Rose's Mail Order Husband - A Historical Mail Order Bride Story (Montana Brides) (6 page)

Not like this. Not like this, kept repeating in her brain. Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn’t all this horror wait until after they were safely married? Then she could rest, secure in the knowledge that his heart protected and sheltered hers from whatever demons haunted her. No one could touch either of them once they were married.

She kept her face covered until the greater part of her upheaval passed. Even then, she
didn’t get up. What was the point of facing the world without him in it? She would lie on her bed forever. She would petrify there, and no one would ever know the truth about her and Jake Hamilton.

Her tears dried on the burning iron of her cheeks. The swollen torture of her eyelids and lips gave testimony to her grief and disfigured her previous anticipation for her wedding.

The sound of men shouting and horses neighing drew her back to the world. She peeked out from behind her curtains and saw a rider pulling his mount up to the barn yard fence. Pete Kershaw met him there and took hold of his horse’s bridle.

Rose pulled her head into the room and heard her sisters’ voices outside on the landing. She opened her door and met them there.

“The minister’s here,” Violet told them. “What are we going to do?”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Iris answered. “We haven’t got any men to marry. We’ll have to call off the wedding.”

“Should we send him home to Butte?” Violet asked. “Or should we try to keep him around, just in case the men come back?”

“How can we keep him around?” Iris replied. “We have no idea when the men will get back. They could be gone for weeks.”

“Do you really think so?” Violet asked. “Don’t you think they’ll be back by tonight?”

“Tonight?”
Iris repeated. “Not a chance!”

“Why not?”
Violet asked. “Jake can’t be too far ahead of them. Once they find him, they’ll come back here.”

“What do you think they’ll do, once they find him?” Rose asked between hiccups of sobs.

Violet took her hand. “The Sheriff will almost certainly take him back to Butte to stand trial for Cornell’s murder.” She turned back to Iris. “But that still doesn’t solve the problem of what to do about the minister. Should we send him away?”

“I don’t see the point of keeping him around,” Iris told her.

“But just think about it,” Violet replied. “Imagine if we send him away, and then the men come back tonight, and we have to send for the minister to come out and marry us all over again. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep him here? Maybe we can get him to marry us tonight or tomorrow morning.”

Iris shrugged. “I guess that’s a possibility. But where are we going to put him?”

“There’s always the Bird House,” Violet suggested. “No one’s staying there.” She stole a glance at Rose. “Rose and Jake won’t be staying there tonight.”

“They won’t be staying there at all,” Iris shot back. “The Sheriff won’t bring Jake back here—not to stay, anyway.”

Rose choked on a sob.

“All right,” Violet agreed. “We’ll ask him to stay on, just for a day or two, and try to marry us when the men come back. We’ll offer him the Bird House in the meantime.”

“We just won’t tell him the previous occupant was murdered here two days ago,” Iris added.

“And we’ll have to change the sheets,” Violet pointed out.

“I already did that,” Rose told them.

Both of her sisters rounded on her. “You what?”

“I changed the sheets on the bed,” Rose repeated.

“When did you do that?” Violet cried.

“Yesterday,” Rose told her. “After the sheriff finished talking to us about Cornell’s death, Jake and the others went up to the range. I did it then.”

Violet pressed her lips together and turned away, but Iris narrowed her eyes at Rose. “That was a little bit presumptuous of you, don’t you think?”

“Why?” Rose asked. “Cornell was dead, and I told you I wanted to live in the Bird House, so it only made sense to assume Jake and I would go live there after the wedding.
Why? What’s the problem.”

“Cornell’s body was hardly cold,” Iris pointed out, “and already you’re planning to move into his house.”

“What are you trying to say, Iris?” Rose shot back. “Are you saying it looks like I planned to kill Cornell so I could move into his house? I didn’t. It just worked out that way.”

“It worked out the way you wanted it to work out,” Iris snapped. “How can we believe you didn’t have something to do with Cornell’s death? You sure moved in fast on the Bird House. It doesn’t look good at all.”

“Cornell winding up dead didn’t look good, no matter which way you slice it,” Rose replied. “There’s no way you can sugar-coat a man getting shot in the head. I might as well have the Bird House. If I stayed down here in the Main House, fretting and tiptoeing around, worrying about making it look good, it wouldn’t bring Cornell back to life.”

Iris made a face and turned away. “There’s no point talking to you. You just aren’t thinking clearly about this at all.”

Violet intervened again. “All right. Both of you stop arguing. Iris, stop accusing Rose of planning to murder Cornell. It’s not helping anything. If she had anything to do with Cornell’s death, that’s for the Sheriff to decide. Now, then. You changed the sheets on the bed in the Bird House. That’s one less job we have to do. Now both of you come with me. There’s the minister on the front porch now. We’ll meet him downstairs and talk to him about what we want him to do.”

The three sisters flew down the stairs and reached the front hall just as the minister’s knuckles struck the door.

Violet opened it and greeted him with a casual smile.

“Good morning, Reverend,” she sang out. “Please come in.” He stepped into the hall. “I don’t believe you’ve met my younger sisters. This is Iris, and this is Rose. This is Reverend Frederick Miles, from the United Lutheran Church in Butte.”

The minister scanned the sisters from head to toe under pretense of bowing his tall, lean frame to them. “Good morning, ladies. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Rose and Iris returned his nod, and Rose noted his bushy beard and sandy mop of hair. He looked more like a Frontier
cattle man than a minister, but everyone out West looked like that. A minister couldn’t be much different from everyone else. He might even run a cattle herd of his own on the side, if he had some land to run them on.

