Pete (The Cowboys) (24 page)

And that was the problem. The killer had disappeared into thin air, something Anne knew was impossible. Yet the only other explanation was that someone in the house had killed Belser. She knew that was impossible.

“Listen.”

Anne stopped her pacing. “It sounds like a buckboard,” she said.

“Who would be using a buckboard?”

Both women hurried from the room, down the hall, and to the front door. They flung open the door and ran out to the porch. Both stopped dead in their tracks, stunned by what they saw. A buckboard had come to a halt in front of the house. The driver jumped out to help Mrs. Horace Dean down.

“I’ve come to support you in your hour of trial,” she announced. “No young woman should have to watch her imposter of a husband be hauled away to the gallows without the support of friends.”

Fear clutched at Anne’s heart. She looked down the trail to see if the sheriff was following Mrs. Dean. The emptiness of the landscape provided little reassurance. He could have gone straight to the roundup.

“Has the sheriff found any evidence?” She couldn’t believe she could control her voice enough to speak.

“No, but he soon will,” Mrs. Dean said as she climbed the steps to the porch. “Bring my trunk in,” she directed the driver. “Dolores will show you where to put it. And now, my dear, you must allow me to comfort you. You must be near fainting from thinking of your near escape.”

“How could we have escaped? You just said the sheriff was going to hang Pete.”

“I mean your escape from a murderer who took advantage of your ignorance to claim to be your husband. I certainly hope you’re not carrying his child. That would be a tragedy.”

Anne had never understood how anyone could be angry enough to commit murder, but she was beginning to.

“My husband is not an imposter and he’s not a murderer. If you’ve come here to say so, you can turn right around and go back to Big Bend. I will not have a guest in my house slandering my husband.”

Anne didn’t know where those words had come from. When she opened her mouth, she hadn’t intended to throw down a challenge to Mrs. Dean, but she would not allow anyone to say such things about Pete.

“As to that, my dear, the future will tell. Now direct your servant to show this man where to stow my trunk. I’m exhausted and want to lie down before dinner. Afterward we’ll talk.”

“Dolores is not a servant. She’s my friend.”

“One should never make a friend of servants, child. It’s a mistake.”

Mrs. Dean sailed right past them into the house as if Anne hadn’t spoken. The woman was impervious to hints, even openly stated prohibitions.

“Put her in my old room,” Anne said to Dolores. “No matter what you do, don’t show her our room. She’s liable to move right in.”

“Not if I tell her Pete’s likely to come home in the middle of the night and crawl into bed expecting to make love to his wife.”

The two women broke into giggles.

“I don’t know what you can find to laugh about in such a situation as this,” Mrs. Dean intoned from inside the house.

Dolores rolled her eyes, and Anne recaptured her dignity.

“I ought to put her in Belser’s bed and hope the killer comes back,” Dolores said.

“Don’t say that, not even in fun. Now go before she comes out demanding to know why I haven’t learned to exercise better control over my servants.”

“I know you don’t like to think about it, my dear,” Mrs. Dean said to Anne as they sat over supper, “but you’ve got to consider all possibilities. There’s something very wrong about this whole affair, and I mean to get to the bottom of it.”

After getting up from her nap, Mrs. Dean had refrained from mentioning Pete or Belser’s murder. Instead, she’d taken Anne over the entire house, inch by inch, telling her how she should redecorate it now she was mistress. Irritated by the constant stream of criticism, Anne had asked her how she could be mistress of the house if her husband was an imposter about to be hanged.

Mrs. Dean had ignored the question.

Having exhausted Anne’s patience and prevented her from helping Dolores with the supper preparations, she led Anne to the table with the aplomb of a queen in her own home. Once at the table, however, she’d reversed herself and concentrated on Pete’s guilt.

“You have to consider every possibility.” That was her reply every time Anne objected to one of her presumptions, or assertions, or out-and-out fabrications. “This thing is a great mystery. The solution may be something quite beyond even my powers of imagination.”

