by Kaki Warner
“Stump says she can stay at the house. But only if you stay, too. He is running a business, after all.”
Raise Kate in a brothel? Never. Besides, Daisy didn’t have it in her to be a whore. It was one thing to give yourself to a man you loved, and quite another to lie with a stranger. “I’ll think on it,” she hedged, hoping to God it would never come to that. Forcing a change in subject, she asked, “Where are you headed?”
“Apothecary. Hazel’s got the itch.”
But Daisy hardly heard her. They had neared the boardinghouse, and she could hear cries coming through the open upstairs window of the room she shared with Kate. “That doesn’t sound right.” Alarm exploded in her chest. “Something’s wrong!”
Charging up the steps, she threw open the front door to the boardinghouse, banging it into Edna, who lay sprawled on the entry floor, her neck twisted at an odd angle. The reek of whiskey filled the narrow space. Without stopping to check on her, Daisy ran up the stairs. When she rushed through the open door into their bedroom, she saw Bill Johnson bent over Kate’s cot. “Get away from her!” she screamed as she slammed into him.
He staggered, caught his balance, then with a snarl, drew back his arm. “Bitch!”
Daisy kicked, aiming for his groin but getting his hip instead.
He stumbled back, his fist missing her jaw, but striking a glancing blow high on the side of her head. She fell against the iron foot rail of her cot, her ears ringing.
Then he was on her, his hands around her throat. “You stupid bitch!” he shouted, his voice rising above Kate’s terrified shrieks.
Daisy clawed at his fingers, fighting for air. Her vision narrowed. A buzzing began in her head. In flailing desperation, she grappled for her coat pocket, found the pistol. Without pulling it from her pocket, she jerked the hammer back, thrust the barrel into Johnson’s gut and squeezed the trigger.
A muffled “pop,” then his grip on her neck loosened. As he lurched back, she smelled spent powder and scorched cloth and the hot, rank scent of blood.
Johnson stood swaying, a look of stunned disbelief on his face. He looked down at the blood blossoming across the front of his vest then up at her. Surprise gave way to fury. Roaring like an animal, he charged toward her.
Pulling back the other hammer, Daisy yanked the pistol from her pocket and fired her last shot up into his open mouth.
Three
LUCY BURST INTO THE ROOM THEN STUMBLED TO A STOP. She gaped at Johnson’s bloody face, then at Daisy, who stood frozen, the pistol wobbling in her hand. “Holy Christ!”
“Is he ... is he ...” Daisy shook so hard she could hardly form the words.
White-faced, Lucy peered down at Johnson. “Dead as a dog in a ditch.” She kicked him to make sure. “What happened?”
“He was a-after K-Kate.” Daisy threw the pistol onto her cot and grabbed Kate. “Shh, baby,” she crooned over and over, holding her wailing twenty-two-month-old daughter’s face to her chest so she wouldn’t see the dead man. “It’s all right. Mama’s here.”
Lucy leaped into action. Yanking open drawers on the small bureau, she threw the contents on Daisy’s bed. “We gotta get out of here quick. You got a valise?”
Daisy blinked at her, still so frozen by what she’d done she couldn’t think, couldn’t move. “Under the b-bed.”
Lucy pulled it out, opened it, and began stuffing it with their clothing. She moved with such savage determination that within a few minutes the room was stripped bare of all of their belongings. After buckling the straps on the valise, she straightened and looked around. “Anything else?”
Daisy looked at her, feeling detached and adrift, her shocked mind still unable to come to grips with the dead man on the floor. God. What had she done?
“Titty,” Kate cried, reaching for her stuffed cat, which had fallen to the floor.
Lucy picked it up and put it in her pudgy hand. “Where’s the pistol?”
“I-I’m not s-sure. My coat—no, there.” She pointed to the bed. “Under the valise.”
Lucy snatched it up and slipped it into her pocket. “Take off your coat.”
“My c-coat?”
“Hurry! Before someone comes! And wipe that blood off your face.”
