Miracle Jones (18 page)

It was a peculiarly sedate and feminine pose for his bride-to-be, Harrison realized.
The oddness of it pierced his worry-fogged mind.

“You’re dressed pretty grandly tonight,” he observed as the horses pulled the buggy down the lane and toward the Garretts’.

Kelsey half-smiled.
“I was tired of Emerald scolding me for not being a lady.” She shot Harrison an amused glance.
“She said that’s why you stood me up at the altar.”

Harrison winced.
“The woman’s got a mean tongue.
I don’t envy Jace.”

“Neither do I.” She drew a deep breath.
“Of course, later we thought you didn’t show because you were dead.”

“I’m sorry, Kelsey.
I would have been at the church if I could’ve been.”

“Would you have?” she asked, half turning to stare solemnly at his face.

He was shocked by her directness – and the fact that she’d apparently sensed his ambivalence about their upcoming wedding.

“Yes,” he answered quite truthfully.

“That woman, Miracle Jones,” Kelsey said slowly.
“How did you end up with her?”

Harrison didn’t want to talk about Miracle right now.
Just thinking of her made him feel uncomfortable.
He could scarcely focus on her image in his mind without a most embarrassing physical reaction taking place.

“Would you mind if I told you about her later?” he asked as they turned into the long and winding Garrett drive.

“No.” She smiled faintly and turned her face away.
“We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Now why, Harrison wondered, did the way she said that make it sound like a prophecy of doom?

¤   ¤   ¤

By the time he returned to his parents’ house, Harrison was bone-weary and his stab wound was throbbing something fierce.
He thought he might just spend the night here, but as soon as he entered the foyer he realized he’d made a mistake.
Lexie and Tremaine were in the parlor.
Hearing his footsteps, they both came out to greet him.

“All right,” Lexie said fondly, wrapping her arm through his.
“Tell us all about your exploits.
Tremaine was about to murder Jace Garrett.
He was certain Jace had left you to die.
I, however, have more faith in Jace.
I said he would only leave you to die if there was a darn good reason.” She smiled at him, only the smudges beneath her eyes testimony to the worry she’d endured over both his disappearance and their mother’s illness.

“He did have a darn good reason,” Harrison drawled, clenching his jaw a little at the pain.
“Money.”

“Is your shoulder bothering you?” Tremaine asked, his astute medical eye focused on the way Harrison held himself.

“I’m just tired.”

Mrs.
Mead appeared from the dining room and exhaled on a humph of displeasure.
“Cook says dinner’s ready,” she declared.
“And I suppose you should be tired, young man.
That dirty half-breed told me you’d been stabbed.
Wouldn’t be surprised if she stabbed you herself!”

“You were stabbed!” Lexie repeated, staring at Harrison in amazement.

“Where were you stabbed?” Tremaine demanded quickly.

But Harrison’s eyes were chips of green ice as they glared at the bustling Mrs.
Mead.
He was so furious he could scarcely see straight.
“That dirty half-breed,” he repeated, biting off each word, “stayed with me for three days making certain I didn’t die.
The reason she’s dirty is the same reason I’m dirty.
We slept on dirt!”

His voice had risen with each syllable, and when he finished his echo boomed throughout the house.
Unearthly silence followed, but apart from the faintest hesitation in the course of her work, Mrs.
Mead appeared not to have heard.
She disappeared back to the kitchen, ostensibly to help Cook.

“Who stabbed you?” Tremaine wanted to know.

Harrison shook his head.
“I’m taking a bath,” he growled.
“I’ll tell you more at dinner.
How’s Mother?”

“The concoction your friend Miracle suggested made it past Eliza’s lips,” Tremaine said by way of an answer.
“She’s resting easier than she was.”

“You sure that’s not the effect of laudanum?” Harrison suggested wryly.

“She wasn’t given more laudanum,” Lexie put in quietly.
“Whoever this Miracle is, she seems to know her remedies.”

Harrison stared into his sister’s brilliant green eyes, then moved his gaze to Tremaine’s more wary blue ones.
“You don’t seriously believe Miracle can help her, do you?” he asked incredulously.
Tremaine and Lexie had been staunchly against Belinda’s cure-all elixirs.

“Miracle didn’t suggest anything out of line, and you know how Eliza is,” Tremaine added, grimacing.
“She wants to think there are secret remedies which will cure everything from snakebite to cancer.”

Harrison, who had been standing with one foot on the bottom step, shook his head in frustration.
He refused to believe in quacks and medicine women, but he couldn’t deny that Miracle had saved him.
“If Mother finds out there’s a faith healer named Miracle about, we’re all in for trouble,” he predicted wryly.

He strode slowly up the stairs to the elegant bathroom his father had installed the year before.
Hot water poured from the pipes, heated by an electric generator.
Harrison frowned at his reflection in the steamed mirror.
There was a nasty cut on his chin he didn’t remember getting, and as he swiped off the road grime, he saw his face was pale beneath his beard.

Twisting, he examined the knife wound on his back.
The small slit was red but not inflamed.
It was just a matter of time before it was completely healed.
He sighed and lifted his right arm as far as he could, examining the white scars.
The knife wound added one more scar to a body already crisscrossed with them.

He thought of Miracle, and it took a painful force of will to keep from feeling that now familiar lust.
Scowling, he wondered how to get the little savage out of his system.

