There were rifles stacked on racks on the walls; a lariat and a braided buggy whip hung from stout pegs. Beside a plain, unvarnished washstand stood a rush-seated chair, so straight-backed and shallow-seated it discouraged any thought of relaxation. There were no curtains at the deep-silled windows, no rugs on the boot-scuffed floors. It seemed a chamber more suited to a monk than a rancher fond of high living. Whatever time my poor sister had been forced to spend with the man had not, I was convinced, been spent here.
I raised the lantern to see a long, coffin-like container opposite the bed. Could that be where Ross Cooper had been laid out? Fighting back my impulse to flee, I kneeled in front of the battered trunk. The stained lid flopped back to reveal the long leather tube Bazz had earlier described. It took only a moment to confirm the nature of its contents; having done so, I exhaled, startling myself with the hiss of my escaping breath, unaware I had been holding it so tightly.
I closed the lid on whatever else the trunk contained. Considering the sad lack of familial affection at Morning Star, it was quite possible the scalps Bazz spoke of existed only as something darkly hinted at to discourage trespass, like a gate posted with signs warning passersby to beware of the dog chained behind it. Whatever else Ross Cooper may have been, he was obviously a very private man, the kind of man who would take care to discourage invasion of his quarters whether or not there was a demonstrated need to do so. No wonder Lottie Cooper had turned to her son for solace.
I returned downstairs and handed the tube to Bazz, who withdrew the roll of plans, took them to the kitchen and chivvied a grumbling Belle into clearing a place on the herb-covered table big enough to accommodate the large sheets. The heavy paper was yellow and dog-eared, but the black-inked lines were as sharp and clear as the day they had been drawn. Bazz soon discovered a space behind the fireplace that neither he nor Belle had been aware of, and Belle excitedly pointed out several places where walls were indicated as thicker than comparable sections elsewhere. I wondered aloud about the storm cellar, which had been added after the house had been completed.
“I imagine it was planned on the spot when the men arrived to build it. There could be all kinds of hidey-holes down there with no one the wiser,” I said, finding myself caught up in the game. “Why, your father could have made them himself, after the men stopped work for the day. Tomorrow why don’t I—”
“I’ll look after the cellar, Reenie,” Belle broke in. “We use it as a root cellar and to store my bottled elixirs. No one will think twice about seeing me going in and out.”
I had no sooner nodded agreement before Belle and Bazz began to argue about the stone bunkhouse which Belle saw as a prime possibility.
“With hands going in and out all the time, it would have been too risky, Belle!”
“I reckon he had to get to it only a few times a year. ...”
As they wrangled I looked idly through the sheets of plans. My attention was caught by a drawing of the mansion’s stone facade, not as a plan, but as it would look when seen from above and off from one side, semicircle of pillars in place, long cast of shadows and all. As my eyes traced the sensitive lines and artful shadings I felt another nudge at my memory, stronger this time, yet I knew I had never been anyplace where I might have seen anything remotely like this. Perhaps I was merely bemused by the placement of a house so grandly formal in this frontier setting. How sad that a man talented enough to plan it had ended broken and penniless in a rough makeshift town a continent and ocean away from home!
“Do you suppose the gold might be under one of these pillars?” I mused aloud.
Bazz and Belle moved back beside me. “What do you think, Bazz?” she asked, aroused by this new possibility.
“I think, unless he had a team of horses and a tackle, he’d never be able budge one of those things; if he did, everyone would have known about it.”
Belle and I looked at each other, her sheepish look no doubt mirroring mine.
“It’s been a long day, girls. I say we go to bed and draw up a plan of attack in the morning,” Bazz suggested.
Belle stretched and yawned. “I’ll be along in a minute. If the weather holds, the poppy heads will soon be ready to harvest—maybe as soon as tomorrow. I have to prepare for it, just in case. You’ve seen them, of course,” she said to me.
I shook my head.
“Lordy, Reenie, how could you have missed that cloud of white and purple? Come look, before they shatter!”
She tugged at my arm; I followed reluctantly. I loved poppies, but I doubted I would Morning Star’s.
