Professional writer Annie Reed writes stories that span genres and are always powerful. In fact with Annie, you just never know the type of story you might be reading, but you will always know it will grab you and be a compelling read.

With this story, Annie takes us to a very real Virginia City. Not much else I can say without ruining the story. So far Annie has had a story in every issue of this magazine and as an editor, I hope to continue that streak.

Her story “The Color of Guilt” was selected for The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories. Look for so much more of this prolific writer’s work at her website anniereed.wordpress.com/

The wind, unseasonably hot this late spring morning, picked up the dry, dusty dirt from the cemetery grounds and whipped it around Bo’s trousers. The wind never stopped blowing out here, what with no tall pines to stop it, only scrub brush and sagebrush and the sun-bleached bones of stunted trees the desert had sucked the life out of long before Bo Bishop came to Virginia City to make a fortune he’d yet to find. The wind cut through his threadbare shirt and flapped the ends of the bandana he’d tied over his nose and mouth like some bandit out of one of the dime novels he used to read when he’d been a kid.

The novels had made life in the West sound like an adventure. Cowboys. Outlaws. Shootouts in the streets, and the good guys always got the girl.

Then there was the money. Gold in the hills of California just ripe for the taking. Gold in the mountains of the Comstock, and silver in blue-veined mud so common that at first everyone thought the damn stuff just got in the way of gettin’ to the gold.

Bo had grown up a poor kid, working on his daddy’s farm from sunup to sundown, too young and scrawny to go off to war like his daddy had, but his momma had taught him to read, and he wasn’t too young to read by lamplight and dream of a better—and more exciting—life out West.

His daddy had died in the war, and then his momma got sick and she died, too. Bo left for California the next day before the army could change their minds and take him. He was eleven years old.

Bo never made it to California. He got as far as Virginia City before what money he’d managed to earn along the way ran out. On the day he dug the grave for the man everyone in town referred to as Frenchie, Bo Bishop had just turned sixteen years old.

He’d hiked a damn long distance to the back of the cemetery—him and Everett, the other man the town hired to dig graves whenever necessary—that dry dirt crunching beneath his boots, before he got to the place where Frenchie would be laid to rest. Didn’t seem right, burying a murderer so close to the grave of the lady he’d killed the year before, but not many in town would have called Julia a lady. Everett, who was a good deal older than Bo, called her an “accommodating woman,” which Bo supposed was a polite way of saying she did things with men for money that no upstanding lady would ever do.

Bo had never met her. She’d been killed—murdered in her bed, Everett had told him—a month before a snowstorm blew Bo and the wagon full of supplies he’d been hired to load and unload into Virginia City.

“Biggest damn funeral procession this town ever saw,” Everett had told him. “Brass band marched through snow and mud and wind cold enough to freeze your pecker right off, and some of them firefighters who took a shining to her, well they marched, too. I heard they even got her a fancy coffin with silver handles. The mines shut down, and the saloons closed up, and the whole town draped itself in black. She was a nice lady, and everybody liked her.”

Bo didn’t know how much of that to believe. The gospel truth and Everett had never been too closely acquainted, from what Bo could tell. It seemed to him like such a fancy coffin shouldn’t have been laid to rest in an unconsecrated grave that only bore a wooden marker with the single name “Julia” written on it.

And besides, if everybody liked her, then why’d somebody go and kill her?

The whole thing sounded like something out of the dime novels. Some story Everett made up to tell a gullible young man. But he wasn’t as gullible as Everett thought.

Bo spent his days climbing up the framework of new buildings going up all over the city. He held boards in place and fetched supplies while men older and stronger than him actually built the building. The company he worked for didn’t care much in what part of town they built the houses (except for the Chinese part, of course). Bo had worked on respectable businesses and boarding houses, and he’d worked on the cribs and cottages in the red-light district. When he was perched up high on the skeleton beams of a new building on C Street, the main street through town, Bo had a bird’s eye view of how the respectable women of town treated the “accommodating women” who lived in the red light. He didn’t think the respectable women in town would have stood for their men displaying such affection and respect for an “accommodating woman,” not even at her funeral.

Just this morning there’d been a hanging, not that Bo had seen it. He and Everett had been busy since dawn hacking at the rocky dirt at the back of the cemetery with pickaxes and shovels. The man who’d murdered Julia—“Duly tried and convicted, the French bastard,” Everett had said—was to be buried no more than a stone’s throw from the woman he’d killed.

