“When is my sister coming back? She’s been gone for two whole days, again.” Cassandra’s whine filled the warm kitchen. “What’s she doing all this time?”
“She and Sam are getting to know one another better. They are newly wedded.” Mary bent closer to the dough she rolled out for a crust, hoping to hide her smile from Cassandra. “She said she and Sam would join us for Sinead’s birthday.”
“Are Sam and Vanessa going to live here or are they going to live somewhere else? I love my uncle, but I want Cassandra to live with us.” Colleen sprinkled a little flour onto the thinning crust, peering up at Mary with an expression that harbored uncertainty.
The question gave Mary pause. She glanced up at her daughter, then lifted her shoulders in a half-shrug. “I’m not sure where Sam and Vanessa plan to live, other than at the boarding house. I haven’t asked. I don’t believe they’ll set up a home too far from town, though.” Mary glanced at Cassandra, the uncertainty in Colleen’s expression mirrored there. As much as she wanted to reassure both girls, she didn’t have those words. She resumed rolling out the dough, trying to find the words she needed to reassure the girls the distance wouldn’t be a hinderance to their friendship. “He is the sheriff. He needs to live close.”
“Why is it taking so long to get to know one another?” Cassandra wasn’t willing to let her sister’s absence go without further commentary. “He loves her, and she loves him. What else is there to know?”
Heat seared Mary’s face as she contemplated and quickly eliminated any answer to that question. Sinead saved her from responding to Cassandra. Her oldest daughter flung herself off the stool near the table with an audible huff and said, “They’re kissing to make a baby, Cassandra. Are you that dense?”
Cassandra visibly paled while Colleen clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a nervous giggle.
“Sinead!” Mary halted her daughter’s retreat. “Where did you hear such nonsense?”
Sinead met her stare, no contrition in her expression. “At the Christmas celebration, I saw Calder and Rose go off into a dark corner and they kissed. A little bit later, they told everyone they were going to have a baby. Kissing makes babies, doesn’t it?”
Still a conversation she didn’t want to have right then with Sinead, especially not with the two younger girls listening. A loud knock on the front door saved her from deflecting away from the conversation. Cassandra raced from kitchen. “Vanessa’s here.”
“Babies are made by kissing,” Sinead repeated.
Mary glanced at Colleen. Bright color suffused her cheeks and she looked away. She turned her attention back to Sinead. “Why are you so insistent on having this discussion, young lady?”
“Because Colleen’s wrong.” Sinead jerked her head at her younger sister. “She says if two people love each other, that’s what makes babies. They have to kiss.”
“Saints preserve us all,” Mary whispered. She never remembered this kind of a conversation with her own mother. Not that her mother would have suffered such a sharing. Such things just weren’t mentioned, not even after Mary knew the sacrifices her mother made to try to keep food on the table for the two younger boys.
“Mary!”
Cassandra’s shout from the front of the house jerked Mary’s head up. That wasn’t an announcement of her brother and his new bride’s arrival. Mary spun away from the table, rolling pin clutched tightly in her hand. She paused just long enough to bark “Stay here” to Colleen and Sinead before she started down the long hallway from the back of the house to the front door.
“Mary!”
The edge in Cassandra’s voice raised her hackles. She shifted the heavy rolling pin in her hand to be able to wield it as a weapon. Sammy had done more than leave her with an old revolver when he left to go fight in that damned rich man’s war. He’d taught her to fight like a street fighter: dirty and to use any item at hand. Rolling pins made excellent bludgeoning weapons.
Cassandra stood stock still in the doorway, her knuckles white on the door where she held it partly closed. Unable or unwilling to open it further, it didn’t matter. One look over the child’s shoulder was enough. Every nerve ending vibrated, the hair at her nape prickled, and her stomach lurched into her throat.
The man standing on the porch was danger personified. Anyone who could have fought their way through the deep snows, willing to push a horse to those extremes rang warning bells with her.
“Where’s the mayor?” He didn’t take his hat off and if anything, his query sounded more like an accusation than a simple question.
“Why…why do you want to see Mayor Denton?” Mary stepped between Cassandra and the stranger. In the same motion, she pulled Cassandra away from the door and into the house. She paused just long enough in her short march forward to put space between him and the young girl to say, “Go to the kitchen and stay there. Tell Sinead and Colleen to stay with you.”
“Ain’t no one at the jail and I figured, when I saw the sign, the mayor’d know where the sheriff is.” He glanced over his shoulder, but never fully looked away. “I got business to take care of.”
