Coming Home to Wyoming (Peaceful Valley Series Book 1) (3 page)

Griff was awakened the next morning by a series of shouts and loud thumps from downstairs—coming from the lobby, presumably. Hoping to get an early start, he washed up, changed clothes, and went next door to knock softly on the door to Clarinda’s room. When she didn’t answer, though, he decided to leave her to sleep a little longer. She’d had a rough time of it yesterday, what with one thing and another, and she could probably use a couple extra hours of rest. He made his way down to the lobby, and found the desk unattended and the desk clerk nowhere in sight. The hotel’s front door was wide open, and he noticed idly that one of the two battered arm chairs in the small lobby lay overturned on the floor—the commotion he’d heard earlier, probably. Not uncommon in a town like this, where cowhands coming off a trail drive liked to unwind getting drunk and beating the shit out of one another.

With nothing else to do until Clarinda woke, he left the hotel and wandered across the street to the mercantile. She’d been adamant about refusing to take any more money from him, but maybe she’d accept a couple of inexpensive dresses as a gift—from one fellow traveler to another.

Unaccustomed to shopping for a woman, he asked the female clerk at the counter for help in finding what he wanted.

“She’s shorter than you, ma’am, ” he explained, holding his hand to a spot on his chest to illustrate Clarinda’s approximate height. “On the thin side, and…”

“You wouldn’t be talking about the young lady who was in here yesterday, would you,” she inquired, “looking for shoes?”

Griff nodded, hoping that the next words out of the woman’s mouth wouldn’t have anything to do with shoplifting.

Even with the salesclerk’s help, it took close to an hour to pick out two dresses, two sets of the necessary undergarments, three pairs of black lisle stockings, a hairbrush and comb, and several small bottles of what the clerk assured him all ladies required,
“for personal daintiness.”
After adding a handful of hair ribbons in various colors, he remembered shoes, and selected a brand
new
pair made of fawn-colored kid leather. The clerk was already adding up the bill when Griff noticed a large, dark green valise on an upper shelf behind the counter, and asked to see it.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” the clerk asked, placing the bag on the counter for his approval. She pointed out the intricate paisley design carved into the heavy fabric. “Cut velvet, they call it. The catalogue I ordered it from claimed that all that work was done by a machine! Can you imagine that? A
machine
? It makes you wonder what in the world they’ll think of next.”

Griff winced a bit when she told him the bag’s price, but added it to the pile of merchandise on the counter, and waited while everything was wrapped and tied up with string. All in all, a good day’s work. The chances of Clarinda making it to Nob Hill were somewhere just south of zero, but he was pleased to know that wherever she ended up, she’d be reasonably clean, and clothed decently enough to avoid being arrested for vagrancy.

He was crossing the street, halfway back to the hotel, when a shrill female voice began screaming his name, and since there was only one female in Brewer’s Creek who
knew
his name, it wasn’t difficult to guess who was doing the screaming.

When he looked around for the source of the shouting, he saw Clarinda, framed in the doorway of a small, one-story building around fifty yards down the street from the hotel. The sun was in his eyes, and the building was just far enough away to make it hard to tell exactly what was going on, but she appeared to be clinging with both hands to the door frame, still shrieking like a banshee, and battling an unseen person or persons who were trying to force her through the doorway. Griff dropped the packages and began running.

It was only a few seconds until he got there, but by then, the tug of war had moved inside. He was relieved to hear that Clarinda had stopped screaming, possibly because she realized that he was on his way to rescue her from whatever fate she was being dragged into. It wasn’t until he stepped from the street onto the wood plank sidewalk, though, that he knew for sure that his day was about to get worse.

The sign on the front of the building read,
“Sheriff.”

The tug of war had ended, but not without casualties. Clarinda was sitting in a chair, handcuffed to the sheriff’s desk. She was red in the face and breathing hard, but apparently unharmed. If battlefield injuries were any measure of victory, in fact, it was clear that Clarinda had won the day, despite the handcuffs. As far as he could tell, she was unmarked and unbowed, whereas the two brawny deputies who’d been trying to apprehend her had sustained multiple wounds—after finally managing to overpower a skinny kid less than half their size, and a quarter their combined weight. Both men were in the corner, sweating heavily, and apparently commiserating with one another over their injuries. There was probably going to be hell to pay, but a former Cavalry officer like Griff couldn’t help smiling. Miss Worthington may have been ultimately defeated by a vastly superior force of arms, but she hadn’t surrendered or given up without a fight, and she’d obviously given an excellent account of herself in the skirmish.

