He didn’t want to think about those days, or
the fact that other people lived safe, comfortable lives, untouched
by the kind of guilt he dragged around with him. Jefferson Hicks
didn’t deserve anything more than what he had right now, and that
was the way it would stay.
But he supposed it wouldn’t hurt to spend a
few minutes on a bright spring afternoon, listening to the
measured, lulling sweetness of a woman’s voice.
~~*~*~*~~
Althea sat on an old rocker and held the book
on her lap. She had never really enjoyed reading aloud, but at
least she didn’t stumble over the text as some did.
Sitting across the quilt from her, Olivia
selected another jam sandwich from a flowered plate and listened
with eyes wide, as if Althea were reading from a lurid dime novel
instead of Jane Eyre.
Althea felt a kinship with Charlotte Brontë’s
much-abused heroine but she kept that fact to herself. And even
though Jane triumphed by the last chapter and married the man she
loved, she wasn’t allowed to have a completely happy ending. No,
indeed. For the sin of loving a man with an insane wife, Jane was
punished—when she finally won Mr. Rochester he had been stricken
blind. For a moment, she imagined Jeff Hicks with a pair of dark
spectacles and a white cane, with his hand tucked in her arm. Oh,
God, how horrible—
“
Altheeeah,” Olivia carped, “I know
there’s more on the page. You’ve stopped in the middle of a
sentence.”
Althea was jolted back to the porch. “Oh,
dear, I guess my thoughts wandered. We can take this up again
later.” She laid a tatted bookmark between the pages and closed the
volume. “I have chores to get to, and you might want to lie down
for a while.”
“
Oh, all right,” Olivia replied with a
sigh. She leaned back against a porch upright and closed her eyes
dreamily. “I’m so glad we had this little lunch. I know I’m such a
pest sometimes, dear Althea. I don’t know how you put up with
me.”
Althea began gathering the tablecloth she’d
spread on top of the quilt. “You’re my sister, not a pest.”
“
And all we have is each other, isn’t
that so? Nothing and no one can come between sisters.” Olivia bent
a brief, hard look on Jeff, who’d left his seat by the tree stump
and appeared to be heading toward the front porch.
Althea noticed the glance, but dismissed it.
“Of course not. We’re family. No one can break up a family.”
Olivia picked herself up with surprising
strength and agility, and scampered across the porch toward the
screen door. “Do you promise?”
“
Promise—” It seemed as if Olivia were
asking if her eyes would always be hazel or if the sky would always
be blue. “We’ll always be sisters, Olivia. Nothing can change that.
We’re related by blood.”
Olivia lingered with her hand on the screen
door pull, digesting her answer. Then she gave Althea a sweet,
endearing smile and went into the house.
CHAPTER SIX
“
Come on, you son of a bitch.” Jeff
ground out more epithets through gritted teeth as he worked a saw
in short, quick strokes. He’d been struggling with this monster for
the better part of an hour, and now he was drenched in sweat and in
a lousy mood.
His opponent was an ancient climbing rose. It
had grown bigger than its trellis, literally pulling the support
out of the ground and loose from the rusty nails that had once held
it in place against the porch overhang. It was as if the rose bush
had a gray-white, fan-shaped skeleton.
At least he thought the trellis itself was
generally fan-shaped, but it was hard to see through the foliage
and twisting branches that gripped it. The rose encircled every
slat and grew through every opening. The thing had branches as big
around as his fist and thorns the size of arrowheads. Its pale pink
blooms were full of enamored honey bees, further complicating his
work.
Jeff’s arms bore so many long red scratches
he looked as if he’d been in a saloon fight with a mountain lion,
and in several places he’d snagged his shirt on the thorns, ripping
holes in the fabric. Branches that had fallen to his saw were in a
pile around his feet, their thorns grabbing his pants legs, too. He
thought the whole damned business ought to be chopped down with a
double-headed axe, but Althea had insisted that he merely trim it.
She liked the climbing rose, she said, its flowers were pretty and
they smelled sweet.
