Jodi Thomas (20 page)

The woman plunked a tiny piece of lead into a bowl as if she were panning for gold.

“I got the one out of his leg,” another bragged as she added her metal to the bowl.

The girl beside Carter stood straight and proud. “Some of these girls weren’t more than my age when they was with Colonel Hooker’s troops during the war. On good days, they’d do laundry and make a little extra on their backs. On bad days, they’d help keep their paying customers alive to fight, and love, another day.”

Carter didn’t comment, so she continued. “See those brandy snifters on the mantel? One’s full of tails from rattlesnakes we’ve killed around the place, and the other is bullets we’ve dug out of folks. One day this town will get a doc, and we’ll lose half our collection. Before then, both glasses will probably be full.”

Carter looked down at her. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen, but I been a working girl for so long I can’t remember when I started. I even got beat up one night by a low-down bedbug who goes by the name of Amos Ally.” She stopped long enough to look like she might spit. “Broke my nose, the bum. You want to feel the knot it left?”

“No,” Carter answered. The girl spoke some foreign language he couldn’t quite understand. The words seemed normal, but she put them together all wrong.

She didn’t take offense. “My name’s Nellie, Nellie Jean Desire.” She said her last name real slow and low almost as if it were part of a song. “I thought that sounded good for a name. You ever heard of me?”

Carter shook his head.

“Fat Alice says I’m gonna be something. Pretty soon men will be coming from all over the state to wrestle me. Miss Nellie Jean Desire.” The name slid off her tongue like warm molasses. “I should be something when my chest comes in.”

Definitely a foreign language, he thought. Or maybe the child was mad. Maybe this was some kind of insane asylum like he’d read about in a paper from Austin. That would explain the house being set off from the others and the clothes. But there didn’t seem to be any bars or guards. Surely the mad didn’t just stay here of their own accord.

The place was obviously decorated by the insane. Colors of reds and unnatural greens fought for space on a battlefield littered with feathers and fringe.

Carter moved closer to the table, fearing what they might have done to the sheriff. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the old man cut up like a turkey.

There was blood everywhere. On the sheriff. The table. The hands of several of the women.

“I got the last one!” the large woman yelled. She wore a dress that had been washed so thin he could see through it. The sight was not one he was thankful for viewing.

She must have bought her dress when she was fifty pounds leaner, for it no longer seemed to come completely closed in the front. “Bandage all the wounds and get him upstairs.” She stepped back and grinned.

The woman turned her attention to Carter. “Got any idea who he is, handsome?”

Carter looked behind him trying to figure out to whom the strange woman was talking.

“Two Bits! Has this guy got a voice?” Fat Alice yelled at the girl who’d called herself Nellie Jean.

The girl beside Carter stormed like a barn cat caught in the house. “I ain’t answering to that name no more, Fat Alice. I told you my name’s Nellie Jean. How am I ever gonna make top money with a name like Two Bits?”

“You don’t worry about making top money until I let you start working. I’m not one to let fruit be picked before it’s ripe no matter how much it wants to jump off the tree.” The large woman slapped the girl out of the way as easily as if she’d been made of spiderwebs. “Now listen up, deary.” She gave her full attention to Carter. “We don’t mind helping out, but we like to know anyone’s name who goes upstairs. We may be cheap, but nothing here, not even the doctoring, is free.”

Carter fished in his pocket. He’d happily pay the ladies. From the looks of their clothes, they could really use the money. “How much?”

“Three bucks a bullet. Luckily, we didn’t have to use whiskey to get him still. So it’ll only be twelve dollars.” She saw the color of his money. Gold. “And I’ll throw in the bed rest for free, providing all he does in it is rest.” Carter glanced up, noticing the other women had Riley halfway up the stairs. They were trying to turn him at the landing without getting his legs entangled in the railing, but the long-legged sheriff wasn’t cooperating. “I’m much obliged, ma’am,” Carter continued. “Twenty should cover his expenses. His names Riley. Sheriff Harman Riley.”

The caravan climbing the stairs suddenly turned around as if someone had yelled “retreat” and started back down.

