Rainy Day Dreams: 2 (38 page)

There were
two
Kathryns.

“I’ve got this one,” shouted Noah, and grabbed up the one in the nightgown.

A bullet whipped through the air above Jason’s head. Forcing his dead limbs to move, he grabbed the other. When he hefted her in his arms, something tumbled to the ground. A dark brown braid. He couldn’t make sense of that now. Snatching it out of the dirt, he whirled and carried the inert form to safety.

Kathryn swam to consciousness, the air around her thick with the smell of gunpowder. The crack of gunshots ricocheted off the walls, fired from every direction around her. The noise was deafening. Even worse were the high-pitched whoops that penetrated the fort from outside, ferocious battle cries echoing toward them from the forest. The savage screeches chilled the blood in her veins.

“You’re all right. You’re safe now.” Evie’s voice, soothing and
comforting, was accompanied by something cool and wet pressing against her forehead. She opened her eyes to find her friend’s face hovering over hers.

“What happened?” Her memory was a foggy jumble. The battle had begun, that much she remembered. She’d rushed to the hotel, jerked Susan out of a deep sleep, and dragged her, protesting, outside.

“You fainted, that’s all.” Evie picked up her hand and pushed her fingers in place to hold the compress to her own forehead.

“Again?” How utterly embarrassing. When had she turned into one of those fluttery women who swooned?

“Apparently it’s a family trait,” her friend said drily. “Your sister fainted too.”

She pointed to a place a few feet away, where Susan sat propped against a post, her hand trembling as she held a cup to her lips. People huddled all around her, most of them seated on the dirt floor, faces pale in the glow that shone through the slitted windows. Dust motes danced in the light, whirling around the heads of the men who stood at every opening, upstairs and down, rifles pointed outward.

Another battery of shots volleyed around them, and nearby a child’s crying took on a fevered pitch. The import of her situation struck her, and she jerked upright. The war had begun.

Evie tried to push her back down, but she waved her friend off.

“I’m fine. Let me help someone who needs it. Are there many wounded?” She hesitated, almost afraid to ask. “Or…killed?”

Amazement stole over Evie’s features. “None so far. A few gunshot wounds, none of them too serious.”

A child near the far corner stood from where he had been sitting with a group of other youngsters. He dashed around the perimeter of the crowd in her direction.

“Miss Kathryn!”

The poor boy’s face crumpled as he drew near, and she opened her arms. Sobbing with fear, John William threw himself into them. Forget what his grandfather might say. For now, the child needed comfort. She hugged him close.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

When his wretched shivers stopped, he pulled back to look up at her with round eyes. He lifted a hand and tugged at her hair. “You look funny, Miss Kathryn.”

“I do?”

She reached up to feel her braid, and her fingers grasped ragged ends. It all came back in a rush. The mad dash down the street with Susan. Louisa running ahead of her. The blockhouse looming in the distance. The fear, the stark
terror
as a bullet blasted into the dirt not two yards away. She’d spotted a familiar figure standing at the top of the hill, tall and beckoning, and her heart had leaped into her throat. Jason! She’d wanted to sob her relief, but she couldn’t waste the energy.

And then something whizzed by her head. A bullet! She heard it whoosh past her ear like a tornado. A pungent, burning smell. Her hair was on fire. She’d reached up, grabbed her braid, and it came off in her hand, the edges singed. And then everything went black.

“They shot straight through my braid.” She looked up at Evie for verification.

Her friend nodded and pulled something out of her apron pocket. She tossed it into Kathryn’s lap. “Jason picked it up when he went after you.”

“Jason came after me?” Tears leaped into her eyes, blurring Evie’s nod. Furiously, she blinked them away. “Where is he?”

Evie’s head lifted to scan the upper perimeter. “There.” She pointed to the platform above them.

Kathryn twisted around to look, and her gaze locked with his. Jason! She saw his lips move, saw them form her name. Emotion rose up in her, so thick for a moment she couldn’t breathe. His eyes
blazed with an intensity she could see even in the dim light, even across the distance, and it wrapped around her like an embrace.

Then he turned back to the window and lifted his rifle back into place.

Another torrent of shots pounded against the thick wall behind her. A new chorus of screams arose from the terrified people in that vicinity, and the ones seated closest to the wall scurried toward the center. Susan yelped and closed the space between them on her hands and knees, where she hovered beside Kathryn, trembling.

“What kind of place have I come to?” She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in Kathryn’s shoulder. “I shoulda stayed in California, where it’s safe.”

John William leaned back in her lap to look at the newcomer, and surprise flashed onto his features. Tears forgotten, he lifted a hand to stroke Susan’s cheek.

