Ingrid (Walker Creek Brides Book 2)

by Miriam Minger

  “Molly told us what Sheriff Logan did for you,” Kari said in a hushed voice so only Ingrid could hear. “Sweeping you onto his horse and riding here like the wind? The whole town must be talking about it!”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Oh, dear? Is that all you have to say? The man saved your life, Ingrid! Not just once, but twice, according to Molly. She said if he hadn’t shouted out to warn you, you might have been run over by a wagon—”

  “I don’t know, everything happened so fast,” Ingrid cut her off, shaking her head. “It might have been him shouting. I was running down the street, so upset that I couldn’t even think straight—though maybe it was the heat after all. He thought I had punished his son with a rod for acting up in class, but I would never do such a thing and he realized it. That’s why he came after me, to apologize. Yet he said, too, that I must be hallucinating because I thought someone else had cried out to warn me…”

  Ingrid fell silent and heaved a ragged sigh, her temple aching again as Kari grasped her hand.

  “Oh, Ingrid, forgive me. I shouldn’t have said a word about any of this to you. You’re supposed to be resting and not recounting such distressing events.”

  “I’m all right, just tired,” she murmured, hoping to reassure her sister, whose blue eyes were filled again with concern. “Do Anita and Andreas know what happened?”

  “Yes, they left the infirmary a while ago. Anita would not stop weeping, you know how she’s always so dramatic, until Seth’s father finally asked Andreas to take her home.”

  Ingrid gave a small laugh, which made Kari smile, too, now not looking half so concerned as she squeezed Ingrid’s hand.

  “We’ll talk more in the morning when I come to pick you up. Get some rest and don’t worry about a thing. Papa said he would cancel school for the rest of the week, which is probably just as well with this terrible heat. He said if we don’t get more rain soon, there may be a drought.”

  Ingrid nodded, not thinking so much about the potential for a drought as about hearing Kari call Caleb Walker “Papa.” She knew her sister had loved Arne Hagen, too, the good man who had raised her as his own daughter. There were so many new things to adjust to, so many changes in their lives, and now what had happened to her today and poor David breaking his leg—

  “Ingrid, everything’s going to be all right,” Kari said gently as if reading Ingrid’s tumbling thoughts. “Mama would be happy that we’re all together. Get some sleep.”

  Kari bent down to press a kiss to Ingrid’s cheek and then she rose and went to Seth, who was already standing by the infirmary door. Caleb tipped his hat toward Ingrid, throwing her a reassuring smile, and then he was gone, too.

  That left Charles and Molly, who spoke in low conference with Joshua. All three stood by David’s bedside, until Joshua turned as well and left the infirmary without a glance in Ingrid’s direction.

  His aloof indifference stunned her, the tension in his broad shoulders making her wonder if she had said something that might have upset him.

  But what? Something he might have overheard between her and Kari?

  “Your sister Anita brought a nightgown for you,” Molly said, distracting Ingrid from her troubled musing. “I’ll put a screen around you and let’s get you changed for bed, shall we?”

  Ingrid nodded, wanting to ask if Joshua was gone until morning, too, but she held her tongue.

  No doubt as sheriff of Walker Creek, he had plenty to do to ensure the town was secure before he retired for the night. Surely he had more important things to think about than anything she and Kari had said, didn’t he?

  “Keep going, man, just keep going.” His jaw tight, Joshua strode toward Blaze, tied to the fence, and loosened the reins.

  He wanted nothing more than to stay longer at the infirmary—with his son, yes, and with Ingrid, too, which made him all the more resolute to be on his way.

  What was wrong with him tonight? Calling her by her first name? Staring into her eyes as if he’d never seen such a stunning blue before? The sound of his name on her lips touching him in some deep place that he was determined to never resurrect again. Never!

  His jaw grown even tighter, Joshua mounted and steered his horse toward the main part of town.

  Wednesday evenings weren’t the quietest, but at least the Red Dog Saloon would soon be closing up for the night.

  Caleb’s directive for earlier hours suited him just fine, especially with the full moon shining brighter than any streetlights. With two deputies manning the jailhouse and two others patrolling the streets, maybe he’d be able to head home before midnight and get a decent night’s sleep.

