Karen Mercury (13 page)

She could have easily recovered from that, but suddenly Tabitha felt nauseous. There was something about that turkey that just didn’t sit right with her. The fumes emanating from it were so thick she could swear she could
see
them. As she hovered above it, leaning on her hands and trying to force herself upright, she lost it.

Tabitha heaved all over the turkey. The glass of muscatel came up first, followed by a mixture of some crackers and Spanish chestnut soup Josefina had fed her for lunch. Her feverish eyeballs colored everything with a green sheen, as if she had eaten pea soup—which she hadn’t. The room swirled around her, and she knew she needed to get out of there.

A few hands gripped her shoulders, but she only recognized her sister Liberty’s voice. “Tabby, Tabby! You must be sick as a dog! Let me take you home.”

She must be the center of attention puking into the turkey like that, for the music had mostly stopped. Only a few men continued thumping hoes or blowing through combs, and one of the fiddlers kept improvising aimlessly on his remaining strings.

“That muscatel must not agree with her.”

It was Foster!
Oh, by Jove
. How embarrassing, when she was trying to impress this man. She couldn’t even hold her liquor.

“Yes,” Liberty agreed. “I don’t think she’s accustomed to booze. How much did she have? Was she eating turtle soup?”

Tabitha grabbed the first thing she saw to wipe the dregs from her mouth, which was a piece of bread. Foster snatched it from her and pressed his handkerchief into her paw. “Just some chestnut soup earlier. I’ll take her home and get her into bed.”

“I feel better,” Tabitha lied.

Liberty frowned. Hands on hips, she demanded, “Who are you?”

Tabitha gestured at Foster with the handkerchief. “He’s a friend of Harley’s. He’s staying at Vancouver. He’s my husband.”

“Husband?”

Tabitha giggled drowsily. She now felt extremely light-headed. “Yes. Remember the talking board—”

The last thing Tabitha remembered was the festive streamers wound between the ceiling rafters before she fainted.

Foster had no choice but to strip the emerald green dress from Tabitha’s body.

A suspicion nagged at the back of his brain, anyhow. First, the dress had materialized in strange circumstances. Foster wasn’t an expert on the armoires of Vancouver House, but Tabitha had acted surprised to see the dress. She had obviously never seen it before in her life. But it was a cunning enough gown to induce her to wear it to the fandango.

Then the gloves had appeared magically, exactly matching the gown. Tellingly, they had materialized while the mystic Caleb was horizontal above their heads, floating toward the ceiling. The psychic vibrations must have been at their peak to enable Caleb to do that. Caleb had told them he had a “glorious mission to convince mortals of the existence of the afterlife.” Every moment, Foster was becoming more and more convinced of it, too.

There was no other explanation for all of the odd things that had taken place lately. The sunflowers. The French people in Texas. His son’s rattle. The spirit of Ezra Kind, the poor miner. His ghost dog, who now sat placidly on the bathroom floor, watching Foster and Josefina remove Tabitha’s gown.

Only, Foster had no idea how to piece it all together. He hadn’t told anyone he recognized the rattle, merely pocketed it to ponder on further.

Tabitha was only halfway conscious as they stripped her bodice from her. Foster was ashamed of himself for admiring the bouncy globes of her ample bosom as Josefina jiggled the long, tight sleeve to disrobe Tabitha’s arm. To cover his shame, he asked the cook,
“¿Trató de
comer al perro
?
”
Did you try to feed the dog?

Josefina shook her head, her eyes dark with confusion. “What dog?” she said in English.

Foster unbuttoned the buttons at Tabitha’s waist. In the dim lamplight, he instantly saw that an eerie green shade had spread over Tabitha’s torso. Her buoyant breasts had taken on the green dye of the gown, making her look even sicker. Her chest where the gown hadn’t covered was still a luscious pale, almost as pale as Foster himself, creamy and ivory.

“The dog sitting right there. Don’t you feed her?” Foster knew Phineas didn’t care a whit for mortal food, but no sense in confusing Josefina with that information.

“What dog sitting right there?”

Phineas regarded Josefina with amusement, blinking her eyes with a smile.

