Authors: Beth Williamson
She stuck close to John, her arm firmly tucked into his. Fuller Gates was an imposing man in his forties, with thick black hair and a matching mustache. His eyes reflected bone-deep sadness that spoke to her. She had lived with the same emotion. One wounded soul recognized another.
Phoebe flitted around behind him, peeking glances at John with starry eyes. The girl couldn’t be more than sixteen, petite and frail-looking. Yet she knew firsthand from her mother’s work with patients in New York how strong a mad person could be. Although she was a young woman, Phoebe likely needed care than her father couldn’t provide.
“This is Frankie, my, uh, wife.” John’s pronouncement startled her, but she hid her surprise by coughing.
“Your wife? You married someone else?” Phoebe stared at Frankie with an intensity that made her skin crawl.
“Hush up, girl.” Fuller pulled her down beside him on the settee. “I’m pleased to meet you, Miz Malloy. I’m Fuller Gates.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you,
Monsieur
Gates. John has told me how much he enjoyed working for you.” Frankie ignored John’s glare. “I am sorry his employment had to end so abruptly because of your daughter.”
As expected, her bald reference to his daughter’s actions made the older man look away. She poked John in the side. He had to speak up now.
“Fuller, I need to tell the law what happened and get that wanted poster off me. I can’t be running from a crime I didn’t commit for the rest of my life.” He glanced at Frankie. “My wife and I were already thrown in jail for it.”
“I thought you were working Oregon wagon trains. How did you get thrown in jail?” Fuller frowned at the news.
“I am, or was, working a wagon train. I had to backtrack for something important. Ended up in Kansas and a small-town sheriff had the idea he wanted the thousand-dollar reward.” John’s expression tensed. “Who’s paying the thousand, Fuller?”
Fuller’s gaze slid to the floor and Frankie realized he was guilty of more than trying to cover up his daughter’s sickness and the murder she committed. He was trying to bury it, along with the man she loved. She felt sick to her stomach.
John’s entire body tightened beside hers. “You knew. You knew it was Phoebe who killed Timmy. You deliberately put out a bounty on my head so no one would suspect her. Jesus Christ.”
Fuller didn’t move his gaze from the floor. Guilt was written in every inch of him.
Phoebe shook her head. “No, it wasn’t me. It was you.” She pointed one slender finger at John. “I cannot tell a lie.” She grinned and a tiny giggle burst from her.
Frankie was horrified. “This was a mistake. We need to leave now.”
“I can’t leave. I need him to admit what he did. I can’t have a bounty on my head. How can we have a future if the past is waiting to snatch it away?” He vibrated with fury. “You’ve destroyed my life, Fuller.”
The older man’s head dropped. “I lost my wife, John. I can’t lose my daughter too.”
“But I can lose my wife and my life so you can keep your daughter? How is that fair?”
Fuller nearly exploded off the couch, anger twisting his features. “It ain’t fair! Ain’t none of it fair! God took my wife from her and left me with a daughter who can’t see right from wrong. We all gotta look after our own.”
“That means I have to be the one to pay for your life not being fair?” John shouted back. “You want to talk to me about being fair?”
The angry words vibrated between them, full of accusations and dark emotions. Frankie was afraid they were about to come to blows, destroying their friendship for good.
Without warning, the front door slammed open with an enormous bang and several gunshots tore through the air. Frankie dropped to the floor and took cover as best she could behind a chair. John shouted and a body hit the floor. She crawled forward and saw him facedown while two men held him in place. The dog raced around, barking and snapping at the men.
“Let him go!” She yanked at one of the men, who smelled of sweat and old tobacco. He lost his grip on John and tumbled down onto her leg. She recognized him as the fool, Bert, who turned John in to the sheriff from hell. Then she spotted the Sheriff George Everett himself, with a gun pressed into the back of John’s neck.
“He is innocent! He did nothing.” Frankie scrambled to her feet and pointed at Fuller Gates. “This is the man who put the bounty on his head. Ask him who the real murderer is.”
