After Sundown (6 page)

And perversely, he felt like a brute, like he was bullying the confession out of her when she was hurt. He relaxed his grip on her arm, just slightly. “I didn’t think so.”

She looked up at him, clearly struggling for words against the pain of her injuries. Her voice was scarcely a whisper. “I... didn’t mean to... do it—”

“I wish I had a dime for every outlaw who ever told me that,” he said caustically.

Her expression held both fear and confusion. “Why... didn’t you... kill me?”

It was the same question that had been plaguing him—the one question he couldn’t answer. For the second time, she rendered him mute.

Why did you close your eyes?
he wanted to ask.

“Because I’m taking you back to Missouri to stand trial,” he told her at last. “You’re on your way to face a judge and jury,
Miss
Sutton. And then you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison. Lucky for you, Missouri hasn’t hanged a woman in fifty years—though maybe they’ll make an exception in your case.”

She flinched, whether from the pain in her ribs or the coldness of his words, he couldn’t tell.

But again, she didn’t argue with him. Simply closed her eyes, remained still in his embrace, and didn’t say another word.

Damn the woman, couldn’t she do what he expected just once? Why did she have to lie quietly in his arms looking so fragile and—

He ruthlessly cut off that thought. He was
not
going to be deceived into feeling sympathy for her. Regardless of how she looked, she was a cold-blooded killer who had murdered his brother. The last thing she deserved was his sympathy.

Lucas looked out across the sea of grass that stretched before them. As the moon rose and the first stars blinked into view, he began contemplating the long trip back to Missouri... wondering how he was going to stand it. If an hour’s ride with her left him feeling this edgy and off-balance, he didn’t want to think about what it was going to be like sharing close quarters with her for the next several days.

Night had fallen by the time they approached the town, visible only as a dark silhouette and a scattering of firelight ahead. Eminence apparently lacked street lamps, but he could make out lanterns and torches, carried by about twenty people gathered in the street. When they caught sight of him, shouts went up and they hurried in his direction.

The kid, Travis, raced ahead of the rest, holding a lantern aloft, the bouncing light illuminating his stricken expression when he caught sight of Antoinette, who had fallen unconscious again. “Tarnation! She ain’t dead, is she?”

“If she were dead, I wouldn’t have her in handcuffs.” Lucas kept riding toward town. “She just needs to be patched up—”

“You said you was her kin.” Travis jogged alongside, his voice accusing. “I told everybody I only pointed her out ’cause you said—”

Lucas cut him off with a dry look and didn’t bother explaining to the boy that he shouldn’t trust strangers. “You got a doctor in this town?”

Before Travis could reply, the rest of the crowd surrounded them.

“Sakes alive!”

“Lord amighty, what happened?” A matronly woman with a purple ostrich plume in her hat touched Antoinette’s cheek.

“Who the hell are you, mister?” one man challenged.

“Poor Mrs. Smith!”

“Her name isn’t Smith and she’s never been any man’s Mrs.” Lucas reined the bay to a halt, shifting Antoinette’s weight to dig in his pocket for his badge. “I’m a federal marshal and this woman is wanted for murder—”

Shouts of dismay and disbelief drowned him out, even as he held up the silver star with the words U.S. MARSHAL on it.

“That can’t be true!”

“You’ve got the wrong woman—”

“She already confessed.” Lucas practically had to yell just to be heard. To his amazement, the crowd had quickly turned hostile—toward him.

He awkwardly swung his leg over the gelding’s neck and slid to the ground, still holding her in his arms. She moaned softly as his boots hit the dirt.

“Her real name is
Miss
Antoinette Sutton,” he continued, “and there’s a warrant out for her in Missouri. Right now she needs a doctor. Do you have one in this town or not?”

The man who had challenged him a moment ago stepped forward. “I’m Dr. Holt. My office is over here.” He reached out to take Antoinette.

Lucas shook his head adamantly. “I’ve got her. Let’s go.”

The townsfolk raised their torches and lanterns to light the way, swarming around him as he carried his injured prisoner across the street.

To his surprise, the doctor led him straight to the two-story, clapboard house on the corner that Antoinette had entered earlier. Lucas abruptly recognized him as the man who had greeted her so warmly when she knocked on the door.

