The Man from Stone Creek (16 page)

The boy.
Sweet Jesus, he'd forgotten all about him.

“There's no time to hitch up your buckboard,” Sam argued when he'd swallowed a throatful of sick dread and a wash of ugly memories from his own boyhood.

“I can ride,” Maddie said. She turned to face the gathering of onlookers. “Who will make me the loan of a horse?”

U
NDINE STOOD
at the gate when Sam and Maddie rode up, one delicate hand shading her eyes from the midday sun. She looked so pristinely fresh in her white-eyelet dress that, for one marrow-chilling moment, Maddie thought she was seeing the specter of Mungo Donagher's young wife rather than the flesh-and-blood woman herself.

“I guess you've come about Garrett,” Undine sang out in the tone she might have used to indicate that tea was about to be served in the formal garden.

Maddie stared so long that Sam had dismounted and come to help her off her borrowed horse before she managed to shepherd her scattered thoughts back into a flock. “We have,” she said, avoiding Sam's upraised arms to put her left foot into the stirrup and get down on her own. Lord, how she despised riding sidesaddle, but her skirts and petticoats precluded the more sensible way.

“Anna Deerhorn is cleaning up the mess,” Undine said with the merest wince of distaste. She was waxen, and her smile seemed a bit fixed, as though it rightly belonged on some other woman's face. She added, a bit hastily, “Mungo was only defending my virtue, you know. I told him he oughtn't to turn himself in like a criminal, but he wouldn't listen.”

Maddie, who had seen Mungo as well as what remained of Garrett, was not inclined to discuss Undine's virtue. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sam set his jaw. He'd related Mungo's story on the way out from town, and it differed considerably from Undine's.

“Where is Ben?” he asked.

Undine's eyelashes fluttered, as though she thought she should recognize the boy's name, but couldn't quite catch hold of it. “I'll ask Anna,” she said, and swayed a little. Maddie reached out, took a firm hold on the other woman's elbow.

Sam was already headed up the walk. He disappeared into the shadowy interior of the ranch house, leaving the door ajar behind him. “Ben!” he called.

If there was an answer, Maddie didn't hear it.

Undine put a hand over her mouth, leaned on Maddie and let herself be led toward the front door. “It was awful,” she whispered. “Garrett barged right into our bedroom—Mungo's and mine—and
forced
himself upon me.”

Maddie slipped an arm around Undine's waist. “What happened then?” she asked very quietly.

“Mungo came back, just in time to save me,” Undine said, and fetching tears brimmed in her eyes. “He…he put a gun to the back of Garrett's head and…and—”

“Maybe you should sit down before you finish,” Maddie said, and eased Undine into one of the two rocking chairs on the front porch before taking the other for herself.

Undine began to rock, back and forth, back and forth, staring wildly into what must have been a truly horrible memory, whatever her own part in the making of it. “How will we go to California now?” she murmured.

Maddie drew and released a long, slow, deep breath before replying. “Mungo is in serious trouble, Undine. He has confessed to murder. He'll be tried, and he could be hanged, if he's convicted.”

Undine's gaze shot to Maddie's face, heated and defiant. “But it
wasn't
murder! Mungo was only protecting me!”

It was not the time to point out, as the Territorial attorney surely would, if there was a trial, that Mungo had employed excessive force in freeing his wife from the unwanted attentions of his eldest son. Mungo might have been elderly, by some standards, but he was bull-strong, and even Garrett, for all his youth, would have found him a formidable foe.

Before Maddie could find words to state any of those things, Anna appeared in the open doorway. Her gaze skittered off Undine, who was back to rocking again, to land fierce on Maddie's face.

“Mr. O'Ballivan wants you,” she said. “He said I shouldn't have took to cleaning that room.”

Maddie rose from her chair, smoothed her skirts uneasily. Although her first instinct was to avoid the scene of Garrett's death, she would not give in to it. If Sam could stand the sight, so could she. “Will you sit with Mrs. Donagher?” she asked.

