by Linda Jacobs
“Let’s take up where we left off,” the Pinkerton man began. “Mr. Sutton, I’ve come to believe you were at the stagecoach scene.” He pulled out his pad and pen. “The question is, what were you doing there and with whom?”
“I can tell you that,” Laura jumped in without thinking. “He saved my life and brought me through the wilderness to this hotel.”
Cord laid a gentle hand on Laura’s arm. Resnick glanced down at their contact.
“I’ll handle this,” Cord said evenly. “I was traveling from my ranch in Jackson’s Hole toward Yellowstone when I heard shots. I got to the coach and found Laura hiding out in a ravine. There was a gun battle, the man we heard called Danny today, rode away … the other man was gut shot.”
“You dispatched him with a bullet to the head.” It wasn’t a question.
Cord nodded, his focus on the wind painting patterns on the blue lake.
“Did you think you’d be in trouble if you told your story?” Something in his demeanor suggested he referred to Cord’s heritage.
“How could he be in trouble? That’s all nonsense Captain Feddors keeps spouting.”
Resnick looked from her to Cord; she’d spoken too glibly, calling attention to Feddors’s claims rather than defusing them.
She tried again. “I asked Cord to keep our journey secret, because I didn’t think my father and aunt would take kindly to me spending three nights in the forest without a chaperone. I’m afraid I did make up the story about the couple from Montana … to avoid being labeled a ruined woman.”
Resnick studied her a moment, his gaze passing over her black eye, then nodded. “There’s plenty more you both aren’t telling me, but for the moment I’ll let
it go.”
He brushed off his pant legs, which bore some pine duff from the stakeout, and rose. “We’ll continue to be on the lookout for this Danny, and I’ll speak with Hank Falls about his ‘twin brother.’”
Left alone, Laura looked miserably at Cord. “I’ve made things worse for you.”
He got up. “I’m going to find Edgar Young and get to the bottom of this.”
She watched him go along the path in a direction that could lead to the stables, to Wylie Camp, or back toward the cabin. Still stunned at what she’d learned about him, she got to her feet in a restless motion.
Manfred Resnick was headed toward the docks, where Hank’s steamboat lay snug against the pier. Curious to know what Hank would say about his resemblance to the outlaw, Laura hurried down the slope. Across the Grand Loop Road and down the steep wooden steps to the pier, she shadowed Resnick so inexpertly that he stopped and waited for her at the base of the stairs.
They stood in the shade of the upper deck overlooking the lake, ripples lapping the dock and evoking a sweet water smell mixed with that of damp wood.
Resnick’s one-eyed regard took her in. “Did curiosity kill the cat, miss?”
Laura bristled. Seeing “Danny” again had brought back what she’d tried for days to forget. “The outlaw tried to kill me.”
“Wasn’t the motive for the attack robbery?” he countered.
“I could have been killed,” she challenged. “Who are you to say what went on?”
Resnick gave her a reluctant salute. “Very well, Miss Fielding. With you along, the conversation with Falls might take an intriguing turn.”
They went along to the break in the rail and stepped onto the well-trafficked lower deck of the Alexandra.
At Resnick’s first knock, Hank opened the main cabin door. His starched white shirt was immaculate; he’d changed for the dinner hour.
Upon seeing Laura with the Pinkerton man, his blond brows arched. Spreading his hands as though offering to be cuffed, he said, “If I’m to be taken into custody, I’d prefer to be Miss Fielding’s prisoner.”
She kept her face stony while Resnick nodded toward the interior of the boat. “May we come in?”
Hank stepped back, and they entered the passenger cabin. It was spare, furnished with brown horsehair benches beneath panoramic windows. The wooden deck here was also scarred from many pairs of boots and shoes. Aft, Laura saw an ornate wooden door with a thick brass knob. The varnish was so heavy she could see an almost clear reflection of the three of them.
“Miss Fielding,” Resnick began. “Suppose you tell Hank about the man who attacked the stagecoach, whom you saw again near the hotel this afternoon.”
