A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.

  She hadn’t seen Charles again until a week before Owen’s birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles’s lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.

  Sarah had had no choice but to comply.

  She’d long since sold the last of her jewelry, her rich clothes and the books. Even the Chinese fan. And she’d promised her clearly disenchanted father she would finish college, no matter what.

  So when her baby boy was born, she’d handed him over to Charles’s lawyer. The loss had been keen, brutal, as though she’d torn her still-beating heart from her bosom and handed that over, too.

  She’d survived, somehow, doggedly arising in the morning, doing what was at hand to do, enduring more than living. She’d worked hard at her lessons, gotten her degree in music, and returned to Stone Creek just in time to attend her mother’s funeral.

  Nancy Anne Tamlin had never known she had a grandchild, nor had anyone else in town, except for Ephriam, of course, and possibly his best friend, Doc Venable.

  Now, ten years later, miraculously, impossibly, that boy was right downstairs, in her own kitchen, helping with the dishes.

  “Sarah?”

  She looked up, startled, and saw Ephriam standing in the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew by the way he’d spoken her name that he was enjoying one of his brief, lucid intervals.

  “That boy I saw tonight. Is he—?”

  Sarah felt for the book of lies, nesting, as always, in her skirt pocket, clenched it through the fabric. She swallowed, then shook her head. “No, Papa. He’s just visiting.”

  “He looks like your mother’s people,” Ephriam said. “What’s his name?”

  “Owen,” Sarah allowed, after swallowing again. “He’s Charles Langstreet’s son. You remember Mr. Langstreet, don’t you?”

  “Never liked him,” her father replied. “Pompous jackass.”

  She saw a change in Ephriam’s bearing, something too subtle to describe, but there nonetheless.

  “Great Scot,” Ephriam gasped. “It was Langstreet, wasn’t it? He was the one who led you astray!”

  “Papa—”

  “And Owen is my grandson,” the old man persisted, sounding thunderstruck. Of all the times he could have recovered his faculties, it had to be now, tonight, when keeping the secret was more important than ever before.

  Sarah simply could not summon up another lie. She felt drained, enervated, as though she’d relived her affair with Charles, her sad, scandalous pregnancy, the birth itself, which had been torturous, and, still worse, watched as Charles’s lawyer carried her newborn son out of her room in the college infirmary. She’d been permitted to give him only one thing: his first name.

  And she’d never expected to see him again.

  “Yes,” she said weakly. “You’re right, Papa. But you mustn’t let on. Owen doesn’t know who I am. He calls me Aunt Sarah.”

  Ephriam pondered a while, silent and brooding. “I’d have killed Langstreet if I’d known,” he said. “I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me.”

  Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, summoned her will, and stood. Doc and Owen had probably finished washing the dishes by then, and they’d be wondering what was keeping her.

  She stood before her father, still looming in the darkened doorway, straightening the front of his long nightshirt as though it were one of the day coats he wore to the bank.

  “Our secret, Papa?” she asked.

  “There are too damn many secrets in this house.”

  “Papa—”

  “All right,” Ephriam said. “But I don’t like it. And I’m taking that boy fishing at the creek tomorrow, with or without your say-so.”

  Sarah’s eyes stung, and she smiled. “Fair enough,” she said.

  She walked her father back to his room, tucked him in like a child. Kissed his forehead. Still under the effects of the laudanum Doc had given him earlier, he dozed off immediately.

  When she descended to the kitchen, via the rear stairway, Doc and Owen were sitting at the pedestal table in the center of the room, playing cards. The pot was a pile of wooden matches.

  Interested, Sarah stood behind Owen’s chair and assessed his hand.

  “Five card stud,” Doc said. “Care to join us?”

  “I never play poker,” Sarah said. The little book in her skirt pocket seemed to pulse in protest.

  Doc merely chuckled.

  Sarah bent low and whispered in Owen’s ear. “Bet all your matchsticks. You’ve got a straight with ace high.”

