True to the Law (44 page)

Mackey looked off in the direction of the fire then at the guests still milling about on the porch. “Why are you standing here? People need help. Go, for God’s sake.” Shaking his head, he stayed at Cobb’s side down the steps to the street. “I don’t suppose any of them were in Chicago during the fire in ’71.” He looked back to see that two of the men looked as if they had the intention to follow. “If you think it’s better for me to go with you, I will.”

“Good. That will make things considerably easier.”

And it did. It was always better, Cobb thought, when the prisoner didn’t know he was one until the cell door closed behind him.

Epilogue

“I think I’ll be nostalgic for these rooms when we’re gone,” said Tru. She was curled in one corner of the sofa, her bare feet tucked under the hem of her nightgown. She held a mug of coffee in her hands and continued to look around as she drank.

Cobb was still eating breakfast at the table, but he leaned back in his chair holding a strip of bacon between his fingers and joined Tru in her thoughtful inspection of her surroundings. “Huh. I don’t think there’s a place here where we haven’t made love.”

“Cobb Bridger!”

Grinning, he glanced over at Tru. “You’re blushing like a maiden schoolmarm, and I know darn well you were thinking the same thing.”

“I was not.”

“Liar.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Nobody likes a know-it-all.”

Cobb was still grinning as he bit off the end of the bacon strip. “How did you convince Mrs. Sterling to let Walt bring our breakfast up here?”

“I thought you did it.”

“I wish I had, but I didn’t. I suppose that means Walt’s going to be in trouble with her.”

“It might have been her idea, you know. A gracious send-off because she’s happy that we’re finally leaving the Pennyroyal.”

He chuckled. “That sounds as if it could be right.” He took another bite of bacon. “That’s all you’re going to have? Coffee?”

“For now. I’ll do justice to Mrs. Sterling’s breakfast in a little bit, so don’t think you can have more than what’s fair.”

In answer, he lifted the domed lid off the stack of silver-dollar hotcakes and speared four of them with his fork. “That’s three left for you.”

“You can have one more.”

He didn’t hesitate to stab another and heard her chuckle softly. He could not imagine that he would ever tire of hearing her laughter. Pushing the cakes off his fork and onto his plate, he said, “You’re pleased about leaving, aren’t you?”

Tru regarded him with surprise. “Of course. I never meant for you to think otherwise. I appreciate Mr. and Mrs. Coltrane’s generosity in allowing us to stay here while our home was being built, but three months of living in a place that’s not ours, well, it’s been a little like wearing someone else’s shoes. I am grateful to have had them, but I’m happier to be wearing the ones that were made for me.” She paused, looking at him over the rim of her mug. “For us.”

Cobb smiled at that. It was apt. He picked up his cup and raised it in the gesture of a toast. “To us.”

Tru lifted her mug as well. “Yes,” she said. “To us.” She rose then and moved to the table, taking a seat across from him after she had kissed him on the cheek and run her fingers through his hair.

Cobb helped her fill her plate until she batted his hand away and told him to look after his own meal. He did, but mostly he took his pleasure from watching her.

She was right that three months was a long time to live in someone else’s place, but now that they were on the cusp of leaving the hotel, it was hard not to look back and think that much of that time had passed too quickly.

The remains of Tru’s house were still smoldering when they exchanged vows in Grace Church. It seemed to Cobb that the entire town showed up for the wedding, but that was probably because they all talked about it as if they were there. Some things about Bitter Springs would never change, and Cobb thought they were all probably the better for it.

Frank Mackey only spent one night in jail with his cousin. Cobb released him the following morning and moved him and his trunks to Sedgwick’s boardinghouse. He kept the Davis brothers on as deputies so they could take turns keeping an eye on Frank until he was called to testify at Andrew’s trial. As soon as Frank answered all the questions put to him in the land office, which on this occasion doubled as a courtroom, Cobb put him on the next eastbound train. He had Mr. Collins send a telegram to Paul Mackey, informing him that Frank was finally on his way home and that Andrew, pending the most likely outcome of his trial, was on his way to the Territory prison.

