The Rustler (35 page)

“Die?” Charles rasped. “Yes. Marjory did.”

“I'm sorry,” Sarah said, and she was.

“You married that outlaw,” Charles accused, startling Sarah again.

She raised her chin, straightened her spine. “Yes,” she answered.

“Divorce him,” Charles said.

Sarah's mouth dropped open. She closed it firmly.

“Divorce him and marry me, Sarah. That's the only way—the
only way
you're going to raise Owen. We'll go back to Philadelphia, together. The three of us. Start over—”

Sarah clung to the edge of the counter, her knuckles white with the effort. “Charles, have you gone insane? I wouldn't marry you even if I were free to do it!”

“I'll take him away, Sarah. Owen, I mean. Send him to school in Europe, and you'll never see him again. I'll fill his head so full of stories about you that he wouldn't stoop to spit on you.”

She knew he meant it. Knew he would carry out the threat. A terrible dread rose up inside her, fairly shutting down her breath and stopping her heart.
“Why?”
she whispered. “Why are you doing this?”

Charles, his hands braced against the counter, used them to straighten up. His face was ghastly, ugly and twisted with hatred. “That bitch,” he breathed. “I'd dance on her grave if I could. I wanted to marry you, Sarah. I
loved
you. But Marjory wouldn't give me a divorce. She's made my life hell since the day she found out about you. I am
glad
—so
goddammed glad
—she finally had the decency to die!”

Sarah did not know what to say. She felt sick, even faint.

The door of the bank opened again.

Let it be Wyatt,
Sarah prayed silently.

But it wasn't Wyatt, or even Rowdy.

The newcomer was Doc.

“You have twenty-four hours, Sarah,” Charles said evenly. “Twenty-four hours. I'll be at the hotel, awaiting your decision. Oh, and by the way, I have all the evidence I need to shut this bank down. And I will.”

With that, Charles left, not even glancing at Doc as he passed him.

“Sarah?” Doc said. His voice came from far away, and it echoed, as though he were calling to her from the other end of a long culvert, far underground. “Sarah?”

She couldn't answer. The room went dark, and she collapsed, sinking, sinking, into nothing at all.

 

“I'
M FINE
,” Sarah said, but she looked like her own ghost to Wyatt, lying there on her bed at the Tamlin house. Doc and Rowdy had brought her there, and then Rowdy had ridden out to fetch him. He'd been so desperate to get to her that he'd left the dog and the buckboard for his brother to manage and streaked into town on Rowdy's horse.

He sat on the edge of the mattress, holding one of her cold hands in both of his. “What happened?” he asked, though he had an idea of what had gone on, thanks to Doc, who'd been waiting here at the house when he rode in.

“Charles is back,” Sarah told him. Tears welled in her eyes. “If I marry him, I can raise Owen.”

“Sarah,” Wyatt said, his throat thick. “You're married to me.”

“But we don't love each other, do we?”

“I don't know,” Wyatt answered, as windless as if he'd been sucker punched in the belly. “I sure as hell feel
something,
and it's powerful.”

She turned her head to one side. A tear slid down onto the pillow. “Owen is my child, Wyatt. My baby.”

“I won't let you do this, Sarah. Not even for the boy.”

“You can't stop me,” she replied, with mourning in her voice. “If I tell Judge Harvey we didn't—we didn't consummate the marriage, he'll believe me. He'll annul it. Tear up the license. And I can marry Charles.”

“
No.
We
did
consummate the marriage. For all we know, you're already carrying a child—
our
child—”

She turned her head, looked at him. The depth of her sorrow wounded him. “I don't love you, Wyatt,” she said, with no inflection at all. Doc had dosed her with something, she'd been so upset after her fainting spell, but her words were cold and matter-of-fact, as if she'd been rehearsing them in her mind. “You're an outlaw—nothing but a ranch hand. Charles is rich. He can arrange for Papa to have the best possible care. None of us will ever lack for anything.”

Wyatt's throat thickened, and his eyes burned. He leaned down, kissed Sarah once on the forehead, and got up to leave the room, moving like a man in a trance. He knew she'd made the only choice she could, but that didn't lessen his grief.

If he'd looked back, he'd have seen Sarah reach for that little book of hers, and scribble something into it with a pencil before collapsing back onto her pillows, her face wet with tears.

 

S
HE'D GET OVER
Wyatt Yarbro, Sarah told herself when she'd recovered her composure. She loved him, she knew that for sure, but she loved Owen, too, with the deep and elemental passion of a mother. She could not turn her back on the boy, not again.

Owen would be helpless in Charles's care, neglected and perhaps even abused.

Wyatt was a grown man, the strongest she'd ever known. He would brood a while, and then he'd marry someone like Davina Wynngate, and get on with his life.

Sarah would have to tear her heart in two—one part for Owen, one part forever in Wyatt's keeping. If that left her with nothing, well, it was the lot of women. Had been since time immemorial.

Still rummy from the sedative Doc had given her, she rose from her bed, washed her face at the basin, tidied her hair and slipped Wyatt's thin gold wedding band off her finger, placing it in a little china box on top of her bureau.

Doc and Kitty were sitting in the kitchen when she went downstairs, both of them looking as glum as if they'd just lost their last friend.

“I'm going back to the bank,” Sarah told them. “It can't be closed in the middle of the day like this. People will think we're insolvent, and there'll be a run of withdrawals.”

Kitty simply stared at her.

Doc rose from his chair. “Sarah, you're in no state to go anywhere. I must insist that you lie down again.”

