A
s Zach expected, the storm turned out to be severe, a deluge that lasted three days. Fearful that his tender new vines would never survive the onslaught, be spent every hour of daylight on the slopes, trying to shore up his plants and redirect the water flow so the topsoil wouldn't be washed away.
On the fourth night, the storm turned violent again, as if in finale, with thunder and lightning ripping across the heavens. Still not up to snuff after his recent illness and feeling indescribably weary after an endless day of work, Zach sat near the fire, absorbing the electrical tension in the air, his skin prickling as the windows and walls shook with thunder.
If the storm unnerved him, how might it be affecting Miranda? He hadn't had time to go by and check on her and Kate since the bad weather had hit. How were they? An awful sense of foreboding filled him. As irrational as he knew it was, he couldn't shake it. Something was wrong. He felt it in his bones. What with all the rain, things had been hectic here at his place. What if, in the confusion, the man he'd stationed to watch the road had missed seeing Ryan Blakely ride past?
The thought brought Zach to his feet. He moved to a window and stared out into the lightning-slashed darkness.
He didn't relish the thought of riding in this deluge to reach Kate's, and he knew she wouldn't appreciate the sacrifice if he did it. If he had any brains, he'd sit tight.
But since when had he laid claim to brains?
Leaving Nosy to cuddle near the fire, Zach dragged on his sheepskin coat, planted his old leather work hat on his head, and let himself out onto the back stoop. Wind buffeted him. He turned up his collar, hunched his shoulders, and stepped off the porch into ankle-deep slop. He wouldn't win any popularity vote from Dander for doing this, that was for sure. But he wouldn't get a wink of sleep if he didn't. He had to assure himself that Kate and Miranda were all right.
* * *
As Zach rode up the road to the Blakely place, he couldn't believe the evidence of his own eyes. When lightning bolted across the sky, he thought he saw Kate in the illumination. Kate outside? In the rose garden?
Peering through the sheets of rain, Zach rode closer and dismounted, leaving Dander's reins dangling. As he drew near he saw her dilemma. As had happened in his vineyards, the heavy and ceaseless rain had trenched the well-turned earth in her flower garden and was washing away the soil in rivers. She was working frantically with her hoe to mound dirt back around her plants.
"Katie! What in hell do you think you're doing?" he called. "You'll catch your death out here."
She gave a violent start and whirled to stare at him. Zach stared back. Her face was smeared with mud. Her gray skirt and white apron were soaked with brown clear to her hips. She must have been out here for quite some time.
Crazy, so crazy. For a bunch of damned roses? He threw a disgusted glance at the battered petals that eddied atop the currents of runoff. It was then that he saw it.
A man's boot.
He fixed his gaze on the sole protruding from the flooded earth. For several endless seconds, his mind refused to register what his eyes were telling him. Then he looked back at Kate. Lightning flared. Her skin was so pale it shone blue-white. She looked as dead as the man buried in her rose garden.
Zach felt as if a horse had kicked him in the guts.
She stood there staring back at him for what seemed an eternity. Then, as if all the fight in her had drained completely away, she dropped her head, let the hoe fall to the ground, and turned toward the house.
Zach remained rooted where he stood, his gaze on Kate as she slipped like a wraith up the steps. A feeble shaft of lantern light spilled across the rickety porch when she opened the door to let herself inside. In his peripheral vision, the boot seemed to loom. Rain sluiced off the brim of his hat in streams, ribboning his vision, trickling down his neck. He couldn't stir himself. Ryan Blakely's insane accusations hadn't been so insane, after all.
Holy Christ.
He finally pried his feet loose and followed Kate into the house. He found her sitting on a straight-backed chair in the room off the kitchen. Head tipped as if to listen, her hands folded demurely in her lap, she gazed sightlessly at the fireplace hearth. Muddy water dripped from her skirt onto the floor, forming a pool around her.
Zach came to a stop several feet from her. With a searching glance, he assured himself that Miranda was nowhere in the room. Since he hadn't seen her as he passed through the house, he supposed she was upstairs asleep, which was just as well. This wasn't going to be a conversation for a child to overhear.
"I think I deserve an explanation for this."
She didn't look up. "There's nothing to explain," she whispered in an expressionless voice. "You saw with your own eyes. I killed him and buried him in the rose garden."
Zach couldn't believe he was hearing this. "But—" He jerked his hat off. "He drowned! I thought he drowned."
