McKettrick's Choice (7 page)

L
ORELEI WATCHED
from her bedroom window as the judge climbed into the buggy Raul had hitched up for him, the way he did every weekday morning and most Saturdays, took up the reins and set out for the main part of town. He would not return home until late in the day, as he had court cases to hear.

Once he'd rounded the corner onto the road that ran alongside the river curling through town, she sprang into action.

Kneeling, she pulled out the valise she'd packed the night before from under the bed. A rap at her door startled her so that she nearly choked on an indrawn breath, but she recovered quickly. “Angelina?”

The door opened, and the housekeeper stood on the threshold. Her eyes traveled to the valise, while Lorelei scrambled to her feet.

“You are really going to do this,” Angelina marveled.

“Yes,” Lorelei said firmly.

“Mr. Sexton, from the bank, will be waiting on the
courthouse steps to tell the judge what you're planning. And he will put a stop to it.”

Lorelei hoisted the valise in one hand, reflecting upon her interview with Mr. Sexton the afternoon before. She'd gone directly to the bank, after her visit to the property, and he'd been pleased to see her—until she'd made it clear that she had no intention of signing her inheritance over to Mr. Templeton.

“I would like to see my account,” Lorelei had said, standing her ground.

“The judge has strictly forbidden—”

“I don't care what the judge has forbidden,” she'd interrupted.

Sexton had sighed, rummaged until he found the proper ledger and licked a fingertip before flipping through the pages.

“You have two thousand, seven-hundred and twenty-two dollars and seventy-eight cents,” he'd said, with the utmost reluctance.

Lorelei, peering over his shoulder, had already deduced that. She'd blinked at the sum, then her gaze had shifted to the debit column. Judging by the long list of tidy figures, her father had made regular withdrawals over the past ten years.

“I'm afraid I must insist that Judge Fellows's wishes be respected,” Sexton had said, closing the book. His jowls were flushed, his eyes skittish.

Lorelei had insisted that the funds be moved to another account, and when Sexton balked, she threatened to fetch the constable. At last, he'd relented, but with the greatest reluctance.

She'd narrowed her eyes at him as she prepared to leave the bank with a purseful of cash and move on to the mercantile. “If you run to my father,” she'd warned,
“I'll move every cent to another bank and have you audited.”

Now, facing Angelina as she was about to leave her bedroom and the house as well, perhaps for the very last time, Lorelei, having recounted the conversation to the older woman, shook her head. “He wouldn't dare go to my father,” she said.

“Mr. Sexton is afraid of the judge, like almost everyone else in San Antonio,” Angelina maintained, a bit frantically, but she stepped aside to let Lorelei pass into the corridor. “If you had any sense at all, you would be, too.”

“It's my land, and my money,” Lorelei maintained, starting down the rear stairway. “Are you and Raul coming with me or not?”

Angelina crossed herself, but she nodded. “My cousin Rosa is coming to look after the judge,” she said. “Still—”

Lorelei opened the back door and peered toward the carriage house. “Where is Raul?” she fretted. “Mr. Wilkins promised to deliver my order by noon. We have to be there to meet the wagons.”

Mr. Wilkins, as it happened, was not among the judge's many admirers. He'd been a vocal supporter of the other candidate during the last election and had written several letters to the editor of the local newspaper complaining about the decisions Judge Fellows had handed down. The merchant had been suspicious at first, then pleased to keep quiet about the wagonload of provisions and supplies Lorelei had purchased and paid for on the spot.

Raul came out of the carriage house, driving the buckboard. Even from a distance, his lack of enthusiasm was readily apparent.

Lorelei felt a pang. Her father was a difficult man, but
he was aging and perhaps even ill. He could get along without her just fine, but losing Angelina and Raul would be a blow.

“If you want to stay here and look after Father,” she said, “I'll understand.”

Angelina dragged a valise of her own from its hiding place in the pantry. “And let you go off alone, to live in the wilderness, with wolves and savages and outlaws and the
Madre
only knows what else? No. Rosa and her Miguel will take our places.”