Even this far back as the ass end of the boneyard, they’d heard cheers and applause erupt from the crowd gathered to watch the hanging, and Bo guessed that meant the French bastard was dead. They’d really put their backs into digging then, and got the grave deep enough just in time. Now they were busy filling the hole that held the remains of John Millian, the dumb sonofabitch who’d been stupid enough to get caught with most of the murdered woman’s possessions in his room.

Bo bent his back and scooped up a shovelful of dusty, rocky dirt to dump into the grave. Between the wind and the sound of the shovels scraping through the earth, he supposed he could be forgiven for not hearing footsteps on the pathway in front of Frenchie’s grave until he caught sight of the woman standing not more than five feet away from him and Everett.

Tall and slender, dressed in a high-necked black dress, the woman had a severe look about her. Her dark hair was pulled back tight against her skull and pinned into a bun at the back of her neck. The wind had pulled some strands loose about her face, which served to soften her appearance somewhat. She stood with her back as straight as the plank boards Bo lifted into place when he worked on them new buildings in town, and her blue eyes were as cold and icy as the worst winter storm.

Even with all that, she was altogether the prettiest woman Bo had ever seen up close.

“Ma’am,” Everett said, nodding his head in greeting.

She didn’t say anything in return. She just stood there, the wind whipping her black skirt around her ankles, and stared at what was left of the open hole in the ground like she expected a rattler to crawl out at any minute.

No mourners had come out to the cemetery with Frenchie’s body. Bo supposed everyone who’d gone to the hanging was back in town now, celebrating the righteous death of a murderer. The cemetery was deserted except for him and Everett, and now this woman.

After a few more minutes of quiet, Everett cleared his throat. “Ma’am, pardon my asking,” he said, “but is there anything we can help you with?”

She raised her eyes from the grave to glance at Everett, then at Bo. That one glance told Bo she was not only the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, she was also the angriest. That was saying something considering his mom used to cuss out the chickens something fierce whenever one of them managed to escape from the henhouse.

“No, thank you, gentlemen,” she said, turning her attention back to Frenchie’s final resting place. “I just wanted one last look at the man they say killed my sister.”

Virginia City wasn’t the biggest city Bo had been to during his travels out West, but it was a pretty bustling place just the same. Saloons and hotels, the Wells Fargo bank and the newspaper office, they all crowded C Street along with a general store and a freight office and even a gentlemen’s fine clothing store. C Street always seemed to be crowded with men and mule-drawn coaches and men on horseback, and every so often some of the respectable ladies managed to cross the busy street “without getting their petticoats in a twist,” as Everett always said.

Bo didn’t spend his time on C Street unless he was working on a building. When the strange new woman came to town—Julia’s sister, so she said—the company he worked for had just started building a new two-story boarding house on a side street at the north end of the city not far from the rickety old boarding house where he lived. He spent most days from dawn to sunset hauling boards and nails and whatever else needed to be carried, and climbing up ladders and over crossbeams like a monkey, which he’d actually seen once in a traveling circus. He’d never filled out much from the scrawny kid he’d been, but he could climb things like crazy.

But just because he didn’t spend his time on C Street, he still heard what happened to the lady who’d come to stare at Frenchie’s grave.

“Calls herself Missus Benoit, she does,” Charlie Mills told him not more than two days after Bo and Everett buried the Frenchman. “She marched right into the International and demanded the best room in the place.”

Charlie paused to spit off the side of the building. They were working putting up the outside wall on the second story of the boarding house. The wind carried Charlie’s spit away before it ever hit the ground.

Charlie was a small man like Bo, but where Bo was scrawny, Charlie was wiry and deceptively strong. He could hammer in a nail three times as fast as Bo could even on a good day, but Charlie loved to gossip more than any man Bo had ever known. Bo supposed that’s how Charlie kept himself entertained, telling and retelling tales he himself had never witnessed. Bo didn’t mind. He liked hearing stories of how other people lived, especially since he couldn’t afford to buy any new dime novels, and he only read the newspaper if he found a copy someone else left behind.

“Well, you know that didn’t sit too well, being how she didn’t keep it no secret she was Julia’s sister and all,” Charlie said.

He spat again. He only had about five teeth in his head, and from the looks of ’em, those teeth wouldn’t be lasting long, not at the rate Charlie was going through tobacco.

“If she is that woman’s sister,” he said. “I ain’t never heard nothing about old Julia having a sister, and I guess nobody else did neither. But the manager, he come out and told the clerk to give her a room—not the best room, he says, but a good room, meaning good enough for the likes of you, if you know what I mean.”

