No . . . Allie drew a deep breath and struggled for calm. There was another explanation, she assured herself. There had to be. The water in the bucket had been cold. Quite simply, the shock had ended Olivia’s hysterical convulsion, much as a hard slap to the face would snap someone out of a panic. It was shock. Yes, that had to be it.
Regaining her composure, Allie shoved all other possibilities from her mind. To believe another reason was just too horrible to contemplate. She clutched her sister’s wet forearm. “Olivia, you’re better! How do you feel?”
“How do you think I feel?” Olivia snapped impatiently. “I’m soaked to the skin, thanks to your hired hand.”
“Tell her, Olivia,” Jeff prodded. “Tell your sister that you’ve been faking these attacks just to run her around in circles.”
“I will do no such thing. I don’t have to answer to you!”
“Tell her.”
Allie’s heart felt as if it had stopped in her chest. No, it couldn’t be true, she told herself again. It was bad enough that Olivia had tricked her and Jeff with the episode in the barn. But her illness—that had to be real. She truly was sick. Otherwise Dr. Brewster would have been right. Lane Smithfield would have been right. “Olivia—my God—”
Jeff put his foot on the overturned bucket and leaned closer to Olivia, fixing her with a hard look that made her shift in her seat. “Tell Allie how you double-crossed me and that you’re the one who hung that dummy in the barn for her to see.”
“He’s lying!” Olivia shrieked, twisting toward Allie. Her face was contorted, pulling her mouth into an ugly pink slash. “I have not been faking! And I didn’t put that horrid thing out there. I swear on Daddy’s grave. On Daddy’s grave! Oh, God, I wish he was here. He wouldn’t have let his awful man set one foot on our property so he could say these dreadful things and turn you against me! I was his little princess, and I deserved to be treated like one because you cheated me out of my mother’s love. Daddy said it was all your fault and you know it!”
“Yes, he did,” Allie agreed woodenly, staggered by the terrible realization that had dawned upon her. “He always did.”
~~*~*~*~~
“I got word from that crazy Olivia Ford about another job for us, Floyd. Seth Wickwire brought me another letter from her. So you be ready a couple of hours after midnight. There’ll be a half moon, enough to see by, but not so much to give us away.” Cooper Matthews spoke to his companion over his beer glass in a hushed voice. Nobody in the Liberal Saloon appeared to be paying any mind to them as they stood at the far end of the bar. The barkeep had his nose buried in a green-backed ledger, and since it was the dinner hour, business was slow. But a man couldn’t be too careful.
Floyd Endicott upended his mug to drain the last dribble of beer into his mouth. “I’ll be ready. I hope she’s payin’ a little more this time.” He dragged his grimy sleeve across his foamy lip and smiled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “But I’d almost have been willin’ to string up that scarecrow for free if we coulda seen their faces when they found it danglin’ there in the barn. Hoo-ee, I’ll bet they went whiter than a glass of milk in a snowbank.” He straightened. “Still, a man’s gotta earn a livin’, and I need beer and tobaccy money.”
Cooper closed his hand around the fragrant stationary in his overalls pocket. It bore Olivia Ford’s message, including the promise of twenty dollars for a job well done. He let his gaze make another sweep of the saloon’s patrons and kept his voice down. “She’s payin’ the same as before—ten dollars. You get four after the job’s done, just like last time. Then there’s all that satisfaction from gettin’ even with Hicks and the Ford woman.”
“I dunno, Cooper. Satisfaction won’t buy me another beer.” He shrugged. “If I’m going to take the risk I want it to be worth my while. Besides, why should you get more than me?”
Cooper signaled the barkeep to bring another round of beers, which he paid for himself. “There. Happy now?” he asked as Floyd slurped down his drink with the noisy enthusiasm of a thirsty dog. “Why do I have to keep remindin’ you, Floyd, that I’m the brains of this outfit? This ain’t like the first time, when the woman left us everything we needed out by the road. There were supplies to buy for this job—am I supposed to pay for them myself and you pay nothin’? That wouldn’t be right.”