Fat Alice huffed a quick breath of air, pulled her dress together, and took Carter’s twenty-dollar gold coin. “He can stay down here on the sofa. I run a respectable boardinghouse for mature ladies. We don’t allow no men up the stairs. Not even a sheriff.”

Carter had no idea what to do. He needed to find Smith and tell him what had happened to Riley, but he didn’t want to leave the old sheriff alone with these strange women. They reminded him of the saloon girl who’d tried to get him to go upstairs, but they were all cleaner, better fed, and older by ten years. Except for Nellie Jean, who, unfortunately, was still at his side.

“Are you a lawman?” she asked when the huge woman hurried off.

“No,” he answered.

“Good. I didn’t want to think of a prime cut like you being wasted behind a badge. You know, I’m willing to offer a deal for the right price. Think of you as part of my advertising discount.”

Carter didn’t even try to figure out what she meant. He covered Riley with a blanket he found on the back of the sofa and pulled a chair up close. “Nellie Jean,” he said slowly so she could understand him. “Would you sit with my friend until I get back? I would be grateful.”

To his surprise, Nellie seemed to understand. She plopped down in the chair and smiled. “Sure whatever you want. You will be back?”

“I promise.”

“And I’ll be your dancing partner when the music stops? I’m not near as young as Fat Alice thinks.” She wiggled her eyebrows as if he were supposed to fill in the blanks.

He saw no harm in humoring her. “Of course.”

To his shock, she winked as if he’d just signed over his soul to the devil. Carter couldn’t get out of the house fast enough.

He ran straight into the rain, wanting to wash clean of the place. He wished he could breathe in water and wash his lungs free of the odor of it. The women looked like they bathed regularly, but they smelled strange. Fat Alice had an aroma that reminded him of the peach barrel when the crop had turned bad.

The rain shifted from a whirling assault on the earth, to a steady downpour. Carter retraced his steps to the station. Bailee’s bag sat on the comer of the platform where he’d dropped it when the shooting started, but nothing else remained to tell what had happened less than an hour before.

He picked up the bag and continued his search.

A thought gnawed at the back of his mind. If a gang of robbers had wrecked the train, why had only one gunman tried to ambush them? Carter didn’t know much about battle strategy, but it made sense that if there had been two men firing at them from different angles, they would have all been shot, maybe dead.

He stared down the tracks, wishing Bailee safe. She was more than just the wife he’d won in a lottery. She mattered to him. Women are strange creatures, he thought. A man doesn’t even care if he has one until she’s missing, then he feels the loss like something’s been cut out from inside of him. Carter wanted her back with him ten times more than he ever wanted her in the first place.

With the bag in one hand he began circling the station as he’d seen the sheriffs do. He half expected to trip over the body of Smith, or maybe even the shooter.

Nothing.

When he came to the edge of the tracks, he looked north as far as the rain would allow, wishing he knew about Bailee. She made it to the train, he told himself. She had to have climbed aboard, though it couldn’t have been easy for her carrying a child in her arms. But his wife was strong. She was one of those people who did what must be done. No matter what.

Carter walked back across the tracks and headed toward town. He’d check there for Smith. As he walked, he thought of Bailee and couldn’t help but wonder if sleeping with him was one of the things that “had to be done” in her life.

He plowed through the rain, hoping he wasn’t just a duty to her, but guessing he was. She hadn’t married him because she wanted to. Marriage had been the only choice other than jail. She was trying. From the very first day, the first kiss, she had tried. Doing what she had to do. What she knew was right to do. Last night, when he’d gotten too close, she must have found out just how difficult her duty would be.

The image of her frightened, clenching her gown that he’d ripped open, flashed in his mind like lightning.

Carter’s free hand began to jerk at his side spelling out words he wanted no one to hear.

If she was safe. If she’d gotten away alive, he promised never to frighten her like that again. If it meant not touching ... never touching her ... then so be it.

Carter hit the door to the sheriff’s office at a full run. It took him three steps into the room before he was able to stop.

The sight before him drained all other thoughts from his mind.

Sheriff Smith sat atop a man almost twice his size. The old sheriff was bleeding from his left side, his few hairs stringing wet in his face, and his Colt pointed at the man’s forehead.