  Dr. Davis had assured him that his son would be fine, the boy so tuckered out from a hellish day that he had slept right through all the commotion of Ingrid’s visitors.

  The only one Joshua had minded was her sister Anita, the young woman starting to weep and wail at first sight of her sister sleeping like the dead from that dose of laudanum. He’d realized almost immediately that much of her inconsolable display was feigned due to her lack of tears, a real Sarah Bernhardt in the making. Thankfully Dr. Davis had sent her packing with Andreas, her strapping twin brother who appeared to have grown another inch since he’d arrived in Walker Creek. They raised them big in Minnesota!

  That had left Seth, a longtime friend of Joshua’s, still at the infirmary, and his new wife, Kari, who had earned his admiration at how kindly she had treated his daughter at their wedding. Emily had clutched that pink rose from Kari’s bouquet all through the reception until bedtime, Joshua not having the heart to take the crushed bloom from her.

  Caleb, too, had lingered, which amazed Joshua. Until a month ago, the man had showed no kindness or consideration toward anyone, yet his genuine concern for Kari’s siblings that he seemed to have adopted as his own had been written all over his face. Like Molly had said, her brother was a changed man—

  “Sheriff Logan!”

  Joshua tensed in the saddle as his newest deputy, lanky Billy Braun, rode toward him on a palomino that looked ghostly pale in the moonlight. His gut instinct told him before the young man even uttered a word that there was trouble in town.

  “A fight at the saloon, the Sutherland boys!”

  Joshua wasn’t a swearing man, but his hands tightened into fists at the reins, making Blaze snort and toss his head.

  Trouble wasn’t the word for Cain Sutherland, an apt name, and his younger brother, Connor. Those two were headed down a reckless path that at the very least would one day mean jail time and at the worst, a hangman’s noose. He’d told them several months ago to steer clear of Walker Creek after their drunken and disorderly conduct, but apparently they had decided to ignore his warning.

  Yet as he kicked his horse into a gallop, Joshua welcomed the distraction…anything to keep him from thinking about Ingrid’s blue eyes and the stirring sound of his name on her lips.

  “Mama, no! Noooo!”

  Ingrid’s eyes flew open with a start, David’s desperate cries waking her from a fitful sleep.

  The single lamp was light enough for her to see that the boy thrashed in bed, caught in the throes of a nightmare. She threw aside her covers and ran to him, fearing that any moment he might tumble onto the floor and reinjure his leg.

  “David, it’s me, Miss Hagen!” Without hesitation, she gathered him into her arms and gently shook him. “You’re having a bad dream—David, wake up!”

  She shouldn’t have been surprised that he went rigid and tried to pull away from her, but she held him fast.

  “It’s all right, I’m not upset with you, I promise. Shh, I promise…” Whispering soothing words, she rocked him just as her mother had done when Ingrid had a nightmare, until gradually, David relaxed against her.

  “Does your leg hurt? Do you want me to call for Dr. Davis?”

  When the boy didn’t answer her, she feared he must be in pain even though Charles surely had given him laudanum to help him sleep. Something truly traumatic
had cut through the sedative, David crying out for his mother. Her heart aching for him, Ingrid gathered him closer even as the boy started to sob.

  “Oh, David, I’m so sorry about your mama. If I’d known—if you’d only told me what was troubling you at school, I would never have punished you. I’m so sorry if I made things worse for you—”

  “Mama didn’t love us! She wanted to leave Papa, but she fell in the stable and hit her head on a shovel. I saw it! He tried to help her, but it was too late. Mama died.”

  Horrified, Ingrid tried to calm him by rocking him again, but he only sobbed harder.

  “She didn’t want us! She didn’t want Papa. She said so, I heard her! Papa, where are you? Papa!”

  David’s anguished cry cutting her to the quick, Ingrid began to shout, too, for Charles, for Molly. It seemed within a moment the door between the house and the infirmary flew open and they came running in their nightclothes.

  “He had a nightmare! I can’t get him to stop crying. He wants his father—oh, dear, what are we to do?”

