Chapter Fourteen

PIPPA

Pippa took Forrest’s hand and descended from the car. Her bad leg wavered on the step, and Forrest tightened his grip.

“Are you all right?”

No, she wasn’t all right. It was another day, another sign that Lily was slowly slipping away. Richard Ripley was on a wrathful rampage and had left the house early that morning to do God knew what. Pippa’s mother had coerced her into a trip downtown to go shopping. Pippa would have much preferred to simply dial 15 on the phone and have the Hemshaw Department Store send their needed deliveries to the house via old Charlie Bucket and his delivery wagon. But no. Mother wanted to shop, and there was no way she was going to entrust Mrs. Hemshaw with picking out a new hat.

Maybe it was Providence that they’d met up with Forrest. Chance, perhaps, that Mother had happened upon Mrs. Braylin and the opportunity to take tea together. So, before Pippa knew it, once again her day had been arranged for her, and she was accompanying Forrest whether she wished to or not. Her drop-waisted, striped cotton dress was hardly suitable for a midday lunch, yet here they were at a restaurant in the town square. All Pippa wanted to do was find a way to be alone. Be by herself with Lily. To coax life back into the calf and at the same time soothe her own ruffled spirit. Maybe . . . maybe even run into Jake Chapman. Though she hated to admit it, the way the man’s thundercloud-gray eyes rolled through Pippa’s mind, setting her nerves on fire like the snap from lightning, convinced her that maybe he shared her restlessness. It was a strange, unspoken kinship that, for some reason, Pippa ached to explore.

Her fingers trembled.

Forrest tightened his hold.

Pippa allowed herself to offer eye contact. Forrest’s brown eyes could be gentle, and maybe he had a soft side to him, hidden way down deep inside. The Landstroms were a leading family in Bluff River, with Forrest’s father having been aligned with the railroad before partnering in the circus. She would never forget the day her father announced he had seen fit to give Pippa’s hand to Forrest. The announcement came over family dinner, no less. Even her mother had the graciousness to appear bewildered, as if the medieval tradition of joining clans had been revived. And it had made Pippa’s food sour in her stomach. Words of protest were stolen from her with one look into her father’s eyes. Her driving desire to please him had silenced her tongue.

She regretted it now.

Pippa removed her hand from Forrest’s, thankful she’d remembered to wear gloves. Not that she was drawn by any physical enticement.

Forrest touched her elbow. “Shall we?”

Do I have a choice?

She dare not verbalize such a rebellious question. Pippa reached into the car and reassured Penn. The dog, leashed and secured inside the car, whined and licked her fingers. She wanted to come along, to be by Pippa’s side where she belonged.

“I’ll not have a pit bull terrier following us into a restaurant.” Forrest eyed the dog with obvious distaste. For a circus man, he was hardly a fan of animals.

“She’ll be no trouble.” Pippa’s protest sounded weak, and she realized it the second it escaped her lips.

Forrest gave her a patronizing smile. “Darling, I realize this breed has been the constant companion of many a child for many a year. However, you are neither a child nor are they nearly so preferred now.”

“It’s not Penn’s fault that men have placed her breed into the pit to fight.” Pippa’s ire rose. It was one thing to diminish her opinion, but it was another thing entirely to criticize her dearest companion.

“Fine then.” Forrest gripped her elbow and steered her away from the car and from Penn. “It’s the mere fact that I won’t have any dog following my footsteps like she’s my nanny and I’m in a pram. It’s ridiculous.”

And parading camels and elephants around the city square on their weekly exercise routine isn’t?

Again, Pippa held her tongue.

“You’ve outgrown the need for a dog,” Forrest stated in conclusion. “You have me now.”

“Do I?” It was a risky thing to mutter, yet mutter it Pippa did. Under her breath. Barely finding the courage to say it at all.

Forrest gave her a surprised look. “Pardon?”

“Must I?” Pippa’s tongue tripped over her reinvented words.

