Home by Nightfall (12 page)

He saw Kuitan tied up at the hitching rail, and his fury and fear gave him the strength to jump onto the horse’s back with the cane and bottle in one hand and his other gripping the reins and saddle horn. Pulling Kuitan around, he galloped down the street and dodged through an alley between two buildings. Reaching the other end, he pulled the horse to a stop. Riley’s heart pounded so hard and fast he expected to see it jump from his rib cage. Sweat pumped from every pore to soak his shirt, and he panted like a frightened animal being chased by a wolf pack.

Looking left and right, he saw the back side of the blacksmith shop and rode toward it. He glanced around to make sure he hadn’t been followed, and dismounted. His leg produced a throb to remind him it wasn’t happy to be part of this, but he managed to lead Kuitan into the chill, darkened shop.

Jeremy had gone for the day, but the forge was still warm with its banked fire. Riley dropped onto an old stool and took a long pull on the whiskey bottle.

The faces he’d seen in Tilly’s zoomed at him in the dim shop like creatures in a fever dream—leering, laughing, screaming… screaming…
Whip! Come on!

• • •

Emmaline stood over a white enamel dishpan and poured a pitcher of warm water through her hair to rinse out the last of the soap. She had shooed off her last customer, taken a bath, and now her hair was clean too.

She’d been able to fix up this place a bit with the cash Whit had given her. He’d taken it from Lambert when he’d arrested him for robbing those poor people. But she sometimes wondered what indoor plumbing would be like—she’d never had anything more fancy than a zinc sink with a pump. At least now it had a drainpipe that ran out to the road. What a luxury it would be to take a bath in a white porcelain bathtub like the one she’d seen in
True Story
magazine. It had ornate claw feet and gleaming taps that poured hot and cold running water right into the tub. No heating water on the stove one kettle at a time, no bailing out the galvanized washtub she hid behind the painted cardboard dressing screen one of her customers had given her.

Sighing, she twisted her hair into a thin towel, tightened the sash on her wrapper, and sat down at the table for coffee and a cigarette. A woman could dream about a lot of things, and a little wishing was natural. But too much could pull her down into a black well of despair that made life unbearable. Things were gray enough—she had her freedom from Lambert, but she’d had to trade her sons to get it. They were better off with Tanner, but for a mother nothing was worse than losing her children. In her life she had been hungry, penniless, and beaten, but the loss of Josh and Wade tore at her heart worse than anything else.

She sat for a few minutes, watching the rain through a side window and toying with her Lucky Strike, then began combing out her wet hair. She had pulled the front shades to take her bath,
so when a knock sounded at the door, she jumped. She hadn’t heard anyone approach, but she’d been lost in her own thoughts.

“I’m closed!” she called. Rising, she took a couple of quiet steps to grab her shotgun and pointed it at the door. It was locked, but that didn’t mean a determined man couldn’t break it down. At least her hands were steady.

“Em, it’s me.” She recognized Whit Gannon’s rumbling voice and exhaled.

She unlocked the door and opened it a crack. “Whit, I just washed my hair. I’m a sight.”

He gave her a wry smile that made his frost-colored mustache widen. “You look fine to me. I came by to see you—I mean to see that you’re all right.”

She smiled too. He’d witnessed her at worse moments, but he’d always been honest with her, and respectful. Sometimes when they sat at the table, drinking coffee and just talking, she could almost forget her circumstances. She pulled open the door. Putting a hand to her wet, pale-red strands, she said, “A girl doesn’t usually want to be caught looking like a drowned cat.”

He stepped inside, bringing in the scent of wind and rain, and took off his hat. “Just as I thought. You look fine, like a young gal who got caught in a rainstorm picking wildflowers.” He closed the door.

Emmaline, who had seen and experienced more than she’d ever wanted to, was surprised to feel her face heat with the compliment. At forty-two, she was too old to blush, or so she’d thought. She dropped her chin, trying to hide it, but she couldn’t help smiling. “That’s nice of you, Whit.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Come and sit down with me. Tell me about your day.”

