Two Brothers (9 page)

Shay had been on his way to retrieve his hat from the porch bench, where he’d left it when Aislinn came outside, but Eugenie’s comment stopped him in midstep. He repressed a grin. “What?”

She sounded pensive. “It was odd, your comin’ in twice for breakfast this mornin’. And the second time, well, there was something real different about you.”

Shay grasped his hat and let out a long breath. He was on the verge of explaining when shots sounded from the direction of the Yellow Garter. “Hell,” he said, automatically checking the cylinder of his .45. “I’d better get down there and find out what’s going on.”

“You take care,” Eugenie commanded, as he sprinted past her.

“Yes, ma’am,” he promised, without looking back.

Aislinn sat alone in the kitchen, her chin propped in one hand, watching the light of a single kerosene lantern flicker over the checkered oilcloth covering the table. She would have been the first to admit that she should have been thinking about the possible consequences of being caught breaking Eugenie’s rules, but she could not seem to get beyond the impact of Shay McQuillan’s kisses. She
was startled when Eugenie spoke, for she hadn’t heard her enter the room.

“You’d best get to bed, miss. Breakfast time comes around early.”

Turning on the bench, Aislinn looked up into the older woman’s face. “You’re not sending me away, then?” She held her breath, waiting for the answer.

Eugenie got a mug and poured some cold coffee, left over from the supper trade. “I don’t turn my girls out into the street,” she said, in her own good time, after several unself-conscious slurps. She was looking out the window over the cast-iron sink, and that was a mercy from Aislinn’s standpoint, because she needed some time to recover her composure.

Aislinn closed her eyes as relief swept through her. She’d taken a big enough risk, helping Liza Sue to escape the Yellow Garter Saloon. Letting Shay McQuillan kiss her in front of God and everybody had been downright reckless, given Eugenie’s strict standards. “I—I don’t know what came over me,” she said, and she was telling the absolute truth. “I’ve always been so—so sensible.”

Eugenie ignored that. “How’s that little Liza Sue gal fittin’ in?”

Aislinn stiffened. “Fine,” she said, in a thin voice. She hated lying, especially to Eugenie, who’d been so unfailingly kind, but she’d been left with little choice in the matter. Liza Sue had nowhere to go but back to the Yellow Garter, if things didn’t work out there at the hotel.

At last, Eugenie turned, still holding the cup. “I reckon she’s glad to get away from Jake and that bunch over in that hellhole saloon.”

“J-Jake?” Aislinn’s heart was beating fast, and the music in the small ballroom seemed farther away than before.

“That’s a mighty hard life,” Eugenie said sadly. “There ain’t anybody bad enough to deserve that kind of sufferin’.”

Misery threatened to swamp Aislinn: the thing she had most feared had come upon her; she’d been found out. Eugenie was sure to change her mind about sending her packing, and she’d have no choice but to move on, leaving the homestead behind, for someone else to purchase. Thomas and Mark, counting the days until they could leave their school and board a westbound train, would be bitterly disappointed, and her own dreams, so close as to be almost within her grasp only the day before, seemed hopelessly out of reach. She started to speak, swallowed, and fell into a wretched silence.

Eugenie approached, sat down beside her at the table. “Thought you had me fooled, did you?”

Aislinn imagined herself writing to her brothers, telling them they couldn’t come to California after all. Imagined herself leaving Prominence. “I was hoping so,” she admitted. “But plainly I was wrong. How did you know?”

Eugenie smiled and patted Aislinn’s cold hand. “Well, for one thing, the girl didn’t have no belongin’s with her. For another, you don’t get bruises like that fallin’ down steps. Them sort of marks, they almost always come from a man’s fist, and even when they fade away, you can still see the shadows of ’em in a woman’s eyes. And you ain’t got so many dresses that I don’t know ’em all as well as my own.”

“Are you going to send her away?” Her own situation was serious enough, but Liza Sue’s was dire. With no roof over her head, and no money to buy stagecoach passage out of Prominence, the other girl would surely end up back in the saloon, worse off than ever.

Eugenie sighed heavily. She sounded exhausted, like someone who’s just come to the end of a long and difficult journey. “That’s what you’re afraid of? That I won’t let that little gal stay here?”

Aislinn nodded. “That man who beat Liza Sue—she says he’ll kill her next time, and I believe her.”

