Felicia Andrews Read online

  Well?

  She took a step toward him.

  And someone called her name.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The muscles across the width of his shoulders bunched in anticipation. His legs were tight, and he felt as though he were walking drunkenly instead of approximating the stride he used to make his rounds. His heart pounded loudly in his ears. His teeth were clenched so tightly his jaw began to ache.

  But the call did not come. Amanda did not stop him, nor did she follow.

  He waited until he was opposite the hotel, its lights blazing merrily, before he admitted to himself that he had made an error. Amanda, no matter how hard he tried not to believe it, did not love him after all. There was no feeling, in spite of the fact that he had seen something in her eyes while they were talking. He was sure of it. He would have sworn on a stack of Campbell's Bibles that she had something to tell him and she was holding back for one reason or another.

  He shifted over to the boardwalk when a group of riders late from one of the ranches, raced down the street toward the celebration at the hall. He would have gone himself, but he did not dare in case he was thrown face-to-face with Amanda, did not dare because her behavior confused and bedeviled him. She had known through her daughter-in-law that the story Carla had told her that night at the Circle B was a lie and still she had not come to him. Why? What was holding her back? When Hope had left him, he had been so furious he had ridden out to the flatlands, knowing that if he had gone to see Carla then, he would have done something he most surely would have regretted.

  After that, however, she would not see him. He had gone to her small cabin, but she would not let him in. When he had dropped by the restaurant, she ignored him as though he were dirt, openly flirting with every man in the room until he felt the rage come on him again and he left before his order could be served.

  Since then he had decided that Carla's feelings were like many of her people's--intense, defensive, demanding protection; and she had defended her love for him the best way she knew how, by trying to eliminate the competition.

  But didn't she know that he would learn sooner or later of her lie and would tell Amanda the truth? Didn't she understand that the way to his heart was not the route of deception and connivance?

  He rubbed a palm hard over his eyes, back through his hair, and swerved across the street and into his office. He had given his deputies the night off to enjoy the party, and the plain, unadorned room seemed far smaller now than it ever had. He was tempted to walk down to the station, to meet the train and see who was coming into his town. And as fast as the temptation rose, he beat it down. He knew that sooner or later he would learn who was and was not on the train. That would have been the excuse; the reason would have been to keep an eye on Trevor Eagleton who he had seen heading in that direction less than half an hour before.

  He sat on the comer of his desk and leafed blindly through a sheaf of "wanted" posters Anders had picked up on the afternoon stage. He saw none of the faces, none of the stated rewards, none of the alleged crimes. Every pair of eyes, every crude set of a mouth, every blunted and squared jaw reminded him of Eagleton.

  Jealousy, he had told his reflection every morning since the man had returned. Pure and simple jealousy, and you're too stupid to do anything about it.

  But whenever he saw the stranger-and no matter how long he had been in Goreville, Eagleton was still a stranger to him-he felt a prickling at the back of his neck. Like the night he had walked into the Wooden Dollar and found Webber stabbed on Diane's bed, a warning, a premonition. He did not believe in spirits and ghosts, could not give credit to any professed manifestation of the supernatural, but he had long ago learned that his instincts were based on items--snatches of conversations, expressions, mannerisms--deeply buried in his mind, coming to the fore only when enough of them gave weight to a suspicion.

  And Eagleton's weight was growing every week.

  * * *

  Diane started whenever someone knocked on her door. Her tongue ran constantly over her lips, and her hands would not stop their slight, hampering trembling. At least once a week she had been visited after hours, always from the narrow balcony outside the rear window. At first she thought it wise to keep the rest of the town ignorant of her connections; later, however, she began to feel watched, as though she were a prisoner in a glass cage--and the jailer spent all his time leering through the transparent bars.

  She began to drink too much, and the men Sophie sent up to her complained. She began to have nightmares and would awaken silently screaming, drenched in perspiration, twice finding herself kneeling on the bare floor and clutching the money chest in her arms.

  The second time it happened, the night before last, she decided to leave. She would wait until the evening of the Fourth, when everyone including Sophie was out at the hall grounds, and she would pack a small grip and take the night train to Casper. From there she would make her way to Cheyenne, Omaha, St. Louis . . . and New York. She was afraid. She had seen the look in her visitor's eyes and she knew with all certainty that unless she moved now, she would never leave the town alive.

  And it wasn't her fault. None of it was her fault. All she wanted was something to give her a start in New York, that's all.

  Whether she obtained that cushion working as a prostitute or accepting more money than she had ever seen in her life to play, as her visitor had put it, a small trick on that damned Indian sheriff, made no difference to her. She had done worse things in her life. Pretending to stab a man in self-defense was close to the least of these, as well as allowing herself to be bruised, expertly, for all that gold was worth the pain.

  Now, unfortunately, she knew her string had run out. Her luck had finally reached the breaking point.

