A Tender Hope

by Amanda Cabot

  She certainly had none of her mother, but, thanks to Lydia, she was beginning to form a picture of the woman who’d given birth to her. It was a picture that caused happiness to bubble up deep inside Aimee. Joan or Grace—the name didn’t matter—loved her. Far from being a mistake, coming to Texas had been the right thing to do, for in a matter of weeks, she would be reunited with her mother.

  Aimee’s life was on the verge of becoming everything she had hoped for. She only wished she could say the same for Thea. Though her friend tried to disguise it, Aimee sensed a sorrow too deep for words, a sorrow she suspected was connected to her marriage. The speed with which Thea had shed her widow’s weeds surprised Aimee far less than the way she deflected questions about her husband. Though it could be that Thea’s grief was still too raw for her to speak of it, Aimee doubted that was the case. Something had been amiss in Thea’s marriage. Aimee could only hope that she’d find healing in Cimarron Creek.

  Confident that Stuart would remain asleep if she laid him down, she placed him in the wicker basket that she’d decided would be his downstairs cradle, then opened a cupboard, looking for ingredients for the midday meal. She’d pulled out flour and a tin of peaches, planning to make a cobbler, when she heard a knock on the front door.

  Aimee glanced at Stuart, then, satisfied that he was still asleep, hurried to greet the visitor.

  “Mrs. Michener?” The woman was three or four inches taller than Aimee, with light brown hair, blue eyes, and an engaging smile.

  Aimee hated to disappoint her. “Mrs. Michener is with one of her patients right now. I’m Aimee Jarre, her friend.”

  As discreetly as she could, Aimee inspected the woman’s midsection. There was no sign of thickening, but the visitor could still be in the early stages of pregnancy. “Would you like to wait, or shall I have Mrs. Michener call on you when she returns?”

  “Oh!” The woman seemed startled, then laughed as the direction of Aimee’s glance registered. “This is a social, not a professional call. I wanted to welcome her to Cimarron Creek.”

  “Then you must come in and wait for her, Mrs. . . .” Aimee let her voice trail off.

  “It’s Miss. I’m Patience Kenton, the new schoolteacher.”

  “Could I offer you some refreshments, Miss Kenton?” Aimee asked as she led the way into the parlor.

  The woman shook her head. “No, thank you, but please call me Patience. I hear ‘Miss Kenton’ often enough from my pupils, and school has yet to start.”

  She took a seat on one of the spindly legged chairs that flanked the low table. “Isn’t Cimarron Creek the prettiest town you’ve ever seen? Rachel—she’s my cousin—said it was, but I thought she was exaggerating. I just love being here.”

  Patience paused to take a breath, then shook her head again. “Oh, there I go again, talking too much. I do that when I’m nervous.”

  Aimee could not imagine what had made the schoolteacher nervous. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “No. Not really. It’s just . . . Well, I heard you came all the way from France. I’ve never met anyone from France before. What brought you here?”

  “Curiosity.” That was one way to describe her reasons, and it sidestepped the fact that the woman everyone knew as Grace Sims was her mother. “When my parents died, I learned they’d once lived in America and wanted to see it.”

  Patience appeared satisfied by the explanation. “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s very different from France. So much bigger.” Aimee gave Patience a conspiratorial smile. “As a teacher, you probably know that Texas alone is larger than all of France, so you can imagine how big America seems to me. It’s also newer and much friendlier.”

  She couldn’t imagine residents of her hometown in France treating a stranger as well as she’d been treated in Ladreville and here. Of course, she had a connection to both towns, but she suspected that wasn’t what made the difference. Texans were simply friendly people. Friendly folks, to use an expression she’d heard in Ladreville.

  “Texans are friendly,” Patience agreed. “They’ll be especially friendly to you. You’re so pretty, and your accent only adds to your attractiveness. Mark my words, you’re going to have every single man in town wanting to court you. Rachel said they’re always interested in newcomers.”

