Two Brothers (11 page)

He found one of scratchy wool, but clean, and handed it through the bars. Then, after bidding her a courtly good night, he went back to the chair behind the desk, settled himself there, and began to read the book he had set aside earlier.

Aislinn was full of questions about Shay and Tristan—had been ever since she’d first seen them together—but it wasn’t the time to make inquiries. She was exhausted, both emotionally and physically, and reluctant to pry, though she suspected that last was a temporary state.

She spread the blanket Tristan had given her over the cot and, with a little grimace, lay down upon it. She supposed stretching out on a jail mattress was no worse than wearing that particular dress. The garment surely had a history of its own; one she didn’t care to examine.

“Do I have to dunk you in the horse trough again, Billy, or are you going to conduct yourself like a gentleman?” Shay asked, crouching beside the youth with the key to the handcuffs at the ready.

“I just wanna go home, that’s all,” Billy whined. He kept his eyes averted, but Shay knew what was in them
all the same: the hope of murder. The converse and bitter realization that, for the moment at least, he was outmatched. “Just let me go home. My pa will be gettin’ real worried long about now.”

Shay blew out a breath and rubbed his chin in a show of deep contemplation. His beard was coming in, and it itched something fierce.

“I’ll see he gets out to Powder Creek all right, Marshal,” volunteered the man Shay had been beating at pool earlier in the evening. Jim O’Sullivan was the foreman on the Kyle ranch, and the old man often sent him along to town to play nursemaid to the boy. Not that it appeared to do much good.

“Well, now, Jim,” Shay said, “I’ll hand him over to you on one condition: that you keep him out of Prominence for a while. Me and Billy here, we’re not on cordial terms these days. We need some time apart.”

O’Sullivan nodded his agreement quickly; no doubt there would be hell to pay if he went back to the Powder Creek spread without the joy and delight of William, Sr.,’s heart.

Shay pretended to consider that, knowing all the while that he couldn’t lock Billy up, since Aislinn was already occupying the only cell. “You got your temper under control?” he asked, and examined the small key between his fingers at great length, as if he’d never seen it before. Billy’d come at him with that bowie knife of his as soon as he’d stepped through the saloon doors earlier that night, after the first encounter with Aislinn, there on the hotel porch. There’d been a scuffle, and Shay had subdued Billy, with more effort than he liked to recall, and finally cuffed him to the boot rail.

During the pool game, which Aislinn had interrupted at the worst possible time, he and O’Sullivan had been discussing the wreck of the stagecoach eighteen months before. The Powder Creek foreman had been getting steadily drunker with every break of the balls, and even
though he’d never admitted to knowing anything about the robbery and murders, it had been plain from the sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead and at the base of his throat that he had some idea who’d been behind it all.

Shay had been real interested in O’Sullivan’s opinion on the matter, but when Aislinn appeared, wearing that god-awful getup and looking scared and defiant, both at the same time, the confessional mood was broken.

He opened the handcuffs and stood, dragging Billy along with him. He flung the boy forward, into O’Sullivan’s arms. “Get him out of here,” he growled.

Billy started to say something he shouldn’t, but O’Sullivan took him by the elbow and headed for the doors.

“That boy’s the sort to shoot a man in the back,” Jake observed, from behind the bar. He was smearing a dirty glass with an even dirtier rag, and when he met Shay’s eyes, it was clear enough that he had a few specific prospects in mind for the honor of receiving Billy’s bullet.

Shay rubbed the back of his neck. It had been a long day, and he was ready for it to be over and done with. He ignored Jake, scanned the saloon in case anyone else was of a mind to offer up their view. To his relief, nobody did so.

The night air was sultry when he stepped outside, and the stars hung low, gleaming like a shower of silver coins fixing to rain down on the earth. Shay smiled at the fanciful thought and headed for the jailhouse.

Tristan was at the desk, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. At Shay’s entrance, he put a finger to his lips, then pointed toward the cell, where Aislinn lay in a pile of frayed purple ruffles. He crossed to the bars and looked in, and something happened inside him, all of the sudden, a sort of shifting slide that changed the terrain of his soul. He suspected the sweet pain he felt was a lasting and elemental proposition, as much beyond his control as that spill of stars he’d admired moments before, and that
scared him more than anything ever had. This was an impervious force, beyond the reach of his wits or his fists or his .45.