“I guess not,” Floyd replied, but sounded unconvinced. “But if we get caught, we’ll both go to jail, and I don’t think Will Mason is gonna care who paid for what.”
Cooper slammed his glass down on the bar and, with no little difficulty, defeated the urge to yell at Endicott. “Goddamn it, Floyd, quit bellyachin’ and take what I’m offering you. Now, I got the wagon loaded and tied up out back of the livery. I’m goin’ out to the Ford place tonight, and I expect you to come with me. If you don’t, you won’t even get four dollars. You’ll get no dollars.”
Floyd looked up at Cooper from under the brim of his greasy, gnarled hat. Pulling a small chaw of tobacco from his pocket, he bit off a hunk and grumbled around it, “Yeah, I’ll come. But I’m not sure I much like it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Numb and yet beset with a strange kind of grief, Allie stood at the back screen door, staring at Jeff’s lean-to across the yard. A variety of emotions assailed her—betrayal, astonishment, and a bone-deep hurt that she could barely comprehend. The night was still warm but her hands were icy with a cold that seemed to radiate from deep within her. She reached for her shawl where it hung on a hook by the door and drew it around her shoulders.
In the wake of the intense drama with Olivia, she had asked Jeff to leave them alone, and he had done so. But once he’d gone outside, Allie realized that she had nothing to say to her sister. Olivia had followed her around the kitchen, weeping and pleading, protesting her innocence and Jeff’s guilt. She had even fallen to her knees and tried to soak up the water on the floor with her skirt.
For reasons she still couldn’t define, Allie had felt nothing. She’d simply stood there, staring down at her sister with a sense of detachment that was with her even now. That place within her chest where she normally felt pain or gladness had turned oddly empty, leaving an awful, hollow nothingness. Unable to bring herself to speak one word, she’d gone about the business of mopping the kitchen floor.
Olivia, who was unaccustomed to being ignored, had finally flown to her bedroom and slammed the door, sobbing at the top of her lungs. Her wails could be heard downstairs and out in the yard, reminding Allie of nothing more than a spoiled, thwarted child having a tantrum. She had quieted down as dusk gathered, and Allie thanked God for the peace.
Afterward, she’d gone to her own room to wash and change into her nightgown, hoping to escape her awful loneliness in sleep. But sleep would not come to her. Her cheekbone ached where the cast iron pan had struck it, and it had positively throbbed whenever she lay down. That pain, though, was nothing compared to her sense of betrayal. All these years she’d devoted to Olivia, defending her, deferring to her, believing that she herself deserved no life beyond the this house and the farm upon which it was built. The thoughts had kept spinning through her tired mind and she’d left her bed again to come downstairs.
Now that full night had fallen, Allie was certain she’d never felt more alone in her life. As she remained at the door, her fingertips resting on the nubby texture of the screen, she considered the fact that she had no family from which to draw comfort. She never had. Her father and Olivia had always been their own family, shutting Allie out in subtle but obvious ways, both of them blaming her for a moment of inattention, a single heartbeat of time upon which four lives had turned and irrevocably changed. Father and Olivia had had each other. And after Amos Ford died, Olivia had Allie.
But Allie had no one.
There was no familiar shoulder where she could rest her head or her ice-bound heart, no one to help her pass this night of terrible emptiness and disillusionment.
She glanced up at the cloudless, blue-black sky and saw
the moon, a buttery half-round, with stars flung around it like jewels.
That’s your moon up there tonight, Allie . . .
Jeff had given her a summer moon one night when she had still believed she knew her world and everything in it. One night a lifetime ago.
There was no light coming from the window in the lean-to, so he was probably asleep.
In bed.
He was hardly more than an acquaintance.
She touched the tucks on the bodice of her nightgown, letting her fingers trail over her breasts. To go to a man dressed only in a nightgown and shawl was so inappropriate she supposed it was downright immoral. And it seemed doubly so, given the kiss they’d shared this afternoon and the thoughts she’d had about him, hot and disconcerting. She had watched him all these weeks gaining strength and rugged confidence. He was not the broken-down drunk he’d been when she met him, dirty and needing nourishment and a haircut. Now he was almost fully restored to the tall, vital, lean-muscled man she’d once admired as he’d walked down the street in Decker Prairie.