The man whose dappled horse she had used to make her getaway.

As they stepped inside, Lucas assessed Holt in the brighter light. Early thirties, brown hair and gray eyes, a match for Lucas at about six feet tall. Something about his furrowed brow and rumpled clothes suggested a schoolmaster, but his tanned face and hardy build seemed more suited to a bullwhacker or a blacksmith than a doctor. Already Lucas didn’t trust him.

A dozen people followed as Holt led him through a simply furnished parlor and into an adjoining room. After lighting a pair of oil lamps, he directed Lucas to lay Antoinette on an examining table.

One of the women came forward to help as the doctor bent over his patient, his expression concerned. “Take these cuffs off, Marshal—”

“Just patch her up and get her ready to travel.”

Holt straightened and fixed him with a stare. “Look, lawman, you can’t just flash a badge and start giving orders. I don’t know who you are and I don’t—”

“Lucas McKenna. The brother of the man she murdered.”

A shocked chorus of gasps and exclamations came from the gathered townsfolk.

And Travis, who had lagged behind in the doorway, came hurrying into the room so fast he almost tripped over his own feet. “Did you say McKenna?” he asked, his voice rising. “
Lucas
McKenna? You’re U.S. Marshal Lucas T. McKenna of Indian Territory?”

Lucas looked at him warily, braced for what he feared was coming next. “Yeah.”

“Tarnation!” The kid took a step back. “Don’t anybody else know who this is?” he asked incredulously, turning to his neighbors. “This is... tarnation, this is one of the best, most wrathy lawmen ever to ride the Red River! Tough enough to chew nails an’ spit out tacks and so quick on the draw they say he’s got rattler blood in him—”

“Kid—”

“He brung in Mad Jack Pickett single-handed, and him and his deputies shot up the Blevins gang and—” Travis looked at Lucas as if he were Wild Bill Hickok come back to life, then stuck out his hand. “Marshal McKenna, sir, I’ve been readin’ about you for years. Why, you’re a gen-u-ine hero—”

“Don’t believe everything you read, kid.” Lucas didn’t shake his hand. “I’m nobody’s hero.”

“But the rattler part might be accurate.” Holt looked up from gently examining Antoinette’s side and gestured to her bruised face. “Did you take a bit of revenge for your brother’s death,
Marshal
? Is that how Ann got hurt?”

“She fell from her horse.” Lucas was rapidly losing his patience and his temper, especially since it didn’t look like Holt or anyone else believed him—regardless of Travis’s glowing biography. “Or rather,
your
horse,
Doctor
. You own that dappled mare she used to escape?”

“I let her borrow it—”

“Then I guess I won’t have to add horse-thieving to the murder and robbery charges.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.” Holt started rolling up his white sleeves. “Just take the cuffs off so I can examine her properly. She may be seriously hurt—”

“Yes.” The woman with the ostrich-plume hat kept hovering over Antoinette and generally getting in the way, her eyes full of worry. “The poor lamb’s barely recovered from losing her baby.”

“What?” Lucas asked in astonishment. “
What
did you say?”

The woman rushed over to him. “Ann came here two months ago in the middle of the night, dropped off by a stagecoach makin’ a detour on its way to Leadville ’cause she was having a miscarriage. She
can’t
be the woman you’re looking for—”

“Rebecca, would you and the marshal and everyone else get out of here?” Holt demanded. “Mrs. Owens is all the help I need. I have to examine this patient more thoroughly and I am
not
going to do it in front of half the town.”

Lucas tore his gaze from Rebecca, with her pink dress and plumed hat and bobbing earrings, and looked down at Antoinette, so slender and pale in the faded blue calico. Nothing about this made sense. He felt like he had stepped into some bizarre dream.
Miscarriage
.

“Get her ready to travel,” Lucas ordered, when he could find his voice. “Keep in mind I’ll be right outside. And the cuffs stay on.”

He moved through the parlor and out into the night with everyone else, his mind reeling.

Miscarriage
. No wonder she looked so wan and fragile. The people he’d questioned had mentioned only “female trouble.” He’d had no idea that Antoinette was pregnant—

All at once, he recognized the emotion he was feeling as pity, and shook it off.

