Rehearsal was not going well. She shouldn’t have tried it today. At last Bellini called for a break. Jennifer grabbed a towel and walked toward her dressing room.
Nicole, her new understudy, fell into step beside her. “Would you rub my back right there?” she asked. “I have a charley horse in that muscle.”
Nicole was slim, with a tiny waist that tapered into full hips and sturdy legs. Her mouth was wide beneath a short nose and dark brown eyes. No one would ever mistake Nicole for her, Jennifer thought, but it was nice to have an official understudy, as she still had no desire to dance.
Jennifer massaged the knotted muscle in Nicole’s back until it relaxed. “There.”
“Thanks. I’ll do you now.”
“I’m okay.”
Nicole shrugged and followed Jennifer into her dressing room. Jennifer sat down at her dressing table and started taking pins out of her hair so she could repin it. Clumps of wet hair hung around her face. Her white stockings hung down the side of the dressing table, their tops held in place by a paperweight.
Nicole walked over to the closet. “Can I borrow your pink stockings?”
“They might be dirty, but help yourself.”
Nicole shoved the closet door aside. Jennifer peered into the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed, her face shining with perspiration. She started to reach for a towel, but caught sight of a mirrored reflection of a pair of eyebrows above her costumes. Just then Nicole let out a full-bodied scream that would have impressed an opera diva. Jennifer whirled around, picking up the paperweight as she did. A large handkerchief covered the intruder’s face to just below his eyes. Nicole hopped backward, screaming as loudly as she could. The man parted the costumes, charged through them and knocked Nicole aside as he ran for the door. Jennifer threw the paperweight, catching him on the left shoulder.
Nicole’s screams brought a dozen dancers running toward Jennifer’s room. “Stop him!” Jennifer yelled.
The man pulled a knife out of his boot and flashed it. Horrified girls gasped and backed away from him. He tore past them, reached the outside door and jerked it open. Pausing for a moment in the doorway, he turned and looked back at Jennifer. The look in his eyes sent a chill of fear down her spine. It seemed to say, “I’m not through with you yet.”
The man got away clean, and everyone decided he’d been a love-starved fan just trying to get a glimpse of the prima ballerina. Everyone except Jennifer. Something about him terrified her. She tried to put it out of her mind, but couldn’t.
Slowly, her nerves settled down. She heard the call to return to practice, and bent down to adjust her toe shoes. As she did, she saw something in the bottom of the closet. Curious, she walked over and picked it up. It was a tiny drawstring purse with BRICEWOOD EAST printed on it in white lettering. She opened the drawstring and saw carpet tacks. Fear jolted through her. The newspaper had said the man who killed Bettina had pushed carpet tacks into her skin.
She told Bellini she had to take some extra time, then went looking for Chane. She couldn’t find him, and she panicked.
Steve explained exactly how it had happened, then ended with, “Jennifer thinks it was the man who’s been following her.” He paused for a second. “And the man who killed Bettina.”
Chane sighed. “It isn’t going to work,” he said grimly. “She’s making things up to get my sympathy. Don’t you see it?”
Steve frowned. “What if she’s not? After the man ran away, she found a small packet of carpet tacks.”
Chane sighed. “Even that could have been staged. It would be easy to obtain one of those small purses from housekeeping…and as many carpet tacks as she wanted right here in the hotel.” Steve frowned and narrowed his eyes at him. Chane sighed again. “All right. I better go see her.”
“She’s with Tom Wilcox and a couple of security men.”
Chane found Jennie in Tom’s office. She looked pale and shaken, her violet eyes solemn. Tom quickly summarized what had happened and then left them alone. Chane glanced at Jennie. “You look okay.”
“Did Steve tell you who it was?”
Chane suppressed a smile. “He told me what you think.”
“No one believes me,” she said, puzzled.
Chane shrugged.
Jennie flashed him a look that damned him to hell, then she turned abruptly and stalked away. Tom Wilcox stepped back inside, closed the door and faced Chane. “I guess you’ll want me to keep an around-the-clock watch over her. Even if the guy is just a lovesick fan, he might be dangerous.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“It won’t?”
“No. She’ll be fine.” He started out the door. The memory of Bettina’s white face stopped him. “All right,” he said, turning back. “Put a guard on her, nothing too obvious. I don’t think it’s necessary, but better safe than sorry.” He didn’t explain that his wife was not trustworthy. No sense in saying anything to diminish her in his staff’s eyes.
The next week passed in a blur. Jennifer avoided Chane. She threw herself into rehearsals, which were long and grinding.
Today’s workout was grueling. Chane had fired Frederick, and Jennie was adjusting to a new dance partner. He was trying hard, and she sympathized with his struggle, but he lacked Frederick’s power, talent, and determination.
She wiped her face, stepped back into position, and waited for Bellini to acknowledge her. Bellini tapped his wand.
