Wolver's Gold (The Wolvers) (32 page)

Someone stepped on her skirt and she heard the fabric rip. A cruel kick sent pain shooting through her side. She could no longer see the walkway, had no idea where safety lay. Her wolf was snarling and snapping to get out and when she saw
a polished shoe rise up in preparation to stomp on her hand, Rachel let her wolf out. She grabbed that shoe, hoisting it higher, and bit the argyle covered ankle above it. Her wolf howled with savage delight at the sound of the man’s screech.

Through the milling legs and stumbling bodies, she saw Cassie. On her knees as well, the young woman was trying to shield another woman with her body.

Rage and necessity gave Rachel the strength to heave upward to her feet. She elbowed, she punched, she bit someone’s hand when it grabbed her shoulder and tried to pull her back. Together, she and Cassie helped the woman rise.

Spy
ing Cassie, Achilles Marbank waded through the tumbling mass, sending bodies soaring through the air if they failed to move from his path. He captured Cassie and the rescued woman, but before Rachel could grasp his outstretched hand, she was carried away on another wave.

Once more, she was pushed to her knees. All around her, she could feel the power of the pack, swirling like an electrical storm, frightening, yet exhilarating. Above her,
she could hear the shouts of powerful men calling a halt to the donnybrook. Things began to settle and above the dimming roar, she heard her shouted name.

“Red!
Where the hell are you, woman?”

The legs barring her way began to disappear as their owners were tossed to the side. McCall was coming for her and she almost cried with relief.

She crawled toward his voice and was about to pound on the instep of the square-toed cowboy boot in front of her, when three booming shots rang out along with a swell of power that blanketed the area in front of the bank. Her head went down in obeisance and the crowd quieted. One toe of the suddenly familiar boots before her nose, tapped impatiently. She followed the long legs clad in heavy cotton twill up and up and up to the belt buckle she knew so well because he refused to wear the braces other men used to suspend their trousers. Up and up, past the chambray shirt he preferred, past the badge on his chest to McCall’s very angry face. He holstered the pistol he’d fired into the air. The area around them had cleared instantly.

“God damnit, Red.
He said a distraction, not a damned fucking riot.”

Rachel took his offered hand. “Must you use such l
anguage, Mr. McCall? We’re on a public street.”

He took in her torn sleeve
s and skirt covered in muck, her smudged face, and the straggling bun that now hung in a ragged snarl at her back. Wrinkling his nose, he plucked some mashed and soggy leafy thing from her hair and dangled it in front of her nose.

“Oh yes, how
could I forget?” he asked in a mocking, snooty voice. “One must maintain one’s decorum at all times.” He snorted a laugh. “The exception being when one starts a fucking riot.”

Rachel slapped at the hand holding the wilted lettuce leaf. “
I didn’t start this.”

“I’m pretty sure Eve said the same thing to Adam. Of course, she ate her apple.”

“He threw it first,” she argued childishly, before she saw the mocking laughter in his eyes. She sniffed indignantly. “I’m going home to change and while I’m gone, you might contemplate, Mr. McCall, how better off we all might be if Eve had beaned her foolish mate with her apple instead of eating it.”

McCall threw back his head and roared with laughter
, then looked over her head at the crowd in the street who’d stopped at the sound. “What’re you looking at? Go on. Get home before I start kickin’ ass and takin’ names.”

It was then Rachel noticed the brawlers were all wolver. “Where are the tourists?”

“Eustace and the boys rounded them up and sent them home. These guys were having too good a time so I let ‘em rip,” he said of the sheepish, but grinning faces around him. “Of course, that was before I knew you were in the middle of it. So much for your promise to stay out of harm’s way.”

“I wasn’t harmed,” she told him, ignoring the bruise that was forming on her side and then she frowned. “But others were. How’
s Mrs. Harper?” she asked about the woman who was struck by the apple.

“Just bruised and frightened.
She’ll be fine. Her assailant, however, has a concussion. He’s gonna be cross-eyed for a week or two. You’ve got quite an arm there, Red.”

Rachel was suddenly too worried to be amused. “What happened here? Surely our little march wasn’t enough to trigger a reaction like this.” She waved her hand at the wolvers limping away. “Where was the Alpha?
Why didn’t he stop it?”

McCall leaned down and whispered, “Later.” In a louder voice, he called to the few stragglers who lingered, listening.

“What am I, speaking Greek? Go home. Show the little woman what a real wolver looks like, but before you go, listen up and listen close. I catch any one of you continuing this party tonight and your ass is going to be hanging from that gibbet.” He poked his thumb at the wooden gallows that had been erected in the middle of the street. “Got it?”

