Liz Ireland (20 page)

“See who?”

“Oren.”

Will flinched. She was calling him Oren now? “I spoke with Tyler just a few minutes ago.” In fact, he was glad to see Paulie here. He still wasn’t certain how to broach the subject of the gambler’s latest move with Mary Ann. Maybe Paulie could give him her opinion. He couldn’t
imagine her not giving it, in fact. “Look at this,” he said, holding out the envelope. “He came here to give me two hundred dollars for Mary Ann.”

“That was nice of him,” Paulie said.

“Nice, my foot!” Will scoffed. “He wants me to give it to her as payment for…” His mouth snapped closed.

“For what?” Paulie asked, immediately curious.

Will swallowed. It was just as well Paulie knew the truth. “For Mary Ann’s child.”

She sucked in a surprised breath. “Mary Ann’s going to have a little one?”

“Yes, and this two hundred dollars is to ease his guilt. The only thing I can hope is that it will show him for the cad he is and Mary Ann will forget about him.”

Paulie shook her head. “She won’t forget about him.”

Will tilted his head and studied her. There
was
something queer about her. For one thing, the last time he’d seen her, she’d been hopping mad. Now she was almost eerily serene. “You seem awfully sure of Mary Ann’s feelings on the matter.”

“I am.” She propped herself up on her elbows and looked into Will’s eyes, and let out a long dramatic sigh. “Now that I’ve talked to him, I understand Mary Ann’s attraction to the man.”

“You do?”

“You know what he called me?”

Will balled his fists. “If he said something to insult or offend you—”

Paulie shook her head. “He called me a sweet little sugar lump.”

Will stared at her in shock. For some reason, those words seemed even worse than he’d expected. “What!”

“He said my eyes were two exotic jade pools,” she went
on dreamily, just managing to suppress another sigh. “Can you imagine?”

Will laughed, hoping to shake this odd mood of hers. “And I always thought they were more grasshopper green!”

She pursed her lips and sent him a scathing glance. “That’s just the difference between you and Oren.”

Will groaned in distress. “Don’t tell me you’re stuck on him, too. Especially not after what I’ve told you!”

“No, but I can definitely see that Oren Tyler is a man who knows how to turn a woman’s head.”

“I’m sure he’s made an art of it,” Will said bitterly. What was Tyler up to, flattering Paulie like that?

“He certainly has,” she said with another languorous sigh.

Will cocked his head and studied her objectively. In a simple navy serge dress, she did look beautiful today. It could be that the gambler was just doing what came naturally. But fancy compliments were never Will’s strong suit. Jade pools! Hadn’t he himself noticed Paulie’s fine green eyes before anyone else?

Her wholehearted defection to Tyler’s camp rankled. “Lord, Paulie, I never thought I’d hear you singing that varmint’s praises.”

“Me, neither,” Paulie said. “But I’ve never had a man look at me like that before.”

Will’s brows shot up suspiciously. “How was he looking at you?”

“Like he was a kid and I was birthday cake. It made me feel all jittery inside, unbalanced.”

Will’s mouth set in a grim line. “Sounds wonderful.”

“Oh, it was very uncomfortable,” Paulie agreed reasonably. “But just think, that’s probably how poor Mary Ann’s felt for months now.”

“Poor
Mary Ann?” Will repeated.

“Gracious, Will, it’s like the man’s cast a spell on her.”

“Sounds more like he’s cast one on you!” he said.

She let out a light chuckle, as if the very idea were plainly absurd. “I know that. Goodness, if that were true, I imagine I’d be on the road to Denver right now.”

“He told you he was leaving town then?”

“Told me!” She laughed merrily. “He invited me to go along with him.”

“What!”

“Don’t worry, I told him I couldn’t possibly.”

Will felt his temper rising. “I should hope so.”

Paulie looked at him, a half smile touching her lips. “Why?”

“Why?” he repeated hotly. “I would think it would be obvious why!”

She flicked at an imaginary piece of lint on her skirt. “Is it Tyler in particular you don’t like, or do you simply despise the idea of any woman running off with a man besides yourself?”

“It’s Tyler!”

“You didn’t seem too happy when Mary Ann married Oat, either.”

“Well of course I wasn’t, but I didn’t know…” It was his turn to let out a sigh this time. A ragged one.

She looked at him squarely. “Why should you worry about who I talk to, or where I go, Will?”

He hesitated. “I just feel responsible for you, is all.”

“That’s all?” she asked.

“Naturally,” he said, barely reining in his temper. “What else should I feel?”

She sucked in a breath, and for a moment she simply looked at him sadly. “Nothing, I guess,” she said, standing. Her good mood and teasing manner disappeared. “But
don’t think I’m sitting around hoping you’ll take care of me, Will. I’ve done pretty well all these years without you. You shouldn’t let responsibility for me weigh down your shoulders.”