Hank’s backbone seemed to straighten.
Looking at him, Laura began, “When I first came to the hotel and Mr. Resnick questioned me about my ordeal … I told him the outlaw who got away on his palomino looked a lot like you.”
She could see from the way his pupils got larger that she’d hit the mark with that one. And, after the first shock, there appeared pain.
“You know it wasn’t me,” he told her. “You knew the person you saw the other day in buckskin wasn’t me, either.”
She nodded. “Then who … ?”
“We do know it wasn’t you, sir,” Resnick broke in. “This afternoon Miss Fielding saw the outlaw again, hiding out in an abandoned cabin. The other man with him called him ‘Danny.’”
A little shudder seemed to pass through Hank.
“He looks too much like you to be anyone but your twin.” Laura looked at his mirror image in the polished door that must lead to his exclusive private quarters.
In an instant, Hank passed from defensive to enraged. “This is all preposterous.” He gestured them to get off his boat. “I have no brother!”
As soon as Laura and the Pinkerton man were gone, Hank strode across the worn floor and flung open the door to his inner sanctum.
His sister stood on the patterned wool carpet near the door. At his entry, she stepped back and almost tripped on the carved wooden leg of a divan covered with gold-threaded pillows.
“You were listening.”
Alex’s eyes, which matched her lace-trimmed lavender dress, widened. She reached to twirl a strand of her hair, a sure sign she was nervous.
Hank thought that her hair still looked like it had when she was a tiny girl, when Danny used to lift her up to ride in front of him. Danny had always chosen palominos because their manes matched their small sister’s crown of shining gold.
“How long has he been here?” Hank slammed the door.
Alex jumped, her usually pink cheeks pale. “Who?”
He stepped closer. “I asked you how long Danny has been here; my brother who destroyed all my illusions about us being two parts of the same whole.”
“A few days.”
“Well, of course, if he were down south attacking a stage and killing the driver on June twentieth, it would have taken a while to get here.”
Alex fiddled with a cameo on a gold chain around her neck. “Danny could never have done what they said,” she protested with the certainty of youth.
“You must know better. Danny admitted he was thrown out of the army for embezzling the payroll.”
Alex turned away.
He shouldn’t tell her what he never had before, but he couldn’t stand her continued denial. “You were too young to understand …”
The sting of bile rose in the back of his throat, but he told her anyway.
Hank had been with his stepfather, Jonathan, when they’d opened the barn door. The smell of sweet hay, dairy cows, and manure was pleasant in the crisp autumn air. Once inside, they passed down the straw-covered aisle toward the little room Jonathan used as an office. Payroll time after the harvest, and the men who had helped bring in a middling crop of Idaho potatoes were coming in an hour for the season’s wages.
Behind the wooden gate of the last stall, Hank saw his sixteen-year-old brother, Danny, the person he loved most in the world, on hands and knees in the hay. Their hired man who helped in the barns, Frank Worth, knelt beside him gripping an overstuffed cloth moneybag.
On the floor was the empty metal box that had contained the payroll.
Hank nearly retched
up his mother’s midday dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes. “Danny,” he gasped.
Big, burly Jonathan grabbed Frank Worth and dragged him up. “How dare you?”
Jonathan swung his fist and connected.
In the same instant, Danny launched at his back. “Leave him alone,” he shouted in a high thin voice. “It was my idea! To take the money and get out. You’ve never wanted another man’s kids. Frank and I are going to the gold mines.”
Jonathan ordered both the hired man and his stepson off his farm and out of his family’s lives.
Hank didn’t tell Alex the rest.
A year later, at seventeen, he’d traveled to the mining districts in search of his brother. And heard he might be working in Garnet Houlihan’s Ketchum, Idaho, brothel.
The rough building was made of new, sawn yellow pine. A heavyset woman held open the front door. “What’s your pleasure, son?”
“No, I …” Hank stopped on the threshold. The smell of resin was overpowered by a miasma of unwashed bodies, cheap cologne, and the musky aroma of sex.
