Addy came bursting into the room, her eyes wild and anxious, calling, “Rede, are you all right? I heard a noise—” She stopped short when she spied him sitting on the bedside chair, his feet propped comfortably on the bed.
“Sorry, Miss Addy. Didn’t mean to alarm you none. I was just a mite clumsy the first time I tried gettin’ up, and knocked the chair over on the floor. It hurt some, makin’ sure I didn’t go over with it.” He put a hand on his ribs, hoping to engage her sympathy, but her expression didn’t change. “Is that loudmouthed old biddy gone? I could hear every word she said, clear back here. I swear she could talk the hide off a longhorn bull.”
Her green eyes kindled and her lips tightened. “You shouldn’t have gotten up without help anyway, Rede Smith! You’re lucky you didn’t fall and tear open your wound! And that ‘loudmouthed old biddy,’ as you call her, is one of my best customers—or was,” she corrected herself while glowering at Rede. “Now she probably won’t ever come again, and she’ll tell everyone in Connor’s Crossing I’m demented, and then no one else will have their dresses made here, and I’ll either starve to death or have to beg my parents for my fare back to St. Louis—”
Rede held up a hand. “Now, just hold your horses! What on earth are you talking about, Miss Addy? Why will they think you’re demented? And why are you goin’ to starve to death?”
Some of the fire died from her eyes. “I—I jumped when I heard the thud, fearing you’d fallen or something,” she began. “That got Mrs. Fickhiser suspicious, and she demanded to know who was here. I tried to…cover up…by saying a stack of books I’d been moving must’ve fallen over, but she didn’t act like she believed me, and…” Now she bit her lower lip and twisted her hands together, looking away from him.
“And what?” he demanded. Lord, had Addy Kelly already given away the secret of his presence to the woman with the biggest mouth in the town?
“And I…oh, heavens, you’re going to think I’m such a silly goose…I implied it might be the ghost of my dead uncle.”
He stared at her, realizing he’d read embarrassment as guilt. He threw back his head and let out a hoot of laughter. “You told her your house might be haunted, yet you want to blame me for ruinin’ your business?”
She stiffened. “I didn’t say it was haunted, just that my aunt had told me that she had seen the ghost of my uncle in here. Oh, it was a complete lie, of course—my uncle was much too kind a man to frighten my aunt by appearing like that—but it was the first fib that popped into my head. I suppose I’m not a very good liar. It was wrong of me to blame you.”
He started to grin at the admission, but then he realized Addy wouldn’t have to be lying about anything if he wasn’t here hiding out at her house.
“I reckon it’s probably better for a person not to be a good liar,” he murmured. “But what kind of business are you in?” he asked, curious.
“I’m a seamstress,” Addy told him, raising her chin a little as she said it. “I sew dresses and do alterations. That’s the reason I was in Austin—buying supplies I couldn’t get at the mercantile here.”
“And you run your business out of your home? Why don’t you have your shop in town?”
“I inherited this place, not a place in town,” she said, a bit defensively. “I can’t afford to rent a shop in town—at least not yet,” she added. “It’s not so far beyond town that people mind coming here—or at least, they didn’t, until I convinced Mrs. Fickhiser the place was haunted, or that I was crazy.” Her brow furrowed in obvious anxiety.
“Your late husband didn’t leave you very well off, I take it?”
Rede was sorry as soon as the question left his lips. Her mouth tightened again, and she looked down at her lap.
“I’m sorry, Miss Addy,” he said quickly. “It ain’t any of my business.”
She raised her head, meeting his gaze squarely. “Indeed it isn’t. But since you asked, no, Charles did not leave me very well off. And I have not been in Connor’s Crossing very long. So I do depend on my good reputation to get my business established and keep it going.”
“Miss Addy, next time someone comes I’ll be so quiet you can hear a hummingbird’s heartbeat,” he promised, his hand over his heart. He was trying to make her smile again; and she started to, but then she got that worried look again.
“Well, hopefully you’ll be well enough to leave before too much longer,” she said briskly. “How long before you’ll be able to ride?”
“Oh, a few days,” he said, deliberately vague. He’d wanted to extend his stay, using her place as his base of operations, but it sure didn’t look like it was going to be easy to talk her into that. And that was too bad, because from what he’d been able to determine, Addy Kelly’s house was perfectly situated—far enough out of town that folks didn’t drop by without a reason, near enough to keep in touch with the news. And once he’d found the Fogarty hideout, Connor’s Crossing was surely big enough to have a telegraph office he could visit to summon his Ranger company.
He’d just have to convince Addy she had nothing to fear from his continued presence. But first, Rede, you’d better convince yourself. If he was allowed to stay, it was going to be awfully hard to keep his hands off the tempting young widow.
Just then he heard the distinct growl of her stomach.
Addy pressed a hand against her middle and blushed. “Excuse me! I was just about to fix dinner when Mrs. Fickhiser came—now it must be the middle of the afternoon! Could you eat a little something, Rede?”
Rede’s queasiness had long since left him, and he could eat more than “a little something.” In fact, he was now so hungry he could eat a horned toad backward, but he didn’t think it was polite to say so.
“Yes ma’am, I reckon I could.”
Two days later, Jack Fogarty rode into the hideout scowling—a bad sign, his men knew from past experience.
“Thought you said you saw the Ranger’s body when you rode back to look, Chapman,” Jack Fogarty snarled. Fogarty had been on a reconnaisance trip to Connor’s Crossing and swore as he pulled off the fake gray beard he wore as a disguise whenever he went into town.