She shook her head. “I have work to do,” she said. “Everything has to be in order before Charles and Owen and Papa and I leave for Philadelphia.”

“Before you do
what?
”

“Charles loves me. We're getting married. Raising Owen together.” Even in Sarah's own ears, the words sounded impossible, but there was no going back now. She'd said cruel things to Wyatt, out of stark necessity. Sent him away. Written in her book of lies,
Today I told the greatest lie of all. I told Wyatt I didn't love him, didn't want to be his wife.

“So
that's
why Wyatt left here looking like somebody ran over him with a hay wagon,” Kitty marveled. “My God, Sarah, what have you done?”

“The only thing I could do,” Sarah said, wondering even then how she'd bear Charles's touch, after what she and Wyatt had shared. How she'd survive the days and weeks and months and years ahead, never looking into those dark eyes and reading secrets there. Never laughing with Wyatt, never feeling his hands on her.

But survive she would. Because of—and for—Owen.

She walked out of the house then, and neither Doc nor Kitty tried to stop her. Maybe they knew she would shatter into pieces if they touched her, and never be able to put herself back together again.

 

“W
YATT
?”

He ignored Rowdy. Climbed up into the buckboard, parked in front of the livery stable. Lonesome, the poor old critter, was still sitting in the back.

Slapping down the reins, Wyatt drove the buckboard team hard back to the place he'd hoped to call home, someday. Poor old Lonesome had no choice but to go along, sitting in the back of the wagon like he was, enduring the axle-breaking pace.

He'd have burned the shack to the ground if he'd had the wherewithal to do it, but he didn't. He should have stopped at the mercantile, bought some matches and some kerosene.

Since he hadn't had the foresight to do that, in the shape he was in, he just sat there, staring at the ruins of some long-gone settler's dreams—and of his own. He could protest the dissolution of his marriage to Judge Harvey, say he and Sarah had made love, not once, but half a dozen times. But it would be his word against Sarah's, and the judge would believe her—or pretend he did.

Wyatt had been aware all along that Rowdy had mounted his horse and followed him out from town. Now, his brother rode up alongside the wagon.

“Wyatt,” he said, “what the hell happened?”

“It's too hard to say,” Wyatt told him. He couldn't look right at Rowdy, but he could see him out of the corner of his eye, and as broken up as he was, he was glad of his presence.

“Sarah?” Rowdy asked, very quietly, shifting in the saddle, resettling his hat, pretending an interest in the far horizon.

“She's come to her senses,” Wyatt said, after a very long time.

Rowdy swung down off the horse. Rescued Lonesome from the back of the buckboard. The two of them walked around in the deep grass littered with old wagon wheels, barrel staves, and empty bottles. Lonesome lifted his hind leg against the corner of what had once been a barn.

“How's that?” Rowdy asked, at considerable length. “How, exactly, has Sarah ‘come to her senses'?”

“You were right in the beginning, Rowdy.” Wyatt's voice came out sounding hoarse. His eyes felt as though he'd splashed them with handfuls of acid, and his throat hurt like sin. Maybe he'd contracted the diphtheria. Maybe he'd die.

He sure as hell
felt
like dying.

“When I said you were an outlaw and she was a lady and you ought to leave her alone?”

Wyatt merely nodded.

“I was wrong about that, Wyatt,” Rowdy said.

“There ought to be a parade,” Wyatt croaked. “One of Payton Yarbro's sons just admitted he was wrong about something.”

Rowdy gave a hoarse laugh. “What's really happening here, Wyatt?” he asked. “Sarah loves you. She glows with it, like she swallowed a lamp with the wick lit.”

“She wants the boy,” Wyatt said. “And this is the only way to get him.”

Rowdy absorbed that. Waited a few moments. “I think I saw Billy Justice today,” he said.

If he'd thrown a bucket of cold creek water all over Wyatt, he couldn't have brought him out of his sorry melancholy the way those words did.

Wyatt let go of his deathgrip on the reins, looked down at Rowdy, who was standing by the buckboard now, with his hat pushed to the back of his head. “What?”

Rowdy described the man he'd seen that morning, in the bank.

It had to be Billy.

And he'd been alone within killing distance of Sarah, even persuaded her to show him the safe.

Reflecting on that, Wyatt's whole perspective shifted. He set aside thoughts of Charles Langstreet, and Owen, and how Sarah had run him off. How she'd tried to run him off, that was.

“You going to fight for her, Wyatt?” Rowdy asked quietly, mounting up again. “Fight for the boy?”

Wyatt nodded, released the brake lever, his jaw set so tight that it threatened to snap in two. “Hold on, Lonesome,” he told the dog. “There's a rough ride ahead.”

 

W
HEN
O
WEN CAME OUT
of the schoolhouse, a stack of new books under one arm, Sarah was waiting for him on the other side of the picket fence. Grinning and shoving with the other boys as they flowed out into the yard, he spotted Sarah and looked delighted at first, then, as he read her face, frightened.

He hurried toward her, through the open gate. “Is something wrong with my grandfather?” he asked.

Sarah shook her head. “No, sweetheart,” she said. It was the first time she'd dared to address him with an endearment. “Your—your father is back. And he has something to tell you—”

“What?” Owen fairly spat the word. His face took on an obstinate flush, and he ignored his friends as they went by, casting worried, curious glances in his direction.

“Owen, Mar—your mother—”

“
You
are my mother!”

Some of the children stopped, turned around at Owen's shout, and Davina appeared on the porch of the schoolhouse, looking troubled.

“Yes,” Sarah said, putting her hands on his shoulders. “Yes, I'm your mother. But Mrs. Langstreet—”