Lake of Fire (12 page)

“Look at these mountains.” She’d held out the
book and pointed to the Teton Range. “Black and white can’t even suggest the myriad colors there must be. And a frozen image doesn’t convey the way those clouds must form and disappear.”

Forrest looked again at his hand: a two, five, and nine of hearts; a jack of diamonds; and the ace of spades. He could discard and draw, but somehow he didn’t have the spirit to do more than fold.

From across the table, Hank Falls’s piercing dark eyes fixed on Forrest, his cards fanned loosely in his long-fingered hands. The tulip-shaped electric light mounted on a redwood column shone on his blond hair.

Hank had talked him into playing, after Forrest had spent the last three evenings rocking on the porch, waiting for news while he watched the light die over the lake.

“I guess this wasn’t such a good idea,” he told Hank and the two men from Memphis who’d joined their game.

Pushing his cards away, he rubbed his chest. His roast beef dinner lay like a rock in his stomach, the same as everything he’d sent down lately.

Laura should be here, dressed in that red brocade she’d worn on New Year’s Eve to receive at Fielding House, with Violet’s exquisite cameo at the neckline. They’d ushered in 1900 with fanfare.

Forrest closed his eyes, while he tried to push away the image of sparkling green eyes turned sightless, vultures pecking and stripping away his daughter’s flesh. Manfred Resnick of the Pinkerton Agency, who had
arrived yesterday to investigate, had told him about the bodies beside the abandoned stagecoach. Thankfully, Laura had not been with them, but where could she be?

The orchestra of hotel employees, who waited tables and made beds during the day shift, played “Lorena,” that haunting tune, and he imagined Laura dancing with Hank Falls. The top of her head would not reach Hank’s shoulder.

Forrest sighed. It would take a forceful and forthright man like Hank to tame his daughter, if only she were found safe.

He excused himself from the card table and trudged across the lobby toward the small barroom, built in the hotel in spite of general prohibition in the park. He ordered Kentucky bourbon, neat, and studied with approval the selection of liquor behind the bar. It was really quite remarkable how good the hospitality was, considering the wilderness outside the front door.

Draining his glass, Forrest contemplated having another and rejected it. A rocking chair on the hotel’s front porch called to him; he would spend the hours between now and bedtime torn between wanting to cry for Laura and wanting to pinch her head off for putting herself in danger.

Ten feet from the door, he swerved to avoid a young boy hurrying precipitously into the lobby. The kid wore trousers and an oversized blue shirt with rolled sleeves, and carried a dirty brown coat under
one arm.

As they collided, the boy’s hat tipped from his head. Brown hair spilled in untidy waves over slender shoulders.

Laura recognized her father when he gasped, “I thought you must be dead!”

He threw his arms around her, and all she could think was that he must have been terrified, or he would not let his silk waistcoat contact her filthy jacket.

Thinking how many years it had been since they embraced, she closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against the scratchy lapel of his wool suit coat. He smelled the same as she remembered, of cigar smoke, bourbon, and a violet-scented preparation he used after shaving. Funny, she had watched him age day by day, but after just a few weeks apart, she noticed his paunch from Chicago steaks and his matching round bald head.

When they broke apart, she blinked in the bright electric lamps that decorated each dark post in the wide lobby. The big room was all wood, redwood paneling and dark beams holding up the white-painted ceiling. Polished yellow pine gleamed underfoot, reflecting the orchestra and couples dancing to the lively rhythm of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” The men wore dark suits or army dress uniforms, while the ladies were decked out in colorful silks.

Laura thought of Cord riding Dante on through the night.

Forrest snapped his fingers for a waiter. “You must be starving.”

“I had something earlier.” She had trouble reconciling the image of trout roasting over an open fire against the aspics, pastries, and frozen dainties she’d heard were served here.

“Nonsense,” he insisted. “You’ll eat something.”

Before she could demur, a man approached Forrest from behind. Rapier-thin, with dark blond hair and a sharp nose, he seemed vaguely familiar.

An equally slender blond woman in a purple satin gown, a match for her eyes, walked up with him. She looked with disdain upon Laura’s grimy trousers and Cord’s too-large shirt that hung on her. “Where in the world did she come from?”

In the silence that fell in the crowded lobby, the tall man ignored the question. A moment later, the woman stalked away, her heels tapping.

Laura hadn’t been able to comb her hair after the wind had knotted it, and in her unconventional dress, she was sure she looked frightful to guests who’d dressed for dinner. Her father was also taking in her sunburned face and arms, as if he wished she’d stumbled in out of the wilderness in a brocade gown. He hadn’t even asked how she’d gotten to the hotel.

“Your father has been very worried,” the thin man said in a tenor voice that grated on Laura’s nerves. “We sent a military posse out looking for you days ago. To-night,
they rode in empty-handed.” He looked down his narrow nose, as if she were at fault for the cavalry not finding her.

She thought of the cloud of dust raised when the soldiers had passed her and Cord on the road; they’d been looking for a helpless woman rather than a wiry boy on a sleek black horse.

Laura’s father also bore an impatient look. “We are going to have a discussion, young lady. I never authorized your traveling alone by stagecoach through the backwoods.”

How could she have thought things might be different? As soon as the initial shock of seeing her safe was past, he was back to his high-handed ways.

Laura straightened her spine. “I am not such a young lady.” Her gaze swept over her father, the imperious man, and the considerable audience their altercation had gathered. “If you will excuse me, I am very tired.”

The interloper bowed from the waist. “You and your family have the Absaroka Suite on the third floor,” he said smoothly, “with the best breezes. There’s a view of the lake and the mountains from your window, along with the ravens that roost in the tops of the pines.”