But he’d known pain and disappointment, and the shock of a life turned suddenly upside down. It was almost as if he called her, urging her to come to him.
Perhaps in the company of a stranger she would find the understanding and consolation that her own kin had denied her.
Allie tightened her wrap and pushed open the screen door.
~~*~*~*~~
Jeff lay naked in his bed, a restless drifter through the night, not awake but not asleep. The sun had pounded down on the lean-to all day, and the tiny room was still like an oven. His rough sheet seemed to brush the nerves raging just beneath his bare skin, rousing him whenever he dozed. As he tossed and turned, images of a red-haired woman floated through his dreams. She was sweetly curved, with skin like honeyed cream and a soft body that had never known a man’s touch.
In this twilight place, he imagined that she came to his bed to lie beside him, her hair flowing over the pillow like tongues of flame. His body responded, hard and keen, to the feel of her smooth thigh against his. He could not move to embrace her. Instead, he lay paralyzed in a helpless fever-pitch as she caressed him and ran her hands over his chest and belly.
Jeff, I’ve been waiting for you . . . waiting all my life . . .
Her fingers trailed lower and he heard himself groan.
I need you, Allie, to give me back my soul again.
I love you, Jeff, more than you can know . . .
The distant sound of an owl woke him, making him aware of the sheet on his skin once again. Jeff lurched to consciousness. He was alone in the hot darkness, slick with sweat, uncertain of his surroundings. It had been just a dream, he realized, a sweet, unattainable dream. A feeling of profound disappointment settled on him like a stone.
Allie wasn’t with him. She hadn’t touched him or called his name or said she loved him. Just this afternoon, hadn’t she told him that she thought about him? Hadn’t he held her and kissed her and fought the urge to take her right there, in the tall grass? Yes. But the other events of the afternoon came flooding back over him—Olivia, the bitchy, spoiled brat, and Allie, confused and disillusioned by what she’d learned. For his own part, Jeff sometimes thought of the hero in the old fairytale about Briar Rose, trying to hack his way through a wall of thorn bushes to reach the princess. The Fords had a whole briar patch of problems, both literally and figuratively, and Allie stood at the center of them. Jeff was certainly no hero—his saber was nothing more than a history of loss and a future of uncertainty.
He rolled over on his side and looked at the empty place beside him lighted by a wedge of moonbeam pouring through the open door. But as he watched, a long, feminine shadow fell across the bed. No figure appeared in the entry, and all his muscles tensed. Jesus, maybe it was Olivia Ford, here to exact some kind of revenge for exposing her charade.
“Jeff?” The voice was so tentative it could have been a breath of night breeze through the willows. But he recognized it immediately.
Allie came to the doorway dressed in only a nightgown and her shawl, her hair falling around her like a girl’s. Jeff was acutely conscious of his nakedness and his state of arousal that was obvious beneath the sheet. He wasn’t a man given to personal modesty, and being undressed in front of a woman had never bothered him. But Allie Ford wasn’t just any woman. He sat up, hoping the darkness would hide his desire.
“Allie—are you all right?”
She advanced a step. “Well, I was wondering if—that is, would it be all right if I sat with you for a while?”
He couldn’t see her face in the shadows, but the moonlight gleamed through her thin gown, revealing the shape of her legs. He wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t have come, that seeing her like this after his dream, after thinking about her all day and craving her every night could very well make him forget what few manners he still possessed. But how could he send her away? She sounded so vulnerable, so defeated.
“Uh, sure, Allie. I’m sorry I’m not dressed for callers.” He rearranged the sheet around him and put his pillow behind his back. Then he lit the kerosene lantern that sat on the window sill next to him. The small room sprang to light and shadow.
Allie stepped inside and perched on an old chair he’d taken from the barn and put next to the bed. The faint, sweet fragrance of lavender seemed to rise from the folds of her gown as it would rise from a field planted with the flowers.
