Dorothy Garlock (31 page)

“Don’t give me no shit and get outta that bed,” Chester ordered Mary.

“I . . . I won’t . . . ,” she whispered hoarsely, still feeling the sting of his blow.

“If ya think I ain’t gonna give ya another smack, ya best think again,” he barked, once more grasping her by the wrist and making her wince in pain.

“Take your hands off my wife this instant!”

Every head in the room turned to the sound of the authoritative voice to find Abe standing in the doorway, his gaze blazing holes in Chester, his fists clenched tightly. Never in her life had Pearl, her heart pounding, been so happy to see anyone.

“Your what?” Chester asked, puzzled and confused.

“I’ll not have you harming a hair on her head, sir!”

As Chester gazed at the sight of the strange man before him, his eyes blinked as he tried to come to grips with whether the figure before him was real or a figment of his imagination. A wry smile spread across his face, his lips curled over filthy, chipped teeth, as he let loose a snort of laughter.

“Who in the hell’re ya supposed to be?”

“This is your last warning, sir,” Abe said, ignoring Chester’s question, as he took a step into the room, his eyes never leaving his foe. “I’ll not be asking you again!”

With that warning, Chester finally saw Abe for what he was, an immediate danger. He let go of Mary’s arm with a twist and turned to face the strangely bearded man, knife in hand. The murderous intent that had filled his eyes when he buried the blade in Hank’s shoulder returned with a vengeance. He tensed as he prepared to attack.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Abe soothed Mary, the woman he believed to be his bride, the woman whose slap he seemed to have already forgotten. “He’ll not harm you.”

Mary didn’t reply, her eyes wide with fright.

“Be careful!” Pearl warned, fearful that Abe would meet the fate of his uncle.

“He is the one who should be concerned!”

“Goddamn crazy bastard,” Chester spat.

The two men slowly circled each other in the small room, each holding the other frozen in his gaze. Chester occasionally swiped out with his knife striking nothing but air as Abe kept his fists close to his chest.

“I’m gonna carve ya up,” the filthy man sneered.

Without wasting a word in answer, Abe’s right hand shot forward and smashed into Chester’s nose with a crack, sending a rivulet of blood spraying down onto his mouth and chin.

“Son of a bitch!” Chester barked in pain.

Before the sting of his first punch could subside, Abe waded back at his foe, throwing a couple of more sharp punches, each landing in quick succession. Not once did he boast about what he was doing, the pain that he was inflicting, his face a stoic mask that betrayed no emotion. One blow followed another as Chester’s defenses faded, blood and bruises taking their place.

“Goddamn it!”

Blindly, Chester swung the knife just as Abe was coming in to hit him again, and an arc of blood spurted from a deep cut on Abe’s forearm. Jumping back quickly, he gave it no more than a cursory glance before returning to confront the armed man.

“That’s just the first cut,” Chester said with a smirk. “There’ll be more!”

Pearl couldn’t
believe
what she was seeing. Never in her wildest imagination would she have believed that Abraham Morgan would have been able to fight, to hold his own with a man like Chester Remnick. But even though he had drawn first blood, she knew that it was only a matter of time before Chester found him again with his knife.

“His leg!” she suddenly exclaimed, the memory of putting a bullet in Chester on that fateful morning springing to mind as if it were a brilliant sunrise, dazzling and bright. “Hit him in his left leg!”

Without any hesitation, Abe followed Pearl’s direction and kicked into Chester’s left leg, striking him flush on the point in which she had felled him.

“Aaarrgghh!”
he howled in pain, collapsing onto his back.

Abe fell upon the man, pummeling him in the face while trying to control the still-dangerous knife that wavered in one hand. Pearl could do nothing but hold her breath as the struggle continued, losing track of the knife’s blade in one moment, seeing it in the next before once again having it vanish from sight. Suddenly, a sickeningly wet sound reached Pearl’s ears, a sound that she knew came from a knife being buried into flesh.

“Oh no!” she cried.

The seconds crawled by as if they were hours as the two men’s bodies stayed clasped together as one, neither man moving an inch, uncertainty filling Pearl’s heart as to who had struck the killing blow. Then slowly, the answer was revealed; Abe rose upward, a thick sheen of lifeblood coating his shirt as Chester remained on the floor beneath him, the knife’s hilt protruding ominously from his belly.