We stepped out on the terrace. The peonies, thank God, had passed, but the foxgloves’ reptilian heads reared menacingly above the poppies Belle proudly indicated.
Their billowing blossoms, glistening like silk taffeta of an unearthly translucency, appeared to undulate in the windless night air. The gray-green stems were clothed thickly with hairs that looked stiff and sharp enough to draw blood. Here and there a swollen head, having shed the fancy dress of its petals, oozed a milky ichor.
I stepped back. “I’m sorry, Belle, I realize you’re as dedicated to this garden as Lottie Cooper was, but I find the plants here ... well, monstrous.”
Belle turned stiffly to stare at me. I couldn’t see her face clearly enough to read her mood, but when she finally spoke she seemed more defensive than angry.
“I reckon that’s ‘cause you been livin’ back East where every thin’ grows so puny.”
That was neither true nor the point; but how could Belle be expected to know about the flowers in the East, coming out here directly from New York City?
“Lottie called them luxuriant,” she continued. “She used to say, ‘Belle, have you ever seen anything so luxuriant?’ Well, let me tell you, my herbs’re bigger and better than anythin’ Lottie Cooper ever grew!”
Her tone conveyed a self-satisfaction that bewildered me. How could she not see what I saw?
“I think of them as my babies, Reenie,” she continued, wagging a finger in mock admonishment. “Don’t you know better than to find fault with a woman’s young’uns?”
I took refuge in silence. I tried to recall what Malcolm once quoted to boost my spirits after one of Mother Rogg’s tongue lashings; something from Romeo and Juliet about roses smelling sweet no matter what they were called. Let Belle think of those wretched plants as her babies it she wished; to me they were and always would be monstrous.
Chapter Nine
The furtive searches we embarked upon the next morning soon disheartened me. Relieved of her nighttime prowls, Belle now arose at the same time as Bazz and I, torn between the need to harvest her herbs and her desire to search for the elusive gold. She was not at her best in the morning.
The house grew more and more disordered, and sometimes, as I walked the long corridors—seeking oddities in the stone structure; rapping for hollow places—the trapped, stagnant air seemed oddly misty, as if I were looking through fine gauze. Bazz ascribed it to the dim light, and indeed a succession of unsettled gray days had all but robbed the prairie of its color; Belle testily suggested a need for spectacles. Both explanations were reasonable enough, but neither satisfied me.
The entire responsibility for preparing meals and tending to household needs had settled on Rita. It she left, which Quinn had pronounced just a matter of time, one of us would be saddled with the job. There was little doubt in my mind who this would be. With this unappealing probability in mind, and with the intent to delay the inevitable, I remonstrated with Belle one morning for haranguing Rita about bringing in wood for the fireplace.
“Well, I beg your pardon! I’d forgotten what a little prig you are, Reenie!”
“Belle, I was only thinking—”
“You’re always ‘just thinking’! ‘Just thinking’ is what you do best, you and your precious Malcolm Wilcox. Maybe I don’t talk as pretty as you; but I know what I’m about, and don’t you ever forget it!”
I turned without speaking and retreated
upstairs. I hadn’t realized I’d talked that much about Malcolm;
I certainly hadn’t meant to throw up my acquaintance with him to her as a measure of my superiority.
I brooded in my room, feeling immensely sorry for myself until I reflected on the fact that this was the first quarrel we’d had since I arrived. Not even a quarrel actually, more a misunderstanding. All sisters have them, I told myself; besides, I already knew Belle really wasn’t at her best in the morning.
Feeling considerably cheered, I walked from my room down the hall to the small room in the northwest corner. In temporary use as a storeroom for Bazz and Belle’s half-filled packing boxes, it had been Bazz’s nursery and opened across from the room that had once been his mother’s. After Ross Cooper died, Bazz moved down there from his boyhood bedroom on the top floor opposite his father’s. Might Quinn, once he had gained possession of Morning Star, take the dead rancher’s austere sanctuary for himself? I pictured Fawn’s graceful, dusky form cradled in the pale doeskins on that rope-latticed bed....
