Lake of Fire (31 page)

“Look there.” Cord tapped her shoulder and pointed out a hawk tracing lazy circles. As they watched, the bird flew into the gossamer veil and disappeared into a curve of indigo light.

Hank studied her and Cord narrowly from across the observation area. His suit had dust on it from
where he’d been leaning against the split-log rail. “Too bad Constance and Hagen decided the trail was too steep.”

“Yes,” Laura’s father answered, so faintly he was difficult to hear over the falls’ roar. He’d planted his bulk on a boulder with a view, and his breathing was shallow and rapid. “I’m going to have a devil of a time getting back up.”

Laura tried to push aside an instinctive daughter’s worry and looked into the rush tumbling over the edge. A large log reached the drop and turned end up to plummet toward the canyon floor. She reeled with a bit of vertigo and leaned against Cord.

“It’s time we moved on.” Hank took the lead onto the upward leg of the switchback path through the trees.

Laura went to her father. His color was bad, and he sweated in the cooling mist.

“Are you all right, sir?” A furrow appeared between Cord’s thick brows.

Forrest got heavily to his feet, brushing aside his offer of a hand. “I’ll have to be.”

He tried to move faster, but his smooth-soled leather shoe slipped on a root and he nearly landed in a patch of loose obsidian gravel. Falling behind, Forrest reached with a trembling hand to steady himself on the rough bark of one of hundreds of lodgepole pines studding the slope.

“Laura,” he called, astounded at how weakly it came out. He could have sworn he nearly shouted, but the sound seemed swallowed up as if his head were swathed in cotton.

She did not turn. Sutton’s dark head was bent toward hers.

Forrest looked for Burke Evans, but the young man seemed to have abandoned them.

He bent forward and pushed himself harder up the trail. It hadn’t seemed this far on the way down. Though sweat beaded his forehead, the heat of exertion gave way to a coldness that seemed to come from deep inside.

His doctor in Chicago had warned him. No smoking, and Forrest had chuckled at the strange notion. Get more rest, but the doctor didn’t understand that in the years since Violet died, work was the only thing that kept him going.

Up ahead, Laura and Cord made the sharp turn of a switchback and she looked back, her green eyes concerned. “Daddy!” She sounded far away.

He put another foot heavily in front of the other and stopped, stunned by a sudden feeling that something slammed into him and then trapped his whole body in a vise. He didn’t know how it could be, but he found himself lying on the ground with his face in the dirt.

The rough earth didn’t seem to matter; he just needed to lie there until he could catch his breath in this air too thick to draw into his lungs.

A hand took his shoulder and turned him over.

Sutton’s blue eyes made nearly a match for the sky bowl above. Forrest looked for Laura in the blurred vestiges of his vision and opened his mouth to tell her of the impossible pressure that bore down and down until he felt he would be pushed into the grave.

Strangely, he thought he heard his wife’s voice.

“Did you hear something?” Constance asked Norman. She clutched the side of the touring wagon, her hair swinging over her shoulder, as she looked around the clearing. The sound had been high-pitched, echoing for a fraction of a second before being swallowed by the wind.

Norman scanned the head of the path that led down to the Lower Falls. “I did think for a moment …” He shrugged.

She compared the big Swede to William, about the same height but built more solidly, his blond hair, red beard, and ruddy cheeks the antithesis of William’s bronzed skin and dark hair.

How dare William show her such lack of respect? This morning when he and Laura had come out from their little hiding place around the corner, the signs had been clear. Both of them had borne the high color and nervous look of someone caught out.

Since she’d met Norman, he’d treated her with the utmost deference, as if she were a china doll.

Now the skin around his eyes crinkled. “You’d turn the heads in my boyhood home of Uppsala, with your hair like black silk.”

Flushing at the potential mention of meeting his family, Constance looked away at the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone, at least a mile upstream, cascading into the opening at the head of the Grand Canyon. A cloud of spray swelled above the green forest.

“It’s hot in the sun,” she observed, careful to keep her voice sweet.

“Let’s move into the shade, then.” Norman pivoted on his heel and reached up to the wagon seat. He lifted Constance free and swung her into the air.

Along with the sudden sensation of weightlessness, she noticed the golden flecks that floated in Norman’s eyes, just at the inner ring of the iris. A sheen of moisture stood on his sunburned forehead, and Constance caught the scent of clean male sweat.

“Oh God!”

Norman’s hands seemed to freeze in midair, holding her, as a woman’s voice cried out again. Swiftly, he let Constance down onto the rough-packed road beside the wagon. She stumbled as he took his hands from her waist.

Laura emerged from the trees with her hair falling over her shoulders and fresh tears flowing from already-red eyes. Behind her came Hank Falls, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder. Farther back, and looking bone tired from the struggle, William carried Uncle Forrest, a dead weight slung over his powerful shoulder.

Constance’s fist covered her mouth, but she still screamed.

Laura clutched the cramp in her side and tried to catch her breath, while Cord took her father to the wagon and lowered him to the floor between the seats. Huffing, for carrying corpulent Forrest Fielding was no mean feat, he straightened and wiped his brow.