Frank argued all the way to the station that he was due at least some part of the reward for capturing Barrington and Beck, both of whom had been transported to Rawlins for trial. Cobb told him he could take it up with the three men who were going to claim it, as long as he made his case from Chicago. No one in Bitter Springs wanted to see him again. Frank had nothing at all to say about Andrew, probably because he said everything he cared to say under oath, including what he swore was the truth about the card game that landed him in jail.

The cards weren’t his, he told the judge and jury. He didn’t know they were marked because Andrew gave them to him and never saw fit to mention it. Winning that night had nothing at all to do with cheating, even drawing to the inside straight was luck. Frank advanced the prosecution’s theory that Andrew had wanted him out of the suite that night, wanted a better, more credible alibi than his own cousin. Miss Cecilia Ross was meant to provide that alibi.

Cobb did not know if he believed Frank’s testimony, but because it saved Cil from having to admit that she had gone willingly to Andrew Mackey’s room, he never told anyone except Tru about his doubts. To the court and all the followers of the four-day trial, it appeared as if Andrew had used drink and drugs to make Cil receptive to accompanying him. All these months later, there was still no evidence to suggest that something more than sleeping in his bed had ever occurred. Cil continued to work at the Pennyroyal, although her flirtations were considerably less animated and she regularly allowed Tom Bailey to escort her around when he was in town on Bar G business. It was good for Tom, too. He hadn’t asked a saloon girl to dance in a long time.

Judge Abel Darlington came in from Rawlins to preside at the trial. Andrew wanted to represent himself, but he had no standing in the Territory to do so, and reluctantly accepted the defense attorney recommended by the judge. Cobb doubted that Andrew could have done any better for himself, although he seemed to have had his say, constantly whispering advice in his lawyer’s ear.

Frank’s testimony that first day was damning in its own right, and followed by what Cil had to say, Cobb could tell the jury was prepared to find Andrew guilty right then and be done with it. Judge Darlington would have none of that. He wanted to hear everything and that meant the jury would also.

On the second day, the prosecution called Cabot Theodore Collins and Carpenter Addison Collins to take the stand. The boys were so unused to hearing their names that they continued to sit at the back of the courtroom until their granny tapped them on the back of the head. Finn had to wait outside while Rabbit answered questions first, but then he was invited to take a seat beside the judge and promised he would tell nothing but the truth, even the parts that sounded like stories.

Jim and Jenny Phillips testified later that day to what Tru had told them when she stopped by the same night as the fire. They laid the framework for the relationship between Tru and her former employer and for the antagonism that existed between Tru and the Mackey family. They also introduced the brooch into the record.

It was Cobb who discussed evidence on the third day. He had turned over everything to the prosecutor: the bottle of whiskey he found in the burnt remains of Tru’s kitchen and the one he took from the bedside table in Andrew’s suite; the brooch he removed from the pocket of Andrew’s coat after his arrest along with Tru’s note that asked Andrew to meet her at an entirely different place and time; and finally, a copy of Charlotte Mackey’s last will and testament sent from Chicago by express mail from the law firm of Paxton, Oliver, and Kingery. The attorneys who thought they had had Charlotte Mackey’s complete confidence for more than a quarter of a century were very glad to learn the whereabouts of Gertrude Morrow. Cobb produced correspondence from the firm in which Mr. Kingery ruefully admitted that Mrs. Mackey had not seen fit to trust them with this last vital detail in spite of repeated requests that she do so. She put them off, afraid they could be turned by her family, but she always made it known that she intended to tell them before she died. In the end, she left it to too late. Mr. Kingery further regretted that the firm’s efforts to find Miss Morrow had not been met with the same success as the Mackey family’s, but he wanted it to be known that they had not given up. They meant for Charlotte’s final wishes to be realized.

Dr. Kent came to the stand afterward to support Cobb’s claims that something—in this case, a concentrate of laudanum—had been added to the whiskey. A residue of the extract still clung to the bottle that had been in the fire, but there was more than enough left in the bottle that Cobb had found in Andrew’s bedroom to clearly identify the contents.

