Sam could clearly see Becky in his mind. He’d watched her a few times as she went through the market, wondering if there was any way she could possibly be happy with her life. She never looked happy. Her blond hair curled around her face when it was down, which it rarely was. She most often kept it up in a bun, with a few loose strands touching her cheeks lightly. She wore no face makeup and her clothes, obviously made by her, were well-fitting and pretty. Sam was glad that Bruce was kind enough to let her buy the material she liked to make her dresses with. He thought it was sad how much control Bruce had over his sister. In the winter, she had a large jacket to keep warm. Sam had heard it was one of her mother’s.
One thing Sam had never found out was how her parents died. It didn’t seem like an appropriate topic of conversation, not that he’d ever had one with Becky. He looked at Bruce closely. He wasn’t going to ask him. It wasn’t his business anyway.
By the time he went back to the drunken man and took the empty plate from him, Bruce looked ready to fall out of his chair. It was a bit strange, Sam thought, because Bruce could usually hold his alcohol and function well, even if he did get belligerent.
Talk about an unhappy man, Sam thought. An unhappy man and an unhappy girl. What a sad state of affairs.
He leaned over and tapped Bruce on the shoulder.
“You all right, friend? You’re not lookin’ so good.”
Bruce looked up at him. Sam was shocked to see that it appeared he was trying not to cry. He had a hard time feeling sorry for the man, knowing what a brute he was as a brother. He’d been wreaking havoc in Wickenburg since he was a very young man.
Sam looked up when the saloon doors swung open and two men entered. He was relieved to see Adam and Mark walk through. They stopped just beyond the door and lifted their heads in a single nod to Sam. He did the same back and they approached the bar. Adam slid onto the bar stool on one side of Bruce and Mark took the other.
Adam slapped a hand on Bruce’s back. “Hey there, Bruce. How you doing?”
“I guess I don’t look too good,” Bruce replied, glancing at Adam before looking up at Sam. “Sam here seems to think I’m lookin' bad.”
“You look like you just found your dog dead,” Mark said, moving to sit on the stool on Bruce’s other side. Bruce turned his head to look at him, then back to Sam, and then to Adam again.
“Looks like the posse is here,” he mumbled.
Adam grinned. “Mark heard you talking to Sam about Becky. You wanna tell me what’s going on?”
“You gonna help me look for her?”
Adam raised his eyebrows. “She’s missing?”
“Yeah. Ain’t that the reason you came? You said Mark heard me.”
“I didn’t catch any details, Bruce,” Mark said, gesturing to Sam to bring him a beer. Sam turned to the beer barrel behind him and filled two mugs. He set one in front of Adam and one in front of Mark. Adam pushed the beer away from himself with two fingers, shaking his head.
“Too early in the day for that. I have to keep my wits about me, ya know?”
Mark leaned forward to look at Adam around Bruce. “I’m drinkin’ mine. I’ll take yours if you don’t want it.”
Sam shook his head and pushed the mug so it was sitting in front of Bruce. “You don’t need to be drinkin’ both of these, Mark. You know how you get.”
All of them laughed except Bruce. He just stared at them in confusion, wrapping one hand around the mug. Mark explained, “I tend to get a little clumsy when I drink. I fall all over the place. It takes a few though.” He looked up at Sam. “Two ain’t gonna make me like that.”
“Don’t matter. You don’t need but one.”
“You my father now?” Mark grinned to show he was teasing.
“Don’t need to be. You gotta help Adam and Bruce. They don’t need you falling off your horse.”
“Ahhh!” Mark dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “It’s okay. Bruce can have it. I don’t care. You’re probably right anyway.”
CHAPTER NINE
JOIN THE SEARCH
JOIN THE SEARCH
“So tell me what’s going on, Bruce. Mark says you can’t find Becky. What happened? Did ya’ll argue?”
