Fatal as a Fallen Woman (24 page)

He squinted at the small print on the railroad schedule as the badly misnamed "express" train left Union Depot for the morning run. "Looks like we'll be traveling all day," he remarked. Arrival time in Torrence, after many stops, was listed at six in the evening.

"And once again you'll have to miss church," Diana said with a faint smile.

On Sundays patients who lived in rural areas visited Ben's surgery. He rarely had an opportunity to attend services at home. Diana was coming to learn him well, he thought. Most of the time he didn't mind missing church, but just now he'd been thinking that a few prayers might help.

The train moved southward, slowly gaining speed as it crossed the bed of Cherry Creek on a long bridge and left the more populated sections of Denver behind.

"I hadn't realized Torrence and Leadville were so close together," Ben said, resuming his study of the timetable, "or that either was quite so far from Denver." According to the schedule, an additional hour and a half on this same line would bring them to the latter city.

Diana took the form printed up by the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad for the benefit of passengers and flipped it over to reveal a map showing the connections. She pushed her veil away from her face so she could see better and spread the page out across the light gray flannel skirt of her traveling suit and the darker gray wool of his trousers. "Our route will take us south for more than 130 miles, as far as Buena Vista, before turning north again to reach Torrence."

Ben frowned. "Seems roundabout."

"The mountains are in the way." Diana tapped the sketched-in elevations with one gloved finger. "There's a line to Leadville that cuts across to the west. Here. We could catch a train there for Torrence, but we'd have a long wait for the connection."

"Was there train service from Denver to Leadville three years ago?"

She frowned. "As I recall, this line was not yet open. But it may have been that Evan wanted to have our own buggy for transportation after we arrived. I cannot remember why we ended up traveling west from Fairplay along the post road. It was rated for travel 'by hack and saddle,' as they say. The mails go by hack only in the summer months, or when the road is not obstructed, and by saddle animals in winter or when the road is bad."

"No six-horse Concord coaches with Sir Jehu sitting in his box?"

"Not many. The route over the pass is direct but hazardous." She gave him an odd look. "What were you quoting?"

"
Crofutt's Grip-Sack Guide of Colorado
. I purchased a copy when I first arrived in Denver, though I haven't had a chance to do more than glance at it." He grinned as he said it, but the humor abruptly faded as he recalled more of the details of her ordeal in the mountains. She and Evan had been caught in an early snow squall and nearly perished going over Mosquito Pass. "If you were traveling all that distance, weather aside, why on earth choose an open buggy?"

Diana looked down at her hands, primly folded in her lap, then glanced out the window as they passed a cluster of machine and repair shops belonging to the Rio Grande company.

"Diana?"

"Evan thought it
looked
well. And he had it in his head that we could travel from Denver to Leadville in a single day. I tried to tell him that we'd drive half the first day before we’d even reach the point where the mountains begin, but he'd taken bad advice from someone and was convinced I was wrong. By that time things were so bad between us that I gave in without a fuss. I assumed we'd stop for the night in one of the towns along the way. We did, but Evan wasn't happy about it."

"I wonder who Evan's source of information was."

"Charlie?" 

As they'd agreed, he'd told her everything he'd learned from the bartender at the Windsor, from Charlie, and from Pearl, but they had not had much time last night to speculate about what any of it meant. By the time they'd shared a late supper in his suite, Diana had been hard put to stay awake. She hadn't slept a wink, she’d said, under Matt Hastings roof. She and Jane had retired to Ben's bedroom, leaving him to toss and turn on the hard, too-short sofa in the sitting room.

"Perhaps we should have confronted him before we left the hotel," Diana said.

"We know where to find him when we get back."

She nodded. "And to be truthful, I'm relieved to get out of that place. Your suite was almost identical to the one Father died in. It made me uneasy."

"More so than being at Hastings's place?"

"You promised not to—"

"I know. I'm sorry." He meant the apology, but his blood boiled every time he thought about Matt Hastings and his plans for Diana.

