CHAPTER

1

The train lurched to a stop and let out a long sigh, exhausted from its trek across the featureless plains of Nebraska. The shouts of the railroad men and the clang of metal against metal pierced the thick air, heavy with the threat of rain.

“She still asleep?”

Fabric rustled as someone in the compartment stood. “Not what I’d call it, but yes.”

With my eyes closed against the sight of Rosemond Barclay’s fine dress and my mother’s necklace around her throat, I heard the sarcasm dripping from the whore’s honeyed Southern accent.

“Want me to stay with her while you stretch your legs?”

“If you don’t mind,” Rosemond said.

“How long it gonna last?”

“Her pain? I’m not sure. I’ve never seen the like. I’ll get us something to eat. I’ll be quick.” The air around me changed and I smelled lavender, Rosemond’s scent. I felt Rosemond’s presence and imagined her leaning down to stare out the window, or at me. “Though with that line, I’ll be lucky if I don’t miss the train.”

“Better hurry, then.”

The compartment door slid open and closed and I was alone with the man who Rosemond called Dunk, a Negro who did everything she bid without question. Standing well over six feet, he was an imposing specimen of a man, but when I was doubled over in pain, or numb from the opiate, he picked me up with soft, gentle hands and carried me.

I opened my heavy eyelids but couldn’t manage more than halfway. My head rested against an open window warmed by the sun and grimy with coal dust inside and out. I rubbed my fist against the glass and gazed through the small, partially clean circle at the activity outside. Passengers and railroad men scurried across the narrow platform and around Rosemond Barclay as if there were a protective cushion around her, though their heads turned and more than one gawped in appreciation. She made a show of putting on a pair of gloves, reveling in the attention no doubt, before continuing on down the steps and across the wide, busy street. She queued up at the end of the line of customers waiting to enter a narrow building. The whore didn’t need to draw attention to herself; her plaid periwinkle-and-white dress stood out against the sober mourning attire still worn by the majority of women, even seven years after the war.

“You awake?” Dunk said.

“Is that what you call this?” With a tongue thick and dry from laudanum, enunciation was difficult.

“Miss Rose went to get us something to eat.”

I nodded. “You have anything to drink?”

He leaned down and pulled a flask from his boot. He uncorked it and handed it to me. I took a long pull and coughed, spitting a good portion across the car. I covered my mouth with my hand and tried to regain my composure while Dunk laughed, but not impolitely. “That’s corn mash,” I said, my voice hoarse.

“You’ve had it before?”

“Once,” I said. I cleared my throat and drank again, ready for the taste and keeping it down. “Thank you.” I returned the flask to Dunk and noticed the knife secreted in his boot when he returned the flask to its home.

“You’re welcome.”

My gaze drifted to the black-and-white painted sign nailed to the depot. GRAND ISLAND STATION. From my vantage point, with dry plains stretching out behind the wide-spaced buildings—one thing the West had plenty of was space—and not a river in sight, let alone an island, the name seemed a disingenuous designation. But Grand Island, Nebraska, wasn’t the first Western town built on an ostentatious idea and duplicity, and it wouldn’t be the last.

My eyelids drooped closed and in my mind’s eye I saw a nattily dressed man standing on a barrel, with a young girl on the ground beside him, handing out leaflets.

Timberline is, by far, the most picturesque spot for a town in all of the Colorado Territory. The Rockies, that’s where the future is!

What of the Indian threat?

We will be traveling under the protection of the Army. The Indians will be no threat.

“It’s all built on lies,” I murmured.

“What?”

Dunk’s expression was open and honest. There was no guile in this man. He would be an easy mark. No wonder Rosemond employed him.

“The West,” I said. My life. “Where are we going, Dunk? That’s your name, isn’t it?”

The man smiled. “Yes, ma’am. We’re going to Cheyenne, then on to Boulder.” His smile turned into a grin. “Then on to the mines.”

“The mines? Rosemond is leaving Saint Louis for a mining town?”

Dunk laughed. “No, ma’am. She staying in Boulder. With you.”

“With me?”