  * * *

  THERE WERE ONLY THREE HORSES in front of Jolene Bell’s Saloon, two in front of the Hell-bent, six lining the hitching rail at the Spit Bucket. Wyatt passed them by, making for the jailhouse.

  All was quiet there, too, so he closed the place up for the night and went around back to the barn, where he planned to stretch out in the hayloft. The weather was clear, and he’d be able to see the stars between the wide cracks in the roof.

  He was thinking about Sarah, and those blue eyes of hers, full of tragic mysteries and an almost formidable intelligence. There was something to her attachment to the boy Owen, though he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. A sort of anxious solicitude, carefully controlled. Her gaze had constantly strayed to the child, rested on him with a certain desperate hunger.

  Mulling over these things as he was, Wyatt almost fell over the dog lying in the path between the jailhouse and the barn. The critter whimpered, and Wyatt righted himself.

  “What the—?”

  The dog whimpered again. It was an ugly brute of a mutt, missing a chunk of one ear and so thin he could make out its ribs even in the relative darkness. Its tail had been lopped off square, close to the hind quarters, and a scab had formed over the wound.

  “Run along home,” Wyatt said.

  The dog started to rise, dropped heavily to the ground again.

  Muttering a swearword, Wyatt crouched for a closer look. “You sick, fella?”

  The animal emitted a soft, keening whine, almost like a plea.

  Wyatt’s heart sank. He couldn’t take care of his own horse, or even himself, but he couldn’t walk away from this dog, either. And about the last thing he needed was a goddamned dog.

  He felt the mutt’s sides for obvious injuries, and found none. The legs seemed sound, too. When the brute didn’t bite him, he sighed, lifted him up in both arms, and carried him into Rowdy’s tidy little house.

  He laid him on Pardner’s rug, as gently as he could, and struck a match to light one of the kerosene lamps.

  In the glow, the miserable specimen looked even uglier than he had in the dark. And there was dried blood all over his coat, some of which had transferred itself to the front of Wyatt’s borrowed white going-to-supper shirt.

  “If you were a woman,” Wyatt told the sorry-looking critter, “you’d have to wear a flour sack over your head every time you left the house.”

  The dog whined again, its moist brown eyes imploring Wyatt, though for what he did not know. Mercy, perhaps. The simple privilege of living.

  “No telling how bad you’re hurt, looking the way you do.” Resigned, Wyatt went into Rowdy and Lark’s fancy bathroom and ran some warm water into the tub. He went back to the kitchen, gathered up the dog again, and lugged him in for a sudsing.

  The dog endured the ordeal with the last of his dignity, and as he soaped and rinsed the critter, and soaped and rinsed him again, Wyatt’s temper, subdued by two years in prison, flared inside him, a slowly spreading heat.

  Som
eone—and God help them when Wyatt found out who—had beaten the dog with either a buggy whip or a tree branch of similar circumference, leaving deep, bloody stripes in his brindled hide.

  Once he’d hoisted the dog out of the tub and dried him off with a fancy monogrammed towel—the only thing at hand to serve the purpose—Wyatt rummaged through cabinets until he found a tin of salve. He applied it lavishly to the dog’s wounds, and the poor, pitiful creature didn’t even try to lick the stuff off. He just huddled there on Lark’s formerly pristine bath mat, looking forlorn and waiting for another blow.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, boy,” Wyatt said, his voice catching raw in his throat. “You’ve fallen among friends.”

  The dog licked his face, tentatively, and then cowered again.

  Wyatt patted his head, then stood. “I reckon what you need now is something to eat and a decent night’s sleep. I’ll figure out what to do with you in the morning. Meanwhile, you’ll require a name. ‘Lonesome’ ought to suit.”

  Lonesome looked pleased. Got painfully to his four feet to follow Wyatt out of the bathroom and toward the kitchen.

  After searching the pantry shelves, Wyatt opened a can of condensed milk, emptied it into a bowl, and set it on the floor. Lonesome hesitated, then made short work of the milk.

