by Kaki Warner
“Good girl,” Lucinda murmured.
“Left?” Edwina parroted, shocked by the notion of a woman simply heading off on her own to a foreign country just because she didn’t like living with her husband’s family.
“I’m an expeditionary photographer. A tintypist, really, specializing in cartes de visite.” Maddie smiled as if that explained everything, which it didn’t. “The Illustrated London News is paying me to capture the American West from a woman’s perspective. Isn’t that grand?”
It was unbelievable. A female photographer? Edwina couldn’t imagine such a thing. It had taken all her courage to travel a thousand miles, yet this tiny woman had taken on a man’s occupation and crossed an ocean to an unknown country. How daring. And terrifying. And admirable.
“And you?” Lucinda inquired, jarring Edwina back to the conversation. “Do you live in this area?”
Edwina blinked at her, wondering how to answer. “Yes. I mean, I plan to. That is to say, I will. Soon.”
“She’s traveling to meet her husband,” Pru piped up in an attempt to translate Edwina’s garbled response.
“How nice.” Lucinda’s voice carried a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.
“Not really.”
“Oh, dear,” Pru murmured.
The two women across the aisle stared at her with brows raised and expectant expressions, so Edwina felt compelled to explain. “I’ve never met him, you see. We married in a proxy ceremony.”
A moment of awkward, if not stunned, silence. A pitying look came into Lucinda’s eyes, but Maddie clapped her hands in delight. “A mail-order bride! How perfect! How utterly western! You shall be my first subject! Won’t that be delightful?”
Delightful in a ghoulish, horrifying way, Edwina thought, not sure she wanted her misery captured on tintype for all time.
* * *
That afternoon, when the wagon transporting the passengers rolled to a muddy stop outside the hotel, Edwina decided that if Heartbreak Creek was an example of divine intervention on her behalf, then God was either extremely angry with her or had a macabre sense of humor.
But she still offered up a grateful prayer of thanks that no tall, dark-haired, unsmiling man rushed forward to greet her.
“Oh, my,” Maddie breathed, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm as she peered over the side rails. “I could take photographs here for a month.”
“If we live that long,” Lucinda muttered. Clutching her leather valise in one hand and raising her skirts with the other—much to the glee of three reprobates grinning from the doorway of the Red Eye Saloon next door to the hotel—she gingerly stepped out of the wagon, onto the mounting block, then up onto the boardwalk. With a look of distaste, she dropped her skirts and looked around. “Two weeks. Here. Surely they’re jesting.”
Edwina climbed up onto the boardwalk beside her, followed by Maddie, then Prudence. Moving aside to make room for the other passengers clambering out of the wagon, the four women studied the town.
It was a dismal place.
Situated at the bottom of a steep-sided canyon, the town was a rat’s nest of unpainted plank-sided buildings, sagging tents, dilapidated sheds, and lean-tos, all sandwiched between a flooded creek and a single muddy dunghill of a street. And the crowning glory, perched on the rocky hillside north of the wretched town, was a sprawling, many-scaffolded edifice that looked more like a monstrous spider poised to strike than a working mine. The entire town had a haphazard, unfinished feel to it, like a collection of random afterthoughts thrown together by a confused mind.
And yet, Edwina realized, looking around a second time, if one looked beyond the eyesore of the mine, and the squalor and taint of decay that seemed to hang in the air like stale wood smoke, there was astounding beauty to be seen. Tall conifers rising a hundred feet. Stark cliffs sheened by cascading waterfalls winding down the rock face like frothy ribbons. High, white-capped peaks cutting a jagged edge against a cloudless blue sky. It was savage and mysterious . . . but it was also blessedly free of the ravages of war, and for that reason more than any other, Edwina liked it.
“I wonder what they mine?” Maddie asked, squinting up at the sprawling hillside monstrosity.
“Nothing lucrative,” Lucinda murmured, eyeing the ill-kempt, wide-eyed gawkers now spilling out of the saloon to get a better look at the ladies. “This place is one step from being a ghost town.”
“A ghost town!” Maddie fairly glowed with excitement. “Two weeks won’t be long enough to do justice to this marvelous place. And look at those faces! Each one tells a story. I can’t wait to get to work.”