Daisy lifted a hand, felt splatters of sticky wetness on her forehead and cheeks, and felt her stomach lurch. Setting Kate on her cot, she yanked off her coat, desperate to be rid of it when she saw the bloodstains on the front. She scrubbed at her face with a sleeve, then handed the coat to Lucy before picking up Kate again.
Throwing the bloody coat over her arm, Lucy grabbed the valise. “Come on.”
On wobbly legs, Daisy followed her down the stairs. When they reached the entry, Lucy set down the valise and bent over Edna’s prone body. “Help me get your coat on her,” she ordered. “We need to make it look like she killed Johnson in a drunken rage then fell down the stairs.”
Reluctantly, Daisy set Kate down on the steps and turned to help Lucy. It took only a few moments. But when they lifted Edna to slip the coat around her shoulders and Daisy saw the way her head rolled on her shattered neck, she almost gagged. After Lucy put the pistol in the dead woman’s hand, she straightened, took a last look around then picked up the valise. “Come on.”
As soon as they were back on the street, fear almost sent Daisy into flight, but Lucy made her walk slowly, as if nothing was wrong. Luckily Kate had settled down, although there was still a hitch in her breath. The click of their heels sounded unnaturally loud to Daisy.
“Keep your head down and quit crying,” Lucy ordered.
Daisy wasn’t aware she was.
“If anyone asks, tell them your husband just died.”
“W-Where are we going?”
“There’s a church on Morton Street. I know the pastor. He’ll let you stay there until you can get out of town.”
“Out of town?” Daisy looked over at her friend, the numbness of terror fading enough that she could think again. “Where would I go?”
Lucy didn’t answer. At the end of the block, they turned left then cut into the alley that ran behind the brothel. At the back stoop, Lucy let the valise drop and sank onto the bottom step. “I gotta rest a minute.” She gave a shaky laugh. “I don’t know when I been so glad to see this old whorehouse.”
Daisy slumped down beside her. Even now her heart drummed with fear and relief at how terrifyingly close she had come to losing her daughter. She looked down into Kate’s sleeping face, tears burning behind her eyes.
“What was he doing in there?’ Lucy asked after she caught her breath.
Swiping the back of her hand over her eyes, Daisy said, “When I came into the room, he was standing over her bed.” She shuddered, the image of Johnson’s hands on Kate burned forever into her mind. “I don’t know why.”
“To sell her.”
Daisy blinked at Lucy in surprise. “Sell her? To who? And why?”
Lucy looked down at her clasped hands with their bitten nails and nicked knuckles. They looked like they’d seen their fair share of fights. “I heard the girls talking. Said a man named Wild Bill was going around to all the whorehouses talking about a blond girl baby he had for sale. I didn’t think of Kate until I heard him yelling upstairs. Baby-stealing bastard!”
“I don’t understand,” Daisy said. “Why would anyone want to buy a baby?”
Lucy turned her head and looked at her. She didn’t speak, but the hard knowledge behind her sad brown eyes said it all.
Daisy drew back in horror, her arms tightening around Kate so much the exhausted child whimpered in her sleep. “No, Lucy. Surely not. She’s just a baby.”
“There’s a lot of crazies out there.”
It was obscene. Beyond evil. Monstrous. Daisy felt like vomiting.
“We got to get you away from here,” Lucy said after a moment. “Someplace far away. Where the law won’t find you. Or Johnson’s friends.”
“But he was attacking my baby,” Daisy argued.
“But, Lucy—”
Her friend rounded on her, her eyes hard as flints. “Do I have to explain it? I’m a whore and you’re my friend. I may already be in trouble. Somebody may have seen us—seen me. Stump won’t pay bribe money, so we got no protection.”
“But how could they blame you?” Without thinking, Daisy reached out and put her hand on Lucy’s shoulder.
Lucy shied away then tried to cover it with an embarrassed smile. “I’ll be okay. If he has to, Stump will hide me until it all blows over. He’ll even cover for us, maybe pass the story around that drunk old Widow Tidwell shot Johnson then fell down the stairs and broke her neck.” Lucy gave a crooked smile. “Who knows? Maybe the old lady really did try to stop him and he killed her for it.”