That earned him a few grins and sloppy salutes. One of them called back.

“Will Mr. Washington be at Court tomorrow?”

“He’ll be there and so will I. Will you?”

“With bells on!” another answered.

“Bring your mates,” McCall added.

“Don’t know if she’ll want to be a part of this,” still another yelled back.

“Tell her she already is,” McCall said firmly.

After hearing the last man’s words, Rachel’s shoulders slumped. “After what just happened, I wonder how many others won’t want to be a part of this.”

“Like I said, they already are.”
As they mounted the steps to the hotel McCall stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Things are going to change, Red, and some members won’t like it. Females in this pack will be given what they deserve.”

Rachel n
odded, but didn’t smile. “I know this may sound silly to you, but I didn’t want my Ladies’ Brigade to be ‘given’ anything. You can’t ‘give’ someone something that is rightfully theirs in the first place and I want them to know that our membership in this pack is ours by right.”

She looked up at him and smiled weakly. “You see what you and John have done to me. You’ve created a monster. I’m no longer meek and demure as a proper lady should be. I’ve become loud and demanding and rebellious.”

“And here I thought those things just came with the red hair.” McCall smiled and offered his arm again. “How’s your wolf feel about that?”

Rachel’s weak smile turned into a grin. “Oh, she’s quite happy to be loud, demanding, and rebellious.”

“There, you see? You have nothing to worry about. It’s our beasts who tell us who we really are. It’s our humans who prevent us from getting carried away with it.”

Chapter 32

The Bank and Land Office robbery had been a resounding success.
With a list of those who’d ‘retired’ from Gold Gulch and those who’d suffered untimely deaths, McCall and Washington knew what to look for and once the right files were found, the rest had been easy. They loaded everything in boxes which were delivered to the hotel that evening, right along with the boxes of chicken needed for the Hanging Day picnics.

While Rachel and Bertie cleaned and floured chicken for frying, McCall and Washington sorted through the
files. Eustace, sitting on a low stool in the corner near Arthur’s bed, had his own box of old and yellowed papers. Their discovery was frightening in its scope. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen from the members of the Gold Gulch pack.

Washington’
s jaw was clenched tight with anger as he leafed through the files. “It’s so neat and organized. Who would keep records of murder?” He dropped the file he was holding as if the poison it contained would seep into his hands.

“Maybe they weren’t all murders. Maybe they didn’t begin that way.” McCall laid another file open on the table. “Orville Prine, age one hundred and ten, died fifteen years ago without issue or heir. His nest egg was small potatoes compared to some of the others
, only forty-seven thousand and change. Think about it. No one knows the money’s there, but the banker. He goes to the Alpha. What should I do with it? It’s the pack’s, right? So why not use it to buy a piece of land.”

Rachel turned from her work, hands held up, gummy with milk and flour. “The loans,” she said, coming to the table to search with her eyes. “Where are the papers that went with the map? There!” She pointed with her elbow as Washington sifted through them.
“Down payment of forty-seven thousand, six hundred and twenty.”

McCall nodded. “So the next time they can’t make the payment or they want to buy more land
, they find another donor. Maybe this one’s so old it would be a kindness to ease their passing and the one after that dies ‘accidently’.”

“Like Sheriff Porter’s fall from a horse,” Eustace added, looking up from his box.

“Exactly, though I suspect there was more to his death than money.”

“What about the Rutherfords?” Bertie asked. “Harold and Ora weren’t that old.”

“And chances are, their money was already gone,” Washington concluded. “Gold Gulch Bank isn’t a real bank. There are no government watchdogs, no audits. A tourist couldn’t open an account. You give them money. They promise to give it back with interest, but the only guarantee you have is your trust in their word. So the Rutherfords decide to pack up and leave. They ask for their money and Slocum writes them a check or promises to transfer it for them. Therein lays the dilemma. They can’t let the Rutherfords find out the check or transfer is bogus. They can’t let them live to tell anyone else.”

“But why?”
Rachel cried, throwing up her hands and spattering the table with flour. “They’re looking for fifty bars of gold that don’t exist.”

“They existed all right,” Eustace said firmly.

“We don’t know that, Eustace,” she argued. “All the records were lost when the bank burned. We only have the bank manager’s word before he died from his wounds. For all we know, he could have been like Slocum.”