“Then you’d best start unpacking,” Lucinda advised, eyeing the boxes of photography equipment crowding the boardwalk.
Prudence nudged Edwina’s arm and nodded to where the conductor was crossing names off a list as the other passengers filed into the hotel. “Let’s get settled.”
The Heartbreak Creek Hotel might have been—for a month or two, anyway—a thriving place. But years of neglect had reduced it to a bedraggled, rickety old dowager, barely clinging to the threadbare remnants of her brief glory. Sun-faded drapes, scuffed wainscoting against peeling wallpaper, once-lovely oil sconces now caked with soot and dust. Even the air that met them when they stepped through the open double doors smelled musty, laced with the lingering scents of stale cooking odors, tobacco smoke, and moldy carpets.
As they waited their turn before the conductor, Edwina scanned the lobby. Directly across from the entry doors was a high paneled counter that showed remarkable, if grimy, workmanship, manned by a harried elderly clerk passing out brass keys as the passengers signed in. Beside the counter rose a steep staircase that led to a banistered mezzanine off which doors into the upstairs rooms opened. To the right of the entry, an archway opened into a dining area, now deserted in the midafternoon lull, while to the left stood a closed door, which led, judging by the tinkling piano music and loud voices, directly into the reprobates’ saloon.
“She with you?” a voice asked.
Turning, Edwina found the conductor frowning at her, his small, faded blue eyes flicking to Pru, who stood slightly behind her. Edwina read disapproval in his expression and felt her ire rise. “She is.”
The conductor’s lips thinned beneath his bushy gray mustache. “You’ll have to share a room. That all right by you?”
“Of course it’s all right.” Edwina started to add, and why wouldn’t it be, you pinhead? when a sharp tug on the back of her coat choked off the angry retort. Pru hated scenes.
The conductor licked the tip of his stubby pencil and squinted at his list. “Names?”
“Edwina Ladoux . . . Brodie. And this lovely lady with me”—ignoring her sister’s warning glare, Edwina swept a hand in her direction—“is my—” Another jerk almost pulled her backward. Before she could recover, Pru stepped forward to say, “Maid. Prudence Lincoln, sir.”
While Edwina coughed, Pru accepted their room assignment, nodded her thanks, and shoved Edwina on into the lobby, where the front desk clerk was directing passengers to their rooms.
“You almost choked me,” Edwina accused, rubbing her throat.
“Hush. People are looking.”
“At my vicious maid, no doubt.”
“Welcome, ladies. I’m Yancey.” Showing stained teeth—what few were left, anyway—in a broad smile, the hotel clerk, a grizzled old man with eyebrows as fat as white caterpillars, beckoned them forward. “Room number?”
Before Pru could answer, Lucinda stepped past them and up to the counter. “Room twenty.” Setting her valise on the floor, she gave Pru and Edwina an apologetic smile. “I told the conductor we would share. I hope you don’t mind. It’ll be safer,” she added in a whisper. Then without waiting for a response, she turned back to the slack-faced clerk, plucked the pen from its holder, dipped it in the inkwell, and smiled swee
tly. “Where shall I sign?”
“Twenty?” The old man was clearly aghast. “But that—that’s the Presidential Suite!”
“So I’ve been told.”
“But you’re not the president.”
“Alas, no.” Turning the full force of those dazzling green eyes on the befuddled Yancey, Lucinda leaned closer to whisper, “But Uncle insisted I take it if I ever came to Heartbreak Creek. Will that be a problem?”
“Goddamn.”
Apparently, that meant it wasn’t. After ordering a freckled boy to take fresh linens and water to “the big suite,” he reverently placed the key in Lucinda’s gloved hand and bowed them toward the stairs. “Last room at the end of the hall, ladies. The boy is setting it up now.”
As they headed toward the staircase, Edwina gave Lucinda a wondering look. “Are you really Grant’s niece?”
“Grant? Who said I was Grant’s niece?”
“But, I thought . . . you mean, you’re not?”
Lucinda laughed. “That old drunk?”
