Lake of Fire (43 page)

“I’m not sure what happened tonight,” Norman told Cord as they walked away from the dock. “There’s bad blood soiling this whole deal.”

Cord looked Norman in the eye. “The fight happened because I thought Hank was raping Laura. I still believe it.”

Norman looked as though he were gathering his
thoughts; he reached into his breast pocket for his Richmond Straight Cuts. “I think most people would find that difficult to believe of Hank.”

“You saw her blouse was torn.”

“Still, it boils down to ‘he said’ and ‘she said.’”

“And what I saw.”

“You’re not what anyone would call a disinterested observer. And you seemed a bit more interested in the situation than prudence might dictate.”

“What’s your point, Norm?” Cord asked tersely.

Bending, Norman struck a match on the heel of his shoe. Cupping the cigarette in his hands, he put the flame to it, inhaling the smoke. “I have no problem with you or who your parents were, but perhaps this is not the time or place for you to publicly fight for Laura Fielding’s hand.”

Cord winced as he involuntarily clenched his fist.

“That’s a nasty cut.” Norman checked out the bloody forearm. Then he looked toward the steamboat. “My advice to you is to leave here tonight, before Falls comes after you again.”

Sound advice, for more than one reason; he didn’t tell Norman that Captain Feddors had a place earmarked for him in the Mammoth stockade.

“What happened to you?” From the cabin doorway, Alexandra took in Hank’s bruised and swollen face, his torn shirt, and the blood he hadn’t wiped from the
decking.

It was approaching midnight. He’d mourned the loss of the Veuve Cliquot with a Napoleon cognac. His broken nose still swelling, it throbbed unmercifully even after he’d drunk the liquor.

“I had a fight,” he said.

“I see that.” Alexandra tossed her cape onto the damask sofa. Advancing into the opulent room she had decorated, she set one of the bronze incense lamps swinging with a flick of her finger. Coming to the bed, she peered at Hank’s wounded face. “Did you go after Danny?”

“You mean, did your brother go after me?”

“Danny is your brother, too. Is he all right?”

“How should I know?” He stretched for his glass of cognac on the bedside table. It was empty. “I was fighting Cord Sutton.”

Alex slumped down on the satin covers piled at the foot of the bed. “Don’t you know how much Danny would give for just one moment of your precious time?”

“I went looking for you both this morning at that old cabin. That would have been a moment of my time, enough to settle the score.”

“Not to fight each other,” Alex pleaded. “For an hour when you would share a meal with him without thinking he’s some kind of monster.”

“He is a monster, a thieving, conniving cheat. He’s been here in the park, not to visit you, as you seem to think, but hatching a plot to destroy my hopes of
owning the Lake Hotel.”

Alex’s back straightened. “All right. He hates you. Because you’ve been against him forever.”

The pain in Hank’s face grew worse. “It’s not just me he hates. He hates everything and everyone who’s decent.” He shouldn’t go on, but … “I’ve reason to believe he murdered a woman who ran him off a job for stealing …”

Alex’s pupils dilated.

“And I’ve learned he attacked the stagecoach down in Jackson’s Hole last week.”

“That’s not possible.” She sprang up, her hands over her heart.

“He was identified.”

“He would never …” Her beautiful face turned ugly. “Danny’s right. He’s been right all along. You’d say anything to turn me against him.”

She was so young; Hank tried to protect her. She might cross Danny in some innocent blundering way and end up like Garnet Houlihan.

“You tell
your
brother …” his voice was flat, “if he comes near you again, I’ll kill him.”

Almost midnight and the musicians had packed away their instruments. The sounds of guests walking the hotel porch and talking on the lawn had died away. Hank was still aboard his boat, unless he’d swum away; Cord had seen no sign of him from his hideout.
From the shadows, he’d watched Captain Feddors lock the front door of the soldier station and retire to the sleeping barracks.

With the wound in his arm burning, he mounted the short stairs to the hotel’s rear porch. Across the boards and inside the darkened lobby, he walked quietly but with purpose, so as not to look suspicious to the night clerk. A glance assured him the young man was absorbed in his dime novel.

Three flights and Cord was in the hall, looking up at the light square of the transom over a room in the Absaroka Suite.

His hand went automatically to his pants pocket where his obsidian usually rested. It wasn’t there.

His heartbeat accelerated, for in the last few days he’d come to believe it was far more than a lucky piece. Rather, it was a talisman, some piece of the planet that Cord Sutton was meant to shelter while it guarded him in turn.

A quick mental inventory said he’d not seen it in his room this afternoon when he packed.

With a creeping dread, he thought what an awful day it had been. Had he brought on this chain of events by misplacing the symbol of his guardian spirit?

Cord almost turned away and went down the stairs, but he’d come for answers. He’d almost been ready to believe Laura’s story about coming to the meeting with Hank because her injured father asked it.