“Leave the dog behind?” Forrest tightened his mouth in a thin line of disapproval. “Yes. You must.”

She allowed Forrest to lead her to the small restaurant. She much preferred a soda from the fountain at the corner drugstore. She wasn’t hungry. Forrest helped her take a seat at the table, and out of habit Pippa arranged the linen napkin on her lap.

“What would you like to eat?” Forrest tried to be amiable.

“Why don’t you decide for me?” Pippa noted his pleased smile and nod. She’d made up for her snippy back talk earlier. He liked that. He liked being in control as much as she resisted being imprisoned. That gnawing panic rose in her chest, an anxious feeling that made her want to leap from the table and flee. Maybe it wasn’t Forrest, after all. Maybe it was just that she knew she didn’t belong here, with him, with the Ripleys, with normal people.

She looked out the window as Forrest ordered their food. She heard him say something about fish. She didn’t like fish. Once, as a child, she had gone fishing with her uncle and cousins on a lake not far from Bluff River. It was the first time she’d seen a fish caught with a hook swallowed deep, and ever since then, Pippa’s appetite for eating one had been lost. The poor, helpless creature had stared at her from unblinking eyes as her uncle worked to dislodge the hook from its innards. In the end, it was a gruesome slaughter.

Forrest was speaking.

“I’m sorry?” Pippa snapped herself back to the present.

Forrest’s brow furrowed, and he glanced out the window where she’d been emptily staring. “Would you like a side of rice with that? Or potato?”

“Rice.” Neither was hardly an appropriate response.

Forrest continued considering his meal as her gaze returned to outside the window.

Pippa’s eyes locked with dark ones set in the face of a boy no older than eight or nine. The shadows under his eyes were emphasized by the disturbing fact that he did not blink. He stood across the street, arms at his sides, tattered britches torn at the pockets. He tilted his head to the right, his newsboy cap staying in place while his eyes became more expressionless by the moment.

Forrest’s voice droned in Pippa’s ears. She couldn’t tear her attention away from the boy. He beckoned to her, eerily reminiscent of the hollow-eyed masked man who called to her from the shadows of the circus. The Watchman.

People strolled by the boy, stepped around him, and ignored him. To them, he was no more than a hitching post or similar inanimate object.

“Pippa.” Forrest’s sharp voice yanked her eyes back to him.

She didn’t realize she had stood, her chair pushed back. Forrest heaved a sigh and set his napkin on the table.

“I was hoping for a leisurely meal with you. To discuss—” his pause was heavy with meaning—“us.”

Pippa glanced back at the boy. He was gone. A strange desperation filled her. She couldn’t lose him. Pippa knew it, could feel it. “Forrest, I . . .” Pippa bit her lip.

He wasn’t pleased.

Somehow she found the gumption to resist Forrest’s annoyance and the feeling of guilty obligation that held hands with it. “I’ll be back. Please. I just spotted someone I think I know, and I really must see to it.”

“Who?” Forrest wasn’t gullible. Suspicion reflected in his eyes.

Confound it. Pippa glanced out the large picture window of the restaurant again. The boy had vanished.

“What are you carrying on about, Pippa?” Forrest didn’t trust her. He doubted her. He was right to.

“Just one moment, please.” Pippa edged away from the table. She would have to face the consequences for her actions later—and she would face them. But if there was one thing that gave her enough courage to be even a tad defiant, it was the Watchman—or her need to discover him and his ties to whoever she was. She had no reason to believe the boy was connected with him, and yet . . .

The thump of Forrest’s hand slapping the table followed her out the door. Pippa exited the restaurant and looked both ways down Fourth Street. The saloon, the liquor and cigar store, the shoe store, the drugstore, and . . . There he was! The boy wove his way between automobiles and a few carriages and bent at the waist to retrieve something from the ground.