Cassandra’s hurried steps gave Mary the bravado to continue. She looked around this disturbing man to the two horses in front of the house. One of the animals carried a strange burden: a man draped face down across the saddle. It was suddenly much too warm for a late February day. Her hand tightened on the rolling pin with the effort to stop herself from swinging it at this creature. “You brought a dead man to my home?”
“Tol’ you. Ain’t nobody at the jail for me to leave him. He ain’t dead,” He paused. “Yet. Now I need to get this outlaw to the sheriff. Why don’ you be a good girl and run along and fetch your husband? Or the sheriff, if you know where he is, Mrs. Denton.”
Mary sucked in the cold air, willing a calm to herself she didn’t feel, and took the sparse, short silence to rake her gaze over him. Correcting his wrong assumption about who she was fled in that silence, as well. At one point, sometime very recently, his nose had been broken. Facial swelling, slurred words with that swelling, and two black eyes seldom lied. Lord knew, she’d nursed Nicky and Seamus through their share of broken noses resulting from fisticuffs. Her gaze skipped to the form slung over the horse. “Then he needs a doctor, not Mayor Denton or the sheriff.”
His blackened eyes narrowed. “I don’t care what he needs, lady. As long as he’s alive when I shove him into a cell, ‘at’s all ‘at matters to me.” He took a full step closer, bringing him toe to toe with her.
Mary backed half a step, readying a swing of the heavy rolling pin. Look for the opening. Don’t let ’em get too close or you lose momentum and force on the swing. As if he stood next to her, coaching her, Sammy’s voice whispered in her memory. With that memory came another, more fleeting, more nebulous, rippling along her spine colder than the waves lapping Brighton Beach in December. Somewhere, somehow, she had seen this man before.
“Mother.”
Her heart sank through the floor. Of all the times for Sinead to once more decide that doing as she was told did not apply to her. Without taking her gaze off the looming figure in the doorway, Mary said, “Go back to the kitchen, Sinead. Now.”
“Sinead is it?” His whole mannerism changed and softened but became no less intimidating. “Do you know where the sheriff is, Sinead?”
“Go to the kitchen, Sinead.” Mary thrust her arm out, preventing Sinead from approaching any closer. She let her voice rise. Let him think it was in fear. Though, she admitted it was partially elevated with the fear twisting icy knots into her stomach and sending her heart skittering with a frantic pace. “Tell Colleen to go out the back door and get Sam. She might not be able to find him. Tell her to go to Miss Millie’s. Miss Millie will know where he is. You take Cassandra with you over to the boarding house and let Miss Annabelle know I won’t have that pie ready tonight.”
“Isn’t he—”
“Do as I said, Sinead.” Mary broke her gaze from the stranger’s unblinking stare to push Sinead toward the kitchen. “Go.”
With a huffing sigh, Sinead stomped to the kitchen. Before she had traversed half the length of the hallway, the man behind her added his own frustration to the mix. “Lady, I don’t know what your problem is. All I want to do is dump that outlaw into a cell and collect the reward for him. That’s it.”
The slamming of the back door gave her enough time to calm her anger and keep a firm rein on her tongue. She took a chance to step around the wall of a man. The crisp winter air stung her cheeks, and she pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. If he wasn’t going to stop her, she was going to assure herself his prisoner wasn’t dead.
Thin mud sucked at her shoes and her skirt grew heavier with the icy water wicking into the fabric at the hem. She placed a trembling hand onto the unmoving man’s back. Warmth seeped through his shirt into her palm. Shallow breaths lifted her hand in a regular rhythm.
“Tol’ you he ain’t dead.” His voice came from behind her. She never heard him walk across the porch. “He’s worth more to me alive than dead. Twice as much.”
Mary carefully lifted the prisoner’s head. Dark bruises formed along one cheekbone. His lower lip was split in two separate places. Blood flowed and dried in a cracking, garish pattern down the side of his face. The cut over his eye oozed blood across his brow into his hair. “I’ll fetch the doctor myself because he needs help.”
“He don’t need that much help. As long as he’s alive when I hand him over to the sheriff, ’at’s all that matters to me.”
“As long as he’s alive when I push him into a cell, that’s all that matters to me. I didn’t have to get you to witness his last breath.”
Renewed nausea washed over her. The memory of this man’s callous indifference to her brother’s life seeping away on the floor of a cold, damp cell in The Tombs buckled her knees. She grabbed the saddle skirt to keep from crumbling. “You are a cold, disgusting excuse for a man. Did you feel the same way when you shoved a knife—” She bit off the next words. While she had recognized him, he seemingly hadn’t recognized her. The thought that he might not flittered through her.