Enough! I crossed to the front corner of the nursery-storeroom to inspect the unusually wide sill of the window there, only to find my disturbing thoughts made flesh in a compelling tableau taking place below on the path leading down to the working center of the ranch.
Quinn, easy-seated on his black Appaloosa, was leaning toward Spotted Fawn. As I watched, the girl’s sharp-chinned little face lifted up toward his, her finger pointing beyond him. He smoothed her dark head with his cupped hand and gently pushed her forward—down toward his quarters, I assumed— to be rewarded with a flashing smile before she dashed off, light-tooted as the creature whose name she bore.
The subject of their exchange was clearly Sharo, who stood clench-fisted a few yards to one side, his stiff-legged departure blocked as Quinn wheeled his big stallion into the youth’s path. Sharo ducked, as if to escape a blow, and as Quinn’s face came into view, I saw his mouth working angrily. The horse continued to back and fill until, intimidation having lost its savor, Quinn allowed the boy escape. Plainly, his capacity for gentleness—if indeed that was what I had witnessed between him and Fawn—was limited.
I turned my attention back to the windowsill. It protruded into the room a good six inches or more than the other sills in the house, and on close inspection I saw that a long slab of stone of nearly identical coloration had somehow been affixed to it. I doubted if a knife blade could have been inserted in the joining.
Had a niche been chiseled within it? A hollow deep enough to conceal the bags or bars of gold our minds envisaged? The Ross Cooper I was beginning to understand might have found a certain humor in concealing his treasure in the room intended as a nursery. An occasional private visit of a father with his child was unlikely to be questioned, and even if removal of the gold was observed by young eyes, who would pay heed to the babblings of a toddler? Just as children see in their rooms at night the giants read to them about by day, so might it be assumed that gossip overheard about the long-rumored cache of gold had been transformed by a youthful imagination into glittering reality.
Bazz greeted the fevered workings of my imagination with an indulgent smile.
“I’m afraid the real reason for it is more prosaic than yours, Serena,” Bazz said. “Apparently I was a venturesome infant, and when quite young I managed one brightly moonlit summer night to haul myself up on the sill to watch the ‘doggies’ gathered near the trough, where they had come to drink.” He paused. “The window was open; the doggies I yearned to play with were coyotes.”
Bazz laughed at my involuntary gasp. “That was Mama’s reaction when she walked in to find me teetering on the edge. Paw refused to have bars installed. He said he wasn’t about to have people accuse him of caging his boy like a wild animal ... as if Paw ever cared what anyone thought,” he added in a mutter. “But Mama kept after him about it until finally he had the blacksmith in Ellsworth forge an ornamental grille which was attached by long flanges to the wooden frame.” He pointed out the holes, roughly filled, that I had failed to notice. “The sill was widened to support the bottom edge.”
When I expressed curiosity about how the widening had been accomplished, Bazz told me the local sandstone was relatively soft and easily drilled when newly quarried. “I imagine Paw attached the slab with long bolts and then plugged the holes so my busy little fingers couldn’t get at them.”
We fell silent.
“Well, at least you know your father went to a lot of trouble to keep you safe,” I said.
Basil raised a dark, slender eyebrow. “Dear Serena, always searching for a silver lining.” He cupped his long hand to my head, reminding me of Quinn’s caress of Fawn’s. “Knowing how Mama must have taken on, I’m sure he only did it to secure a little peace.”
“When was the grille taken down?” I asked as together we descended the stairs to the ground floor.
“I don’t remember exactly. It was just before Quinn came that first time, so I guess I was nine. Paw didn’t think it right, Mama going in and out of my room the way she did, so he made me move upstairs.” He shook his head. “It was hard on her, Serena. Mama was a sensitive, impulsive woman. It was important for her to be able to share thoughts and events as they happened. Who else was there but me?”
“But, good heavens, Bazz, you were only a short flight of stairs away from each other.”
“It was hard on her,” he insisted. “As for the grille, after the nursery was dismantled it was put to good use in the storm cellar. Mama had the blacksmith add hinges and a lock so it could be mounted on the shelves where she kept her herbal mixtures. Far as I know, it’s still there. Some of those elixirs ... well, she didn’t want anyone helping themselves.”