Pretty. “Well, then let her come out here and
argue with this no-good—”
Over the sound of his sawing, swearing, and
shrubbery-rustling, Jeff heard the muffled thud of slow hoof beats
in the road that passed the front of the house. Dragging his torn
shirt sleeve across his forehead, he looked up to see if Will Mason
had come back to deliver him from this miserable job. But when the
rider climbed down from his horse and stood back to look at the
place, Jeff felt every muscle in his body tense.
It was not Will Mason at the gate. It was
Cooper Matthews.
Slowly, Jeff let the saw drop to the floor.
He didn’t own this property—hell, he hadn’t even been here long
enough to say he lived here. And he was not related to either of
the women who did own this place. But whether or not it was his
right, a fierce territorial instinct rushed through his veins,
surprising him as much as it incited him to wariness. The general
consensus in Decker Prairie was that Cooper Matthews was a
no-account scum. There weren’t many, though, who knew just how
black his heart really was.
Jeff Hicks knew. And there was bad blood
between them, as bad as it could get.
He stepped down from the porch, making his
presence known, and stood with his arms crossed over his chest.
Though it had turned into a hot day, the sun pounding down on
Jeff’s shoulders did nothing to dispel the icy knot in his
stomach.
Matthews saw him, as Jeff had intended, and
sauntered forward. As long as he’d known him, Jeff had seen only
two expressions on the man’s face: a haughty smirk, or a malevolent
glare. Right now he wore the smirk.
“
What are you doin’ out here, Hicks?”
He raked Jeff up and down with a venomous, contemptuous look. “You
courtin’ one of those crazy Ford women?” If it were possible, Jeff
thought that Matthews actually smelled worse than he had himself
before his dunk in the trough. His clothes were even dirtier, and
his teeth looked like short, walnut-dyed pegs in his red, puffy
gums. He had the kind of face that made Jeff long to mash his fist
into it, just to get rid of that smirk.
“
I’m here because you didn’t show up
yesterday, like you told Miss Ford you would.”
“
Shee-it, today, yesterday, it don’t
make any difference.” He waved his grimy hand at the house. “This
place ain’t goin’ nowhere, and besides, that woman just don’t know
her place. Nobody orders Cooper Matthews around. But I guess you
know that, don’t you, Sheriff?”
Jeff had arrested Matthews once or twice, and
he’d raised such a ruckus while in custody, Jeff had been sorely
tempted to either lynch him or turn him loose.
“
Besides, me and Floyd Endicott had
somethin’ better to do with a couple of gals he knows over in New
Era. But I’m here now, so you run along back to what you do
best—bein’ a coward and shootin’ boys.”
Jeff clenched his jaw so tightly his head
began to throb. He uncrossed his arms and let them hang at his
sides, his hands closed into fists. As much as Wesley Matthews’
death had tortured his dreams and dogged his waking hours, Jeff
believed that the boy’s father hadn’t been troubled by the loss.
Oh, he had vowed revenge against the man who’d shot Wes. But on the
afternoon of his son’s funeral, while Wes was buried Cooper
Matthews had stood at the bar in the Liberal Saloon, telling all
who would listen that now he had one less mouth to worry about
feeding. Since then, Jeff had cut a wide path around him and done
his best to avoid the man.
“
You’re a day too late, Matthews. Miss
Ford hired me to help out here.” Jeff didn’t feel an urgent need to
reveal just how that had come about.
The smirk on the other man’s face turned into
a malevolent glower. “The hell she did. You? You’re just a
sorry-assed wreck.” He pushed past Jeff and climbed the front porch
stairs. “We’ll just see who’s doin’ the work here. It sure ain’t
gonna be you.” Matthews pounded on the front door. Palpable
unreasoning fury rolled off him waves that were just as obvious as
the body odor he exuded. He was like a vicious dog that barked at
anything that moved or came near.
Anger, an emotion that Jeff had long ago
abandoned with the rest of his feelings, stirred inside him. He
shot up the steps behind Matthews and grabbed the man’s arm hard
enough to spin him around. “Leave the woman out of this. If you
wanted the job so much you should have been here when you
promised.”
Matthews’ glower evolved into a snarl,
revealing his brown pegs of teeth. “I’ll hear it from her own
mouth! You get your hands off me, you goddamn—”
At that moment, Althea opened the door, and
found both Jeff and Cooper Matthews standing there. The tension on
the front porch was heavy and thick. “What’s going on out—?”
