“Kurt’s dead.”
In disbelief, Petra repeated the news. “Kurt is dead. He’s dead and Beau’s in jail.”
Seated at the table, Buck held Gabriel, leaving Petra free to absorb the facts presented in the Herald.
Lowering the paper, she shook her head at him. “I’ll need to see the body to believe it.”
“The paper’s a couple of weeks old,” he said and tapped a finger on the date at the top of the paper.
Tilting her head to the side, Petra rubbed the back of her neck. She huffed, then vigorously rattled the paper, he thought she did it to get the creases out, or perhaps she thought to shake out the mystery that lay hidden between the lines of type.
Lips drawn back into a thin line, jaw tight she said, “I don’t believe a word. You can’t kill the devil. Nothing can kill the devil. The devil can worm his way out of any jail. If the devil goes to trial, it is his plan. No one lives to testify against the devil, ever. And if a mere mortal should live long enough to betray the devil, that person will surely meet with a horrible fate. In the end they will pray for death, which the devil will cheerfully arrange.”
Gabriel had gone to sleep in his arms, Buck slowly rose from his chair, carefully, quietly making his way over to the baby’s cradle and laid the baby down. In his bed, Gabriel grunted, scrunching up into a tight little ball, his knees coming up to his chest. Buck held his breath, waiting to see if he would wake up and start fussing, or go back to sleep. Gabriel’s lips started making sucking motions, then his little fist came up and he inserted his thumb in his mouth and started working it. Soon his lips stopped, his hand relaxed, and Buck felt confident the little fella would be out of commission for a couple of hours, at least.
Their patient, above stairs, had gone back to sleep after lunch, consuming two bowls of soup and three biscuits covered in butter and honey. Buck figured the old poop would live and be good enough to travel by tomorrow morning.
He came back to the table, sat down, and took the newspaper from her, folded it and set it out of reach to keep her from hitting him with it when she heard what he proposed they do.
“You have to go to Baker city, Petra. You have to tell the sheriff what you know. If you don’t, they might turn Beau loose. I don’t think you want that.”
She’d gone as pale as a wisp of vapor, her eyes a bottomless sapphire. Placing his hand on hers, he begged, “Tell me, tell me what happened, tell me why the bastards locked you up, put you in the cage? Tell me everything this time, don’t leave anything out.”
She shook her head, her lips so tightly pressed together they lost their rosy color.
“Petra, come on, you have to tell me.”
Eyes tightly shut, lips trembling, he watched Petra physically cave in, her shoulders hunching forward and her chin going to her chest.
“Kurt said he’d cut my tongue out, then slit my throat and let me bleed to death if I told anyone what I knew—what I’d seen.”
She brought up her head, and turned to look him in the eye. “You might think that an empty threat but then you weren’t there. He had me down, my tongue pinched between a pair of pliers and the blade of his knife to my throat. When I tried to scream, he laughed and pulled harder on my tongue.”
With her arms straight, hands clasped tight between her knees, she went on. “Beau wanted him to kill me and be done with it.
“Kurt promised him that as soon as I gave birth, he’d get rid of me.”
Buck squeezed her wrist, and she opened her eyes to search his face. Buck offered her gentle encouragement with a faint smile, but he didn’t think it would help, nothing could. She’d been through hell, and he couldn’t take away the memories.
“You have to put him away, Petra. What do you know? What couldn’t you tell? What were they afraid of?”
Taking a deep shuddering breath, she closed her eyes again and threw her head back.
“They were stealing gold nuggets and gold dust from two of the mines in Sumpter—I don’t know which ones.”
Bringing her head down, she stared at the table top.
“I don’t know how they were doing it, probably bribes or blackmail or both.”
Glancing in his direction, she tried to steady her breathing by straightening her spine.
“That’s why they needed my money. They needed cash to get enough gold so they could salt the Lucky Laski mine to lure investors. They needed a positive assay report to prove a positive strike.”
Bringing her hands to the table and folding them tightly together, she stared straight ahead.
“The mine wasn’t how they were going to strike it rich—they were counting on investors. I knew they were getting close to securing a really big investor’s capitol. They were getting nervous and they needed more of my cash to buy enough gold to keep up the appearance of the false bonanza at their mine.”
Her eyes open, vacant, she stared at the far wall.
“I got caught in their vicious circle. I wanted out. I wanted to go home, but after I witnessed Beau kill the clerk from the assay office, and watched as Kurt poisoned three of the Chinese coolies they had forced to help them salt the mine, they couldn’t allow me to live, not for long. I knew it.”
Murder.
Buck hadn’t counted on that. He gave out a low whistle.
Blinking, coming out of her trance, Petra gazed into his eyes.
Buck had a lot of questions but had to go slow; pale and trembling, she could shatter into a thousand pieces, pieces he might not be able to retrieve or put back together. He couldn’t risk sending her over the edge.
“You have any proof they murdered the coolies and the clerk?”
She shook her head. “I don’t have proof, but I saw them do it. It would be my word against theirs—I wouldn’t stand a chance in hell.”
The hand he held felt ice cold—he brought it to his lips to warm her fingers.
His lunch churned, mixing in with burning acid in his stomach, but Buck had to know. “When? How?”
