Her Bodyguard (27 page)

“Just barely,” Kat replied with a smile. “That was before Papa married Jenny, right? I was awfully young. I didn’t have a clue what all that giggling and groping was about.”

That wasn’t the case anymore, for either of them.

Kat was a married woman. Mari had learned plenty about giggling and groping during the past few days. “It’s early yet. It shouldn’t be too busy, especially with the show still going on. Is there an outside staircase?”

“Around back.”

Mari gestured for Kat to lead the way. Kat slipped her arm through Mari’s as they walked, and Mari expected her to ask about their family. Instead, she said, “I wish it would rain tonight. Those clouds building off to the west look promising, don’t you think?”

The weather? She wanted to talk about the weather? Well, she probably preferred privacy herself for the upcoming conversation. Still, it depressed Mari a bit to think that she and her younger sister had come to filling conversational gaps with talk about the summer drought. How times had changed. Offering a weak smile, Mari agreed, “Rain would be nice.”

The back staircase led to a narrow, second-story hallway lined on each side by a half-dozen closed doors. Kat led the way to the last door on the left. Inside was a bed and nothing else. Maybe this wasn’t a good place to talk, after all.

Before Mari could broach the subject, Kat climbed onto the bed and sat cross-legged. “Sit down, Mari. I’m dying to hear all the news from home.”

Funny she should use that particular turn of phrase. Mari walked to the dirt-fogged window that overlooked Main Street and pushed aside a threadbare curtain. Where to start? Staring down into the near-empty street, she said, “I think it’s safe to say that home is pretty anxious for news from you, too.”

A long moment ticked by in silence. Finally, with a hitch in her voice, Kat asked, “Are they?”

Mari glanced over her shoulder. Her brows winged up at the earnest expression on her sister’s face.

“Be honest, Mari.” Kat plucked at a loose thread on the bedspread. “I’m prepared. I know they probably hate me. I know what I did was awful.”

“Yes, it was,” Mari shot back, surprised herself at the amount of venom in her tone. “How could you, Kat? How could you do that us? To me and Emma, Billy and the boys and to Mama. And Papa. God, Kat. How could you have done that to Papa?”

Tears welled, spilled from Kat’s eyes. “I don’t know. I didn’t set out to elope that night. I was mad at Papa because he’d forbidden me to see Rory again. It got all over me, Mari. All over me!”

Mari was surprised to feel tears swelling in her eyes. The emotion of that awful night had come rushing back, and she now had a cold stone of pain lodged within her chest, weighing her down.

“I was angry with Papa, and in love with Rory, so I acted irresponsibly,” Kat continued. “I’m so sorry, Mari. Not for loving Rory, mind you, but for acting indiscreetly that night. And for our argument. It haunted me that the last words we exchanged were so harsh.”

“Haunted you!” Mari snapped, whirling around. “For three months, I had to live with the fact of those words.”
Dead cold ashes
. She shuddered at the memory. “I thought I’d had a premonition, and that by ignoring it, I sent you to your fate. That’s what I’ve been living with, Katrina. While you’ve been gallivanting around Texas with your new husband, that’s what I’ve had to deal with. Not to mention the family’s grief. That’s a whole other subject.”

Now, a hint of mulishness joined the heartbreak in Kat’s expression. “I won’t apologize for marrying the man I love. The family could have accepted that, accepted him. You ask how I could have done this to y’all. Well, I ask how y’all could have done this to me? Was eloping with the man I love such an unforgivable thing? How could you cut me out of your lives this way?”

“You were
dead
to us, Kat.”

“That was cruel!”

“Yes, it was!”

Seated on the bed, Kat clenched her fists. At the window, Mari wrapped her arms around herself. So much anger, hurt, and pain swirled in the room that it seemed as if a third person had joined them.

Finally, Kat sighed. “I knew Papa would be mad, but I never thought he’d totally turn against me. And Mama…I know they always try to present a united front to the children, but I honestly can’t believe she went along with him. They ripped my heart out, Mari. The day I got that telegram was the absolute worst day of my life.”

Mari waited a beat, tried to think it through and make sense of what Kat had said. She couldn’t. “What telegram?”

“Papa’s telegram. The one he sent in answer to mine.”

Mari went totally still. “You sent Papa a telegram? When?”

