12 
12 Never in her life had Meg told a man she loved him. She didn’t know what possessed her to tell Vernon.
Meg had been presumptuous.
Margaret had been fainthearted.
So it was Meg who had done the talking, but Margaret did the running away. As soon as she’d spoken the words of love aloud, she’d had to flee and catch her breath. Thank goodness he hadn’t rung the bell. She didn’t know what she would have said to him.
Actually, she should have waited for him to say what he was going to say to her while they’d been on the porch. He hadn’t been specific and she had jumped to conclusions. All he’d announced was he wanted to discuss something with her. Looking back, Meg realized telling a woman you loved her wasn’t a discussion.
Maybe he didn’t feel the same way about her as she did him.
But if that were true . . . Why did he take her into his arms the way he had?
The day was sunny and bright, but cool enough for Meg to wear her blue coat trimmed with gold braid and buttons. The mandolin sleeves set with double box-plaits from the shoulders gave the impression her shoulders were set and squared. When in reality, she really wanted to hunch over with regret.
Being in love wasn’t easy.
Being deceptive was even worse.
Meg had decided this morning that she must tell Vernon just exactly who she was. Wasn’t.
Margaret Brooks was a fraud.
Meg Brooks was the real her. But with that realism came undesirable traits. Or so she’d been told. Frankly, none of that mattered to her anymore. She had to be who she was or she would suffocate from trying to fit in. She just couldn’t anymore.
She didn’t like gloves or overdecorated hats or parasols. Or petticoats that showed a flirt of lace. Or tea and tearooms. Or polite, witty and oh-so-strained conversation. Or pretending like she was the epitome of perfect etiquette. She preferred swinging on the tire swing by Fish Lake and going for a refreshing dip, or drinking a glass of lemonade in her bare feet or reading the next chapter in her romantic book.
In the light of day, Meg couldn’t believe she’d actually gone through with speaking words aloud that she had only recently dared to pen in her diary.
She didn’t know what she’d say to Vernon the next time she saw him.
Well, that wasn’t true. She would tell him that she wasn’t sorry for being so bold by making her feelings clear and that if he returned those same feelings—which he must, surely had to by the way he kissed her—he needed to get to know who she really was. If he was receptive, she’d be the happiest woman in the world. If he was not . . .
Vernon had already left his room by the time she’d arrived at the hotel this morning. Putting the lobby in order had been easier with his absence. She hadn’t had to look over her shoulder at the stairs and wonder when he’d come down and see her.
But she had wondered where he’d gone.
Surely not back to Alder. He’d tried his luck at selling there. Perhaps to Waverly.
Thank goodness Meg had an errand to do or she would have gone crazy waiting for Vernon to return to the hotel. Grandma Nettie had asked Meg to collect the hotel’s mail and to see if she’d had any word from Mrs. Gundy. Final plans had to be made; they were going full steam ahead and chaining themselves to the White House.
As Meg walked to the post office, she felt a thousand different things at once: joy, fear, elation, nervousness. Everything looked new, seemed new. She was different. She was back to her old self.
Sunshine filtered through her transparent hat brim, casting her gaze in a pearly white. The whole world looked wonderful today. The trees seemed bigger; their leaves seemed greener. The sky seemed bluer; the clouds higher. Flowers that had begun to bud seemed more colorful; tulips and iris more plentiful than she’d recalled from last year.
Meg was in love with a man who made her insides flutter. The way Vernon made her feel, put Harold Adam’s Apple to shame. How could she ever have considered a man like Harold as her beau? Considered marrying him and living with him the rest of her life? Thank heavens he hadn’t come to call lately.
The post office came into view, a whitewashed building, located right on Sugar Maple Street, or as it was more commonly known, Main Street. Awning canvases of forest green added some character to an otherwise modest clapboard structure.
Meg let herself inside and went toward the postal grate to see Mr. Calhoon.
Mr. Treber stood at the counter engaged in a heated political conversation with Mr. Calhoon. Mr. Calhoon talked politics with anyone and everyone. Meg’s own father could spend hours ranting and raving about the trust’s and how they were ruining everything and how President McKinley was a schlemiel. On and on about how Bryan would have saved them all if he’d been elected president.
Waiting patiently for her turn, Meg couldn’t help overhearing the two men with their raised voices.
“How can the trusts sell anything when they’ve got all the money to buy the property in this country?” Mr. Calhoon lamented. “There’ll be a war between the trusts and the Socialists, let me tell you.”
Mr. Treber, who dressed fashionably from head to toe—he did own the men’s store in town—made a fist and aimed it skyward. “What really gets my goat is the latest talk from Washington. They’re stirring up a pot of trouble. All this drivel of taxing incomes again.”
Pointing his forefinger, he declared with a growl, “Any man who says he’s from the Bureau of Internal Revenue, I’ll avoid like the plague. It’s pure folderol, that’s what it is!”
