"The mountains. You ought to see them in the spring. They're covered in flowers and wildlife, and a man can look as far as the eye can see and not find another human being."
"Sounds lonely. I find it hard to picture a city man living like that for long."
"I don't find it hard at all. I had a place up there for the winter, raised mustangs. Never saw a neighbor from one day to the next. Can't say I'd do it for a lifetime, but it suits me fine right now. What about you? Do you like teaching out here where the cowboys shoot up the town every Saturday night?"
"I like living where people respect me for what I do, and I can make something of myself. A woman can't do that easily back East."
It seemed to him that women got plenty of respect back East, but Peter had the feeling he was missing something. He began sanding the rod. "It seems to me there are more rich men back East than out here."
"I never said I was looking for a rich man, Mr. Mulloney. I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself. You're the one who thought I ought to be married."
Her answer was quite complacent and not the least bit angry. He found it hard to believe that any woman didn't consider marriage her lifetime goal, but he didn't mean to argue. She did seem to be getting along quite well without a man of her own, whereas he grew mighty tired of living without a woman. The difference might be that she didn't know what it felt like to have a man in her bed. It gave him something to think about while the conversation drifted on.
They were trying out the new curtains and rod in Betsy's bedroom when the knock sounded at the front door. Beside him, the schoolteacher froze. He gave her an impatient look when she didn't hook the rod in the bracket. Seeing her expression, he peeked between the curtains to identify the visitor was.
"From the shape of her, I'd say it was your friend from the mercantile. Want me to see what she wants?"
Janice instantly recovered. "No! Heavens no. Ellen is a good girl, but she gossips dreadfully. Stay in here. Don't let her know you're in the house."
She fled the room, leaving Peter helpless to do anything else but sit on the bed for fear he would make a noise that would alert the visitor of his presence.
Janice flung open the door and caught Ellen's arm, pulling her into the house. "Ellen! Whatever are you doing out at this hour?" A dozen possibilities danced through her mind, but only one was logical. Ellen's reply confirmed her suspicion.
"You haven't seen Bobby, have you? Mr. Harding said it would be all right for him to stay in town with me now that I'm so close to my time, but he didn't come home tonight."
"Sit down. Get yourself off your feet. Let me make you some hot tea. You haven't been all over town looking for that scoundrel, have you?" Janice pushed her guest into a chair and looked about to be certain no evidence of Peter's presence lay about. The whittling knife lay by the hearth along with a clump of shavings. There wasn't any way she could disguise them. She'd have to think up a story if Ellen noticed.
Ellen looked uneasy. "I just stopped by. I don't need anything. It's just... Well, Bobby was complaining about that Mr. Mulloney. And I thought... You know how Bobby is. He's got this quick temper...."
Janice patted her shoulder. "Mr. Mulloney can take care of himself, I assure you. And as much trouble as he's in with the sheriff right now, he won't hurt Bobby if he can help it. Don't you worry about a thing. Bobby's probably just out with the boys somewhere. He'll be home soon."
She wanted to offer the girl the bed in Betsy's room. Bobby's temper was notorious, but so far he hadn't been known to take it out on Ellen. Normally, she wouldn't take any chances, but she couldn't see any easy way to get Peter out of the bedroom so Ellen could go in.
Ellen struggled to her feet. "I'm sure you're right. I just worry all the time these days. Isn't that silly? Mrs. Danner says it's because of the baby. I sure will be glad when it's born. I'm sure Bobby will be glad too." She shrugged slightly with embarrassment. "He can't... you know. Not while I'm like this."
Janice was afraid she very much did know, but she didn't feel inclined to comment upon it. After all, she was supposed to be an old maid. She hugged Ellen's shoulders instead. "Bobby will be so proud when he sees that baby, he'll have that new house built in no time. Do you need me to walk you home? I don't like for you to be out alone like this."
Ellen giggled. "Then you would have to walk home alone, and I'd be obliged to walk back with you. We'd be walking all night."