  "Go away," she muttered when a footfall paused outside her door, and she did not start to breathe again until it passed on and clumped loudly down the stairs to the room below.

  On the bed was a small, faded carpetbag and beside it the chest. She had thrown most of her clothes into a heap in a comer of the wardrobe, and after a few minutes of hesitation decided that she would take with her only what she wore on her back, plus two changes that would keep her until she reached Cheyenne, or Omaha, or St. Louis.

  She glanced around the room and saw nothing she wanted to take with her.

  All of her life, she thought sourly, there was nothing to take from one place to the next. Just the bag, and the chest. And the clothes on her back.

  She considered saying good-bye to Sophie but immediately realized that would be asking for trouble. Though the old bitch was kinder to her than most had been, there was no sense courting trouble. She might raise a stink like the last one did, in Denver. That madam had demanded at the top of her rasping voice and in the middle of the street, where Diane thought she was going to get another girl at such short notice. Didn't she understand? Didn't she know how hard it was to get the right sort of replacement these days?

  Diane knew, and Diane did not care, especially now, when she tried to swallow and felt the knot of fear clogging her throat.

  Through the closed door she heard Badeye Jones running over the tunes he would play when the party out at the hall was over and the cowhands and farmers dropped by for a quick drink, and some flirtations with the girls. Few of them would come upstairs tonight; it was a holiday, and a patriotic one, and those with womenfolk would be on their reasonably best behavior. The notes sounded sour to her, and she winced every time he hit the wrong one. As he did often, she thought and could not understand why Sophie kept him around. He was only a one-armed nigger from Louisiana, not worth a damn, and other than "Dixie" he couldn't play anything through once without making a dozen mistakes. Not, she thought, that anyone cared.

  He had tried to take her once, two days after she had arrived. She had punched him across his patched eye, and he had never looked at her again, not even when she'd done her vamping routine and draped herself around his shoulders while eyeing the man she want
ed next to entertain.

  She spat dryly toward the door, then walked to the nightstand and blew out the lamp. She waited for several moments until her vision adjusted, then slipped her cloak over her shoulders, slid her arms through the slits, and put her hand on the bag's arched handle.

  She stopped when she saw a shadow outside the window and slapped a hand to her mouth when the sash, kept greased by her to reduce the noise, rose as though it had been touched by the wind. The curtains drifted inward. A shadow crossed the sill.

  "Going somewhere, Diane?"

  "I . . . " She backed away from the bed. The cloak suddenly seemed to have trebled its weight. "I . . . "

  The shadow wore trousers and a large-brimmed black hat."You should tell me these things," it said.

  Diane put her hand to her throat; her flesh was cold.

  "You . . . you don't need me anymore," she said and found courage in the sound of her voice. She stiffened. "I don t have to stay here if I don't want to. "

  "But you should have told me. "

  "Well . . . I'm tellin' you. I'm leavin'. "

  The shadow nodded.

  Diane took a step toward her bag and choked back a scream when the shadow sprang lightly over the bed and stood in front of her.

  "Please. I ain't goin' to tell no one."

  "That's right. You aren't."

  Ordinarily the night's din from the saloons would have drowned out most incidental noises. But Doug found himself straining as he walked slowly down the street, finding the near-complete silence as loud as he could stand without firing his gun just to hear something else. He had looked in at the Silver Palace, had waved a greeting to the two bartenders who were setting up for the anticipated rush, and he was standing now in the doorway of the Wooden Dollar, grinning at Badeye's feeble rendition of a gay Foster tune. He was about to call out something to the black when he heard a muffled scream.

  The piano fumbled into silence. The scream came again.

  Doug automatically slipped his revolver out of its holster and glanced back at the street. It was deserted. Not even a stray dog making the rounds of the alleys.

  A third time, and the scream was cut off in mid-note.

  He slammed through the batwing doors and raced across the floor before Badeye had left his stool. He took the stairs two at a time and stood in a semicrouch at the top landing, listening, cocking his head to give him direction. A faint thump to his right sent him to Diane's door, had him cursing when his hand closed over the knob and it would not budge.

  "Diane!" he shouted, barely noticing Badeye huffing up the stairs with a shotgun in his hands. "Diane, open up! Open up, it's me, Sheriff Mitchell!"

  He wasted no time when a reply was not immediate. He stood back a step and kicked hard at the door, just above the lock. It trembled, and he kicked again, grunting at the shock waves of pain that raced up his leg. A third time, and the door slammed inward, splinters from the frame spilling to the floor. He lunged through, dropping to his knees as he did, revolver sweeping around the room as the light from outside swept back the shadows like a flare of dim lightning.

  In an instant his eye recorded the toppled screen on the right, the nightstand lamp's shattered amber globe scattered over the floor, the crumpled heap of clothing on the bed, and the slow flapping of the curtains that covered the open window.

