The Rustler (8 page)

Owen's face brightened, causing his freckles to stand out. “Really?”

“Enough,” Charles said coldly. “Philadelphia is a long way from Stone Creek. Have you forgotten that we just spent a week on a train?”

Owen subsided as suddenly as if he'd been slapped.

Doc Venable cleared his throat and turned the conversation in a new direction. “I understand you're keeping the peace around town while your brother is away, Mr. Yarbro,” he said.

Wyatt shifted in his chair, oddly uncomfortable with the remark. “Yes, sir,” he said. “And I'd appreciate it if you called me Wyatt.” His gaze moved to Sarah. “You, too, Miss Tamlin.”

Sarah blushed.

“My, but we are a friendly bunch, aren't we?” Charles asked dryly. His nostrils were slightly flared, and the skin around his mouth looked tight.

“I reckon most of us are, anyhow,” Wyatt said quietly.

“Can I call you Wyatt, too?” Owen wanted to know.

“Sure,” Wyatt said. “Long as I don't have to call you ‘Mr. Langstreet.'”

Charles reddened.

Owen giggled with delight. “Nobody calls me ‘Mr. Langstreet,'” he said. “I'm only
ten.
”

Wyatt's lips twitched. “You could have fooled me,” he replied. “Like I said this afternoon, I'd have said you were forty if you were a day. Just a mite short for your age.”

Charles favored Sarah with a pained look. Again, she wondered why he'd brought Owen to Stone Creek, when he seemed, at least at the moment, barely able to tolerate the child's presence.

“You ever seen a man as short as Owen here, Doc?” Wyatt asked, well aware that he'd gotten under Charles's skin and clearly enjoying the fact.

“Can't say as I have,” Doc said, regarding Owen thoughtfully.

Owen beamed.

“Is everyone ready for dessert?” Sarah asked brightly.

She served strawberry preserves on shortbread, and poured coffee for the adults. Earlier, she'd longed for the evening to end. Now, she realized that Charles was the only unwelcome guest. Doc, Wyatt and Owen had lifted her spirits with their banter.

Charles was the first to lay his table napkin aside, push back his chair, and stand. “I've got a meeting tomorrow in Flagstaff,” he said. “It came up unexpectedly. Sarah, I wonder if I might speak to you in private.”

Sarah felt a prickle of dread, but she welcomed the chance to talk to him about Owen, out of the boy's earshot. “Certainly,” she said. “I'll walk you to the door.”

Owen remained in his chair, his eyes fixed on his plate. He seemed to have shrunk a full size, and his head was bent at an angle that made Sarah's heart hurt.

She proceeded to the front door, Charles following.

“I can't leave the boy alone at the hotel,” Charles said, before she had a chance to speak. “Will you keep him while I'm away?”

Sarah nodded, surprised. She'd expected some kind of harangue.

“I might be gone for several days,” Charles warned.

“I'll look after him,” she promised. “Charles, I—”

Something ominous flickered in Charles's eyes.

Sarah straightened her spine. “He refers to himself as a bastard. Owen, I mean.”

“He's precocious,” Charles said, taking out his pocket watch and checking it with a frown. “And he lies constantly.”

“Is he lying about Christmas? Having to stay at school alone while everyone else goes home for the holiday season?”

Charles's mouth took on a grim tension. “It isn't always convenient to have a ten-year-old underfoot,” he said. “Marjory's nerves are—delicate.”

“
Convenient?
Charles, he's
ten.
A child.”

“Marjory—”

“
Damn
Marjory!” Sarah whispered furiously. She was in no position to anger Charles, given the shares he held in the bank, but her concern for Owen—
her
son—pushed everything else aside. “What do I care for the state of your wife's nerves?”

“They'll hear you,” Charles said anxiously, inclining his head toward the dining room. “Do you
want
the cowboy to know you gave birth to an illegitimate child when everyone in Stone Creek thought you were getting an education?”

“Oh, I got an education, all right,” Sarah said bitterly.