Bo did. The International Hotel was one of the finest hotels in Virginia City, and it boasted one of the best dining rooms in town. Bo had never eaten there, Charlie neither, but that didn’t stop them from speculating on the quality of the food.

Bo swiped at the sweat trickling down his forehead and threatening to get in his eyes. “Why do you think she came here?” he asked.

“Crazy woman,” Charlie said. “Came all the way here from Louisiana”—he pronounced it Loo-siana—“just to see Frenchie hang.” He leaned in closer to Bo. His breath would have done in a lesser man, but Bo prided himself on being able to look people in the face even when their breath would have knocked out a mule. “’Cept to hear her tell it, Frenchie didn’t do it all by hisself.”

Charlie said that last bit with a wicked grin.

“We all know that’s horseshit, of course,” Charlie said, going back to hammering.

The trial of John Millian had been the biggest news in the Comstock since the day one of Julia’s neighbors in the red-light district had discovered her body.

The newspaper reported all the goings-on at trial, and Bo had scrounged every copy he could get his hands on. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been in town when Julia had been murdered, or that he hadn’t even known the woman. Reading about the trial was like reading a real-life dime novel.

Millian was just a simple French baker, his lawyer had argued. He didn’t understand English enough to realize he’d confessed to murder when he made a statement after he was caught with the murdered woman’s clothes and paste jewelry in his room. He hadn’t killed her himself. He’d simply gone to her crib to avail himself of her talents. Someone else had killed her before he arrived, he’d said. He swore he’d only been foolish enough to steal her belongings.

The circuit judge hadn’t believed him. Neither had the three justices of the new state’s Supreme Court. Millian had lost his appeal and been hanged for murder.

Most people in town didn’t believe Millian either. Apparently the murdered woman’s sister did.

If she really was her sister.

Bo had seen a portrait of the murdered woman, of course. It was in the window of the firehouse where her funeral had been held. The portrait made her look she was some important person—a politician or a banker or one of the mine owners. Charlie said the firemen had loved her, and not just for the obvious reasons, but because she always came out to help whenever their company responded to a fire in town. She helped other people besides, always giving to charity whenever she could.

Bo supposed the woman he’d seen at the cemetery possessed a vague resemblance to the murdered woman. They were both tall and regal looking, both had dark hair and severe features, but where Julia (funny how he never thought of her with a last name, even though he knew it; probably because the marker on her grave only bore the single name) had been wide in the face with heavy, almost mannish features, Mrs. Benoit’s features were delicate and soft, even beneath her severe expression. Bo had spent more time than he wanted to think about imagining what she might look like with her hair loose about her face and an actual smile on her lips.

But was she really Julia’s sister? If she was, why hadn’t she come to Virginia City after her sister was murdered? Why did she wait more than a year?

It had taken Bo a long time to cross the West and he still hadn’t made it to California, but he’d taken odd jobs along the way to support himself, and hitched rides when he could to cross the worst of the desert. A fine lady like Mrs. Benoit looked to be, someone who could afford to stay at the International Hotel, she surely could have made the journey quicker.

Did she really think someone else killed her sister?

If that was the case, Bo had buried an innocent man.

Bo shivered in spite of the sweat running down his back. He’d buried a lot of people during his time in Virginia City. Men who got sick from working a worthless claim and died penniless, and miners who died down in the company mineshafts, their bodies carted up to the surface like so much ore. Babies who died in their cradles, women who died in childbirth. Men who got drunk and fell in front of a mule-drawn wagon or tumbled down a set of rickety stairs. Once he’d buried a man who’d actually been shot, but the man who’d shot him had been as drunk as the man he’d hit, and they’d both been trying to outdraw the other on a bet (“Empty pistols! I swear my gun was empty!” the shooter had claimed) even though the only time they’d actually used their pistols was to put meat on the table. The dead man had been hit in the leg and the leg had turned putrid and poisoned him, but the man who shot him hadn’t been hanged.

“Can’t hang a man for being stupid,” Everett had said as they buried the man with the poisoned leg. “Have to hang half the town if being stupid was a crime.”

What made Bo shiver was the thought of half the town turning up for the hanging of an innocent man. Well, not truly innocent—he had, after all, stolen the dead woman’s belongings—but what if he hadn’t murdered her? In the dime novels, frontier justice was swift and usually handed out with a smoking six-gun, but it was still justice. The dead men—the outlaws—always got what they deserved.