Daisy felt tears well up again. A drunk, a harlot, and a jaded procurer. What an odd assortment of guardian angels. She wanted to hug Lucy in gratitude, but knew her friend wouldn’t like it. Lucy might earn her living allowing strangers to use her body, but she didn’t like to be touched. “Oh, Lucy. You’ve done so much to help me. Even put yourself in danger. How do I thank you for that?”
Lucy looked away, a flush further staining her rouged cheeks. “You take that sweet baby out of this hellhole. That’s how you thank me.”
“Take her where?” Daisy slumped wearily, the false energy of fear draining away, leaving her trembly and dispirited. “I’ve got hardly any savings, no job—”
“What about her Pa?” Lucy cut in. “Would he keep her while you trained?”
“Jack?” Daisy gave a strangled laugh. “I don’t even know where he is.”
“How about his family then?”
“I don’t know them. And even if I did, I couldn’t leave Kate for two years.”
“You don’t have to leave her,” Lucy argued with strained patience. “Just get enough money from them to take her with you.”
Get enough money how? Just waltz in there and ask for it? Ridiculous. That would never work. Would it?
Foghorns on the bay signaled the mist was rising. The sky hung low, clouds draped like frothy gray blankets over the peaked roofs of the row houses. Already the air was so wet Kate’s blond curls had started to frizz. We should get to the church before the fog comes in, she told herself. But she couldn’t seem to move.
Lucy’s voice cut into her thoughts. “If you stay, they might throw you in jail. What would happen to Kate then? You got no choice but to go to his family.”
Daisy stared at her, hearing the words but not daring to believe she had no other option. Leave? Travel all the way to New Mexico Territory? Throw herself on the mercy of people she didn’t even know? How could she do that?
She tried to remember what Jack had told her about his family. It wasn’t much. Two older brothers. A ranch somewhere in New Mexico Territory not far from a town named after a flower—a rose. Val Rosa. Yes, that was it. Ranchers had money, didn’t they? And even if Jack was still off somewhere trying to get over his lost love, wouldn’t his brothers want to help his daughter?
“Kate is their kin, too, you know,” Lucy reminded her.
Daisy nodded, thoughts racing through her head. “Yes. She is.”
RosaRoja Rancho
“AS YOU CAN SEE,” ELENA MOTIONED TO HER HIP, “THE operation was not a success.”
They were gathered in the main room. Dinner was long past, and the children had gone upstairs an hour ago with the Ortega sisters—their keepers, as Brady thought of them. Other than Elena, only the two brothers and their wives sat before the fire crackling in the huge stone fireplace.
“Dr. Sheedy did the surgery?” Molly asked.
Elena smiled her surprise. “How did you know? Have you met him?”
“Brady asked about him. I’d heard he was a fine surgeon.” Molly explained that in her travels as nurse to her surgeon-father, even though most of her training during the War of the Rebellion had been below the Mason-Dixon, she had heard of Dr. Sheedy, a gifted medical officer in the Irish Brigade of the Union Army.
As Molly spoke, Brady studied her, noting the lines of strain around her mouth and the sadness in her hazel eyes. He knew she was fretting. The other day when he’d gone into Hank’s wing of the sprawling house he’d heard her crying. He wondered why.
“I read some of his early articles in my father’s old medical journals,” Molly went on. “Papa thought highly of his innovative ideas about antiseptic procedures in the surgical room.”
Elena laughed. “I am not sure what that means, but he was the cleanest man I ever saw. He made the nurses loco with his demands that they wash their hands.”
“What went wrong with the operation?” Molly had a deep interest in the mechanics of surgery even if the practice of it often made her sick.
After the derailment that had almost cost Hank his life, Brady had witnessed her affliction when she’d worked so hard to save Hank’s crushed arm, then vomited like a muleskinner on a three-day drunk as soon as it was over. A woman of extremes, Molly was, and not above killing to protect those she loved. A good match for Hank. But lately, Brady had sensed something had started to unravel between them. He didn’t know the cause, but he recognized discontent in a woman’s eyes and figured it was something Hank had done—or not done. He resolved to talk to him about it later.
