Anita Mills (34 page)

“The uncle said he’d taken to drinking heavily, that he was pretty down on his luck.”

Laura eyed the ramshackle boardinghouse skeptically. “I’d say so.”

He sucked in a deep breath, then expelled it before he started up the steps. The faded sign above the door bore the pretentious name of Hathaway House. He rapped several times, and when no one answered, he opened the door into a dark, narrow foyer backed up against a steep set of steps.

The only illumination was a row of smoking candles set in chimney sconces following the stairs upward to the landing above. The walls had once been painted a lovely shade of green, but now they were streaked with soot and rusty rain. The pattern on the carpet snaking up the steps had disappeared, exposing the frayed strings of jute underneath. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, Spence saw the bank
of small wooden cubicles along the front wall.

Moving closer to them, Laura read the names until she found a yellowed piece of paper with the name R. Donnelly on it. “Well, I guess he’s here, all right.” Squinting, she tried to make out the faded number penciled above it “I think it says eight, but it could be a three,” she said.

“We’ll try the three first.” Moving down the dark, dank hall, he found the number on a door, and he knocked. He could hear a stirring of sorts within, then a lumbered gait approached the door, and somebody threw an iron bolt, opening it a crack. A fat, toothless crone looked him up and down before asking, “Hep yeh, dearie?”

“I’m looking for Ross Donnelly—his name’s on one of the mailboxes, but we couldn’t make out the number.”

“I don’t know any—what was the name again?”

“Donnelly—Ross Donnelly”

“No McDonalds here—less’n it’s Mr. Ross upstairs—that’s all anybody knows him by—Ross. I got no notion what he’s callin’ hisself but that.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs—second door right of the top.”

“Thanks.” Taking Laura’s elbow, he propelled her toward the staircase.

“He ain’t fit comp’ny!” the woman called after them. “He ain’t nuthin’ but a sot!”

“Well, I guess this is where we find out,” he said, hesitating. “It’s been a long, hard old journey to get to this.”

Stepping past him, Laura banged as hard as she could on the warped slab of wood. “Mr. Donnelly, are you in there?” she shouted.

“I could’ve done that,” Spence muttered.

“Yes, but he might not answer you. You said he was a ladies’ man, so I thought I might have the better chance.”

“Who’s there?” a slurred voice demanded from the other side.

“Laura—Laura Taylor!”

He slipped three bolts before the door swung in. Her eyes took in the disheveled blond hair, the pale stubble on his cheeks, and his rumpled clothes. Seeing her first, he passed a hand over bloodshot eyes. “Who’re you? Don’t know—”

“Hello, Ross,” Spence murmured. “She’s my wife.” Before the other man could shove the door closed, Spence blocked it with his boot and shoulder. “Now is that any way to treat an old friend?” he asked silkily. “I’ve come a helluva long way for this visit.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s just plain blasphemy coming from you,” Laura declared. Looking him up and down again, she shook her head. “You sure don’t look like much of a ladies’ man to me,” she said.

“I was good enough for Liddy. She—”

His words died on his lips as Spence shoved the door into his face. “Now, wait jus’ a minute, Spen—”

His head snapped back from the blow to his chin, and he fell to the floor.

“You want to live, don’t you, Ross? Well, I’m going to give you one chance, and one chance only.”

“Spence!” Laura shouted.

Ignoring her, he advanced on Donnelly as the man tried to pull himself up by a faded settee. “Where’s my son, Ross?”

“I don’t know—dammit, Spence, but you got no right—”

“Oh, I’ve got every right—I could kill you right here and now, but I’ll let you live if I get my boy.”

His low voice was much more menacing than any shout. Catching his right arm, Laura cried, “Spence, you can’t!—he’s too drunk to defend himself!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—I never had your boy.”

“You ran off with him and Liddy, Ross. Now, I’m not fooling around—either you tell me where he is, or this is your last day on earth.” Shaking free of Laura, Spence doubled up his fist again, and when Donnelly didn’t answer, he delivered a hard body blow, sending Ross backward into the settee. “Answer me! Damn you, answer me!”

“She’s dead, but I didn’t kill her—I swear it! It was cholera—she and the old nigra both got it, and both of ‘em didn’t make it.” Looking up sullenly, he shook his head. “She wasn’t worth killing me for. I wasn’t the only one—she was usin’ me, just like she was usin’ you.”