“I thought we got rid of income tax in ninety-four. Only lasted one year, so that tells you it isn’t worth salt. The very idea of the government taking our hard-earned money is absurd.”
“This nation wasn’t founded for religious freedom or freedom of the press or speech,” Mr. Calhoon avowed. “No sir. What chipped off our ancestors to the point of going to war was taxes. The Stamp Act. Boston Tea Party.”
He drew up to the metal postal grating and glared. “Taxation without representation.”
“Scoundrels, every last one of those bureau men. Everything that the poor man consumes, we tax, and yet why aren’t the rich taxed? I ask you that.”
“I’d spit on an Internal Revenue man. Scallywags, all of them.”
Meg gave an impatient sigh which got their attention.
“Oh . . . Miss Brooks,” Mr. Calhoon said apologetically. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Mr. Treber turned around. “Didn’t see you come in, Miss Brooks.”
“Yes, well, that’s quite all right. Just so long as you’ll allow me to interrupt for a moment so I can get the hotel’s mail. And our residence mail, too, please.”
“Certainly.” Mr. Calhoon adjusted his visor and licked his fingertips as he began to sort through letters on the counter before him, then check the pigeonholes labeled: Brooks House Hotel and 215 Elm Street.
A moment later, he handed her several envelopes and one postcard from New York—her mother had written from the Clifton Hotel at Niagara Falls. A reproduction of the sprawling four-story hotel with its covered piazzas was on the front.
“Miss Brooks,” Mr. Calhoon slid two more envelopes beneath the grill, “might I ask you to bring these letters to Mr. Wilberforce? He came by twice yesterday but the mail he was waiting for hadn’t arrived. Mr. Seymour from Waverly just came not fifteen minutes ago. I can see why Mr. Wilberforce was so anxious. One is marked ‘urgent’ and I was meaning to get to the hotel myself to deliver them but I haven’t had a chance yet and as long as you’re here—”
“I’d be happy to do that for you, Mr. Calhoon.” Meg grew relieved, glad to have the excuse to seek Vernon on an official capacity. This way it wouldn’t look like she was hovering. She took the envelopes as if they were gold in her hands. “Good day.”
“Miss Brooks,” Mr. Calhoon and Mr. Treber said together, then the two men continued their lively oration on the evils of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.
Meg walked away from the post office, the letters for the hotel stowed without regard into her pocket-book. The two letters for Vernon remained in her hand. She didn’t dare look at them. Not yet. She wasn’t a snoop, really. It wasn’t as if she were going to open them or anything. She just wanted to see who had written to him.
Urgent. Impressive. Nobody had ever written her a letter marked “urgent.”
Meg had to cross the street by Storman’s feed and seed, then traversed the alley behind the Blue Flame Saloon. Without conscious thought, she stopped. Standing close to the building’s wall, she lowered her gaze and looked at the letters.
The one marked “urgent” was from David West and the postmark was, of all places, San Francisco.
She slid the top letter behind the bottom letter and gazed at the return address which was penned in a very flowery, feminine-looking script. Meg grew very still.
Mrs. Vernon Wilberforce
Flickertail street
Battlefield, North Dakota
Mrs. Vernon Wilberforce.
Mrs. Vernon Wilberforce!
Mrs. Vernon Wilberforce!
Her eyes began to burn and she blinked rapidly in an effort to focus on the writing. The letters slipped from Meg’s hand and fell in a slow, airy swirl like leaves onto the ground.
Mrs. Vernon Wilberforce.
The man she loved was already married.
Meg bit back a sob. There had to be an explanation. There had to. He would not have gone stepping out with her if he’d already been married.
Tears fell down Meg’s cheeks, and she brushed them away with a trembling fist. Not her Vernon. He wasn’t a liar. But then . . . he was a traveling man.
And those traveling men were so good at what they did. Travel from town to town and call women “girlie” and “bright eyes” and other things of an illicit nature. To a traveling man, each city was a new conquest. Her mother had warned her about them, her words came back to haunt Meg.
“Those men are a bold and bad breed, Margaret. If you ever look really hard at one, you’ll see little wrinkles of knowingness at the corners of their eyes. And they smile all too readily. Too flexibly.”
Meg tried to think if Vernon had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. She couldn’t remember any. But he was considerably younger than Ham Beauregarde who definitely had them, the swine. And Hamilton also wore one of those dastardly pinkie rings. Vernon did not.
Sniffing and trying not to fall into a complete crying spell, Meg didn’t want to believe it.
Mrs. Vernon Wilberforce.
There was that chance. Oh, a very good possibility. Of course. That explained it. Vernon was named after his father—although he’d never told her that—but she’d never asked, and so Mrs. Vernon Wilberforce had to be his mother.
His mother. Yes. That’s who she was. Wasn’t she . . .?