She shrugged her shoulders, her eyes glazing over, she retreated into a trance and began to speak, “I overheard them talking about salting the mine one night. Foolishly, I confronted them. Then they started locking me in my room and sent the house staff packing.
“They took away my clothes and my shoes thinking I couldn’t run. But I tried to escape, so they started to haul me back and forth to and from the mine. They tied me down, gagged me, and threw a tarp over me to hide me. They gave me some burlap bags to use for blankets to keep me warm in the cage. I made myself a skirt and some boots, and Kurt gave me one of his old shirts.
“The clerk was just a kid, maybe eighteen. I’d seen him a couple of times. He’d come to the house, usually with a box under his arm. One night, as Kurt and Beau were shutting down the mine for the day, the clerk showed up. They took him back into the mine. I heard them arguing. The kid said he couldn’t get any more nuggets or gold dust because his boss watched him like a hawk. He wanted his money so he could get out of town. Kurt handed him a wad of bills, the kid started toward me, heading out of the mine, then Beau shot him in the back.
“They loaded the body into the back of the wagon next to me. His blood got on me…on my toes.”
Swallowing hard, Petra held her breath, scraping her lower lip to the side with her teeth.
Buck didn’t know what to do. He wanted to hold her, tell her she didn’t have to remember anything else, tell her she could forget everything. But it would have been a lie.
Bravely, she kept talking. “The next day, Beau read the paper out loud to me. The papers reported it, the body found behind the Blue Bucket Saloon. Beau and Kurt, they laughed about it, bragged about it in front of me. One of the saloon girls had found the kid’s body. The paper said the kid had only been in town a few months, and no one knew much about him. No one had seen or heard anything and there were no witnesses. Except me, but I was no longer alive, not really.”
She heaved a heavy sigh and looked down to the hand he held and put her hand over the top. When she lifted her gaze to meet his, Buck could hardly stand it. He could see it there in her eyes, all the horror, all the desperation, raw and unsheathed.
With trembling lips, she whimpered as a tear rolled down her cheek. “The poor coolies. They were prisoners like me. They worked hard and took beatings and abuse—expendable, like me. I guess they’d simply outlived their usefulness. Kurt had no problem taking care of them; it only took a little rat poison in their food. No one missed them or questioned their disappearance.”
“You actually saw Kurt and Beau poison the coolies? How many?”
She straightened her shoulders and rocked her head from side to side.
“There were three of them. They had rice at every meal. Kurt fried up some fresh trout for’em. They were very grateful and ate hearty. I saw the smile on Kurt’s face as he seasoned the fish with the rat poison. He winked at me. I didn’t eat anything Kurt gave me for three days afterward. Then I ate, and hoped and prayed he’d poison me too. I wanted to die so badly.”
Buck scraped his chair back. He couldn’t stand to sit still one more second and started to pace the room.
“You, and Gabriel, you’re both lucky to be alive.”
Kneeling down beside her chair, he wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his head against her side.
“Yes,” she said, as her hand stroked his jaw, “I know.”
Turning his head up to her face, he held her trusting gaze with his eyes. “You have to tell the sheriff everything. You’ll have to testify. I’ll be right beside you all the way. I won’t let anything happen to you. You have to, Petra. You have to do this. Is there anyone else who might back up your story?”
“I don’t think so. After I overheard them in the study, they wouldn’t allow me to speak to anyone. And I don’t think anyone saw what was happening to me. The housekeeper doesn’t know anything, not really, she’s just guessing. She’s a very sweet lady. No, no one saw me. They hid me away—out of sight—coming and going to the mine. The Laski brothers can be very wily when they put their evil minds to it.
“Matt, will you hold me for a while? Will you come to bed with me, and just hold me?”
Scooping her up in his arms and carrying her to the bed, Buck slid in beside her and pulled the quilt up over the both of them. They lay there, both of them staring out the window.
“We’ll leave first thing in the morning. We should get to Baker City in a day, easy.”
With her back to him, her butt pressing into his hips, she cried out, saying, “Oh, God.”
He almost gave in. He almost changed his mind. They could pack up this afternoon and light out, head for Canada like he’d always planned.
“The moment the shot missed your head I knew there was a reason why. I knew it,” he said, sorry he’d said anything.
“What? What did you say?”
Damn, she’d heard.
“Nothing, nothing, just thinking back to when I found you up there by the boulder. At the time, I didn’t understand why me.”
She relaxed in his arms, and Buck closed his eyes, vowing never to tell her how close she’d come to dying that afternoon, not from the elements or starvation, but by his hand.
Unable to hold back, he turned her around to face him, he needed to look into her eyes, he needed to kiss her, savor the taste of her, feel her in his arms.
This was a dream, a lovely dream. He had to hang on to it, never let it go. The kiss, all he intended, was all he needed. That is, until she began to unbutton his shirt, her hand slipping inside, her fingers warm, moving across his chest. Silently they looked deep into each other’s eyes, and he knew what she was asking. A slow dance began. A slow dance of caresses, kisses and sighs. Led by instinct, their bodies in rhythm, they satisfied their need to touch, to feel, to taste, and to hell with tomorrow.