an ether drinker? An opium smoker?”

  “Yes,” she said again. “But not ether. Opium. Morphine, to be precise.”

  Jackson gave a bark of laughter and sagged in relief against the pillar. “Doc, you may not have much experience with this, but I’ve seen a few addicts in my time. Seen them puking in alleyways and begging at train depots, seen them being hauled off to jail now and then.” He pictured the sallow skin, the bleary eyes, the air of complete hopelessness. “Carrie’s no addict.”