Charles consulted his watch again. “I have to go,” he said. “I have paperwork to do, before tomorrow's meeting.”

Good riddance,
Sarah thought. She'd gotten a reprieve, as far as the bank was concerned, but another part of her was alarmed. Was this “meeting” with the other shareholders? Several of them lived in Flagstaff, a relatively short train ride from Stone Creek. Suppose Charles had asked around town, heard about some of her father's recent escapades, and made the decision to take over control? Alone, he couldn't do it. With the help of the other shareholders, though, he could be sitting behind her father's desk the morning after next.

With the first smile he'd offered all evening, Charles ran his knuckles lightly down the side of Sarah's face. “I'll be back in a few days,” he said, as though he thought she was pining over his departure. “A week at the outside.”

A week with Owen. A week to cover her tracks at the bank.

She tried to look sad. Might even have said, “I'll miss you,” as he seemed to expect her to do, but since she would have choked on the words, she swallowed them.

He bent his head, kissed her lightly, briefly on the mouth.

She stepped back, secretly furious.

“Still the coquette,” Charles remarked smoothly. “You're not fooling me, Sarah. I remember how much you liked going to bed with me.”

Sarah's cheeks pulsed with heat so sudden and so intense that it was actually painful. She would surely have slapped Charles Langstreet the Third across the face if she hadn't known the crack of flesh meeting flesh would carry into the nearby dining room.

“Good
night,
Mr. Langstreet,” she said.

He grinned, turned, and strolled, whistling merrily, down the porch steps, along the walk, through the gate.

Sarah watched him until he was out of sight, then turned and nearly collided with Wyatt, who was standing directly behind her.

Her heart fluttered painfully. How much had he heard? Had he seen Charles kiss her?

She could tell nothing by his expression.

“I'd best be leaving, too,” he said. “I've got to count horses in front of saloons.”

“What?” Sarah asked, confused.

He chuckled. “Rowdy's way of watching out for trouble,” he said, taking his hat from the coat tree. “Thank you, Miss Tamlin, for a fine evening and the best meal I've had in a long time.”

Something tightened in Sarah's throat. “If I'm to call you Wyatt,” she heard herself say, “then you must call me Sarah.”

His smile was as dazzling as the starched shirt he'd put on to come to supper. “Sarah, then,” he said. The smile faded. “That Langstreet fella,” he began. “Is he…? Do you—?”

“He's a business associate,” Sarah said. It was a partial truth, and she wondered if she ought to record it in her book of lies.

“That's good,” Wyatt said. His dark eyes were almost liquid, there in the dim light of the entryway. “Because if I stay on in Stone Creek, I mean to set about courting you in earnest.”

“
If
you stay?” She'd known he was a drifter, an outlaw, that he'd be moving on at some point. So why did she feel as though a deep, dark precipice had just opened at her feet?

“Reckon I'll be deciding on that further along,” he said. “Good night, Sarah.”

For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, just as Charles had—his face was so very close to hers—but he didn't. And she was stunned by the depths of her disappointment.

She watched until he passed through the front gate, turned toward the main part of town, moving in and out of the lamplight. Then she closed the door quietly and went back to the dining room.

Doc and Owen were busy clearing the table.

“Is Papa leaving me here?” Owen asked hopefully.

“Yes,” Sarah said, taken aback, exchanging quick glances with Doc, who'd paused in his plate-gathering like a man listening for some sound in the distance. “But only for a few days. I thought you'd be—well—surprised—”

“Papa's always leaving me places,” Owen said. His manner was nonchalant, though there was a slight stoop to his shoulders that hadn't been there before.

Doc shook his head, though the boy didn't see.

Sarah contrived to smile and moved to help with the work. “What sort of places?” she asked, in a tone meant to sound cheerful, as though abandoning a child with people who were virtual strangers to him was a common occurrence, and wholly acceptable.

“Once, I lived at a hotel all by myself for a whole week,” Owen told her. “It was scary at night, but I got to have whatever I wanted to eat, and Papa gave me lots of spending money.”