Still completely motionless, she whispered, "I threw his saddle and some of his clothes into the river to make it appear that he had. It isn't uncommon for the bodies of drowning victims never to be discovered. As I hoped, Joseph was pronounced legally dead." Her mouth twisted. "If not for Ryan and you, that would have been the end of it."
He started to pace, his wet boots squishing as they thumped an erratic tattoo on the floor. Memories rushed at him. Serena, the house ablaze, his frantic efforts to reach her, the accusations later. Though these circumstances were completely different, there were similarities, and every instinct he had told him Kate was as innocent as he had been. Trapped in a nightmare, yes, but that didn't make a person a murderer.
Finally he halted, raked a trembling hand through his hair, and said roughly, "I don't believe it. You don't have a violent bone in your whole body. You couldn't even bring yourself to hit Nosy, for Christ's sake! Don't sit there and tell me you killed him. There's more to this than you're saying, and I want to hear it."
She finally lifted her gaze to his, her eyes haunted with memories he could only guess at. "You'd like me to tell you what you want to hear, that I'm somehow innocent? That it wasn't premeditated, maybe? Or that I regretted doing it later?"
"I want to hear the truth," he came back raggedly.
She blinked. "If I'd had regrets, they wouldn't bring Joseph back. And the truth, if you're really set on it, is that I considered murdering him at least a dozen times. Once I nearly drove my scissors into his back. If he hadn't turned at the last second and caught me, I would have."
Zach's throat felt raw. "Is that how you did it, with the scissors? Jesus, Mary, and—" He broke off, folded his arms across his chest, and put a hand over his face. "How, Kate? How did you do it? I can't believe you have it in you to stab someone."
"Trust me, I do. I wished him dead a hundred times," she replied in that horribly hollow voice. "The fact that his death, when it actually occurred, was accidental doesn't alter that." She dragged in a shaky breath. "I can only pray that—I can only pray Miranda doesn't do penance with me."
The pain he heard in her voice at mention of her daughter drew Zach toward her. Instinctively, he knew that fear for Miranda had been at the root of everything. Tossing his hat onto the floor, he hunkered beside her chair.
"How did it happen, Kate?" he asked gently.
She turned her gaze back to the fireplace. "It happened on a night like this. There was a storm, and I brought Miranda in here to keep her warm by the fire. Joseph didn't let me tell her stories other than those I read to her from the Bible, so to pass the time, I was doing mending while she sketched at the hearth." Tears filled her eyes.
"While I wasn't watching, she found a sliver of kindling, and she was touching it to a hot coal, blowing and trying to make it catch. Joseph walked in and saw her."
Zach's heart had begun to pound. He forced his eyes toward the hearth, an awful coldness filling him.
"As he often did, he began to scold. 'Don't you know what happens to little girls who play with fire?' That was what he asked her." Kate made a strangled sound. "That's how it always started. 'Don't you know what happens to little girls who play on the steps?' 'Don't you know what happens to little girls who play with scissors?' And then he would show her."
Zach closed his eyes. Dear God in heaven, he didn't want to hear this.
"He was given to fits of anger," she whispered. "To doing outlandish, obscene things to drive home his point.
Once when she snitched a bit of cornbread, he crammed an entire piece in her mouth and slapped her until she finally tried to swallow and choked. Once, when he found her dipping cream, he shoved her head in the pail. I finally succeeded in dragging him off her, but he nearly drowned her before I did."
Zach felt as if he were drowning himself, in a horrible sickness that penetrated his bones. But the words kept pouring from Kate, descriptions of one incident after another, as if she were spewing poison.
Then, at last, she returned to the night when Joseph had caught Miranda playing with fire. "As was his way, he…" Her voice shuddered down to nothing but a quavering breath. She pressed her fingertips to her lips and closed her eyes for a moment. "He thrust her hand into the flames."
Silence dropped like a blanket over the room. Zach could hear his pulse throbbing.
"Miranda started to scream," she whispered. "I'll never forget the sound. 'Ma! Ma!' over and over again. I tried to pull Joseph away. He beat me off with his fists and went back to holding her hand in the fire."
Zach fixed his gaze on the hairline scar on her bottom lip.
A sob jerked up from Kate's chest, dry and tearing. "I couldn't make him stop," she cried. "But I couldn't bear to let him continue. I had to do something. And so I grabbed up a length of firewood and hit him across the back.