“How charming.” She was too exhausted to sound pleasant.

“And how thoughtless of me,” Forrest’s hand closed on her wrist, “for failing to make a proper introduction. Laura, this is Hank Falls.”

She gasped.

Hank bowed again and tried to snag her hand. She drew it back and stared up at him in disbelief. How could this haughty stranger have taken the place of the man she had manufactured in her mind?

As though he read her thoughts, her father slid his grip to her elbow and pointed her toward the stairs. “Here. As you are tired, you’re to go right to bed.”

He guided her up to a third-floor bedroom with a brass bed, heavy wardrobe, and bureau topped by a mirror. Pale champagne striping accented the wallpaper. She assumed the door on the opposite wall opened into the suite’s parlor.

“It will be better if we talk in the morning about how you came to arrive here.” He barely brushed a kiss on her cheek. “Rest well.”

He closed the door.

She leaned against it.

How could he have no more curiosity about what she had been through? How could he not ask what she had seen at the coach and after?

She looked at the bed, longing to collapse into a sleep so deep she might forget the past few days. But nature called, so she went back into the hall to find the bathroom.

Above the lavatory, a posted sign indicated that for a nominal charge of fifteen cents one might order a tub and hot water brought to their room.

Back down the wide hall, she descended the stairs and went to the front desk. The orchestra still played,
and a young man with a baritone voice sang.

A pair of strong-backed boys, probably some of the college students working for the summer, carried a heavy tin tub up to Laura’s room. Then they ferried up buckets of cold water until the tub was three-quarters full. Last, a steaming teakettle of hot water was delivered, and Laura was left alone.

She unwrapped a cake of lavender soap that smelled gentler than the harsh bar of lye Cord had given her at the hot spring.

Her mouth twisted, and she stripped off his shirt and threw it on the floor.

Blinking fiercely, she shampooed and washed herself with vigor. She would not think about him, not now or ever. Not imagine that he stood in her doorway, taking in her nakedness with eyes that appreciated it. Not wish the trail from Jackson’s Hole to Yellowstone had gone on forever.

Tears teetering behind her eyelids, she rose from the tub and toweled off as roughly as she had washed. Throwing back the chenille bedspread and wool blanket to expose clean white sheets, she prepared to climb into the luxury of a real bed.

The linens were surprisingly soft for a wilderness outpost. Though she never slept without a nightgown, tonight she slid between the covers naked. Her father had not even commented on her lack of luggage, and she had been too preoccupied to mention it.

Tired as she was, she expected to fall asleep immediately. Instead, she lay staring at the square of light
on the ceiling above a glass transom. The clock on the heavy wooden dresser ticked, marking the minutes toward midnight.

Each time Laura closed her eyes, she saw Cord’s blue eyes against an even bluer sky. After an hour, she gave up fighting it and allowed herself to remember. Moving her arms and legs restlessly on the smooth sheets, she felt a heavy fullness in the palms of her hands.

Tears welled again, rising behind the dam she’d built. For as much as she hated to admit it, she longed to be with Cord tonight.

The dam broke.

Laura lay on her back, shaking while tears ran into her hair. How could she still want to see him when he’d turned away without a backward glance?

If only she had not lost her journal in the raging waters of the Snake. If she had her leather-bound book, she would get up, find pen and ink and nib, and pour out everything that had happened since leaving the Union Pacific train and boarding the stage.

A soft tap at the bedroom door brought her up with a start. She retrieved Cord’s shirt from where she had dropped it beside the bed and used it to dash at her wet face.

Another knock. God, not her father, after he had promised to leave her alone until morning.

“Who is it?” Laura padded across the room and pressed her ear against the heavy dark wood, while she wrapped herself in the shirt.

An indistinct voice murmured something she didn’t understand. Slowly, she pulled the door open a crack, peering out into the hallway.

A warm soft shape nearly bowled her over, and she smelled the floral scent of too much Stolen Sweets perfume.

“Constance!”

“Laura!”

“Laura!”

Opening the door wide, she fell into the arms of her cousin from Chicago, Constance Devon. Both only children, they had grown up playing together.

As feminine and fragile as Laura was tough, Constance was two years younger and at least four inches shorter than Laura’s five feet, five inches. In the glow of electric light, Constance’s dark hair made a silken veil around her porcelain face. Her blue eyes were not the clear sky blue of Cord’s …

Laura clamped her teeth together.

… but pansy blue, the purple blue of winter flowers against snow, a shade that matched the silk wrapper belted snugly around Constance’s ample curves. She was a devotee of The Princess Bust Cream, “unrivaled for the enlargement of the bosom.”

“Father didn’t say you were here,” Laura groused. “Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised, for he seldom has much to say to me besides giving me household orders.”

“I went to bed early with a headache, and Mother took a dyspepsia powder,” Constance declared. “We’ve been so worried for you since we heard about the stage attack. I just overheard Uncle Forrest telling Mother
you were here safe.”

“Then why didn’t she … ?”

“Because he told her to let you sleep. You know she listens to him the way he wishes you would.” Constance’s expression conveyed her own frustration. Since her father had died when she was very young, Forrest Fielding’s influence had been the dominant force in her life, as well as his daughter’s. Even his younger sister, Fanny, lived largely underneath his shadow.

As though there was no point in reopening an old wound, Constance began to speak of other things. “How on earth did you get away from the stagecoach robbers? I heard the driver was killed.” Her eyes were bright with a mix of trepidation and vicarious excitement.

Laura sat down heavily on the woolen blanket, feeling it scratch her bare legs. How like Constance not to notice that she had been crying, to assume she was all right because she always had been before.