Sarah could not look at him. He might see what she was thinking. “Why did he do that?” she asked lightly, when she could trust herself to speak. Again, her gaze met Doc's, but this time, the look held.

“He had meetings with a lady. She wore a big hat with pink feathers on it and rode in a carriage with six white horses pulling it.”

Sarah drew back a chair and sank into it, breathless.

“Are you sick, Aunt Sarah?” Owen asked, clearly frightened.

“I'm f-fine,” Sarah muttered. She wouldn't have to write
that
lie in the book to remember it.

“Let's wash up these dishes,” Doc told the boy, his voice a little too hearty. “Since your aunt Sarah went to all the trouble to cook it and all.”

Owen nodded, but his eyes were still on Sarah. “I'll be quiet,” he said. “If you have a headache—”

Sarah longed to gather the child in her arms, but she didn't dare. She'd weep if she did, and never let go of him again. “You don't have to be quiet,” she told him softly.

Doc put a hand on Owen's shoulder and steered him in the direction of the kitchen. “I'll wash and you dry,” he said.

W
HILE
O
WEN AND
D
OC WERE
washing dishes, Sarah went upstairs, looked in on her father, who was sleeping soundly, then opened the door to the room across from her own. It contained a brass bed, a washstand and a bureau, and soft moonlight flowed in through the lace curtains.

The mattress was bare, since no one had used the room in months, with a faded quilt folded at its foot. Briskly, Sarah fetched sheets from the top drawer of the bureau and made up a bed for Owen.

The process was bittersweet. Tonight, her son would sleep in this room, dreaming, she hoped, little-boy dreams. But there was a disturbing truth in Wyatt and Doc's teasing—young as he was, Owen was more man than child. He'd lived in hotel rooms by himself, and God knew what other places.

She yearned to keep him, raise him openly as her son. She wouldn't mind the scandal that would surely ensue, the extra expense, the inevitable work of bringing up a child. But she must not allow herself to think such thoughts, she knew, because Charles would come back and take him away again.

Under the law, she had no rights. On his birth certificate, Marjory Langstreet was listed as his mother.

Some of the starch went out of Sarah's knees.

She sat down on the edge of the freshly made bed, fighting back tears of hopelessness.

She'd been so young and foolish—only seventeen and far from home—when she'd given birth to Owen, in an anonymous infirmary room, a decade before. Charles, fifteen years her senior and sophisticated, a friend of her father's, had been her “protector,” met her at the train when she arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, taken her by carriage to the women's college in the rolling green Pennsylvania countryside.

Homesick, regarded as a bumpkin by the other pupils in residence, most of whom had been raised in cities and not crude frontier towns, she'd quickly become besotted with Charles. She'd studied hard at school, majoring in music, but on weekends, he often came to collect her in his elegant carriage. It was all innocent at first; he escorted her to museums, to concerts, to fine restaurants.

And then he took advantage.

He said college was a waste for a woman, and suggested she leave school so they could spend more time together. He'd set her up in a fancy hotel, persuaded her not to tell her father that she'd dropped all her classes.

That was when the lying had begun. She'd written weekly letters to her parents, describing books she hadn't read, lectures she hadn't attended, field trips she hadn't taken. Someone Charles knew in the college office mailed the missives, and forwarded the replies. Sarah returned the funds her father sent for tuition and textbooks, claiming she'd won a scholarship. Her grades were forged, with the help of Charles's friend, and for a long, blissful time, the deception passed as truth.

Sitting there in Owen's moonlit room, Sarah blushed. Charles had been right earlier when he'd taunted her about enjoying his attentions in bed. Just sixteen, her body in full flower, she'd lived for his visits, reveled like some wild creature in his caresses.

Even when she realized, one eventful day, that she was carrying a child, she hadn't worried. Charles would be pleased. He would surely marry her, straight away.

She was awaiting his visit, full of her news, when a grand woman in tailored clothes presented herself at the door of Sarah's suite. She'd been tall, imperious, exuding angry confidence.