Anne didn’t believe that was possible. Mrs. Dean seemed capable of imagining anything, regardless of how absurd it might be. Such as the scenario she was propounding just now.

“Even you have to admit it covers all the particulars,” she was saying. “This man who calls himself Pete meets up with the real Peter Warren on his way here. Peter was such a dolt he’d tell anybody anything and not suspect a thing. It would have been child’s play for this man to have pumped him for as much information as possible, then murdered him in his sleep.”

“Pete was never that bad, not even as a boy.”

Mrs. Dean ignored her interruption.

“Then that man shows up here pretending to be your husband. It’s entirely understandable how you could be fooled, my dear. I’m the first to admit he’s more handsome than poor Peter would ever have been.”

“He looks just like what I thought Peter would look like as a grown man,” Anne insisted.

“You overlook the bone structure,” Mrs. Dean said. “Never overlook bones. They don’t lie.”

Anne didn’t know how she could forget about the bones, as much as she would like to, with Mrs. Dean forever flinging them in her face. Nobody could tell what a boy’s face was going to look like at maturity, not even Mrs. Dean.

“It’s perfectly logical he should want to put an end to Belser’s insisting he was an imposter,” Mrs. Dean continued. “I imagine he would have liked to murder me as well if he dared do such a thing.”

Anne was beginning to wonder if there weren’t a lot of people who would like to murder Mrs. Dean.

“And if all the things I’ve said were true, there’d be nothing easier than to steal into poor Belser’s room in the dead of night and kill him. Being drunk, he couldn’t offer any resistance.”

“I’ve told you repeatedly, Pete didn’t leave again after he came to bed,” Anne said.

“You were asleep. How could you tell?”

“I’m a light sleeper. I would have woken up.”

“You’d had a long trip from town, my dear. You were exhausted. I’m sure you slept like the dead.”

“Not quite. I did wake up when Pete came to bed. And he was tiptoeing in his stocking feet so he wouldn’t wake me. I heard him outside the door.” Mrs. Dean didn’t need to know she had already been awake. “He couldn’t possibly have gotten out of bed and into it again without waking me.”

“He could have murdered poor Belser before he came to bed.”

“No, he couldn’t. He told the sheriff he only stayed downstairs a few minutes. Belser had just gone upstairs. He wouldn’t have been asleep yet.”

“I’m sure he could find a way. I will admit he’s a clever man.”

“Much too clever to kill a man under his own roof,” Anne said, repeating Pete’s rationale. “Now I’m tired of talking about Belser’s death. There must be something else of interest going on in Big Bend. Are you in charge of the ball at the fort this year?”

The annual officer’s ball was the highlight of Mrs. Dean’s year. She had been placed in charge of arrangements eight years before when the fort was moved to Big Bend, and she hadn’t let her husband’s retirement force her to give it up. Anne could relax for the rest of the evening knowing that once started, Mrs. Dean wouldn’t stop talking about the ball until bedtime.

Anne rose from bed on the third day of Mrs. Dean’s visit in the certain knowledge that she couldn’t stay in the house with that woman another day without committing murder herself. She couldn’t send her back to town because there was no one at the ranch to take her. Pete had left Ray at the ranch with strict orders not to let Anne out of his sight for any reason. When he flatly refused to take Mrs. Dean to Big Bend, Anne was marooned. She had been forced to listen to even more theories about why Pete was impersonating Peter Warren and how he’d managed to kill Belser without anyone knowing.

It didn’t matter that some of her theories were completely implausible. She was certain Pete had killed Belser. Such a man could do many things ordinary people couldn’t.

Anne had to get away from her, but there was no place Mrs. Dean wouldn’t follow her. Yesterday, hoping to escape for at least a short while, Anne had said she wanted to collect anything Belser might have left in the bunkhouse. It hadn’t worked. Mrs. Dean had followed her. Anne was desperate, but what could she do?