His hand snaked out, grabbing her just above the elbow, and he pulled her away from the injured man and closer to him. He stepped around her, putting his back to his prisoner, and spun her with him in a macabre dance step of sorts. “When I shoved a knife where?”
“Take your hand off me.” Mary jerked her arm, but his grip merely tightened, fingers digging deep, sending a sharp stab of pain shooting down into her fingers and up into her shoulder. She pulled her arm again, repeating, “Take your hand off me.”
Still struggling, she wasn’t ready when the stranger suddenly released her. She fell backward and landed on her backside in the snow and mud in the middle of the street.
“Step away from my sister, now, or you’re a dead man.” Sam’s voice rang true and steady. She put her shaking hand to her heaving chest and tried to take a deep breath. Before she had caught her breath, Sam thrust a hand down to her, which she took. Without any seeming effort, he pulled her to her feet. He never even looked at her as he asked, “Are you all right?”
“My pride is damaged but I’m fine.” She extracted her hand from her brother’s and backed a step further away and then another, until she stood at the bottom step of the porch.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my town?”
She’d heard that tone from Sam before. He was beyond furious.
“Name’s Mueller. I’m a bounty hunter.” He nudged his head toward the man face down over the horse. “That’s Jack McGarrett.”
Her brother’s head snapped back. He lowered his revolver, brushed his dark frock coat off his leg and holstered the weapon. “Jail’s just a little ways down the street.”
“Sam, no.” Mary halted her forward motion with the icy glare Sam directed at her. She deliberately softened her voice. “Sammy, whoever he is, he’s hurt. He needs a doctor. Please, bring him in here and I’ll go fetch Doc.”
“This one’s going to the jail. Doc can tend to him there.” Sam turned back to the bounty hunter. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The stranger didn’t say one word. He simply tipped his hat and mounted his horse.
“Sam, why?” Mary closed the distance between herself and her brother, stopping his retreat with a hand on his lower arm. “The jail isn’t any place for a man as injured as he is.”
Sam bent his head to her hand. Self-conscious, Mary pulled her hand back and gathered her shawl tighter around her shoulders.
“I have a wanted poster for a Jack McGarrett sitting on my desk. He’s dangerous, Mary. Go on back in the house. I’ll handle this.”
“She and Sam are getting to know one another better. They are newly wedded.” Mary bent closer to the dough she rolled out for a crust, hoping to hide her smile from Cassandra. “She said she and Sam would join us for Sinead’s birthday.”
“Are Sam and Vanessa going to live here or are they going to live somewhere else? I love my uncle, but I want Cassandra to live with us.” Colleen sprinkled a little flour onto the thinning crust, peering up at Mary with an expression that harbored uncertainty.
The question gave Mary pause. She glanced up at her daughter, then lifted her shoulders in a half-shrug. “I’m not sure where Sam and Vanessa plan to live, other than at the boarding house. I haven’t asked. I don’t believe they’ll set up a home too far from town, though.” Mary glanced at Cassandra, the uncertainty in Colleen’s expression mirrored there. As much as she wanted to reassure both girls, she didn’t have those words. She resumed rolling out the dough, trying to find the words she needed to reassure the girls the distance wouldn’t be a hinderance to their friendship. “He is the sheriff. He needs to live close.”
“Why is it taking so long to get to know one another?” Cassandra wasn’t willing to let her sister’s absence go without further commentary. “He loves her, and she loves him. What else is there to know?”
Heat seared Mary’s face as she contemplated and quickly eliminated any answer to that question. Sinead saved her from responding to Cassandra. Her oldest daughter flung herself off the stool near the table with an audible huff and said, “They’re kissing to make a baby, Cassandra. Are you that dense?”
Cassandra visibly paled while Colleen clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a nervous giggle.
“Sinead!” Mary halted her daughter’s retreat. “Where did you hear such nonsense?”
Sinead met her stare, no contrition in her expression. “At the Christmas celebration, I saw Calder and Rose go off into a dark corner and they kissed. A little bit later, they told everyone they were going to have a baby. Kissing makes babies, doesn’t it?”
Still a conversation she didn’t want to have right then with Sinead, especially not with the two younger girls listening. A loud knock on the front door saved her from deflecting away from the conversation. Cassandra raced from kitchen. “Vanessa’s here.”
“Babies are made by kissing,” Sinead repeated.
Mary glanced at Colleen. Bright color suffused her cheeks and she looked away. She turned her attention back to Sinead. “Why are you so insistent on having this discussion, young lady?”