“It’s a long night for you, isn’t it?”
She sighed, folding and unfolding her hands in her lap. “Yes, and it’s not even ten o’clock yet. I feel as if . . . as if someone pulled the floor out from under me. Everything is topsy-turvy. Do you know what I mean?”
Oh, how he knew. “I’ve had some experience with that, yes.”
“Of course, I suppose you have.” She dipped her head in a way that revealed the angry bruise on her face. Jeff sucked in his breath.
“Jesus Christ!” Instinctively he reached out to take her chin and turned her injured cheek toward the lantern. Even her eye was a bit swollen. “Did your sister hit you?”
“No. You know . . . Olivia throws things during her spells. This afternoon she threw a pan and it glanced off my cheek before she flung it through the window. I’m sure she didn’t mean—I don’t think she meant to hit me with it.”
“Is the bone broken?”
She touched her fingertips to the bruise and pressed gingerly. “I-I don’t think so.”
It looked so painful, and just the knowledge that she was hurting turned up the fire under his boiling kettle about Olivia. “I’ve seen men beat up like this after a bar fight.”
He released her chin and it began to quiver. She dropped her gaze to her lap.
Damn it, could he be any more tactless? he wondered. Allie had had a lousy life, he concluded, and he knew only the very thin top layer of it. Deeper than that were years of loneliness and servitude to a sister who knew exactly how to get what she wanted. He wanted to pull her off that chair and into bed with him, just to cuddle her and protect her. “Hell, honey, I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sorry,” he murmured and took her icy hand. “This’ll heal, and you’ll be as pretty as ever.”
She jerked her hand away and a sob rose in her throat. “Pretty! I don’t care about that! What does pretty matter? I took care of my father and I took care of Olivia. I did everything I was ever asked, except that one time. And that one time, just that one horrible, single mistake, led me to this.” She gestured at her cheek. “It was all my fault, but if not for that, why, I would have left here years ago! I had dreams once, about a home and family of my own, far away from here.”
She looked at him with her mouth slightly open, obviously as surprised as he was by her statement.
He reached for her hand again. “Allie, tell me about it. I think you need to tell someone, and I want to hear it. What mistake did you make that was so bad?”
“I killed my mother!”
She’d said it earlier that
day, too, but he didn’t believe it. It had to be something else. Something that had haunted Allie every day of her life since it happened. But she obviously believed what she’d told him, so he went along with her.
“How? What did you do?”
Tears welled in her eyes but she remained mute.
“Allie, honey, how did you kill your mother?”
She dropped her gaze to her lap again, as if looking at him were too painful to bear. When she finally spoke, her voice trembled, like an old woman’s. “From the day that Olivia was born, my mother wasn’t quite—well, she wasn’t quite right. Dr. Brewster said she had melancholia, that it was a common ailment following childbirth, and that women usually come out of it. Except Mama never did. It dragged on for months, and if anything, she seemed to get worse. She’d sit by the window all day long and stare at nothing. Or she’d stay in bed. She rejected Olivia. She wouldn’t even n-nurse her, so I had to feed her with a bottle. Father didn’t have much patience with Mama’s strangeness. He expected her to get better, and right away.” She fixed her gaze on the wall, a curiously distant look entering her eyes. “‘No more of this nonsense!’ he’d say. ‘You snap of this, woman. Right now, I say, or by God, I’ll know the reason why.’ ” Her gaze flicked to Jeff, then back to her lap. “Only she didn’t seem to hear him. Not really. So he took me out of school to see to things around the house.”
“All the chores fell to you? God, Allie, how were you, eight or nine?”
“Yes. He was busy with the farm, and I was the only one who could help. I did the cleaning and cooking and washing. I took care of Olivia and Mama.”
“Your father didn’t want to hire someone to help?”
She looked up at him then. “Dr. Brewster suggested it. But Father said it was my job. The Fords took care of their own, he said. So I was responsible for running the house. I did everything I was told to, or I’d get a licking.”
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