Undercover Bride (3 page)

“Sounds reasonable to me,” Reverend Holly said. “As long as you and Garrett here conduct yourselves in a”—he cleared his voice and stroked his goatee—“godly manner.”

Since the minister was staring at her hand still on Garrett’s arm, Maggie quickly pulled it away. “Rest assured that we would never do anything to shame the family or harm the children,” she said with schoolmarm primness.

“Then it’s settled.” Reverend Holly slapped his hands on his thighs and stood.

“Not so fast,” Aunt Hetty said, intent upon having the last word. “It’s not settled until we set a date.” She hesitated as if doing a mental check of her calendar. “June’s a lovely time for a wedding, don’t you think? And it’s such a healthy month. Doc Coldwell told me he treated fewer patients that month than any other time of year. What about… the fifteenth?”

A quick calculation told Maggie that was little more than a month away. Five weeks at the most. She glanced at Thomas, hoping he would object, but he remained silent.

“That doesn’t give us much time,” she said. She hoped that was all the time needed to do the job she was sent to do, but things always took longer than planned. “The children—”

“That’s a long time in a child’s life,” Aunt Hetty said in a voice that indicated the matter settled, at least in her own mind. “And if we wait much longer, I might not be around.”

“Are you moving away?” Maggie asked.

The older woman gave her a fish-eyed stare. “I’m dying,” she said in a straightforward tone that one might use to express a matter of less concern.

Maggie drew back, hand on her chest. “I—sI’m sorry,” she stammered. She glanced at Thomas, but he offered no help. If anything, he looked oddly unconcerned about his aunt’s health.

Aunt Hetty put on her gloves and stood. “Maybe this works out for the best. Now we can plan a
proper
wedding.”

W
hen Thomas’s aunt left with the minister, Maggie let out a sigh of relief.

With her piercing looks and pointed questions, Aunt Hetty would have made a fine detective. Never had Maggie felt more like an insect beneath a microscope. It was a good thing his aunt didn’t know her real reason for being there. That was one foe she’d rather not tackle.

After the two children finished waving good-bye, Thomas shut the door, and she could have sworn she heard him mutter something beneath his breath.

“I apologize for my aunt,” he said.

It seemed like an odd thing to say about a woman whose days were numbered. “She’s just concerned about you. I only hope the wedding isn’t too much for her.”

“Don’t worry about Aunt Hetty.” His eyes were so clear, so blue, so intense as he studied her, she feared he could see right through her disguise and know she was a fraud. “She’ll outlive us all. But she just can’t seem to leave well enough alone.”

She frowned, not sure she’d heard right. “Are you saying your aunt
isn’t
dying?”

His mouth quirked upward. “Let’s just say she suffers from an embarrassing lack of ailments to go with her pains.”

Laughter bubbled out of her unexpectedly; she couldn’t help herself. So seldom did she get to laugh in her profession. Criminals were not known for their sense of humor.

His eyes warmed to her laughter, but his attention was soon drawn to his young daughter tugging on his arm. Elise’s hair was more gold than blond, and her eyes a lovely pale blue. She probably took after her mother in appearance.

In contrast, eight-year-old Toby was the spitting image of his father. His eyes were the same deep shade of blue, and brown hair fell across his forehead from a single part. He looked like a normal active boy, but Thomas’s aunt had indicated otherwise. So what had Thomas not told her?

“Let’s go outside and give Miss Taylor some privacy,” Thomas said. He opened the door and brushed the children through with a sweep of his arm. “If you need me—”

She smiled. “I’ll know where to find you.” The blood that rushed to her face surprised her. Either she was a better actress than she thought or the desert heat was adversely affecting her.

With a quick smile and slight nod, he turned and followed the children outside.

Grateful for the reprieve, she drew in her breath and wiped her damp hands on her skirt. The hardest part was over—or at least she hoped it was. Now all she had to do was find the seventy thousand dollars stolen during the Whistle-Stop train robbery and leave.