“So this is where Charles is keeping his current mistress,” Marjory Langstreet had said, sweeping past a startled Sarah into the sumptuously furnished suite. “And how gracious of him to support you in such style.”

Sarah had stared at the woman. “M-mistress?” she'd echoed stupidly.

“Surely you understand,” Marjory had said, “that you are a kept woman? A bird in a gilded cage?”

Sarah's mouth had fallen open. This was surely some kind of cruel prank. Charles
wasn't
married. He loved her—hadn't he said so, over and over again? Hadn't he given her jewelry, bought her trinkets and clothes?

“Who are you?” she'd managed.

Marjory ran a gloved hand along the keyboard of Sarah's treasured piano. The sound was discordant, and bore no resemblance to music. From there, she proceeded to examine a painted porcelain lamp, a novel bound in Moroccan leather, a delicate Chinese fan with an ivory handle—all gifts from Charles.

“You really don't know?” she trilled, after several long moments. Then she'd turned, hands resting on her hips, and shattered Sarah's world with a single sentence. “I'm Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third,” she said, the words slicing through Sarah with the stinging force of a sharp sword.

Then, as now, Sarah had been unable to stand. She'd dropped into a chair, blind with confusion, pain and fear. Unconsciously, she'd rested a hand on her abdomen.

“Pack your things, dear,” Mrs. Langstreet had said. “As of tomorrow morning, you won't be living here any longer. A backstreet whore belongs, you see, on a
backstreet.
If Charles wants to continue this dalliance, that's his business, but I won't be footing the bill.”

With that, she'd gone, leaving the suite door standing open to the hall beyond.

Sarah had been too numb to move at first. She simply sat, waiting for Charles to come and say it was all a mistake. That
she,
Sarah, would be the only Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third.

All day she waited.

But he didn't come.

Sarah had finally closed the door, gone to bed and lain staring up at the ceiling throughout the very long night to come.

In the morning, a tentative knock sent a surge of hope rushing through her. She rushed to the door, opened it to find, not a smiling Charles, with a credible explanation at the ready, but one of the hotel's porters. The fellow stood in the corridor, clearly uncomfortable.

He'd offered an anxious smile as two maids and another porter collected themselves behind him. “I'm sorry to hear you're leaving us,” he'd said. “Mrs. Langstreet asked that we help you gather your belongings. There'll be a carriage waiting to take you to your new residence at ten o'clock.”

Sarah had not protested.

She'd simply watched, stricken, as her clothes were folded into trunks and boxes, her books taken from the shelves, her jewelry stuffed into valises Marjory Langstreet had evidently provided for the purpose.

By noon, she'd been settled in a seedy rooming house, one door of her tiny room opening onto a rat-infested alley.

And still there had been no word, no visit, from Charles.

Sarah waited a week, then began pawning jewelry, a piece at a time, to buy food. Twice, she wrote long letters to her unsuspecting father, telling the shattering truth, but she'd never mailed them.

She was too ashamed.

Too heartbroken.

Several times, when hunger forced her out into the narrow, filthy streets, she'd considered standing on the tracks when the trolley came. It would be over, that way.

In the end, she couldn't do that to the baby, or to herself.

She finally sent a wire to her father, reading simply,
I am in trouble,
and listing her address at the boardinghouse.

Within ten days, he'd arrived, bent on taking her home to Stone Creek. She'd told him everything but the name of the man who'd sired her child, and patently refused to return to Arizona Territory. As much as she yearned for her own room, the sound of her mother's voice, the soothing touch of her hand, Sarah simply hadn't been able to face the inevitable gossip and speculation.

Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.

She hadn't seen Charles again until a week before Owen's birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles's lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.

Sarah had had no choice but to comply.

She'd long since sold the last of her jewelry, her rich clothes and the books. Even the Chinese fan. And she'd promised her clearly disenchanted father she would finish college, no matter what.

