After the Thunder (32 page)

“No!” he cried, and his hand shot out like a snake’s striking head to stop hers. “No, not in there. Here, I
have another handkerchief in my pocket.”

She kept her eyes lowered behind her lashes but she felt him look at her sharply. Good. Now he would surely look into the drawer and see that the bottle was gone before he came back to Tall Pine for dinner, and his nerves would be on edge.

After much pretended pain and after sitting with her foot propped up on a stool for several minutes until she could declare the hurting was much less, he finally went out into the street and found Mud Martin and his wife, Beuly, who were heading out toward their own farm, which lay just on the other side of Tall Pine.

“This way, you’ll have the buggy to come home in,” Cotannah told Peter Phillips as he carried her out to the Martins’ wagon. “Don’t be late for dinner, now, because I’ll feel bad that I’ve been the cause of delaying the start of your workday like this.”

“No, no,” he assured her. “Not at all.”

But he settled her into the seat next to Mrs. Martin and went back inside the mercantile without any more flirting or a lengthy good-bye, with only a cheery, “You take care of yourself, now, Miss Cotannah!” thrown over his shoulder as he left her.

She felt her lips curl in a triumphant smile.

Was he rushing back to his office to see if the poison was still in the drawer?

Cotannah decided on the way to Tall Pine to keep her own counsel for a while. If Emily knew for sure that Cotannah had the poison, that knowledge would show on her honest, open face and for the moment, Cotannah wanted to keep Peter Phillips guessing a bit. Of course, if he did go right in and look in the drawer, he’d almost know that Cotannah was the culprit, but yet he wouldn’t know for sure. It could’ve been stolen during the night.

The more she thought it through the more she knew that she’d do more good with her baiting of Phillips if everyone else at the dinner table remained in the dark. After dinner, if Phillips hadn’t incriminated himself, she’d tell Tay and Emily about the poison. But if things went well, Phillips would trap himself right there in front of everyone.

So she went back to Tall Pine and searched Peter’s room, to no avail, and then tried to take a quick nap to sharpen her wits. She locked the doors and windows to her room to protect the poison bottle when she went downstairs to supper. The family and the boarders were gathering, but Phillips was nowhere in sight.

A terrible, sharp-clawed fear took hold of her heart—what if her stealing the poison bottle had scared him so much that he left town? What if he was halfway to Texas by now?

But he wouldn’t just run off and leave the mercantile that he had invested in so heavily. Surely not. Besides, she couldn’t prove a thing about his guilt, and he knew that.

Her heart soared, anyway. Soon she wouldn’t need to prove anything because she’d frustrate Phillips into blurting out the whole story before he knew what he was about.

The man beside her, a traveling preacher called Brother Jones, held her chair and she sat down. She smiled up at him in thanks and then couldn’t stop smiling. She wanted to lick her lips like the cat who stole the cream, she wanted to jump up and shout. Walks-With-Spirits should be on his way to Tuskahoma by now, but he was not going to die. She was going to save him.

Finally, after what seemed an eon, when she felt she could not bear the waiting another minute, Phillips drove
the buggy into the yard, washed up, and came in for dinner. He looked a bit drawn and strained, Cotannah thought.

“We were getting worried about you, Mr. Phillips,” Emily said. “Did you have trouble on the road?”

“No, no, simply too much business,” Phillips said, in an approximation of his usual, hearty tone. “But then that’s the best trouble a store owner can have, don’t you think so, Miss Emily?”

He smiled and nodded at Cotannah, too, as the only other woman at the table since Aunt Ancie and Uncle Jumper had eaten earlier and gone outside to play with Sophie, and the schoolteacher, Jane Strahorn, was away visiting with a student’s family. Cotannah met his pale blue gaze and smiled at him.

“Yes,” she said. “There’s a lot
worse
trouble you could have.”

He held the look for a moment too long, searching her face with steel in his eyes. A flush gradually grew redder in his cheeks.

Cotannah softened her smile and gave him an innocent, wide-eyed look. “Mr. Phillips gave me a wonderful tour of the new mercantile,” she announced to the room in general, “and a souvenir gift to remember it by.”