She turned and stalked out of the room, and once again, Will felt bewildered. And this time, he felt a little angry. Didn’t women ever stay on an even keel? It seemed they were always flying off the handle about something!

He tried thinking over his words to figure out what he could have said to make her so snippety with him. He’d told her he felt a certain responsibility for her. What was so wrong with that? Weren’t women supposed to want to be watched over, and be taken care of? She’d looked at him as if even hinting at such a thing should have been a hanging offense. But when she was talking about running off with Tyler…

Maybe he should have owned up to how much he cared for her. But it was a new feeling for him. Besides, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d laughed in his face if he’d told her the truth.

But clearly he had to say something to patch things up between them now. He got up slowly from the chair, glad that he didn’t seem to feel any dizziness. The pain in his shoulder had subsided a good deal too, down to a dull throb. He could live with that for a while. What he couldn’t live with was Paulie not understanding that he didn’t think of her solely in big-brother terms.

He took a few more tentative steps across the room, pleased by his progress, when the door flew open and Mary Ann dashed in, breathless and flushed.

“Where is it!” she cried, practically flattening him. She rushed into his chest, causing a riot of pain to rush through him.

He bit back a groan. “What?”

“Paulie said Oren was here and left something for me,” Mary Ann said impatiently. “Where is it?”

Biting his lip, he nodded toward the envelope on the table by the bed. “There.”

She ran over, snatched it up, and tore it open. “I knew it! I knew he’d want to see me again. I bet he’s sending for me, isn’t he?”

As she said the words, she shook the envelope and the two hundred dollars came spilling out. She checked the emptied envelope for a message that wasn’t there.

But almost immediately, the expression on her face said that the message had come through loud and clear.

She shook her head, in denial. “You sent him away, didn’t you, Will?” she asked, her voice quick and breathy as she searched in vain for some positive slant on this slap in the face, this payoff. “You’ve thought over my offer and told him that you intend to marry me, didn’t you?”

Sadly, Will shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mary Ann. I can’t,” he said. “And now Oren’s left for Denver.”

And almost immediately, the boardinghouse was rocked by the sound of a piercing wail the likes of which no resident there had ever heard.

T
hat afternoon, a pall fell over the boardinghouse. The members of the household walked on eggshells and spoke to each other in hushed tones. Even Maudie appeared to feel the void created by the gambler’s leaving town and the passing of Mary Ann’s ill-fated romance. She lost five straight games of poker to Paulie.

After recovering from her first stroke of shock, Mary Ann began to dash in and out of the house, a black-draped flurry of purpose. What exactly she was doing, no one could tell, and no one was about to ask her point-blank, but the young woman seemed to be intent on something, even if it were simply taking short, frequent walks. At the same time, she had the distracted, feverish air of a person about to become permanently unhinged from reality.

When she left the house for the third time in an hour, Paulie could stand no more. She put her cards on the table and pushed her chair away. “I think I’ll take a walk,” she told Maudie.

“You mean you’re going to leave me five games down just so you can go spying?”

Paulie gasped, shocked that she was so transparent.

“Don’t worry,” Maudie said, winking. “You have my blessing. I also want to know what the girl’s up to.”

“She sure looks distraught, with all her running in and out.”

Maudie crossed her arms. “I’d be distraught, too, if I’d just been widowed by one man, abandoned by another, and had a little one on the way.”

Paulie nodded, not bothering to add that it must seem twice as dismal to be abandoned by such a good-looking fellow. Then she snapped her head up.
With a little one on the way?
“How did you know?” she asked.

“I had a child myself, you know.”

Paulie shook her head. Maudie had probably known before any of them. “You may not believe this, but I’m beginning to think Mary Ann really did love that gambler.”

Mrs. Worthington considered that hypothesis with a doubtful squint. “Anyways, the girl’s got a tough row to hoe ahead of her. I guess I can keep her on here.”

Paulie jerked her head up in surprise. “Here?” She wouldn’t have imagined Maudie would feel so generous towards Mary Ann.

She knew plenty of people, even men, who would have tossed her out on her ear once they learned of her unseemly conduct and its consequences.

Maudie waved a hand at her. “Sure, I’ve criticized her, and I do wish she could sit still long enough to play cards now and then. But where else is the poor thing going to go?” Before Paulie could voice the obvious, she pointed out, “If Mary Ann had wanted to live with her parents, I don’t suppose she would have run off and married a man three times her age to begin with.”

Maybe Mary Ann would be grateful to hear that she wouldn’t be tossed out of Maudie’s, Paulie thought as she made her way down the street towards town. It was another
breezy, fine day, so she enjoyed the walk. Once in the center of town, she stood on a sidewalk and looked around at the people milling about, trying to find any sign of Mary Ann.