“I promise you will not regret this,” Lorelei said, well aware that the statement was a rash one. Once the judge realized she'd not only taken her funds out of his keeping but helped herself to his housekeeper and handyman, he would be enraged.

Angelina looked doubtful but resolved. “I think I already regret it,” she said. Raul came to the door, looking woebegone, and claimed both the valises. “By all the saints and angels, when your father learns of this, the ground will shake.”

As if to lend credence to Angelina's words, thunder clapped in the near distance. The horses nickered and tossed their heads, and Lorelei looked up at the sky as she descended the back steps. Fast-moving gray clouds were gathering over San Antonio, churning with mayhem.

Angelina looked up as well and opened her mouth to speak, but at the look Lorelei gave her, she held her tongue.

Raul helped his wife onto the wagon seat, then Lorelei, before climbing up to take the reins.

“Cheer up,” Lorelei said. “This is a new beginning.”

Five minutes later, the rain began.

 

M
ELINA STARED
mutely at the gallows, a raw wood structure, half-finished, shimmering in the heavy rain. She
was soaked to the skin, as was Holt himself, and the Captain, but she seemed oblivious to everything but the mechanism where Gabe was slated to hang.

She'd ridden behind Holt all the way down from Waco and refused to stop at the Cavanagh place to rest, put on dry clothes and wait for the rain to let up. Watching her now, Holt wished he'd taken her there anyway.

She shivered in the downpour, hair dangling in wet strands down the sides of her face, looking bedraggled and small in Holt's coat.

Still mounted, the Captain lifted the collar of his canvas duster. “Warm as bathwater,” he said of the rain, his voice pitched low. “Just the same, we'd best get that woman someplace dry.”

Holt swung a leg over the Appaloosa's neck and jumped to the ground. He said her name quietly, reached out to lay a hand on her slight shoulder.

She shrugged him off. “I want to see Gabe,” she said. “Right now.”

“There he is,” the Captain said. “That window, yonder.”

Both Holt and Melina looked up. Sure enough, Gabe was gazing down at them, his face like chiseled stone, his hands grasping the bars.

Melina took a step toward him, staggered a little.

Reaching out, Holt caught hold of her arm.

“Where is the way in?” Melina wanted to know.

“Tomorrow,” Holt reasoned.

She shook her head, and water flew from the thick tendrils of hair. “Now,” she said, laying both hands on her belly.

“Might as well show her inside,” the Captain said. “If you don't, we'll be at this all day.”

The old man was right. Melina was already prowling
back and forth like a caged cat, and she looked as though she'd climb the drain pipe if that was what she had to do to get to Gabe.

Holt took her arm, and this time he didn't let her pull away. Gabe stared down from his cell, looking as if he might chew his way past those bars and jump two stories to the ground. “This way,” Holt said.

“I'll tend to the horses and then join you,” the Captain said, leaning from the saddle to catch hold of the Appaloosa's reins. “After that, I'd accept a drink if you're offering one.”

Holt merely nodded.

The Captain set out on his errand, and Holt squired Melina into the courthouse and up the stairs to the jail.

“No women allowed,” announced old Roy, sitting in a corner next to the window, watching the rain and whittling.

Holt ignored him. Took the keys down off the hook next to the inside door.

“Wait just a minute,” Roy protested. “Didn't you hear what I said?”

“I heard,” Holt replied, working the lock and then putting the keys back in their place. “I just don't give a damn.”

Melina streaked through the opening, and Holt followed.

“I could send for the marshal!” Roy called after them.

“He's just downstairs, testifying in Judge Fellows's courtroom.”

“You do that,” Holt replied, quickening his pace to catch up with Melina.

She strode past the other cells as if she knew exactly where Gabe was—and maybe she did.

Gabe was waiting at the front of his cell. “I told
you I wanted her to stay in Waco!” he hissed, glaring at Holt.