His eyes slashed at her face like twin swords the instant those words left her mouth.

“What is it?” Emily asked.

“The ribbon in her hair,” Peter Phillips said to Emily, but his eyes never left Cotannah’s face.

She smiled at him again.

He turned away from her at last and began filling his plate from the bowls and platters the others began to pass to him, but the tension between them was beginning to make itself felt and everyone fell quiet while they
tried to figure out what was going on. Emily, especially, was glancing questioningly from Cotannah to Peter Phillips and back again.

Maybe she should have told her, Cotannah thought. She didn’t know quite what to say next. What if Phillips fell silent and wouldn’t talk anymore? What would she do then?

“The town was filling up with spectators for the execution when I rode through there this afternoon,” Brother Jones said. “It’s a shame that more people will turn out to see a criminal shot and sent to hell than for a camp meeting where they can learn how to send themselves to heaven.”

Tay answered him.

“Many of us think that Walks-With-Spirits is not a criminal, that he is innocent of murder.”

“I don’t know how you can still say that,” Peter Phillips snapped, with uncharacteristic irritability. “He put a death curse on Jacob, and the boy died without a wound on him. What else could have killed him? The people that found him said he looked like he’d just fallen asleep.”

“It really was the weirdest thing, Jacob falling dead in the street like that when he was so young and strong,” Cotannah said. “But, you know, this morning I remembered a young, strong vaquero who died on Las Manzanitas last year—he also looked as if he’d just fallen asleep. There was no shaman within miles of the rancho and no death curse for him.”

Emily sighed. “That is so sad. Did they ever know what killed him?”

“Poison,” Cotannah said, and looked straight at Peter Phillips.

He glanced up from his plate with daggers in his eyes.
Fear trembled in Cotannah’s stomach for a moment, but she held the look.

“Who did it?” Emily asked, and it took Cotannah a second to realize she was referring to Ruffy and not Jacob.

“Ruffy killed himself,” she said, slowly, still looking at Peter. “He rode in from town after the girl he’d been courting rejected his proposal of marriage and ate some monkshood.”

Peter Phillips’s face turned red as the sunset Cotannah could see through the window behind him. He swallowed hard and then coughed, almost choked on the bite that had been in his mouth when she’d named the poison.

“Is monkshood a wild plant that grows on the
rancho
?” Emily asked.

“I believe so,” Cotannah said, although she had no idea what it was because Ruffy had died of too much laudanum.

Peter Phillips made a strange little noise, deep in his throat.

Emily turned to him.

He continued to stare at her, and his face grew redder still.

“Why, Mr. Phillips,” the innocent Emily cried. “Are you all right? Do you have a fever?”

He coughed some more and took a sip of water. He seemed to lessen his color through the sheer force of his will as they all watched.

“I’m fine,” he said, calmly, and looked at Emily, then at Cotannah, with a cool, steady gaze. “Just fine, thank you.”

His pale blue eyes spoke to Cotannah as clearly as his tongue could have done.

I know you have it, but I also know that you can prove nothing. Nothing at all
.

Everyone saw the look, and no one but Cotannah knew what it meant. The tension came back with a vengeance, it lowered silence over the table like a shadow. Finally, Emily, always the perfect hostess, started a conversation going again and kept it firmly away from the coming dawn and death and poison until the plates were cleared away and dessert had been served and eaten.

Cotannah’s heart sank. What could she do now? Obviously, Peter Phillips didn’t intend to break down and confess. When Emily rose from her seat, everyone followed suit, and Phillips left the room with the other boarders, chatting along as if he hadn’t a worry in the world.

A sudden picture flashed across Cotannah’s mind: that of Walks-With-Spirits in a cold, dawn wind, stripped to the waist, his heart marked by a cross of white paint. Bravely facing the rifles of the Lighthorsemen. Her heart gave a hard, painful clutch.

Not while she still had breath in her body, she thought. She had Phillips worried and long before dawn she would wring an admission from him somehow.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have let him know that she had the poison, she thought, as she waited for the others to leave so she could draw Tay and Emily aside. Maybe she should’ve stuck to her original plan to seduce him.