“Got a lot there. House on the way. Starting over, she say. I been wanting to try my luck in the mines for years, but Miss Rose always talked me out of it. I knew she been softening to the idea a’ goin’ west for a few months now. Then she came home with you and we were gone next day. I owe you a debt of thanks.”

“Happy to be of service,” I said.

There was a knock on the door. Dunk stood and slid it open. The dark-skinned conductor glanced at me and lowered his voice. “You lookin’ for a game?”

Dunk tried to shield the conductor from my view. “May be.”

“Last car.”

Dunk returned to his seat and rubbed his hands up and down his thighs.

“Don’t stay on my account,” I said.

“I told Miss Rose I’d look after you.”

“You’re guarding me, you mean?”

Dunk’s expression turned sheepish. “No, ma’am.”

“Where would I go?” I nodded toward the town plopped down in the middle of the plains. “Besides, I’m too exhausted to move. Go on. Rosemond will be back soon.”

Dunk rubbed his hands together and stood. “You sure?”

I closed my eyes and nodded. I heard Dunk pull a bag down from the overhead shelf, rifle through, and return it. The door opened and closed, and I was alone.

I sat up straight, took a few deep breaths to steady my queasy stomach and spinning head. I wasn’t sure what Dunk meant about me staying with Rosemond, but I didn’t want to wait to find out.

Holding on to the open window, I stood on wobbly legs and retrieved the bag on the shelf. Inside were a few men’s clothes, a razor and soap, and an old copy of Shakespeare’s Othello. I flipped through the well-worn pages and stopped at the front. To Dunk, Elizabeth Jennings March, June 20, 1857. I dropped the book back into the bag and exhaled. No money. Of course Dunk took his money with him. I returned the bag to its place and looked around the compartment.

A bulging leather notebook tied securely with a leather string lay on the bench across from me. I untied the notebook and a pencil, the cause of the bulge, fell from the marked page. Expecting a journal and hoping for a secreted sawbuck, I stared dumbfounded at a sketch of a woman sitting on a bench, her head leaned against the window, asleep.

Me.

I flipped back through the notebook, finding much of the same. Women and men, in various poses and states of dress, an occasional landscape. Doodles, half-finished character studies, two birds sitting on a windowsill. A dark-skinned man from behind, his head turned as if looking over his shoulder, his back crisscrossed with long scars. A naked woman, looking down and away from the artist, dark curly hair exploding from her head and down to her shoulders. It was the most complete and detailed sketch and when I flipped forward I saw why: pages and pages of starts and stops, of small sketches focused in on different angles, different parts of the body, trying to achieve the artist’s vision.

I glanced out the window, searching for Rosemond. She’d advanced to the shebang doorway and would be inside soon. The urge to escape from Rosemond and whatever future she’d kidnapped me for was overwhelming, but even in my drug-addled state I knew escape would do me little good without money.

A woman in a dark dress clutching a blue-and-orange paisley carpetbag stepped into my line of sight, obscuring Rosemond. Her head turned on a swivel, searching for someone. She stood approximately where Rosemond had, but with strikingly different results. Where Rosemond had been met with admiring looks from the men on the platform (and, like most of the West, it was nearly all men), men caught sight of this woman and their expressions turned from a willingness to admire to a quick aversion of their eyes, and maybe a tip of their hats to disguise their rudeness. The woman stood as if a rod were strapped to her back, her shoulders and long neck straight in what could only be a defiant mien.

The woman’s head stilled and, after a brief pause, she stepped forward and stopped. I followed her gaze to see what caught her eye. A man—a farmer by the looks of his plain dress, sunburned face, and slicked-down hair—stood twenty feet away, holding his hat in his hands in much the same way as the woman held her bag. Unlike most of the men, he stared at her for a long moment. Disappointment morphed to disgust and he turned on his heel, shoved his hat on his head, and walked away. The woman’s body leaned toward the departing man, as if readying to follow, before straightening. She turned toward the train. I saw her face for the first time, and I understood the revulsion.