As fast as her leg would allow, Pippa hurried after him. She dodged a man exiting the drugstore and limped around a Stanley Steamer with its white-rimmed tires. There. The boy was crouched by the front wheel. In his hand he held a wayward coin that had escaped from a richer man’s pocket. In his eyes there was emptiness. No emotion. No recognition. Life had sucked the personality from this child.

The bustle of the downtown square drifted away. For the moment, it was just Pippa and the boy. She was motionless, afraid any movement might frighten him. The boy remained in a squat, his fingers closed around the coin, and a hint of challenge touched the corners of his eyes.

“I don’t care about the coin.” They were the first words she could think to say to him.

A tiny flicker of life crossed the boy’s expression. His lips were pale, his cheeks even more so, and the shadows beneath his eyes spoke of malnutrition. He was probably from the south side of town, across the railroad tracks, where the poor and the delinquents lived. Oddly enough, not far from the circus grounds.

“Here.” Pippa fumbled with her purse. Coins. She found a nickel. Holding it toward him, Pippa waited.

The boy stood.

She extended her arm as far as she could.

The boy reached out and snatched it from her fingers. His voice was hoarse and it squeaked, betraying the boy’s journey to manhood. “He says to tell ya that ya broke his trust.”

Once again, Pippa was at the mercy of someone else who held claim to her secrets.

“Please tell him I’m sorry.” Without thinking, Pippa reached for the boy’s shoulders to grab him in her urgency, to have her sincere apology communicated. He shrugged away with a frown. She quickly pulled back, not wanting to frighten him, and debated her next words. She was begging, which was pathetic of her. “Tell him it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know how everything would dissolve into complete chaos with the elephant.”

I didn’t know how terrified he would make me.

She didn’t voice her last thought. It was a betrayal of him, of who she believed the Watchman to be.

The boy pocketed the coin. Her explanation didn’t move him. Giving her the message was his only task, and with that done, Pippa knew she’d never see the boy again.

“He said you’re to find the toy.”

“The toy?” Pippa shifted her weight onto her good foot. Her movement spooked the boy, and he took a step back.

“The zebra toy. When you find it, he will come to you. You’re to leave a message for him when you do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—what he is talking about.” Desperation gripped her. “Please. Do you know who he is? Have you seen him?”

The boy retreated another step and ignored her questions. “He has shown his loyalty. You must show yours. Bring him the toy. It’s what binds you.”

The boy spun on his heel then and darted away.

“Wait!”

Pippa stared after his retreating form. The boy was merely a messenger. The Watchman had sent him, and she was at his mercy. She looked over her shoulder, toward the restaurant where Forrest waited still, probably growing in exasperation.

A toy. She would find it. Pippa had to believe the Watchman would meet her again. The man who could still reveal who she was. And if she could uncover her true identity, Pippa knew she’d find the courage to become whoever she was meant to be. And when she did, she would fly away. Forever.

Pippa mouthed the lemon drop she’d offered up a penny for at the corner drugstore. The sour-sweetness puckered her lips and matched her mood. Candy didn’t help Pippa find any sense of peace. Neither did Forrest’s sore reaction to her desertion at lunch, and his equally dour mood when her mother acquiesced to her request to remain downtown, chaperoned only by Penn. Forrest was begrudgingly accepting of his charge to escort her mother home with all her packages. The knitting of his dark brows matched the questioning mistrust in his eyes.

Pippa tucked away the niggling sense of guilt. Guilt for cajoling her mother into giving her some rare freedom. Guilt for using the opportunity to escape a lecture from Forrest. She tickled Penn’s ear with her fingertips as she walked in the direction of the circus. Guilt for heading to the one place she’d been told she was not to go to anymore. She gave her sailor scarf a nervous yank, straightening it before letting it fall against the striped backdrop of her dress. Penn trotted alongside her, nose in the air, ears perked, and her mouth tipped up in a contented dog smile.