Just across his shoulders. I didn't mean to hurt him, only to stop him. But when he fell, he struck his head on the hearth." She held up her hands in helpless supplication. "He was dead. I didn't mean to kill him, not that time. But he was dead."
"Katie…" Zach grasped her shoulders. "Honey, you didn't mean to do it. If you had, you'd have hit him on the head. Why in God's name didn't you go to the sheriff? There would have been a coroner's inquest, and within days, you could have put it behind you. Surely you didn't believe the law would punish you for protecting your child from a madman?"
"I was afraid!" she cried shrilly. "What if they had put me in jail? Even for a few days? Miranda had just been through an ordeal, and she needed her mother. I had no relatives to take her. There was only Ryan, and he's as mad as his brother was."
"She would have survived it for a few days," Zach came back.
Kate's eyes, huge and black in contrast to her white face, fastened on his. "Would she have? You don't know how fragile she really is. I couldn't let Ryan get his hands on her, not even for a single night. And what if, after trusting in justice, I had been found guilty of murder? I would have been imprisoned or hanged, and Miranda would have been in Ryan's custody for years. None of it was her fault! She didn't deserve to be punished, and if she were given to Ryan, she would have been, for the rest of her life. I couldn't risk that."
"So you buried Joseph in the rose garden."
She closed her eyes and nodded.
So many things suddenly came clear for Zach. That first day, and Kate's frenzied attempts to keep Nosy from digging in the flower bed. Nosy's determination to return, again and again, to resume his excavations. Kate's terror that Ryan's wild accusations might stir suspicion against her among the people in town. Her pallor the afternoon he had suggested that Ryan start his digging in the rose or vegetable garden. The list seemed endless.
Last, but not least, he finally knew why she had been so eager for him to recover from the snakebites and get out of her house.
There had been a dead man buried in her yard…
Now that she was silent, Kate blinked again and seemed to refocus on reality. She searched his gaze for a long while, then looked away. "You needn't look so stricken," she said softly. "There isn't any question of what you must do. I understand that." Her throat worked as she swallowed. "You'd best get to it."
When he remained hunkered beside her, she hugged herself.
"Go, Zachariah. There's no need to worry that I'll take off while you're gone to get the sheriff. I have nowhere to go, and no money to get there. I know better than to try fleeing with a child in a broken-down buckboard. I tried it a few times, you see, and we never got more than a few miles. The one time I saved enough for train fare, which I assure you I don't have now, Joseph wired ahead and had us detained in Medford ."
"By the law?" Zach recalled the afternoon he and Miranda had played dells, the story she had told him about Sarah and her mother being put off the train in Medford by the conductor. At Kate's affirmative nod, he asked,
"Why didn't you tell the sheriff what Joseph was like? And why you were running?"
She lifted her hands. "I tried."
Those two words revealed a world of heartache. From the look in her eyes, he knew a measure of the pain and helplessness she must have felt.
She refolded her hands in her lap, intertwining her fingers, digging into her skin with her nails. "Joseph—he was so respectable looking—so charming. He had everyone here, including the authorities, convinced he was wonderful and that I was the strange one." Her breath caught, and she moistened her lips. "He wired ahead to Medford that I—that I wasn't quite right, and that I'd run off with his daughter. The people there thought I was crazy and that I was the one who might harm her."
Her voice became shrill as she uttered those last few words, and she closed her eyes, making a visible effort to regain her composure.
Zach was about to reply when he spied movement from the corner of his eye. When he turned and peered through the gloom beyond the lantern light, he saw Miranda lurking in the adjoining kitchen. On leaden legs, he went to find her, gathered the frightened child into his arms, and carried her upstairs. Under her direction, he located her bedroom and tucked her into bed.
"It's just a storm," he assured her. "Nothing to be afraid of."
She huddled and shivered under the quilt. "Is my ma gonna get took away to a bad place 'cause of what she did?"
Zach realized that she had overheard their conversation and that she understood far more than she should. The accusing look in her eyes tore at his heart. He had no idea how to answer her or to explain what he knew he had to do.
As if she sensed his thoughts, she cried, "My ma didn't mean to hurt my pa. The fireplace hearth did it. People shouldn't oughta be punished for what they didn't do."
Zach tried to swallow. "Mandy, the way the law works is usually fair. It's very unlikely that your ma will be punished for something that was an accident."
"They'll take her away," she accused. "She won't be here with me no more. I'll be all alone!"
Zach leaned over and gathered her close. "No, never that. I'll make sure you're never alone."