After a while, he turned, resigned to utter mystification, and went back to the desk. “You’d better go and get some sleep,” he said to Tristan. “It’s late.”

“Thanks,” Tristan said, low, and with a small grin. “You want to read me a story and hear my prayers?”

Shay didn’t bite the hook; it was too late and he was tired to the bone. He tossed a brass key onto the desk. “My room is on the second floor, over at Miss Mamie’s boardinghouse. In the back, to the right of the landing. She’s used to me coming in late, so she won’t bother about you.”

Tristan looked at the key for a moment, then shrugged and picked it up. “I guess one of us might as well get some rest,” he said, and stood. “You have any luck over at the saloon?”

Shay glanced ruefully toward Aislinn, slumbering so peacefully in the cell, and couldn’t forestall a brief twitch at the corner of his mouth. “I was making a little progress,” he said, “until Miss Lethaby decided to save me from the forces of evil.”

Tristan laughed quietly and slapped his brother’s upper arm. “Don’t worry,” he said, in an exaggerated whisper. “I think that was Saint Aislinn’s last miracle.”

“Get out of here,” Shay said. He hoped Tristan was right—he didn’t want or need Aislinn or any other woman taking stupid chances on his behalf—but he knew stubbornness when he saw it, and she had a plentiful supply of that.

Shay blew out the lamps, settled himself in the desk chair, put his feet up and closed his eyes. “Night,” he said.

“Night,” Tristan responded, and went out, closing the door behind him with a soft click.

Shay meditated on the fact that if it wasn’t for Aislinn, he’d have been sleeping in his own soft bed, sober as an angel, instead of that hard chair. Miss Mamie kept strict rules in her establishment, and she could smell whiskey on a man from an alarming distance, which was why he’d passed many a night on the jailhouse cot. He shifted in the chair, trying in vain to get comfortable, and sighed, listening as the town settled down around him like a creaky old house.

He hadn’t been asleep long when the sound of the back door being forced open brought him back to the surface of consciousness. He swung his feet down from the desk top, silent as an Indian, and rose. The .45 was in his hand before he thought to reach for it.

“You must be loco, messin’ with that marshal,” whispered one of the two shadows lurking back by the cell. Shay couldn’t make out their features, just the shape of their framework, but he knew who they were all right.

“You saw him leave,” Billy told O’Sullivan impatiently.

“I still don’t like this. I’m tellin’ you, it ain’t right.”

There was, Shay reflected, a moralist in every bunch.

“We’ll get the girl and leave. That’ll teach McQuillan a thing or two.”

“Teach him? You’re the one with a dick for a head, Billy. You didn’t learn nothin’ that other time, apparently.”

That other time
. The phrase was a crooked twig, shoved through Shay’s gills. He waited, hoping the exchange would continue, but once again Aislinn got in the way.

“Who’s there?” she demanded crisply. There was a tremor of fear in her voice, but it was so faint you had to listen hard to hear it. Shay admired her grit even as he suppressed an intense desire to put a gag on her.

“Hell,” said O’Sullivan. “What if she screams?”

Billy ignored the question. “It’s your new beau, ma’am,” he said, with what he probably conceived of as
ironic charm, “come to take you home. It won’t do, a pretty little thing like you, sitting here by her lone-self, all dressed up for a party.”

Shay’s palm sweated where he gripped the handle of the .45, but his hand was steady.

“Damn it, Billy,” O’Sullivan grumbled. “Have you lost your brain someplace along the line? Let’s get out of here before the marshal shows up. Swearin’ off the bottle ain’t done his disposition any good, in case you didn’t notice.”

“We couldn’t leave the girl here even if we wanted to,” Billy argued, making sense for once in his life, “now that you went and said my name.” There was a brief, thoughtful pause. “Where do you suppose he keeps them keys of his?”

Shay cocked the .45. “Right here in my pocket, boys,” he said, all friendly and accommodating. “Drop whatever you’re carrying and put your hands up. I’d hate to have to shoot you just because I wasn’t clear on your intentions.”

“Son of a bitch,” O’Sullivan groaned, and there was a clunking sound as his pistol hit the floor.