“Garnet,” the woman called. “This boy needs breaking in.”
Hank stared at the legs of cots that showed beneath woolen army blankets forming flimsy partitions. Feminine laughter cascaded over the top of one curtain.
A hard-looking woman in her thirties came out of a small office near the entry. She wore a faded rust velvet gown with dirty lace at the neck, her hair an improbable shade of burgundy.
As she surveyed him with knowing tawny eyes, the sound of a man grunting behind a blanket brought Hank’s sex to sudden shameful attention.
Trailing a hand down his cheek and chest to brush the front of his trousers, Garnet said amiably, “I believe I’ll do the honors meself.”
Grabbing his hand, she led him down the narrow aisle to an alcove at the end. A window looked out onto the muddy morass of road beside the Salmon River. Great piles of rock, sifted by miners, lined the once-pristine riverbank. The hills were covered with stumps where trees had been cut to construct buildings and sluices. Men shoveled river sand and gravel into long troughs to check for the flash of color in their pans.
“Ye’ve struck gold today, me boy,” Garnet announced. Sitting in front of Hank on the narrow cot, she opened the front of her bodice. “You can touch ‘em.”
Despite his aroused state, feeling the fleshy, blue-veined globes was the last thing Hank wanted. But he reached forward woodenly and felt their flaccid softness.
Garnet reached for the buttons on the front of Hank’s trousers.
Yet, even as she raised her skirt and tried to draw him down onto the cot, he recalled his mission. “I’m not here for … I’m looking for my brother, Danny.”
“Ye don’t know a good thing when you’ve got it, boy.” Garnet pushed Hank away. “Danny worked here a while, tending bar. I found out he had his hand in the till, and I run him off, I did.”
Hank ran down the long aisle that led to the muddy street.
When he heard, a week later, that Garnet had been brutally slain, he couldn’t help but suspect his brother. Within the month, a traveling salesman came by the farm and reported someone had seen a palomino tied to the brothel’s rail the day Garnet died.
In his elegant cabin aboard the Alexandra, Hank clamped down hard with his teeth to keep from being sick.
“Stay away from Danny, Alex.”
Between episodes of futile pounding at Edgar Young’s door, Cord spent time walking along the lakeshore. The water smells and the scent of heated pine in the afternoon sun made him aware once again that the major draw of buying the Lake Hotel was the wilderness that surrounded it. Sure, he loved Salt Lake City, but in Yellowstone, as at his ranch, he thrilled to the savory blend of sage and cottonwood, of earth and evergreen.
His gaze skimmed the Absarokas east of the lake, and he noted the telltale plume of wildfire burning through the backcountry. What a mix of contradiction drove this country outpost; fire on the mountain, azure water below. Plain soldiers labored at tack by day and donned dress uniform by evening to dance with the ladies beneath tulip lights. All the while, out among Wylie’s tent campers, Cord’s own uncle plied the trade of “Injun storyteller.”
His cheeks grew hot, and his breath labored with mingled shame and pride. Laura had offered to go with him to see Bitter Waters and to help him speak with the man who shared his blood. But how could he allow her when seeing his uncle in native costume before a tipi would reinforce their different heritages forever?
A passing cloud obscured the sun and darkened the lake’s brightness. When Edgar had approached him about buying the Lake Hotel, Cord had had the egotistical effrontery to think the man believed he owned Excalibur outright, that he didn’t know Cord’s heritage had decreed the encumbrance of his stolid adopted brother’s name on the title. At the time, Cord had been too pleased at his good fortune to examine Edgar closely.
But at some level, he’d known since his arrival that there was something not quite right about the banker’s manner, a certain quality of evasiveness, along with his unexplained absences. Even so, he would never have suspected mild-mannered Edgar of consorting with a murdering outlaw.
As far as Cord knew, neither Edgar nor Danny had seen him and Laura sneak up and listen to their conversation in the cabin. Yet, the two men had gotten away clean. Coincidence, or had Cord and Laura been seen?