Did John Millian—Frenchie—get what he deserved? What if he was just a simple thief, not a murderer?

If Bo was one of the heroes in those dime novels, he’d find out. He’d bring the real killer to justice, along with help from Mrs. Benoit, and she might be so grateful he’d get the girl. But this wasn’t a dime novel. This was real life, and real life for Bo consisted of working hard enough to pay for his own room and board, and spending his nights—when he wasn’t so tired he just went to his room and slept—sitting in a comfortable chair in the parlor of the boarding house reading by lamplight, either a copy of the newspaper he’d managed to scrounge up or re-reading one of the three dime novels he’d brought with him from his daddy’s farm.

He never went to the saloons or visited the women of ill repute in their rooms in the saloons or in the cribs in the red-light district. His landlady didn’t cotton to such activities, as she periodically informed him and the other men in her boarding house, and neither did the Good Lord. She frequently served up passages from the Bible along with her biscuits and gravy, and told her gentlemen boarders that she’d kick them out on the street if she ever found out they’d been seen in a saloon or keeping company with low women.

Yet even with her admonitions hanging over his head, the mystery of Julia and John Millian and Mrs. Benoit caught fire in Bo’s imagination. No matter how hard he tried to think of other things to distract himself, his mind kept going back to the same question:

Had he buried an innocent man?

Which was why, three nights later, he got caught in the red-light district, standing in front of the crib where Julia Bullette had lived.

The farm where Bo had grown up was on flat land that seemed to extend almost as far as the eye could see. Low, rolling hills dotted with tall oaks and maples and willow trees had separated his daddy’s land from his closest neighbors, but their small farmhouse sat on solid, flat ground.

One of the hardest things Bo had to get used to when he came out West was the size of the mountains. Back home, mountains had been distant ridges on the far horizon. Out West, mountains were gigantic things with steep slopes and sheer, rocky cliffs, and granite peaks that seemed to touch the sky. Men had to make their way across those mountains to get from place to place, and more often than not, men either died or quit trying, making their home wherever their wagons broke down.

Bo used to have nightmares about some of the trails he’d been on during the years after he’d left the farm behind. If he’d known then what he would be facing, he might never have left, but he’d just been a boy entranced with stories about the adventurous West.

Virginia City was built in a narrow canyon high up in the mountains. C Street was the most level of the streets in town, and probably only because it was the main street that ran down the center of the canyon. Once you left C Street, all the buildings perched on the slopes of the canyon, some so steep so that if you went in on the first floor on one side of a building, you had to climb up a set of stairs to get to a second floor that was street level on the back side of the building. Bo’s boarding house was no exception.

Neither were the cribs in the red-light district.

The cribs were some of the smallest houses Bo had ever seen. Little more than one-room shacks, most of them, like the miners lived in on the east side of town. At least, those miners who didn’t live in tent city year round, even when it snowed and the streets turned to icy mud. The cribs were built on streets that sloped up sharply from C Street, close enough to the saloons so that drunken men could be persuaded to part with their money by visiting the women who lived in the cribs, but not so close as to offend decent society by reminding the upstanding citizens of what happened in these tiny shacks with their crooked floors.

Bo had helped to build a few of the cribs when he’d first come to town. He’d been hired on as cheap labor by a man who’d come from the South fleeing the war and who didn’t want no black men working for him. Bo knew from that experience that most of the cribs consisted of nothing more than a single room big enough for a bed and a chest for the women to store their few belongings.

The crib where Julia had lived was different. The house was almost double the size of most of the tiny houses in the red-light district. From what Charlie had told him, she had a huge parlor room with sofas and chairs where she’d entertain nearly a dozen men while they waited their turn with her in her bedroom. He could believe it, standing there on the slope in front of a house that looked nearly as big as the farmhouse he’d grown up in.

Someone else was living there now, of course. A prime crib like this wouldn’t go vacant long, not even when a murder had been committed inside.

Bo didn’t know exactly why he’d felt compelled to come here. He could put it off to curiosity, but it was more than that.

He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to find the answer to the question of who really killed the woman who used to live here, but he didn’t want to do it for himself.

He wanted to do it for the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, even if he’d only seen her once. That’s what heroes did.

Only he had no idea how to get started.