  The schoolteacher leaned forward slightly before she added, “I hope I can trust you not to tell anyone, but that’s one of the reasons I came here. I want to find a husband.”

  Aimee was surprised at both her candor and the fact that Patience, who she guessed was a few years older than herself, was still unmarried. While Patience wasn’t beautiful by the usual standards, her enthusiasm infused her ordinary features with appeal. “Weren’t there any eligible men where you used to live?”

  “Half a dozen,” Patience admitted. “The problem was, I wasn’t interested in any of them. They were boring.” And Patience was far from boring. She was energetic and vivacious, leaving Aimee with no doubt that she would find more reserved men boring.

  “What about you?” Patience continued. “Did you leave a beau behind?”

  “No. Like you, I had some suitors, but none that I wanted to marry.” Though Aimee hadn’t been able to explain it, she’d always felt as if she were an outsider, despite the fact that Maillochauds had been the only home she’d known. Then, when she learned the truth of her birth, she had realized that it hadn’t been her imagination that she was different.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” Patience said firmly. “I predict you’ll be married before the year ends.”

  “That’s not why I came.” While Aimee had dreamt of marriage and children, she had never dreamt of finding them anywhere other than France.

  “Maybe not, but it would be a good reason to stay. Oh, I hope you do. I just know we’re going to be good friends.” Patience flashed a smile at Aimee. “A girl can never have too many friends, can she?”

  Aimee shook her head. “No, she can’t.” Nor could she deny that she felt a kinship with the schoolteacher. While it wasn’t as strong as the one she shared with Thea, it was still more than she’d experienced with any of the young women in France. Was this another of God’s signs that she was meant to be here? Aimee felt hope, as tender as a shoot of grass in the early spring, take root within her.

  “How did I miss it, Blaze?” Jackson knew his horse didn’t understand him, but that didn’t stop him from talking to him. Long hours of solitude meant that his vocal cords would tighten if he didn’t exercise them someway, so he had frequent one-sided conversations with the animal who was as much a partner as Leander had been.

  He’d been on this stretch of the road yesterday when he left Cimarron Creek. It was the same road he’d traveled when he’d first come to the town, and while he hadn’t seen any sign of Stuart’s mother that day, Jackson reminded himself that he hadn’t been looking for anyone until he’d found the baby. Afterward, though he’d seen the countryside as he’d ridden, his primary thought had been getting Stuart to Cimarron Creek so that he could be fed and cared for properly.

  When he’d begun his search for the missing woman, Jackson had believed it logical that this was the road the baby and his mother had been traveling when Stuart had been abandoned. While he’d acknowledged the possibility that the boy had been taken from his mother somewhere else and abandoned under the cactus when his abductors grew tired of his crying, that was a more convoluted scenario.

  If there was one thing Jackson had learned from his years with the Rangers, it was that the simplest answer was often the correct one, and so he’d scoured the sides of the road he’d taken two days earlier, looking for evidence a young mother might have left.

  He’d also stopped in each of the towns he’d passed before he found Stuart, asking if a woman and a baby were missing, all to no avail. There was no sign of anything unusual. When he’d finally decided that he was literally on the wrong track, he’d turned around, planning to retrace his steps until he r
eached the next intersection. Then he’d head west.

  Jackson was perhaps three hours from Cimarron Creek when he saw the buzzards circling, some of them landing, others keeping watch from the air. It was not a good sign. Though there had been other birds soaring and chirping as he’d ridden through here yesterday, there had been no vultures. The sinking feeling in the pit of Jackson’s stomach told him his search was over. While the scavengers could have been attracted by a dead steer, his gut said otherwise.

  “C’mon, Blaze. Let’s see what’s going on.” He tightened his grip on the reins as he turned the gelding into the field. The birds ignored him until he was only a few yards away, then scattered, their raucous cries leaving no doubt of their displeasure.

  It was as he had feared. This was no steer, not even a large rabbit. The body of a young woman lay on the ground. Jackson dismounted, forcing himself to remain calm, though the sight set his senses reeling.