The music started and Jennifer swept into the graceful movements of the solo they were rehearsing. One, two, three…one, two, three. Bellini was keeping beat with his wand, and it was growing louder and louder. Startled, Jennifer realized she was in the wrong position. Flushing with embarrassment, she stepped back.
Just as she did, a blur of something dropping very fast beside her caught her attention. It crashed within inches of her and a large hole opened in the floor, wood splintering and flying. Then the floor next to the hole gave way beneath her feet. Jennifer tried desperately to get the leverage to leap clear, but her feet had no stable place, and she slid toward the hole, unable to stop herself.
Her new dance partner tried to grab her, but his hand merely brushed hers. His face registered horror as she slid past him into the gaping hole in the stage floor.
Steve found Chane in the library on the first floor.
Chane looked up from the tablet on which he’d been making notes and waited for Steve to speak. Something in Steve’s eyes made Chane put his pen down.
“What?”
“Jennie’s been hurt.”
Chane stood up. “How bad?”
“We don’t know. Half a dozen weights went crashing down from the flies through the stage floor and took her down with them. They were getting a ladder to try to get her out. They called out to her, but she didn’t answer. I was waiting there until we saw how bad it was, but I—”
Dread gripped Chane’s heart with an icy hand. He crossed the room in two strides and broke into a run, with Steve following. Chane couldn’t think of anything heavier than a half-dozen stage weights falling from thirty feet up. If they’d hit her, she’d be dead.
As Chane reached the Grand Ballroom, two men were lowering a ladder into the gaping hole in the stage floor. One stood up to test the floor near the hole.
“Stand back. I’ll go down,” Chane said, pushing through the crowd that had gathered on the stage.
“Wait a minute,” Steve said. “They’re coming with boards to reinforce the floor around the hole.” Ordinarily, a stage this size would have had a door leading into the understage, but it had been so hastily constructed on such short notice to accommodate the ballet company that they’d cut corners.
At the sight of Chane, silence descended on the white-faced ballerinas clustered around the splintered wood.
“Is she alone down there?” Chane asked.
A young dancer stepped forward, his face twisted with misery. “I tried to catch her…”
Men arrived with four two-by-sixes and crisscrossed them over the opening to reinforce the floor. Gingerly, Chane stepped onto one of the two-by-sixes and walked across it to the ladder, which extended a good three feet above the shattered wood. He checked to be sure it wasn’t resting on Jennie, swung over, tested the ladder with his weight, then started down.
At the bottom, Chane stepped over Jennie’s body and knelt beside her. Light from above revealed she was lying beside the weights. Her back seemed arched too far and at a strange angle. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
He stepped off the ladder and knelt beside her. Her skin was still warm, but of course it would be. It had only been a matter of minutes.
“Jennie…”
He pressed his fingers against the artery in her neck. Her skin was damp, her hair wet and plastered against the side of her face. At first he felt nothing. His heart thundered in his chest. He moved his fingers and dug them in deeper. A tiny pulse felt like a brush moving under her skin, caressing his fingers briefly and receding, briefly and receding. Relief and exultation swelled up in him. His fingers were reluctant to let go of the reassuring feel of her pulse.
“She’s alive!” he croaked. He felt so weak he had to sit down. “She’s alive.”
Overhead, ballerinas murmured and scuffed their feet. The sounds seemed amplified. Every movement echoed in the cavernous pit beneath the stage.
He was reluctant to move her. He might lift her only to discover that her neck was broken, or her back.
“Jennie…”
He leaned close to her. “Jennie.”
Her eyelids fluttered.
“I’m going to carry you up a ladder. Can you move your legs, your head?”
Jennie pulled her legs toward her. “Ohhh! My foot.”
He picked her up and waited for her to relax in his arms. She gritted her teeth, covered her face with her hands, shuddered once, and finally relaxed against him.
Slowly, carefully, he started up the ladder. She winced, but that was all. At last he reached the top. Steve was waiting and took Jennie as Chane maneuvered himself off the ladder and onto one of the cross beams.
“Her foot’s broken,” Dr. Campbell said, snapping his bag open.
“How badly?”
Campbell shook his head and pulled on his gray goatee. “She won’t be dancing for a while. Maybe never.”
“That’s all? Just her foot?”
“I doubt she’ll think it insignificant.” He patted his goatee. “She’ll have some nasty bruises as well.”
Chane waited outside while Campbell set the foot and bandaged it. Jennie cried out once, and he could hear her panting to keep from doing it again. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Chane wanted to go in there and toss that doctor out a window, but he restrained himself with difficulty. When the doctor finally came out, made his report, and left, Chane wiped his face again, eased the door open, and walked into Jennie’s bedroom.
At the sound of his shoes crossing the carpet, she opened her eyes. “Can you think of anything more worthless than a ballerina with a broken foot?” she asked, her eyes bleak.