Whatever she had been through, it didn’t matter. And it didn’t come close to the pain she had inflicted on his family—on James and Olivia and their children and his sisters.

And it didn’t change Lucas’s mind about taking her back to Missouri to face every bit of suffering the law could inflict. He took a deep, steadying breath of the cold night air. There was no way to know, he told himself, if it had even been James’s child.

Lucas doubted the daughter of a whore would be faithful to a lover.

Maybe
that
was what she and James had been arguing about that night.

He had walked several paces outside before he realized everyone was peppering him with questions again.

“I do
not
have the wrong woman,” Lucas insisted, raising a hand to quiet them. He turned to Travis, who had followed close on his heels. “Go get my saddlebags, kid. I left them at the livery when I came in on the stage.”

While Travis hurried down the street, Lucas glanced from one frowning, unfriendly face to another, some of them as weathered as the buildings in this forgotten town.

“The
lady
you’re all so concerned about,” he said tightly, “is no lady. She’s not a respectable young widow who was on her way to Montana Territory. She’s nothing but a low-born tramp.” Anger made his voice sharp. “She was my brother’s mistress for the last three years. He took her in off the streets, set her up in a fine place of her own, gave her the best of everything. And she showed her gratitude by stealing all the cash from his safe and shooting him through the heart.”

One tall, skinny matron pursed her lips, turning to a friend. “I just
knew
something wasn’t right.
I
knew all along there was something not right about that girl—”

“You hush up, Priscilla Kearney. You did not,” the woman named Rebecca said, her earrings and the plume in her hat fluttering as she shook her head. “It’s not true. He’s made a mistake!”

Few people looked or sounded convinced of Antoinette’s guilt. Travis came running up with Lucas’s saddlebags and black drover’s coat, and his hat, which had fallen to the dirt when he lit out on the bay gelding. Lucas put on the coat and hat and pulled a crumpled wanted poster from his bag. He smoothed it out, then took his hunting knife and stabbed it through the top of the paper, attaching it to the wooden clapboards of the doctor’s house.

The townspeople gathered around it, lifting their lanterns to study the sketch and read the description of Miss Antoinette Sutton of St. Charles, Missouri.

“It
is
her,” Rebecca whispered, echoing the stunned and distressed opinions of many others.

“But... but what kind of
evidence
do you have that she’s guilty?” one lady asked plaintively.

“There’s no question of her guilt.” Lucas didn’t understand why they were so damned reluctant to believe him. And he wasn’t used to having to explain himself in situations like this. Normally when he rode into a town and arrested an outlaw, people were
glad
, grateful to have their streets made safer, eager to see justice done.

“You keep sayin’ that.” Another woman turned toward him. “But what kind of
proof
is there?”

Lucas gritted his teeth. He proceeded to describe the crime, trying to do it the way he had described dozens of crimes before to fellow lawmen or lawyers.

Coolly. Unemotionally. “My brother apparently wanted to end the relationship, and she disagreed. So she went to his
house
, where his wife and children live. The servants overheard Antoinette arguing with him, in the study. Then they heard a gunshot. She was
seen
running from the grounds, through the gardens. The murder weapon was never found—which means she must have brought it with her and then disposed of it later. Everything was planned and carried out perfectly. She got her revenge and she got away with fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Fifteen thousand?” someone asked.

Travis whistled in disbelief.

“But she doesn’t
have
any money,” one man said. “She’s poor as Job’s turkey—”

“And if you could have
seen
the way she mourned her baby,” Rebecca added, her voice quivering, “visiting the cemetery every day—”

“She’s so tenderhearted—”

“How can you stand here and
defend
her?” Lucas stared at them in disbelief, feeling ready to explode. “After everything I’ve just told you, you
still
don’t believe she’s guilty?”

The crowd fell silent for a moment.

“We
know
her, mister,” one of the women told him quietly, her eyes as stubborn as the tilt of her chin. “We don’t know
you
a’tall.”

A few of the townsfolk—the skinny matron by the name of Priscilla Kearney, and three or four other sensible types, who were apparently in favor of law and order—started to drift away from the crowd, whispering among themselves.