Her nose was too small, her face too long, her jaw too strong, her skin too freckled. Full lips struggled to contain her protruding teeth. A fringe of wiry orange hair escaped the edge of her sugar-scoop bonnet. Her green eyes, though, were beautiful, and stared straight at me, full of pride and challenge, and I knew being rejected or stared at wasn’t the worst that had ever happened to her.

A tall man with a hat pulled low walked behind the woman, jostling her and breaking our gaze. A small strip of his white collar showed between his longish dark hair and the navy-blue coat he wore. Buff-colored pants were tucked into the top of his cavalry boots, well worn and dusty from the trail. He held a Remington rifle loosely in his right hand and favored his left leg. A stream of smoke trailed behind his head and I knew he held a thin cigar between his teeth.

I dropped the notebook. It was Kindle, come to find me. Rosemond hadn’t been lying about helping me on Kindle’s behalf. I grasped the open window and yelled, “Kindle!”

My voice was barely a whisper, and the man continued on without stopping, down the steps of the platform and into town. I stumbled across the compartment and opened the door on the third try. Ricocheting down the hall on legs I could scarcely feel, I tripped down the stairs and fell onto the platform on my hands and knees. The redheaded woman was next to me, helping me up with strong, thin hands. I stripped my arm from her grasp and tried to run in the direction the man had gone, but stumbled again. Why wouldn’t my legs work?

“Let me help you.” The woman lifted me up, put an arm around my waist, and walked me in Kindle’s direction while I craned my neck searching for him. The steel-gray sky was thick with the earthy smell of impending rain.

“There.” I pointed at a saloon down the street and the woman dutifully carried me along. We navigated through horses, wagons, and pedestrians, drawing our own peculiar interest: an ugly woman holding a carpetbag in one hand and her other arm around a pale, ill woman. I reached for the porch column and pulled myself up the step. I rested my cheek against the coarse wood, hoping for a wellspring of strength to propel me inside the saloon and into Kindle’s arms.

“You can’t go into a saloon,” the woman said.

I stumbled through the open door and stood for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. A card game at a table to the right of the door. A bartender polishing a glass behind planks of wood resting on two cracker barrels. A cracked mirror behind him. The jagged reflection of a thin woman with disheveled hair and bruises beneath her eyes. My mouth watered as the oaky scent of whisky drifted around me. I followed the sound of a woman’s laughter coming from the back.

“Hey!”

Finding my legs, I made it to the hallway in the back and stripped open the canvas curtain door of the first room. Empty. I moved to the room across the hall, startling two women in various states of undress. I went to the next room and ripped open the curtain. Kindle had his back to me, facing the naked woman on the bed, her hand between her splayed legs. My stomach lurched with nausea. “Kindle?” My voice was barely a whisper.

“She your wife?” the whore said.

The man turned and appraised me. A thin mustache hung limply from his upper lip, framing a cruel mouth and taking no attention away from his pockmarked olive complexion.

“That dope fiend? Hell no.” The man grabbed my arm and threw me out the door and straight into the bartender, who lifted me up and tossed me over his shoulder like I was a bag of leaves. He stalked through the saloon and dropped me on the ground outside in the middle of the only puddle in the street. With shaking arms, I pushed myself into a sitting position, horse piss dripping from my jaw, and looked up into the ugly woman’s face. The sun was behind her head, masking her expression.

“I told you not to go in there.” I took her offered hand. She pulled me up and released me quickly. She flicked the excess urine from her hand, bent down, and wiped it on the bottom of her skirt. “Was it him?”

I shook my head.

She sighed. “I’m sorry.”

The train whistle screamed and the train labored forward toward California.

“You’ve missed your train.”

Though my brain was fuzzy with laudanum and I wanted nothing more than to lie down in the middle of the street and sleep, I understood the import of the train leaving without me. I was free of Rosemond and could return to Kindle. I managed to smile. “So I have.”

My happiness was short-lived.

“Laura!”

Rosemond in her ridiculous blue dress stalked toward us holding a flour sack, her powdered, pox-scarred face a mask of fury. The ugly woman turned around and stood shoulder to shoulder with me. “Who’s that?”

“My kidnapper.”