“Bank burned, jail didn’t. These here come from the jail; old wanted posters and such. Someone, probably
whoever was sheriff back then, used the backs to make notes. According to these, he suspected the banker was like Slocum, a thief, ‘ceptin’ his name was Holter, Barnabas John Holter. Sound familiar?”

“Too familiar.”

Eustace held up a wad of papers from the box he’d been searching through. These were old and brittle, hand written in faded ink. “Jake Brannigan and his gang didn’t steal ‘em. They just got blamed for it. Leastwise, that’s what the sheriff thought.”

Everyone gathered around Eustace and the papers he had spread on the floor. They began to sift through the things he’d already sorted. Along with the wanted posters, there was a log of arrests made and fines paid. There were scribbled receipts for prisoners’ meals and several from the Tonsorium for funeral expenses
, which indeed cost five dollars. Most gruesome were the yellowed photographs of dead men propped up in their coffins, standing upright against the jail.

“Proof, I suppose, that they were duly hanged,” McCall said as he inspected
one of a tall, skinny man with a drooping mustache.

“Pictures of the dead were quite popular back then. We have some up in the attic,” Rachel told him. “And they weren’t hanged,” she added when she saw the mischievous look in his eye. “They’re lying respectfully in their coffins with their hands folded over their bibles.”

“I got one in the family bible of my great-great granddaddy,” Eustace said proudly. “Not the one that captured Jake Brannigan, the one before that, the one that settled here when this was no more’n an exchange of horses for the Pony Express. Prosperity they called it then.”

“The Mate told me once a long time ago they had one of Ste
rling’s great-great grandfather sitting in his chair dead as a doornail,” Bertie said, fingering the pictures. “She was asking folks if they had any mementos of the past; pictures, diaries, jewelry and such, that they might donate to a Gold Gulch Museum. I’ll bet Sheriff Porter gave her these from the jail.”

Eustace nodded and said to McCall, “That jail is original, bars ‘n all, but that back room you’re sleeping in had to be rebuilt. Sheriff fell through the floor one night when he got up to use the john. Whole back
half was rotted out and when they tore it off they found a bunch of wooden crates up in the rafters. Most of it was water rotted or mouse eaten. I’ll bet this is what they salvaged.”

“What happened to the museum?” McCall asked.

“The Alpha said we didn’t need anything that wouldn’t bring in money, so that was that.”

John Washington, who’d appeared not to be listening as he squinted at some faded notes, looked up. “Or someone saw what was in here and didn’t want it known. What did Brannigan say before they hanged him?”

“It’s under the last lode,” Eustace quoted. “and I’ll be laughing in hell while you try to find it.”

Washington held up the paper he’d been deciphering. “Legend got
it wrong, not unheard of by the way. According to this firsthand account, it’s under the first lode. All these years, people have been searching at the wrong ends of the digs. The Alpha, Holt, Slocum, and their cronies didn’t want any competition.”

“But they still haven’t found the gold.”

“No, they haven’t, but what they have done is roll one loan into another with a sizeable payment due on the first of the year. Default on the loans and Gold Gulch could find itself under new ownership.”

“They can’t!”

“They can,” Washington insisted. “Gold Gulch isn’t a town. It’s a business and it was used as collateral.” He named the needed sum of money.

Rachel
rose from the floor, washed her hands and attacked the remaining chicken pieces with a concentration far in excess of what was needed to do the simple job. Dip with one hand, roll with the other, dip, roll, dip, roll. It wasn’t enough to keep her from thinking about losing her home.

And it was her home, more so in these last few weeks than it had ever been before. She was excited about the possibilities, the future of Gold Gulch. She wanted to see what would happen and how it would come about. She wanted to be a part of it. In spite of her promise to herself and her offer to McCall, she didn’t want to leave.
She didn’t know if she could. Her heart was invested as much in Gold Gulch as it was in McCall. This pack needed him and he needed this pack.

“We could lose everything,” Rachel whispered.

“We could, but we won’t. Our first order of business is to get through tomorrow and then we’ll put our heads together and figure it out. We’ll come up with something, Red.”

Rachel already had. Their second order of business would be to find her a mate, one that loved Gold Gulch more than money. Her mother’s legacy would buy them enough time to figure out what to do next.

Eustace rose, worked the kinks from his legs and stretched his arms out, never taking his eyes from the clock. “Well,” he said, stretching the word along with his arms, “Since the march is over and done with and you fellas got what you needed, I’m figuring my job here is done. Miss Rachel don’t need watching and I’m a-longing for my bed.”