  It was far from the first time he’d seen death. It was far from the first time he’d seen the result of violent death. But it was the first time he’d seen . . .

  Jackson wasn’t one to shrink from reality. He didn’t consider himself a coward. But his mind refused to admit what his eyes saw. There was no question that the woman was dead. There was also no question why he hadn’t seen her yesterday. The fact that rigor mortis was only beginning told him that her death had been recent, that Stuart had been left by the cactus more than a day before his mother died. The condition of the body left no question about the cause of death.

  “Steady, Jackson,” he said, voicing the words aloud. “This is your job.” Though his brain continued to catalogue the details, his heart ached at the realization that the woman who was most likely Stuart’s mother had been tortured. She had not died easily. That much was clear. And so was the fact that Jackson had trouble accepting, the one that made his gut clench.

  The dead woman bore a striking resemblance to Thea.

  “The poor woman.” Travis’s eyes flashed with fury as he stared at the body that was now lying on the cot in the town’s sole jail cell.

  When Jackson had arrived back in Cimarron Creek, he hadn’t wanted to leave the woman strapped to Blaze and had carried her into the sheriff’s office. Though he knew she was beyond caring, it still seemed wrong to leave her outside where she’d be subjected to the curious looks of passersby. Even though he’d wrapped her in a blanket, no one would have any difficulty identifying the form as a human body. Besides, Travis needed to see what had happened.

  “Whoever did this deserves to be skinned alive.”

  The intensity of the sheriff’s reaction surprised Jackson. His own feelings had seesawed between grief and anger, but Travis’s appeared to be unmitigated anger. “I agree.”

  The thought of inflicting the kind of agony the woman had endured had an undeniable appeal. Death had come so slowly and painfully that when the killer had finally slit her throat, it must have been almost a relief.

  “What do you make of it?”

  Jackson clenched his fists, then forced himself to relax. “Someone wanted her to talk. That’s usually the reason for torture. What surprised me is that the killer didn’t touch her face. If I wanted to threaten a woman as pretty as this one, I’d tell her I was going to slice open her face.”

  “But this killer didn’t.”

  “Nope.” And that puzzled him as much as the fact that Stuart had been abandoned well before his mother was killed. Threatening a woman’s child was normally more effective than threatening the woman herself.

  “Any clues?”

  “None. The vultures were already there by the time I arrived. She’d been dumped in a field, but the lack of blood around her made it obvious that she’d been killed somewhere else.”

  Travis nodded. “The first thing we need to do is find out who she is.” He looked at the woman’s body again, shaking his head in either disbelief or dismay. “It’s uncanny how much she looks like Thea Michener.”

  “It could be a coincidence.” Jackson ventured the idea that he’d considered and dismissed simply to see the sheriff’s reaction.

  “You don’t believe that.” Travis didn’t bother making it a question.

  “No.” Jackson had learned a long time ago that there were few coincidences. “I hate to do this to Mrs. Michener, but I want to see if she can identify the body.”

  Travis ran a hand through his hair, his frustration obvious. “I don’t envy you that task. You’re right, though, that it needs to be done. If Thea doesn’t recognize her, I’ll send telegrams to all the nearby towns to see if they know who she is.”

  While it was a logical step, Jackson doubted it would accomplish much. “You might be wasting your time. I asked in each of the towns I passed through, but they all claimed no one was missing.”

  “The difference is we have a description now. That might trigger some memories. It’s worth another try if Thea can’t help us.” Travis pulled the blanket back over the woman’s face. “I have to say that the resemblance bothers me.”

  “Me too.” More than he was willing to admit to Travis. Though he’d told him about his search for the Gang, he hadn’t mentioned Thea’s connection to it. This woman’s death changed everything.

  If the resemblance wasn’t a coincidence and if the woman had been killed because of that likeness, it increased the probability that Thea had some involvement with the Gang beyond being married to one of its members. Though he had no proof, Jackson believed the Gang had killed her husband, and now, if his suspicions were correct, they’d killed the woman they believed was his wife.

