AEMON TURNBULL, THE MAN HUNCHED IN THE JAIL CELL, issued a low, groaning grunt, and this sound temporarily drew the marshal’s attention; he said quietly, “We will speak in my quarters rather than this office, Miss Rawley. If you’ll accompany me?”
Though he framed this as a question, it was actually an order; I could do nothing but nod. He locked the front entrance to the jail and I allowed him to lead the way outside, where the air was chill and the sounds of the town at play in the saloons drifted to our ears. A small wooden structure, no bigger than Branch and Axton’s shanty cabin, was situated a few yards beyond the jailhouse; Miles had plucked the lantern from the desk, which he now placed on a tabletop in this, his personal space.
My eyes roved anxiously from the table with three mismatched chairs to a small porcelain basin of water, a fat-bellied woodstove, and a narrow bed made of ropes stretched taut over a wooden frame, covered by a disheveled quilt. I darted my gaze at once from the place where he slept.
“Please, be seated,” Miles said, withdrawing a chair. “I apologize for the unseemly location of this conversation. I am unwilling to converse before that vermin in the jail at present, and I have a wish to speak with you. I have since our first encounter.”
I sat, awkward and nervous, clutching the bloody cloth, his jacket still hooked over my shoulders. Miles dragged a chair around the table, closer to me, which seemed to create a force field in my chest; it was all I could do not to scramble away, as tense as though I sat here naked. Without asking permission, he took the cloth from my hand, dipped it in the basin and then squeezed it out.
His shirtsleeves were unbuttoned, rolled back from his forearms, which were covered in dark hair. He had lean, strong, long-fingered hands, which I studied as they performed the small tasks; the dark hair continued over the backs of his wrists. I watched as though transfixed as he leaned and dabbed at the wound on my forehead.
“Turnbull struck you?” His anger at my potential response was held carefully in check.
I nodded.
“He claims you and Mrs. Yancy struck him,” the marshal went on, placing his fingertips beneath my chin, holding me steady as he administered the damp cloth. His touch was gentle and warm at both points of contact on my skin. No more than two feet of empty air separated our faces as he cleansed my forehead; he said softly, “I hope you realize I am not going to hurt you.”
I found my voice at last. “I know.”
“You appear afraid of me,” he justified, pausing in his ministrations to look into my eyes. His fingertips moved against my chin, not quite stroking me but not far from it. I thought he must be able to feel the strength of the pulse in my throat. He turned to rinse the cloth, tinting the water faintly red with my blood. I released a narrow breath, clutching his jacket together between my breasts.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I found the wherewithal to say.
He reapplied the cloth to my forehead; he hadn’t squeezed it out as well this time and a lukewarm drip of water rolled down the left side of my nose. I reached to swipe at it the same moment he did and our hands collided. Unexpectedly, he smiled. My heart throbbed in response.
He said, “Well, that’s good. And I apologize.”
I spoke before I thought. “No, it’s me who should be apologizing.” His eyebrows lifted in an obvious question and I hurried to explain, “For accosting you on the street the other day.”
“About that.” His focus returned to my forehead and he took a moment cleaning the last of the blood away, finally sitting back and folding the cloth over the edge of the basin. “Are you able to tell me what happened this evening?”
I gripped his jacket tighter around my body; his eyes followed the movements of my hands. “I was planning to walk out to Branch Douglas’s claim shanty.”
“Walk out of town?” he interrupted. “Surely you have better sense than to walk alone after dark.”
“No one notices me. Usually Axton and I ride together in the evenings, and I eat supper with them –”
He interrupted for the second time to repeat my words, rather more heatedly than necessary. “No one notices you?”
“They really don’t.” He looked as though he thought I was lying and I felt a spark of temper, insisting, “I don’t work as a…” The word lodged in my throat. “As a whore. Rilla offered me a place to live if I help out with the daily laundry. I don’t normally hang out on the floor after customers start arriving, but still…”
“Have you no idea how vulnerable you are?” Miles was visibly upset. “A woman alone, wandering the streets of this town after dark? I wouldn’t let my own mother consider such, and she could probably out-shoot me on any given afternoon.”
“I don’t make a habit of it. I was only alone tonight because I told Axton I didn’t feel well enough for our usual ride.”