“Now, Reverend,” Violet began, “we have an unforeseen situation here.
I’m sorry to tell you that our men aren’t present at the moment. Sheriff Maitland deputized them at the last minute to help him track down an accused killer who went on the run in the area. So we don’t have any men to marry just now, and we have no idea when they will be back.”

The minister raised his shaggy eyebrows. “You don’t say.”

“My sisters and I just discussed the situation a moment ago,” Violet continued. “If you are willing to wait just one day for the men to come back, we would like to put you up in a spare house we happen to have on the ranch. We’ll do everything necessary to make you comfortable, and hopefully, we can go ahead with the wedding very soon.”

“You see, Reverend,” Iris added, “the man our men are after only left a few minutes before them, so they may return at any time. We
wouldn’t ask you to stay if we didn’t think they would likely return before too long. We would greatly appreciate it if you would stay, as we’re all anxious to celebrate this wedding as soon as possible.”

The minister scratched his beard, and dust sprinkled out of it. “Well, let me see here. I
don’t really have anything pressing in Butte to go back for. I suppose I could stay.”

Violet touched his sleeve. “Oh, thank you so much! I promise we
won’t keep you long. If this search looks likely to drag on, we’ll let you go and celebrate the wedding at another time more convenient to you. You would be doing us a great service if you would stay.”

The minister bobbed his shaggy head. “All right, Miss. I’ll stick around at least until tomorrow, and we’ll see what falls out.” A wry smile spread across his face. “I
gotta tell ya, I don’t much mind a vacation in the country, if I do say so myself.”

Violet and Iris returned his smile, and Violet bustled away to show him up to the Bird House. Iris remained standing next to Rose in the hall.

“I guess he’ll find out soon enough that only two of us are getting married,” Iris remarked.

Rose gulped hard. “I could still be getting married. You never know what might happen.”

Iris grimaced. “I know you’re distraught about Jake running off to avoid arrest, but don’t you think it’s about time you faced the fact that he killed Cornell? You’re not doing yourself any favors by continuing the illusion that he’s innocent and that he’ll clear his name. You’re only making yourself more upset.”

Rose’s hands worked in and out of each other, and her eyes darted around the walls. “But he has to! He has to clear his name! How else can we get married?”

“You’re not going to marry him,” Iris insisted. “When are you going to get that through your head? You can’t marry a killer.”

“I have to marry him!” Rose whined. “I have to!”

Iris threw up her hands and turned away from Rose. “You’re out of your mind. You’ve always been so level-headed in the past. I don’t know what Jake’s done to you to turn you into such a sniveling wreck. I just can’t stand to talk to you anymore when you just keep repeating the same nonsense.”

She spun away and stomped up the stairs, leaving Rose alone in her distracted despair.

Rose retreated to her own room, but her dressing table mirror no longer held any sway over her. When she entered her bedroom, she cast one brief glance toward it and flung herself down on her bed.

How long would she have to wait here, on tenterhooks, before she knew whether the Sheriff had caught Jake? He might shoot Jake while attempting to capture him. What would she do then?

She sobbed into her pillow, already damp with tears, until she fell into a swoon of exhaustion.

She had no idea how much time elapsed before she woke up, but her restless anxiety tormented her more than ever. She took to pacing around the room, but before very long, she had no choice but to go out and roam the house.

Every place she turned repelled her. The clusters of daisies in the parlor, the cutlery and china
laid out in the dining room for, even the open range outside every window plagued her beyond all endurance. They drove her onward to the next agonizing reminder of her loss.

The sun crept around the sky, hour dragged after painful hour, until Rose thought she would drop dead from the strain. Once, she found herself near the back door and the path leading up to the Bird House.

She couldn’t even go there anymore. The house only reminded her of her excitement at the prospect of going home to that house with Jake. Now the minister was up there, reading Cornell’s books and drinking the tea Violet brought him. She couldn’t even walk in the garden the way she used to. She fled from the sight of her lost future, around to the other side of the house, where she wouldn’t see the Bird House anymore.

She came around to the front of the house and spotted Iris sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. She would have walked away to avoid speaking to her.
But at the same moment, Violet came out of the house, and all three sisters stood together, gazing toward the West, where their men rode in search of some elusive destiny.

“When do you think they’ll come back?” Violet asked.

“It’s impossible to say,” Iris replied. “If they find him, they could come back any time. If they don’t find him, it depends on how hard the Sheriff wants to keep pushing until they do find him. If the Sheriff wants to, he’ll just keep driving them day and night until they find him and bring him in.”

“Can he really do that?” Violet asked.

“He can do whatever he wants,” Iris told her. “He’s a lawman pursuing a wanted criminal. From what I saw, he’s determined to bring Jake in. He didn’t take Jake running off very well. He’s made bringing him to justice a personal campaign. It wouldn’t surprise me if he pushed on without stopping, and he’ll take Chuck and Mick along with him.”

Rose turned her face toward the range to hide her tears, and Violet touched her lips with her fingertips. “But this could take days, even weeks. When are we supposed to get married?”

“I guess we won’t,” Iris replied, “not until they catch Jake, at least.”

The three sisters gazed westward again. The sun shone in their eyes, but none of them saw the scenery around them. All three saw only their men, riding somewhere out there. Were they riding toward their brides, or away from them?

The sound of horse’s hooves disturbed the stillness of the moment, echoing out of the blinding sunlight, coming closer and getting steadily louder. The steady drumbeat of a galloping horse commanded all their attention.

Iris stood up from her rocking chair and shaded her eyes with her hand. Rose knit her hands together until her knuckles ached. Which one of them would it be?

The horse broke out of the canyon across the pasture and charged at full speed along the fence line toward the ranch house. Only when it reached the corner of the fence and skidded to a stop, unable to run any further, did the sisters see that its saddle was empty.