Nothing was suspicious; everything, depressing. Tom Guest had been sleeping in her bed for five years and she hadn’t known it. Why hadn’t Papa told her? Why had he pretended not to know?
So that’s how it all came out? he replied. And he knew the truth all the time. Jacy suppressed a feeling of betrayal. Why had he thought he had to protect her from the truth? Didn’t he know you can’t protect someone from life? Look at what life had done to him. If he had shared the burden, perhaps his mind wouldn’t have broken.
Back downstairs, she accepted Mama Dee’s glass of tea and waited for Trevor, who had gone to check on their horses. When he returned, it was to relate no progress in the downstairs office.
“Nothing upstairs, either.” She tried to keep disappointment from her voice. “Tom keeps a loaded pistol under his mattress, like a lot of people.” She smiled, rueful. “And a stack of letters tied with blue ribbon in his bureau. Mrs. Guest must not have been such a persimmon face after all, if she wrote love letters that Tom still keeps.”
“Those letters weren’t from Miz Oleta,” Mama Dee corrected. “They’re from his lady friend in town, Miss Abbie.”
“Miss Abbie?” Trevor found Jacy’s eyes. “Did you look at them?”
She shook her head. There was, after all, a limit to peeping into another person’s life. Or so she had thought. Now she felt downright foolish.
They jumped to their feet in the same instant.
“Show me.” Trevor pressed a hand to the small of her back, guiding her toward the hallway. Upstairs he came to a halt in the bedroom doorway. When Jacy turned back, it was with a quizzical expression.
“What?”
She could practically see heat emanating from his steamy expression. The emotion was so raw she felt weak in the stomach.
“This the same room?” he asked, his voice husky. When she nodded, he gave a pitiful imitation of a grin.
Caught by memories that had nothing to do with Tom Guest or a lady friend named Abbie, Trevor’s feet faltered on the threshold. Something light and airy soared through his head.
“Dang,” he teased, his eyes holding hers, “I should have taken you up on that offer.”
“I told you you’d be sorry.” She was teasing now, but she hadn’t been teasing six years before. Her father was gone and Mama Dee was out doing the wash, when Jacy lured him upstairs to this bedroom.
A few days earlier he would have taken her up on it. But Jacy’s offer, the latest in her long line of bold offers, came two days after he promised Hunter not to take her innocence.
Her innocence. That was a laugh, even then. But watching her now, standing where she had stood then, with everything in their lives changed, he knew that was one promise he was likely to rue to the day he died.
He watched her cross the room, pull out a dresser drawer, remove a stack of letters. He wouldn’t have recognized the room without her in it. Without the sunlight streaming through the west window, turning her flaxen hair to silver.
When she turned back to him, her blue eyes were all business, and sad, the way they were so much of the time these days. She sat on the bed, patted the place beside her, beckoning him.
Beckoning, but not like before. He went to her anyway, sat on the bed beside her. His first sight of the letter she held open in her hand drove thoughts of making love to Jacy Kimble to the back of his mind. His heart pounded in his throat.
“It’s the same damn handwriting.”
“Or close?” she asked. He saw her hand tremble.
“We’d have to compare them to be certain.” He took the letter, scanned the message. Nothing incriminating in the message. Thanks for the present. It was everything I expected. I’m looking forward to the next installment.
It was the signature, not the message, that arrested Trevor. An A fashioned with the same curlicues and flowers as on those damning letters that had convicted him and Hunter of murder. While he numbly tried to come up with possible connections, Jacy went through the next letter, passed it on, and the next.
All were signed the same way. “Abbie?” Jacy asked, speaking the name in hushed tones, as if even saying it aloud would haunt them. “Or Ana?”
“Is there a connection? Sisters?”
“I don’t know.” She tried to think what she had heard about the women. “Neither Hunter or I objected to Papa’s affair with Ana, but her name was never mentioned in this house. Of course we heard about her from time to time, but nothing substantial. I never heard of her having a sister, or of anyone named Abbie.”
“You never heard the rumor about Tom and Ana?”