“That’s most likely so,” Eugenie agreed, and she seemed to be staring through the kitchen wall, through the night itself, toward something far off in the distance. “She’s not goin’ anyplace, Aislinn, and neither are you. Not tonight, anyhow. You just get on up to bed. I expect a good day’s work out of you tomorrow.”

Tears sprang to Aislinn’s eyes, and she blinked them back, rising from the bench. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you!”

Eugenie turned to look up at her. The lamp was burning low, and in that moment the night seemed especially dark, pressing at the window like some diabolical fog. “You’re a fine girl, Aislinn, and I confess I’m inclined to favor you over the others, just a mite. But I made them rules of mine for a reason, and I’ve got to see that they’re kept. You understand what I’m sayin’ here, don’t you? You’ll have to find yourself another place if you don’t behave yourself proper.”

Aislinn nodded. Eugenie liked her, but she wouldn’t turn a blind eye again; it was a matter of principle. “I understand,” she confirmed. Then she hurried up the rear stairs, never bothering with a lantern, and let herself into the dormitory. The room was black, and the girls were all asleep, except for Liza Sue, who sat bolt upright on her cot, bathed in a single beam of moonlight, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“She knows,” Liza Sue whispered.

“Yes,” Aislinn answered, just as softly. “But it’s all right.”

“You mean that?”

“Eugenie will protect you. Now, go to sleep.” Aislinn snuggled down, and was just about to doze off, when Liza Sue spoke again, very softly.

“You hear that racket, down at the saloon? A little while ago, there were some shots fired.”

Aislinn hadn’t noticed the noise until then. The only law in town, Shay was almost surely square in the middle
of the situation, whatever it was, and the realization was terrifying, now that she cared about him so much. She sat up again, listening. A popping noise punctured the night.

“Was that a shot?”

“I don’t know,” Liza Sue said. “Billy’s probably kilt somebody. Maybe that good-looking marshal, for making such a fool out of him in the street.”

Some demon took Aislinn over in that moment. Tossing back her blanket, she scrambled got out of bed. “Where’s that dress you were wearing?”

Liza Sue didn’t reply until they were both out in the corridor. “It’s behind that big crate in the storeroom,” she hissed. “Why?”

Aislinn headed for the door across the hall. “Never mind. You just go back to bed.”

The former prostitute stayed on Aislinn’s heels. “That’s my dress, and I have a right to know what you mean to do with it,” she insisted.

Inside the small, stuffy room, Aislinn groped and searched until she found the crumpled gown. She shed her nightdress and wriggled into the garment, which was slightly too small and smelled of sweat, cheap perfume and stale whiskey. She suppressed a shudder. “In this instance,” she answered, however belatedly, “ignorance is most certainly bliss.”

“You’re not actually planning to—to go down there, to the Yellow Garter? In that dress? Why, you’ll stand out like a sore thumb!” Liza Sue stopped, struggled to bring her rising voice under control. “Are you touched in the head? If you don’t get shot or beaten or arrested, you’re bound to be thrown out of this place once and for all!”

Aislinn was well aware that what she was doing was pure lunacy, and she’d meant her implied promise to Eugenie, that she’d abide by the rules from then on and look for no special dispensation if she broke them, but she couldn’t ignore the very real possibility that Shay was in terrible trouble. She knew, everybody knew, about his
confrontation with Billy Kyle that afternoon, out in front of the undertaker’s, and the rancher’s son had probably been fueling his indignation with liquor ever since. How could she lie there, in that stuffy attic room, throughout the night, wondering if the marshal was alive, or if he’d been gunned down?

As for the dress, well, she was headed for a saloon, not a church social. By her reckoning, she’d have been a lot more obvious in one of her prim calicos.

She made for the stairs, began a careful but quick descent. Liza Sue hovered at the top, like a disgruntled guardian angel, but she didn’t follow.

On the second-floor landing, Aislinn collided full speed with an immovable object—Eugenie. The older woman, the sentinel, struck a match to the wick in a brass wall sconce.

Her gray hair was wound into a bristly plait and dangling over one shoulder, and she was clad in a high-necked nightgown and a plaid wrapper. Her eyes pinned Aislinn to the wall as effectively as a spear.

“I have to go,” Aislinn gasped.

Eugenie took in the ridiculous dress for a second time, slowly. “I don’t reckon I need to ask where you’re headed, but I sure as hell want to know why you’re headed there, and in such a getup as that one.”