"I still don't understand why Father wanted such a close watch kept on Evan," Diana said, after a moment.

"Perhaps he was concerned about his daughter's welfare."

"I doubt it."

"You said he asked Col. Arkins to keep your connection to him out of the Leadville newspapers."

"That was to protect his reputation, not to give me privacy. He never contacted me afterward, or offered to help me, and if Pearl was still in Leadville, he must have known I was destitute."

"According to Pearl, Evan borrowed money from him."

"Borrowed?" she repeated, sounding doubtful.

"You think he extorted it?" Ben saw no reason not to be blunt. When Pearl had told him that Evan had boasted of "getting money out of Mr. Torrence," the first thing he'd thought of himself was blackmail.

"I can't imagine what he knew that Father would have paid to keep secret, but yes, I do think that. Nothing else makes sense. Father certainly wouldn't have given him that much money just because he was married to me."

He took her hand in his and felt the tension beneath the soft kid of her glove. She'd been hurt, first by her father's rejection, then by Evan's disloyalty. He wanted to keep her safe, but here they were, headed straight into trouble.

And straight into one of the most magnificent landscapes in the country. He nudged Diana and nodded towards the vista beyond her window. Pike's Peak lay directly ahead of the train. To the right, beyond the Platte River, was a wide strip of rolling prairie leading up to the base of the mountains. From a previous visit, he knew they were still at least fifteen miles away. Distances were deceiving.

"You climbed that," she said, remembering that he'd boasted of the accomplishment early in their acquaintance. "Voluntarily."

"You grew up in these mountains. How can you fear them?"

"
Because
I grew up in these mountains." She looked at the height again and shuddered. "I hope you don't expect me to enjoy the same sports you do."

"Women do climb."

"I know, but I don't intend to be one of them. You may go off on a spree without me if it involves mountains."

He gave her a hard look. "Can you tolerate this grip to Torrence?"

"Tolerate. I don't anticipate taking any pleasure in it. And I will have my eyes closed part of the time. I prefer not to look out at the view when the train is perched on narrow-gauge track laid only inches away from the edge of a bottomless gorge."

Neither of them spoke again until after the stop at Littleton, a town of a few hundred inhabitants with a post office, stores, and hotels. Ten miles south of Denver, it boasted a station of the Denver & Rio Grande on one side of the Platte and a station for the South Park division of the Union Pacific railway on the other. Some Denver businessmen had homes here, Ben had heard, from a talkative Harry the bartender, and rode the train into the city each day for a fifty-five cent fare.

After Littleton, the bluffs and ravines to their left seemed to gradually close in as they rolled through numerous cuts and crossed a canal that supplied part of Denver's water supply. At some points, the grade was so steep and the gorge so deep that the mountains seemed to tower overhead while the train perched on a narrow strip of rail. Ben watched the scenery, picking out pine, spruce, and cedar on the slopes, and the beginnings of summer's ferns and flowers.

At his side, Diana's eyes stayed squeezed shut. He'd have thought she slept if it hadn't been for the death grip she kept on his hand.

It had been when he was still in college, Ben recalled, that he'd first visited Colorado. He and some friends had spent the summer traveling. Climbing Pike's Peak had been just one of many Western adventures.

How strange to think that he'd been so near to Diana back then and never realized. She'd have been a young girl still living with her parents in Denver. If he'd chanced to meet her, would anything have changed? Might he somehow have spared her all she'd endured with Evan Spaulding?

He felt his lips curve into a wry smile at the fanciful thought. Diana wouldn't have become the woman she was now, the woman he loved, without the hardships she'd faced and overcome. It was doubtless a very good thing people could not go back in time and change the course of events. Good or bad, life dealt each of them a hand. It was how an individual played it that made all the difference.

"Mother said I had reason to want revenge," Diana murmured, cutting short Ben's philosophical musings.

He opened his mouth to ask what she thought that meant, but a small sound from Jane stopped him. He'd almost forgotten the other woman was with them. She was the sort who could sit quietly in a corner and blend into the woodwork. Now, however, her face was a mask of astonishment.