“Branch and Axton Douglas look after you? They claim to have found you earlier this summer, badly injured. What of this? How came you to be alone on the prairie outside Howardsville?”
“I wish I knew.” I felt the familiar prickle of tears and used my knuckles to swipe at them; the jacket sank from my shoulders.
“Allow me,” he said, drawing his jacket around my upper body. Our gazes clung. I felt as if with the slightest touch applied to any part of me, I would burst like a soap bubble. My heart beat with such agitation I could feel it to the soles of my feet.
“Thank you.” My voice shook.
“Who are you?” he whispered. His hands, having accomplished the polite task, now lingered; he cupped my shoulders, with extreme care, as if I was constructed of glass. My gaze moved between his eyes and his lower lip, the top hidden by his full black mustache. My thighs began trembling.
“I don’t know.”.
“I do not understand.” He lifted his hands and tucked hair behind my ears with movements both adept and tender, and the trembling overtook my belly. He whispered, “Your hair startled me so, when you first confronted me. It was loose and I am unused to seeing women with their hair loose, at least in the daylight hours.” He seemed to realize he was behaving exceptionally boldly – certainly out of line – and he could never know I wanted right then to lean into his full embrace. I wanted this so much physical pain swelled in my chest.
“Forgive me.” He leaned back, withdrawing his touch. He appeared ashen beneath his darkly-tanned skin. “I very much apologize, Miss Rawley. I am not myself this night.”
I felt desperate with the need to understand. “Then who are you?”
Instead of answering, he asked, “How is it that I know you, when I am certain we have never met before the other day? I have felt I must be losing my mind since last I saw you.”
“I’ve felt the same way,” I whispered.
“You’ve been hurt and I am behaving most abominably.” He sounded tortured. “Aemon Turnbull will pay, of that rest assured. I have no doubt he would have caused you greater harm if not for Mrs. Yancy happening upon you. She struck him?”
“Yes. She saw him follow me so she followed him. She saved me. Marshal,” and a sharp pain stabbed my heart as I spoke his formal title rather than his name. “You weren’t wrong. I should know better than to walk alone at night. I just wanted to see Axton and Branch, and my new horse. I missed them.”
“They care for you? They look out for you?”
“They do.”
“Have you no family, no one searching for you?”
“I can’t remember,” I said miserably. “I don’t know a thing about my life.”
“Rilla Jaymes allows you room and board, in exchange for laundry duties?”
“She treats you well in her establishment?”
I faltered, not wanting to seem ungrateful; Rilla gave me the security of a nightly bed.
“Rilla Jaymes does not strike me as a compassionate woman,” he said when I didn’t answer. “I dislike imagining you at her mercy. I dislike the thought of anyone mistreating you.”
I said in a rush, “Celia Baker. She cares for me. And she really is pregnant. She has no reason to lie and she would kill me for having told you. She won’t tell you herself.”
His eyebrows drew together, forehead creasing in a combination of denial and confusion. “I cannot…how may it be possible…”
“She told me she was with you, and no others, last spring before getting pregnant. And she believes there’s nothing you would do, even if she told you the truth.” I hadn’t intended to punish him with these words but his expression indicated I had. I said quickly, “But you can help her. You can arrange it so she won’t have to send the baby away.”
He clenched his forehead with one hand, as if to stop a flood of thoughts he wanted nothing to do with. “You must think me a heartless man, a man without principle.”
“I truly don’t. But Celia needs help.”
“I cannot raise a child.” He sounded horrified at the prospect. “I haven’t the means. I haven’t a wife.”
My thoughts whirled through possibilities. “What about your brother? Isn’t he married? Isn’t he near here?”
“Grantley? Yes, on both counts. But he and his wife have two of their own children. I could not ask my brother to raise my bastard child…oh, dear God…”
I whispered, “You could marry Celia.”
He looked even more horrified than he’d sounded moments ago. “I could not.”
“So she’s good enough to share your bed but not your name?” I cried. “Is it because she’s a whore?!”
“It is because I do not love her. Nothing would stop me if I loved her.” His tone was deadly serious. “My father taught me two things. One, to ride a horse. Second, to marry a woman for love. He loves my mother with his whole heart and I have always listened to what my father taught me.”
I felt totally out of control. “So you can have sex with her for a solid month but you can’t stoop to marrying her?! What the hell would your father have to say about that?!”