Without hesitation, Abe turned to where Mary lay on the bed, her small hands clutched tightly together, her eyes wide and staring. Throughout the two men’s struggle, she remained frozen and silent, a witness to a fight that was for her honor if not for her hand.

As Abe moved closer to her, Pearl worried that it would be the same as before, that Mary would be as fearful of Abe as she had been of Chester, that the only thing poor Abe would receive for his efforts would be cries of horror, tears, and another slap on his face.

“You’re safe now, my Mary,” Abe soothed. “You need not be afraid.”

Tears once again began to fill the young woman’s eyes, until they cascaded down her white cheeks, spilling onto her blouse and blanket below. But in that moment, Pearl could see something strange, something different from the first time Abe had spoken her name. Before Mary knelt a man who had fought to protect her, who didn’t grab for her or demand that she do as he say, who was patient and kind. While Mary did not know what lay ahead, she knew that the horror she had lived through for far too long lay behind, and that it would never threaten her again.

Sobbing, she fell forward, right into Abe’s waiting arms.

“It will all be fine,” he soothed into her ear. “It’s all over now.”

Tears fell from Pearl’s eyes. She knew that he spoke the truth.

Chapter Twenty-nine

H
ALLIE’S THOUGHTS RACED
. As the sharp crack of the pistol’s firing echoed in her ears and the tang of gunpowder hung in the air, she could not take her eyes away from Fawn, standing in the barn’s open door, framed by the newly born night, no longer the woman that she had known.

“What—what happened?” she asked into Eli’s chest.

He didn’t answer, his eyes staring ever forward, his jaw set as if it were carved in stone as blood continued to trickle from the scrapes and cuts on his face.

No matter how hard she tried, Hallie could not believe her eyes.
Fawn had just shot and killed Seth, the man to whom she was engaged, the man she had professed to love!
No amount of hoping or wishing would ever return him to her. Even though Seth had meant to do her harm and had injured Eli, Hallie felt a sadness at his violent death.

“Eli . . . I’m frightened,” she whispered.

“Hush now,” he soothed. “Just stay close.”

Fawn stared silently ahead, her eyes reflecting a detachment from the heinous crime she had committed, the gun still clenched in one hand, tendrils of smoke drifting from the barrel as it remained pointed at the ground. She seemed in a trance. She blinked once, then twice. Finally, she seemed to awaken and her gaze focused upon them. The look on her face was that of a child who had just committed a small, naughty act for which she feared she would be punished. But the gleam in her eye was one of amusement that said she was not sorry for what she had done. When she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper.

“Why, Eli?” she said. “Just tell me why you don’t like me anymore.”

In his arms, Hallie could feel the cowboy startle at the question, as unsure of its meaning as she was. “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Fawn,” he managed. “I don’t—”

“You know damn good and well what I mean!” she suddenly screeched, her meek voice coming to life as she brought the gun up and pointed it directly at Eli’s body. Hallie’s breath caught in her chest, so certain that Fawn would pull the trigger and end the life of the man she loved. But no shot rang out.

“Why, Eli?” she asked again. “Why, after all I have done for you over the years, after all the attention that I have showered on you. Why have you chosen that worthless woman from nowhere over me?”

From the first moment that she met Fawn Billings, Hallie knew that the prissy banker’s daughter was in love with Eli. Jealousy colored her words, her smile, and the very way in which she carried herself. It now appeared that there was no end to which she would not go to have what she desired.

Eli’s words were measured. “Fawn,” he began, his voice unwavering and as strong as the noonday sun, “while I’d be a liar if I were to say I haven’t cared for you ever since we were kids, I’ve made it as plain as I could that I was not in love with you.” He paused. “I thought that you returned Seth’s affect—”

“Just shut up!” Fawn shouted, cutting him off in midword.

“No one wanted to hurt you, Fawn,” Hallie ventured but fell silent when Fawn leveled the gun at her.

“Shut up!” Fawn yelled.