A lion’s roar penetrated the otherwise calm autumn afternoon. The ringing of metal on metal echoed from the blacksmith’s forge. Benard the smithy would be there, pounding away his own personal angst against his body’s deformities. She didn’t speak with him often, but Pippa knew that not unlike many members of the circus family, he’d been born with a deformity. His was facial, and it stretched from his forehead and wrapped down around his neck. She’d been told it was a birthmark, though its splotchy color—from dark brown to pasty white—had people dubbing him “Giraffe Man.” Just a blacksmith, not even a performer, and he had been labeled and shelved as an oddity like so many of them.

Pippa noted her own limp and without looking could recall every twist and ugly wrinkle on her leg. Thin and turned, her foot’s angle made running nearly impossible and walking a chore.

Welcome to the circus. A place where eccentrics came to hide and where, even here, they abandoned their own.

She paused in front of the elephant barn. Penn panted, for the day was unseasonably warm for September. Pippa glanced left and right, afraid she would be noticed by someone who mattered. But, it was hardly common for her father to be loitering around the grounds during the afternoon, and Forrest was with her mother. Still, the very fact her visit here alone was forbidden made her heart beat an irregular cadence as she slipped through the doors of the barn in a hurried fluster.

“Oh, criminy!” Pippa couldn’t bite back her exclamation as she smacked face-first into Jake’s chest. He was exiting the barn. Now he grabbed for her arms to steady her, even as Pippa’s outburst echoed in the octagonal ring. While the place was empty of elephants, piles of dung still littered the cement floor.

Jake pierced her with his steely gray eyes, and immediately Pippa’s stomach flip-flopped. She was a tad hesitant about his beard, though intrigued by his dingy striped shirt that stretched over a muscular chest. The shirt looked as if it might rip if he even raised an arm above his head . . .

“Miss Ripley?”

He’d caught her staring. She laid her palm on Penn’s head to stabilize herself. She needed stabilization, and not because her leg was disabling her. Pippa was going weak in the knees, and for once it wasn’t because she was trepid and shy. Jake was—he was a man. Well, so was Forrest, but then . . . no, Jake was dangerous. Perhaps? Or was it due to the fact that Clive had insinuated he was out for revenge? No. The cigar. It was the cigar that drooped from the corner of his mouth, a tendril of putrid smoke drifting upward, that repulsed her. Made her stare. Made her completely, inadequately able to speak a lick of sense.

“Pippa?” Jake stroked her with his cloudy gaze.

The use of her surname made Pippa blink, and she ripped her focus from his cigar. He had a nice nose. But it was crooked.

Penn edged her way between Jake and Pippa, her muzzle turned up at him and her body tensed. Pippa kneaded the dog’s short fur with her hand. Penn’s stiffened muscles responded to Pippa’s unspoken anxiety. Yes. Jake Chapman was a threat. To her safety and to her sense of reason. Pippa couldn’t find her tongue, and if she could, it was as twisted as her leg in this moment. He really was intimidating.

“Go home, Pippa.” The cigar bobbed in a haphazard motion as he spoke. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Gosh, you’re behaving awfully familiar!” Pippa’s criticism slipped out before she could stop it.

His mouth twitched. So did the cigar.

“What I mean to say is—”

“Don’t edit your words, Pippa.” Jake tossed his cigar down and ground it against the floor with his boot. The smoke wafted up and dissipated. Snuffed out. “Say what you mean.”

She didn’t. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

Jake reached around her for a shovel leaning against the wall. He kept his eyes locked on hers, and she couldn’t move.

Penn growled.

Jake smiled cynically. “A dog like that could rip a man to shreds.”

“She’s not a trained fighter.” Pippa hated the reputation dogs like Penn seemed to be achieving through no fault of their own. Such a loyal, gentle breed trained to be killers. It was disgusting, the dog pits.

“She could be.” Jake turned on his heel and walked in a lazy line toward a pile of dung.

Pippa noticed the wheelbarrow parked at the edge of the ring. “I suppose you would know.” She bit her bottom lip. Drat, her words would be the death of her, and why they flowed so freely and uninhibited with a man like Jake Chapman thoroughly stumped her.