“I’ve got to see for myself that Shay’s all right. That’s all. Billy Kyle swore to kill him and I’m sure he’s in the Yellow Garter, and I heard shots—”

“I won’t let you do it,” Eugenie said. “He’s a grown man, Shay is, and a United States marshal to boot. He’s fought his own battles for most of his life and he can fight them now. Fact is, he won’t thank you for interferin’.”

“I have to go,” Aislinn repeated, and moved to step around Eugenie.

The other woman swore quietly. “Just hold on for a minute, then. I got somethin’ you’ll need.”

Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was an instinct for
self-preservation, but Aislinn waited while Eugenie went back into her bedroom, returning only moments later to offer a small object in one extended hand.

Aislinn accepted the tiny pistol shakily.

“It’s loaded,” Eugenie said. “If you have to use it, step in close and make the shot count. You only got one bullet.”

Aislinn didn’t ask any questions; she just took the pearl-handled, nickel-plated derringer and sped down the steps, through the lobby. The dance was over, and the music was only an echo. The night clerk looked at her with popping eyes, and if he said anything, she didn’t hear. She was outside, racing down the wooden sidewalk, her whole being attuned to the cacophony belching out of the saloon, like smoke billowing from a corridor to hell.

The street was empty, except for horses tied to various hitching rails, and a drunk sleeping in a trough, up to his chin in water. Reaching the Yellow Garter, Aislinn took a deep breath, prayed that God would look after Thomas and Mark if anything happened to her, and burst through the swinging doors.

She was well inside, and ankle-deep in filthy sawdust, before her eyes adjusted to the brighter light and the blinding sting of burning tobacco. Cowboys and gamblers looked at her with scurrilous interest, but she paid them little mind.

Shay was in the middle of the saloon, engaged in a game of pool, his pistol lying close at hand on the table’s edge. His opponent was a man she didn’t recognize, tall and thin and pockmarked. His holster was empty but his firearm, like Shay’s, was within easy reach. Billy Kyle sat on the floor, his back to the bar. He was handcuffed to the boot rail, red-faced and rumpled, and even from a distance, Aislinn could see both his temples throbbing with fury.

She hardly dared to look at Shay again, for she could
already feel his gaze boring into her, every bit as ill-tempered as Kyle’s was, but she made herself meet his eyes. She’d pegged his expression just about right, which was no consolation, of course. She’d been rash, and made a terrible mistake because of it.

Laying down his cue stick, his blue eyes narrowed, Shay took in the borrowed dress, the derringer and her face, in a slow, scathing sweep.

“Maybe the little lady would like a dance,” a hapless cowboy speculated, swerving in Aislinn’s direction.

Shay never looked away from her, although he recovered his pistol with an unerring motion of one hand and slipped it back into its holster as easily as if it were slathered in bear grease. “Anybody moves,” he said, in a deathly quiet voice that nonetheless seemed to carry to every part of that godforsaken monument to sin and depravity, “I’ll plug ’em.”

The stranger at the pool table smiled, leaning on his cue stick now, both hands clasping it like a pole he meant to climb. The piano jangled to a discordant, echoing stop, and the cowboy who’d wanted to dance stood unsteadily, but still.

Aislinn took a step backward, and Shay advanced.

“I guess this was a reckless thing to do,” she said, with a hard swallow.

That statement brought a nervous laugh from the assembly of revelers, prostitutes and general ne’er-do-wells, and Aislinn, while still painfully conscious of her blunder, was also indignant. She felt hot color pulsing beneath the flesh of her face. She’d come here on a heroic mission, after all, however misguided, and she deserved some understanding.

Reaching her at last, Shay snatched the derringer out of her hand and dropped it into his shirt pocket. He bore little resemblance, at least in manner, to the man who had kissed her so thoroughly on the hotel veranda, that very evening. His voice was low, pitched for her ears
alone, as hard and as burning cold as a pump handle in a prairie blizzard. “You’re under arrest,” he said.

That was just about the last thing Aislinn had expected him to say. She stood there, her vocal cords paralyzed, while he strode over to Billy Kyle, bent down to take him by the hair. “You wait here for me, Billy. You hear?”

Adam’s apple bobbing, a muscle jumping in his cheek, Billy looked as though he’d sooner spit on Shay than draw his next breath, but after a long and awkward moment, he nodded. Not that he could have gone far, cuffed to that foot rail the way he was.