“Dr. Sheedy did his best,” Elena said. “But even though he removed most of the scar tissue, the bones broken where my brother kicked me had healed crookedly and could not be straightened. The infection it had caused also did damage to other organs.” A blush crept over her olive cheeks. She lowered her eyes to the cross she gripped tightly in her fisted hands. “Such damage would have prevented me from being a true wife or bearing children.”
Brady frowned, trying to piece together what Elena wasn’t saying. Was she barren? Was that why she chose God over his brother, to spare them both the disappointment of a childless marriage? If so, considering the way she had felt about Jack when she’d left, she should be heartbroken. Yet she seemed content. Happy, even.
Jessica must have wondered the same thing. “Is that why you and Jack didn’t marry?”
Elena looked up. Her eyes shimmered like dark, glistening pools in her pale heart-shaped face, so black they seemed to swallow the faint light from the kerosene lamps scattered throughout the room. “It is the reason I opened my heart to such a possibility. When I did, I saw another way of life waiting for me.”
“A reclusive life,” Brady said, still not convinced it was a true vocation.
“A life devoted to God,” she corrected gently. “Which I would have chosen whether the church accepted me or not. In the end, it had nothing to do with Jack.”
They sat in silence except for the snap of burning wood and the soft whisper of wind around the balcony supports off the back of the house. Brady looked beyond the glass doors flanking the fireplace to the hilltop where the rising moon highlighted the angular shapes of the tombstones under the mesquite tree. Most of his family was buried up there. With Jack still missing and Elena lost to them forever, it would be like burying two more.
Hank rose, added more logs to the fire, then returned to his seat beside Molly.
Brady wondered what he was thinking. His brother was such a closemouthed sonofabitch, Brady never really knew what went on in that prodigious brain of his. Did he feel it too? That sense of change coming?
Brady didn’t like change. Being head of the family since he was twenty-one, he had spent most of his adult life struggling to protect the ranch and the two brothers he had left. Change was a threat to the precarious balance he worked so hard to maintain. Jessica was teaching him to ease up a bit—to be less controlling, she called it. But even now, with new perils rising against them, his first impulse was to gather his family close and bar the doors.
“So you don’t know where Jack is now?” Jessica asked. “We’re quite worried about him.” She was almost
as protective of the family as Brady was, but somehow that didn’t count as controlling. He didn’t even try to make sense of it.
Elena shook her head. “He was muy enojado—very angry—when I told him of my decision. He said many things, tried many times to talk me out of it. But once I entered the abbey as a postulant and was no longer able to speak to him, he stopped trying to see me. That was close to three years ago. I have heard nothing from him since. I pray he is still alive. I pray that God will help him understand and forgive me.” She turned her head and looked directly at Brady. “I pray the same for you.”
Brady forced a smile. “It’s not you I have to forgive, Elena. Never was.”
A sad look came into her eyes. “My brother. Sancho.”
“And myself.” Brady felt Jessica’s hand slip into his. As always, her touch calmed him, anchored him until the flood of terrible memories receded.
Elena sank back into the upholstered leather cushions of her chair. “My brother was an evil man who did terrible things. He broke every law of God and died because of it.” Her gaze shifted to Jessica, whose grip on Brady’s hand tightened until her nails bit into his fingers. “Do not blame yourself, hermana de mi corazón— sister of my heart,” Elena said to her. “You were God’s instrument. Nothing more.”
Before Jessica could respond, Elena turned back to Brady. “And you, querido, what you did for your little brother was an act of love, not evil intent. How can you blame yourself for that?”
Brady didn’t answer. He didn’t want to talk about Sam’s death, or the agony his little brother had suffered at Sancho’s hands, or the soul-shattering act of mercy Brady had been compelled to perform to release him from the pain. All of that was thirteen years in the past. Today he had another brother to worry about.
“Could Jack still be in San Francisco?” he asked, changing the subject.
Elena gave a weary shrug. “He spoke of Australia. Perhaps he went there.”
“I can see you’re tired, Elena.” Jessica stood, pulling Brady up with her and glaring Hank to his feet as well. She was a stickler for proper behavior. Probably her English upbringing. “We’ve kept you up too late after such a long journey. Perhaps we can talk more tomorrow after you’re rested.”