Bruce snorted. “We always argue. But no more than any other time. I went to bed last night and she was there. I wake up today and she’s gone.”
“And her things are still there?”
“I didn’t notice anything missing. But then,” Bruce hesitated. He was ashamed that he didn’t know if anything of his sister’s was missing. “I don’t pay a lot of attention to what she has or what she does. The house is always clean when I come home; she cooks the food and washes my clothes. I never see her doing anything other than cleaning or cooking.”
Adam held in a frown, keeping his face as neutral as possible. Bruce was not much of a brother, in his opinion. “So she has no hobbies or anything? She doesn’t do anything for fun?”
“Nah. Sometimes she says she talked to Alice.” He looked at Adam. “Your wife.”
Adam nodded. “I know who Alice is.” He gave Bruce a small smile.
“And there’s a couple other ladies she’s mentioned in the past, but usually if she says anything to me at all, it’s about Alice. Alice said this and Alice said that. It’s caused a couple fights. Maybe your wife shouldn’t be getting in on my business.”
Adam raised his eyebrows and Mark came to the rescue.
“Let’s not argue about anything, Bruce. We need to see if we can find Becky. Adam’s only asking those questions because we need to know more about Becky before we can actually start searching. I mean, where would she go? What does she do? Does she enjoy anything? A walk in the park? Looking at the shops for dresses and such?”
Bruce shook his head. “I ain’t never heard of her going for a walk. Not anywhere. And she makes her clothes. She don’t buy them.”
“All right, so she makes her clothes and doesn’t go for walks. You are gone most of the day working, aren’t you?”
“Five or six days a week, yeah.”
“So maybe she’s doin’ stuff while you are at work.”
Again Bruce shook his head. “I don’t see how she’d have time for all that frivolity when she has a house to clean and land to keep up.”
“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “You don’t do any work in the garden or the yard? She does all the outside maintenance on the house?”
Bruce narrowed his eyes. “I gotta work. I’m tired when I come home. I just want to eat, drink, and go to sleep. Then I do it again the next day.”
“Are you off work today?” Mark thought it strange that he would take a day off in the middle of the week.
“Not supposed to be, but, you know, the girl is gone and all.”
“The girl is gone,” Adam repeated in a mumbled voice. He was becoming increasingly frustrated with this cad. He repeated the phrase once more under his breath, looking away from Bruce.
Sam continued, “You shouldn’t be laying all that burden on her, friend.”
“I gotta do what I gotta do and she’s gotta do what she’s gotta do. That’s just the way it is and we’ve been comfortable and happy like this for years.”
“I would question whether or not Becky is happy, Bruce,” Mark said. “Is it possible she ran away from home?”
Bruce snorted. “I suppose that’s what children do.”
“She’s not a child.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because if Becky is unhappy enough, no matter what her age is, there’s a good chance she might just pick up and leave. Is there any way she might have some money?”
Bruce shrugged. “I have no idea if she has money. I don’t know where she’d get it from.”
“She never has any money? You don’t give her any?” Mark was trying to keep his temper and to keep up the conversation. He could see Adam was already angry. It would do no good for Adam to confront Bruce about his horrible behavior.
“What wou
ld she need money for?”
“Maybe she would like to go buy herself an ice cream sometime,” Adam growled. “Or buy a new dress instead of making one. Surely you have enough money to give her for that kind of thing.”
“I do, but she don’t need anything. She’s never asked for anything so I never give her anything.”
“You shouldn’t make her ask,” Mark replied. “You should give her stuff that makes her happy.”
“I don’t owe her anything.” Bruce took a long swig from the beer mug, swallowing the last of its contents and setting it back down. “I’m the one who’s had to sacrifice all these years. She’s just doing her duty. She knows her place.”
Adam clenched one hand into a fist and used the other to cover it, resting them on the counter in front of him. He looked at Mark, who shook his head. Mark mouthed Becky’s name, reminding Adam who was in trouble here.
