Home by Nightfall (24 page)

She looked out the window, which was bracketed by plain white curtains, and saw that it had begun snowing again. The light ticking of frozen flakes on the glass caught her attention. That east wind, so frigid in the winter and broiling hot in summer, blasted the back end of this building. Soon, she imagined, all commerce in town would come to a stop. She couldn’t begin to guess how Cole would drive the truck back to the house.

Josh and Wade were with Cole at the blacksmith shop next door. The three adults felt that it was too soon for them to visit Tanner, and Cole found ways to keep them occupied.

A few patients who lived close by straggled into the clinic, and Susannah heard them come and go. Sometime in the afternoon, she heard the overhead bell ring on the door out in the waiting room, and then the low rumble of Whit Gannon’s voice speaking to Jessica. Presently, she also heard the approach of Jess’s footsteps. She poked her head around the screen.

“Whit would like to ask you a few questions, Susannah.” She glanced at the sleeping Tanner. “He should be all right to leave alone for a few minutes. Cole also got you a tray from Granny Mae’s.” Just as Susannah was about to protest, Jess stopped her. “You might not be hungry but you have to keep up your strength. Tanner and the boys will need you.”

Susannah nodded and sighed. “All right.” She stood and gave Tanner an agonized look.

Jess patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll be close by in case he needs anything.”

Walking down the hall to the front, Susannah saw the sheriff waiting for her, hat in hand. He was tall and lanky, with mostly salt–and-some-pepper hair and a luxuriant mustache that had lost its color when he was in his midthirties. Other towns might have law officers with uniforms and such, but Whit Gannon had not evolved. She thought he would have looked right at home in a sheriff’s office fifty years earlier, with his sheepskin coat, vest, badge, bandana, and gun belt. For the sake of efficiency, the county had provided him with an automobile, but he was just as likely to be seen on horseback. Today, she saw his Model T parked outside.

“Miss Susannah, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry to trouble you at a time like this.”

“That’s all right, Whit. If I can help, you know I will.”

He nodded. “I’ve talked to Cole and Doc Jessica about what happened, and I’ve been doing some checking on my own but I’d
sure like to have more information to go on. Since the war ended, quite a few homeless drifters have been wandering the country. Now and then, one of them is bound to make trouble. Have you seen anyone lurking around your place recently?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question all day. At first I couldn’t think of anything odd happening. But I remember that just before Christmas, Tanner and I went out with the boys to cut a tree for Christmas. Someone shot at us.”

Whit’s brows rose. “You’re sure?”

She nodded. “At first Tanner thought that someone was just out pheasant hunting. But several shots were fired after the bird was flushed out of the brush.” Absently, she toyed with the fringe on her shawl, still wracking her brain. From next door she heard the muted sound of Cole’s hammer on the anvil. Across the street, Granny Mae’s café traffic had slowed but she saw three or four people sitting at the tables.

Whit turned the brim of his hat in his hands. “Um, ma’am, this is not an easy question to ask.” Susannah’s eyes flashed back to his. “Well, it’s pretty common knowledge that when Riley learned about Tanner, he didn’t take the news too well. Is it possible that he—I mean do you think he could have anything to do with the shooting?” He glanced at the floor and shifted his weight from one hip to the other.

Susannah swallowed. What could she say? How could she express that nagging shadow of doubt she’d felt with nothing to explain or defend it? She’d seen not much more than his profile and a rifle barrel retreat into the kitchen. To make such an accusation would be horrible enough. To be wrong about it would be devastating to the family, especially after everything else they’d been through. “No, I don’t see h-how Riley could—would—”

All of this went through her mind in the blink of an eye but Whit must have sensed her hesitation. “Now, Miss Susannah, I know you want me to catch the person responsible for this. Doc Jessica says Tanner’s condition is still touch-and-go, and if the worst should happen—” He inclined his head toward the back of the clinic. Her heart dropped to her stomach at the suggestion. “This will become a murder investigation.”

“Oh, God,” she whispered brokenly.

“Do you have anything else you want to tell me about?”

She pulled up her shawl. “It’s nothing certain. You’ll just think it’s women’s intuition, and nobody puts much stock in that.”