“Because Colleen’s wrong.” Sinead jerked her head at her younger sister. “She says if two people love each other, that’s what makes babies. They have to kiss.”
“Saints preserve us all,” Mary whispered. She never remembered this kind of a conversation with her own mother. Not that her mother would have suffered such a sharing. Such things just weren’t mentioned, not even after Mary knew the sacrifices her mother made to try to keep food on the table for the two younger boys.
“Mary!”
Cassandra’s shout from the front of the house jerked Mary’s head up. That wasn’t an announcement of her brother and his new bride’s arrival. Mary spun away from the table, rolling pin clutched tightly in her hand. She paused just long enough to bark “Stay here” to Colleen and Sinead before she started down the long hallway from the back of the house to the front door.
“Mary!”
The edge in Cassandra’s voice raised her hackles. She shifted the heavy rolling pin in her hand to be able to wield it as a weapon. Sammy had done more than leave her with an old revolver when he left to go fight in that damned rich man’s war. He’d taught her to fight like a street fighter: dirty and to use any item at hand. Rolling pins made excellent bludgeoning weapons.
Cassandra stood stock still in the doorway, her knuckles white on the door where she held it partly closed. Unable or unwilling to open it further, it didn’t matter. One look over the child’s shoulder was enough. Every nerve ending vibrated, the hair at her nape prickled, and her stomach lurched into her throat.
The man standing on the porch was danger personified. Anyone who could have fought their way through the deep snows, willing to push a horse to those extremes rang warning bells with her.
“Where’s the mayor?” He didn’t take his hat off and if anything, his query sounded more like an accusation than a simple question.
“Why…why do you want to see Mayor Denton?” Mary stepped between Cassandra and the stranger. In the same motion, she pulled Cassandra away from the door and into the house. She paused just long enough in her short march forward to put space between him and the young girl to say, “Go to the kitchen and stay there. Tell Sinead and Colleen to stay with you.”
“Ain’t no one at the jail and I figured, when I saw the sign, the mayor’d know where the sheriff is.” He glanced over his shoulder, but never fully looked away. “I got business to take care of.”
Cassandra’s hurried steps gave Mary the bravado to continue. She looked around this disturbing man to the two horses in front of the house. One of the animals carried a strange burden: a man draped face down across the saddle. It was suddenly much too warm for a late February day. Her hand tightened on the rolling pin with the effort to stop herself from swinging it at this creature. “You brought a dead man to my home?”
“Tol’ you. Ain’t nobody at the jail for me to leave him. He ain’t dead,” He paused. “Yet. Now I need to get this outlaw to the sheriff. Why don’ you be a good girl and run along and fetch your husband? Or the sheriff, if you know where he is, Mrs. Denton.”
Mary sucked in the cold air, willing a calm to herself she didn’t feel, and took the sparse, short silence to rake her gaze over him. Correcting his wrong assumption about who she was fled in that silence, as well. At one point, sometime very recently, his nose had been broken. Facial swelling, slurred words with that swelling, and two black eyes seldom lied. Lord knew, she’d nursed Nicky and Seamus through their share of broken noses resulting from fisticuffs. Her gaze skipped to the form slung over the horse. “Then he needs a doctor, not Mayor Denton or the sheriff.”
His blackened eyes narrowed. “I don’t care what he needs, lady. As long as he’s alive when I shove him into a cell, ‘at’s all ‘at matters to me.” He took a full step closer, bringing him toe to toe with her.
Mary backed half a step, readying a swing of the heavy rolling pin. Look for the opening. Don’t let ’em get too close or you lose momentum and force on the swing. As if he stood next to her, coaching her, Sammy’s voice whispered in her memory. With that memory came another, more fleeting, more nebulous, rippling along her spine colder than the waves lapping Brighton Beach in December. Somewhere, somehow, she had seen this man before.
“Mother.”
Her heart sank through the floor. Of all the times for Sinead to once more decide that doing as she was told did not apply to her. Without taking her gaze off the looming figure in the doorway, Mary said, “Go back to the kitchen, Sinead. Now.”
“Sinead is it?” His whole mannerism changed and softened but became no less intimidating. “Do you know where the sheriff is, Sinead?”
“Go to the kitchen, Sinead.” Mary thrust her arm out, preventing Sinead from approaching any closer. She let her voice rise. Let him think it was in fear. Though, she admitted it was partially elevated with the fear twisting icy knots into her stomach and sending her heart skittering with a frantic pace. “Tell Colleen to go out the back door and get Sam. She might not be able to find him. Tell her to go to Miss Millie’s. Miss Millie will know where he is. You take Cassandra with you over to the boarding house and let Miss Annabelle know I won’t have that pie ready tonight.”