“Maybe you should have told
her,
” Holt retorted.

“Why didn't you send word, Gabe?” Melina asked, getting as close to the bars as she could with that stomach of hers. Holt could still feel it pressing against his back, during the long ride from Waco. “I
did
send word,” Gabe answered. His voice was harsh, but his eyes consumed Melina, and he reached through the bars to lay a hand to her cheek. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Melina, you shouldn't have come here.”

“How could I stay away?” she demanded, covering his hand with her own.

“I'll see if the Cap'n's back from the livery stable,” Holt said, turning to go.

Gabe drew in a sharp breath. “The Cap'n? He's with you?”

“I ran into him in Waco. He's getting the horses some water and feed. He'll be in for a word once you and Melina are through talking.”

Gabe nodded. “Did you ask him about Frank? Has the Cap'n seen him, or heard anything?”

Holt had broached the subject to Walton on the way out to the Parkinson place. Now, he shook his head. “He's got no more idea where Corrales is than we do.”

A ruckus started up out in the front office, and Holt figured the Captain had completed the horse business. He backtracked with some haste, for fear Walton would lose patience with old Roy and get them all thrown in jail.

Sure enough, the Captain had the other man by the shirt collar, slammed up against the wall. Roy's eyes were bugging out and he was sputtering, his wind cut off by Captain Jack's grip.

“Let him go,” Holt said, without particular urgency.

“You left that star behind in Waco, remember?”

With a flourish, the Captain released the jailer and watched with interest as he struggled for breath.

“We got rules around here!” Roy wailed. “And you can't just go around chokin' folks!”

“The hell I can't,” the Captain said. “You got any whiskey in this place?”

T
HE FREIGHT WAGON
had already arrived when Lorelei, Angelina and Raul got to the ranch, and it was stuck up to its axels in mud. Raul drew the buckboard up alongside and leaped down.

“I put the load inside that old house there!” the driver shouted, in an effort to be heard over the torrent. “Help me unhitch this team.”

Raul nodded, and Angelina and Lorelei climbed down on their own. Lorelei would have stayed with the men, but Angelina took her arm and dragged her out of the rain.

“It's an omen,” the older woman said, with conviction, when they stood under the relative shelter of the leaking roof.

Lorelei bent to open the rusted door of the woodstove, and it creaked on its hinges. “Is that a mouse's nest?” she asked, peering inside.

“Madre de Dios,”
said Angelina.

Lorelei shut the stove and turned to survey the piles of provisions, mostly in crates stacked helter-skelter around the room. She picked up a shiny new ax and tested its heft, then set it carefully in a corner. “We won't need a
fire, anyway. It's hot as the far corner of Hades, even with this rain.”

Angelina went to the door, probably watching for Raul.

Lorelei bent over the tent pole, thinking it was the size of a ship's mast, and wondered if the canvas could be unwrapped and draped over the roof. Then she picked through the crates until she found the shiny new coffeepot. It was good-sized, for she expected to entertain as soon as she was settled. And the ranch hands—once she hired them and bought some cattle—would want their coffee.

“We'll have to have a fire after all,” she said, starting for the door.

Angelina turned to look at her. “Where do you think you're going?”

“Why, to set the pot in the rain,” Lorelei said, surprised.

Angelina opened her mouth, closed it again, and went out to join Raul and the driver, who were hobbling the horses.

Lorelei centered the pot in the middle of the dooryard, pleased with the prospect of hot coffee, and went back inside. Purposefully, she emptied a crate, splintered it into manageable pieces with the ax and poked uncertainly at the mouse's nest. Nothing scurried or squeaked, so she assumed it was abandoned.

She had a nice blaze going when Angelina returned and let out a little shriek.

“Lorelei,” she cried, rushing over and tugging open the stove door. “The chimney!”

Lorelei frowned, assessing the crooked metal pipe disappearing through the roof. Smoke began to billow
out through the opening in the stove and seep through heretofore invisible gaps in the pipe.