“Hey, Adam, let’s talk,” Mark slid off the chair and walked back toward the saloon doors. Adam looked at Bruce and then slid off his stool.
“We’ll be right back.”
Bruce gave him a single nod and went back to burying his nose in the empty beer mug in front of him. Sam had not bothered to refill it. The bartender watched Adam and Mark walk toward the door, wishing he could be in on the conversation. He didn’t want to leave the bar, though. He had customers walking in the door and they all wanted something to drink.
“Adam, you gotta rein in the temper, my friend,” Mark said calmly. “I know the guy is a scoundrel and treats his sister like a servant, but right now, we gotta find Becky. We gotta set our focus on her. If she didn’t wander off, which I highly doubt she did, she might have been taken. If that happened, we gotta save her. We’ve done it before. We gotta do it again.”
“How do you know she didn’t just wander off though?” Adam asked. “If I had to live with that, I’d sure leave. I would have been gone by the time I could make my own money and support myself.”
“Becky hasn’t had that opportunity. She’s not a man. She can’t do what we can do.”
“There are jobs for people like her.”
“Yeah, housekeepers and nannies. But you know there ain’t a soul in Wickenburg that’s gonna pay to have her go in and clean their house or watch their kids. Who do you know in Wickenburg with that kind of money besides the Kingston family? And they got an Irish nanny.”
“It would give Becky a chance to get out of that house and under the nose of that pile of crap over there.” Adam glanced with angry eyes in Bruce’s direction. The man’s back was to Adam and his head was down, so he didn’t see the look.
Mark put one hand on Adam’s shoulder. “All right, you gotta calm down now. We need to think about Becky and not Bruce. He said your wife has talked to Becky on occasion. Do you know how often? Were you ever around?”
“I’ve never had the girl home for dinner, that’s for sure,” Adam said.
“What do you mean? You don’t want her in your home?”
Adam scowled. “That’s not what I said. I know for a fact she hasn’t been to the house because Alice has invited her several times and she’s always turned her down. Alice doesn’t talk much about her. She’s only told me a few times that she wishes Becky could be on her own and happy. I… I didn’t pay much attention. I don’t know Becky.”
“Both of us already know that Bruce isn’t a good brother to Becky. Let’s try to be good friends to her and find her. If she’s in trouble, we’ll get her out. If she wants to be left alone, we should respect that, too. The only problem is if Bruce wants to go with us while we look for her.”
“Don’t you have work to do today?” Adam asked.
Mark raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you?”
“I never take a day off. I’ll take one today.”
“I will, too. If we don’t find her today?”
“We’ll look when we aren’t working. I gotta provide for my family. And it seems almost like a possibility that Becky really did go off on her own. He’s gone all day, there’s no way to know what she’s been doing.”
They were quiet for a moment, contemplating the situation. “Do you think she’d have the fortitude for something like that? I mean, she seems kind of… fragile to me. I don’t know whether she’d do that.”
Adam paused before answering. “I think you’re probably right. And if she’d left, she surely would have taken her things with her.”
“Yeah, she’s not stupid enough to leave her things behind. He’d notice if she was gone before he’d notice her stuff was gone.”
“I agree.”
“So what do you think we should do now?”
“I think we should go talk to Alice and if she has any idea where the woman went.”
“Are we gonna tell Bruce?”
Adam turned back to the bar. “We’ll tell him only what he needs to know. That we’ll help him look. He doesn’t need to know how.”
“He’s probably gonna want to come with us.”
The two men began to walk back to the bar. Sam was watching them. He tapped Bruce on the shoulder and said something to him about Mark and Adam coming back.
“He ain’t comin’ with us,” Adam said in a low voice. “Not to my house anyway.”
Mark just nodded. They reached the bar and slid into the stools they had previously sat in.
“Okay, Bruce, we’re gonna help you look for her. We need to know what your plan is and how you are gonna go about looking for her. Where you gonna start?”