“Well, I do. That gut feeling, that hunch or sense of something—that’s how crimes get solved. I can’t say that I have a lot of practice with that type of thing around here. Powell Springs is a peaceful little town. But that’s why I ask questions.”

“It’s almost nothing, just a coincidence.”

He settled his hat back on his head. “Let me decide what’s important and what isn’t, okay? You just take care of your man.”

She sighed and nodded. “It’s true—Riley has had a terrible time adjusting to life here. I can’t blame him for that after everything he’s been through. Once he got most of his memory back, though, he started drinking more. It sounds odd, but I think he was happier living in that strange world where he couldn’t remember the war or the family. Now he’s become even less settled than he was before he regained his memory—as if he doesn’t know where he belongs or who he should be.” She shrugged. “I know he resents Tanner. How could he not? And I think his father has been planting notions in his head too. Shaw never liked the idea of my marrying Tanner.” She went on to tell him about seeing his profile briefly at the back door that morning, then hurried to
explain. “But really, Whit, you know everyone out here keeps a loaded weapon close by. We have to, what with coyotes coming down from the hills and so on. We even had that cougar pestering us for a while. If I heard a gunshot, I’d probably react the same way he did. After all, Cole had a gun, too.” She realized she was apologizing not only for herself but for Riley as well.

“Sure. I understand.” He looked skeptical. “Well, thanks, Miss Susannah. I’ll check around while there’s still some daylight and see if I can learn anything.” He started to turn for the door. “Oh, by the way, where are Riley and Shaw now?”

“We left them at the house, but that was early this morning.”

He nodded again. “I might take another run out there and see if they have any ideas.” Then he opened the door and walked out.

• • •

“
You’re
a woman—do you think she’ll ever come back?” Orville Forster asked. He sat on the edge of Emmaline’s thin mattress and bent over his considerable belly to tie his shoes. When he stood up, she saw that his face and bald head had turned crimson with the effort and he sucked in a gasp of air. “I keep hoping I’ll get a letter from her, telling me she made a bad mistake and is on her way home. Do you think that will happen?” He still wanted Emmaline’s ear but now he also wanted the rest of her body, and she increased her price to him accordingly.

That he’d made it up here in this weather surprised her, but it told her that he was a man unlikely to give up on an idea, no matter how foolish.

“Sure, Orville, she might,” she replied, spritzing the bottom sheet with an atomizer filled with five-and-dime rose water. He asked her the same thing every time she saw him. The fact that
Lorna, a flighty young woman almost twenty years his junior, had been gone since the end of the war didn’t seem to rain on his dream, so Em told him what he wanted to hear.

He reached for his porkpie hat and put her money on the table. “Thanks, Emmaline. You’re just so nice to talk to and all.”

She finished straightening the bedding and adjusted the tie on her new dressing gown. The old one had become so threadbare, she’d had to break down and replace it. “I’m always happy to help,” she lied. “You take care of yourself.”

He walked the few paces to the door and she followed, eager for him to leave so she could wash.

“I’ll see you again.” He lifted his hat and went outside. Frigid air and the clean smell of snow blew in.

She watched to make sure he was gone, then locked the door and turned to go to the washstand she kept behind the dressing screen. Passing the table, she saw his empty money clip. He must have forgotten it. She picked it up and put it on a shelf over the sink.

With her enameled pitcher in hand, she poured hot water into it from the stove and then began working the pump to add some cold. But before one drop made its way out of the spout, she heard a hard knock on her door. Still holding the pitcher, she sighed and grabbed the money clip. That Orville—she’d seen about as much of him as she wanted to for the next month. Maybe next time he dropped by, she’d be “busy.” She opened the door without bothering to ask who was on the other side.

Em found herself staring down a rifle barrel and into the coldeyed, long face of a menacing-looking man who seemed vaguely familiar. Behind him, she recognized someone she wanted to see far less than Orville. The
last
man she wanted her eyes to fall upon: Lambert Bauer.

Before she had a chance to grab her shotgun, they pushed their way inside. Emmaline dropped the money clip, and with both hands, launched the boiling water in the pitcher at them, scorching her fingers. “Get out!” she yelled with all the authority she could muster from her outnumbered position. The water caught Lambert square in the face, and some splashed on the other man. “
Get the hell out of my house!
”

Lambert squealed like the scalded pig that he was, and his partner backhanded first him, and then Emmaline. “Shut up!”