Both of her captors, on the other hand, were covered with a startling array of scratches, cuts, and scrapes, and the larger one was nursing a swollen eye that was already turning blue around the edges. By tomorrow morning, he’d be doing his damnedest to explain to his drinking buddies at the Yellow Dog saloon how a diminutive teenaged female had blackened his eye and left him with both a bad limp and a bloodied nose. A third man—the sheriff himself, Griff learned, was bandaging a fairly serious bite to his forearm, and trying to hold a lit cigar between his clenched teeth while he interrogated his young prisoner.

“What the hell’s going on, here?” Griff demanded, and when the sheriff didn’t answer, he directed the same question to Clarinda, who had just managed to knee one of the deputies in his testicles after he strode over and slapped her across the face.

“This little wildcat here, tried to rob the hotel clerk,” the sheriff explained, finally.

“That’s a goddamned lie,” Clarinda shouted. “All I was doin’ was gettin’ Griff’s money back from that hotel fella.”

Griff rolled his eyes. He wasn’t particularly surprised by what had happened. After last night’s restaurant fracas, he’d had a kind of uneasy feeling—almost a premonition—that he and the girl wouldn’t get out of town without at least one more catastrophe.

“Did you ask the man
nicely
, Clarinda?” he asked, suppressing a grin.

The betrayed prisoner narrowed her eyes and shot her betrayer a look of pure loathing.

“Why should I?” she demanded. “It’s him who done all the stealin’.” She turned to the sheriff. “One whole dollar for a few hours on a lumpy horsehair mattress crawlin’ with bedbugs! And I found a cockroach big as that stinkin’ cigar o’ yours in that fancy fuckin’ laundry boiler they call a
bathtub
!”

The wounded sheriff patiently outlined the charges, showing what even Griff regarded as admirable restraint, under the circumstances. “Well, mister, I’m guessin’ you’re the
danged fool
she’s been hollerin’ about—the fella who throws his money around like it was nothing but cow flop. So here’s the situation. This girl here, claims the hotel owes
you
a dollar and fifty cents. Says she slept in the hall last night, to save you paying for two rooms, instead of just the one.”

Griff groaned. “Actually, Sheriff, I believe her story. I found her sleeping in the hallway this morning. She’s a little… Can I get her out of here by paying what’s owed, and any damages?”

The sheriff shook his head. “It’s not that easy. She threw a couple of chairs at the hotel clerk, and then tried to destroy evidence—chewed up a lot of room receipts.”

“She
ate
them?”

The sheriff nodded. “Swallowed ‘em like she hadn’t been fed in a week and they were hot biscuits and gravy. And besides all that, this girl fits the description of a runaway that disappeared around ten days ago from an orphans’ home up north of here. She busted some Baptist preacher in the nose while he says he was trying to pray over her—for breakin’ the rules, or something. After she belted him, she finished up by stomping on the man’s spectacles. Poor fella was blind as a bat without ‘em. Told the sheriff up there that he tripped over his own pants chasing after her, and broke his damned nose when he hit it on a pew.

“I talked to the girl over at the hotel, and she tells a whole different story, of course. I’ve been in this business for thirty years, though, and after that long, you get to know a goddamned pack of lies when you hear it—even if it’s a sweet-faced child like this one doing the lyin’, and doing her best to ruin the name of a god-fearing reverend who was trying to keep her from goin’ to hell. Shit, she couldn’t, or
wouldn’t
even
tell us what happened to set her off. She looked like she was gonna start bawlin’ when I kept askin’ her about it, but then she just glared at me and clammed up. I figure she was trying to come up with some wild story so we wouldn’t send her back.”

Suddenly, Griff began to see the whole, sad picture. He had already known the girl long enough to know that whatever else she was, she
wasn’t
a liar— with the obvious exception of the preposterous name she’d made up, and maybe to… He sighed. All right, then, so, maybe Clarinda
was
given to spinning tall tales—when she needed to.

Later, Griff would be surprised at how quickly he came up with a couple of lies of his own.

“I’m sorry about the minister you mentioned, Sheriff, but this girl isn’t the one you’re looking for. She couldn’t have been there, because she didn’t run away from any orphanage. She’s my sister, and two days ago, she
did
run away from home—to avoid being punished. Our pa was about to give her a hard licking she’d had coming for a while.”

The sheriff looked suspicious. “Your pa sounds like a smart fella,” he muttered. “That girl’s your
sister
?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Griffin Harper.”