  Next, he purloined a jar of venison stew, home-preserved, and gave that to the dog, too. At this rate, he’d owe his deputy salary to Lark for the groceries he was using up.

  Lonesome lapped up the stew, burped like a dry-throated cowboy swilling beer, and laved the toe of Wyatt’s right boot with his tongue.

  He’d planned on bedding down in the barn, but Lonesome didn’t appear to be up to walking even that far. Feeling like a squatter, Wyatt found some blankets, made himself a bed on the settee in the little parlor, with one for the dog beside it on the floor.

  Lonesome settled down to sleep, after circling the blankets for a spell, and Wyatt stretched out on the settee.

  Again, he thought of how the last thing he needed was something he had to look out for and feed, but he didn’t have the heart to say so aloud. Might hurt Lonesome’s feelings, and he’d been hurt enough already.

  * * *

  SOMEONE FROM THE HOTEL brought Owen’s baggage over in a wagon, bright and early, along with a telegram from Charles.

  Called back to Philadelphia on an urgent matter. Will return for the boy as soon as possible. Funds for his maintenance to follow.

  Maintenance? Was that all Owen was to Charles—something requiring maintenance? Sarah stared at the neatly typewritten words, amazed, dangerously hopeful, and utterly confounded. Her father and Owen were seated at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal and planning their fishing expedition to the creek. Ephriam was properly dressed, though in outdoor clothes rather than his usual suit, his hair was brushed, and his eyes were as clear and placid as still water.

  Indeed, in Owen’s chattering presence, he seemed almost like the man he had once been. Sarah was both thrilled and terrified, knowing as she did that the change would be fleeting.

  Owen, for his part, seemed delighted to be going fishing on a summer day. The creek was shallow, so Sarah didn’t fret that he’d drown, and as she cleared away the remains of breakfast, she stole sidelong looks at her son.

  Her son.

  He did resemble her mother’s side of the family, just as Ephriam had remarked the night before. Fortunately, Nancy Anne Owen Tamlin hadn’t looked a thing like her fair-haired parents and siblings—she’d been stout and quite plain, with hair she herself had described as mouse-brown, ears that protruded slightly, and an exuberant laugh.

  Sarah had adored her.

  “I’m due at the bank,” she told the man and boy at the table, as though it were a perfectly normal morning in the Tamlin household, her father bright-eyed and clear-minded, Owen gobbling up the last of his oatmeal. “Be careful down at the creek, both of you.”

  With that, she found her pocketbook and left the house by the front door, humming a little under her breath.

  As she passed the church, Sarah opened the gate and entered the cemetery. It was something she often did, of a morning, though she never stayed long.

  Intent on reaching her mother’s final resting place, she didn’t immediately notice Wyatt Yarbro standing nearby, gazing down at another grave. When she did, her face heated up, and she crouched in front of Nancy Anne’s headstone, her skirts spilling around her, pretending she hadn’t seen him.

  “Mornin’,” she heard him say.

  Sarah looked up, shaded her eyes from the dazzling sun. Wyatt’s lean frame seemed rimmed by the glare, eclipselike. “Good morning, Mr.—Wyatt.”

  As her vision adjusted, she noticed the speckled dog, sniffing between headstones a short distance away.

  “He and I have taken up with each other,” Wyatt said, grinning a little as he squatted beside Sarah in the sweet-smelling grass of that peaceful place. “You wouldn’t happen to know where he calls home, would you?”

  Sarah squinted. “I’ve seen him trying to scrounge food behind the saloons,” she said, then wished she’d held her tongue, because Wyatt would, of course, wonder what business she had behind saloons. “Sometimes, people throw rocks at him.”

  Wyatt plucked a blade of grass, examined it thoughtfully, and then tossed it aside. “Then I guess he’s my dog for the duration,” he said. When his eyes met Sarah’s, she had the disturbing sense of tumbling into them. The fall took her breath away.