  He frowned as the thoughts whirled through his brain. Daniel Michener’s death had been merciful compared to this woman’s. A single gunshot had ended his life, but the woman’s final hours had been fraught with pain, the torture indicating her killers believed Michener’s wife had something they would do anything to get. But what?

  The only thing that made sense was that the rumors that one of the Gang had taken all the gold from their last heist were true. Jackson nodded as his thoughts began to coalesce. The fact that Michener had been killed pointed to him as the one who’d stolen the loot. This woman hadn’t led them to it—Jackson was certain of that—and that meant they’d try again.

  That was an idea he didn’t like. Not one bit.

  6

  Thea knew something was wrong the moment she opened the door and found Ranger Guthrie standing on her front porch. Though he tried to smile, she could see the concern in his eyes. Today, instead of being as bright as spring grass, they reminded her of a murky stream, its water darkened by submerged vegetation.

  “Did you find her?”

  “Possibly.” Though Thea gestured for him to enter, the Ranger remained stationary. His lips flattened, the visible effort he made to control his emotions confirming her assumption that what he had found was unpleasant. “Do you have any family near here?”

  Thea felt her eyes widen with surprise. She had expected further explanations, not this odd question. Still, though she had no idea how it related to Stuart’s mother, there was no reason not to answer honestly. She shook her head. “My only family is in Ladreville—my sister, brother-in-law, and their children. Why?”

  A songbird warbled to its mate, but the Ranger appeared oblivious to the melodic calls. He stood a foot away from Thea, his face as solemn as if he were a judge about to pronounce a death sentence. “I hate to do this, but I need you to come with me to Doc Harrington’s.”

  Despite the grim air that clung to Ranger Guthrie, a glimmer of hope flitted through Thea. Perhaps she’d misread him. Perhaps Stuart’s mother was still alive. Why else would he want her to go to the doctor’s office?

  “Is she very ill?” Although the Ranger’s expression said otherwise, Thea hoped whatever it was wasn’t serious enough to need the doctor’s care.

  When she’d made her first professional call on Lydia yesterday, Lydia had echoed Belinda Allen’s relief that she’d come to Cima
rron Creek, saying that the town’s doctor was old-fashioned and used techniques that often did more harm than good. Unfortunately, until Austin Goddard, the new physician who was currently in France with his family and Aimee’s mother, returned, Doc Harrington was Cimarron Creek’s only source of medical care.

  The Ranger’s eyes darkened even more, and creases formed at the corners of his mouth. “There’s no easy way to say this. She’s dead. The doctor also serves as the town’s coroner.”

  Dead. The word echoed through Thea’s brain. It was as she had feared: Stuart was motherless and most likely an orphan. Though she’d believed she was prepared for this possibility, having it confirmed wrenched her heart, and tears sprang to her eyes. Blinking to keep them from falling, Thea looked up at the man who’d delivered the unwelcome news. “Where did you find her?”

  When he shook his head and said, “That’s not important,” Thea realized he was trying to spare her what were undoubtedly unpleasant details.

  “Thank you, Ranger.”

  A flicker of surprise crossed his face, momentarily lifting the shadows that had clouded his eyes. “You’re thanking me? For what?”

  “For trying to shelter me.” It wasn’t the first time that had happened. Because Thea was shorter than average, men often thought she was also fragile. She wasn’t.

  “I’m stronger than most people realize,” she told the Ranger, “but I appreciate your concern. Let me get my hat and gloves.” Even though it was only a few blocks to the doctor’s office, she would not go farther than her front porch unless she was properly dressed.

  “I don’t doubt that you’re strong, Mrs. Michener, but this could be difficult. I want to do everything I can to make it as painless as possible.”

  “Thank you again, Ranger.”

  His mouth puckered as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Would you do me a favor? Would you call me Jackson?”