“Well, Mr. Harper, that’s not what the girl told me. She says her name is…”

With a resigned sigh, Griff finished the sheriff’s sentence. “I know. She likes to call herself
Clarinda Isabella
Worthington.
She read it in a book, somewhere.” Shaking his head sadly, he touched a finger to his temple. “The doctors tell us she’s simple-minded. Not so bad we need to put her away, but we sometimes have to… The truth is, when she’s having one of her spells, we usually just paddle her butt and lock her up in the spring house ‘til she calms down.” He looked over at Clarinda, who was listening to the exchange with renewed interest, and an appreciative smile. “Her given name is Gertrude— Gertrude Eulalie Harper, but the family just calls her Gertie. It seems to fit her.”

The sheriff made a face. “With a name like that, I reckon I can understand why she came up with
Clarinda,
” he conceded. “Well, Mr. Harper, I’ll make you a deal. If you’re willing to pay what’s owed to the hotel, and come up with another twenty dollars cash—for her disturbing the peace and biting an officer of the law—she’s all yours. And I’m hoping you won’t take offense when I say you’re goddamned welcome to her.”

Griff reached for his wallet, which felt noticeably lighter than it had just twenty-four hours earlier. “No offense taken, Sheriff. I appreciate you not tossing her in the clink.”

“I reckon she’s kinda young for that,” the sheriff replied, “especially with her… with her condition, and all. That’s real sad, but if you don’t mind my saying so, it seems to me this little sister of yours, even with her being kinda slow, could use a good, long lesson in how to behave—with your pa’s razor strop, if he’s got one.”

“Something I’ll be sure to see to once we get back to the farm,” Griff replied, with a stern glance in ‘
Gertie’s’
direction. “The little hellion has had a whipping coming for a long time. Did you hear that, little sister? When we get home, I’m taking you out to the barn for a walloping you won’t soon forget. You’ll be damned lucky if you can sit down easy for a full week. Now, unless you want some of that walloping I just promised you right here and now, you’ll get your behind outta’ that damned chair. We’ve got a long ride ahead of us, and you just might be making it with your dumb runaway ass on fire.”

After he’d paid Clarinda’s fines at the Sheriff’s office, Griff walked back to the hotel, pulling the newly liberated criminal behind him. She was still sputtering about injustice and lowdown thieving desk clerks, and he was afraid she’d open her mouth and say something to set off another brawl—a concern that seemed justified when she began threatening to
“cut out the lying sonofabitch’s damned gizzard.”

He would have preferred to leave her in the sheriff’s safe-keeping while he settled up with the hotel, but when he asked, the sheriff had simply shaken his head and muttered, “
Not on your life
,
mister.”
It was beginning to look like they might have worn out their welcome in Brewer’s Creek.

With the damages paid and his wallet measurably flatter, Griff collected their few belongings from the hotel, and his horse, Jack, from the livery stable, and rode out of Brewer’s Creek as quickly as possible—with Gertie/Clarinda behind him, chatting without letup, and clinging with one fist to the handle of her new green valise.

“Why are you in such an all-fired hurry?” she asked as they rode past the battered sign announcing the town limits. “I was hopin’ we could get us some breakfast at that place we ate our supper last night. Maybe show off this new dress you got me.”

“I don’t think we’d be real welcome there,” Griff explained irritably. “Not after the ruckus you raised about the food.”

“I keep tellin’ you,” she growled, “there wasn’t nothin’ all that much wrong with the food, ‘cepting what it cost.”

Griff turned in the saddle to face her. “The bill might have been less if you hadn’t tried to swipe all the damned silverware, and the six napkins they found stuffed down your drawers.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I figured you paid enough for the danged things. Besides, hoity-toity places like that prob’ly get all that stuff real cheap.”

When they were safely out of town, Griff reined Jack to a slow walk.

“We need to talk about a few things,” he said.

“What kinda things?”

“To begin with, I need to know if what the sheriff said back there was true.”

“If what was true?”

“You know damned well what I’m talking about. Did you run away from an orphanage, or not?”

“And what if I did?”

“Then, you’re going back, just as soon as I can get you there. Where is it?”

“I forget,” she said sweetly. “I’m kinda simple minded, remember?”

“All right then, what’s your name, and how old are you—
really
?”

“You been good to me, and I owe you for that,” she said stiffly. “I mean to pay you back when I’m able, but I figure that’s
all
I owe you. The rest is my own damned business. I don’t need no more help from you, or nobody else.”