Not much of an answer, but apparently all Lucinda was willing to give. As they trooped up the stairs, Edwina mused that there were a lot of unanswered questions about Lucinda, not the least of which was what was in that valise that she guarded so protectively. Edwina sensed that like her, Lucinda had been through hard times and devastating loss. But Lucinda had chosen to fight back, while Edwina had chosen to run.
But, really, what choice had she? Raised in the lap of luxury without a care beyond what to wear to the next ball, Edwina barely knew how to survive. Oh, certainly she had skills—dancing, flirting, performing parlor tricks like finding water with willow sticks or playing the piano blindfolded—but that hardly put food on the table. Other than her meager sewing income—which Pru augmented with sales from their vegetable garden and the occasional household position that came her way—the only thing that had kept them going through the last hard years was hope. But after five years of the excesses of Reconstruction, that was gone, too. Now all that remained of her past was a weed-choked cotton plantation sold for back taxes, her father’s watch, and a graveyard full of new markers.
The South she loved was no more. She had realized that the day Pru had been spat upon by a white man just because of her dark skin, while she, a white woman, had been vilified for sharing blood with a woman of color.
No, she wasn’t running away. She just had no reason to stay.
As they neared their room at the end of the landing, the door swung open and the freckled boy darted out. “All set up, ma’ams. You need anything, just yell over the banister to Yancey.” Then he was off at a run down the hall.
“Set up” meant tattered linens were stacked on the unmade beds in each of the two bedrooms opening off the sitting area, and a pitcher of cold water sat on the bureau. Edwina peered down into its murky depths. “Is this the water we’re not supposed to drink?”
“I’ll stick with brandy,” Lucinda muttered, carrying her valise into the bedroom on the left.
Maddie stopped beside the pitcher, took a look, and shuddered. “It looks used. How vexing.”
“I wonder what’s wrong with it?” This whole water thing confused Edwina. “With a creek running right through the middle of town and all those waterfalls streaming down the slopes, how could the water be so bad?”
“Probably the mine,” Pru said as she hung her coat on a hook beside the door. “They often use harsh chemicals to leach gold or silver from the raw ore. If it seeps back into the ground, it can taint the entire water table.”
Edwina turned to stare at her. “How do you know these things?”
“I read.”
“About mining practices?” Edwina shouldn’t have been surprised. Her sister took in information like a starving person gobbled up food. But mining practices? “Why would you read about mining practices?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” As she spoke, Pru set herself to rights, straightening her sleeves, brushing her skirts, running a hand over her tightly pinned hair. “I’m only guessing, of course. But since the mine is upriver from the town, and I did see some sluices and a thick canvas pipe running down from one of those waterfalls to what I assume is a concentrator, I can only deduce the water is being used to leach out unwanted chemicals.” She paused in thought, one long, graceful finger gently tapping her full lower lip. “Or maybe it’s for a water cannon. I’ll have to check.”
“Oh, please do!” Shaking her head, Edwina walked into the bedroom she was to share with Pru.
An hour later, their valises were unpacked, their beds made, and they were as refreshed as four women could be, sharing one pitcher of cold water between them.
“We’re famished,” Lucinda announced, walking into the sitting room with her valise in her hand and Maddie on her heels. “Shall we brave the cooking in this wretched place and go down to the dining room?”
“Dare we?” Edwina asked.
Pru straightened her collar and checked her buttons. “I’m willing.”
“Excellent.” Swinging open the door, Lucinda motioned the other ladies into the hallway, stepped out after them, and locked the door. “And while we eat,” she said, following them down the stairs, “Edwina can tell us all about her new husband, and Maddie can tell us about her errant husband, and Pru can tell us what she hopes to do with all that astounding book learning.”
And perhaps while we’re at it, Edwina added silently, you’ll tell us what you have in that valise you guard like stolen treasure.
Berkley Sensation titles by Kaki Warner
Runaway Brides Novels
HEARTBREAK CREEK
COLORADO DAWN
BRIDE OF THE HIGH COUNTRY
Blood Rose Trilogy
PIECES OF SKY
OPEN COUNTRY
CHASING THE SUN