Hallie’s eyes grew wide at the sight before her. Fawn looked nothing like the elegant, fashionable young lady that she first met in Bison City or even the shrill would-be nurse who appeared at the ranch house just one day earlier. Tears ran freely down her cheeks, melting trails through her face powder. Her hair, usually set in tight curls around her shoulders, hung in sweat-drenched strings. Hate had transformed her carefully groomed beauty into ugliness.

“Don’t you say a word,” she warned Hallie. “This doesn’t concern you!”

“You’re right, Fawn. Hallie doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Eli interjected. “This is between you and me.”

Fawn shook her head violently. “She’s ruined everything,” she cried out. “If it weren’t for her, you would have turned to me and discovered how much I love you and always have. It might have been me that you held in your arms and in your heart! You might have loved me!”

“It’s not true, Fawn,” Eli countered. “My heart had decided long ago, and there was nothing to be done to change it.”

“No matter what I’ve done, no matter how hard I’ve tried, none of it made any difference,” she kept on as if she hadn’t heard a word he had spoken. “Everything I did failed! Even the last time I held this gun in my hand, even that didn’t work! You still left!”

“Wha-what did you say?” Eli managed, his body suddenly shaking.

“The last time I held this gun in my hand,” Fawn explained, “was the night that I killed your brother!”

As Fawn’s words registered, Eli’s knees grew weak, buckling under the weight of four years of pain that he had borne since that fateful night his brother had been stolen from him. His breath hissed through clenched teeth. His heart pounded and shook as if the earth itself were in upheaval. His eyes grew wet at the same moment that his blood began to rush through his veins and throb in his temples.

“You?” he asked, his voice trembling. “
You
killed Caleb?”

“It was a night very much like this one,” Fawn began calmly, telling her story as if it were unconnected to sordid reality. “Still hot with the heat of the day, thousands of stars in the sky, crowds of people on the streets. I followed him leaving the saloon, gunshots and fireworks spilling all around me.”

Each word that she spoke was like a dagger in Eli’s heart, driven into the block of pain that sat heavy in his chest. Still, he could not bring himself to believe, could not wrap his thoughts around a truth he felt he had no choice but to reject.

“But I—I thought . . . ,” he stumbled, searching blindly for the words that would force it to all make sense. “I thought that it was Seth. He followed me to the cemetery and tried to kill me . . .” He stopped, his voice trailing into the stale air of the barn.

“He did?” Fawn asked, as surprised by the new revelation as Eli had been at her own secret. “I wouldn’t have thought that he had it in him to hatch such a harebrained scheme. I suppose that I underestimated his jealousy about the feelings he knew I have for you.”

When Seth had first approached him in the barn, it was a confrontation that Eli hadn’t shied from, had actually encouraged, all so that he could mete out the justice he knew Caleb could never gain for himself. He had thrown punch after punch, delivering a beating that could never return his brother to him but could allow him to move forward with his life, to leave some of his heartache behind. All that was wrong was suddenly right, and he couldn’t so much as catch his breath.

Hallie suddenly sobbed in his arms, her voice cracking.

“Quiet now,” he whispered, his words full of urgency and concern. A sickening fear gripped him at the thought that Fawn would now turn her festering vengeance upon the woman he loved, the woman who had captured his heart. For Hallie’s safety, as well as his own sanity, he had questions that needed answers.

“But why?” he uttered, the one truth he needed, that he
must know
!

“Because I had to have you for my own and you were planning to go away to the army,” she said simply, as matter-of-factly as if it were the most obvious explanation imaginable. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of you out of my life, ruining all my hopes and dreams.”

“What did Caleb have to do with that?” he asked, his anger rising.

“He had everything to do with it, silly.” She chuckled.

“Tell me
why
!” Eli cried, no longer able to check his raging emotions.

Fawn looked coldly at him for a moment, unhappy at the stern rebuke he’d given her, her face that of a child scorned. She then took a deep breath, her eyes softening, and said, “It was your fault. I killed Caleb because of you.”

The force of her words was enough to tear the air from Eli’s lungs, leaving him gasping.
What in the hell is she talking about?
His thoughts raced and rocked, unable to alight upon something that would make her words make sense, turmoil roiling in his gut.