“If I hadn’t stepped in and
helped
you,” Griff said, “you’d be sitting on your stubborn butt in the Brewer’s Creek jail, waiting to be hauled back where you came from in handcuffs—and probably a damned muzzle. I’ve never met a small town sheriff who took kindly to being bitten.”

“I’m real sorry I bit that sheriff fella, but it was him to blame, mostly. He shoulda’ just listened to what I had to say before dragging me off to his no-account jail. You think I couldn’t a busted outta a dump like that?” she asked smugly. “I got outta that damned hellhole they called an orphanage often enough—six times since I was eight years old.”

“What was it about the place that made it so bad?”

“Still none o’ your business.”

Griff sighed. “You know, I’m thinking that sheriff back there might be right about something else. How about if we get down off this horse and I blister your backside?”

“I’d like to see you try it.”

“There’s this old Mexican proverb I read once,” he said wearily. “It goes: ‘Be careful what you ask for. You may get it.’”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Yeah, and what’s that supposed to mean? Why the hell don’t you just say what you mean, and quit tryin’ to sound so fuckin’ smart all the time? Like you know how to read Mexican, and all.”

Griff reined Jack to a full stop, got down from the saddle, and pulled her down after him. Then, in one deft motion, he turned an obviously shocked Gertie-Clarinda across his hip and tossed up the skirt of the brand new dress she’d owned for less than twenty-four hours.

“What the Sam Hill do you think you’re—” That was as far as she got before Griff laid three fast resounding thwacks on her squirming backside, eliciting a howl of shock from Gertie-Clarinda, and a stream of obscenities that impressed even him.

“Now,” he said, addressing the back of her head. “Let’s try this again. What’s your name, and how old are you?”

She craned her head around to face him, brushed her hair out of her eyes, and stuck out her tongue. “I told you already, it ain’t none of your fuckin’ business. And I still don’t believe you can read Mexican!”

There was a pause of several seconds, while Griff tightened his grip around her waist, pulled off his belt, and folded it in two. With her head down and her toes barely touching the ground, Gertie/Clarinda couldn’t see what was happening during this short “intermission,” making what
did
happen the
second
unpleasant surprise of her day. The wide leather belt cracked across the exquisitely sensitive underswell where her upper thighs met her buttocks, and even through the fabric of her brand-new muslin drawers, every blow felt like she’d sat down on a red-hot stove.

A half-dozen painfully well-placed swats later, Griff dumped her back onto her feet.

“Who the hell give you the right to wallop me like that?” she demanded, rubbing her rear-end in a futile attempt at extinguishing the fire.

“I’m your older brother, remember?”

“Yeah, well I’ll just betcha you’d never do nothin’ like that to your danged
sister.”

“If she’d called me what you just did, she’d be sitting on a pillow for a day or so, that’s for sure. Now, how old are you? And if you lie to me again, we’re gonna start all over, with those pretty new drawers of yours down around your damned ankles.”

“I turned sixteen last month,” she muttered sullenly.

“What’s your name? Your
real
name?”

“My ma and pa named me Eileen a’Roon. It means
secret pleasure of my heart
, and yeah, I know it’s a stupid thing to call a little baby, but they was both from some little place in Ireland where folks go around naming babies stuff like that—stuff that nobody can spell, or understand what it means. Ireland’s somewheres over in Europe, I think. Anyway, I reckon the damn fools at that orphan place they took me hadn’t cleaned their ears so good, ‘cause when I told ’em my name, they took to callin’ me Earleen right-off. I had this little bitty locket with my name writ on it, but all that was left on it by then was the big
‘E’
and a lot of scratches. It got all beat up during the wreck.”

“
Wreck?
”

“Yeah. We was on this paddle-wheeler headed upriver—Ma and Pa, and me and my baby sister, Annie. After the tax people took our place in Kentucky, Pa sold off just about ever’thing we had, hopin’ to maybe find us a little farm in Oregon, so’s we could get us a new start. Even sold off my ma’s harp—the one I told you about, that she come over from Ireland with. Ma wasn’t the kind to go around cryin’ all the time, but she cried when they carried off that little gold harp. I was about to cry too, but I didn’t let on. I figured Pa already felt bad enough.

“Anyway, one mornin’ while we was all still asleep, there was a real big boom, and the whole boat just upped and blew itself all to smithereens. Nobody acted like they knew what the heck was goin’ on, but one fella kept on yellin’ about the boiler. After that, the boat just kinda went all to pieces, and the pieces started floatin’ off down the river. I reckon most of the folks there got drowned. Someone throwed me and Annie in the river with two of them float things on, and after a while, we got picked up by a fella out fishin’ for catfish. We was both about froze to death, but we wasn’t hurt much. We never seen Ma or Pa again, though.”