Piano music drifted up the hill from the saloons on this end of C Street. He could hear men shouting—drunks, most likely—and the sound of doors slamming and boots tromping on the boardwalks in front of the saloons. He stood stock still with only a sliver of moonlight keeping company with the stars overhead, his breath ghosting out in front of him in a night that had turned cold, and he had absolutely no idea what to do next.

That question was answered for him when the door to Julia’s crib opened and a woman came out.

Slinked out, would have been a better word.

She opened the door just wide enough for her to sidle through, then turned and shut it behind herself, quiet as a mouse. Her hair was long and dark and hung past her waist. She was dressed in a dark skirt and some type of thin, white, frilly thing on top that showed entirely too much skin, and nothing that Bo had seen a respectable woman wear in public.

She must be the “accommodating woman,” to use Everett’s term, who lived in Julia’s crib now. Bo had never been this close to one of those women in his life, and he didn’t quite know what to do.

He must have made some small sound of discomfort because the woman whirled to face him like he was going to bite her. She must not have seen him, standing there with only scant moonlight lighting up the street, because she looked about as startled as he felt.

Then her expression changed, and he guessed she recognized him about the same time he realized who she was.

Mrs. Benoit.

Julia’s sister.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice little more than a harsh whisper. “Did you follow me?”

What?

“No, ma’am,” Bo managed to say. “I just…”

But he couldn’t finish the thought. How to explain to her why he was here when he didn’t even know himself?

She held some type of garment draped over one arm—perhaps a jacket to cover herself with—and a small satchel with her other hand. As he glanced at the satchel, she gripped it harder. Her mouth thinned into an unpleasant smile.

“But you’ve seen me now,” she said.

She seemed to consider something, then her expression softened. Now she looked like the beautiful woman he’d seen at the cemetery, only prettier, if that was possible, with her hair loose around her face. She smiled at him, this smile warm and pleasant.

And inviting.

“Did you come here to see my sister’s house?” she asked, a thoroughly unexpected lilt in her voice, and for the first time he heard the hint of an accent, although he couldn’t place it. Maybe that’s how people talked down in Louisiana. The man Bo had worked for who’d fled from the South came from Georgia, and he talked different than she did. “I can show you inside,” she said. “Satisfy your curiosity.”

She tilted her head and looked at him in a way no grown woman had ever looked at him before.

Bo had been with a woman before, of course, but it had been a long time ago and they’d both been little more than kids who didn’t know what they were doing. Mrs. Benoit was a grown woman, and she was inviting him inside a crib in the red light. Maybe Charlie and the manager at the International were right about her, and she was just like her sister.

“I can’t pay you,” Bo blurted out.

Her grin grew wider. “Young strapping man like you, I’m sure we can come to some sort of accommodation.”

She opened the door a crack, seemed to listen for something, then opened the door wider.

“Come on,” she said. “I won’t ask you twice.”

Heart thumping hard in his chest, Bo took one step forward, then another, and before he knew it, he was through the door of the crib where Julia Bullette had died.

And where he didn’t see the knife Mrs. Benoit had hidden beneath the garment she’d draped over her arm until it was almost too late.

The dime novels Bo had read told stories about gunfights and cattle rustlers and outlaws who shot up a town before they were brought to justice by a hard-riding marshal. They told stories about fragile women who needed rescuing by the hero before he rode off into the sunset.

They never said anything about a cold-blooded woman wielding a knife.

Mrs. Benoit attacked Bo with all the ferocity of a timber wolf.

The inside of the crib was dark, the only light coming from a lamp in the bedroom that had been turned down low. He caught just a glimpse of that dim light shining off the knife, and might have missed it all together if she hadn’t snarled at him as she turned on him.

As it was, he didn’t move quite quick enough.

The parlor where Bo stood was crammed with furniture that looked like little more than lumpy shadows in places where a normal person wouldn’t expect furniture to be. If he hadn’t spent all that time crawling around on the skeleton struts of buildings, a job that had made him sure of foot and quick to boot, she would have shoved that knife smack dab in the middle of his belly. Even in his shock at her sudden attack, he turned and twisted out of the way—and would have made it, too, if he hadn’t tripped over one of those shadows. Her knife caught him high on his left arm, slicing through the only coat he owned and into his flesh beneath.

His arm erupted in fire, and he howled in pain and surprise even as he fell to the floor.

She landed in a heap on the other side of what felt like a small table, the kind a fancy person would put in a room just to put a tea service on. The woman who ran Bo’s boarding house had something similar in her parlor, only hers was made of rough pine boards, not the smooth, solid wood Bo’s hand came up against as he pushed himself off the floor.