Chapman, crouching over a pot of beans, stopped stirring and squinted up at the outlaw leader as the rest of the gang gathered around to listen. “I did, boss,” he insisted. “He had a Ranger badge on, right enough—just above the hole in his chest. What’s wrong?”
He never saw the swift fist that knocked him flat on his back, but when he opened his eyes, Fogarty’s angry face was scowling down on him.
“You damned fool! He warn’t no Ranger!” Jack Fogarty shouted down at him. “I went t’ claim the body at the undertaker’s in town, on behalf a’ the grieving widow in Llano, I told ’em—only to be told his carcass had already been taken away!”
Chapman blinked. “Already been taken away?” he echoed. “By who?”
“By his real wife—who said he was a shotgun guard, not a Ranger, and the undertaker told me she was right puzzled as to why her man had that Ranger badge pinned on his shirt. The undertaker was lookin’ all squinty-eyed at me, so I figgered I’d better hightail it outa there before he pointed me out to the sheriff.”
Fogarty’s voice was ominously quiet now, and Chapman felt a flicker of alarm. The leader of the Fogarty gang had been known to shoot a man for less cause than a mistake like this.
“So how would someone get a Ranger’s badge on his chest that wasn’t a Ranger?” Lew, one of the other outlaws, asked.
“That’s just what I’m wonderin’,” Fogarty growled, a murderous glare in his eyes.
“Sounds like someone wanted folks to think the Ranger was dead,” the man said carefully, keeping an eye on Fogarty.
“Especially us folks,” someone else muttered.
“Yeah, especially us,” Fogarty said, as if to himself. “Which means that Ranger we heard was on that stage is still alive.”
There was silence around the campfire as the outlaws considered the idea.
“You reckon we got double-crossed, Jack?” Clete Fogarty, his younger cousin asked.
Fogarty stiffened. “What d’ you mean?”
Clete shrugged. “You was told the Ranger’d be on the stage. What if the fella that tol’ you so was lyin’?”
“He wouldn’t dare.”
“What’s t’ stop ’im?” Clete retorted, careful to keep his voice nonchallenging.
Fogarty grinned and jerked his head meaningfully at the bony-thin woman who sat mending his shirt in the sparse shade of a mesquite tree, just out of earshot. “Mary Sue, yonder. She just happens t’ be my informant’s wife, ain’t she, Chapman?”
Chapman had been the only other one in on the secret, and now he puffed out his chest with pride—and secret relief that Fogarty no longer seemed angry at him. “That’s so,” he told the others, eyeing the female who was Fogarty’s sole possession.
“I figger he don’t want nothin’ t’ happen to his wife, even if she is a mite…wayward,” Fogarty said of the woman he’d enticed to run away with him. “He knows her life wouldn’t be worth two bits if he lied to me—or his neither.”
The casually uttered words cast a chill on the group, and they looked away from Fogarty’s expressionless eyes.
“So you’re sayin’ the Ranger had to have been on that stage,” Chapman said.
Fogarty nodded, rubbing his chin, which itched after wearing the fake beard. “I don’t remember seein’ a badge on any a’ the men we shot that day, come t’ think on it. Lessee, there was the driver that we plugged first,” he said, counting on his fingers, “that other fella on top that turned out t’ be the shotgun guard, that skinny little fellow with the derby hat…”
“Hoo-whee, I ’bout busted a gut when that silly li’l hat flew up in the air when you plugged ’im, boss!” one of the men snickered.
Fogarty’s jaw clenched. “I’m so glad I could amuse ya, Thompson,” he snapped. “Now, if we could stick to the subject—”
“There was that big fella dead on the floor a’ the coach,” Thompson said, eager to get back in the outlaw leader’s good graces again. “You know, the one that fell over the woman? Mebbe we got ’em both with the same slug, ya think?”
“Jack, I d-d-don’t f-f-figger he was the R-R-Ranger, noways,” Walt Fogarty, Clete’s brother, said with his usual stutter. “A b-b-big tub a’ l-l-lard like that!”
“But as I remember, there was one other gent on the stage,” Fogarty mused.
“Yeah—some dark-haired tall fella,” Chapman said. “Looked like a drifter. I shot ’im in the chest.”
Fogarty gave him a measuring look.
“Did ya? Did you check t’ see that he was dead when I sent you back for a look-see? Did you check all of them?”
Full of nerves and resentful that he’d been sent on this task, and eager to be safe back at the hideout, Chapman hadn’t done more than glance at each of the corpses. They’d sure as hell looked dead enough to him. He couldn’t admit that now, naturally. “’Course I did. They was all was dead, all right.”
“So…that leaves that wiry little fella with the derby hat who coulda been the secret Ranger, Chapman? Is that what you’re sayin’?”
Too late, Chapman saw the chasm yawning in front of him. He’d have done better to admit he hadn’t checked the bodies very closely.
He shrugged, ice closing around his heart.
“You’re sayin’ the man I shot while you were pluggin’ the other fella was the secret Ranger?” Fogarty persisted. “The one whose skull I let daylight into?”
The others chuckled uneasily.
“Or maybe it was the big fella whose blood was puddlin’ on the floor—or maybe even one of them women was really a Ranger dressed up like a gal, and wasn’t dead!”
Chapman took a step back. “Boss, I don’t know…I sure thought they was all dead, ’specially the one I shot—”
Fogarty whipped out his pistol and killed Chapman while the other man was still making excuses. Once a man lied to Jack Fogarty, he would never trust him again.
“Next time I want you fellas to be sure,” he told the others, who stood slack-jawed and wide-eyed with horror at the sudden killing of their compadre.