Chapter 24
Louisa followed the tracks of Edgar Clayton down off the saloon’s front porch and into the street. It wasn’t snowing hard, but the hard-blowing wind was quickly filling in Clayton’s tracks, dark dimples in the freshly fallen snow angling across the street.
She followed the tracks through the snow that was around three or four inches deep. It wasn’t the snow that made for hard going. It was the brutally cold wind. In fact, as she peered up at the sky, she could see the dull glow of a pale moon between thinning, parting clouds. The snow would likely cease soon, but Louisa had grown up in the Midwest—albeit farther south, in Nebraska—and from that she knew that savagely cold temperatures often followed a storm.
The wind made the cold doubly bad.
She followed Clayton’s path between two buildings on the north side of the street. The man’s tracks led out behind the buildings and then angled again to the right, toward where a lone, two-story house with a peaked roof sat near a small barn and stable—vaguely outlined against the dark, stormy sky brushed with pale moonlight. As Louisa headed toward the house, a man’s ragged breaths sounded behind her as did the crunching of running footsteps.
Louisa wheeled, taking her rifle in both hands, and quickly racked a round into the action.
The man heading toward her—an inky silhouette against the paleness of the snow lit by the feeble moon—stopped suddenly and raised his gloved hands. “Captain Yardley!”
Louisa lowered the rifle, turned, and continued striding toward the house. Yardley ran up beside her and kept pace with her. She could hear him breathing beneath the wind; she could hear her own ragged breaths, as well.
“You don’t need to be out here, Captain,” Louisa said. “It’s not your game.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
“Yes, it is.”
Yardley looked at her and she looked back at him. She couldn’t read his expression in the darkness but saw only the shimmer of the moonlight in his eyes beneath his thick, dark brows.
Louisa stopped and turned to him. He stopped, too, facing her, his pale breath frosting around his head upon which he wore a round hat made of the same fur as his coat.
“If you’re out here to impress me, you’re wasting your time. It’s not going to happen. We’re not going to happen. Not tonight.”
Yardley flashed his perfect white teeth in a smile, chuckling. “You flatter yourself, Miss Bonaventure. You’re not the only one concerned about justice, you know.”
Louisa wasn’t sure how to respond to that. So she didn’t. She merely turned and continued following Clayton’s dwindling tracks in the snow. She was baffled by the man’s behavior. Most men had ulterior motives. If Yardley did not, he was a rare breed, indeed. She shook her head, ridding her mind of the useless reflections. She had more important things to think about.
Just as she broke into a jog, Clayton’s voice sounded beneath the howling wind, from dead ahead: “Ramsay?” A pause, then: “Ramsay Willis?”
Louisa stopped. She and Yardley shared a look. Louisa broke into a run again, and the captain did, as well.
As Louisa approached the house, which sat sideways to her, she could see a shadowy figure standing behind it. The figure moved off toward the barn and the stable to Louisa’s left, flanking the house, which was a modest, brick, two-story affair. Small and tight but stately, with dormer windows and a shake-shingled roof. Just the kind of house a small-town banker would own.
The figure stopped. Clayton appeared to lower his head slightly and tip it to one side. He raised his rifle.
“Ramsay?” he called, the words ripped by the wind. “I know you’re out here, Ramsay Willis!”
The rifle in Clayton’s hands flashed, stabbing flames in the direction of the barn. The report reached Louisa’s ears a quarter second later, sounding little louder than a twig snapping beneath the moaning, rushing wind.
Louisa quickened her pace. As she drew within twenty or so yards of the rancher, she yelled, “What are you shooting at, Mr. Clayton?”
The man turned to her. His voice was shrill, hoarse with emotion. “I seen him! I seen Ramsay Willis! He just ran around behind the barn.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“Don’t you worry—I know! You best go in and see to the woman. I’ll get Ramsay. He’s mine. He murdered Rose. He’s all mine!”
Louisa looked around for tracks in the snow. The only ones she could make out were Clayton’s own. Yardley ran up behind her as Clayton ran off toward the barn.
“Where’s he going?” the captain asked Louisa, raising his voice above the wind.
“He thinks he saw Willis run behind the barn. Why don’t you check it out? I’ll go inside and see how the banker’s wife is doing.”
Yardley nodded and reached under his coat for a long-barreled Colt Navy revolver. “Right!”