Janice got the girl to the front door, but Ellen wasn't eager to leave yet. They talked a few minutes more, standing on the porch in the warm June air. Most of the town had retired for the night. Being Sunday, even the saloon was closed. Janice breathed a sigh of relief when she noticed a familiar figure striding down the street.
"There's Sheriff Powell. Let me have him help you home. Then we won't have to walk back and forth all night." Reassured by Ellen's giggle, she signaled the sheriff.
Powell hurried toward her. "Anything wrong, Miz Harrison? Did that Mulloney fellow go back to your lean-to tonight? I been looking around for him."
"He was helping me hang curtains, Sheriff. I'm sure he's sleeping by now. Would you escort Ellen home? We got to talking and it's kind of late and I hate for her to be out there alone."
Five years of teaching school had not only taught her how to speak with authority, but to cover up what wasn't being said with a firmness that left her audience completely convinced she'd answered their question. She'd covered many gaps in her education that way. It served her well tonight.
Powell took off his hat and offered his arm to the girl standing in the shadows of the porch. "Come along, Miz Ellen. Let's get you on home. Your fella will be wondering where you are."
As they walked away, Janice could hear Ellen rhapsodizing over how hard Bobby had worked today and telling the sheriff that her husband was no doubt sound asleep in bed already. If that was true love, Janice wanted no part of it. If she were Ellen Fairweather, she'd have the sheriff out looking for her drunken sot of a husband and hauling him off to jail for criminal neglect, at the very least.
But she would never be as naive as Ellen Fairweather, so the point was moot. She entered the house and latched the door behind her. It was time to call it a night. Just because she had taken to staying up late, filling the empty nights with work, didn't mean she ought to be entertaining a man like Peter Mulloney while doing it. She marched promptly to the tiny front bedroom.
And found Peter Mulloney sound asleep on Betsy's narrow cot.
She stared at him in perplexity. He was too large for the cot. His boots hung over the edge. He was lying flat on his back with his hands crossed over his chest as if he had just been lying there contemplating the ceiling while waiting for Ellen to leave. If he turned over, he would fall off the bed and flat on his face. But he must have been exhausted to fall asleep so quickly, and she really didn't have the heart to wake him and throw him out. She'd heard the rumbling of thunder when she was outside. It didn't seem quite fair to send him to sleep on the porch again.
The sheriff thought he was sleeping in the lean-to. Knowing Powell's regular habits, he'd head on to his own house now that he'd made his rounds. Who was to know or care if Mulloney fell asleep in Betsy's bed? Common sense told her he wasn't harming anyone.
It wasn't common sense making her nervous as a June bug when Janice went to her own room to prepare for bed. She didn't like the idea of a man sleeping in the other room. That's all it was, she told herself. But she couldn't get the image of Peter Mulloney's sprawling length out of her mind as she pulled on her nightgown. What if he got up in the middle of the night?
He wouldn't do that. He was a gentleman. He wasn't a crude youth to take advantage of a helpless woman. And she was far from helpless, anyway. She'd been helpless at fifteen, but she wasn't now. Grimly she shoved a chair under her doorknob and checked the shotgun under her bed. She'd never had to use it, but Jason had shown her how.
Oddly enough, she didn't have any difficulty going to sleep this
time. The knowledge that Mulloney slept in the next room was somehow comforting, providing a security she hadn't felt in years. She drifted off to sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
She shot right out of that pillow the moment the fire bell began its excited clamor.
Running to the window, she checked the partially finished schoolhouse first. No flames leapt from the rafters, and she breathed a momentary sigh of relief. The rain the other night had made the possibility of a flash fire less likely, but the wind from the approaching storm didn't bode well. She reached for the gown she had discarded a few hours before. This time, she meant to go out properly attired.
She heard Mulloney's boots hitting the floor in the other room. She had almost forgotten about him. She hurriedly buttoned her bodice over her nightgown and pulled the chair from under the doorknob. He was already heading for the front door when she caught him.