“Right after Rory and I got married. I wish you could have been there, Mari. We found the prettiest little church in Paradise Prairie. It had a brand-new coat of white paint with yellow rosebushes in bloom all around it.” She smiled wistfully, then sighed. “The preacher was out of town, but we got a judge to do the honors. It was the happiest day of my life, but also the saddest. I was marrying the man of my dreams, but my family wasn’t there.”

Mari’s heartbeat thumped in her chest. “And you telegraphed Papa with your news?”

“Yes, that, and I asked if the family was all right, because I heard about the Texas Spring Palace fire.”

“And he responded.”

Kat nodded, her tears welling anew. “He said everyone was fine, but that he was ashamed of me and disowning me, and for me to never contact the family again.”

“What?” Mari screeched.

Kat frowned, blinked twice. “You didn’t know?”

“It didn’t happen!”

“Yes, it did. It really did. Papa said those things to me. I couldn’t believe it. I cried for a week afterward. I even sent two more telegrams, one to Mama and one to Emma, but I guess he wouldn’t let them reply.”

“No!” Mari paced the small space between bed and window, and waved her arms as she spoke. “You don’t understand. It-did-not-happen. Papa never got a telegram from you. When I said you were dead to us, I meant d-e-a-d. We thought you died in the fire, Kat. We thought we’d lost you forever!”

Kat’s mouth dropped open. “Dead?”

Mari nodded.

Color leached from Kat’s face. “You thought I was
dead?
”

“Yes!”

She ducked her head, thought for a moment, then looked at her sister and asked, “Not you’re-not-family-anymore-and-I-won’t-think-about-you dead, but dearly-departed dead?”

“Cold corpse in a coffin in a Pioneer’s Rest Cemetery plot dead.”

“I always liked Pioneer’s Rest Cemetery,” Kat absently observed before the confusion in her expression cleared and she demanded, “Why? How could you think such a thing?”

The words tumbled from Mari’s mouth. “Billy was watching when you knocked over the candle, then went back behind the curtain. He saved Luke, but by then the fire was too hot, and he couldn’t get to you. They told us there was no other way out.”

Speechless, Kat simply stared at Mari, shaking her head. “I didn’t…we left right away…I never even knew about the fire until the next…oh, wait. Wait! You said I knocked over a candle?”

Reluctantly, Mari nodded. It was a sign of Mari’s distress that she’d mentioned the candle in the first place since she’d never intended to share that particular detail with her sister.

Kat’s eyes rounded in horror. “Oh, my God. Mari, did
I
start the Spring Palace fire?”

“They never determined exactly how it started.”

“But I knocked over a candle. Oh, Mari, people died in that fire! Because of me.” She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. “I killed them. I killed them!”

“No, honey.” Mari rushed to sit beside her sister and take her in her arms. “No, it was an accident. Just an accident.”

“People died because of me,” Kat murmured before burying her head against her sister’s bosom and sobbing.

Mari held on, stroking Kat’s hair, quietly shushing her, offering soft words of comfort until the storm ended. When Kat finally dried her eyes, Mari returned to the subject of the telegrams. “Honey, who sent the telegrams?”

Sniff. Sniff. “Rory.”

“Hmm…”

“What do you mean, hmm…?”

“Obviously, something isn’t right about all this. Papa never received a telegraph from you, Kat.”

“Maybe he did. Maybe he hates me for starting the fire and running away. Maybe he just let the rest of you think I was…I was…”

“No. You know better than that, Kat. Your father loves you. He
loves
you.”

“But—”

“No! Stop that right now. You’re being foolish. Think about it. Even if the world turned on its axis, and he decided he didn’t love you anymore, he still wouldn’t have lied to the rest of us. Kat, this nearly killed Mama. And Billy? Oh, Kat, you wouldn’t recognize him, he’s changed so much—and not for the better. He carries the weight of your ‘death’ on his shoulders like a yoke. In fact, Papa and Mama were so worried about him that they took the boys to Britain to visit the Rosses. That’s why, when I learned you might still be alive,
I
came looking for you, not Papa.”

Mari told Kat about the letter from their friend, and the mention of the necklace. Holding her emerald pendant in her fist, she asked, “But if Papa didn’t send that reply, who did?”

“It had to be Rory. He must have lied to you.”

“No!” Kat pushed off the bed, backed away from her sister. “No, Rory wouldn’t do that to me. Why would he? He loves me.”