An idea occurred to her. It was rather bold, perhaps too bold, but she was desperate. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it. With a smile of satisfaction, she jumped out of bed and started looking through her closet for something she could use for riding clothes.

She was going to join Pete at the roundup.

Chapter Thirteen

“The roundup has gone slower than I expected,” Pete said to Eddie, “but I think we can finish up tomorrow.”

They were standing on a slight rise, upwind from the herd, where they could watch the cowhands cutting out the animals to be sent to market without having to breathe the dust stirred up by thousands of hooves. The weather had turned cold. The ceaseless wind cut through Pete’s clothes like a knife. He thought longingly of the warm clothes the killers had taken when they shot him and stripped his camp. He had a big score to settle with those men when he found them.

If he ever did.

Under the pretense of checking the condition of the horses, he’d made a careful inspection of all the horses in the remuda. He hadn’t found either of the horses ridden by the men who shot him. If he’d found any newly shod horses, he’d have suspected they’d pulled the old shoes. But only the horses kept at the ranch had visited a blacksmith in the last month.

“When you take the herd to the railhead, I want you to buy any hay you can find,” Pete said.

Eddie looked surprised. “It’ll be expensive.”

“I know. But if the winter’s as bad as the Indians predict, it might be the edge we need to bring the herd through.”

“You put a lot of stock in what those Indians say, don’t you?”

“Like I told the sheriff, they lived on these plains for hundreds of years before we got here. A lot of people think they’re not very smart, but they survived. And without log houses and nice warm stoves.”

“I’m not sure I can get any men to stay. They usually head south after roundup.”

“I’ll only need a couple to help with that hay.”

Eddie went off to talk with the men, leaving Pete to enjoy the view from the rise. He wondered how Anne was getting along back at the ranch. He’d hated to leave her, but to have stayed away from the roundup—even to protect and support his wife—would have been interpreted as a sign of guilt. He couldn’t afford to do anything that might weaken his precarious position. By coming on roundup and doing his work with the confidence of a man with a clean conscience, he had changed the cowhands’ minds about his guilt.

Besides, he couldn’t find his money by staying at the ranch. Despite his lack of success so far, his instinct told him the horses were still around somewhere. The men, too. He didn’t know how or why, but he had a gut feeling that whoever killed Peter had killed Belser as well. He just hoped he would find them before they found him. He’d made a point during the last two weeks of being sure he wasn’t an exposed target as he had been on the trip to Big Bend. He tried to keep himself in the midst of a group of men. When he was in an exposed position as he was now, he made certain he could see far enough to know no one could shoot him from ambush. Except along the streams and some of the foothills closer to the mountains, the plain was barren of anything except miles and miles of grass. He had every intention of heading south with his money and his hide in one piece. But he had to admit, the longer it took him to find his money, the smaller his chances of success.

There was another reason he needed to find his money and leave. If he didn’t get out of Wyoming soon, he was going to do something he’d be sorry for. Every hour, every minute he spent in Anne’s company made it harder to keep his hands to himself. More important, he had started to like Anne. Still worse, the thought of staying at the ranch kept popping into his head. He wasn’t the marrying kind. He wanted to be free to roam. Only freedom didn’t look so inviting when it meant leaving Anne behind. It was difficult to understand how she had taken such a hold on his feelings in such a short time. He’d been infatuated before, but this wasn’t the same.

His fantasies about women had always started and ended with sex. But while thoughts of making love to Anne kept ruining his sleep, it was the dreams of taking her back to Texas, seeing her with her own daughters, growing old alongside her, that let him know this was more than infatuation. He was in very great danger of falling in love with a woman who was married to another man. The fact that the man was dead wasn’t going to make any difference. He’d lied to her over and over, urged her to support him against her friends, tied her credibility tightly to his statement that he was the Peter Warren she married by proxy.