Meg looked at the two letters that had fallen in front of her feet. Precisely, in a puddle of the Blue Flame’s cast off dishwashing water. Crouching down, she went to pick them up. They were wet so she shook them. In the process, the glue seal on the back of the one from his mother, loosened and the flap opened.
She hadn’t done that on purpose. She never would have opened the letter. No matter how curious.
Never.
But since it had been an . . . accident.
Meg guiltily gazed left and right, then stuck the letter from David West into her coat pocket. She sucked in her breath and slipped the stationery from its bed. The faint fragrance of apple blossom came to her nose. Mothers didn’t perfume the stationary they used. Grimacing, Meg swallowed her unsteadiness.
She unfolded the single-folded letter to read the words meant for Mr. Vernon Wilberforce, Bissell salesman.
Coward. Liar. Vagabond. Womanizer.
The syrupy salutation broke down any reserve she had left. She gulped hard, hot tears slipping down her cheeks. The fat drops of her heart-wrenching sorrow plopped on the letter that began:
My Dearest Sweetums:
I miss you more than you’ll ever know. I wish you were with me now, my darling. Hurry up and catch all those fish so that we can be together soon.
Meg couldn’t read anymore. She could barely breathe. As distraught as she was though, a quiet and calm type of anger overtook the bitterness and feelings of deceit.
Vernon had some explaining to do.
* * *
With her heart pounding in her chest, Meg slipped the door to room thirty-two closed behind her. Her gaze traveled the contents of the room that she had been in once before. On that fateful day when she’d met Vernon and had gotten stuck beneath his bed.
Today the room wasn’t neat and tidy the way it had been on his check in. The furnishings were still the same, but everything else was in a shambles. Paper everywhere. There was barely a single vacant spot for another sheaf. What in the world was he up to?
It was amazing how simple it had been to break into Vernon’s room. Grandma Nettie had been conversing with a guest in the lobby—her letter not having arrived from Mrs. Gundy, and Delbert had gone to the train depot to see if there were arrivals for the hotel. Meg had purposefully waited until she’d heard the No. 4 blare its afternoon whistle. Then she’d snuck behind the registry counter, snagged the key to Vernon’s room, and rushed up the stairs without anyone noticing.
Closing the door behind her, Meg walked through the cleared path that had been left on the rug. She now understood why Vernon had forgone having the housekeeper come to his room on a daily basis. Agnes only came once a week on Friday morning. He must tidy up before she comes, Meg thought. He neatens up all this mess because Agnes hadn’t said a word about it. Meg had, very innocently of course, inquired once after the state of Vernon’s personal effects.
Like what sorts of things he kept in his room, or what quirks it looked like he had from outward appearances. But the maid never said anything out of the ordinary was in view. Aside from his room being cleaned once a week, Mr. Wilberforce asked for fresh linens from Delbert on an every-other-day basis.
At least he liked clean towels.
Now Meg knew why he never asked for housekeeping like the other guests. Vernon was slovenly.
She continued through the clutter and gazed at this and that. The typewriter at the writing desk held a sheet of paper on the roller. Meg furrowed her brows in thought. Where on earth had he gotten a typewriter? And what for? He wasn’t writing up hundreds of orders.
There were books on the bed. At a glance, they were all on fishing. Fly-fishing to be exact. One with a worn cover and numerous bookmarks sticking out from it caught her eye.
The New American Fly-Fishing Manifesto by Arliss Bascomb.
What was all this?
Her intention had been to pull up a chair and be waiting for the bounder when he returned to his room. She didn’t have the nerve to make a scene in the lobby so she felt he deserved a surprise attack. After all, that’s what that letter from Mrs. Wilberforce had been to her.
Meg inadvertently stepped on a copy of the Montana Herald. There were several issues, their pages sloppy and not even folded. And another newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle. Why did he have that? David West was from San Francisco. Who was he?
Beneath the desk sat a traveling case with his initials emblazoned on the worn leather: V.W. The bag was half-open and she saw the Bissell catalogue with order pads inside. This was not the traveling case he’d brought to her house last night. It was there, in the corner, that was the correct case. Why were there two?
If she hadn’t been so distressed about the letter from Mrs. Wilberforce, Meg would have turned tail and ran. Foreboding came from the room. That and . . . wait a minute.
Meg walked slowly to the desk. There, laying curled on a handkerchief, was her hair. Several strands of it. She knew it was hers, plain as day. Copper. Such a coppery hue that was unmistakable. Why did he have her hair? Gooseflesh rose on her arms. Any other circumstance and she would have thought the find was utterly romantic. Vernon Wilberforce had saved her hair. But now, she was fearful of his motives.
Inasmuch as she felt she had the right to be here, she felt like a lowly peeper. She didn’t like it, not one little bit. Seeing his private things didn’t give her the satisfaction she thought it would. Instead, she felt ashamed that she was looking at them without his knowledge.