His chuckle was dry. The scrape of the shovel against the cement cut through the veiled tension. Pippa’s insinuation in regard to his previous life wasn’t veiled at all.

“You should go home now.” Jake dumped the load into the wheelbarrow. “Hasn’t your father told you what a bad influence I am?”

“Yes,” Pippa replied honestly.

Jake outright laughed this time. “Of course. I can’t blame him. Your father doesn’t want you near me. Neither does your man,” Jake tossed over his shoulder as he neared another pile of elephant dung.

“Forrest isn’t my—” Pippa bit off her argument. Forrest was stuck to her indelibly, like the glue children used in primary school. “Please, may I see Lily?”

She skirted an elephant pie as she moved across the ring toward the doorway on the far end that led to the high-ceilinged elephant shelter.

“Not a good idea. Ernie won’t approve of that any more than your father.” Jake’s back was broad, but it was the way his shoulders strained against his shirt that captured Pippa’s fascination.

“And does no one care about Lily? What she needs?” Pippa winced.

Jake stopped and planted his hands on his hips. Penn was diligent to her mission and positioned herself between them. Her tail didn’t wag, and her eyes were sharp and focused on Jake. Jake’s expression was unreadable.

Pippa hobbled up to him. “My father isn’t pleased with me.”

Jake chuckled and tipped his head to the side. “Fancy that.”

She forged ahead. “But I care about the calf and her survival. I still want to help.”

“Even after you’ve failed as miserably as the rest of us. You want to work alongside me?” There was a twinkle in his eye.

“No, not you.” Curse the man, he’d turned her into a flibbertigibbet. “I didn’t fail miserably. Lily did take the bottle for a bit when I offered aid. Please, I just want to help.” To give the baby elephant a sense that someone cared, that she wasn’t alone, that there was hope for her future. Or, more honestly, to be at the circus so she might find the Watchman and also sift through this new information about a toy. A zebra toy.

“There’s nothing you can do.” Jake’s curt response snagged her attention away from the toy.

“But the calf responded to me. I can bring her comfort.” Pippa grew braver with her insistence. Something in Jake’s demeanor seemed to give her permission, and a part of Pippa couldn’t resist it.

“She’s dying, Miss Ripley. You’re only here to report our failure back to your father.”

“That’s not true!”

“So, you’re not a snitch? Here to bring home more tales of misdeeds and the circus’s mishandling of the elephants?”

Pippa drew back. The man was goading her. She knew it. She knew it was also working. “I’m not a snitch!”

“Pippa . . .” His voice caressed her name, as if even the sound of it tasted good to him. Maybe being alongside him to minister to the injured elephant wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“Go home,” Jake repeated. His eyes squinted with an insistence that wasn’t gruff but instead seemed to be laced with a protective warning. “I know you like being at the circus. I’ve seen you here before.”

Pippa’s breath caught. He’d noticed her.

“But this isn’t—” Jake hesitated and looked to the ceiling as though offering a quick prayer—“this isn’t the place for a lady.”

Pippa reached for Penn as she always did when she was feeling anxious. The dog responded and pushed against her legs, sniffing her palm with its black nose. “I won’t go home.”

Because it wasn’t home.

They locked eyes.

Jake blinked.

Pippa didn’t.

Jake’s left eye squinted even more as he curled his lip and half snarled in resignation. “Landstrom won’t be pleased you’re here without him. Your father will hunt me down if they know I’m anywhere near you.”

Pippa shook her head. “I won’t tell them.” The words slipped from her lips with shocking ease.

Jake raised his brows in surprise, and then a lopsided smile tilted his mouth. “You won’t tell them,” he said with a vague tone of admiration.

Again, Pippa’s stomach flip-flopped.

Jake rubbed a finger under his nose as if considering the ramifications of allowing her to see the calf. “Fine. Follow me around if you want.” Then he gave her a wink. But it wasn’t flirtatious; it was a challenge. It was an if you dare wink.

It was dangerous.