The only thing that came to mind was himself without her. The thought that he was still so weak-minded sickened him. Thank God he was almost ready to leave for Colorado.
Chane got up earlier every day, but he seemed to be falling further behind. The day before he was supposed to leave, Tom Wilcox walked in at eight o’clock in the morning and handed him a telegram from Tom’s contact in Denver.
LEGISLATURE PASSED LAW YESTERDAY REQUIRING THAT ANY RAILROAD THROUGH STATE HAS TO BE BUILT BY RESIDENTS OF COLORADO STOP.
“Damn!” Chane crumpled the telegram and tossed it into the trash. Over the past weeks, he had purchased tons of supplies—food and bedding for a couple thousand men, spikes, hammers, axes, carts, pulleys, dynamite, and hydraulic jackhammers, which might or might not work, since they’d just come on the market. All month he’d worked feverishly, overseeing the moving of this equipment from the warehouse to the train depot.
He wasn’t about to give up now, just because some hick legislature had changed a law. He retrieved the wire, brought it to Steve’s office, and tossed it on his desk. Steve looked up from the brief he was writing.
“Bad news,” Chane said.
Steve read it and frowned. “Laurey isn’t a resident, either,” he said.
“But Gould is. He can front for both of them.”
“So what now?”
“I need a favor.”
Steve realized what Chane was going to ask him. The blood drained from his face. “No trains. I won’t ride anymore trains.”
“It’s our only hope. If you don’t go and break things loose, I might as well kiss all the money we’ve spent on this venture good-bye.”
Steve groaned. He knew Chane had sunk almost a million dollars of his grandfather’s money into the purchases to begin the railroad. Without the railroad, he’d be stuck with that stuff indefinitely.
Jennifer called home every day, but Peter still had not returned. This time Augustine answered the telephone. Her timorous voice on the end of the line made Jennifer homesick.
“Augustine? It’s me, Jennifer.”
“Madame!”
“Have you heard from Peter?”
“No, madame.”
“Did I get any mail?”
“Oh, yes, madame. A letter from London.”
Jennifer closed her eyes. It had come. She had waited all this time. “Could you send someone over with it?”
The messenger arrived an hour later. Jennifer tore the letter open and read it.
Dear Miss Van Vleet,
As director of the Royal Ballet of London it is my extreme pleasure to tell you that we are most thrilled by the opportunity presented by your agent. We therefore invite you to come to London and dance the lead in any of a number of ballets upon which we can agree. We look forward to hearing from you as to your expected arrival date and will wait for your reply. We are most anxious to accommodate a ballerina of your range and power.
Respectfully yours,
Wollencott Edwards
Jennifer crumpled the letter and sank back against her pillows. She had waited all her life for this letter, and now it had come. Too late. She might never dance again. No one knew how a broken foot would mend, or if it would mend at all.
She turned over and stared at the pattern on the wallpaper, surprised that she felt no bitterness. None at Chane, and none about this terrible loss. A strange feeling of gratitude welled up from deep inside her. She was being punished exactly as she deserved.
A week went by with agonizing slowness. Chane’s departure was delayed by one problem, then another. At first Jennifer had been resigned to letting him go without her. But slowly, as she lay in bed, struggling against the fairly constant pain and the ever-present boredom, she could feel her life coming into clearer focus.
One of the first things she realized was that she truly loved Chane. She had expected her love to die along with his, but it hadn’t. The more he avoided her and tried to ignore her, the greater her hunger for his attention became.
Dr. Campbell came every day to check on her progress. During his Tuesday visit she learned that Chane was leaving the next day. After Campbell left, Jennie asked Mrs. Lillian to send one of the lady’s maids in to help her change. Marianne Kelly washed her hair and dried it, then Jennifer changed into a prettier nightgown and rubbed a little color into her pale cheeks. When she looked as good as she felt she could, she asked Mrs. Lillian to send for Chane.
Then she hobbled into the big four-poster bed that, according to Mrs. L., had been brought over from England for Chane’s great-grandmother. The bed was so big, and Jennie so slim, that she seemed to disappear into the folds of the feather mattress. She picked up her hand mirror and gazed into it. Her eyes were bigger and darker than she’d ever seen them. With her silvery blond hair framing her face in light and her features scrubbed clean, she looked twelve years old. Maybe that would soften Chane’s hard heart, she thought. Her own ached dully. She had lost too much in the last year—her parents, her baby, her brother, her dancing, and now she was about to lose her husband, again.
Chane tapped lightly on the door.
“Come in.”
He walked in and looked about the room as if he’d never seen it before. He looked everywhere except into her eyes. Finally, he cleared his throat and glanced at her. “So…how long does he expect you to be laid up?” he asked.
“Three or four months.”
“Damned shame.”
“You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Tomorrow, yes.”
“Is Steve going?”