With a tremendous yank, Matthews pulled his
arm out of Jeff’s grip. “Tell him, this bastard that murdered my
boy,” he demanded, a maniacal look in his eyes. “You hired me to do
the work here and he’s got to git. Tell him!”
No one had ever spoken to Althea like that.
In the life she’d known, voices were never raised, anger was never
expressed. In fact, no feelings were expressed. Amos Ford had
considered emotional outbursts, angry, happy, or sad, to be the
sign of a weak character. Well, there had been just that one time
he’d gotten angry, with a fury she would remember till her last day
on earth, a rage even more frightening than Matthews—
Althea looked desperately to Jeff, hoping he
would intervene, but it seemed that even he waited to hear her
decision, as if she might choose Cooper Matthews over him.
Her heart thundering with fear, she laced her
hands together to hide their trembling. She wished she could slam
the door and put both men on the other side of it. But Althea Ford
was no coward, she told herself. “Mr. Matthews, I did hire you but
you didn’t keep to our agreement. So I went into town and made
other arrangements. Mr. Hicks is going to do the work for me.”
Jeff stood aside, clearing the path to the
steps. “All right, you heard her. Now you’re leaving.”
Matthews didn’t budge. Instead, his
expression grew even wilder, and he unleashed his rage on Althea.
“You want a trigger-happy murderer workin’ here? You might be
standin’ in your kitchen one mornin’ and he’ll pick you off like a
bird settin’ on a fencepost. Just like that—” He snapped his dirty
fingers. “Just like he did my poor Wes. And with no more feelin’
either.”
Althea backed up, truly terrified not only by
the malevolence she saw in his face, but by the picture he
painted.
Jeff grabbed the back of Cooper’s collar. He
steered the handyman down the steps and over to the gate. Though
she shivered with terror, once again Althea sensed a ghost of
Jeff’s old authority. He seemed like one of the steely-eyed lawmen
Ned Buntline wrote about in his famous dime novels—confident and in
command.
And just as cold.
~~*~*~*~~
“
You get back on your horse, Matthews,
and don’t ever come around here again.” Jeff gave the man a light
shove toward his horse, but what he really wanted to do was
throttle him.
Cooper Matthews adjusted one of the straps on
his overalls, and glared at Jeff. “You don’t tell me what to do,
Hicks, no mor’n that female or anybody else does. I ain’t forgot
what you did to Wes—
“
I haven’t forgotten what you did to
him, either.”
“
I ain’t the one who put that bullet in
his chest.” He leaned in closer to Jeff and poked him in the
shoulder with an index finger. It took everything Jeff could muster
to keep from snapping that finger off. “I’ll tell you something,
though. I’m gonna get even with you, for Wes and for those times
you threw me in that stinkin’ hole of a jail. And I’m gonna get
even for today.”
“
Just get out of here, Matthews.” Jeff
didn’t want to stand here in the road and argue with him. He felt
that anger coming to life in his heart again, a sleeping giant that
he didn’t want disturbed.
“
I ain’t sayin’ when or how—” Cooper
glanced back at Althea where she stood watching from the porch, her
hands clasped tightly at her waist. “And it might not even be you I
get my revenge on.” He untied his bony nag from the fence and swung
a leg over its slatted sides. “This ain’t finished yet between us.”
He gave the horse a kick and it shambled down the road back toward
town.
Jeff watched him to make sure he didn’t turn
around and come back. No, it wasn’t finished, and now Althea might
be in danger, too. Matthews had a grudge against him that he wasn’t
going to give up. And it wouldn’t be satisfied until one of them
was dead.
~~*~*~*~~
Worried about Olivia, Althea went upstairs to
see if the noisy scene on the porch had upset her. But when she
reached her sister’s room she found her propped up against her
pillows, reading and looking very much like the blond doll sitting
on Olivia’s chest of drawers.
“
What on earth was that racket
outside?” Olivia asked. “It woke me up.”
“
It’s all over now, dear, don’t worry.
Cooper Matthews and Mr. Hicks had a little—altercation—but Cooper
has gone.”
Olivia sat up a little straighter. “Didn’t
you say it was his son that Mr. Jefferson shot?”