He grabbed onto that table and managed to lift it, intending to keep it between himself and Mrs. Benoit. He didn’t know why she was trying to kill him, and at that moment he didn’t much care, but he was pretty sure she’d come at him again.

“What did I do to you?” he asked. “Why’d you invite me inside?”

She didn’t answer, just grunted as she got to her feet.

Bo’s eyes were adjusting to the darkness inside the crib. He could see the pale, frilly cloth that barely covered her chest and shoulders, the smoothness of her creamy skin, and the absolute fury in her expression. She no longer looked like the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and she bore no resemblance whatsoever to the portrait of Julia Bullette hanging in the firehouse.

“You’re not her sister, are you?” he asked.

“I have no sister,” she said. “Only a brother.” She lifted the knife, her eyes shifting between his face and the table he held in front of himself. Probably trying to figure out how she could get to him. “A stupid brother. You buried him,” she said, before adding something in a language Bo didn’t understand.

In his shock, Bo let the little table slide toward the floor.

He really was living in a dime novel story, but it was a story he didn’t entirely understand.

Mrs. Benoit—if that was her real name—was John Millian’s sister. Had she come out here to clear his name? But if that was the case, why had she waited so long? Why did she come to Julia’s crib, and why was she trying to kill him? Just because he’d seen her here?

He remembered how tightly she’d held on to her satchel.

Her brother had only stolen clothes and jewels that turned out to be worthless. He must have left something behind. Something of far greater value he was supposed to steal but didn’t, and she’d come to get it.

“What was it?” he asked. “What did you find?”

Instead of answering, she lunged at him again.

Bo didn’t think. He just swung the table at her with all the strength he had in his right arm.

He might not be as strong or as fast with a hammer as Charlie, but he was strong enough to wield a pickax to dig a grave and fast enough to keep Mrs. Benoit from stabbing him again.

The table struck her first on the arm, knocking the knife out of her hand, and then on the side of her head as Bo finished his swing. The hard wood splintered and she went down hard. Bo heard the sickening crack as her head struck another piece of furniture and she fell to the floor in a boneless heap.

She didn’t get up again.

Bo knew what death looked like. Bo had seen his momma die when he’d only been eleven years old, and he knew without touching the woman who’d tried to kill him that Mrs. Benoit was dead.

When his heart slowed down and he started breathing normal again, he went into the bedroom to turn off the lamp. He almost jumped out of his skin when he saw a half-naked woman lying on the bed, but this woman wasn’t dead. A small glass vial sat on the table next to her bed along with an empty whiskey glass. Mrs. Benoit must have drugged the woman who actually lived here so that she wouldn’t know Mrs. Benoit had searched the place for whatever her brother had failed to steal.

Mrs. Benoit had been thorough in her search, even going so far as to pull floorboards up beneath a fancy rug. Bo didn’t take the time to put the parlor furniture to rights before he left. He just took her satchel and disappeared into the night.

He didn’t even look inside the satchel.

Not until much later.

Bo finally made it to California nearly six months after he’d buried John Millian. He bought himself a spot on the stage that was returning a troupe of actors home to San Francisco after their contract at Piper’s Opera House came to an end. They were a lively bunch and kept him highly entertained, but for the most part Bo kept to himself.

He’d found gold nuggets—small ones, and six of them—inside Mrs. Benoit’s satchel when he’d finally opened it. Enough gold to let him get where he was going and maybe a little more to live on when he got there. He’d used the money he usually paid his landlady to buy his ticket on the stage. He wouldn’t do anything with the gold itself until he got far away from Virginia City.

No one had made a fuss about Mrs. Benoit when her body was found. She was just another woman of ill repute who’d died in the cribs, and she wasn’t as well liked as her “sister.” No one investigated her death. No funeral parade was held in her honor, and no one came to the grave when Bo and Everett buried her.

Bo tried to think of himself as the good guy, but a part of him still felt guilty about what had happened. Mrs. Benoit hadn’t been a good woman certainly, and she had tried to kill him over six small pieces of gold. The ease with which she’d turned on him made him think that she’d killed men before, maybe with the help of her brother.

At least that’s what he told himself when the cold, damp San Francisco nights made his arm ache where she’d stabbed him, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

In the dime novels he’d read as a boy, no one ever mentioned how the heroes carried the scars and the pain of their adventures with them until the day they died.

Bo didn’t need a dime novel to tell him that he would.