“Why does he stay masked? Why are you the person out on the streets soliciting an audience for your magic shows? Is he running from someone, Kat? Hiding from someone?”

“Well, yes. Yes, we have a bit of a problem. There are these men…but no. No. Rory sent my telegrams. I was with him when he sent the third one.”

“He must have bribed the telegraph operator, then.”

“No! No. I won’t believe it.”

“Won’t believe what, darlin?” Rory said from the doorway.

Neither Mari nor Kat had noticed the men’s arrival, but now both women turned. “Why did you pretend to send my family Kat’s telegrams?” Mari demanded. “Why did you lie about my father’s response?”

Guilt flashed in his eyes and Kat gasped. “Rory!”

“Ah, darlin’.” The Irish brogue came on thick. “Don’t be a-lashin’ me with yer tongue. I have an explanation.”

“I’ll just bet you do,” Luke observed from behind his brother. “You always have an explanation.”

Kat turned white. “They thought I was dead! They mourned me.”

Her husband attempted a smile. “Won’t they be happy to learn they were mistaken?”

“Why, Rory?” Kat asked, advancing on him. “Why did you lie about the telegrams?”

“I didn’t exactly lie,” Rory said, his brogue disappearing.

“Rory,” Kat warned even as she swiped furiously at the tears spilling from her eyes.

“All right. All right.” Shedding his attempts at charm, he tugged impatiently at his black cape’s string tie around his neck. “It’s all connected to the Dickerson brothers.”

Kat folded her arms. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Who are the Dickerson brothers?” Mari asked.

“We’ve been running from them since we left Fort Worth, although I don’t know why, since Rory gave him all our money on our way out of town.”

Luke muttered an invective. “I wondered why you were selling magic-show tickets with ten thousand dollars in your pocket.”

Mari and Kat looked at each other, then at Luke.

“Ten thousand dollars?” Mari repeated.

“And I’m bunking in a whorehouse?” Kat asked.

“Care to explain that one, brother?” Luke said to Rory.

“Brother!” Kat exclaimed.

“Half brothers, actually,” Mari clarified.

Kat lifted her fingers to her head and began massaging her temples. “Just what is going on here? Obviously, there is much about this situation that I don’t understand.”

Rory tossed his black cape onto the bed, then raked his fingers through his hair. In the action, Mari for the first time saw a familial resemblance between the two men. “You remember Tom and Joe Dickerson, don’t you, Luke?”

“Those redheaded boys? The ones you and Murphy used to go fishing with?”

Murphy
, Mari thought. Wonderful. She was liking this less and less.

“I ran into them last time I was in Galveston, and we got into a bit of a scrape. It was bad business, Luke. More than I had bargained for. The long and the short of it is, I left town with something they think is theirs. They’re looking for it, and I don’t want ’em to have it.”

“That was an eventful trip to Galveston,” Luke drawled. “You may have taken something with you, but need I remind you that you left something else behind?”

Mari glanced at Luke. Though she found herself quite curious about this “something” Rory referred to, a note in Luke’s voice, along with the hard look in his eyes, told her to pay close attention to what he’d said.

Something left behind?

Rory rubbed the back of his neck. “I remember. Maybe we could talk about it another time?”

“Soon,” Luke snapped. “So, let me see if I follow this. You gave those redheaded Dickerson boys the ten thousand dollars you stole from your sister, the only support money she’s ever received from her children’s father, but that wasn’t enough to get ’em off your tail?”

“I didn’t exactly steal Janna’s money. I borrowed it. I have every intention of paying it back. I only had about eight of it left when I turned it over to the Dickersons. I think it would have been enough, but they talked to Murphy and told him what I had. Murphy wants it, of course, so I knew they wouldn’t stop coming after me.” Glancing at Kat, he added, “Not unless they thought I was dead.”

Mari put the clues together. “You read the obituaries in the newspaper, didn’t you? You knew we thought you’d died. That’s why you didn’t send the telegram.”

Still looking at Kat, he nodded. “I thought it was the best way to protect your sister.”

“Not to mention yourself,” Luke observed with a snort.

Her expression wounded, Kat said, “You lied to me. All this time, you’ve been lying to me. How could you? I’m your wife!”

Below his breath, but loud enough that Mari heard it, Luke muttered, “Where have I heard that before?”