  “I’ll take him, Ingrid. Everything’s going to be all right. Molly, help her back to bed.”

  Ingrid sobbed now, too, overcome by what David had revealed as Charles eased the boy from her arms. How could Joshua’s wife not want him? Not want her own children?

  As Molly supported her around the waist and guided her back to bed, Ingrid glanced over her shoulder to see Charles had tucked David under the covers and was administering a spoonful of medicine.

  “He’ll be fine, Ingrid,” Molly sought to soothe her, helping her into bed. “Try to get some sleep. We’ll stay here for a while in case he has another bad dream.”

  Curling on her side, Ingrid nodded as she silently wept, her nightgown damp from David’s tears and her pillow growing wet from her own.

  Chapter 4

  “Oh, Ingrid, you gave us such a fright!” With the back of her hand pressed dramatically to her forehead, Anita spun in a pirouette and sank onto the settee. If she had intended to feign a faint, she failed miserably when she erupted into giggles, which made Ingrid smile and shake her head at her irrepressible younger sister.

  It felt good to be home, good to feel like herself again. Good to be sitting in the drawing room instead of lying abed in the infirmary.

  Yet Ingrid’s smile faded when she thought again about what David Logan had revealed last night when she had tried to console him. In spite of Anita’s best efforts to entertain her, she just couldn’t get his words out of her mind.

  She wanted to leave Papa, but she fell in the stable and hit her head on a shovel.

  What tragic sequence of events could have brought Joshua’s wife to such a terrible end? She had assumed that Mary Logan had died in childbirth or from some sudden illness.

  Ingrid had wanted to ask Dr. Davis about it earlier that morning, but she could never quite work up the courage—and then Kari and Anita had arrived in a carriage to take her home. David had still been sleeping soundly from the moment Ingrid awoke to her departure, everyone taking great care not to disturb him. Nor had Joshua come to visit his son by the time Ingrid left the infirmary, her keen sense of disappointment unsettling her.

  Why should she care if she had missed him? He probably would have ignored her like he had last evening, walking out without a good night or even a gentlemanly tipping of his hat.

  She had mulled over what she and Kari had said to each other that he might have overheard, but there was nothing that would have upset or offended him. It didn’t make sense, one moment Joshua calling her intimately by her first name and then becoming so stiff and distant. She had little social experience with men, her shyness precluding most interaction when she had lived in Faribault, so she had nothing with which to compare such puzzling masculine behavior.

  Ingrid had hoped Seth would accompany Kari to take her home this morning, and she could have asked him if it was true that Joshua’s wife had struck her head on a shovel—oh, it was too dreadful to even think about! Kari had left in such a hurry after dropping them off, having forgotten about an appointment to choose drapery fabrics for the new house, that Ingrid hadn’t been able to visit with her about it, either.

  “Ingrid, I’ve been trying to make you laugh, but now you just look troubled again. I don’t know what else to do!”

  She glanced at her crestfallen sister and was about to offer an apology when Miguel, the cook’s teenaged son, appeared suddenly in the doorway.

  “Miss Ingrid, Miss Anita, my mother said to come and find you right away! Your brother, Andreas, is in jail!”

  Ingrid jumped up from her chair while Anita gasped, glancing with confusion at Ingrid.

  “I went to take him his lunch at the blacksmith shop,” Miguel rushed on, “but they said he’s been locked in a cell since last night.”

  “Last night?” Anita echoed. “How can that be? We left the infirmary and came straight home…unless Andreas didn’t go to bed after all and left the house—”

  “Yes, his boss, Mr. Weaver, told me there was a fight at the Red Dog Saloon—a big fight! It took Sheriff Logan and all of his deputies to break it up, and Mr. Andreas was hauled away with the bad men that started it.”

  “Miguel, get the carriage!” Her face aflame, Ingrid followed the young man into the foyer while Anita hastened after her.

  “What are you going to do, Ingrid?”

  “Why, get our brother out of jail! Surely Joshua—Sheriff Logan—made a mistake. Andreas has never done anything like this in his life!”

  “I’m coming, too!”