“Dang, you two, I can hear you all the way outside,” said Cole Spicer, entering the little cabin without a knock. He looked amused, eyeing me with a grin. He teased, “You seem far too ladylike for the kind of language I just heard.”
I nearly bit through my bottom lip, unable to suppress an angry glare in Miles’s direction; he spoke at the same moment, saying to Cole, “I’ll thank you to take your sorry, eavesdropping self out of here.”
“I just got here,” Cole returned easily, not in the least perturbed, kicking a chair around so he could brace his forearms over the back of it. “I ain’t going anywhere for a day, at least.” He looked between the two of us, still grinning. “Is Rawley taking good care of you, Miss Ruthann?”
It would be unfair to act like he wasn’t and so I nodded, now avoiding Miles’s gaze.
“I’m glad to hear it. He’s never been a true ladies’ man, like myself,” Cole continued, winking at me. He seemed almost giddy.
“You want a severe beating, Spicer? Right here?” Miles demanded.
“I don’t see anyone who could deliver it,” Cole threw back.
“Did Patricia get safely home?” I asked, breaking into their brotherly-sounding bickering.
“She did indeed,” Cole said, merriment fading. He was silent, reflective, for the space of a heartbeat. “She seems intent on befriending you.”
“I would like that.” I wondered at his pause.
“She said she wishes to see more of you this week.” Cole rested his chin on his stacked hands, which were curved over the rounded chair back; his eyes were the brown of acorns, almost devilish in their expression. I found myself speculating he’d always been the friend who got everyone else in trouble with his ideas.
“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” I muttered.
“Has Miles offered you something to drink? Food of any kind?” Cole pressed.
The marshal issued a deep sigh, rubbing his fingertips over his forehead in the manner of someone with a headache. I felt a small twinge of sympathy. I told Cole, “He cleaned my wound and determined that someone is looking out for me.”
“He ain’t ever been much of a host. We’ve been friends a long time, Miss Ruthann. We don’t hold nothing back when it comes to each other’s business, do we, Rawley?”
“Jesus Christ,” Miles muttered. “Would you rather spend the night in the alley? As I can arrange it.”
Cole ignored this jab. “The cook in the saloon next door was friendly enough, earlier. I’ll run and see if she can fix me one more plate. You must be hungry.”
I was, but I said, “I don’t want to trouble you.”
“No trouble at all,” Cole said. “Give me just a minute,” and he disappeared out the door.
In Cole’s absence, Miles moved to kneel near the woodstove. Without a word, he began building a fire in its belly and for a time we were silent, the tension slowly leaking away. At last, without looking my way, he said, “I should have asked if you were hungry. I apologize.”
“I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.” I was surprised to hear myself admit, “It’s just that you make me so upset.”
Miles looked over his shoulder, his expression more serious than ever. Behind him, in the woodstove, the fire glinted to existence.
I rushed on, “I know it’s not my business, I really do, but Celia is my friend. I care about her. And she’s so worried.” The thought of my conversation with her the first night we’d spoken intruded into my head; I was half in love with him, Celia had said and she meant Miles, the man kneeling before me just now.
“And you are worried for her,” Miles understood.
I forced myself not to fidget under his steady gaze.
I began, “I am –” but Cole suddenly returned, bearing a plate of biscuits and sausage gravy; my stomach clenched in hunger. I’d eaten nothing since my breakfast of a boiled egg and lukewarm coffee.
“Thank you.” I accepted the plate and a bundle containing both fork and butter knife.
“My pleasure.” Cole settled again onto his backward chair. “Cook next door was sweet as pie to give me a second plate. It’s because I’ve got a nice smile.”
I gouged an enormous forkful from a biscuit and dragged it through the thick sausage gravy, smiling at his teasing bravado.
Cole tipped his chair on two legs, like a little boy. “Miles, this night has been unexpectedly exciting.”
Miles closed the woodstove’s grate and rejoined us, claiming the same chair he’d used earlier, dragging it just a little closer to mine. “It’s been unexpected, that’s for certain.”
The quiet, dimly-lit space lent me a fleeting sense of confidence; before I could lose my nerve, I asked Cole, “Why would you say Patricia’s husband’s family is criminal?”