As he jogged off after Clayton, Louisa walked over to the house’s back door. Firewood was stacked five feet high against the back wall. More lay farther out from the wall. That stack, twenty feet long, was covered with several tarpaulins. Between the two stacks of wood was what appeared to be a chopping block now mantled with snow. Near the small wooden porch angling down from the back door were several deep scuff-marks that the wind had not yet filled in with snow.
That must have been where Lester Johnson had found the banker, Emory, before dragging him into the house.
Louisa mounted the stoop, tapped on the door. No response.
She tapped again, harder this time.
Still, no response.
Louisa turned the knob. The latching bolt clicked. She eased the door slowly open, the hinges creaking softly. She stopped when she saw a man lying just inside, the man’s feet shod in brown ankle boots maybe three feet from the door’s threshold.
A light shone to Louisa’s left. Sidling through the quarter-open door, she peered toward where a lamp burned on a table.
The room she was in was a kitchen—well appointed and neatly arranged, with a black cooking range abutting the back wall, to Louisa’s hard left. What caught the brunt of the Vengeance Queen’s attention was the woman sitting on the floor against the far wall, beyond the range and near a wet sink with a pump and several well-stocked shelves, pots and pans dangling from hooks in the bottom of a finely crafted wooden wall cabinet.
She was a plump young woman, possibly in her midtwenties, with light brown hair pulled up in a bun, though the bun had come partly undone and had tumbled down the left side of her head. Her face was round and even-featured with a small nose and thin lips, scars from a bout of pimples when she was younger showing faintly on her forehead. She wore a plain cambric housedress, buttoned to the throat, and a white apron.
She stared without expression toward the table, as though trying to make out something that lay on the floor beneath it. Atop the table, two loaves of freshly baked bread were cooling on a rack beside a bowl of red apples.
The kitchen was smoky and rife with the smell of the stew that had been burning atop the stove until the fire in the stove’s firebox had burned down. Apparently, the young woman had been preparing supper when her husband, the man on the floor—the banker, Emory—had gone out for more wood. When he’d returned, it had been with the assistance of Lester Johnson, and Emory had been sporting the ax in his back.
He still was.
Johnson had been right. The ax resembled nothing so much as a half-lifted pump handle.
Emory was a lean man of medium height, in his midthirties. There were a few strands of gray in his dark brown hair combed straight back from a severe widow’s peak. Wire spectacles dangled from his left ear. His eyes stared vacantly at the floor, glazed in death. He wore broadcloth trousers, a white shirt, and a fawn vest from which a pocket watch drooped to the floor, dangling by a gold chain.
Emory hadn’t been robbed—that much was plain. The watch looked expensive.
Louisa closed the door on the howling wind. She felt her belly tighten when she inspected the ax, the head of which was nearly entirely embedded in the banker’s back, revealing the grisly mess of his ruined spine and several ribs, the shards of which shone inside the bloody gash. There had been nothing tentative about the attack. Whoever had wielded the ax had been resolute in his endeavor to kill the banker, and he’d gotten the job done without question.
He, if the ax-wielding killer had been Ramsay Willis, as Edgar Clayton was insisting. However, Louisa couldn’t help entertaining a vague suspicion concerning the redhead from Jiggs’s place. Could it be a mere coincidence that the banker had ended up dead—murdered—only a few minutes after turning away the young woman who’d come inquiring about a job with the longer-range hope of someday marrying the man?
Louisa turned to Emory’s wife. The woman continued staring in a daze at the floor beneath the table. She had her knees drawn up toward her chest and angled slightly to one side, the skirt of her dress tenting over them. She had her hands on her knees. She was in shock. She didn’t even appear aware of Louisa’s presence. The only thing real to her was the horror inside her own head.
Louisa knew all too well how she felt. She herself had been in shock for nearly three days after she’d watched her own family butchered in the yard of their farm in Nebraska.
When she’d come out of it, she’d buried her family one by one, and then she’d strapped on her father’s old pistol and slid his old rifle into her saddle scabbard and set out after the men—the Handsome Dave Duvall gang—who had killed her parents and siblings, shooting her father and brother and raping her mother and sisters while Louisa had looked on in horror from the brush.
No, not when she’d come out of it.
Because she knew that she had never fully come out of the shock of such an experience, and she likely never would.
She leaned her rifle against the wall by the door and walked slowly over to where the woman sat on the floor. Louisa removed her mittens and gloves and stuffed them into her coat pockets. Crouching beside the banker’s wife, she slowly waved a hand in front of the young woman’s face.
Mrs. Emory didn’t react. She didn’t even move her eyes.
