Lake of Fire (26 page)

Hank nearly retched up his mother’s midday dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes. “Danny,” he gasped.

Big, burly Jonathan grabbed Frank Worth and dragged him up. “How dare you?”

Jonathan swung his fist and connected.

In the same instant, Danny launched at his back. “Leave him alone,” he shouted in a high thin voice. “It was my idea! To take the money and get out. You’ve never wanted another man’s kids. Frank and I are going to the gold mines.”

Jonathan ordered both the hired man and his stepson off his farm and out of his family’s lives.

Hank didn’t tell Alex the rest.

A year later, at seventeen, he’d traveled to the mining districts in search of his brother. And heard he might be working in Garnet Houlihan’s Ketchum, Idaho, brothel.

The rough building was made of new, sawn yellow pine. A heavyset woman held open the front door. “What’s your pleasure, son?”

“No, I …” Hank stopped on the threshold. The smell of resin was overpowered by a miasma of unwashed bodies, cheap cologne, and the musky aroma
of sex.

“Garnet,” the woman called. “This boy needs breaking in.”

Hank stared at the legs of cots that showed beneath woolen army blankets forming flimsy partitions. Feminine laughter cascaded over the top of one curtain.

A hard-looking woman in her thirties came out of a small office near the entry. She wore a faded rust velvet gown with dirty lace at the neck, her hair an improbable shade of burgundy.

As she surveyed him with knowing tawny eyes, the sound of a man grunting behind a blanket brought Hank’s sex to sudden shameful attention.

Trailing a hand down his cheek and chest to brush the front of his trousers, Garnet said amiably, “I believe I’ll do the honors meself.”

Grabbing his hand, she led him down the narrow aisle to an alcove at the end. A window looked out onto the muddy morass of road beside the Salmon River. Great piles of rock, sifted by miners, lined the once-pristine riverbank. The hills were covered with stumps where trees had been cut to construct buildings and sluices. Men shoveled river sand and gravel into long troughs to check for the flash of color in their pans.

“Ye’ve struck gold today, me boy,” Garnet announced. Sitting in front of Hank on the narrow cot, she opened the front of her bodice. “You can touch ‘em.”

Despite his aroused state, feeling the fleshy, blue-veined globes was the last thing Hank wanted. But he reached forward woodenly and felt their flaccid
softness.

Garnet reached for the buttons on the front of Hank’s trousers.

Yet, even as she raised her skirt and tried to draw him down onto the cot, he recalled his mission. “I’m not here for … I’m looking for my brother, Danny.”

“Ye don’t know a good thing when you’ve got it, boy.” Garnet pushed Hank away. “Danny worked here a while, tending bar. I found out he had his hand in the till, and I run him off, I did.”

Hank ran down the long aisle that led to the muddy street.

When he heard, a week later, that Garnet had been brutally slain, he couldn’t help but suspect his brother. Within the month, a traveling salesman came by the farm and reported someone had seen a palomino tied to the brothel’s rail the day Garnet died.

In his elegant cabin aboard the
Alexandra
, Hank clamped down hard with his teeth to keep from being sick.

“Stay away from Danny, Alex.”

Between episodes of futile pounding at Edgar Young’s door, Cord spent time walking along the lakeshore. The water smells and the scent of heated pine in the afternoon sun made him aware once again that the major draw of buying the Lake Hotel was the wilderness that surrounded it. Sure, he loved Salt Lake City, but in
Yellowstone, as at his ranch, he thrilled to the savory blend of sage and cottonwood, of earth and evergreen.

His gaze skimmed the Absarokas east of the lake, and he noted the telltale plume of wildfire burning through the backcountry. What a mix of contradiction drove this country outpost; fire on the mountain, azure water below. Plain soldiers labored at tack by day and donned dress uniform by evening to dance with the ladies beneath tulip lights. All the while, out among Wylie’s tent campers, Cord’s own uncle plied the trade of “Injun storyteller.”

His cheeks grew hot, and his breath labored with mingled shame and pride. Laura had offered to go with him to see Bitter Waters and to help him speak with the man who shared his blood. But how could he allow her when seeing his uncle in native costume before a tipi would reinforce their different heritages forever?

A passing cloud obscured the sun and darkened the lake’s brightness. When Edgar had approached him about buying the Lake Hotel, Cord had had the egotistical effrontery to think the man believed he owned Excalibur outright, that he didn’t know Cord’s heritage had decreed the encumbrance of his stolid adopted brother’s name on the title. At the time, Cord had been too pleased at his good fortune to examine Edgar closely.

But at some level, he’d known since his arrival that there was something not quite right about the banker’s manner, a certain quality of evasiveness, along with his
unexplained absences. Even so, he would never have suspected mild-mannered Edgar of consorting with a murdering outlaw.

As far as Cord knew, neither Edgar nor Danny had seen him and Laura sneak up and listen to their conversation in the cabin. Yet, the two men had gotten away clean. Coincidence, or had Cord and Laura been seen?

He hadn’t told Laura exactly what Danny had said. That remark about “holding off cleaning up loose ends” might explain why Danny hadn’t killed him or Laura on the trail. Or later.

But if Cord “had served his purpose,” he … and Laura … might now be targets.

L
aura pulled on a pair of Constance’s lace-trimmed muslin drawers and sat on the edge of the bed, ignoring the flounced underskirt. From outside her window came the sounds of merriment as coach and wagon tours returned for dinner.