She finally spotted her corning out of a bank on the opposite street. She was carrying a large envelope in her hands, and staring intently at it as she walked, but when she stopped at an intersection to let a wagon pass by, she looked up—right in Paulie’s direction.

Paulie panicked. Suddenly, it felt underhanded to be spying on her this way. How could she explain her curiosity? She darted back into the shadow of a building and ducked into the first doorway she saw.

It was the postal and telegraph office. Luckily, the building had a large glass window, so she watched Mary Ann as she headed back in the direction of Maudie’s street, following her bobbing blond ringlets until they disappeared from view completely, and she knew it was safe to go home.

“Is somebody after you?”

Captured off guard by the strange voice, Paulie turned and found a short balding man behind the post office counter looking at her with interest. “No,” she replied. “Just the opposite—I was watching someone else.”

He chuckled. “I see. I thought maybe I had me a real female desperado on my hands—maybe a new name to add to my gallery.” He nodded toward a wall where several Wanted posters had been pinned.

A face on one of the posters—one that appeared to be brand-new—caught Paulie’s eye. “Night Bird,” she said. On this particular poster there was a rudimentary drawing, but the cold eyes were unmistakable. She walked over to read the litany of his crimes listed beneath his likeness.

The man squinted at her, then stepped out behind his counter. “You ever seen him before?”

“We’re old friends.”

“First he was wanted for killin’ the three men with the railroad payroll. Then just yesterday he killed another man.”

“Who?”

“Some fellow who’d been chasin’ him for a while. Used to be a Texas ranger once, but I think they kicked him out. Name was Cal Tucker. Wasn’t too far from here, either.”

Paulie felt a chill sink deep into her bones. “Cal?” she repeated. That man had to be the man they’d seen at Roy Bean’s! But his being killed was almost incredible. He’d looked so able, so…mean. She couldn’t believe that Night Bird had gotten him. More than that, she was amazed anew that she and the others had actually had the good fortune to escape the fate Cal had met. She felt clammy with relief—and renewed anxiety.

She turned, thanked the man for letting her use his post office to hide in, then rushed for the door. She couldn’t wait to tell Will the news about Cal. Her pace was brisk as she began to walk down the street, but moments later she found herself transfixed in front of a store window.

It was a general store, the same one Will had gone into the other day. With the memory of Night Bird’s latest attack fresh in her mind, she went inside it for the same reason that Will had gone in before his meeting with Tyler. A gun. She and Will would be heading back to Possum Trot soon, and she didn’t want to be on the road without a weapon again.

She bought the best piece she could with what little money she had left over from paying Maudie. It was an old revolver, none too solid looking, but she imagined it would do in a pinch. She just hoped the pinch never came.

She stopped in an alley and tucked the revolver away under her skirt. Just having the gun in her possession made her feel a little safer as she walked back to the boardinghouse. The cold that had crept into her bones when she heard about Cal dissipated a little.

“Mary Ann got back a while ago,” Maudie said as she walked into the house. “Where you been? You must have missed her.”

Paulie’s mind was miles from her spying mission now. “I suppose so,” she said, heading straight for the staircase. She wanted to talk to Will.

“You might tell the others that dinner’s ready,” Maudie said. “I don’t suppose Mary Ann’s going to be much help serving tonight.”

Paulie hated to tell the woman her doubts about Mary Ann’s helpfulness on
any
night, so she simply nodded and started up the staircase. She raced all the way to Mary Ann’s attic room, deciding to save talking to Will for last so they could have a leisurely discussion about their renegade acquaintance.

She rapped lightly on Mary Ann’s door and stepped back, waiting for either a shouted reply or for the door to be flung open. Neither happened. Paulie accompanied her next knock with a whispered, “Mary Ann?” When that also failed to garner a response, she carefully pushed the door open, just enough to peek inside and discover that no one was in the small chamber, there was a note on the bed.

Paulie edged toward it, feeling somehow guilty for being in Mary Ann’s private space, which had such an eerily deserted feeling, and dreading, too, being the one to discover whatever was contained in that note. She was certain it couldn’t be good news. A quick perusal confirmed her fear.

I have gone to Denver. Please don’t worry. I have Oat’s bonds.

Mary Ann

P.S. I had to take one of the horses so I could catch up with Oren. I’m not sure whose it is—the pretty dark one.

I know you won’t mind!

The short missive was addressed to no one in particular. Paulie rushed to the window and looked out, half expecting to see Mary Ann in the yard below. How had Mary Ann sneaked out of the house? She must have just left while Maudie-was busy in the kitchen. But if she was on Will’s horse, even a few minutes’ lead would put her well ahead of anyone who wanted to catch up with her.

A shiver worked its way from the crown of Paulie’s head to the tips of her toes. Denver! On horseback? Alone? Didn’t she realize there were miles and miles of rough country between her and her destination? What if she never did catch up with Tyler?