“Isn’t he—”
“Do as I said, Sinead.” Mary broke her gaze from the stranger’s unblinking stare to push Sinead toward the kitchen. “Go.”
With a huffing sigh, Sinead stomped to the kitchen. Before she had traversed half the length of the hallway, the man behind her added his own frustration to the mix. “Lady, I don’t know what your problem is. All I want to do is dump that outlaw into a cell and collect the reward for him. That’s it.”
The slamming of the back door gave her enough time to calm her anger and keep a firm rein on her tongue. She took a chance to step around the wall of a man. The crisp winter air stung her cheeks, and she pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. If he wasn’t going to stop her, she was going to assure herself his prisoner wasn’t dead.
Thin mud sucked at her shoes and her skirt grew heavier with the icy water wicking into the fabric at the hem. She placed a trembling hand onto the unmoving man’s back. Warmth seeped through his shirt into her palm. Shallow breaths lifted her hand in a regular rhythm.
“Tol’ you he ain’t dead.” His voice came from behind her. She never heard him walk across the porch. “He’s worth more to me alive than dead. Twice as much.”
Mary carefully lifted the prisoner’s head. Dark bruises formed along one cheekbone. His lower lip was split in two separate places. Blood flowed and dried in a cracking, garish pattern down the side of his face. The cut over his eye oozed blood across his brow into his hair. “I’ll fetch the doctor myself because he needs help.”
“He don’t need that much help. As long as he’s alive when I hand him over to the sheriff, ’at’s all that matters to me.”
“As long as he’s alive when I push him into a cell, that’s all that matters to me. I didn’t have to get you to witness his last breath.”
Renewed nausea washed over her. The memory of this man’s callous indifference to her brother’s life seeping away on the floor of a cold, damp cell in The Tombs buckled her knees. She grabbed the saddle skirt to keep from crumbling. “You are a cold, disgusting excuse for a man. Did you feel the same way when you shoved a knife—” She bit off the next words. While she had recognized him, he seemingly hadn’t recognized her. The thought that he might not flittered through her.
His hand snaked out, grabbing her just above the elbow, and he pulled her away from the injured man and closer to him. He stepped around her, putting his back to his prisoner, and spun her with him in a macabre dance step of sorts. “When I shoved a knife where?”
“Take your hand off me.” Mary jerked her arm, but his grip merely tightened, fingers digging deep, sending a sharp stab of pain shooting down into her fingers and up into her shoulder. She pulled her arm again, repeating, “Take your hand off me.”
Still struggling, she wasn’t ready when the stranger suddenly released her. She fell backward and landed on her backside in the snow and mud in the middle of the street.
“Step away from my sister, now, or you’re a dead man.” Sam’s voice rang true and steady. She put her shaking hand to her heaving chest and tried to take a deep breath. Before she had caught her breath, Sam thrust a hand down to her, which she took. Without any seeming effort, he pulled her to her feet. He never even looked at her as he asked, “Are you all right?”
“My pride is damaged but I’m fine.” She extracted her hand from her brother’s and backed a step further away and then another, until she stood at the bottom step of the porch.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my town?”
She’d heard that tone from Sam before. He was beyond furious.
“Name’s Mueller. I’m a bounty hunter.” He nudged his head toward the man face down over the horse. “That’s Jack McGarrett.”
Her brother’s head snapped back. He lowered his revolver, brushed his dark frock coat off his leg and holstered the weapon. “Jail’s just a little ways down the street.”
“Sam, no.” Mary halted her forward motion with the icy glare Sam directed at her. She deliberately softened her voice. “Sammy, whoever he is, he’s hurt. He needs a doctor. Please, bring him in here and I’ll go fetch Doc.”
“This one’s going to the jail. Doc can tend to him there.” Sam turned back to the bounty hunter. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The stranger didn’t say one word. He simply tipped his hat and mounted his horse.
“Sam, why?” Mary closed the distance between herself and her brother, stopping his retreat with a hand on his lower arm. “The jail isn’t any place for a man as injured as he is.”
Sam bent his head to her hand. Self-conscious, Mary pulled her hand back and gathered her shawl tighter around her shoulders.
“I have a wanted poster for a Jack McGarrett sitting on my desk. He’s dangerous, Mary. Go on back in the house. I’ll handle this.”