My Darling Melissa (31 page)

“An operation might or might not relieve the pressure on the optic nerve,” he explained. “There is a possibility that her sight will return on its own—in these cases, the body can take considerable time to repair itself. Mr. Rafferty’s concern—and I admit that I share it—is this: Surgery could halt the healing process, if it’s happening.”

Melissa was sitting on the edge of her chair. “You mean it’s really possible for Mary’s eyesight to come back on its own? It’s been a year, after all.”

The doctor nodded. “Yes, it’s possible.”

She turned and looked up at Quinn’s face, and in that moment she knew that the subject of Mary’s surgery was closed. The risks were too great, and he wasn’t willing to take them.

His decision was either the beginning of Mary’s hopes or the end of them. Only God could know which.

Eighteen

The big house was quiet at last.

Adam Corbin breathed a contented sigh and spread an ace-high straight flush out on the surface of the small table in his office.

Jeff threw in his cards and muttered, “Damn it, that woman’s got me so confounded I can’t even play a decent hand of poker!”

Keith laid down two measly jacks and laughed. “Who are you trying to kid?” he asked good-naturedly. “Fancy’s the best thing that ever happened to you, and you know it.”

Turning in his chair, Jeff glowered at his younger brother but said nothing.

“Don’t mind the captain here,” Adam said, taking a cheroot from the pocket of his shirt and lighting it with a wooden match. “He’s feeling sorry for himself tonight.”

Keith coughed as smoke wafted through the cramped, cluttered little room. He ignored Adam’s remark. “You ought to give those things up,” he said, referring to the cheroot. “They’re bad for you.”

Jeff rolled his eyes. “Are you going to treat us to a sermon?” he drawled.

Keith drew his chair a little closer to the table and cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, big brother,” he began, “I do feel a need to offer my help in your hour of desolation.” He paused and looked back over one shoulder. “It’s sure quiet in here. Where are the children?”

Adam shrugged. “We’re hiding out from them,” he answered with a straight face. In truth, Maggie, the housekeeper, had put the herd of them to bed upstairs.

Jeff glared at Keith. “I don’t need your help or anybody else’s,” he grumbled, as though there had been no break in the conversation. “In fact, I think you’ve got some nerve even bringing up the subject! What the hell do you know about what I’m going through?
Your
wife is safe under your roof, probably warming your slippers or something!”

Keith sighed. “Tess is as fired up about women getting the vote as Banner and Fancy are,” he told his brother patiently.

“But she didn’t go to Seattle to the rally, did she?” Jeff asked, looking smug.

“She would have if it weren’t for the chicken pox.”

Adam was amused to see that Jeff shrank back a little at these words, as though Keith had been in contact with bubonic plague. “Chicken pox?” he echoed thinly. “Tess has the chicken pox?”

Keith chuckled and shook his head. “No, Jeff. The children do. Probably got it from the Bradley children. They came down with it a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh.” Jeff looked reflective for a few moments, then horrified. “My God, what if my boys get it? Fancy’s going to be away for a week!”

Although Adam certainly didn’t relish the idea of a chicken pox epidemic sweeping through the family as well as Port Hastings in general, he couldn’t help grinning at the thought of Jeff trying to take care of three itchy little boys. “You’ve got a housekeeper,” he suggested. “Make her look after the kids.”

Jeff looked crestfallen. “I can’t. She quit.”

Adam and Keith exchanged a knowing look that seemed to infuriate Jeff, and he shoved back his chair and nervously loosened the collar of his shirt. “Hell, what am I worrying about? They might not even come down with anything.”

“How about you, Jeff?” Keith asked with a broad grin. “Have you ever had chicken pox?”

“I don’t remember,” Jeff said.

“You haven’t,” Adam informed him.

“Good God!” Jeff boomed as the possibility of his own infection struck him. He’d talked with the Bradleys at church himself!

Adam and Keith both laughed, even though neither of them was immune to chicken pox either.