“Never mind.” Apparently Josefina couldn’t see Phineas. “Can you add more water to the bathtub? It looks like this dye rubbed off on her arms.”

Foster had Tabitha stripped down to her drawers and chemise—he removed the one petticoat that had protected her legs from the green dye. Now he tried to sit the woman up on the settee, but she lolled senselessly.

“I’m sorry I’m sick,” she murmured. “I’m sorry I puked into the turkey.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Foster said. “That turkey had already taken a few spins around the block before you heaved into it.” He slung her limp arm around his shoulders and made as if to stand, but she wasn’t of much assistance. Josefina returned with another cauldron of hot water to dump into the tub.

“Come on,” Foster urged. “We’ve got to get you into the tub.”

“So embarrassed…” Tabitha muttered, but she had gained enough strength to somewhat stand and slide into the tub. She slithered like a fish, barely holding herself up by weakly gripping the edges of the metal tub.

Foster tried to sponge off the green dye from her arm, but it was resistant. Tabitha was clad in a shirt of emerald green—her hands were green, too, from the gloves—but she already seemed to be perking up.

Foster said, “I think that dress made you ill. You have no idea where it came from? Can you ask your sister if she’s ever seen it before? Your telegraph operator sister lives here, right? When she’s not at her Snowy Range ranch?”

“I will,” Tabitha breathed. She seemed to be luxuriating in the washing of her arm, her head rolling back against the edge of the tub. “When she returns from her ranch. How could a gown make me ill? I thought it was the muscatel.”

“You’ve got to admit—” Foster squiggled each of her fingers in turn. He thought he saw the corners of her mouth lift into a slight smile. He imagined it was a heavenly feeling. He hadn’t had a moment to frequent the local prairie flowers, and at the fandango had even run into a few dolls who had wished he would court them years ago, but he suddenly had lost all desire for those activities. “Odd things have been happening since we met up.”

Now she really did smile, catlike. “Yes. It’s evident that Bettina and Pierre Badeaux were meant to be together. I wonder how we could find out more about them. I’ll bet one of my brothers-in-law could find someone in the Port of Galveston who could find out more. We know the name of their plantation, Campeche.”

Foster was glad this subject had come up. “I might know some who’ve done some scouting down in that area, too.” He was reluctant to place her hand back into the tub, although he’d washed off most of the green dye by now. The soap foamed with a nauseating color between their intertwined fingers. “When you were talking earlier about the dead bear wrestler, you used the phrase ‘my sister and her husbands.’ You were saying, ‘Why would my sister and her husbands lie?’ What did you mean?”

Tabitha’s eyes popped open, clear and aware as could be. Her mouth slacked to reveal her adorable beaver’s teeth. “Did I say that?” She looked down in shame, maybe only now becoming aware that her wet chemise was hiding nothing of her erect, pert nipples. She snatched her hand from Foster to riffle it through the bathwater.

“Yes, you did,” Foster said softly. He lifted the sponge to her chest. He wanted to soap off the rest of the dye before she became aware how truly naked she really was. And if he stood up now, his rigid erection would be prominently displayed.

Tabitha grinned secretively. “I suppose I did. Well, I believe all three of my sisters to have rather unconventional marriage arrangements. Ivy is legally married to Neil, Laramie’s marshal. Yet they live with Harley, your friend.”

“I remember Neil. When I lawyered here in town, I had many dealings with him. He’s an upstanding, on-the-square fellow. Harley has talked a bit about Ivy and Neil, and I knew they lived together, but I had no idea…” He trailed off, to allow Tabitha to continue when, or if, she wished.

She sighed deeply. “I probably shouldn’t sit in this water, if it’s poison dye. Well, since you’re such a boon companion of Harley, you must know that he has rather exotic tastes.”

“That’s sure as shooting.” Foster knew that Harley had been ousted from the British Army for a making a scandalous report on male brothels in India. The brass had requested the report, but they sure didn’t like the results. Probably because Harley wasn’t tactful, to say the least, and he’d made it clear that he had actually participated in some, or all, of the topics at hand.

“Well. Then it wouldn’t seem odd that he would share a wife with Neil. No?”