He stepped up to the only room with a light burning, took the faceted doorknob in his hand, and made a
mental inventory. According to the hotel plans, there were three bedrooms in the suite. Forrest was in the infirmary, so Cord was either about to try Laura’s door or the one Constance shared with her mother. The knob turned smoothly.

Inside, Laura stood naked beside the china washbasin, scrubbing herself with a washrag.

Cord closed the door behind him and leaned against it. “Could we finish our conversation?” His voice was hard.

She turned to him with a disbelieving expression and flung the wet cloth at him, hitting him squarely in the face. “That’s my answer to your thinking I was on Hank’s side.”

Retrieving the rag with the arm Hank had stabbed, Cord winced. Despite that, he pitched the rag accurately back into the white china bowl.

“If you’re not on his side, how did you manage to end up in his bed? Sure, you screamed when things got too rough, but he could scarcely have dragged you to his pleasure nook.”

Her glare said she wished she had another cloth to throw. Instead, she reached for a rose silk wrapper and knotted it firmly around her. “How dare you? You checked out of the hotel, and I had every reason to believe you’d left without saying good-bye.”

“So you went straight to him.”

“Yes, I went on-board Hank’s boat with him, but I was trying to get some answers, not to … not to …”

Cord’s knife wound had begun to bleed again.
The sight of it made him queasy, the way he felt when he recalled the sight of Laura’s hair spread over Hank’s fancy pillow.

“If I thought Captain Feddors would believe me and not Hank, I’d try to get him brought up on charges for attacking me,” Laura despaired.

Blood splattered the shining wood floor. Cord collapsed on the bed. This was wrong, baiting her when he should have known from the fright in her screams that she didn’t want Hank.

“I’m sorry,” he managed. “Little dizzy.”

Gray spots started at the edge of his vision.

Laura’s fingers trembled while she unbuttoned Cord’s soiled white shirt and slipped her hands inside. Gently she pushed the cotton off his shoulders, catching a whiff of the sweat he’d worked up during the fight.

“I’m sorry, too,” she murmured. “I was terrified when you and Hank started slashing at each other.”

When she tried to slip the sleeve from Cord’s arm, she found the shirt plastered to the wound. Going to the bureau, she found the manicure scissors Aunt Fanny had loaned her and cut away the material.

Fresh blood mingled with a blackening crust, the deep puncture already growing dark around the edges. Carefully, she washed the cut with lavender soap and poured from a bottle of White Heliotrope perfume.

The sting of the alcohol seemed to revive Cord. He
shook his head as though to clear it. “I … shouldn’t,” he muttered, “have doubted you.”

Tearing one of Constance’s petticoats to make a clean bandage, Laura tied it on carefully. Then she pushed at his shoulders for him to lie back on the bed.

A few steps to the door and she turned off the overhead light, plunging the room into darkness relieved only by a faint glow from the night sky. Sitting beside Cord, she lit a candle on the night table.

Then she climbed onto the bed, slid her hands into his hair, and massaged his temples with soft circular motions. Of course, he was angry and suspicious. She would be, too.

She wanted to ask why he’d checked out and then stayed around, but she could do that later. For now, she continued to stroke his head.

From the window, she could see Hank’s steamboat at anchor beside the dock, starlight glinting on the golden flames that topped the stacks. How vile and ugly Hank had turned out to be, not the opposite of his outlaw brother, but a mirror image.

She looked down and found Cord watching her with renewed alertness.

A
woman’s scream ripped the fabric of Laura’s sleep.

Opening her eyes, she found a red glow suffusing the ceiling of her hotel room, and she smelled smoke. Her heart surged, but she forced herself not to move until she knew whether it was safe to get up or if she needed to crawl.

A look around revealed the candle beside the bed had nearly burned down; its faint glow did not begin to compete with the fire she realized was not in her room.

“Cord?” she asked of the rumpled bed beside her.

She patted his empty place. A look around the room, which was getting brighter all the time, showed that sometime after they’d made love, he’d put his clothes back on and left.

Getting up naked, she went to the window and parted the curtains.

On the slope between the hotel and the lake, guests who had worn silks and tuxedos for dinner emerged from the building. Women’s hair tumbled loose from their pins, and they clutched their shawls over batiste gowns. A heavyset man worked at tucking his nightshirt into his trousers.

Beyond the Grand Loop Road, flames from Hank’s steamboat leaped into the night.

From next door, Laura heard Constance’s voice, “I’m going …” and Aunt Fanny’s reply, “We’ll stay here where it’s safe.”

Laura opened the wardrobe and put on the first thing that came to hand, the water-spotted emerald silk. On with the black slippers, and she took no time to comb her hair. Moments later, she ran across the lobby, still buttoning the front of the dress.

As she went out the door, an explosion aboard the steamboat caused fire to bellow out in a flaring arc. The flames caught a uniformed soldier in the bucket brigade.

He staggered back, arms flailing. His shirt blazed in the brisk wind.

Two other men, silhouettes against the fiery night, grabbed the burning man. They tried to slap out the flames, but as he began to scream, they shoved him off the dock. One leaped into the lake after him.