“I don’t give a damn about Liddy! You hear that, Ross? I don’t give a damn about her!” Yanking the man up by the banded collar of a dirty shirt, Spence pulled him within inches.
“Where is he?”

“1 don’t rightly know now—”

Laura winced as his head hit the wall. “For the love of God, Spence!”

“You stay out of this—it’s between me and him.”

Grasping Ross’s head by his hair, he banged it into the wall again, cracking the plaster. “You’ve got a choice, Ross—your brains or my boy. How many times you want me to crack your head? Five? Ten? More than that? Because I’m going to keep doing it until I know where he is—either that, or you’ll die without telling me.”

“I’m tellin’ you I don’t know!” As the wall met his face again, he cried, “Jesus God, Spence—I don’t know!”

“He was with you when you got here. Your uncle saw him, and he described him to a T, so don’t you lie to me.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Then I guess it’ll be number four.”

“No! I haven’t seen him in a year—I swear it.”

“What did you do with him?”

“Nothing—he was fine—”

“Where, Ross? Pretty soon that skull of yours is going to crack wide open, but I guess you must figure you’ve got it coming.”

“Turn me loose, Spence!”

Instead, he threw him into the cracked plaster, then watched as the man slid to the floor. Standing over him, his fists still clenched, Spence told him low, “I don’t care what I have to do—I’ll stomp you—I’ll knock your brains out—I’ll beat you to a bloody pulp. I promised Laura I wouldn’t shoot you, but by God, that’s about all I won’t do.”

Donnelly leaned over to spit blood on the floor. “You’ve got it all wrong, Spence. It wasn’t even my idea——it was Liddy’s. I wasn’t there two weeks before she was beggin’ me to bring her out here. She wasn’t waitin’ for you—we were just tools to get what she wanted— She—”

“I don’t care about her, I told you—I don’t care about her.”

“But you got to hear it.” Pausing to wipe blood from his mouth, Ross looked up at him through swelling eyes. “She was like a black widow spider. She’d spin that web of hers around a man and just pull him in, and when she was done with him, she’d spit out his bones. She did it with you, with me, and with a dozen other fools just like us.”

“She’s dead, Ross. You hauled her dead body into McPherson and dumped it; then you took off with Josh, with him crying all the way out of the fort. You don’t have to tell me anything else, because I
know.
I saw that grave out there.”

“I’m telling you she was using both of us!”

“It doesn’t matter now. If you want to tell me something, you’d better make it something I want to know.”

“It wasn’t me she wanted—she just wanted a way out here. She had somebody else waiting for her.”

“Don’t tell me lies. I saw the hotel registers in St. Louis, St. Joseph, and Omaha with my own eyes.”

“Oh, I’m not denying I had her—that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying she played both of us false. She didn’t want me, and she didn’t want you. I should’ve known what she was when I saw what she did to her father, and if that wasn’t enough to open my eyes, I sure should’ve known the day we left Sally Jamison with the Richardson woman. She sucked her own folks dry, Spence. She thought she had Charlie out here waiting, but he was smarter than we were—he told her he was coming to California, then went somewhere else.”

“I don’t want to hear any of this—just tell me what you did with Josh.”

“I’m gettin’ to it. She was bringin’ the boy to join him. I didn’t find out until she was babblin’ mad with fever, but that’s how it was. She was cozyin’ up to me, lettin’ me do what I wanted with her, and I thought it was me she wanted. I should’ve known it wasn’t, because she was the coldest woman I ever had. She opened those legs to get me, but it was like laying a block of ice by the time we got to Missouri. She didn’t care about the boy either, you know. She was just using him to get Charlie, but I guess maybe Charlie wasn’t buyin’ this time. Maybe he knew he wasn’t the only one she’d been going down for.”

“I don’t even know any Charlie, so he’s got nothing to do with me,”

“He’s the boy’s daddy, Spence. Cullen caught ‘em in the peach orchard one night, threatened to kill ‘im if he came around again, told her he was going to lock her up. A day or two later, he brought you home, and she must’ve thought you’d get her out of there.”

“She knew I’d already joined up.”