“No,” Foster agreed. Especially one as beauteous as Ivy. “That’s entirely in keeping with what I know of old Harley. But when you mentioned the bear wrestler, you were referring to your sister Alameda. You called Remington Rudy her husband, but I know she is married to Senator Spiro.”

“Yes, it’s the same sort of thing with Alameda.” She cocked her head in a fetching manner. She still wore her green jeweled hair barrette from the fandango, and without thinking, Foster reached out and slid it from her flaxen hair. “Don’t you agree it would be expedient to share a wife with another man? Especially since there are so few women in the far West.”

If the other man was Worth
. “Yes,” Foster agreed honestly, “although I’d have a difficult time sharing you with anyone.” He didn’t want to ask about the third sister, Liberty. She was the schoolmistress and lived with two mining tycoons, married to one of them.

She cast him a low look of censure, but her eyes glittered with amusement. “All right. Now get up and turn around. I don’t want to bathe in this green slime anymore.”

Foster rose from the stool and obediently turned his back. He mostly turned away out of embarrassment at the erection that jutted from the lap of his tailored trousers. But if it looked as though he did it from respect, all the better. “I saw Sherman Bullard at the party. The fellow who was supposed to be caring for Phineas.”

Tabitha splashed in the bathwater. He didn’t let on that if he peeked behind the screen that divided the room in half, he could see her in the vanity mirror. “What did he say?”

“He said he never
got
Phineas. He saw her the last day he helped Orianna pack for California. The next day when he lugged some stuff to the train station for her, she said Phineas had run off.”

“But he sure took the money you sent.”

“Yes, he did that. I understand he didn’t know how to find me, though, to get a letter through, so I don’t blame him.”

She stood in the tub, stripping the sodden chemise from her torso and flinging it to the tiled floor. Yes, her breasts were literally outstanding, the erect pink nipples set high on the perfect globes, and they barely swayed with their weight. “But that’s suspicious. A dog like that would never drown, as you said.”

“Yes, and she would never run off. Phineas was devoted to me and to the baby, Abe. She would easily leap onto that train to follow them anywhere.”

Tabitha stepped out of her dripping petticoat, adding it to the pile on the floor. Foster’s heart beat faster with manly excitement as he peeked at her absolutely flawless little muff. She was the picture of a perfect Venus, her white skin glowing without a freckle to break up the impeccable expanse. He became so stimulated he feared he would breach decorum, and he did not want to rush the widow into any unseemly courtship. But in a pig’s ass! He wanted nothing more than to take her into his arms and kiss her once again, to breathe in her essence—of apples and lavender, he recalled from their first, and only, abrupt kiss in front of the Cactus Club.

“What do you suspect happened?”

“I suspect Orianna,” Foster said forthrightly. He would have to admit it sooner or later. His former flame had murdered his beloved dog.

Tabitha sat again in the tub, to swish clean the areas that had been hidden by her garments. “Why do you think she’d do such a heinous thing?”

“She
was
heinous,” Foster admitted. It was not good form to sail into a former flame like that, but Tabitha had a right to know why her new dog had become a ghost. “Not at first, of course. It was an accident that she had the babe, but I wanted to do right by her.”

“And marry her?” Tabitha’s tone was light, but Foster was glad there was trepidation to it. That meant she was jealous—a good thing.

“Right. She wasn’t interested, though. She wanted to take my son to San Francisco where an old beau of hers had set up a shipbuilding enterprise.”

“But…” In the mirror, Foster could see Tabitha pluck a towel from the stool and press it to her moist body. “As a lawyer, didn’t you make enough money for her?”

“Plenty, as far as I could see. But those shipbuilding fellows, well…They’re just flush. Utter moneybags.”

“But why would she harm Phineas? Was she that beastly?”

Beastly.
That was a good word for Orianna. She had not always been that way, of course. Foster would hardly bed a woman mean enough to steal a coin off a dead man’s eye. “No. But toward the end, after she decided to go after the shipbuilding fellow, her personality changed. I would not put it past her to murder poor Phineas to get even with me.”

Stepping from the tub, Tabitha wrapped the towel around her torso. She stood so close behind Foster he could feel the heat radiate from her lithe body. She said, “There’s no way we can prove that, unfortunately.”