"Out the back!" she whispered, as if someone would hear her. "I told the sheriff you were in the lean-to."
He nodded curtly and turned in the other direction. Seeing her disheveled attire, he frowned. "You stay here. I'll send someone back if they need more help."
"Don't be ridiculous." As if that were argument enough, Janice hurried back to find her shoes. It was too late in her life for any man to take to ordering her around now.
He didn't hang around to argue more. Giving her a steely frown, he hurriedly strode for the back door.
By the time Janice was appropriately dressed, most of the excitement was over. As she hurried out in the street, she could see the dying flames of the fire in the old shack on the outskirts of town. The men on the fire wagon pumped water over the last burning timbers. There hadn't been enough to the shack to burn for long.
She knew some of the town men gathered there on Sunday nights. She'd been told the old man who lived there sold illegal liquor. A sudden frisson of horror struck her as she remembered Ellen's tearful plea. That was just the sort of place Bobby would frequent. And there could have been others. She hurried toward the silent crowd.
They carried out a blanket-wrapped body just as Janice arrived. She clutched the arm of the woman nearest her. As much as she despised Bobby, she couldn't wish him dead for Ellen's sake. Even as she thought this, she saw Bobby helping wind up the fire wagon hose. He was all right then. Janice turned to the woman next to her.
"Do they know who it is? Or what happened?"
"It's Old Man Samuel. Sheriff says the place smells of kerosene. He thinks somebody lit it."
As the other woman spoke, Janice looked up in time to see Sheriff Powell clap a pair of handcuffs on a tall, familiar figure at the front of the crowd.
Powell was arresting the only suspected arsonist in the county—Peter Mulloney.
Chapter 10
Stunned, Janice didn't move as Powell jostled his prisoner past the expectant crowd. A man had died this night. The town would require justice. She imagined a cloud of righteous satisfaction rising from the people around her as they watched Peter Mulloney hauled off to jail. He wasn't one of them. There would be no weeping widow or grieving children to mourn his departure when the jury found him guilty and ordered him hung. She could almost hear their thoughts as Mulloney was dragged to his fate. There had been two fires since the stranger had arrived in town. That was evidence enough for them.
As the last of the fire was quenched, the crowd dissipated. The woman whose arm Janice clutched gently disengaged herself and walked off.
She had to do something. She couldn't stand here and let everyone think Mulloney had murdered an old man in his bed. It didn't even make logical sense. What in heaven's name would a man like Peter Mulloney get out of murdering some old man he didn't even know?
Maybe she could use logic to have him released. She knew better than that. Logic didn't explain the wildfires that swept the town or the floods that inundated it in spring. Logic didn't explain the senseless use of guns on Saturday night. Logic explained very little of life. Vengeance was the only recognized logic. No one would question why a man would set fire to a shack. The shack burned and a man died.
That was fact. Someone had to pay for it. Mulloney was convenient.
Janice wondered how soon Jason Harding would return. He wasn't likely to get caught up in the emotional melodrama that would seize the town now that the scent of a hanging hung in the air. She could talk to Jason. She shivered at the thought of how he would take it when he learned Mulloney had been sleeping in Betsy's bedroom. He wouldn't believe her claim of innocence for a minute. Neither would anybody else. But Jason would more likely keep his mouth shut about it.
But she would lose her job whether she told Jason or the sheriff. Female schoolteachers did not allow men to spend the night in their houses. That was another fact of life. To give Mulloney the alibi he needed, she would have to lose her job. She would have to leave Mineral Springs entirely. Betsy would never see her new curtains.
Janice had been terrified more times in her life than she could count, but these last years had been relatively comfortable ones. She didn't want to go back to the terror of living from one day to the next, never knowing where the next meal would come from or if she would have a roof over their heads. Panic froze her insides, as it always did at times like this, and she walked woodenly toward home.