Shaking her head in disbelief and yet unable to take her eyes off the note, Paulie hurried back down the flight of narrow stairs, knocked quickly on Will’s door, and strode right on in.

The man turned and shot straight up about two feet into the air at the sight of her. When Paulie looked up from her note, she jumped, too. There stood Will, gloriously barechested in front of her. She’d seen him like this before, of course, but it was an even more impressive sight when the man was standing up. Vertical, he looked more imposing, more dangerous. Especially with that slash of white bandage covering his shoulder.

“Don’t you ever knock?”

Paulie licked her lips, sure she didn’t have enough spit in her to answer. “I did knock,” she finally managed.

He rolled his eyes and quickly snatched a waiting shirt off the bed. “That’s fine. Now all you have to do is learn the second part. There are two magical words called ‘come in.’“

She shook her head, marvelling at the speed that Will’s large but nimble fingers could work those buttons. He seemed so self-conscious about being shirtless in front of her, which wasn’t like him. Of course, the fact that she was gawking at him probably didn’t put him at ease.

“I just came in to tell you dinner was ready,” she said slowly, knowing there were other things she had to talk to him about, too, and yet not being able to call them up at just this moment.

He nodded at the all-but-forgotten note she held in her hands. “Your racing in here didn’t have anything to do with that?”

She glanced down, almost as startled by his perception as she had been by his nakedness.

“I heard you come clattering down from Mary Ann’s room,” he explained, taking the note from her hands. “What kind of a fix is she in now?”

Paulie didn’t have the nerve to tell him. Instead, she let him read for himself, watching his face as he did so, wait ing for the shock or anger to register. To her surprise, it was a long time coming—not until he’d read and reread the last line.

“Damn!” he cried, looking up sharply at Paulie. “Did you see this? She stole Ferdinand!”

Paulie blinked. This wasn’t the reaction she had expected. “Don’t you understand? She’s gone after Oren Tyler!”

“’Course I understand,” Will said. He ran a hand
through his hair. “I also understand she ran off with the best horse I ever had.”

She couldn’t believe her ears. “Just think how dangerous it is for her. How is she ever going to catch up with him? Do you know how many miles are between here and Denver?”

Will nodded, his lips twitching in disgust. “Good luck to her.”

“But Will!” Paulie stamped her foot excitedly, but the gesture didn’t result in a decisive
clump
in her new shoes like it always had in her old work boots. “Mary Ann’s in danger, Will. Night Bird’s out there somewhere.”

Will looked at her oddly. “Of course he is, but hundreds of people still travel the roads every day.”

She shook her head. “I was just at the post office. That man Cal who we met at Roy Bean’s got killed by Night Bird.”

Will’s face paled a little. “What do you suggest?”

Paulie didn’t have to think two seconds to come up with an answer. “I think we should go after her.”

“We?”

She nodded fervently. “Right away.”

“We?”
Will repeated.

“Of course!” Paulie said. “I can’t just stand by while Mary Ann goes riding off all alone,” she declared. “I can’t believe you would, either.”

“Why not?” he asked. “We both could probably spend the next few decades of our lives trailing after Mary Ann to keep her from making mistakes, but that wouldn’t keep her from making them. At some point, you have to put a stop to nonsense, or you’ll just be encouraging it. You said yourself—it’s time to let her make her own decisions.”

Paulie couldn’t believe this was Will talking. Will, who
a mere three days before had been intent on trailing after Mary Ann forever like a knight on a white horse!

Of course, thanks to Mary Ann, he now had no horse at all.

“The Breens could arrive here any time after tomorrow to fetch Mary Ann back home,” she pointed out.

“That was your doing, not mine.”

“All right, but what will we say to them—’Sorry, after making you come all this way we just stood by while your daughter ran off after a stranger’?”

“He’s not exactly a stranger.”

“What do any of us know about Oren Tyler?” Paulie asked. “The only thing we can be certain of is that he’s callous and disreputable. That’s not the kind of man Mary Ann needs in her condition.”

Will’s eyes narrowed on her. “You seem awful keen to rescue poor Mary Ann.”

“I risked my neck finding her, and you almost got yourself killed. Why should we stop now?”

“My question is, why shouldn’t we stop before we
do
get ourselves killed. Unless there’s some reason why you think the risk would be worth it. Some reason aside from Mary Ann…”

Paulie snapped her head up to stare into his speculative eyes. His lips were set in a grim line. He definitely had something on his mind, she just couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Is it just chance that your newfound concern for Mary Ann just happened to coincide with your being so taken with Oren Tyler?” he asked.

She sucked in a breath. “That’s absurd!”

“If you’d told me three days ago that levelheaded Paulie Johnson would have been prancing around mooning over
some fancy-talking gambler, I would have said that was absurd, too.”

Paulie set her jaw and glared up at him. “I wasn’t mooning.”