That night Rand busied himself at the Golden Nugget bar reading a cheap magazine while Lolly Maguire consulted with Samson the piano player and then began circulating among the patrons. Finally she glided over to the piano, and Samson played an introductory arpeggio. Lolly-Alice struck a pose and the room quieted.
At the sound of her voice, Rand looked up from the account ledger he’d concealed under the pages of Gentlemen’s World. The tune Samson played as an introduction was familiar, something Rand had heard many times before, and when he recognized it, he froze. Good God, it was the folk song “Barbara Allen”! He’d sung it a hundred times when he was growing up.
“‘In Scarlet Town, where I was born...’”
Lolly began to sing. But it wasn’t “Barbara Allen.”
Back in Smoke River that first night he remembered asking Alice if she could sing. She’d said no, but obviously that wasn’t true. Her voice had a low, smoky quality that was impossible to ignore. And the words raised his eyebrows.
“‘There was a lass from Dublin town, That all the boys from there around, Did want to kiss and take to bed, So...never did she want to wed!’”
Rand choked on his beer, and the miners cheered and stomped their heavy boots on the floor. Where had Alice ever learned such a song? Could she be making up those bawdy lyrics on the fly?
There was more. More suggestive words sung to the tune of the old folk song.
“‘There was a girl from Abilene, Oh, she was pure as purest cream, Until she learned that sex was fun, And then...her work was never done!’”
Rand clamped his jaw closed and forced himself to shut out Alice’s seductive voice and concentrate on the account ledger. Absently he reached for the shot glass of whiskey Lefty had offered in exchange for a magazine page with girlie pictures, turned over another page of debits and credits and choked.
Something sure didn’t add up. He flipped back through the figures for the preceding thirty-six months and began making some comparisons, and all at once things began to fall into place.
Alice turned her face aside to snatch a breath of un-whiskey-saturated breath. What was this miner’s name, Charlie? Donald? Jonah, that was it!
“Jonah, you’re a very successful miner. Did you ever visit Coleman’s Assay Office?”
“Oh, shore, Miss Lolly. But she shore were busy! Miss Dorothy, she allus used to shoo away all them gentlemen, but they jest kept comin’ and comin’. Made some of us miners mad cuz we knowed she weren’t no loose woman, even if she was a widow.”
“I bet you have a good memory for faces, Jonah. Who were these ‘gentlemen’?”
“Mostly it was that doctor fella, Doc Arnold. He practically drooled all over hisself whenever Miss Dorothy walked by. And then sometimes there was the sheriff.”
“That would be Sheriff Lipscomb?”
“Yes, ma’am. And, lessee, oh, yeah, that lawyer over on Jasmine Street. Jason Meade his name is. Sometimes I’d hear Doc Arnold yellin’ at her and then she’d cry and carry on. Dang, it made me mad!”
“Cry and carry on about what?”
“Don’t rightly know. But iff’n I was to hazard a guess it’d be somethin’ he wanted her to do that she didn’t want to do.”
“Something about money, maybe?”
Jonah shook his straggly salt-and-pepper hair out of his eyes. “Nah. Doc’s got plenty of money. I’m thinkin’ it was something more personal-like.”
Alice nodded. What kinds of things would a well-to-do man want a well-to-do woman to do? Lie for him, maybe? Steal for him? Surely not...
She went cold all over and suddenly stopped dancing.
“Gol-darn-it, Miss Lolly, I knowed I shouldn’t have told ya nuthin’. Ain’t none of my never-mind, anyhow.”
“On the contrary, Jonah. You did exactly the right thing. You are a gentleman and a prince.”
His leathery cheeks turned bright red. “A prince, huh? Golly, who’d a thunk that about ol’ Jonah?”
Jonah tramped off with a gobsmacked expression on his wrinkled face, and Alice found herself in the arms of another beery miner. This one, called Tom, had lots to say about the Coleman’s Assay Office. Emmeline Whittaker had never gotten along with Dorothy Coleman, and after Dorothy’s death, Emmeline was often seen in the back room of the office, talking with both Sheriff Lipscomb and Jason Meade, the attorney.
She’d heard enough. Alice left Tom in the middle of the floor and headed straight for Rand, sitting at the bar. He glanced up from the magazine he was reading. “You look like a cat who’s just lapped up a saucer of cream.”
“And you,” she said in a low voice, “look like you’d just swallowed a cage full of canaries.”
He grinned and leaned close to her. “You’ll never guess what I discovered in the assay office accounts,” he said quietly.
“Someone was embezzling money from the business?” she asked.
Rand stared at her. “How’d you figure that out?”
“Intuition,” she intoned. “And Jonah McCrary and some miner named Tom just told me some equally interesting things.”
“About your sister, Dorothy,” he guessed.
“And Dr. Arnold. Jonah heard them arguing about something after Jim was killed.”
“Money, I bet,” Rand supplied. “Interesting.”
“Possibly not money,” she breathed. “Tom told me something even more interesting.”
He gave her a considering look. “Alice, I have an idea. Could you manage some more play-acting tomorrow night?”