Gently, Louisa said, “Can you tell me your name?”
Nothing.
Louisa dropped her butt to the floor, beside the stricken young woman. Louisa leaned back against the wall. She studied the woman’s profile, the expressionless face with lips slightly parted, the unblinking, staring eyes.
Gradually, a cold darkness crept into Louisa’s bones. Into her very soul. It was like poison. Snake venom. She was well acquainted with this darkness. She’d gotten fairly good over the past couple of years at holding it at bay. She must have let her guard down too low, however, because suddenly it grabbed her like a giant fist, squeezing, making her heart race, oozing cold sweat from her pores, and she was right back in that brush at the edge of her family’s farm in Nebraska.
She heard her mother pleading with her tormentors, begging them to take her and to leave her daughters alone.
“Please . . . please don’t you savage my girls!” she screamed.
Two gunshots. A man yelled. That was Louisa’s father.
“Oh God, no!” he bellowed as Louisa’s brother flew back off his heels with a bullet in his chest. “Noooo—not my boyyyyyy!”
Handsome Dave and the other gang members were whooping and yelling and passing bottles, two members wrestling Louisa’s mother into the brush behind the springhouse. Two others had Louisa’s sisters. Her sisters were screaming at the top of their lungs, one being dragged by one ankle as she fought to free herself, grabbing at the brush with her flailing hands. Her captor held her ankle with one hand, and he took pulls from a bottle with his other hand.
There was another gunshot.
Louisa leaped nearly a foot up off the floor of the dead banker’s house in Dakota Territory and slammed her head back against the wall. In the brush at the border of the Nebraska farm, she watched her father drop to his knees. He knelt there for a moment then looked down at the bloody wound in his chest. He fell forward without breaking his fall and lay facedown in the weeds, quivering.
Meanwhile, Louisa’s mother screamed, “Not my baby girls! ”
She screamed . . . and screamed . . .
Louisa rolled onto her belly, lay flat against the floor, writhing with the screaming in her head and the daggers of grief and terror in her heart, grinding the heels of her hands against her temples as though to knead away the sights and the sounds that were more real than the cold wooden floor she lay upon.
A hand closed over her shoulder. A man said, “Louisa?”
She thought she recognized the voice. Louisa rolled over. She placed both her hands on the man’s arm, squeezing, half sitting up and yelling hopefully, “Lou?”
It was Captain Yardley staring down at her with concern, on one knee beside her. Lou’s absence was nearly as palpable as that of Louisa’s family. Suddenly, she wanted to scream the bounty hunter’s name, to call to him across the cold miles between them, for it was only he who could comfort her, settle her down when the black claws of terror engulfed her.
But he wasn’t here.
It was the handsome, cobalt-eyed Captain Yardley. She felt tears slither into her eyes, felt her lips tremble with longing. Her disappointment must have been plain on her face.
Yardley gave a regretful smile, his brows forming a V above his nose. “Sorry. Just me.” His eyes probed hers. “Are you all right, Louisa?”
Quickly, she brushed her hands across her cheeks, rubbing away the tears that had started to dribble down from her overfilled eyes. She sniffed, nodded, her face warming with chagrin. “Did you find Clayton?”
Yardley shook his head. “Dark back there. I lost his tracks. I think he headed for some woods north of town but I couldn’t be sure. I thought I’d come back and check on you . . .” He glanced at the banker’s wife to Louisa’s left. “And Mrs. Emory.”
“She’s been sitting like that since I came in,” Louisa said.
“Poor woman.”
“Does she have family around here?”
Again, Yardley shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. I only pass through here from time to time.”
Still flushed with embarrassment over her unseemly emotional display, Louisa rose with a grunt. What horrified her almost as much as the memories of her family’s murder was Yardley having witnessed her breakdown. If only she could go into the captain’s brain and clear his memory of the past few minutes. Only Lou had ever seen her like that. Only the big ex-rebel knew how to comfort her.
If only he were here. If only they could get along, stay together . . .
She suppressed the trembling in her hands and knees and looked down at the banker’s wife. “We’d best get her over to the saloon. We can’t leave her here. Not with a killer on the loose. Can you carry her?”
“Sure.” Yardley glanced at Emory. “What about him?”
“Leave him here,” Louisa said, walking over to the door and picking up her rifle. “Let the town deal with him once the storm breaks.”
Quickly, feeling the walls of the banker’s house closing in on her, Louisa glanced once more at the dead Emory still lying with the ax embedded in his back, then swung around and went out.