It wouldn't do any good to go to the sheriff now. Maybe they would turn up a new suspect before dawn. Maybe Peter would tell them a believable lie. Maybe he would tell them the truth and they would come to her for corroboration and everyone would believe them. Maybe pigs could fly.
There wasn't a chance of sleep now. She went in and filled up a bucket and began scrubbing the kitchen floor.
She could show them the wrinkles on Betsy's bed. She would show them the new curtains and the wood shavings on the hearth and they would have to believe her. They would have to believe Mulloney was innocent. They wouldn't have to believe the same of her.
The panic she had experienced as a pregnant unmarried fifteen-year-old came back as clearly as if it were yesterday. Janice vividly remembered the buckets of tears her mother had wept, the stony anguish on her father's face, the uncertain looks she had received from her younger siblings when she broke the news of her fall from grace.
To hide her shame, her parents had made a disastrous move to Cutlerville, a move that eventually destroyed the lives of everyone in her family, right before Janice's eyes. She had watched her mother starve to feed her children, watched her father grow old and weak in the years of scraping by after that. She had spent years bending over backward to make some kind of reparation to her brother and sister for the misery she had caused. Only to have it happen all over again like this.
Hot tears hit her hand as she scrubbed the wood planks—tears ten years had failed to heal. She would never rid herself of the hideous memories of those years of poverty and guilt. She wept harder, wept for the child she had never been, the parents she would never see again, the years of deprivation and suffering that followed their deaths. She had tried so desperately to keep her little family together. And she had succeeded. She had succeeded despite everything. They were all healthy and nearly grown now. They would be happy.
Except for Betsy. Wouldn't God ever forgive her for that one mistake? Why did He have to make Betsy suffer for what her mother had done? It wasn't fair. Life wasn't fair. Why should any of them have to suffer for what was as much Betsy's father's fault as anyone's?
The thought of Betsy's father made Janice sit up and wipe her tears. They'd both been young and foolish, she more so than him. He'd known precisely what he was doing, but she'd only been madly in love and eager to display her affections. Things went too far too fast.
She had tried to stop him, but he was older and stronger. She remembered the piercing pain, the helpless struggle, and the humiliation. But when he was done with her, she remembered her foolish pride that this handsome man had chosen a girl like her for his wife. Except they never quite made it to the altar.
&nb
sp; And she placed that blame squarely on the shoulders of Artemis Mulloney, Peter's father. Janice hastily wiped her face with her sleeve and tried to remember she was a grown woman now. Artemis Mulloney was a crippled old man. He couldn't ever hurt her again. He didn't even know she existed. All he had done was fire Betsy's father from his job on the railroad.
Actually, he fired most of the employees so he could hire cheaper labor—Negroes from the South and indigent immigrants. The town they'd been living in was a railroad town. It had become little more than a ghost town after that. And Stephen had left for parts unknown along with dozens of others.
Leaving her with Betsy, an aching gap in her middle that could never be filled, and a terror that never quite went away. Stephen had taken all the joy from her life that day. She'd never known happiness since. These last years she had learned contentment, and that had been enough. It had been more than enough. The peace of having a roof over her head and a regular income and the respect of her neighbors was sufficient to keep her going from one day to the next. She didn't know what she would do if she had that taken away from her again. And taken away from her because of Artemis Mulloney's son.
Janice got off the floor and dusted her skirt. She walked across the still wet planks to pull out the tin tub. She would take a bath and put on fresh clothes and think about it later.
While she bathed, she heated more water. She had promised to wash Mulloney's clothes today. He would need fresh clothes in jail. She could do that much for him.
She fixed breakfast and wondered who the sheriff had cooking for his prisoners today. No one came to collect a meal from her.
No one came as she filled the wash bucket and scrubbed the light-colored clothes. Would Mulloney really keep quiet about where he'd been last night? It didn't seem possible. It wasn't within the realm of her experience with men. She methodically wrung out the light clothes and hung them on the line, then started on the dark. She had to rummage through Mulloney's saddlebags to find his things. They were pitifully few.
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