Griff sighed. “I’m very sorry about your parents, Clarinda. Life can be hard out here—especially for newcomers, but at least you still have your sister. Is she still at the orphanage?”

She shook her head. “She passed on a couple months after we got there.”

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, knowing that his words were woefully inadequate, no matter how often he repeated them.

“They told me she’d caught the diphtheria,” she went on. “Annie was real little for her age, and she’d always been kinda spindly, but there was never enough to eat there, and one day, it’s like she just got too weak to wake up. I pitched a fit and told the son of a bitch who run the place they starved my baby sister to death. They locked me up in this old root cellar ‘til I said I’d take it back and stop tellin’ lies about ‘em, but I told ‘em no, and that for all I cared, they could all go shit in their damned hats.”

He smiled. “Good for you.”

“Maybe,” she conceded, with a resigned shrug. “But I got the tar beat outta me a couple o’ times with this big ole black strap the preacher liked usin’ on the littler kids—said it helped ‘em to
get the point
, early on. I kept on spittin’ in his fat face while he done it, but none of it brought Annie back. She wasn’t but four years old when they put her in the ground.” She wiped her eyes. “You really gonna take me back there?”

“What’s the place called?” he asked, avoiding the question until he could decide if, and
how
he was going to arrange a good solution to what was a phenomenally
bad
situation—a solution that would allow him to walk away with a clear conscience, and if he was lucky, with no regrets.

“You plan on takin’ that belt to me again, if I was to say I can’t remember?”

“No,” he replied with a deep sigh. “But if you won’t tell me what I need to know, I don’t see how I can help you. The fellow-traveler bargain we agreed to goes both ways, Clarinda.”

For around thirty seconds, the girl didn’t say anything—trying to decide whether or not to trust him, Griff guessed. And then, finally, Gertie-Clarinda started talking.

“My whole name is Eileen a ‘Roon O’Malley—but my pa used to call me Elyn, for short. The name of the place I was at was Angels Unaware, like in the Bible,” she began. “Ain’t that…
Isn’t
that a hoot? One time, there was four young’uns died in just three weeks, so I guess they maybe
did
get to be angels after that. No one ever said nothin’ about what happened. One day they was there, and the next day… There was this graveyard out back, with rocks, and dead grass and a lot of little wood crosses, but most a’ the names on the crosses was all worn off. I found me an old shingle, and wrote Annie’s name on it with a piece o’ burnt wood, but the rain kept washin’ it away, ‘til I gave up and figured I’d just keep her in a little corner of my heart somewhere. Maybe I’ll get back there some day and give Annie a proper gravestone.”

When she’d finished the story, Griff could tell that she was having trouble holding back the tears, and since he was having a problem with the same thing, he continued asking for information. “How long does this place keep the children they take in?”

“The girls earn their keep sewin’ feed bags ‘til they turn eighteen. I seen some of ‘em go out when they was fourteen or so, when some dirt farmer come lookin’ for a woman he could work to death without payin’ her a red cent, and usin’ her for what he… Anyhow, after they left, we never heard nothin’ else about ‘em. No letters, or nothin.’ It was like most o’ them girls just fell down a hole and disappeared. I got hired out a lot’ o times, to work on some farm or other, but when I kept on tryin’ to run off, they quit lettin’ me out. When the boys got to around twelve, they usually got hired out during the day and come back at night. They was always plumb wore out from hard work, but none of ‘em ever seen the wages they was supposed to get.”

When Griff didn’t say anything else, Eileen found a large rock and sat down to remove a pebble from her shoe. With that done, she began braiding her hair.

“You still ponderin’ how to get shed of me?” she asked finally, with a feigned air of indifference. “I’m kinda runty, so I reckon you could just tie me up in a feed sack and toss me in a damned lake, or somethin’, or drown me in the first well we come to, like I was some old stray cat you didn’t want.”

Griff chuckled. “No lakes around here that I know of, and most people don’t like fishing stray cats out of their wells. Besides, I’m partial to cats.”

She stood up, beaming. “I’m kinda like a stray cat, so I reckon me and you are gonna have to stick together for a spell, right?”

He smiled. “It looks that way—for now.”

But the truth was, Griff had something else in mind for this stray kitten. Something better—if he could arrange it.