  Ingrid didn’t argue with her younger sister, both of them grabbing their bonnets from wooden pegs and hurrying out the front door.

  “When are we going to get some food around here, Sheriff? Are you intending to starve us?”

  Seated in a swivel chair, Joshua kept his back turned to the iron-barred cells lining one side of the jail, his feet propped on the desk and his hat settled low over his eyes.

  To the half dozen men occupying those cells, he might have appeared to be dozing, but he was wide awake, just biding his time.

  “Sheriff! Did you hear me?” shouted Cain Sutherland, his gravelly voice laced with outrage. “My brother and I and my men haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday!”

  “You should have thought of that before you came into town looking for trouble. Sign the confession that you started the fight at the Red Dog, and agree to pay for all the damages, and I’ll think about sending out for some beans and rice.”

  “We’re not responsible for the damages! I already told you that big, dumb Norskie came at us first—”

  “That’s because you don’t have the good sense to keep your mouth shut when a man’s minding his own business and enjoying a drink,” Joshua countered, glancing over his shoulder at the furthest cell where Andreas lay stretched out on a cot, staring silently at the ceiling.

  Joshua wanted to let him go home; he imagined by now that his sisters had heard their brother was in jail, but he needed a confession from the Sutherlands before he would release anyone. So far the two instigators had been as stubborn as mules, but hunger was a powerful tool in getting a man to confess to his misdeeds.

  “I don’t want any blasted beans and rice, anyway,” Cain muttered. “I wouldn’t feed that slop to my dogs. You get us thick juicy steaks, Sheriff, and maybe Connor and I will come around to signing your piece of paper. What do you think, little brother?”

  If Connor, as swarthy and unshaven as Cain, uttered a word, Joshua didn’t hear it, lunging to his feet as Ingrid burst through the jailhouse door in a flutter of yellow calico and indignation.

  “Sheriff Logan, there must have been some mistake! Where’s my brother? Andreas!”

  Joshua groaned inwardly to see Anita hard upon her sister’s heels, and expected any moment for her to burst into noisy tears as she had at the infirmary. Instead, both young women stopped cold as the men occupying the middle cells—a rough-looking bunch even before their bruised faces,
cut lips, and blackened eyes—rushed forward to grip the iron bars and leer at them.

  “Hey, Hagen, if I’d known you had such pretty sisters, I would have bought you a drink instead of insulting you,” Cain taunted Andreas, who had jumped up from the cot and stared in dismay at Ingrid and Anita.

  “What are you doing here? Go home, I’m fine!”

  “Good advice,” interjected Joshua tightly, not liking at all how the Sutherlands and their three unsavory companions were ogling Ingrid and Anita. Gripped by fierce protectiveness, he took them both by the arm and ushered them outside, not surprised that they didn’t resist him. Their faces gone pale, the two had clearly been made uncomfortable by the unwelcome male attention.

  Especially Ingrid, whose distress was written plainly in her lovely eyes, pinned on him now.

  “Joshua, please, my brother…”

  Hearing her say his name again so softly made his breath seem to still, but he shook his head at her. “I can’t release him until the Sutherlands sign a confession that they caused the ruckus, otherwise they’ve got witnesses saying Andreas rushed at them.”

  “He would never start a fight! It’s not like him at all.”

  “I know. They egged him on, saying who-knows-what to him. It shouldn’t be much longer. If they want to eat, they’ll sign the paper and be done with it. I’ll bring Andreas home as soon as they do.”

  Joshua didn’t give them a chance for any argument or discussion, but steered them firmly to their carriage. He helped up Anita first, and then took Ingrid’s small hand to assist her onto the upholstered seat. She didn’t let go, instead holding fast to him, a tremor in her voice.

  “Andreas is hurt…his knuckles black and blue, his left eye swollen shut—”

  “He gave far better than he got. I’ve never seen anything like it. Five men against one, his fists pounding all of them. I had to shoot a gun into the saloon floor to get him to stop. I read a book once about Vikings going berserk in battle, and your brother sure looked how I imagined them. Thank God he wasn’t armed with a sword.”