Jeff scratched the side of his neck. “Don’t just sit there,” he said to Adam. “Deal the cards.”

Adam began to shuffle the worn deck. “Actually,” he began after clearing his throat, “it just so happens that Keith and I did want to have a little talk with you.”

Jeff looked suspiciously from one brother to the other. “About what?” he demanded.

“Your private business,” Keith said bluntly. “We feel the need to interfere in it a bit.”

Color suffused Jeff’s face. “Is that so?”

Adam set the cards in the middle of the table, and Jeff cut them automatically, even though his dark blue eyes were fixed on his brother the whole time and snapping with fury.

“You’re going to lose Fancy if you keep on being so damned hardheaded,” Adam said, speaking around the cheroot clamped in his teeth. “Do you really want that, Jeff?”

He seemed to deflate, settling back in his chair and reaching for the glass of whiskey he’d been nursing all evening. Glumly, he shook his head. “This whole thing has gotten completely out of hand. I don’t even know how to start making things right again.”

“I’d suggest moving back into your own house, for one thing,” Keith ventured to say, making a steeple of his fingers beneath his chin. At the defiant look this brought from his
brother he added, “You’re going to have to give some ground, Jeff. Let Fancy have a little breathing space.”

Jeff sighed and idly scratched his left shoulder. “I guess that means I shouldn’t go over to Seattle and drag her out of that rally by her collar,” he said with a sheepish grin. “Damn it, a week is a long time.”

“Long enough to think about what you want to say to her,” Keith pointed out.

Adam was pleased, since this was the first sign of cooperation Jeff had shown since his marital problems had begun. He glanced at Keith. “Shall I deal you in for another hand, Reverend?”

Keith shook his head. “Can’t stay. I’ve got a wife and a warm pair of slippers waiting at home.”

“Lucky bastard,” Jeff muttered, albeit with a half grin.

“Amen,” said Adam.

It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and the steamboat was scheduled to sail in an hour. Quinn was having a heart-to-heart talk with Mary in the hotel dining room, so Melissa set off for the nearby newspaper office.

The place was bristling with excitement, and the huge presses made an ear-splitting racket. People ran in every direction, some of them shouting, and the air smelled of ink and sweat and smoke.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” a clerk yelled, smiling at Melissa.

“I just want to look!” Melissa hollered back pleasantly.

The clerk nodded, but cautioned at the top of his lungs, “Be sure and stay out of the way, now, or you might get hurt!”

Melissa wandered around as long as she dared and left the clamorous building with a freshly printed edition of the
Seattle Times
under her arm. When she met Quinn in the hotel lobby, as agreed, she was full to bursting with what she’d seen and heard.

There were shadows in Quinn’s eyes, even though he smiled as he listened to Melissa’s accounting. She had
chattered on for several minutes before she brought herself up short and said, “I’m sorry, Quinn. I didn’t even ask about Mary. Is she going with us, or will she stay here?”

He sighed. “She’s staying—going back to school.”

Melissa slid her arm through the crook of her husband’s. Their baggage was being carried outside and loaded into the boot of a carriage, and in the distance she could hear the sad drone of half a dozen steam whistles. “Maybe Mary will want to come back to Port Riley when the term is over.”

Quinn not only failed to answer, he seemed so preoccupied that Melissa didn’t say another word until they’d reached the wharf. Their baggage was being hauled aboard the steamer, and Quinn had just paid the carriage driver.

“Still wishing we didn’t have to go back home?” Melissa inquired as her husband escorted her along the creaky wharf toward the boarding ramp.

At last Quinn seemed to really see Melissa, and to hear her. He smiled and squeezed her hand. “No, Calico, I’m not sorry. With you beside me I can handle anything.”

Melissa was both pleased and flattered, even though she knew that men often said such things just to distract a woman from a subject they didn’t want to discuss. “I can’t wait to start my newspaper,” she said happily.