Bruce was quiet for a moment. The men looked at him to see if he was still conscious. His head was swaying slightly and he looked about as depressed as he could possibly be. “I dunno.” He mumbled.
“You want some suggestions?” Adam asked.
“I… I suppose.”
Adam looked over Bruce’s lowered head at Mark. “Well, first of all, we’re gonna look in a few places we think she might possibly be. I am gonna talk to my wife. Why don’t you check the shops, the park, and the doctor? Maybe she was feeling sick in the middle of the night and decided to go to the doctor?”
Bruce seemed to perk up a little. “I guess she could have. Dunno why she wouldn’t have told me about it, but yeah, I guess she could have. If she was all of a sudden sick. Or if she hurt herself during the middle of the night. Then, how would she walk all that way? And why would she want to when she can just ask me to take her? She didn’t take a horse from the stable.”
“How many do you have?”
“Just the two, one for me and the other for when I need the wagon.”
“Okay.” Adam tried hard to hold in his disgust with the man in front of him. “And she didn’t take either.”
“Nope.”
“We’re gonna go back to my place and talk to my wife. You go and check those other places. We’ll come back later and let you know what Alice says, if she has any good suggestions. That sound good to you?”
“If you want to. Don’t y’all have to work today?”
“We’ll take a day off today. If we don’t find her today, we’ll have to work around our schedule. But hopefully we’ll find her today. You go on and check the school, too.”
“Why would she be at the school? She doesn’t have children,” Sam pointed out. Adam gave him a narrow, warning look and Sam immediately understood. Adam was trying to get Bruce to go to as many places as he could alone, so that Adam and Mark didn’t have him tagging along. “Oh, to watch the kids or maybe volunteer. I see.”
“That doesn’t sound like Becky to me.” Bruce mumbled in a voice so low the other men could barely hear him.
“Well, you just never know with women. No man will ever understand them,” Sam said with a large smile. He ran one hand through his red hair while flinging the dishtowel over one shoulder and letting it hang there. “Complicated creatures, I gotta say.”
“That, my friend, is the truth,” Mark lifted his beer mug and held it up in the air as if to toast what Sam had just said. “Which is why I am currently
unmarried.”
“Forever a bachelor, that’s you,” Sam said.
Mark grunted. “Thanks for reminding me.”
Sam shrugged. “You’re the one who brought it up to begin with.”
The men chuckled.
“All right, Bruce,” Adam said, turning to the side to get off the stool once more. “We’re gonna head to my house.”
“You want me to come?” Bruce shuffled to one side but left his elbows on the counter. Adam could see he didn’t want to leave yet. He looked up at Sam and shook his head.
“No, you stay here until you feel good enough to go search for our lady. Okay?”
“Our lady…” Bruce spoke in a near whisper. He’d never heard Becky referred to that way. Then again, he never talked about her to anyone anyway.
“And when we come back, we’ll meet up here and give you any information she might have about Becky’s whereabouts. You like that?”
“I like that.” Bruce nodded. His eyes were half-closed and his hand surrounded the empty beer glass as if there was something in it.
“Okay. We’ll see you back here in a couple hours.”
Adam and Mark gestured goodbye to Sam and went toward the door. “He isn’t even going to look,” Mark said quietly. “He’s just gonna sit in here and drink.”
Adam nodded at him. “I know.”
CHAPTER TEN
ADAM SEEKS ALICE’S HELP
ADAM SEEKS ALICE’S HELP
The ride out to the Collins' ranch took about a half hour. During that time, neither man spoke much. They were deep in thought, wondering where the young Dupont woman could be.
For his part, Mark didn’t know the woman at all. He’d seen her around town and knew what she looked like. However, the sightings were few and far in between. They didn’t move in the same social circles. It would have been nearly impossible, since Becky rarely visited town, other than to go to the market. She always did that during the day when he was at work.
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