She hit the floor, still holding the pitcher, which clanged like a cast-iron kettle. Her head felt as if her brain had bumped against her skull with the impact. With no small effort, she pulled herself up and got to her feet.

“Who are you to come busting in? What are you doing here?” she demanded when her ears stopped ringing. Getting slapped wouldn’t send her cowering to the corner. But damn it, the coldeyed man had taken her shotgun from beside the door.

“We’re just going to keep you company for a while,” he said, peeking out the windows. “Is there another way out of here?”

“No.”

Meanwhile, Lambert righted himself. His face and neck were red and beginning to blister. “Goddamn bitch! Look what she did to my face!” he complained to his partner. Despite her own peril, Em felt a moment of supreme satisfaction in looking at the damage. All the black eyes and bruises he’d given her, his years of berating her, forcing himself on her…Right or wrong, her revenge felt good.

“Can’t say it looks any worse than before. I’ve had a bellyful of your whining and laziness,” Rush griped. “You’re as useless as tits on a boar.”

Em remembered Jobie Rush now. He’d visited her a couple of times in the past few months, but there had been nothing remarkable about him to make him stick out in her memory. Until today.

Keeping a death grip on the pitcher, now her only weapon, she considered her options and found few. “What have you done this time, Lambert?” She didn’t want to antagonize these intruders but she was more angry than frightened. Would she never be rid of this man?

“You mind your own damned business, Emmaline,” he snapped, “which, by the way, I hear is booming. Once a whore, always a whore!”

Rush turned and pointed the shotgun at both of them. “Bauer, Em, both of you be quiet or I’ll shoot you myself.” He looked just menacing enough to keep his word. “Tear up that bedsheet and tie her to a chair,” he said to Lambert.

Now Em began to panic. “Why?”

“Go on, Bauer. Do you think you can handle a job
that
simple?”

“She burned my face!”

“You’re not going to use it to tie her up.”

With some grumbling about being tired of Rush’s abuse and how he was just as good as anyone else, Lambert ripped her bed apart and tore into the top sheet with his rotting teeth to get the strips started. “This was supposed to be an easy job,” he complained, ripping the fabric. “Get over to this chair, Emmaline, and make it quick.”

No matter how she wracked her brain, ideas weren’t coming to her, and because she knew she could do nothing else for the time being, she complied. Lambert started tying her ankles together.

“We were supposed to shoot him, get paid, and get out of town. Now we’re holed up here with Emmaline, who’s friends with that bastard Gannon. And you call
me
the dumb one.”

“You shot someone?” She looked at her former husband in horror. This was a rock-bottom low, even for him.

“Bauer, I ain’t going to tell you again—next time I’ll let this shotgun of hers do the talking. Now finish that job.” Rush nosed around Em’s kitchenette. “Don’t you got something to eat here?”

She didn’t bother to answer. Lambert tied her hands, one to each side of the chair back, so tightly she could already feel her fingers beginning to tingle. What would they do to her? Different scenarios galloped through her mind and made her heart pound—kidnapping, rape, death. She knew she was in serious trouble.

Whit hadn’t been up here since the day he offered to take her away from this. Not for the first time, she regretted her rejection of that offer. She wouldn’t be in her current fix if she’d admitted to herself—and to him—how much she cared about him, and that she was sick to death of this life. She knew he cared about her too, and that her past and present didn’t matter to him, only the future.

Whether she still had a future was now in question.

• • •

Riley limped back and forth from the parlor to the kitchen windows that faced the big open yard, stable, and corral. The long hours stretched out behind him and before him, and his only company was a whiskey bottle and his miserable father, who’d spent most of the day in his bed, complaining of belly pain. When Riley had heard the gunfire this morning, vivid memories of the
battlefield, excruciating in their detail, had swamped him. But then he’d looked down and realized
he
was holding the rifle. He couldn’t remember how or why. The barrel was hot and the smell of gunpowder drifted to his nose. He’d put down the weapon as if it were a live viper and had squeezed himself into a corner of the parlor under a table, burying his face against his knees with his hands clamped over his ears. He didn’t know how long he’d sat there, but it had taken all the fortitude he could muster to finally come out of his hiding place.