She grimaced, rueful. “I’m not as familiar with that side of life as you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ladies don’t know anything about women of the night.”
He grinned. But it was hard, for his lips felt misshapen with wanting to kiss her.
“Hunter and I discussed the rumor,” he said, explaining, “I didn’t pay much attention. From what I recall, Drummond was supposedly getting ready to dump Ana, to clean up his image for the campaign. Talk was that Tom was taking up where Drummond left off with her.”
Jacy shook her head. “That’s really sordid. I can’t see Papa dumping Ana. He cared for her. And…sharing her with Tom. That’s sick. It can’t be true.”
“It should have come out in court,” he agreed. “What if—” Trevor stopped in midsentence. “This letter is dated after the damned trial.”
“After?” Jacy flipped through the others. “So were these. All of them. January 1892 is the earliest.” She read off dates on the dozen or so letters. “All after April 11, 1890.”
As always when he heard it, the date on which he had been sentenced to death by hanging stupefied Trevor. “Too much of a coincidence to ignore.”
“I agree.”
“What the hell does it mean?” he mused.
“It must be significant. It couldn’t not be.” Jacy pocketed one letter before returning the stack to the drawer. Then she crossed the room, coming to a stop directly in front of Trevor, who still sat in a stupor. She felt herself begin to tremble from the inside out.
When he glanced up, Mari’s claim flashed to her mind. Was it true? Could it ever be true? Calling on every nuance of voice and emotion she had ever used to seduce him, she tipped his chin with a forefinger and smiled. “It means that there’s a slight chance you’re innocent.” She kissed him tenderly on the lips.
Ten
Jacy Kimble had never been one to take her time mulling over a matter. Trevor always said, if Trouble was her middle name, Action was her first. In that respect she hadn’t changed one iota since the old days. Before he could explore her reasons for claiming the letters might prove his innocence, she came up with a startling plan of action.
“I intend to confront Tom with this the minute he returns from Gila Bend.” Trevor heard her determination, saw the deep underlying hurt. But this was one plan she would implement over his dead body. Yancy’s words haunted him more than his dreams—“If they don’t get you first.”
Until he learned who the hell they were, he intended to distrust everybody. He figured it was the only way to stay alive.
“Whoa, Jace,” he said now. “That’s not such a good idea. We don’t know how Tom figures into this scheme. We have to be careful.” Before he finished speaking, her eyes had narrowed. As expected, she took exception to his implication.
“Tom may have bought the ranch, but I’m not ready to call him an enemy. He deserves a chance to explain.”
“And we deserve a chance to get to the truth, before someone gets to us.”
“Why did you bring me here, if not to confront Tom?”
Trevor glanced to the dresser where she had returned the letters. “We found what we came for, Jace.”
“You, maybe.”
He watched her anger flare, but it had a long way to go before it matched the hurt underneath. This wasn’t their usual game of baiting each other. Jacy’s ange
r came from deep within, from a hurt he could only imagine. Except for what seeing her so hurt and disillusioned did to him.
“Now I know why you wanted me to come back,” she accused.
“Jace—” He reached for her.
She shied away. “Don’t Jace me, Trevor Fallon. I know what you wanted. You weren’t satisfied with ruining our lives, you had to rub my nose in it. I—” Without warning tears gushed from her eyes. He could tell she was as startled by them as he was.
Fully expecting her to resist, he took her in his arms and she surprised him by allowing it. He felt her resistance ebb as he stroked her hair, her back. Docile as a babe, she laid her head against his chest and sobbed.
Her tears reflected his own distress. He had never had a place like this to lose, much less to cry over. But he had mourned the loss of his mother, in much the same way Jacy mourned the loss of this ranch, for both seemed grounded somehow in a man’s treachery.
His father hadn’t knowingly killed his mother, he had stupidly killed her.
Whether Drummond Kimble knowingly lied to Jacy about his part in this disaster remained to be seen. If Trevor were a betting man, he knew where he would put his money.
