Willow: A Novel (No Series) (36 page)

Gideon was pensive, the set-to with Zachary far from his mind, thinking about what the judge had told him. He’d seen Willow in the churchyard, Devlin had, placing flowers on the graves of Coy and Reilly Forbes and never casting so much as a glance in the direction of Steven’s. That bothered Gideon, as it had bothered his father-in-law.

He didn’t speak of it, though. Instead, he considered odd bits and pieces torn from the fabric of the last week or so.

Grief-stricken women usually cried until the pain had
passed, but Willow had not shed a tear, to his knowledge, since the day her brothers were brought in. She hummed and played her piano. She pored over seed catalogs and had already marked off plots for next year’s flower and vegetable gardens.

At night, or any time he came to her, actually, Willow was more than ready to make love. That very morning, in fact, she’d followed Gideon out to the barn when he went to do the chores and—well—there was no other way to explain it: she’d had her way with him. She’d knelt in the musty hay and straw and he’d had to brace himself against the outside railing of a stall, moaning as she took her pleasure.

Just the memory of it made Gideon harden and break out in a sweat. His release had been so explosive that it had wrung a shout from him.

Now, in the buggy seat, Gideon had to widen his knees slightly, to accommodate himself. The experience had been beautiful, and yet it bothered him for several reasons. For one thing, Willow had hated him, really hated him, the day Vancel Tudd brought her dead brothers to town. She’d spat at him and called him Judas. It was hard for Gideon to believe that her feelings had changed so completely and so rapidly.

And then there was her continuing habit of wandering in the night. Gideon had lost count of the times he’d found her outside somewhere, barefoot, her eyes haunted. Always, no matter how far she might be from that structure, she claimed she’d been to the outhouse.

Sadly, Gideon came to the obvious conclusion: Willow’s
behavior was irrational. It was entirely possible that, losing her brother, she might also be losing her mind.

He reached the ranch, then unhitched the horse and buggy. Just as he was leaving the barn, Gideon remembered the presents he’d bought for Willow—it seemed a thousand years ago—and went back to the rig to get them. In the kitchen, dimly lit by just one lamp, he shyly extended the parcel.

“What’s this?” Willow asked, and it was impossible to read her face.

Gideon sighed. He’d given a thousand presents to a thousand women and never once felt this way. He might as well have been a little boy, for God’s sake, presenting something he’d made with his own hands to an adored goddess. “Just some things I bought in town a while ago,” he said.

It seemed, in the half light, that Willow’s fingers trembled a little as she untied the string and opened the crackly brown paper. The gifts inside were separately wrapped in white tissue, and she found the tiny piano first, gazing at it in wonder.

“Oh, Gideon,” she breathed, as though he had given her a chest full of faultless gems. She turned the little key on the bottom and the kitchen was filled with the soft, chiming music.

Gideon felt deflated. This was Zachary’s gift, not his; he hadn’t been the one to choose it for her. He wanted to leap at the table and snatch away the still-wrapped monkey before she could see it and know what a raving idiot she had married.

It was too late, though; she reached for it, undid the wrapping. A cry of startled glee escaped her when she saw the little monkey with his brass cymbals and stupid hat. “What does he do?” she asked in a small voice.

His hand trembling almost imperceptibly, Gideon reached out and turned a tiny key buried in the toy’s woolly fur. The monkey began to chatter and clap the cymbals together with surprising exuberance.

Willow cupped the little creature in the upturned palms of her hands, watching it with wide eyes. Then she threw back her head and laughed so joyously that Gideon was completely taken aback, not knowing whether his gift had succeeded or failed.

He blushed miserably. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry?” The lovely golden eyes were fixed on him now, unreadable. “Gideon, why on earth would you be sorry?”

The monkey was winding down, clapping the cymbals more and more slowly, chattering only after lengthening intervals of silence. Gideon just stood there, his hands in his pockets.

“Gideon?” Willow prompted gently.

“I should have given you diamonds or something,” he burst out, unable to stop the rush of words. “Damnit, there isn’t a decent jewelry store in the whole town and . . .”

Slowly, Willow began to wind the monkey up again. “Diamonds!” she scoffed.

Gideon had never heard a woman speak of diamonds in exactly that tone before. Again, he was at a loss.

Willow set the monkey in the center of the table and laughed again at its gyrations, clapping her hands in delight, like a child. “Oh, Gideon, it’s so wonderful.”

“Wonderful?” he echoed hoarsely.

And she flung herself into his arms, burying her face deep in his neck. “I love you!” she cried, her voice muffled by his flesh. “Oh, Gideon, I love you so much!”

Despite his relief in knowing that the gift had pleased her, Gideon was aware of the desperation in her tone. It was almost as though she feared they would be parted somehow.

Unnerved by this prospect, Gideon carried his wife up the stairs and into their bedroom, where their joining was fierce and bittersweet. Sometime later, when she thought Gideon was asleep, Willow left the house.

For a few minutes, Gideon lay still in the rumpled bed, thinking. And then it occurred to him that Willow might not be behaving strangely because she was losing her mind but because Steven Gallagher wasn’t dead.

16

Willow’s heart leaped into her throat as the long shadow near the house solidified into a man, and she started violently. “Gideon?” she croaked.

A cloud passed over the waning moon, moved on again. In the thin light, Willow saw the nod, made out the familiar frame. “Yes,” he said.