Backing away from the door, her skirt brushed against a chessboard, and several pieces fell over. Not knowing how to play, she had no idea where the pieces belonged. She stood the ivory chessmen upright across the board and hoped for the best.

She walked to the children’s room she now shared with Elise. Toby would bunk across the hall in his father’s room. It was a simple adobe house with two bedrooms, a parlor, and a kitchen. It also had a separate small room furnished with a cast-iron horse trough. Bars of soap and folded towels told her this was a bathing room, a luxury she hadn’t counted on.

Surprised and overjoyed to find such a convenience, she gazed longingly at the tub. What she would give for a hot bath. Later… Closing the door, she moved away.

It appeared that the hall, bedrooms, and bathing room had been added to the original house. Outside there was a privy, barn, well, small corral, and vegetable garden.

Searching a house this size would take no more than a few short hours, and her spirits lifted. With a little luck, she’d find enough incriminating evidence on Garrett Thomas to quickly complete her task. If all went as planned, she could be on her way back to the States in a day or two—a week at the most.

The house was comfortable but needed work. The gingham curtains were faded, the furniture dull, and the carpets looked like they could use a good beating. The house had once been cared for but now looked as forlorn as a child’s outgrown toy.

She finished unpacking her few belongings and glanced around the tiny room. Laughter coaxed her to the window. Thomas and the children were playing a lively game of hide-and-seek. A frisky white dog chased after them, its yippy barks mingling with their happy whoops.

From the window she had a clear view of the desert and the distant mountains. The sun rode low in the sky, casting purple shadows across the stark landscape. Tall, stately cacti seemed to beckon with upraised arms, and she was tempted to answer the call.

The closest neighbor was a good mile away, and she felt completely alone and isolated. An unfamiliar bout of nerves surged through her. It was as if the hot desert air had burned away her usual confidence.

In an effort to reassure herself, she checked the derringer holstered to her thigh. Reaching for it was just a matter of sticking her hand into the false pocket of her skirt. Tomorrow she would travel to town and meet with her colleague.

The Pinkerton principal thought the job too dangerous to send a woman alone and had dispatched another operative to work with her. For that she was grateful.

Most of her assignments had been in large cities like St. Louis, New Orleans, and Boston. This job was unlike any she’d ever known. If something should go wrong… If Thomas came to suspect her real identity…

Shuddering, she said a silent prayer. Placing her worries squarely in God’s hands forced her negative thoughts away.

Thomas ran past the window, and her eyes tracked his long, lean frame around the yard. He bore little resemblance to the stoic man who had driven her home from the station. A playful smile softened his granitelike features, and not even the red scar took away from his good looks. A slight desert breeze rippled through his hair. The strand falling across his forehead gave him a boyish look that was hard to resist.

Elise fell, and he was by her side in an instant, checking her over for injuries and soothing her with hugs.

He appeared to be a doting father, and that was a complication Maggie hadn’t expected. It wasn’t all that unusual for criminals to be good family men, of course. Some, like the head of the McMurphy gang, were downright neighborly and invited friends and family in for gala parties. But the Pinkerton file on Thomas pegged him as possibly psychopathic, and so far nothing about him seemed to fit that description.

She dropped the curtain in place with a sigh and moved away from the window. However much she felt sorry for the children, she had a job to do.

She glanced around the small but tidy room. Two beds occupied opposite walls, separated by a single bureau.

The Pinkerton principal would no doubt object to her staying at Thomas’s house rather than the hotel as planned. The mail-order-bride ruse was dangerous enough without the added risk of staying at the suspect’s house. But she was far more likely to meet with success here than in town. Especially now, for thanks to his aunt, she had only a few short weeks in which to conduct her investigation. Aunt Hetty had accepted the decision to postpone the wedding, but Maggie doubted she would again.

A wall shelf contained a McGuffey’s Reader piled on top of books on civil government and penmanship. A metal locomotive the length of a bread box rested on a second shelf. It was a remarkably accurate model down to the last detail.