An hour later, dressed in some of his father’s clothes which were too short in the arms and tight across the chest, Harrison checked in on his mother, who was sleeping, then returned downstairs.
Lexie and Tremaine were already seated in the dining room, as was his father, but no one seemed to have touched their food.
They were all absorbed in serious and dismal thoughts, judging by the looks on their faces.

“Where’re the boys tonight?” Harrison asked, referring to Lexie and Tremaine’s children.

“With Annie.
She’s staying at the house with them until Mother gets better,” said Lexie.

If she gets better.
Harrison didn’t voice his thoughts as he scooted in his chair.

“Lexie and Tremaine say you’ve been stabbed,” Harrison’s father said with concern.

“I’m fine, Pa,” Harrison answered shortly.

“Who stabbed you?
Jace?”

“No, not Jace.” Harrison almost smiled.
“How is Jace, anyway?
His carriage wasn’t at the Garretts’ when I dropped Kelsey off.”

“Jace is as lily-livered as ever,” Lexie said, picking up her wine glass.
Her mouth was fixed in a firm, angry line.
“He didn’t tell us he’d left you at the barn, and then, when he did, we all thought you’d burned to death.”

“He was probably afraid you’d blame him,” Harrison pointed out.

“We did blame him!” Lexie declared.
“We
do
blame him!”

“So who stabbed you?” Tremaine asked.

“I got stabbed trying to rescue Miracle, who’d been kidnapped and trussed up and was being sold to the highest bidder.” Harrison drank some wine, and it went straight to his head.
Food, he remembered belatedly, was what his body needed most.

“You mean they were auctioning her off?” Lexie said in a quietly dangerous voice.
Her expression was a mixture of fury and horror.

“Don’t worry.
She fended them off,” Harrison muttered dryly.

“So how did Jace get out of there?” Tremaine demanded.
“He didn’t stay to help you?”

“I won the hand and Jace didn’t have the cash to pay me, so a few of our fellow card players escorted him outside.
I assume they put him in his carriage and brought him back to Rock Springs.” He lifted a questioning brow.

Tremaine nodded.
“From what Jace says – and you never can trust him to tell the truth – he went straight to the Half Moon, and was in his office when these gunmen showed up and insisted he open the safe.
Jace argued and stalled and managed to somehow let Conrad know that he needed help.
Conrad summoned Sheriff Raynor, but not before Jace was – er – coerced to open the safe and pay them off.”

Harrison nodded.
Conrad Templeton was the Half Moon’s bartender and business manager.
“They didn’t just show up.
They were with him.”

“I imagine they offered to shoot off parts of Jace’s anatomy unless he gave them what they wanted,” Lexie said primly, smoothing her napkin.
“Something I threatened to do once and wish I’d gone through with it.”

Harrison threw Lexie an amused glance.
“Did Raynor see the men?”

“Not really.” Tremaine shrugged.
“And Jace didn’t seem to want to lodge a complaint.”

Harrison stared into the crystal wine goblet in front of him, slowly chewing on Cook’s special Beef Wellington, which had been specially prepared in celebration of his return.
“Those men may have been the highwaymen who kidnapped Miracle.
If that’s the case, they’re the ones who’ve killed other women along that stretch of road.”

Silence fell across the room, and Joseph Danner, who’d been listening to the conversation with only half an ear, too worried about the fate of his wife to concentrate on anything else, finally surfaced.
“Then Jace is in danger.
They would have killed him if Raynor hadn’t gotten there first.
Jace can identify them.”

And so can Miracle,
Harrison thought with a wrench of fear.

¤   ¤   ¤

Miracle tied Tillie and Gray to the rail outside the Half Moon Saloon.
She glanced longingly down the street to where Garrett’s Hotel stood.
What she wouldn’t give for a real bath and a real bed!
But she had no money.
All her money had been inside the stolen tin box.
She would have to sleep in the wagon tonight, her only protection the knife, which was once again strapped tightly to her upper thigh.

A wave of laughter erupted from the Half Moon, followed by the tinny sound of the piano playing somewhere in the saloon’s interior.
Miracle stood on the boardwalk, shivering, wishing she’d put on a cloak or shawl.
But her shivering wasn’t only from the cold.
If she were ever to find Uncle Horace, the Half Moon was her best bet.
She dreaded the thought of walking into a room of mainly men and asking questions which could alert someone that she’d been at the barn that night, but what choice did she have?

You could wait for Harrison,
her treacherous conscience pointed out.
He would help you.

Squaring her shoulders, Miracle rejected that idea outright.
Harrison had his own problems, and he had a fiancée to help him solve them.

The swinging doors to the Half Moon creaked loudly beneath her hand, but the noise was swallowed up by the raucous crowd.
Miracle stepped inside and narrowed her eyes against the curling smoke.
A dozen or so tables supported card games of various sorts.
Through the haze Miracle could see seven or eight women lounging across an upper balcony rail, their postures so languid and suggestive she rightly assumed they were whores.
A small door to one side of the highly polished bar was open, and she could see inside to a carpeted office.
The manager’s office.

With determined footsteps she crossed the room.
Heads turned, and men stared at her unabashedly.
Unlike the gaily and scantily dressed women draped over the balcony, Miracle was a disheveled, torn mess.
Her presence created a stir only because she was someone new, someone with a mysterious purpose, someone who made a point of not meeting the speculative gaze of any of the Half Moon’s other occupants.

There was a man at the bar with thin, graying hair.
He watched as Miracle approached, but he didn’t change expression.

“I’m looking for my uncle,” she told him in a low voice.
“Are you the owner?”