“No, ma'am,” Anna Deerhorn replied.

Undine did not seem to hear her. She was rocking harder and muttering under her breath about California.

Maddie nodded, straightened her shoulders and marched into the house.

“Through the kitchen,” Anna said, behind her.

Maddie's nerves leaped under her skin, and she felt perspiration gather between her breasts and shoulder blades, but she made her way toward the master bedroom. Toward Sam.

A mound of blood-soaked sheets and blankets marked the doorway. Maddie swallowed a rush of bile, stiffened her backbone, and proceeded.

A ludicrously graceful spray of crimson patterned the wall above the bed. Sam was digging, with one finger, in a hole in the equally grisly mattress. He brought out a spent bullet, held it up to the light pouring in through the nearby window. “It must have gone right through his head,” he mused in a detached voice, entirely devoid of emotion. “Undine's lucky it didn't hit her.”

Maddie's stomach roiled and she thrust out one hand to steady herself against the framework of the door. The smell of death was rife in the room, dense and cloying, with an edge of coppery sweetness. It seemed to seep into her very flesh, become a part of her.
Where in God's name was Ben? Had he heard the shot or, worse yet, witnessed the tragedy firsthand?

“Undine claims Mungo was defending her,” she said, feeling light-headed, struggling not to disgrace herself by vomiting or even swooning.

Sam didn't answer. He was still intent on studying the bullet.

“I'm—I'm going looking for Ben,” Maddie went on.

At last Sam met her gaze and, for the briefest of moments, she glimpsed an old and elemental horror there, something that had nothing to do with the grim events of that dreadful morning. “Look behind the cookstove,” he said. “Then in the barn and the chicken coop.”

“There's no need to search,” Anna Deerhorn said, and Maddie flinched, for she hadn't realized that the woman was standing almost at her elbow. “He's at my cabin.”

Maddie nodded and turned, perhaps too quickly, to make for the kitchen door. She half expected Anna to accompany her, but the housekeeper went instead to the sink to pump water for the round washtub at her feet. There was explanation forthcoming, but Maddie didn't require one. Once the tub was filled, Anna would soak Garrett's lifeblood from the sheets.

The cabin stood well back of the main house, sturdy and small.

Maddie lifted her skirts in both hands as she climbed the plank steps and entered without knocking.

“Ben?” she called gently. There were two windows, with heavy burlap curtains, tightly drawn. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the change. “Ben, it's me, Maddie Chancelor. Terran's sister.”

Nothing.

She squinted, and Sam's oddly knowing words came back to her.
Look behind the cookstove.

Anna's stove was huge, taking up fully a quarter of the space in the single room. Maddie approached at a slow pace and said Ben's name again, gently.

Sure enough, he was there, huddled against the wall behind that stove, his arms wrapped tightly around his skinny knees.

Maddie crouched, reached out tentatively to touch his cap of fair hair. He jerked away from her and let out a small, despairing whimper.

Her eyes burned and her throat constricted. “It's all right, Ben,” she said, very gently. “You're safe now. I'm here, and so is Mr. O'Ballivan.”

Ben raised his head, stared at her with enormous, panicked eyes. Then, to her surprise, he grasped her arm and tried to pull her behind the stove. “There's been some shootin'!” he rasped, clawing at her in desperation. “You've got to hide, Maddie! You've got to hide!”

A raw sob escaped Maddie. She shifted to her knees and hauled the child into her arms, holding him close and then closer still. He clung, his hands knotted in the fabric of her dress.

“It's over now,” she promised. “It's all over.”

“Pa shot Garrett,” Ben cried, burying his face in Maddie's bodice. “He dragged him through the kitchen, put him in a wagon. There was so much blood—”

Maddie held on to the boy as tightly as he held to her. “Shh,” she whispered against his fever-moist temple. He had heard the shot. He had seen his father hauling his brother's decimated body out of the house and loading it into the back of the buckboard. What
else
had the poor child seen? It wouldn't do to ask him, not yet. “Shh.”