The room smelled like peppermint candy, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Walking out into the hall, she paused outside the closed door directly opposite the children’s room. She could hardly wait to search it, but now wasn’t the time. Thomas could enter the house at any moment.

Stomach growling she walked to the kitchen. It was well equipped with an icebox, cookstove, water pump, and coffee grinder. A butcher-block table seated four, and a large window over the sink gave a panorama view of the fast-setting sun over purple mountains.

Thomas had indicated earlier that there was fresh chicken for supper, along with garden vegetables. She’d heard it said that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. But it wasn’t Thomas’s heart she was interested in as much as his secrets, and there was nothing like a good meal to loosen the tongue.

One by one she opened cupboards and drawers to get the lay of the land.

Never had she seen so much tinware. Cooking utensils, metal plates, and cups crammed practically every shelf. Some even hung from hooks on the wall. Garrett Thomas was a tinker by profession, and the GT stamped on the bottom of each pot and pan confirmed it.

It was this very stamp that had led to Thomas in the first place. A man fitting his description had emptied the safe of an eastbound train. The train had stopped at the Holbrook station for water and fuel. Passengers, engineer, and trainmen had disembarked for a thirty-minute supper break, leaving only the guard aboard.

Without warning, the train suddenly backed out of the station. Though the engineer and his crew gave chase, the train was soon a distance away. The guard was forced to open the safe, and by the time the crew reached the train, they found the man dead and the thieves long gone, along with seventy thousand dollars. It was the largest heist of its kind.

Train robberies were still relatively rare. Outlaws preferred robbing stagecoaches to trains. Maggie suspected that would change when more track was laid. That’s why Pinkerton put his best people on this case. If this particular robbery went unsolved, it would send the wrong message to any would-be thieves.

It had been a daring robbery, and after a preliminary investigation, the railroad hired the Pinkerton detective agency. Allan’s son, William, had walked the tracks where two men had been seen prior to the holdup. It was during this initial investigation that he found a money clip marked with the initials GT right next to the tracks.

This led to a two-year investigation that had stymied Pinkerton’s best detectives. A witness described one of the men seen boarding the stopped train as having a scarred face. That, along with the money clip, pointed to Thomas, but they still lacked tangible proof. Scarred faces were a dime a dozen in the West, and anyone could have dropped the money clip.

The investigation went nowhere until six months ago when suddenly five one-hundred-dollar bills showed up in Furnace Creek during a school fund-raiser. That was more money than anyone living in a small Arizona town was likely to afford. The fact that the money happened to show up at the school where Garrett Thomas’s children attended was too much of a coincidence to ignore.

Oddly enough, the money appeared around the same time Thomas had placed an ad in a popular mail-order-bride catalog, providing investigators with a daring plan.

It was now Maggie’s job to find enough evidence against him to satisfy a court of law.

Pushing her thoughts aside, she found a woman’s apron in one of the drawers and tied it to her waist.

Her detective work left neither time nor the inclination to improve her culinary skills. Since a mail-order bride would be expected to be well versed in the art of homemaking, Pinkerton arranged for training. Her teacher was a widow named Mrs. Cranston who insisted that oil heated to just the right temperature was the mainstay of life.

“Even manna from heaven tasted like oil,” she’d declared.

Maggie stared at the chicken laid out on the counter waiting to be plucked. She sure did hope Mrs. Cranston was right.

A
n hour and a half later, the four of them gathered around the butcher-block table that took up half the kitchen. Thomas sat at the head and Maggie took the chair opposite him at the foot. The children sitting on either side cast curious glances at her.

Toby had a strange-looking bowl-shaped hat on his head with coiled pieces of wire sticking out in every direction.

“That’s an interesting hat you’re wearing,” Maggie said.

“That’s his thinking cap,” Elise explained.

“Oh, I see.” Maggie spooned peas onto Elise’s plate. “I dare say, we could all use a thinking cap on occasion.”

Nothing on the table could pass as manna, but the chicken had been fried to a crisp golden brown and the peas cooked to perfection. The potatoes and gravy were almost but not entirely lump-free; hopefully no one would notice.