Quinn laughed and steered her into the salon, but they didn’t remain in that spacious room for long, because the weather was too beautiful. It was only when Seattle was far behind and the midday meal was being served that Quinn and Melissa returned to seat themselves at a table.

Melissa opened her newspaper, the one she’d been given that morning after her brief tour, and immediately a piece midway down the front page caught her eye: “Fraud Uncovered in Seattle Justice System.”

A peculiar feeling of dread niggled in the pit of Melissa’s stomach as she scanned the short article, as mysterious as the force that had drawn her attention to that particular item in the first place.

“What is it?” Quinn asked, reaching across the table to close one hand over Melissa’s wrist. “You’re white as snow.”

Melissa pulled free of him to rest one hand at the base of
her throat. Her heart was hammering there, fit to choke her. “Dear God,” she whispered. “Oh, dear God!”

“Melissa!”

She laid the newspaper down slowly on the table, gazing at Quinn and wondering how he could have said such pretty words and made such tender love to her when all the while his heart had been black and shriveled and evil within him. She tried to speak but couldn’t, and some calm part of her mind reflected that that was probably a good thing, since there were people around.

Quinn snatched the newspaper up and scoured its front with smoldering brown eyes. “What the—?”

“What a good pretender you are,” Melissa managed to get out. Her eyes were brimming with tears now. “When all the time you knew. God in heaven, I don’t know how you can live with yourself!”

Quinn looked so explosively frustrated that Melissa stabbed at the headline in question with one finger and half sobbed, “There!”

As Quinn read the piece he looked honestly shocked. What an actor he is! she thought.

“The justice of the peace who married us was a fraud,” he said when he looked up, and he sounded like a man talking in his sleep.

Melissa was shaking her head slowly from side to side in an utter agony of the soul. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know,” she pleaded. “I remember how you talked with that man—you called him by his first name, you were friends! Quinn Rafferty, you had to have known that any marriage he performed would be invalid!”

“Melissa,” Quinn whispered raggedly, furiously, “you can’t believe that!”

Melissa did believe it, and she had initials carved in trees for proof—Quinn’s initials, and Gillian’s. She had his own admission that he wanted the borrowing power a link with her family could give him. Lastly, there was his first reaction to her suspicion that she was pregnant. He’d been patently horrified.

As he looked at her something changed in Quinn’s face.
She saw the eagerness to convince her fade away, heard him say with resignation, “I suppose you’ll want to get off the steamer in Port Hastings.”

Melissa shook her head. “I have no intention of making things so easy for you,” she said coldly. “I’m going on to Port Riley, where I intend to publish a newspaper.”

His face was drawn, and in that moment Quinn looked far older than his thirty-three years. “I think we’ve got more important things to discuss than your harebrained ideas about cranking out local gossip on that decrepit old press,” he said. Ignoring the angry color blooming in Melissa’s face, he went on. “You’re so anxious to believe that I deceived you. Why is that, Melissa? Is it because you’ve decided that being married isn’t what you want after all—even though you’re probably carrying my baby?”

Melissa had never been more confused or more tormented. The shock of finding herself still a spinster when she’d thought she was a wife left her in a terrible muddle. “This is my baby,” she said belatedly, resting both hands on her stomach. “Not yours.”

The rest of the journey seemed interminable. When the steamer docked temporarily at Port Hastings Melissa felt a wild urge to run home to her brothers and sob out her sad story. She knew they would take her side and probably even avenge her, but when the ship chugged onward toward Port Riley she was still aboard it.

Quinn had avoided her insofar as he could since their confrontation over the newspaper article. When the ship docked that evening, however, he insisted on escorting her down the ramp and then ordered her things loaded into the waiting wagon.

Melissa was furious, but she was too weary to make a scene in front of the town. She grasped Quinn’s arm and whispered, “What do you think you’re doing? I certainly have no intention of going home with you, Mr. Rafferty.”