"You talked to Elmira? When? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I thought it best if no one knew," Diana said in an apologetic voice. She risked a peek out the window, apparently saw no drop-offs to alarm her, and visibly relaxed. Quickly and concisely, she recapped the highlights of Elmira's early morning visit for Jane's benefit. Ben listened with particular attention to the comments Diana's mother had made about Evan.

"So she knew something," he said when Diana had finished.

"But Mother wasn't there when they met. Father was already married to Miranda. She probably didn't know any more than she said. But what did she
mean
?"

"I'm not so sure she doesn't know more. Remember what Pearl told me about your parents spying on each other?" He turned to Jane. "Did Elmira ever talk about that? Do you know who reported to her on Torrence's activities?"

"I don't know a thing about it." Jane was so insistent in her denial that Ben took a harder look at her. He'd always thought there was a great deal of truth in Shakespeare's line about the lady protesting too much and there was a haunted expression on Jane's pale face.

Diana did not seem to share his suspicions. "Mother kept a great deal to herself, Ben."

"Then how can you be so sure she didn't kill your father?" Jane asked.

"Because she was lured out of the Elmira with a note." Diana frowned. "I'm still not certain where Ed Leeves fits into this. I can't think of any reason why he'd want to frame Mother for murder."

"He tried to take over the hotel," Jane reminded her.

Diana just shook her head, unconvinced.

Each lost in individual thoughts, they rode in silence as far as Plum—twenty-four miles from Denver, according to
Crofutt's Guide
. When the train resumed its journey, they headed southeast, up Plum Creek. It was rough country, with no cultivation that Ben could see. The land appeared to be used for stock-raising.

Some considerable time passed before Diana roused herself from further closed-eyed musings and spoke. "Keep a lookout for Castle Rock," she said. "It's one of the sights to see in Colorado." Her voice sounded strained, as if it took tremendous effort to focus her mind on the scenery. "It's a huge, castellated rock that projects out into the valley to the westward, as if it had been put there to bar further progress."

Once Castle Rock had passed out of sight, Diana fell silent once more. There was an air of listlessness about her that worried Ben. He couldn't blame her for being discouraged, and he understood her trepidation about venturing up into the mountains, but she was ordinarily such an energetic person, so full of optimism and enthusiasm, even if she did tend to be a bit too impulsive. It broke his heart to see her like this.

"Let's reconsider what Elmira said about Evan," he suggested. If he could not distract her from her worries, at least he could help her reason out some of the answers she sought. "What did you think when she told you he'd met with your father?"

Diana blinked at him and it was a moment before she answered. "That Evan had tried for a reconciliation, hoping to see me put back in Father's will, and that he failed so utterly that he never even mentioned their meeting to me. He never did like to admit to failure."

Ben wondered where her thoughts had been, but he had her attention now. That was the important thing. "How did you think he got the money for the move to Leadville?"

"I thought he won it at cards. That's what he told me. And sometimes he was lucky." She closed her eyes a moment. "And sometimes he was not. He did cheat. Pearl was right about that. It was only chance that someone didn't shoot him for it sooner."

Jane made a small sound of distress. Sympathy, Ben assumed. He ignored her, keeping all his attention fixed on Diana. "What happened to the man who shot him?"

"He took off. As far as I know, he was never caught."

"There was no suggestion of premeditated murder?"

Color leeched from Diana's already pale face. "I was told Evan was shot in a quarrel over a poker game in the casino where he'd been working as a faro dealer. The other players said he was cheating but the killer was never questioned. No one even knew his name."

"Blackmail is rarely a one-time demand," Ben said softly.

Both Diana and Jane looked appalled.

"You think Father had him killed?" Diana's voice was flat. "That he was afraid Evan would demand more money?"

"It's a possibility. Some of the things we've learned about your father indicate he wasn't above using underhanded means to achieve his ends. He hired someone to lie about your mother in court. Is it so hard to believe he'd hire someone to get rid of a man he perceived to be a threat?"