She might very well have left and confronted him elsewhere had she not seen the stack of notations—and a name, a name that was very familiar to her.
Lowering herself onto the bed, she picked up the notepad with its numerous pages written on and folded over. The top sheet, not yet wrinkled but with doodles on the headline, had several fragments and sentences. But the two words written on it jumped out at her as if they’d been penned in red. Both were underlined.
Wayne Brooks.
She skimmed the page.
Motives. Objectives. Probability for stocking the lake. Money spent. Waverly hatchery. Talk to fish farmer again. Monday. Read about speciality casts. How to control loop shape and speed to get different results.
Then once more below the notations:
Wayne Brooks.
She couldn’t get her heartbeat to cease its fear-filled thumping. Why would Mr. Wilberforce have her brother’s name written down? Those horrible and untrue words: stocking the lake.
Wayne had never been found guilty of cheating in the contest last year. Yet there had been many men who had believed otherwise because he’d won. And yes, it was suspect that he’d only caught brown trout in a lake that supported mostly rainbows. But Wayne wouldn’t do anything deceptive. As much as she and Wayne had their spats, she knew his character was above low-down tactics.
Mr. Wilberforce was trying to dredge up trouble against her brother. This was almost a worse slap in the face than the letter from Battlefield. He was now trying to ruin her family’s respectable name. Wayne might be a bit starchy, but he was the only brother she had.
With renewed offense, Meg flipped through the other tablet pages and found endless notations on how to fish and what different parts of the tackle did what—as if Mr. Wilberforce hadn’t a clue. In between the third and fourth sheets of paper, a letter had been stored. She looked at the return address.
David West. San Francisco.
Having no qualms now at all about rifling through Mr. Wilberforce’s things, she easily slipped the letter from the envelope and read:
Matthew—
I’ve looked over the Preliminary notes of your article on the fishing tournament in Harmony and I think an angel on how it was rigged will go over well with our readers. Who says modern cities are the roots of all evil? Hanky panky goes on in even the smallest of towns.
Rigged!
The word shot from the page. So did the name “Matthew.” Matthew Who? Not Matthew Wilberforce . . . or was it Matthew Somebody and Wilberforce was a nobody?
Meg turned and looked at the other items on the bed. There was a writing box with initials on it as well. Only these were not V.W. They were M.G.
M.G.
Matthew G.
Oh my goodness. What horrible thing had she stumbled onto? Or worse . . . what had happened to . . .
A key fit into the door. Meg’s chin shot up. Alarm knifed through her. But she had no time to escape as the panel swung inward.
* * *
Gage stopped just shy of entering his room as soon as he saw Meg sitting on the bed with David’s letter in her hands. Her complexion was as pale as alabaster paint and her fingers quivered as she dropped the piece of paper and stood.
She knows.
He expected as much. He’d just come from the post office. Calhoon told him that he’d given Meg his letters. Two of them. Gage didn’t have to guess who they were from.
Closing the door behind him, he set his journal case on the floor beside the jamb.
“Meg.” He took a step toward her.
She ran to the fireplace and pressed her back up to the mantel. “Don’t you come near me, you . . . you—whoever you are!”
Gage remained where he was, not wanting to agitate her further by going closer. He thought through how much she knew about him from the return addresses on those letters she’d just picked up. He didn’t think she’d read them. But obviously she’d read David’s letter addressed to Matthew Gage.
From the frightened look on her face, she was wondering who Matthew was. Dammit, he should have told her last night.
“Why do you have my brother’s name written in your tablet?” she lashed out.
Rubbing the roughness of his chin, then removing his hat and tossing it onto the bed, Gage folded his arms across his chest.
“I’m investigating him.”
“Investigating him! For what?”
“Illegal activities.”
Her neck grew flushed and she put a hand to her throat. “My brother hasn’t done anything illegal.”
Gage calmly replied, “I’m trying to find hard facts to prove that.”
Meg’s voice was quiet, but held an undertone of icy fear. “Who’s Matthew?”
Gage moved to the bed, bent down, and picked up David’s letter, then began to straighten the papers that littered the coverlet.
Sinking onto the edge of the bed, he rested his elbows on his knees. “I am.”
Her body stiffened, less from shock and more from indignance. “Why did you lie?” Then without warning and with pure terror in her eyes, she gazed at Wilberforce’s traveling case. “What did you do with Mr. Wilberforce? Did you shoot him with your gun?”
“I left him in a Bozeman jail cell. Very much alive.”
“I don’t understand.” Her whisper sounded petrified. “Who are you?”
He couldn’t blame her for being scared. He’d put fear in bigger fish than her. Men in high places; women with shady pasts.
“My real name is Matthew Gage. I work as a stunt reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle.”