“Damn it,” Billy added, after adding to the clatter with his own weapons, “I watched you leave here an hour ago!”

He’d seen Tristan, of course, but Shay felt no compunction to clear up the misconception. His brother had been right: having an identical twin had its advantages, disturbing as it was to find out that even though you were a whole man in your own right, you were also half of something else. Keeping the .45 trained on the visitors, he used his free hand to take the glass chimney off the kerosene lamp on his desk, strike a match and light the wick.

Billy and O’Sullivan made a miserable pair, standing there by the cell door, with their weapons at their feet. Billy had been carrying a virtual arsenal: his knife, a .38 revolver and a smaller handgun similar to the derringer
he, Shay, had taken from Aislinn in the saloon. He hadn’t known about that last piece, but there it was, in plain sight. That was Billy for you, honest to a fault.

He gestured with the barrel of the pistol. “Over here in the middle of the floor,” he said. “Lie down on your bellies and please, for the sake of my immortal soul, don’t give me call to shoot you. The temptation is nearly more than I can bear as it is.”

The miscreants looked at each other, gulped in unison, and laid themselves down. Shay stepped over them, pulled the cell key from the inside pocket of his vest and unlocked the door.

Aislinn scurried past him, giving the new prisoners ample territory to themselves, and hovered over by the desk. In a sidelong glance, Shay saw that she was trembling, and her eyes were taking up most of her face.

Shay kept the .45 aligned with the back of Billy’s head, searched him quickly, then picked him up by the scruff of the neck and tossed him into the cell with such force that he bounced off the inside wall. O’Sullivan followed a minute or so later, after undergoing a similar pat-down, and Shay slammed the door on them and locked it.

“What are we supposed to do in here, with just one bed?” Billy wanted to know.

“Cuddle,” Shay answered, and turned his back on them.

Aislinn was still staring at him. He didn’t think she’d be fool enough to ask about Tristan in front of Billy and O’Sullivan, but he couldn’t take the chance. “This is no place for you,” he said quickly, taking her arm. “Come on. I’ll walk you over to the hotel.”

She was pale, and scraped her upper lip once with her teeth. “What about the back door?” she asked. “They broke it down.”

“There’s only one key to that cell,” Shay replied, “and I’ve got it. Let’s go.”

They stepped outside. “Did you hear what that man said to Billy Kyle?” she asked, almost immediately, in an unnecessary whisper. That bright spangle of stars hung almost within reach. “About how he hadn’t learned anything the other time?”

Shay nodded grimly. He was still assimilating that, and didn’t want to discuss it with anybody just yet. “I heard,” he confirmed.

“Do you think he was talking about beating up Liza Sue?”

“No,” Shay answered, after taking a long breath. He was remembering the scene of that coach wreck, the screaming horses, the shattered bodies. Grace, lying there in his arms, stone dead, her delicate limbs broken and askew. He had no doubt that Kyle was mean enough to wreak that kind of havoc—most men would simply have taken the strongbox and fled—but he couldn’t imagine him conceiving such a scheme on his own, or carrying it out without help. He was sure now that Billy had been involved, and so had O’Sullivan, but there was a deeper question—who had they been working for? Had the gold been the only objective, or had there been a deeper reason?

He started up the steps of the hotel veranda, where he and Aislinn had danced together, and kissed. It seemed that those things had happened a long time before, instead of just a few hours ago, and he was caught off-guard when she suddenly stopped and dug in her heels.

“I can’t ask Eugenie to take me back,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

Shay looked down at her, standing there on the road, gazing up at him, looking earnest as a wayfarer before the gates of heaven. “Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to sleep somewhere.” He pulled on her hand, but still she resisted, shaking her head.

He sighed. “Then I’ll get you a room.”

“Unaccompanied ladies are not welcome in this hotel,” she told him. “Besides, look at me. I couldn’t get past the desk clerk in these clothes if I were escorted by the president of the United States.”

Shay began to fear that she was right, which begged another set of questions. What was he to do with her—sneak her into Miss Mamie’s place and tuck her in beside Tristan? Take her back to the jail, to enjoy the company of O’Sullivan and Billy Kyle? He swore and resettled his hat with a yank.

“I can go down to the church,” she said, “and sleep on one of the pews.”