“Hmph.
More like the Widow Cove’s bed,” Bertie sniped.

“Mind your own business, you old bat. I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the sheriff.”

“Go, Eustace, to whatever bed you’re aiming for. Thanks for your help today and tomorrow, you’re officially a deputy.” McCall reached in his pocket and pulled out a badge. “I couldn’t ask for a better one.” He held out the badge to a beaming Eustace.

“They ain’t going to like this.”

“After tomorrow, it won’t matter.”

The kitchen quieted after Eustace left; the women going back to their food preparations, the men to sorting papers and taking notes. Not many
minutes passed before the newly sworn deputy was back, banging on the back door and calling for McCall.

“There’s
some to-do over at the bank. Arnold Slocum and Jack Coogan were having a bit of a set-to, so I moseyed on over and asked what was going on, but all I got was Slocum asking where you were. I told him you were over here, chattin’ with the schoolmaster. He told me to go fetch you and then take myself off as it was none of my concern. Slocum didn’t look alarmed like he would knowing he got robbed. He just looked riled, like he wanted to hit Coogan. O’course, I can’t blame him there. I wouldn’t mind taking a poke at Coogan myself. So,” he said shuffling his feet a little, “I fetched ya and now I’m off to Maudie’s.”

“I’ll go with you,”
Washington volunteered, “Just let me run up to my room and get my coat.”

“I think I’ll go count those boxes in the dining room,” Bertie said much too quickly. “Make sure we’ve got enough set
up for tomorrow.”

“I think they know,” McCall chuckled as he came up behind Rachel and kissed the back of her neck.

She tilted her head to the side to give him better access. Her hands were still covered in chicken and flour. “I think so, too. Don’t be late,” she told him, “And you’d better wear your coat, too. It gets cold at night this time of year.” She turned her head so he could reach her lips and he obliged.

“It’s been a long time since someone worried about me,” he said against them. “It’s nice.”

“Ready?” Washington called from the dining room.

“Gotta go,” McCall said and kissed her again.
He grabbed his coat from the peg in the hall. “But I’ll be warm, so you don’t have to worry.” He pointed his finger at Arthur, snoozing in the corner. “Keep an eye on her, boy, until I get back.”

Arthur thumped his tail.

“I’ll always worry about him,” Rachel whispered to the dog when the door closed behind him. “I’ll worry about you, too.”

The chicken was done and she started on the potatoes. The more she got done tonight, the less she’d have to do tomorrow.

“Go home, Bertie. It’s been a long day. I’ll finish up,” she said when she heard the older woman re-enter the kitchen.

Bertie went immediately to the table where all the papers were neatly replaced in their boxes.
She lifted one and tucked it neatly beneath the look-alike stack of empties. “It’s been a long one for you, too, and I’ve brought re-enforcements.”

“Fudge is made, taffy is pulled and strawberry creams are cooling on the counter. The Sweet Shop is ready for tomorrow. Now let’s get you ready, too.” Liddy
waltzed through the door, winked at Bertie and threw up her arms. “Surprise!”

Boxes surreptitiously stored, Bertie took over the management of the kitchen.
There was no stopping. The three continued to work, chatting as they always did, until the refrigerators were packed with chicken, salads, boiled eggs, and biscuit dough. Liddy had even set the guest dining room for a buffet breakfast for which she’d made several casseroles of egg and sausage.

Rachel stood back and surveyed the spotless kitchen. “
I don’t think we’ve ever been so ready for Hanging Day. Thank you. Now, Bertie, go home. Liddy, go to bed.”

Hands on hips, Bertie nodded. “Yes, ma’am, with all the work we’ve done tonight, looks like three will be a crowd in here tomorrow. With all the preparation done and no Luncheon or Tea, we only need one to cook and one to serve.”

“Bertie! How can you say that? We need Liddy.”

“Oh,” Liddy laughed, “She wasn’t talking about me. I
shall be right here to serve breakfast to give you a lie-in and then I’ll be packing and selling picnic boxes. Bertie shall do the cooking. You’re the one who won’t be here.”

“I have to be here.”

Bertie took her apron off and held out her hand for Liddy’s. “No you don’t,” she said as she tossed the aprons in the washer. “You’re taking a holiday and we don’t want to hear another word about it. It’s all arranged. Liddy and I have had our holidays. We’ve had our share of spun sugar and candy apples. You never did. So tomorrow, you’re going out there and enjoy yourself like a visitor. Buy yourself a new hat to replace the one you lost at the march today and eat sweets until you’re sick.”