When she stirred, it was with embarrassment. “I never cry,” she whispered, unable to meet his gaze.
“Everybody cries, time to time.”
Without moving from the shelter of his arms, she glanced around the room. “Tom Guest is Papa’s friend. I’m sure of it.” Couched as a statement, her tone lacked conviction.
Trevor decided not to challenge that fact just yet. “Come on, let’s go see what Mama Dee packed for us to take to the cabin.” As he feared, she had her own ideas about how this shindig was going to run.
“I’m not leaving this house until I hear Tom’s side of the story.” Her eyes darted around the room. “About everything.”
Trevor considered his response, decided blunt might work better than gentle. Right now she was hurt over the loss of material things—if a home and everything a person had known in life could be considered material. “Remember why we’re here, Jace. The real reason.”
“To save Hunter,” she snapped, decisive. But it was short-lived, for resolve quickly gave way to despair again. “Oh, God, what an unholy mess! How will we ever get to the bottom of it in time…” Her words drifted off. He knew what she was thinking. No need to hear it.
“Tomorrow we’ll go into Gila Bend and look up Abbie and some of the jurors,” he said. “Then we can—”
“I will look up Abbie.” Decisiveness again. “You can’t be seen, Trevor.” Despair returned. He had never seen someone vacillate so quickly between resolve and despair.
“I still think I could get the truth out of Tom,” she argued, weakly now. “If he knows anything.”
Considering all the surprises thrown at them today, Trevor wondered how she could doubt Tom Guest’s hand in this mess. “Later,” was all he dared say at the moment.
When she challenged him with a fiery glance, he added, “Play it my way a little longer, Jace. If we can’t find another way, you can talk to him. Regardless of what you want to believe, something is all wrong. These letters are only the latest in a long line of things that don’t add up. Take the letter Tom wrote Wes Hardin. How did he know about Yancy’s murder? Why would he use it against Hunter?”
“News travels fast.” She quoted Hardin. “Judge Lindstrom would have heard. He’s a friend of Tom’s—and of Papa’s, too. Maybe we should see Jud—”
“We have to be careful,” Trevor repeated. “One slip to the wrong person and we could do Hunter more harm than good.” He watched her consider. Saw hopelessness reflected in her distressed blue eyes.
“It’s hard.” She turned away. He watched her shoulders slump. “So damned hard.”
Unable to resist, he pulled her back against his chest. “I know, sweetheart.” But he didn’t know. Hell, he’d never had a home, certainly not one that meant as much to him as this ranch meant to Jacy. He had never had a father he admired or family friends who could do no wrong. The only thing he ever had was the one thing Jacy Kimble had not had, a mother who kowtowed to her bastard husband until it killed her. And a son who could do nothing to stop her.
Returning downstairs they picked up the two baskets Mama Dee packed and headed for the cabin. Jacy looked back at the house as they rode up the backside of the rocky, cactus-strewn gorge. “If Tom is Papa’s friend, why does it hurt so much that he owns the Diamond K, or whatever the hell he calls it?”
Night had fallen by the time they reached the small rock cabin, but Jacy didn’t seem to notice. She was past disguising her hurt as anger. Her anguish was naked and raw. Her last spark of life had flared when Trevor refused to allow her to remain at the ranch house to confront Tom Guest.
He shouldn’t have brought her back; Trevor knew that now. He should have known what seeing this ranch in the hands of someone else would do to her. Damn! How could he have been so stupid?
Hunter’s life or Jacy’s peace of mind? Back in El Paso the choice had seemed simple. Jacy Kimble was a strong woman, he had reasoned. Losing Hunter would hurt her a whole lot worse than anything Trevor could think of, but he hadn’t realized what seeing Jacy hurt and disillusioned would do to him.
In another sense her despair surprised him, for he figured if the past five years hadn’t defeated her, nothing could. Today something had. And now, dismounting at the cabin, Jacy Kimble didn’t even notice the star-studded night sky, which she so reveled in. That worried Trevor further. Couldn’t he make one damned right decision?