“For heaven's sake,” she marveled.

Angelina stabbed at the fire with the handle of Lorelei's brand-new broom, chattering in Spanish. “Water,” she coughed. “Get me some water!”

Lorelei hesitated, confused, then dashed outside to get the coffeepot, already half-full of rain. She handed it to Angelina, who promptly flung the contents into the stove. There was a puny sizzle, and then Angelina straightened, shutting the squeaky little door against the smoke.

“From now on,” Angelina said evenly, “
I
will make the coffee.”

Lorelei snatched up a blanket and waved it, but the smoke met the veil of rain at the door and rolled back inside.

Thunder shook the roof.

“A bad omen,” Angelina reiterated, crossing herself.

“Nonsense,” Lorelei said, reclaiming the broom. “With a little straightening up, this house will be cozy.”

Raul came inside, followed by the driver. Both of them were drenched, but then so were Lorelei and Angelina.

“I smell smoke,” said the driver.

They all sat down on crates and stared at each other.

“I believe I'll ride one of them horses back to town,” the freight man said presently. “Plenty of other mounts, if you all want to go along.”

Raul looked longingly toward the door.

“I'm staying right here,” said Lorelei.

“That's your privilege, ma'am,” the fellow answered, rising from his crate. Raul stared down at his hands, and Angelina shook out her skirts.

The driver took his leave, and Lorelei rose to watch
him go. He mounted one of the four horses, abandoning his wagon, and set out for San Antonio. The remaining three followed along, without benefit of a lead rope.

“He would have been much wiser to spend the night,” she observed. “He could be struck by lightning along that road, and, anyway, he'll have to come back to get his wagon.”

Neither Angelina nor Raul spoke, or even looked in her direction.

It was up to her, Lorelei decided, to set a cheerful tone. “Raul,” she said, bending to pick up the coffeepot Angelina had dropped after putting out the flames. “Perhaps you could make a bonfire in that copse of oak trees next to the water. We'll need one for cooking.”

Raul looked at her as though she'd just risen from the dead.

“A bonfire?” he echoed.

Angelina sighed. “Just do it,” she said forlornly.

Raul went out.

“We'd better get into dry clothes,” Lorelei said. “Warm as it is, we could take a chill. I'll brew up a nice pot of tea.”

“How do you plan to do that?” Angelina asked reasonably.

“Why, I'll just catch rain water—or get some from the creek—and set it on the fire to boil.”

“And how will you go to and from this fire without getting wet all over again?”

“Oh,” said Lorelei.

“Yes,” said Angelina. “Oh.”

Raul was gone for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and when he returned, he looked defeated.

“There is no dry firewood,” he said.

Lorelei and Angelina, wearing dry clothes, sat on crates, brushing the rain out of their hair.

“We shall have to do without our tea,” Lorelei said bravely.

 

I
N THE DAMP,
thin light of dawn, Lorelei gazed up at the cobwebs swathing the ceiling rafters like entangled ghosts. She'd slept in her clothes, on a pallet of blankets, and her skin was peppered with chigger bites. On the other side of the ranch house, which was, she admitted to herself, really just a cabin, Angelina and Raul slumbered on, their soft snores interweaving.

The remnants of last night's rain dripped through holes in the roof, the chimney was still stopped up with birds' nests, dirt and layers of soot and she would have sold her soul for a cup of hot, fresh coffee.

By now, her father knew that she'd not only defected from his household and claimed her property and what remained of her funds, but stolen his servants as well. He was probably livid. No, no
probably
about it, she thought, squaring herself to face reality.

Judge Alexander Fellows was surely in a fury, and even now taking steps to deal with his rebellious daughter.

Isaac Templeton's vast spread sprawled on one side of her little ranch, and Holt McKettrick's on the other. For all her brave thoughts to the contrary, a range war was a very real possibility, and if it happened, Lorelei would most likely be caught square in the middle.

She didn't know how to ride. She didn't know how to shoot.