Cole righted his chair and rubbed a thumb over his jaw, plainly unsure how to respond; I was, after all, a stranger to him. Both he and Miles radiated a sense of strength and capability I found reassuring and slightly intimidating, and I hoped he would trust me with an answer. At last he said, “That’s a long story, Miss Ruthann. There’s plenty I could tell you to help you understand but it involves the business of my very dear friend, Malcolm Carter. I couldn’t tell you the entire story without Malcolm here. Does that make sense?” “Of course.” I was touched he would take his friend into such consideration.
“I meant every word I said about the Yancys,” Cole went on. “They’re a treacherous, dangerous lot. Always have been.”
Miles added, “Patricia’s father-in-law, Thomas Yancy, was once a marshal but he was run out of Iowa City back in ’sixty-eight, when he was my family’s neighbor. There were allegations at the time that he was involved in an attempted murder. He disappeared without a trace and my mama took in his sons, Fallon and Dredd. Then Fallon up and ran away. Scared my mama half to death. This was long ago, when we were just sprouts in Iowa.” Miles sighed and his gaze lifted up and to the left, as one looking backward through time. “The Yancys disappeared for a long time after that. Wasn’t until the mid-seventies that we heard word again, when they struck it rich with a silver vein in the mines near here. And since then they’ve multiplied their wealth seemingly without end, purchasing land and ore mines and investing in the market. Fallon, damn his rotten hide, has a knack for investment, so they claim, but he’s as dirty as they come. A thief, a killer, many times over. He’d do anything to increase his wealth and position but he’s a coward to his core. The family resides in Chicago these days. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of any Yancys in a good four years and don’t relish the thought of seeing any in the future.”
I considered this information, disliking the notion that anyone connected to Patricia was a criminal. “Surely Patricia wasn’t aware of their illegal doings when she agreed to marry into their family. She’s so young. What’s her husband’s name again?” I only remembered thinking it had been an unusual one.
“Dredd,” Miles supplied. “He’s the younger of the two. He lived with us for nearly half a year and I know him better by far than his brother. My mama believed most of the bad things Dredd ever did were because Fallon pushed him.”
“Patricia is eighteen,” Cole added, his voice low and quiet. “I asked her on our walk. Her pa died a year ago, her ma back when she was just a little girl.”
Miles glanced at his old friend; there was a winsome note in Cole’s voice not present earlier.
His tone gaining strength, Cole said, “And a halfwit could see she ain’t happy.”
“Spicer…” Miles spoke with a subtle note of concern, enough to bring Cole’s gaze back to his; Cole pressed his lips together in a stubborn manner, briefly closing his eyes.
“Your family is still in Iowa?” I asked Miles, redirecting the conversation, curious to learn more about these people with whom I shared a last name. “Axton has told me some.”
“They are.” Miles’s voice softened with fondness. “My parents reside in the same farmhouse in which my brothers and I were raised, along with Willie, my youngest brother. Cole’s family settled on the adjacent acreage in the summer of 1868, around the time Fallon ran away.”
“And you believe Fallon is worse than Dredd?”
Miles nodded. “He is by far the worst. I’ve hated him since our boyhoods. I don’t rightly know how to explain him, except to say he is dangerous. He cares for nothing and no one, except himself.”
Cole interjected, “Fallon needs hanging. I vow to see that bastard at the end of a hanging rope before I die.” He paused. “I hope you don’t think me a terrible man for the saying so, Miss Ruthann.”
“I don’t. If you say he’s dangerous, I believe you.” For whatever reason, I trusted their opinions.
Miles said, “Though we haven’t seen the son of a bitch in nearly four years, I could not agree more.” Immediately he apologized. “Excuse my cursing.”
“It’s all right,” I murmured and Miles reached and curved one hand around the back of my chair, his long arm making a V between us. I ignored the way my heart thrust at this simple, protective gesture, remembering something else. “There was speculation at Rilla’s just tonight that Thomas Yancy funded Bill Little’s gang once upon a time.”
Both men nodded seriously.
Miles said, “The Little brothers fought alongside Thomas Yancy in The War Between the States.”
Cole picked up the story Miles had started. “My pa, Henry Spicer, and Miles’s pa were both soldiers in those days, too. My pa bought a farm neighboring the Rawleys’ place in the autumn of ’sixty-eight, like Miles said. We’d intended to reach Montana Territory but decided to settle in Iowa. My youngest brother and sister were desperate ill, you see. It’s only been since last winter that my folks have decided to finish the journey they originally started.”