He shouldn’t have brought her to this cabin. It was only one more reminder that nothing in her life was the same.
Set on a crag high above the wash, the one-room rock house was surrounded by paloverdes, cottonwoods, and a couple of oaks, which rose like black mantilla-clad statues in the darkness. According to Hunter, the cabin had been built before the Kimbles had settled here, by gold miners or hermits or some such. The crag appeared austere when approached from the gorge, as they had done, but the opposite side gave way to a valley of uncommon beauty, lush with grasses and eucalyptus and palmettos.
The cabin had been used by hunters until a couple of years before the Kimbles left Arizona. By that time Drummond had turned the business of running the ranch over to Hunter, moved himself into town, and begun in earnest his quest for the office of territorial governor.
One day while out looking for strays, Trevor had ridden up on the abandoned old cabin. When he asked, Hunter readily agreed for him to move into it. It was only one of many things Drummond Kimble disapproved of where Trevor was concerned.
“It isn’t like it’s putting anyone out,” Hunter argued after Drummond hit the ceiling about Trevor living in the cabin.
“You hired him to be a cowhand, so let him sleep in the bunkhouse with the others,” Drummond had retorted before returning to politicking. Hunter, as was his custom, listened to Drummond then made his own decisions, even though the price he paid was sometimes high.
Jacy had come here a couple of times while she was trying to tempt and tease her way into Trevor’s bed. Tonight when they climbed the crumbling steps, he could tell that tempting him was the farthest thing from her mind.
It wasn’t from his. He thought maybe a good strong loving might be the very thing to take her mind off her troubles, but he was neither callous nor selfish enough to suggest it. Hell, probably his fire-in-the-belly want was acting up. Trouble was, the only known cure for the ailment was out of reach, always had been for one reason or another. Likely always would be.
He hurried up the rickety steps, set the basket on the dusty table and turned to see Jacy standing on the threshold, eyes wide, yet vacant.
“Come on in,” he invited. “Make yourself at home.” Which, of course, was the wrong thing to say. He wondered suddenly whether she hadn’t been right when she suggested he’d been hit on the head one too many times in prison.
“This isn’t my ho
me,” she retorted. “Not anymore.” The yellow glow from the lantern Trevor lit cast a dusky halo about the shabby room, adding to Jacy’s melancholy.
For hours she had struggled against the despondency that grew inside her with each new discovery. Finding Mama Dee was the best present she had had in years, but everything else was so unexpected, so dismal, that she had trouble focusing on that one blessing.
She felt tremulous, on the verge of losing control, like a top spinning in the dirt, losing speed. Trevor had jerked the string and started her spinning again when he reminded her of Hunter, but she seemed incapable of focusing on their mission without his prompting.
Which made her feel even more inadequate.
Trevor left and returned lugging two more baskets. “While I take care of the horses,” he suggested lightly, “why don’t you see what Mama Dee packed for supper. I’m half starved to death.”
After he left, she dusted the table with a cloth from one of the baskets. The thought of food repulsed her, but Trevor needed to eat, and she recalled Mama Dee’s claim that idle hands gave the devil a chance to play with your mind. Jacy had enough things playing with her mind without the devil getting involved, so she busied herself setting out cold fried chicken, potato salad, sourdough bread, beans, and enough coffee grounds to last a month. Mama Dee must have thought they were moving in to stay.
She made a fire in the fireplace, then for lack of anything else to do, opened the second of Mama Dee’s baskets. Her breath caught. Dear old Mama Dee. Item after item, she withdrew pieces of her own clothing: bloomers, chemise, and a blue serge dress with white collar and cuffs which she had worn so seldom as to have forgotten it. But she hadn’t forgotten the twill riding trousers with jacket and starched white shirt. One of her favorite outfits.
Clean clothing, her own clothing, renewed Jacy’s spirits as nothing had all day. The sense of disaster, which had swept over her in greater and greater waves this whole day long, began to ease. In the morning she would bathe in the creek beyond the cabin. She would face the new day with her own clothes and a plan to free Hunter.
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