Her thoughts turned to Hank, for no matter his denial of a family relationship with the outlaw, she trusted her eyes. The two men had to be not only blood kin; they were virtually identical except in grooming and manner.

Had it shocked Hank to learn his brother had gone bad? Or did he already know? The pain she’d seen in his expression made her suspect he did. And if they were twins and not just brothers close in age, how especially awful it must be.

Unless Hank were a smoother version of Danny.

At this disturbing thought, she realized that sometime in the last few days she’d gone over to Cord’s side.
From his first grudging admission of his parents dying when he was young, to this afternoon’s revelation that his grandmother was Nez Perce … and had died for it, she’d been touched. He was, as Constance had said, more alive than most people.

Laura pushed off the bed, donned the underskirt, and was studying upon which dress to wear when her cousin came in, as though summoned by Laura’s thinking of her. She wore a smart crimson velvet number with a nipped-in waist, and her intent air said she was up to something.

Laura kept her eyes on the bureau mirror and dressed her hair.

“What have you been amusing yourself with this afternoon, while Mother and I were sewing in the lobby parlor?” Constance ran a finger along the lace scarf beneath the mirror.

Laura set Aunt Fanny’s hairbrush on the wooden dresser with a clack. “First, you know I went to the paddock to go riding with Sergeant Nevers. Then, while walking in the forest near the shore, I saw the outlaw who robbed the stagecoach.” She expected surprise, but Constance’s blue stare was impassive.

“We called for help, and though the soldiers gave chase, he got away.”

“We?”

Laura reached for the brush again.

“Quite more eventful than embroidery, I should say.” Constance put her small hands on her hips. “I had hoped for more than to be left for the day with
my mother, especially as I wear William Sutton’s betrothal ring.”

Doubt and envy stabbed at Laura as it had in the stable. Cord might be playing them both false, as he had been hiding his family secrets. But something tremulous in her cousin’s tone gave her pause.

“Tell me, then,” Laura challenged. Though it was like biting an aching tooth, she had to know. “What was it like when Cord asked you to be his wife?”

“Wha … what do you mean?”

Laura advanced on her. “I mean when and where. Were you on the terrace in St. Paul, or the rose garden, lost in a half moon’s magic, when he popped the question? How did he say it?” She dipped as though to go down on one knee. “Did he say, ‘Marry me, Connie? I cannot imagine a life without you’?”

Constance glowered.

Laura gripped the silver handle of the brush. “I mean did Cord ever really ask you to marry him
in so many words?”

Crossing her arms over her chest, Laura focused on her cousin, who met her stare for stare.

She waited.

“All right, he never asked me!”

Laura gasped. If that were true, why hadn’t Cord denied they were betrothed?

Constance rushed to fill the silence. “He invited me out West to see his land and to bring Mother, so I believed …” Her chin began to quiver. “Why do you call William ‘Cord’ in that crass way?”

“Perhaps if you knew him better, you’d realize it suits him.”

“And you, of course, know him intimately. Since you spent three nights on the trail with him!” Constance’s expression was both triumphant and ugly.

Laura’s face got hot. “How … ?”

“Mother and I were much enlightened by your conversation with Mr. Resnick and … William on the porch outside the window where we were sewing.”

It was her own fault. No one had forced her to speak up for Cord.

“Eavesdroppers are the lowest of the low,” she countered.

“How about liars? How about that kindly couple from Montana that brought you to Yellowstone?”

“How about your lying to everyone who’ll listen about Cord asking you to marry him?”

Constance’s hands-on-hips formed into fists. “I’m not the one in trouble here. Mother went straight to Father to tell him about you being with a man those nights. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t call your ‘Cord’ out.”

“My Cord? I thought you cared for him. How could seeing him called out make you happy?”

Pansy-blue eyes brimmed with tears, and Constance rushed from the room, slamming the door.

Laura entered the lobby, dressed in her best hand-me-down from Constance. The emerald watered silk
brought out the green in her eyes, and the puffed peplum at the rear emphasized her waist. In spite of her confidence in her appearance, her chest clutched at what must be coming since her secret was out. All she could do was hold her head high and hope the dressing-down she expected from her father would not be a public one.

The first person she encountered was Constance, who stood alone near the fireplace in her crimson velvet. With sad eyes, she poised with a hand at her throat in a dramatic gesture. Any man seeing her would no doubt be passionately disposed to take on the task of bringing a smile to her tragic countenance.

She broke character enough to give Laura a dirty look.

Going over to Constance and putting a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, Aunt Fanny fixed Laura with a chill regard that said she’d taken her breach of truth about the people from Montana badly.

How would she feel if she knew how deep her daughter’s deception was?

“There you are.” Hank spoke from behind Laura.

She turned and he bowed, his company manners making her almost wonder if the scene on the
Alexandra
with Manfred Resnick had really taken place. At any rate, the closed expression on his hawklike face did not invite her to dredge it up.

From the east hall, Cord made an entrance. His black suit was freshly pressed; his newly shortened hair waved over his brow. In spite of his neat appearance,
he bore a scowl that made an arriving male guest step out of his way.

Constance’s wilting violet act went into high gear, and she sent Cord a come-hither message. When he did not even look her way, another daggerlike glare shot toward Laura.