The sheriff scowled. “I don’t rightly care what you think, girlie. You’re under arrest too. The lot of you destroyed my jail. You are going to pay for it one way or the other.”
Frankie’s stomach clenched and fear flooded her veins. The man was maniacal, solely intent on capturing John and getting his thousand dollars. Now he would take his time doing it, extracting his pound of flesh for their escape. His pride, not his jail, was the source of the thirst for vengeance.
They were trapped.
John was able to turn his head. “Tell them, Fuller. Tell them!”
Frankie wasn’t surprised when the rancher remained mute. His face flushed red as he tucked his daughter under his arm.
“Coward.” Frankie’s voice was rough with fury and she nearly vibrated with it. “You are a coward and a liar.” She slapped Fuller so hard his head snapped to the left. “I feel sorry for your daughter, not because of her madness because that cannot be helped, but because of her father. You are not even a man.” She spat at him, much to the amusement of the sheriff and his foolish sidekick. The dog punctuated her fury with a single ear-splitting bark.
They hauled John to his feet and marched him outside. Frankie shook with fear and anger, her stomach lurching left and right. She couldn’t allow John to fall into their hands. There was no doubt in her mind he would swing from a tree before they reached any town.
“John Malloy is a good man and you have just signed his death warrant.
Bâtard
. I hope you enjoy the life you have made for yourself with the blood of an innocent man.” She walked out of the man’s house, her head held high, her mind whirling with ideas of how to escape from the two men.
When she arrived outside, there were another four men on horseback waiting. She might have had a chance to escape if there were just two men, but the sheriff had brought a small army to bring them back. She shook with the knowledge this was the end of her life with John, as short as it was.
She turned to him, to the man who had taken up residence in her heart. Tears stung her eyes as he struggled against the ropes around his wrists. Heedless of the men, or of propriety, she pushed her way through until she wrapped her arms around him.
“Frankie?” He sounded unsure.
“I cannot let you go,
mon amor
. I feel so much for you my heart is overflowing.” She leaned back and cupped his face, the whiskers rough against her palms. The lump in her throat proved difficult to dislodge. “I want nothing more than to lie with you every night and wake with you every morning.” She kissed him with all the love inside her, ignoring everyone and everything but her beloved blue-eyed man.
When she pulled back, she saw the love shining in his eyes, satisfied that even if he could not tell her, she knew he loved her. Sadness mixed with the love, as he understood the same reality she did. They would not live longer than this moment.
“I knew you were trouble the first time we met and you shot me.” His mouth quirked up in a lopsided, sad grin.
She managed to chuckle softly at his teasing. “I knew you were trouble the moment you did not help me up from the mud.” She closed her eyes and laid her head on his chest, knowing she had found her match, her perfect mate, if only for a short time. Fortune was a fickle mistress and she found it easy to target the worst kind of luck for Frankie. However, touching him, telling him how important he was, it would have to be enough to carry her through to what was to come.
“What are you doing with him?” Phoebe’s voice cut through the morning air like a rusty knife. “That is my future husband. You can’t just take him away.”
“Out of the way, girl. This is men’s business.” The sheriff obviously had no idea just how dangerous Phoebe was.
Perhaps there was hope after all. Frankie glanced up at John and saw the same flicker of hope in his gaze. An imperceptible nod was all she needed. They had to show the rest of the world how unbalanced the girl was, to throw suspicion off John and onto the real culprit. It was dangerous and selfish, but John could not hang for a crime he didn’t commit.
Frankie whirled around and opened her arms wide. “This is not your man,
petite fille
. He is mine.”
Phoebe frowned, her beautiful doll features showing a smidge of the violence that bubbled beneath. “He is not yours. John has always been mine.”
Frankie scoffed. “You are a child. He has
never
been yours. Why would he choose a little girl when he could have a woman?”
