Love & Marry (8 page)

She pressed her hand against her chest.
Had the man’s death been a result of what she’d witnessed the night before
?

After she caught her breath, she said, “And I-I may have been the last one to see him alive.”

“I’ve sent a man to Lake Andes to fetch the sheriff,” the driver said. “He’ll probably have some questions for you.”

He offered his hand to help her down from the stage.

“How long will we be stuck here?” Joshua asked. “My wife and I are supposed to be in Deadwood on Saturday for her sister’s wedding.”

The driver shrugged a shoulder. “Sorry for your troubles, but I’m not leaving my wife here alone with a dead man. She’s in the family way. Besides, the murdered man came in on this stage last night, and I’m not moving this rig until the Sheriff says it can go.”

Annabelle sat in one of the porch rockers and watched the stage driver pace back and forth across the yard. He wouldn’t allow anyone to go back into the inn, and the heat of the day was steadily rising. She removed the fan from her purse and waved it around her face. As hot as
she
was, Daisy must have been miserable.

“Are you alright?” Annabelle asked.

The woman nodded but Annabelle couldn’t help noticing the tremor in her hands.

“I’m fine,” Daisy said. “I’ve just never seen anything like that before. There was blood everywhere.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In the root cellar right outside the kitchen,” Daisy said. “I can’t figure out what he would have been doing in there.”

“He was such a strange person,” Annabelle said. “He hardly said two words during the whole trip from Tyndall.”

“He listed his address as Yankton,” Daisy said. “But he boarded the stage in Tyndall for some reason.”

Annabelle opened her purse again and took out a handkerchief to pat away the beads of perspiration popping out around her hairline.
Had he been murdered only steps away from her while she finished her bath and dressed
?
And what about the diamonds
? It seemed to be taking forever for the law to get to the way station.

“How much longer do you think it will be?” she asked.

“It’s a little over eleven miles to Lake Andes,” Daisy said. “Riding our fastest horse at a good gallop, it takes around forty-five minutes to get there. Duke might have had to wait on the sheriff or the undertaker.”

Her head snapped around at the sound of horses hooves. Daisy got to her feet and ambled to the edge of the porch. “It’s them,” she said.

Annabelle joined her on the steps. Along with Duke, she saw two other men on horseback and a man clothed in a black suit and black top hat, driving a wagon. The stage driver went to meet them and said a few words to the two men wearing badges before they all started toward the inn. One of the lawmen was an older man with patches gray around the temples and deep lines around his mouth and eyes.

The other man seemed to be much younger and…familiar. She’d seen him before. He’d held the door for her at the train depot in Yankton.

“That’s Marshal Johnson, in case you were wondering,” Daisy said. “He must have been in Lake Andes today. Good thing, too. Sheriff Tuttle couldn’t catch a killer if one turned himself in.”

“How did he get the job?” Annabelle asked.

“He’s the only one who’d take it.” She sat back down in the rocker. “I just can’t understand who would do this,” Daisy said. “There wasn’t anyone here last night except you, my husband, the stagehands and me. My housekeeper lives down the road a piece, and she went home right after we cleaned up the supper dishes.” Daisy paused and looked Annabelle up and down. “You don’t look like the kind of person who would murder somebody—not with a knife anyway.”

While taking the seat next to Daisy, she pondered whether to tell the woman the truth or wait until Marshal Johnson and Sheriff Tuttle questioned her. She twisted the wedding band she still wore on her left hand.

“You’re awfully young and pretty to be walking around in black mourning clothes,” Daisy said. “How long have you been a widow?”

Annabelle lowered her eyes. “Not long. My husband was an older man and in poor health when we married,” she said.

“Oh, I see,” Daisy said. “Not that it’s any of my business, but you should take off the mourning dress. There are plenty of good, strapping young men out here looking for wives. The men outnumber the women, you know.”

She knew that Daisy meant well but becoming someone’s wife again wasn’t on her agenda for the near future. At the moment, she was more concerned with figuring out how to take care of herself. She switched the subject to the matter at hand.

“Daisy, how easy would it be for someone to come on the property after dark without anyone knowing it?” she asked.

“Well, that depends on which direction they were coming from,” Daisy said. “And they would have to leave their horse or wagon somewhere down the road and sneak up on foot. The stagehands sometimes sit up late playing poker, but I think they turned in early last night.”

“Did you see Mr. Kelly go outside?”

Daisy straightened in the chair. “Right after supper and the strangest thing was that he took that valise with him. Why would a man go outside at night with his valise?”

“And did you see him come back into house?”

Her brow furrowed. “No, I didn’t. But you were out in the bathhouse around that same time. Did you hear or see anything?”

“I—”

The screen door flew open. Daisy’s husband came out and called to the men, “Duke, Billy, come give the undertaker a hand.” He turned and looked at Annabelle. “Mrs. Miles, the Marshal has some questions for you. He’s waiting for you in the parlor.”

She stood on shaky legs. She’d never been questioned by the law for any reason, much less as a witness in a murder case. This trip to see her aunt was turning out less than grand. She hoped this wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.

Both the marshal and the sheriff awaited her in the small parlor.

“Ma’am, I’m U.S. Marshal Luke Johnson,” he said. “This is Sheriff Tuttle of Lake Andes.”

He motioned for her to take a seat on the dark green, velvet-upholstered settee. The Sheriff sat in the wingback chair next to the sofa while the Marshal leaned against the mantelpiece with his arms crossed over his broad chest.