“He’s gone.” He told her briefly about the residency problem. “Steve will try to find a loophole that will allow us to build through Colorado. If not, we’ll have to jump off from Topeka and build through the plains to the desert. It won’t be pleasant, but it can be done.”
“Please sit down,” she said, motioning to one of the chairs. “I need to talk to you.”
Chane carried an armchair from beside the fire, sat down and stretched his legs out in front of him, all without looking at her again.
“As you know,” she began hesitantly, “I’ve had a lot of time to think lately.”
Chane nodded.
“I realized that part of the reason I’ve worked so hard at being a ballerina is that it’s kept me from having to deal with my difficult family. It also saved me from marriage, until recently. It’s done everything I wanted it to do and more. Well, that’s gone now, and it may never come back. Dr. Campbell says I may never dance again. I won’t know for months.”
Chane waited in silence. Jennie couldn’t help but notice how his dark hair curled around his left ear, and how a shadow of beard darkened his cheeks.
“I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’ve discovered I love you in a way I never thought I could love any man—totally and all-consumingly. I suppose it’s…too late, but my feelings are real, and overwhelming to me.”
“You suppose it’s too late?” he asked incredulously, his voice low and thick with pain.
“I think I could earn your trust again.”
“No,” he said with finality. “It won’t work.” His profile looked grim and set against her. The brick wall he’d built between them was solidly in place. He thought himself safe behind it.
She refused to let that stop her. “I want to go with you.”
“Building a railroad is not like going on tour with a ballet company.”
Jennifer lifted her chin. “I’m your wife. I want to go with you.”
“That’s because you don’t know how boring it is riding the rails behind a crew that only moves a few feet a day. You’ll be better off in New York near a doctor.”
“You loved me once. Maybe you can again.”
“This is no picnic we’re going on. It’s either boring or dangerous,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard her. “We’ll be doing most of the work in the winter. It’s bitter cold,” he said, looking into her eyes for the first time. “It’s a punishing sort of cold, and very little else to do but suffer through it.”
The look in his eyes told her he was talking about the cold that now filled his heart. “I don’t care,” she whispered, a lump rising in her throat.
“You say that now.”
“I promise you I will die before I complain.”
“Jennie, it won’t work—”
“I think my life is in danger.” She ignored the disbelief in his eyes and plunged ahead. “First I was being followed. Then someone tried to kill me. You promised to take care of me. Was that just talk?” she asked bitterly.
Chane scowled, but she sensed weakening and plunged ahead.
“I’ll need a doctor, though,” she said.
Chane sighed as if his burdens were almost unbearable. “I’m taking Campbell anyway,” he admitted grudgingly. “With three thousand men, accidents happen.”
“I won’t be any trouble. I promise.”
“You won’t be anything but trouble,” he said grimly.
That hurt, but it didn’t matter. If she didn’t go, she had no chance at all. Even if she did go, she might have no chance, but she wouldn’t know until she tried. And she loved him too much to give up now.
His teeth clamped together, and muscles bunched in his lean cheeks. “All right. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Chane left, and Jennifer telephoned Augustine.
“We miss you, madame.”
“I miss you, too, Mamitchka.” Jennifer paused. “I’m going away for a while. Can you pack all of my warmest clothes? I’ll have a man pick them up. Will you call me and let me know when they’ll be ready?”
“Oui, madame. May we ask where you will be going?”
“Colorado.”
“Where is that?”
“It’s out West.”
“Oh, no.”
Jennifer knew that Augustine had heard a great many bad things about life in the West. She was convinced it was inhabited by cold-blooded killers, thieves, and bloodthirsty Indians.
“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m going with a very large party. I’ll be well-protected.”
“Should we close the house, madame?”
“No, Peter may be back any day. And where would you go?”
“With you, madame.”
“All of you?”
“Oui.”
Jennifer had to decline, knowing it would push Chane’s patience to the breaking point. Next, she called her father’s attorney, Ward Berringer, and told him that she was leaving.
“How long do you expect to be gone?” he asked.
“About six months, maybe more.”
“Well, as you know, the estate is in probate, which limits what I can reasonably do for you, but since your…husband has taken care of the outstanding debts, I’m sure I can continue the payments to keep the house running and the servants paid during your absence.”
“I still do not understand how my parents’ estate could go from being worth millions of dollars during their lives to being worthless after their deaths,” she said.
“As you know, there were some dealings with certain unscrupulous people…”
“You’re implying it was Mr. Kincaid, aren’t you?”
Berringer cleared his throat. “Your brother told me himself…” His words trailed off as if his feelings were hurt.
Jennifer didn’t like the man, but she took pity on him and dropped that line of thinking. “It was not my intent to criticize, Mr. Berringer. I know you’re doing the best you can.”
Jennifer ended the conversation and put down the telephone. She had reassured everyone but herself.