Mr. Abraham Stern, a respected watchmaker and jeweler in Cheyenne, was invited to come to Bitter Springs to appraise the brooch and testify regarding its worth. Cobb thought he would never forget the look on Andrew Mackey’s face when he realized that his grandmother had lied to him. Mr. Stern told the jury that the conservative value of the brooch was forty-five thousand dollars. The judge immediately ordered the brooch to be removed from the courtroom and delivered by Cobb and one of his deputies to the safe at the Cattlemen’s Trust until they sorted out proper ownership.

The sorting out occurred the following morning when Tru delivered her testimony. She kept her explanations brief, and they were all the more powerful for it. She held the courtroom as rapt as she held her students, and when she finished describing how Andrew Mackey had carried her from her kitchen to her bedroom with the intent of further harming her before he set fire to the house, some women wept and all the men scowled.

Tru had saved herself. She was not as helpless as she had made herself seem, and she managed to roll out of the bed before he trapped her. The fall was the catalyst she needed to finally purge the whiskey and opium that was still in her stomach, and being sick was the thing that drove him away. He left her lying on the floor beside the bed reaching for the shotgun he had hidden there earlier. She could recall hearing him hurrying down the stairs and remembered that she tried, and failed, to get up. Her next memory was watching her house burn from across the street and seeing Cobb sitting on the sill of her bedroom window. She had been told that he jumped, and she believed the accounts, but she could not recollect it for herself.

Against the advice of his attorney, Andrew testified. None of the greats traveled from Chicago to offer a defense on his behalf. It turned out they had the family business to manage. While Charlotte Mackey had left them no part of her personal fortune, the operation of all the Mackey enterprises was still in family hands. If Andrew was convicted, he would be removed permanently from the circle, and that apparently influenced their decision to stay home to calculate the best way to administer their spoils.

It was this, the fact that Charlotte Mackey had left her grandson with the means to make his own fortune, which persuaded the jury that they could not trust his testimony. In spite of his impassioned protests that Miss Morrow was the cause of these circumstances, not the victim of them, they saw him as so profoundly greedy that they wanted to hang him on principle.

The law only allowed them to put Andrew Charles Mackey III in prison for fraud, arson, and attempted murder for the rest of his life.

Cobb was more satisfied with that outcome than the jury. Tru understood, and her understanding was all that mattered to him.

His brilliant blue eyes darkened at the center as he watched her drag a bite of hotcake through the molasses syrup on her plate. A droplet of syrup remained on her bottom lip as she chewed. He anticipated the moment the tip of her tongue would appear and take the droplet back. It was always worth waiting for, and when it happened, he just smiled.

“What are you going on about?” she asked.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Do you think that matters?”

He laughed. “I guess it doesn’t. All right, I was thinking that later today I will have the opportunity to carry you across the threshold of our new home.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“And I’m wondering if I can do it.” He placed a hand on the left side of his rib cage and regarded her doubtfully.

“It’s been three months since you threw yourself out a window. I think you’re healed.”

“We should test that theory.”

“Ah. Now I understand.” She set down her fork. “And that was
not
what you were thinking.”

“It started with your tongue, but it ended there.”

Sighing deeply, as though her surrender were a reluctant one, she raised her arms above her head. “If you can get me out of this chair, Marshal Bridger, you can have me.”

Cobb accepted the challenge, which was her purpose in issuing it. He groaned for effect as he lifted her, but she wasn’t fooled and told him so. Rather than deny it, he pretended that he was going to drop her. That made her hold on tighter, which also was the purpose in doing it.

He announced they were crossing the threshold as he entered the bedroom, and she congratulated him on having made it so far. He did toss her on the bed then, but he also followed her down. They made love in happy haste, teasing, laughing, finding pleasure in the ridiculous and the sublime, and having no thought of a moment more distant than the one they were in now.

And afterward, when Cobb was holding his left side, this time because his heroic effort to keep Tru from tumbling out of bed had given him a stitch, she leaned over and kissed him very sweetly, first on his mouth, and then between the fingers splayed over his ribcage.