She cast a furtive look toward the outhouse, which was so far away as to be invisible in the night. She could not say she’d been there, not again. The lie had grown and grown and now it lodged in her throat, the size of a Christmas orange.

“Steven is alive,” Gideon ventured evenly, letting no emotion show in his voice.

Willow was torn between relief and terror. “How did
you know?” she managed, shivering a little in the chill, drawing her shawl more closely about her shoulders.

Gideon reached out, took her arm in a grasp that betrayed no anger, and squired her toward the back of the house, then inside. There, he lit a lamp before answering. “It was just a guess, until now. You’ve been behaving very strangely, for a bereaved woman—stuffing yourself after the funeral, when no one else had an appetite, riding into the hills that day with Daphne, making love with me as though you hadn’t just suffered a shattering loss.”

Willow sighed and sat down at the table, bracing her head in her hands. She was too tired to lie anymore; the secret was too heavy to carry, just as Steven had warned it would be. “You must have thought I was losing my sanity.”

“At first, yes. Tonight, after you left our bed again, I started to think about the day Tudd brought the bodies in. You went into the back room to view them, remember? And you cried out and fainted.”

Willow nodded.

“You had opened Steven’s shirt; I was too worried about you then to think about it much, but that was how you knew that Tudd had shot someone else by mistake, wasn’t it?”

Again, Willow nodded her head. “The hatchet wound—Steven had been injured in a fight with Red Eagle a few days before—”

“And there was no wound,” Gideon guessed, quite correctly. “You must have suspected something before that, though, or you wouldn’t have bothered to look.”

Willow’s mouth went dry. She nodded. There had been so many things, really, but she’d been in shock. It had taken a few minutes to absorb the truth—that the hooded man sprawled belly-down across Steven’s saddle
wasn’t
Steven.

“I knew almost right away,” she admitted.

Gideon was standing near the sink by then, watching her, his face expressionless, his arms folded. His voice was like gravel when he spoke. “Put your clothes on, Mrs. Marshall,” he said. “You and I are going into town.”

Alarm leaped through Willow like a fire, out of control. “Why? Gideon, it’s the middle of the night—”

“And your father believes his only son to be dead. We, or more specifically you, are going to tell him that the man lying in that grave in the churchyard, next to Coy and Reilly Forbes, isn’t Steven.”

Gideon was right, of course.

Her father needed to know Steven was alive—whatever the consequences of that knowledge might be. Holding it in, especially in the face of Devlin’s terrible grief, had been killing Willow.

So with a nod, Willow got up from her chair, made her way toward the back stairs, then climbed them and moved along the dark hallway and into the room she and Gideon shared now as married people.

It took, or seemed to take, a very long time to get dressed, but when Willow joined her husband in the kitchen again, she was clad in a lightweight woolen dress and wearing a bonnet.

Gideon hitched up the horse and buggy, saying nothing as he worked.

Nor did he speak during the drive into town.

When they reached Devlin’s front door, Gideon knocked hard. His manner was cold and deliberate and he remained as silent as a stone, except for the knocking. Why didn’t he rage at her? Why didn’t he indicate, in some way, whether he understood what she’d done?

She’d had no choice but to pretend that Steven was dead.

Devlin himself opened the door, looking sleep-fogged and gaunt. He’d pulled on a pair of trousers, but his shirt was misbuttoned and left much of his chest bare.

Looking at him, in that brief moment while he tried to absorb the fact that he had guests in the middle of the night, Willow suddenly realized the full depths of what her father had suffered, was suffering still. A compassionate word from her would have saved him so much pain.

Impatient, Gideon gave her a slight push forward. The command was silent, but it was not to be disobeyed.

“Papa,” Willow blurted out, “I-I have something to t-tell you.”

Devlin peered at her, yawned, and ran one hand through this thick, graying hair. And suddenly he was completely alert. “Come in, then,” he barked, leading the way into his study.

There he lit the lamps and fastened the study doors while Gideon sank into a chair, looking quietly fierce, and Willow paced back and forth along the hearth.

“Well?” demanded Devlin Gallagher, perched on the
edge of his desk. Obviously, he sensed that the visit was important, but he could have no way of guessing just
how
important.

Willow flung one desperate look at her husband and knew that she would find no help from him. No sympathy. “The-the man in that grave across the s-street isn’t Steven,” she said.

Devlin tensed, glaring at his daughter. After a moment of thunderous silence, he stood, crossed to her, and stayed her pacing by grasping her shoulders and looking right into her eyes. “What are you saying?” he rasped, and she could see that he wanted desperately to hope, but was afraid to. “You can’t mean?”

Tears began to trickle down Willow’s cheeks. “Steven is alive, Papa,” she said, ashamed. Why hadn’t she told him? Why hadn’t she listened to Daphne and Steven, who had argued that Devlin had a right to know?

A hoarse sob came from the depths of Devlin’s powerful chest and rumbled in his throat. “God in heaven, how?”

Willow could not speak for her misery, and Gideon did not seem inclined to intervene.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Devlin asked, croaking out the words.

“I was afraid,” Willow managed to reply, shaken in the face of her father’s obvious anger and shock. “I thought word would get out, that Vancel Tudd would go after Steven again, with a vengeance, and succeed this time—”

Shaking his head, Devlin cut her off. “Where is Steven now? He’s well? Safe?”