“I can't stay here,” Ben said fretfully. “Where am I going to stay, Maddie?”

“With Terran and me, of course,” Maddie said with a certainty she didn't feel. Mungo Donagher owned the general store, and she, as his employee, was at his mercy. If he hanged or went to prison, she might not have a roof over her own head, and her brother's, let alone one to offer this shattered, frightened boy.

He pulled back far enough to study her face, but his hands were still fisted, gripping the cloth of her dress as fiercely as if letting go would mean being swept downstream in a violent river. “Could I? Could I really?”

Maddie bit her lower lip, nodded. “We'll go to your room right now and pack your things. When Mr. O'Ballivan and I head back to town, we'll take you with us.”

The child's eyes seemed to take up his entire face, and he shook his head hard from side to side. “I won't go in there,” he vowed. “Not ever.”

Maddie let out her breath. “Then you can share Terran's things,” she said.

“Is my pa coming home?”

She stroked his hair, damp with perspiration, clinging in tendrils to his forehead and the nape of his neck. “No, sweetheart,” she told him. “Not right away, anyhow.”

A great shudder moved through the small, wiry body, and Maddie tightened her embrace.

“Mr. O'Ballivan's here?” he asked, his voice muffled. She felt the tension seeping out of his frame, now that he'd taken in what she'd said before.

Maddie still held him tightly. Sam O'Ballivan represented safety to Ben and, she realized, to her, as well. It was an unsettling insight. Except for that brief and shining time when she'd believed Warren would be her protector, Maddie had been on her own since her folks died. The thought of depending on another person made her want to scramble behind Anna's cookstove and hide there with Ben.

“Is the boy all right?”

Maddie stiffened. She'd left the door open and Sam was standing just over the threshold. “As well as can be expected,” she said moderately. She got to her feet, somehow managing to bring Ben along with her. He kept a death grip on her hand, stayed close to her side.

Sam was a sturdy shadow, rimmed in daylight.

“Anna's got some of your belongings together,” Sam told the boy. “We can head back to town whenever you're ready.”

Ben swallowed audibly. Nodded. “Maddie said I could stay at the store, with her,” he said almost fearfully. Perhaps he was afraid she would rescind the offer.

“That'll be fine,” Sam said. He looked past them, to the cookstove, and once again, Maddie thought she saw some dark recollection move in his eyes. “Come along, now. There's nothing more to be done here, for the time being.”

Undine did not come out of the house to say goodbye, nor did Anna Deerhorn. Sam helped Maddie onto her waiting horse, then mounted his own, pulling Ben up behind him. The pitiful bundle tied behind Maddie's saddle represented what little was left of Ben's former life.

They made the five-mile journey back to Haven mostly in silence, and Maddie was relieved to see that Mungo's buckboard, along with its horrid load, had been removed.

Charlie Wilcox's patient old horse stood forlornly in front of the Rattlesnake Saloon, waiting to carry his master home, and folks had gone back to their usual pursuits. Only the smoke curling from the jailhouse chimney and the red splotches in the dirt, where Mungo's wagon had stood, marked this as anything but an ordinary day.

Maddie and Sam parted in front of the mercantile. He untied Ben's bundle from the back of her horse, handed it to her and leaned to take her horse's reins. It was understood that he would return the animal to its owner and she would see to her new charge.

“Thanks, Maddie,” Sam said.

She nodded, watched for a little too long as he rode away.

 

T
HE COWBOY
Sam had left in charge of the jailhouse in general and Mungo Donagher in particular sat back in the marshal's chair, his feet on the desk.

A squat man in a bowler hat stood nearby, looking consternated. His handlebar mustache twitched as he gave Sam a rapid up-and-down assessment.

“Sam O'Ballivan,” Sam said.

“Elias James,” came the reserved reply. “I run the Cattleman's Bank.”

Sam went to shut the jailhouse door, and almost closed it on the old yellow dog, which slunk across the threshold, pausing to stretch himself midway.