“Maybe she thought she could make you come back, or maybe she liked having you gone—married woman belongs to her husband, not her father. But I don’t have to know, anyway. When she was wanting me to bring her out here, she said she was afraid when you came home, you’d find out the boy wasn’t yours. She said she was afraid you’d kill her. That’s how she started working on me. You ever notice how she’d demand impossible things, then use ‘em as an excuse for something else? Until things got bad from the war, she had everything the way she wanted it.”

“You’re a lying bastard, Ross—a damned lying bastard.”

“The kid’s daddy is Charlie Madsen, Spence. Big strapping, good-looking fellow who used to train horses for Cullen. At least you came from the gentry, so even if he didn’t like the notion, he could stomach you a whole lot better than a horse trainer. But in the end, it was Madsen that got even for both of us. He didn’t want her, and he didn’t want the kid either.”

Afraid Spence’s temper was about to explode, Laura moved closer to Ross. “Lying’s apt to get you killed right where you sit, Mr. Donnelly. You’ve got no business ruining lives by saying despicable things you can’t prove. We’ve come over mountains and deserts and fought off Indians to get here, and all we want to know is where we can find Joshua Hardin. The rest of this stuff is just pig slop.”

“Well, if it’s proof you want, ma’am, I’ve sure as hell got it. After I heard all that ravin’, I went through her things, tellin’ myself it wasn’t true, that she was just out of her mind but it was probably the only time she told the truth. She had a letter from him, answering one of hers. And you want the worst of it? I found the lying little bitch’s half-finished letter she was writing him after she took sick, telling him the old woman was dead, and she was afraid she was dying, too. She asked him to take care of the kid.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“And you want the real hell of it all? As mad as I was at her, I brought that kid out here, thinking Madsen would want him. Hell, he wasn’t even here! I was stuck with the boy, havin’ to look at him every day, when he was the spittin’ image of her!”

“Where’s the letter, Mr. Donnelly?”

“Over there,” he answered with a sweep of his hand.

“Over where?”

“Leave it be—I don’t have to see it,” His eyes on Ross’s battered face, Spence muttered, “You’re not worth killing.”

“Over where?” Laura asked again.

“I’ve got a box—over back of the chair. But he won’t want to read ‘em any more than I did.”

“I said I don’t want to see it!”

“Well, I do. I don’t believe it even exists,” Walking across the little room to a worn wing chair, she bent down to find the box. As she opened it, she saw several envelopes.

“It’s the one that stinks like a whorehouse,” Ross said tiredly. “She even perfumed it up for the son of a bitch.”

“It must be the one on top,” she said.

“Yeah. Every now and then I take it out and read it to remind myself I was a damned fool. I wanted to believe in her as much as Spence did, and I knew what she was.” He laughed mirthlessly, then winced. “I even made myself believe I loved her.”

Opening the folded paper, she started to read before she heard the door slam. “Spence! Spence!” Running after him, she watched as he hit the boardinghouse door with his fist, then walked out. By the time she reached the street, he was nowhere in sight. The only thing there was the horse-drawn cab that had brought them. “Spence, don’t listen to him! Come back!”

He was just gone. Standing in the street, she finished the letter, thinking what an idiot Lydia must’ve been. When she got back up the steep stairs, Ross Donnelly was still sitting in the same place.

“If you want this back, you’ll have to tell me where you left Josh.”

He looked up morosely. “I guess Spence was the lucky one, wasn’t he? Looks like he got over her.”

“Yes. We’re expecting a baby next winter.”

“Yeah.”

She could almost feel sorry for him. “You shouldn’t have told him. It was a cruel, vicious thing to do to somebody who believed you were once his friend,”

“Maybe I wanted to share the misery,”

“I’d like to see Josh, Mr. Donnelly. Whether he wants to be or not, Spence may be all that little boy’s got left.”

“I took him to the Catholic orphanage. I just couldn’t look at him anymore.”

“Do you have an address for it?”

“In the box.” As she lifted the lid again, he sighed. “Damned if Spence doesn’t have all the luck. I figured you’d be the one dragging him out the door, glad to wash your hands of the kid.”

“I just hope he’s still there. We’ve made a lot of plans for that little boy, and I hope I can see them happen.”

When she left, she handed the driver the scrap of paper with the orphanage’s address. “Do you know where this is?”