Remembering Father Rogg’s similar precautions at his pharmacy, I nodded. “Have you explored the space behind the fireplace yet?”
Bazz gave me a rueful smile. “Assuming there is one, I haven’t yet figured out how to get into it. When I first saw that space drawn in on the plans, I wondered how Belle and I could have missed it, but for all we know it isn’t there. Just because plans indicate something, doesn’t mean it was built that way. Especially out here, where every man’s got his own notions about what makes sense and doesn’t. The masons, seeing no sensible use for a place like that, mightn’t have bothered making it.”
“But Bazz—”
He held up his hands. “I know what you’re going to say. Faint heart never won fair fireplace.”
I laughed. “Or words to that effect.”
Bazz stepped off the bottom riser, and turned to look up at me. He took my hands in his and leaned to kiss my cheek. His lips were warm, his breath sweet. His mouth brushed down to lightly graze mine. “Or words to that effect,” he murmured.
We trailed out to the kitchen to report our lack of success to Belle. Wreathed in steam, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, her face frowning as she stirred at the pots bubbling on the big black range, she might have been one of Macbeth’s witches come for a visit from his Highland castle, except I doubted any of those formidable ladies had strawberry-blond hair. Pinned up in an untidy twist, her steam-dampened locks had escaped to fall lankly across her forehead. I idly wondered at their coarseness. I knew henna accounted for the color; could it also have caused Belle’s fine hair to thicken?
He reaction to Bazz’s theory promptly reclaimed my attention.
“Any lazy meddler fixin’ to change Ross Cooper’s precious plans sure woulda got the scriptures read to him in a hurry! You’d best keep on tryin’, Bazz. How ‘bout you, Reenie?”
I reported my lack of success. “You and Bazz had pretty well covered the upstairs already, Belle. I’ve run out of places to look.”
“What about the bunkhouse?” She fanned away the steam around her head; her eyes were hard and bright.
I avoided her penetrating gaze. I was reluctant to admit that its proximity to Quinn’s quarters had kept me away. “I used to ride Bingo every morning, but we’ve been so busy lately. ..
.” I shrugged and smiled weakly. Prevarication didn’t come easily to me.
“Then, you’d better start up again,” Belle said sharply. “If Bazz and I started prospecting around down there, it might get Quinn to wondering.”
She wiped her perspiring brow with her forearm. “I got my hands full enough with the herbs and searching the cyclone cellar without ridin’ herd on you two! I’d plum forgot how deep that cellar went and how cold it is even in summer. Near turns my bones to icicles.”
Her words alarmed me. “You shouldn’t stay down there too long, Belle. A chill can turn into fever awfully fast.” The memory of my mother’s cold, still form powerfully invoked the sense of loss and loneliness I knew would never cease aching deep within me. “No amount of gold’s worth your getting sick!” I blurted.
Belle regarded me through narrowed eyes; her hand slowed its stirring. “Lordy, if that isn’t just like you, Reenie. Better poor and healthy, is that it? Don’t you ever get tired of those Sunday school maxims of yours? If I was you, I’d give up tryin’ to wheedle the natural cussedness out of folks.”
Her choice of words didn’t sit well. “I care about you, Belle. I wouldn’t use an expression of my feelings to coax you—or anyone else—in or out of anything.”
Bazz laughed. “Why, Belle does that all the time! Are you sure you two are twins?”
Belle and I looked at each other. “‘Identical opposites,’“ she whispered, quoting an orphanage matron who had more than once become exasperated out of patience with us. I can’t recall which of us began to giggle first, and the succeeding exchange of do-you-remembers, tumbling one on top of the other, soon eased the awkwardness.
Belle was right, of course. I had dragged my feet long enough. Before Bazz told me about the local sandstone’s peculiar qualities, my sister’s speculations about sills fashioned like boxes seemed to me more wishful thinking than a real possibility. Now that I knew otherwise, nothing justified further delay in carrying out my assignment to spy out the bunkhouse. Quinn was the one forcing our departure; why should I harbor qualms about deceiving him?
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