But then she decided that it wasn’t too late for that. She could always resort to her old, flirtatious ways, and if he questioned her about the poison, insist that she had no idea what he was talking about. If she were clever enough about it, that might make him angry and lustful at the same time and the more emotional he was, the more likely he was to make a mistake. He was upset already, that much was certain, and even though he’d
sent her that calm challenge of a look and had started visiting with the others as if nothing was wrong, she just knew that she could push him a bit more and he would shout out something in anger that would form a trap for himself.

“I’m onto something and I’m not giving up,” she said quietly when Rosie had gone into the kitchen with an armload of dishes and she, Emily, and Tay were alone. “You two watch and listen for surprises this evening, because I may end up in Phillips’s room.”

They questioned her curiously but she wouldn’t say any more right then—she couldn’t because she wasn’t sure what tack to tell them she would take. No, she admitted to herself, she couldn’t tell them because she needed to do this all herself. She had been the cause of all this horrible trouble and making it all come out all right was the only way she could redeem herself.

Just the mention of going to Peter’s room brought back so many terrible recollections that they paralyzed her for a moment. Her whole body turned cold at the thought.

She shivered and rubbed at the goose bumps that were springing to life on her upper arms as the unwanted memories took over her senses: Headmaster Haynes, advancing on her slowly while he brandished his whip, the big
bandido
with the hairy hands, taking hold of her chin and jerking her mouth up to his dirty, stinking kiss. Herself in the bed at Las Manzanitas after Tay and Emily had rescued her, surrounded by the whole worried family who knew that she wasn’t really herself, that she was only a shell, a wraith lost in the long, empty, sinking feeling of not caring what happened next, of wanting nothing but to drop through the face of Mother Earth.

She stiffened her spine and pushed the past away. This was not then, this was now, and she would live, truly
live this moment, as Walks-With-Spirits had taught her. She wouldn’t let the past make it any worse than it had to be.

And she would not be ruled by fear. She was stronger than that.

She was stronger than she’d ever known she could be or she’d never have been able to leave Walks-With-Spirits before someone tore her out of his arms. She’d left him to try to save him, and that was exactly what she intended to do.

Her new peace was still there, deep down, and it would give her the strength to do what she had to do.

She gave Emily a quick hug, whirled, and ran to the stairs to go up to her room. Phillips had gone out onto the veranda with the rest of the company, just as he usually did—to keep up the appearance of normality, the crafty devil—and she’d use this opportunity to search his room again. Perhaps she had overlooked something significant the first time.

But still she found nothing in his room that would help her. The bottle of monkshood was all she had. When she got back to her own room she sank down onto the bed and tried to slow her pounding heart. She would have to approach him when he came upstairs and she told herself, over and over again, that she would go through with seducing him, all the way, if she had to. She could do it.

Even though it wouldn’t be much different from being forcibly bedded, which was her greatest fear. She could face it, though. To save Walks-With-Spirits, she would face it gladly.

Emily sighed and shifted from one foot to the other without taking her eye from the narrow crack between her door and the jamb.

“Darling, don’t wear yourself out,” Tay said. “Phillips is still on the veranda, and we’ll hear him when he comes up.”

She turned and threw him a quick glance across their dim bedroom.

“Sh-h-h!” she whispered.

Then she put her eye to the door again. A second later, she saw movement at the edge of her vision and then Cotannah’s slender form gliding silently past. Her heart stood still. She waited long enough for her friend to reach the top of the stairs, then closed the door a little more and turned to whisper to Tay again.

“There she went—why won’t she tell us what she’s up to? She’s going downstairs, do you think she’s going to confront him out on the veranda? What’s she doing?”

He crossed the room silently and slipped his arm around her.

“She said for us to wait for a surprise. We’ll find out soon enough.”

Emily leaned back against the blessed comfort of his hard, lean body, but for once she couldn’t relax in her husband’s arms.

“How can you be so calm about this when there are so few hours left for Walks-With-Spirits?” she asked.

“Cotannah is the stubbornest person I’ve ever known,” he murmured. “And she’s determined to save him, so she will. She just wants to do it all by herself after finding out whatever she found out today.”