“Mr. Hansen said that you might have some information about the victim,” Sheriff Tuttle said.

For some reason, she felt as if she couldn’t get her breath.
Why was she so nervous
? All she had to do was tell them what she knew.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “Last night, after supper, I went out to the bathhouse. I saw Mr. Kelly talking with another man. I had a feeling that their business was private, so I didn’t make my presence known.”

Annabelle turned and looked at Marshal Johnson. The formidable lawman stared at her in way that made her slightly uncomfortable, but she continued with her story.

“I heard them talking about a diamond mine, and Mr. Kelly handed over what looked like a large sum of money in exchange for a pouch containing a handful of diamonds—maybe a dozen—and a deed to the mine.”

Marshal Johnson’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute, sheriff. Before the undertaker leaves with the body, check Mr. Kelly’s suit pockets for the items Mrs. Miles just mentioned.”

“No,” Annabelle said. “He didn’t put them in his pockets. He put them back in that valise he was carrying.”

“Then search around the area where we found the body for a valise,” Luke said.

Sheriff Tuttle went out leaving her alone with Marshal Johnson who took the seat that Tuttle had vacated. “Are you sure that the pouch contained diamonds?” he asked.

“He—Mr. Kelly said that they were diamonds. He had one of those eyepieces that jewelers use.”

Marshal Johnson leaned forward with his elbows on his knees bringing his face closer to hers. “You must have been in very close proximity to witness all of this.”

Heat rushed to her cheeks, and she found herself stammering. “I-I was in the tub. They were in the room next door.”

He squinted at her. “You can see through walls, Mrs. Miles?”

She released the breath she’d been holding. “Of course not. I saw them through a cracked board in the partition. I had turned down the wick of my lamp so that I wouldn’t be seen in my altogether by anyone passing by the window. I’m from back east, Marshal. I’m not used to bathing out in the open.”

A crooked smile worked its way across his lips, changing his face from stern to handsome. He nodded. “Must have been a pretty big crack for you to have seen so much,” he said.

Was he making fun of her
? She straightened her posture. “I was curious, so I made an extra effort to see what they were doing.”

“I see,” he said with a tilt of his head. “Can you describe the man? Would you know him if you saw him again?”

Annabelle nodded. “Yes, I’m sure I would. He was tall, had dark hair and a mustache. He had the build of a man who does hard labor, and something else. He had a long scar across the back of one hand.”

Sheriff Tuttle appeared in the doorway carrying the brown leather case. “I searched the body and the root cellar, Marshal. Here’s the valise, but it’s empty. The lock has been pried open. I did find
this
in one of his pockets.” The Sheriff showed Marshal Johnson a piece of paper. “It’s a telegram instructing Mr. Kelly to meet someone named Nate Harper at this way station on yesterday’s date,” he said. “It’s signed with the initials J.F.”

“I heard Mr. Kelly call the other man Mr. Harper,” Annabelle said.

“Take this to the telegraph office in Lake Andes,” Marshal Johnson said. “And find out if the operator has any way of knowing which telegraph office it was sent from.”

“Are you not coming back to Lake Andes?” the Sheriff asked.

“I’ll be along later,” The Marshal said. “I want to do a thorough search of the premises on my own before I send the stage on its way.” He turned back to Annabelle. “Can you think of anything else that might help my investigation, Mrs. Miles?”

“I’ve told you all I know,” she said. “After the two men left the bathhouse, I didn’t see or hear anything else.” She paused and held up a finger. “No wait a minute. There is something else, but I don’t know if it means anything.”

“Go on,” he said.

“Before he extinguished the lamp, Mr. Harper checked the time on his pocket watch as if it were important that he know the time. It looked just like a gold watch that my husband had.” She shrugged one shoulder. “That’s all.”

“Well, thank you, Mrs. Miles.”

He stood and started towards the door. Before leaving, he stopped and turned back to her. “May I ask where you’re going,” he said. “Just in case I have more questions.”

“Red Gorge,” she said.

One eyebrow rose. “That’s a small mining town. Kind of a rough and tumble place for a lady if I may say so.”

His description of her destination didn’t do much to set her frayed nerves at ease. “My aunt lives there. She owns a gold mine.”

He nodded and smiled. “Well, take care, Mrs. Miles.”

His eyes lingered on her for a moment before he left the room. For the first time during her journey west, she considered high tailing it back to Baltimore the quickest way possible.

L.K. Campbell has been writing for most of her life. Her professional writing career began with a weekly newspaper column called
Scenes From Real Life
. She wrote this column for her hometown newspaper for four years. She began writing fiction in her early twenties, choosing the romance genre because she enjoyed reading books by Victoria Holt as well as the Harlequin and Silhouette lines.

From 1986-2007, she worked for her hometown, daily newspaper, becoming the paper’s composition supervisor in 2000. In 2007, she left the newspaper and now does e-book formatting for “indie” authors and for two publishers as her full-time business, LK E-Book Formatting Service.

For more information, visit
http://www.lkcampbell.com

Books By L.K. Campbell

Available at most e-book retailers.

Novels

A Soldier’s Love

Gold Star Wife

A Different Tune

Front Page News

Novellas

The Law & Annabelle

Inheriting Evergreen

Short Stories

Love & Marry

Christmas Wishes (Lead Me Home & In The Nick of Time)