  "Diane?"

  Slowly, cautiously, he rose to full stance and stepped inside, kicking the door shut behind him before Badeye could blunder in and interfere. He called over his shoulder for the black to fetch Doc Manley as quickly as possible, then hurried to the window and brushed aside the curtains.

  The balcony was deserted, but he could hear distinctly the racing thud of footsteps echoing down the narrow alley that backed all the buildings on this side of the street. Without thinking, he climbed over the sill and vaulted the balcony railing, landing lightly on his feet, his legs and back absorbing the impact as he swung his gun around, then broke into a loping run.

  A moment later a dark figure burst from an alcove behind the Silver Palace.

  "Stop!" he shouted.

  The figure slowed, twisting its head around before breaking into a headlong rush toward the alley's far end.

  Doug muttered imprecations as he ran on, trying to shake off the stinging needles of his leap from the balcony, knowing that once the intruder reached the comer, he would be swallowed up by the darkness and the trees that marked the western edge of Coreville's town limits. He stumbled, then, over a low pile of rocks and had to fling out his right hand to steady himself against a rough-cut wall. His palm was scraped raw, but he did not slow. His boots cracked loudly against the hard earth, and his eyes narrowed as he glared at the racing figure ahead of him--at the murderer.

  The heap of clothing on the bed had been the body of the prostitute, Diane.

  "Amanda, I thought you had left."

  She wanted to run away from Grace, then, but the worried look on her face stalled her. She glanced once more at Doug's shrinking back, then sighed and walked slowly toward the improvised outdoor auditorium. Before she reached it, however, she saw in the back row, seated directly behind Harley and Olivia, the two children she had talked to earlier in the evening.

  She stopped.

  Grace turned to stare at her.

  "Go on," she told the housekeeper.

  "But-"

  "Go on. I have something to do. "

  She turned away from the crowd, from the children, from the acting troupe now cavorting hysterically on the stage and made her way past the tables of food and drink, across the open field where the ball game had been played, until she was standing near the trees where Trevor had kissed her. Gently she passed her hands over her clothing, feeling the designs Sam had traced there, feeling the wind touch at the fringes and whisper through her hair.

  It had been so long, she thought, since she had taken on all the aspects of her people, so long that the sensation was one of blended uneasiness and relief.

  She glanced up at the moon and smiled. Where the birds go at night, the little girl had said; where she herself had originated, the little boy had insisted.

  It rode majestically across the deep velvet sweep of the night sky, heightening rather than diminishing the power of the stars that dared to drift close. Encircling it was a faint white haze, and its surface was pocked with meaningless shadow.

  And it was then that she knew what she had to do.

  When she had been a child, she had walked with her father into the forest behind Daghaven, and he had left her alone, telling her that her mother often did this herself-walking, listening, not trying to hear anything but what the wind and the leaves and the very air itself told her. And when she had arrived in Natchez, she had waded into the Mississippi, taken a deep breath, and had let herself sink into the powerful currents, digging her bare feet into the thick, cool mud, feeling the strength, feeling the purpose . . . until, both times, she had understood the voices that she had been hearing-not with her ears but with an inner sense that bespoke of centuries of living, of observing, locating and understanding the patterns that made all life possible and gave all life meaning.

  It was not witchcraft; or so she believed. But if there was another word for it, she did not know it. Just as she had not known, at various times in her life, what had kept an obviously ravenous cougar from taking her life, what had told her which bends in the river were safe and which were filled with a treachery that meant death, what gave her the ability to know when she was no longer alone.

  In white, then, she stepped out of the shadow and faced the gliding moon. Her hands were loose at her sides, her eyes staring but not focusing, her ears open but not hearing. She took several deep breaths and released them so slowly she almost lost consciousness. She did not strain. She did not force herself to search for what was missing, and she had not trusted her instincts.

  These had been her errors, what had kept her from knowing.

  She stood still, not rigid-a slen
der bole that seemed to absorb the gentle light falling around it. It cast a shadow, but the shadow was different, less intense, less sharp-edged, less anchored in reality.

  There was no conception of time. Distant voices, distant laughter, all washed over her and passed her and left her behind.

  The racing shadow tripped over something Doug could not see. He grinned mirthlessly and reached down for extra speed, sprinting past the Silver Palace as he grunted softly to urge himself onward-twenty yards, ten. The figure scrambled to its feet and looked frantically around it, as if searching for a doorway or a window to smash through.

  "Hey!" Doug called and brandished his revolver.

  The figure spun around, its left hand raised. Moonlight glinted off the blue-black steel of a dagger.

  Doug slowed for a moment, regained speed when the figure whirled around and raced on.

  There was no sound but his breathing and the gasping that floated back from his quarry. His smile became a grimace; there was a stitch in his side that spread around his waist, making him gulp for air and close his eyes briefly.