Smith barely glanced at Carter. “Thank God you’re here, Carter. I’m having a little trouble cuffing my new prisoner.”

The man on the floor struggled, slinging water from his buffalo-hide coat. “Get off me, old man. You’re bleeding all over me. Shoot me or holster the gun, because it’ll take more than you and this dummy’s brat to put me in this town’s jail.”

The outlaw suddenly shoved the sheriff toward Carter.

Smith yelped in pain as Carter tumbled to the floor, trying to break the old man’s fall. The sheriff’s gun fired as it hit the floor. The explosion rattled the room, but the bullet missed his prisoner.

Carter jumped for the stranger, catching him by the arm and trying to pull him back. The mountain of a man turned on Carter with the fury of a seasoned soldier fighting for his life.

Carter was tall and strong, but the stranger outweighed him by more than fifty pounds and must have cut his teeth on frontier fights. Carter took blow after blow before landing a few of his own. The battle was like some kind of tortured lesson. Carter was learning from a master, but it was costing him dearly.

The outlaw roared and shoved against Carter with his entire body weight. Both men flew through the window, rolled across the porch, and landed in the mud. Glass cut into Carter’s shoulder and sliced down one leg but there was little time to notice as the stranger pounded against first his side, then his back.

Finally, Carter raised to his knees, pooling all his energy so he could stand. A fist slammed against the side of his face sending him backward. For a moment he lay in the mud in too much pain to open his eyes.

When he finally fought through the agony and raised his head, the stranger was gone.

“
L
ITTLE MOTHER? LITTLE MOTHER. YOU WAKE UP now?”

Bailee tried to open her eyes at the sound of someone talking, but they were glued closed with fear. She rocked to the movements of the train. The air was thick with smoke and the smells of a barn. Slowly memory returned, but when she forced her eyes open, all she could see were shadows moving above her.

A wrinkled hand patted her shoulder. “You all right, Little Mother? We take good care of your child.”

Bailee pulled herself up to a sitting position and tried to see through the darkness. Pale, watery moonlight squeezed between the wood that formed the walls of the smelly freight car. A light flickered at the far end. Hazy forms huddled along the fringes, unclear, unidentified. “Piper?” she whispered, feeling as if her mouth were as full of straw as her clothing. The odor of damp hay and cow manure thickened the air.

“She is fine.” A thin man, wearing a hat almost as wide as his shoulders, answered. “Bullet only skid across her shoulder and arm. Bled a great deal, but she will live with only a scar and her memories.”

The old man helped Bailee to her feet, and they walked slowly across the car to where Piper rested in the lap of a woman layered in rags. The child’s arm was in a sling made from a multicolored scarf. White bandages replaced the top part of her dress over one shoulder and arm.

“She not say a word,” he whispered as Piper turned her pale face toward Bailee and smiled. “We use the nightgown in her little bag to make the wrap for her wounds. Even as we work, she never cry out.”

“She can’t hear or speak,” Bailee whispered as she brushed her hand over the dressing. “And she’s not my daughter; she lost her mother in a train wreck a few days ago.” Bailee knew she shouldn’t be telling the little man so much, but she had to trust him. She owed these people her life. If one of them hadn’t grabbed her from inside the car when she jumped toward the opening, she never would have made it.

The man spoke to the woman in a language Bailee couldn’t understand.

Bailee closed her fingers around Piper’s hand, wishing her words true as she told Piper they were safe now. No one would be shooting at them again, Bailee mouthed slowly.

“My wife says”—the man in the hat smiled—“the child has the gift of silence. A rare gift indeed. Think of all she must hear with the world stepping back.”

Bailee thought labeling Piper’s lack of hearing a gift was a strange way to look at it. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the other faces lined along the walls of the car. They were clustered in families, holding to one another for warmth. Fathers trying to block the rain seeping through the cracks from their wives and children. Mothers cuddling their little ones close, using their skirts to blanket them. All were dressed in an odd mixture of rags and brightly colored scarves. And jewelry, Bailee noticed. Rings, bracelets, necklaces. Beggars wearing gold.