He hadn’t told Laura exactly what Danny had said. That remark about “holding off cleaning up loose ends” might explain why Danny hadn’t killed him or Laura on the trail. Or later.
But if Cord “had served his purpose,” he … and Laura … might now be targets.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JUNE 26
Laura pulled on a pair of Constance’s lace-trimmed muslin drawers and sat on the edge of the bed, ignoring the flounced underskirt. From outside her window came the sounds of merriment as coach and wagon tours returned for dinner.
Her thoughts turned to Hank, for no matter his denial of a family relationship with the outlaw, she trusted her eyes. The two men had to be not only blood kin; they were virtually identical except in grooming and manner.
Had it shocked Hank to learn his brother had gone bad? Or did he already know? The pain she’d seen in his expression made her suspect he did. And if they were twins and not just brothers close in age, how especially awful it must be.
Unless Hank were a smoother version of Danny.
At this disturbing thought, she realized that sometime in the last few days she’d gone over to Cord’s side. From his first grudging admission of his parents dying when he was young, to this afternoon’s revelation that his grandmother was Nez Perce … and had died for it, she’d been touched. He was, as Constance had said, more alive than most people.
Laura pushed off the bed, donned the underskirt, and was studying upon which dress to wear when her cousin came in, as though summoned by Laura’s thinking of her. She wore a smart crimson velvet number with a nipped-in waist, and her intent air said she was up to something.
Laura kept her eyes on the bureau mirror and dressed her hair.
“What have you been amusing yourself with this afternoon, while Mother and I were sewing in the lobby parlor?” Constance ran a finger along the lace scarf beneath the mirror.
Laura set Aunt Fanny’s hairbrush on the wooden dresser with a clack. “First, you know I went to the paddock to go riding with Sergeant Nevers. Then, while walking in the forest near the shore, I saw the outlaw who robbed the stagecoach.” She expected surprise, but Constance’s blue stare was impassive.
“We called for help, and though the soldiers gave chase, he got away.”
“We?”
Laura reached for the brush again.
“Quite more eventful than embroidery, I should say.” Constance put her small hands on her hips. “I had hoped for more than to be left for the day with my mother, especially as I wear William Sutton’s betrothal ring.”
Doubt and envy stabbed at
Laura as it had in the stable. Cord might be playing them both false, as he had been hiding his family secrets. But something tremulous in her cousin’s tone gave her pause.
“Tell me, then,” Laura challenged. Though it was like biting an aching tooth, she had to know. “What was it like when Cord asked you to be his wife?”
“Wha … what do you mean?”
Laura advanced on her. “I mean when and where. Were you on the terrace in St. Paul, or the rose garden, lost in a half moon’s magic, when he popped the question? How did he say it?” She dipped as though to go down on one knee. “Did he say, ‘Marry me, Connie? I cannot imagine a life without you’?”
Constance glowered.
Laura gripped the silver handle of the brush. “I mean did Cord ever really ask you to marry him in so many words?”
Crossing her arms over her chest, Laura focused on her cousin, who met her stare for stare.
She waited.
“All right, he never asked me!”
Laura gasped. If that were true, why hadn’t Cord denied they were betrothed?
Constance rushed to fill the silence. “He invited me out West to see his land and to bring Mother, so I believed …” Her chin began to quiver. “Why do you call William ‘Cord’ in that crass way?”
“Perhaps if you knew him better, you’d realize it suits him.”
“And you, of course, know him intimately. Since you spent three nights on the trail with him!” Constance’s expression was both triumphant and ugly.
Laura’s face got hot. “How … ?”
“Mother and I were much enlightened by your conversation with Mr. Resnick and … William on the porch outside the window where we were sewing.”
It was her own fault. No one had forced her to speak up for Cord.
“Eavesdroppers are the lowest of the low,” she countered.
“How about liars? How about that kindly couple from Montana that brought you to Yellowstone?”
“How about your lying to everyone who’ll listen about Cord asking you to marry him?”