“Will they settle in this area?” I asked.
Cole nodded affirmation. “They plan to undertake the journey next March, or thereabouts. I spent the past month visiting them in Iowa and made good time on the ride here, what with the fair weather. Pa, Mama, and my brother Charles are readying to move, while my sister May and her scalawag of a husband –”
“Who is my brother, Quinlan,” Miles interjected, with the slightest smile.
“May and Quinlan married this past spring and will stay behind and farm our old land, in Iowa,” Cole explained. He bumped a fist against Miles’s shoulder. “Them two lovebirds. Quin is already to be a father.”
I observed the subtle way these words affected Miles, striking him with a deeper significance – a married brother could acknowledge and welcome a child.
“What are your plans here?” I asked Cole.
“To visit this ingrate.” He nodded at Miles, with a grin. “And to scout the land near Grant’s homestead, to report back to Pa. They’d like to settle near Grant and Birdie if they are able.”
“And also to give me unimaginable grief and trouble,” Miles said.
“Shit,” Cole scoffed, with a laugh. “What else are friends for?” He looked my way. “Patricia asked me to remind you she’ll call on you in the morning.”
“Good,” I murmured. I admitted, “I like her very much.”
“She likes you, too.” Cole’s eyes moved upward but he was not seeing the rafters. Hushed and reverent, he muttered, “Those eyes. I expect she saw straight through to my soul.”
Miles said, without challenge, “No good can come of that, my friend.”
Cole’s chest expanded with a deep breath; he rose, all at once restless, and rooted around in the single cupboard like a dog after a bone, at last extracting a corked brown bottle. “Thanks be to Jesus you keep a supply, Rawley. You got three drinking glasses?”
“None for me,” I said, eyeing the whiskey the way I would a dead skunk on the side of the road.
Cole returned to the table with two small glasses, each with a three-quarters pour of clear amber liquid. As he took his seat, he asked Miles, “You think it might be true, what they’re saying about Little’s gang? That Vole might be alive and running the show?”
“We have to assume it’s possible. You’d think Bill Little himself rose from the dead to hear the talk around these parts the past few days,” Miles said, downing a sip of his whiskey.
I’d finished my biscuits and gravy, wishing there was something to drink that wasn’t eighty-proof. I watched Miles as he considered this new serious issue; his posture had changed, growing both threatening and defensive. He kept his hand on the back of my chair.
“If it’s Vole riding this way, we’d best be ready,” Cole said, draining his glass in a neat gulp.
“I agree. Though I doubt he would chance approaching us, not after all these years. He’s named after a varmint and it suits him. He went to ground years ago. I wasn’t a lawman back then, didn’t have the legitimacy to shoot him on sight, as I would now.”
“If it’s him and he wants a fight, he’ll provoke it.” Cole leaned over the table. “He’s too much a chickenshit to come after us. He wants us to come after him. That might explain the killings and cattle rustlings. He’d recognize you’d have to investigate such matters.”
“He is not an intelligent man, though intelligent enough to evade a hanging, thus far. But he must realize another marshal would control the territory that far east of here.”
“Howardsville is the eastern-most of your range, ain’t it?”
“It is. Besides, if Vole rides this far he’ll skirt the town,” Miles said. “He always hated towns, if you’ll recall.”
“We shoulda run down that rat-faced bastard and killed him four years back, regardless,” Cole said, with fire. “I knew it then. He’s goddamn slippery. And as Miss Ruthann just mentioned, he’s connected to the Yancys. Vole did Fallon’s dirty work once upon a time, and likely still does.”
“Excuse us,” Miles said. “We are being unpardonably rude, speaking of matters unknown to you. We speak most freely with each other.”
“It’s fine,” I insisted. “I feel safe with you two, like I can trust you. Maybe it’s crazy…”
Cole spared me a warm grin. “It ain’t crazy.”
Miles agreed, “It is not the slightest crazy. You may surely trust us,” and I experienced the sudden urge to collect his hand from the back of my chair and braid our fingers together.
“Thank you, marshal.” I dared to meet his eyes; he was not as close as he had been touching my face and my hair, but enough that I could have counted each of his numerous eyelashes. There was a hint of happiness in his expression, I was not imagining it.
And yet the trench of sadness in my heart was deeper than ever.