In the fading light of the dark afternoon, she struck a match and held it to the wick on a lamp she kept on the table. They drank coffee and chatted for a while. After he’d brought her up to date on the news in Powell Springs, he leaned forward and put his elbows on the table with his chin resting on his fists. “You know, Em, winter will be coming on again pretty soon.”

“Every year, just like clockwork.”

He smiled, then said, “I had a birthday last week. I’m forty, and in the last couple of years, those winters have started to tell on me.”

Forty and almost completely white-haired, she reflected. He must have had some hard days to turn at such young age.

He wrapped his hands around his coffee cup. “Or maybe it’s being alone all these years. Anyway, I’m tired of it.”

Emmaline froze. Oh, God, he’d come to tell her something bad—he was leaving town or getting married or—

“Haven’t
you
ever thought you’d like to get away from this? That you should have something better?”

Damn it, this was the same question Tanner had asked. She sat with her hands folded tightly in her lap. “You know my portion, Whit. This is all I’ve got. Yeah, the winters are cold and this is a lonesome life, but it’s mine and I learned to put up with it. If you need to move on—” She swallowed. “If you need to, well, no wife would want her man coming to check on a worn-out whore.”

He squinted at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You came up here to tell me you’re getting married or courting someone.”

He gave her a level, patient look. “Honey, I’m talking about you and me. And the woman I know is
not
a whore.”

Now truly at a loss for words, she gaped at him. “You and me—what—”

“We’ve been dancing around the edges of this for years. I’m betting that you wouldn’t mind giving up this life for something that’s easier and not lonesome.”

Of course she wanted that. What idiot wouldn’t? For an instant, she remembered that bathtub advertisement again. But it was a life that other people could have, not her. A defensive edge crept into her voice. “Like I said, it’s mine. And I don’t have some man keeping me on a tether like a dog and telling me what I’m doing wrong or beating me. I had plenty of that and worse with Lambert—when a man marries a woman he owns her and can do whatever he wants with her. I’m not much interested in doing it again. I’d rather live in this dump for the rest of my days than go back to that.”

He sighed but didn’t break his gaze with hers. “Is that really how you think I would treat my wife?”

She knew that wasn’t fair of her. “No, I don’t think you’d beat me.”

“But the other things?”

Horrified to feel the sting of tears behind her eyelids, quickly she looked down at her clenched hands. “I—I don’t know. I’m too afraid to find out.”

After a long silence, she heard the legs of his chair scrape the floor. She lifted her gaze in time to see him unfold his long frame and stand up.

He looked at her and briefly touched her shoulder. “I’ll be around, Em. If you ever change your mind, let me know.” He put on his hat and walked out, closing the door with a quiet
click
.

She got to her feet and pulled the shade aside a sliver to watch him walk through the rain to his Model T.

When he’d pulled away and the sound of the car’s engine had faded, she sat down again, and the emptiness of her life suddenly seemed much more bleak.

• • •

“Dr. Carmichael?” Jessica practically shouted into the transmitter on the telephone box on the wall. After all, a call to Portland was long distance. “Dr. Douglas Carmichael?” She nodded as she listened to the receiver. “This is Dr. Jessica Braddock in Powell Springs. I got your telegram—yes, yes, that’s right. My brother-in-law, Riley Braddock.”

Susannah stood in Jessica’s office, listening to this side of the conversation. Jess wore her white bib apron and a blue-and-white striped dress, the uniform she’d adopted for her job. Susannah, who had barely slept in three days, made do with a plain skirt and blouse and wore her hair tied with a cord at the back of her neck.

After a number of Powell Springs citizens turned out to search just about every building in town and ride the nearby surrounding farms, Tanner had finally found Riley in the Cole’s blacksmith shop next door to Jessica’s clinic, dead drunk and exhausted, too weary to fight him. Tanner had brought him to Jessica’s office, and Riley now slept in one of her patient beds upstairs. He’d been here for three days, rarely waking, and then unwilling to talk to anyone except Jess. Whenever someone else tried to visit him—Cole, Shaw, even Susannah herself—he turned his face to the wall and refused to acknowledge them.