The taunt had the wanted effect. Phoebe’s expression transformed into one of ugly fury. A knife appeared in her hand and she ran toward Frankie with an unholy scream. Panic kept her rooted to the spot—what had she done? The men were paralyzed momentarily, but every one of them scattered, leaving a clear path for the mad girl to reach her intended target.
“No!” Fuller stepped in her path and Frankie watched in horror as the knife slid into his body. Blood sprayed out in an arc, telling her the abdominal aorta had likely been severed by the sharp blade.
Phoebe screamed again, stepping back, her hands covered in blood. “Pa! You made me kill you.”
Fuller dropped to his knees, blood pouring from his stomach. Frankie ran to him, ripping the hem of her dress to help stem the flow of blood. Although she wasn’t to blame for the younger woman’s mental state, she did provoke her into action. Frankie reached him as the older man collapsed. His wound was deep, the blood a deep red. She pressed the fabric to the slice, but it was immediately soaked.
She glanced in his eyes and saw apology and regret. “I apologize,
monsieur
. I did not realize the depths of her madness.”
He gripped her arm. “No, I’m sorry. You were right. I am not half the man your John is. I’m sorry for what I did.”
Tears fell freely from Frankie’s eyes as Fuller life’s blood poured out onto the dusty ground in a river of red. Phoebe’s keening cry split the air as she ran in a circle around her father. She smeared the blood on her face, hair and clothes.
“Pa can’t be dead. I didn’t hurt him. I didn’t. It was John again. Just like Timmy. I didn’t stab anybody. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.”
John struggled against the ropes on his wrists. “Let me help him, dammit. He’s my friend.”
The sheriff, for once, seemed at a loss for words, the gruesome scene unlikely to be duplicated again in his life. He stared at the girl, whose mental state degraded with each passing turn around her dying father.
“Boss?” Bert asked tentatively.
“Untie him.” The sheriff backed away as Phoebe came close to him, blood coating her as though she had been the one wounded.
Bert untied John, who immediately ran to Fuller’s side. He pulled off his shirt and joined Frankie in trying to halt the flow of blood.
“Elias, get the doctor,” John snapped at the foreman.
“It’s an hour’s ride there and back.” Elias stood there as foolishly as the other men.
Frankie got to her feet and stalked toward him. The big man backed up a step. “Your boss lays dying. Get on your horse and get the doctor.
Now
.”
Elias turned and leapt on a horse, riding hell for leather away from the ranch. Frankie wasn’t one to wait for men to take action when things needed to be done. She reached for Phoebe and stopped her mad progress.
“You need to help your father now.”
Phoebe blinked at her, the macabre condition of her face in sharp contrast to her normally sweet visage. “Pa needs me?”
“Yes, he needs you,
ma petite
. Come, let us help him together.” She led the girl to her father.
John looked at her with incredulity in his expression. She shook her head. There was no time to explain Fuller needed his daughter at his side, regardless of the bloody mess they both were. Fuller seemed to relax when Phoebe knelt beside him. He took her hand and smiled, his face tight with pain.
“Pa, what happened?” The girl seemed surprised to find herself and her father covered in gore.
“I got hurt, is all. You are gonna have to be brave, darlin’.” He looked at John. “I’m gonna ask John to make sure you are taken care of. I owe him a lot, including the last three years of his life. I’m hoping he can find it in his heart to forgive me.”
John nodded. “You’re still my friend, Fuller. I’ll find a safe place for Phoebe.”
“I know a hospital in New York with a doctor who can take care of her.” Frankie knew contacting him would mean Oliver would find her again, but that was secondary to making sure this young girl was put in a safe place. Given the distance, Frankie could run again before Oliver found her. She did it once; she could do it again.
“Thank you both.” Fuller smiled sadly at John. “You were the son I wish I had. You’re a good man, John Malloy, and you’ve found yourself a good woman too. I’m sorry for all I done.”
“Stop talking and focus on not dying. Elias went to fetch the doc.” John glanced at Frankie and she shook her head.