  “I’ve tried to get him to follow me home,” Sarah said, catching herself, regaining her balance, nodding to indicate the dog. “He was just too skittish, though.”

  “Do you like dogs, Miss—Sarah?”

  “They’re God’s creatures,” she affirmed.

  Wyatt’s grin flashed, fairly knocking her back on her heels. “What I said last night about courting you—I hope you weren’t offended.”

  Sarah didn’t know how to reply, and she’d reveal too much if she tried.

  “I wouldn’t want to scare you off or anything,” he went on, somewhat awkwardly. “But it’s only right that you hear the truth about me, Sarah. I did a couple of years in prison for train robbing.”

  Still tongue-tied, Sarah simply stared at Wyatt Yarbro, wondering why she felt safer in the presence of an admitted criminal than she ever had with Charles.

  Wyatt sighed, stood, offered a hand to help Sarah to her feet.

  She took the hand, let him pull her up.

  “I figured you’d be shocked,” he said.

  At last, Sarah found her voice. “But I’m not,” she said. “Shocked, I mean.” She indicated the nearby grave of his very famous outlaw father, Payton Yarbro. “Rowdy’s been straightforward about his past, at least since he met Lark. It’s no surprise to learn that you were caught and punished for what you did.”

  He studied her, his wonderful eyes slightly narrowed. “Did Rowdy tell you about me?”

  Sarah shook her head. “No, and neither did Lark,” she answered.

  Wyatt was quiet for a long time, his gaze fixed on the far horizon, where a plume of dust rose against the sky.

  “Riders coming,” he finally said.

  “Cowboys, probably,” Sarah said, unconcerned. There were a lot of ranches around Stone Creek, and the hired hands often came to town to carouse at one of the saloons, especially when payday rolled around.

  Recalling that it was the last day of August, she sighed. She’d best get to the bank and help Thomas take in the deposits. Some of the cowpokes actually had accounts, and they put a portion of their wages away, or bought drafts to send funds home to mothers, wives and children, before throwing the rest away on whiskey and women of unfortunate character.

  Wyatt whistled for the dog, put his hat back on. He seemed distracted, even a little troubled, and kept glancing
toward the billow of dust swelling against the southeastern skies.

  Even though he walked at Sarah’s side as far as the churchyard gate, and held it open for her while she passed through ahead of him, he was far away. When they reached the sidewalk, Wyatt touched the brim of his hat and he and the dog headed in one direction, while Sarah went in the other.

  The window shade was drawn at the bank.

  Frowning, she consulted the small watch pinned to her bodice. Five minutes past the opening time of eight o’clock. She was late.

  The door was locked.

  Sarah fumbled for her key, let herself in.

  Thomas stood behind the counter, looking anxious.

  Sarah rolled up the shade.

  “Maybe we ought not to open for business today,” Thomas said. Perspiration glistened on either side of his nose, as well as his forehead, and he kept wetting his lips with his tongue.

  “Nonsense,” Sarah said. “It’s payday on most of the ranches. Down at the feed store and the livery stable, too. People will want to make deposits.”

  “We shouldn’t open the safe,” Thomas insisted, glancing at the rolled-up shade above the front window.

  “Thomas, what on earth—?”

  “It’s just something I overheard at the boardinghouse last night,” he said. Then he walked right past her, lowered the blind again, and locked the door. “Probably nothing to be concerned about, but—”

  Sarah laid a hand on his arm. “Thomas.”

  He shoved splayed fingers through his hair. “A couple of drifters stopped off at our place and asked to chop wood in return for a hot supper. Mother allowed as how she’d feed them, all right, but they had to eat outside because they were strangers and she didn’t like the looks of them.”

  “And?” Sarah prompted.

  “It was hot, so Mother had a window open in the kitchen, and I went in there to shut it. That’s when I heard them talking outside. The drifters, I mean.”

  Sarah pressed her lips together, waited.

  “They said there was money to be gotten, in a place like Stone Creek, and they wouldn’t have to ride for the likes of Sam O’Ballivan to get their hands on it.”