So when her baby boy was born, she'd handed him over to Charles's lawyer. The loss had been keen, brutal, as though she'd torn her still-beating heart from her bosom and handed that over, too.

She'd survived, somehow, doggedly arising in the morning, doing what was at hand to do, enduring more than living. She'd worked hard at her lessons, gotten her degree in music, and returned to Stone Creek just in time to attend her mother's funeral.

Nancy Anne Tamlin had never known she had a grandchild, nor had anyone else in town, except for Ephriam, of course, and possibly his best friend, Doc Venable.

Now, ten years later, miraculously, impossibly, that boy was right downstairs, in her own kitchen, helping with the dishes.

“Sarah?”

She looked up, startled, and saw Ephriam standing in the doorway. She couldn't see his face, but she knew by the way he'd spoken her name that he was enjoying one of his brief, lucid intervals.

“That boy I saw tonight. Is he—?”

Sarah felt for the book of lies, nesting, as always, in her skirt pocket, clenched it through the fabric. She swallowed, then shook her head. “No, Papa. He's just visiting.”

“He looks like your mother's people,” Ephriam said. “What's his name?”

“Owen,” Sarah allowed, after swallowing again. “He's Charles Langstreet's son. You remember Mr. Langstreet, don't you?”

“Never liked him,” her father replied. “Pompous jackass.”

She saw a change in Ephriam's bearing, something too subtle to describe, but there nonetheless.

“Great Scot,” Ephriam gasped. “It was
Langstreet,
wasn't it?
He
was the one who led you astray!”

“Papa—”

“And Owen is my grandson,” the old man persisted, sounding thunderstruck. Of all the times he could have recovered his faculties, it had to be now, tonight, when keeping the secret was more important than ever before.

Sarah simply could not summon up another lie. She felt drained, enervated, as though she'd relived her affair with Charles, her sad, scandalous pregnancy, the birth itself, which had been torturous, and, still worse, watched as Charles's lawyer carried her newborn son out of her room in the college infirmary. She'd been permitted to give him only one thing: his first name.

And she'd never expected to see him again.

“Yes,” she said weakly. “You're right, Papa. But you mustn't let on. Owen doesn't know who I am. He calls me Aunt Sarah.”

Ephriam pondered a while, silent and brooding. “I'd have killed Langstreet if I'd known,” he said. “I suppose that's why you didn't tell me.”

Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, summoned her will, and stood. Doc and Owen had probably finished washing the dishes by then, and they'd be wondering what was keeping her.

She stood before her father, still looming in the darkened doorway, straightening the front of his long nightshirt as though it were one of the day coats he wore to the bank.

“Our secret, Papa?” she asked.

“There are too damn
many
secrets in this house.”

“Papa—”

“All right,” Ephriam said. “But I don't like it. And I'm taking that boy fishing at the creek tomorrow, with or without your say-so.”

Sarah's eyes stung, and she smiled. “Fair enough,” she said.

She walked her father back to his room, tucked him in like a child. Kissed his forehead. Still under the effects of the laudanum Doc had given him earlier, he dozed off immediately.

When she descended to the kitchen, via the rear stairway, Doc and Owen were sitting at the pedestal table in the center of the room, playing cards. The pot was a pile of wooden matches.

Interested, Sarah stood behind Owen's chair and assessed his hand.

“Five card stud,” Doc said. “Care to join us?”

“I never play poker,” Sarah said. The little book in her skirt pocket seemed to pulse in protest.

Doc merely chuckled.

Sarah bent low and whispered in Owen's ear. “Bet all your matchsticks. You've got a straight with ace high.”

 

T
HERE WERE ONLY THREE HORSES
in front of Jolene Bell's Saloon, two in front of the Hell-bent, six lining the hitching rail at the Spit Bucket. Wyatt passed them by, making for the jailhouse.

All was quiet there, too, so he closed the place up for the night and went around back to the barn, where he planned to stretch out in the hayloft. The weather was clear, and he'd be able to see the stars between the wide cracks in the roof.