She didn't own a single cow, or a horse.

So why, she wondered, smiling, did she feel so exhilarated?

 

“G
OOD
G
OD
,” said Holt McKettrick, right out loud, when, riding along the creekbank, with Tillie's dog trotting along behind his horse, he saw Lorelei Fellows kneeling on the other side, splashing her face with water.

She couldn't have heard him; he was still a hundred yards away, at least, but she looked up, just the same, and took him in with a visible lack of enthusiasm.

The dog, spotting her, barked exuberantly and plunged right into the stream, paddling toward her for all he was worth.

Lorelei's sour expression turned sweet as she watched Sorrowful make his way across. He came up onto the bank beside her and shook off the creek water with a mighty effort, making her laugh aloud, the sound ringing like church bells of a Sunday morning.

It did something to Holt, hearing her erupt with joy like that. Caused a soft, subtle shift inside him.

That riled him.

Setting his jaw, he urged Traveler into the water and crossed.

Lorelei paid him no notice; she was busy having a reunion with the dog.

He felt a sting, watching them, and this did not have a positive effect upon his disposition.

“What the devil are you doing out here?” he asked Lorelei, getting down from the Appaloosa and leaving the horse to drink from the stream.

Lorelei was nose to nose with that dog, ruffling his ears and laughing, and she took her time answering. Got to her feet, fussed over Sorrowful a while longer and patted her hair. Her fine breasts rose when she did that, and Holt felt another sharp shift, somewhere in his middle.

“I live here,” she said.

Holt scanned the property and found it sorry to behold. The house was on a tilt, and the barn, such as it was, had probably collapsed before Santa Ana massacred one hundred and eighty-five brave men at the Alamo. There were two wagons, one of them stuck axel-deep in drying mud, and the other dripping rainwater through the floorboards. A pair of town horses, pretty but essentially useless, grazed alongside the stream, and there wasn't a cow to be seen.

“Alone?” he asked, amazed.

Her mouth tightened briefly, and she was sparing with her answer. “Angelina and Raul are with me.”

“Does your father know about this?”

She laughed, more at his consternation, he suspected, than because she had any case for mirth. “No doubt he does.”

“Just what are you planning on doing, way out here?”

“Making a life for myself,” she answered, with a confidence Holt found downright annoying. Didn't the woman know there were outlaws on the prowl, not to mention renegade Indians, wolves, wild boars and every other kind of bad luck?

Holt remembered his hat and took it off, shoving his free hand through his hair. “This is no place for a lady.”

“Then it's a good thing I'm not much of a lady,” Lorelei retorted.

The words struck Holt like a sucker punch, though he was damned if he could think why.

She chuckled at his expression, rocking a little on her heels. “Come now, Mr. McKettrick. Does that really come as such a shock to you? I'm the woman who burned her wedding dress in the town square, after all, and day
before yesterday, when we met on the street, I'd just been booted out of the Ladies' Benevolence Society.”

“So you moved out here, to the middle of nowhere?” Holt challenged, strangely exasperated. What did he care if the damn fool female wanted to make her home on this godforsaken patch of no-account ground? “Seems a mite extreme, to me.”

“I guess it is,” she allowed, obviously enjoying his discomfort. “But I'm here to stay.”

He fiddled with his hat, looked away, looked back. “Damned if you're not serious,” he marveled.

“I certainly am,” she confirmed.

Over her shoulder, he saw a Mexican man come out of the cabin, rubbing his eyes. Seeing Holt, he ducked back inside, probably to get his rifle.

“At least you're not alone,” Holt said, as she followed his gaze, but it was precious little comfort—to him at least.

Sure enough, here came the Mexican, rifle in hand, followed by a plump little woman moving at a fast clip. Probably his wife.

“Raul, Angelina,” Lorelei called to them, smiling. The dog was hunkered down beside her, wagging his stumpy tail and gazing up at her face with pure adoration. “I'd like you to meet Holt McKettrick—one of our neighbors.”