A red stain, bright as paint, saturated the back of Cord’s shirt.

“Cord, my God. There’s blood all over …”

“I know.”

“I thought his heart …”

“No.”

“But I didn’t hear …”

“I didn’t hear the shot, either.”

The forest hugging the canyon rim could easily hide a marksman.

Norman stepped up to the wagon on the other side and bent to examine Forrest. Constance followed and stood at his side, blue eyes wide.

“Perhaps a poacher,” Norman suggested.

Cord made an impatient gesture. “No poacher worth his salt would work this close to a tourist area. As we heard nothing, he must have been shot from downwind.”

“You’re saying someone shot Uncle Forrest on purpose?” Constance cried.

“Who, pray tell?” Hank’s cold gaze fell upon Cord. “Perhaps I should ask you to empty your pockets to find out if you pistol-shot Forrest at close range.”

Laura saw the danger in Cord’s profile as his clenched muscles turned his scar white. She moved between the two men. “For God’s sake, we haven’t time for you to fight.”

She shoved past Cord and saw her father looked ashen. Cord was beside her in an instant, tearing open Forrest’s coat to reveal bright blood drenching a white shirt from left shoulder to waist.

Behind her, she heard Hank’s sharp inhalation. Was he wondering what would happen to his backing? For how could her father survive with his heart pumping away his blood?

Cord ripped Forrest’s shirt, popping off buttons, to reveal a neat hole welling blood. It appeared to be above and to the left of his heart, but only just.

“I’m going to lift him, Hank. Can you run your hand under his back and see if there’s an exit wound?”

Dimly, she heard Hank. “Let someone else.” He remained at a little distance, looking as colorless as his coat.

“I’ve got a good angle to reach under,” Norman said from the opposite side of the wagon. “Pick him up now, Cord.”

Constance covered her face with her hands.

“Ready, then.”

Cord lifted.

Norman’s hand disappeared under Forrest’s back.

Laura dreaded what he might feel, the sticky slickness of more blood, the ragged edges of a larger exit wound.

“It’s dry.”

Her shoulders sagged as her father’s were lowered back to the dusty wagon floor. Cord pulled a folded navy bandana from his pocket and pressed it over the bullet hole, bearing down with the heel of his hand. “I’ll hold pressure.”

Norman scanned the forest along the canyon rim. “It would be good to be away from here in case someone is lurking about, but we seem to be lacking a driver.”

“Press-gang one from another tour.” Cord looked up the dirt road about fifty yards where another wagon was stopped. Though the tourists appeared to be away, two drivers in dusters stood together smoking and talking.

Cord waved and shouted.

“I can drive while you hold on the wound,” Norman offered.

But, as soon as he spoke, one man broke away and came running toward them.

Burke Evans looked ashamed for having deserted his guests, but Laura suspected it had happened before. “I’m sorry, folks, I thought you’d want plenty of time to enjoy …”

He stopped and stared at Cord’s stained shirt, then past him to Forrest lying limp in the wagon. “Gad!”

“Let’s get him to the Canyon Hotel,” Norman ordered. “There’s bound to be a surgeon there.”

“Possibly a doctor is on call, sir, but that’s not a good bet,” Burke Evans reported. “I’ll have you to the Lake Infirmary at top speed.”

Laura’s eyes met Cord’s, and she saw in his her own belief … that her father might not survive the ride.

D
r. Upshur, a nondescript, brown-haired man in his thirties wearing a white coat spotted with what Cord believed was Forrest’s blood, faced the crowd that was waiting for news.

The doctor’s gaze roved over the group from the wagon: Constance and Norman, Hank, Cord, Laura, and a goggle-eyed Burke Evans. In addition, because the wagon had arrived behind lathered horses proceeding at a gallop, Fanny, Lieutenant Stafford, Sergeant Nevers, Manfred Resnick, and even Hank’s elusive sister, Alexandra, had come to see what was wrong.

“Mr. Fielding is in grave danger, and I know you are all interested in his condition,” Dr. Upshur said, “but there are other sick people here, and I cannot have them disturbed.” He considered. “His daughter may stay … the rest of you must wait elsewhere.”

Cord opened his mouth to protest that he was going to remain with Laura, but closed it. If Forrest’s
sister and niece were willing to accept the verdict, then he must, as well.

Lieutenant Stafford stepped forward. “With your permission, doctor, I’m going to place an armed guard on duty. As we don’t know who shot Mr. Fielding or why, we cannot be sure they will not be back to finish the job.”

Hank glowered at Cord. “As the only man with a motive, want to show us you’re not carrying a pistol?”

Stafford looked pained. “Let’s all get out of the hospital as the doctor ordered.”

Everyone, except Sergeant Nevers on guard duty, and Laura, left, moving with reluctance the way a crowd will when told to disperse from a wagon accident.

Cord hoped Hank would be ignored, especially as Captain Feddors was not around, but as soon as they were out of earshot of the hospital’s front door, Stafford paused.