Shaw complained that here he’d climbed all of those damnblasted stairs just to be ignored by his own flesh and blood.

Susannah had berated and second-guessed herself for the past three days. Should they have told him from the beginning about her marriage to Tanner? Maybe, but no one had told her how to deal with him, and she foolishly hadn’t anticipated that someone else would reveal the truth to him.

The men at Tilly’s had held Winks at the saloon for a couple of hours until Sheriff Gannon could be located. He had put Winks in his jail cell to sleep off some of the alcohol that he’d guzzled after his encounter with Riley, but he’d refused to take Riley into custody. He said the Braddock family had suffered enough heartache already and that given the circumstances, Riley couldn’t be blamed for his reaction.

While Jess continued her loud conversation with Dr. Carmichael, Susannah went to Jess’s back office and sat on the horsehair sofa, waiting for whatever information Jess had discovered. Once again she wished she could take her horse Sally and ride forever, away from the problems, away from the poisonous looks and the silence.

At last she heard the approach of Jessica’s decisive footfalls on the hardwood floor.

“I have some hopeful news,” she said, sinking down next to Susannah. “Dr. Carmichael has been following the work of a psychiatrist named Arthur Hurst at Seale Hayne Military Hospital in Devon, England. That was why I contacted him a couple of weeks ago. I read about it in a journal a few months back.”

“Psychiatrist?”

“That’s a doctor who treats mental disorders. Really, that’s what shell shock is.”

“But Riley was in that army hospital in New York and they couldn’t help him,” Susannah said, then added with a shade of bitterness in her words, “They just put him on a train to get rid of him when they didn’t know what else to do.”

“I know. I think they’re still treating the disorder as if the patient is just slacking off or being cowardly. Hurst doesn’t believe that’s true—he has proven it’s a real condition that requires treatment. He’s had great success treating shell shock in the countryside
hospital in England using a combination of hypnotism, occupational therapy, and other methods. Dr. Carmichael is a proponent of his work, and believes he can help Riley regain his memory and solve the riddle of those fits.”

“Hypnotism—you mean mesmerism?”

Jessica pulled at a loose thread on her apron. “It’s similar but not really correct. Franz Mesmer’s work was more, well, fanciful, I guess you could say. But his ideas led to the development of what we now call hypnosis.”

“And this will help?”

“It’s certainly worth a try. Dr. Carmichael is going to come here. Because Dr. Hurst’s hospital is in the country, he thinks a quiet rural setting would be better for Riley than his office in Portland. He said that Riley’s case is the most extreme he’s heard about locally. He also believes that Riley can be helped with just a session or two.”

“Really? When is this going to happen?”

“He’ll be here on tomorrow’s train.”

Susannah leaned forward and buried her face in her hands, her eyes hot with tears. “God, Jess, six months ago, if someone had told me we’d be in this mess, I wouldn’t have believed them. First the war, then the influenza, then being notified of Riley’s death, only to find out
that
was a mistake. Tanner is—well—oh, it’s all too much.” She felt Jessica’s hand on her shoulder.

“I know,” Jess murmured. “We all feel like that. Well, maybe not Shaw. Nothing can penetrate that thick skull of his. It’s as if it grows a new layer every day.”

Something about that image struck Susannah as funny, and she began laughing. “Maybe that’s his problem—it’s filling in his head and there’s no room for a brain anymore. It might be from drinking that pop-skull.”

“Pop drinks pop-skull!” Jessica started in too, and soon they were helpless with hysterical giggling over the really dumb joke. They fell over each other on the sofa and tears streamed down both their faces, but strangely enough, the laughter made Susannah feel a little better. “We’re terrible,” she said, swiping at her face and trying to catch her breath.

“Not so bad,” Jess said, pushing at loose strands of hair. “We’ve been through a lot.” Susannah suspected that she was also thinking of her own sister, Amy. She’d been Susannah’s friend too, and ultimately had deceived them both. In the midst of a white-hot scandal, she’d run away with Powell Springs’ minister and no one had heard from her since. “If we can’t laugh once in a while, we’ll lose our minds.”