“There’s two Miss Kathryns,” he said to Evie, his eyes full of wonder. “Only that one still gots all her hair.”

A wild desire to laugh seized Kathryn. She swallowed it back. A ferocious fear hovered over her, and she was afraid if she started laughing she would give in to hysteria. Instead she forced her tone into a semblance of normalcy for the boy’s sake.

“There aren’t two of me, sweetheart. This is my sister, Miss Susan. Susan, this is John William.”

Susan lifted her face to peer at the child. A quick, nervous smile flashed onto her lips. “Hello. Aren’t you a cute little…”

Her voice trailed off, and her mouth inched open. She stared at the child, jaw dangling. A look of utter disbelief stole over her features.

In a flash, everything fell together. Will’s accusation rang in Kathryn’s ears even louder than the retort of the rifles.

“
Does your father know what you really are, or have you fooled him along with everyone else?”

“I don’t know what game you’re playing but I will not let you ruin everything. We’re happy here.”

All the time she thought he knew her secret. That he would expose her for being a criminal. But she was wrong.

He thinks I’m Susan.

And that meant he knew Susan from somewhere. With eyes that felt like they were finally open for the first time, she looked at John William. The time she’d seen him biting the tip of his tongue, he’d looked so much like Papa. The round green eyes, so very similar to her own. The same color as hers…and Susan’s.

From his vantage point on the upper deck, Jason counted the pillars of smoke visible through the loophole. Eight, and that was only on the east side of town. How many homesteads had been ransacked and burned? How many lives lost? He turned to scan the people crowded below him. Nowhere near the three hundred souls who called Seattle home. Had their senses of danger dulled with the repeated false alarms, or had they been too terrified by the actual attack to escape?

The gunfire from the forest had slowed to a few scattered shots twenty minutes ago, and then ceased completely. One of Captain Gansevoort’s scouts reported that he’d heard a squaw shout
hyas muckamuck,
which David translated as
lots of food.

“Do you smell that?” Beside him, Noah pointed his nose in the direction of the window and sniffed. “They’ve butchered our livestock for sure and roasted them for lunch.”

Beyond Noah, Big Dog turned a wry scowl on him. “It’d be nice if they’d share. My belly’s as empty as a rain bucket with a hole in the bottom.”

“Here.” Noah scooped a bulging scrap of linen off the floor near his feet. “It’s only a biscuit, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Where’d you get that?”

His shoulders shook with a quick laugh. “Louisa Denny. She said she was pulling them out of the oven when the alarm came, so she dumped them in her apron, grabbed her daughter, and left.”

Jason looked down to find Louisa, but his gaze stole once again to the place below him where Kathryn and her sister sat in a small cluster of women. Twins. With a hand that smelled of sulfur he scrubbed at his scalp, as if he could force his thoughts into something that made sense. The frenzy of the past eight hours had left him too bone-tired to think straight.

To his right, Will had claimed a seat on a half-empty gunpowder keg. He, too, stared at the pair, his expression one of stunned disbelief.

“All this time, I thought it was her.” His head shook back and forth. “I thought she’d given a false name to deceive me until she could make arrangements to take him.”

“I can see why you’d think so.” Though he had not yet seen Kathryn’s sister up close, the resemblance from this distance was so striking as to be uncanny. “I couldn’t understand why you hated her so.”

“I can’t bear the thought of losing him.” The agony in his voice snatched at Jason’s heart, and he followed his gaze to the boy, John William, who was seated between Kathryn and her sister. “She didn’t want him. John told me so. He met her in a saloon in El Dorado and fell for her. I went and saw her dance there once. Didn’t tell her who I was.” His glance slid sideways to Jason’s face. “He would have married her when he found out there was a baby coming, but she wouldn’t have him. Said she was too young to be tied down to a husband and child. When the boy was born she gave him to John. A month later she left town. My son brought my grandson home. To me. And then he was killed.” He closed his eyes, pain etched in
the creases on his face. “I made inquiries about her, found out her father was a wealthy man. I was afraid he’d come for his grandson. My grandson.”

“So you came here, to Seattle.”

“I never thought she’d find us here.” He turned sideways on the keg and fixed an intense gaze on Jason. “I can’t lose him, Jason. John William is all I have left of my son. And I—I love the boy.”

Jason clasped his shoulder with a sympathetic grip. He had no answers. Did a grandfather have rights in this situation? It was a question for legal minds, not his. Perhaps David would write to his brother Arthur in Olympia. With the Dennys vouching for Will’s character, he might have a chance.

Unless Kathryn’s sister could claim that he was unsuitable to raise a child. Another answer fell into place in his mind.

“You stole the oil of turpentine from Kathryn, didn’t you?” He pitched his voice low.