Willow: A Novel (No Series) (38 page)

Tudd was pacing back and forth, making the smell worse.

“Don’t be a ninny, Daphne,” Willow replied, “he wants
Steven
.”

Tudd paused, favoring Willow with a lingering once-over and another smirk. “Now that’s right smart thinkin’, little lady.”

“How did you find out you killed the wrong man?” demanded Willow.

“I had my suspicions almost from the first,” Tudd answered airily, rocking slightly on the worn heels of his boots. Filthy and self-satisfied, he dragged greedy eyes over Willow once more before going on. “Then I happened to be in Lot Houghton’s office the afternoon when
he came back from the telegraph office with a judge’s order to have the body in Gallagher’s grave dug up. He said he’d bet we’d find Silas Blanchard in that coffin, not your brother, and I figure he’s right.” Tudd was pacing again, rubbing his stubbly chin with one hand. “The bounty on Blanchard is respectable,” he reflected, “but it sure as hell don’t come near what’s offered for your big brother.”

Willow shivered. She’d gone to such lengths to protect Steven, alienating her husband, letting her father suffer, and what had come of it? This, her worst fear. “I’ll die before I’ll lead you to Steven,” she said, meaning every word.

Vancel Tudd laughed. “I figure you would, little lady. I figure you would. Lucky for both of us that you won’t have to. No, ma’am, you won’t have to, because Gallagher will come to me like a baby to a sweet-sucker, once he finds out that I’ve got my hands on his kid sister and his woman.”

Beside Willow, Daphne flinched. But then her chin went up and her shoulders squared.

Tudd’s pig eyes went to Dove. “’Course, this one’s no use,” he speculated. “Might as well just cut her throat.”

“If you hurt Dove in any way, my papa will hunt you till the day you die!” Willow reminded him forcefully, depending entirely on bravado. “You’ll be a wanted man yourself—you’ll know how it feels to have a price on your head!”

“I don’t want trouble with no bounty hunters, that’s true,” Tudd conceded, surprisingly. “Still, I can’t leave Miss
Triskadden here behind to tell Lot and Devlin and the rest about tonight, now can I? No, sir, she goes with us.”

“Goes where?” Daphne dared to ask.

“To the hills, of course. I know a good place for us to wait. Word’ll get to Gallagher fast enough, I reckon.”

Willow knew that Tudd’s reasoning was sound. Steven would come, and he would trade himself, if necessary, for the bounty hunter’s captives. “What makes you think my brother won’t call your bluff?” she snapped. “Maybe he’ll just shoot you on sight and that will be the end of it. Did you ever think of that?”

Tudd touched Willow’s chin with a rough, stinking hand. “Why, little lady, I ain’t bluffin’. He’ll know it, even if you don’t.” He shook his head and grinned, as if unable to believe his good fortune. “Damn if this ain’t a fine night; got the Fox’s sister and his favorite woman without even tryin’!”

The word
favorite
struck Daphne with a visible impact, and she bristled a little, but she wisely refrained from comment.

“Tudd, you’ll hang for this, you fool!” Dove cried suddenly, rounding the sofa, her small fists clenched at her sides. “You can’t.”

Tudd drew back his hand and struck Dove so hard that she fell back against the fireplace and hit her head. Willow went to her immediately, followed by a stricken Daphne.

Dove was faint, and she was bleeding a little from a cut on the back of her head, but she was a frontier woman and she rallied soon enough. Tudd wrenched her to her
feet by her hair, and the cruel warning was meant as much for Willow and Daphne as for Dove herself.

The three women allowed themselves, however much it rankled, to be gagged with pillowcases from Dove’s linen cupboard and then bound at the wrists. Pleased with his handiwork, Vancel Tudd herded his three captives, single file, through Dove’s darkened dining room and kitchen and into the yard beyond. There were no near neighbors, and it was an easy matter for Tudd to force the women into the bed of a waiting buckboard and drive away through the night.

Jolted and bounced about on the hard wagon bed, Willow struggled to get free of her bonds. Daphne and Dove, perhaps wiser than she, lay perfectly still.

Nausea scaled Willow’s windpipe and burned in her throat. God in heaven, if she vomited with this gag pressed so far back in her mouth, she’d drown for sure. She swallowed convulsively and closed her eyes, concentrating on staying calm by mentally reciting the books of the Bible:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy . . .

It was the closest she could come to praying, she was so scared.

And the wagon moved on and on, up and up, endlessly. The sky turned from black to gray to an apricot shade shot through with pink and mauve, and still they traveled.

Finally, Tudd barked a hoarse “whoa” to the plodding team and the wagon stopped. All three women sighed with relief.

Their captor jumped down from the wagon seat and rounded the rig to haul them out, one by one. Willow’s
legs were shaky and uncertain beneath her, and she stumbled as Vancel Tudd shoved her toward a sizable cabin hidden in the woods. Hardly aware of Daphne and Dove staggering along beside her, she grappled with a long-buried memory of this place. The feeling that she had been here before was intense, but she couldn’t think when that would have been or reason out why it seemed so all-fired important to recall that time.

Though ramshackle, the cabin had a spacious interior. There was a stove, a table, several broken-down chairs, and a sagging cot. Willow knew for certain that there was a back bedroom, too.

Sure enough, after untying the women’s gags, if not their wrists, which remained firmly tied behind them, Tudd thrust them all through a doorway and into a small room with a slanting roof. Without a word, he closed the door and bolted it, safe in the knowledge that there was no window to offer an avenue of escape.

Willow did not like that room. Odd sounds played on the edges of her memory, frightening sounds countered by Steven’s efforts to distract her . . .

“Willow?” queried Daphne, looking at her friend with a worried expression. “Are you all right?”

Willow shook off the eerie feeling that had come over her at first sight of the cabin and summoned up a rueful smile. “I’m as all right as either of you, I imagine.”

“What do you suppose he’ll do to us, Willow?” Daphne pressed anxiously. There were great, dark shadows moving in her eyes and smudges beneath them. “Do you think he’s the kind to—”

“No,” Dove broke in, settling herself on the edge of the old bed that took up most of the dingy room. The springs creaked and Willow gasped, prodded again by that dim and unsettling memory.

“He could rape us!” insisted Daphne, unaware of her friend’s terrified state, her attention fixed on Dove.

“He won’t,” said Dove firmly. “If he was that kind, I’d have known it last night. I was alone with Tudd for a good hour before you two blundered in.”

Willow was swirling in an eddy of memory, afraid. Tears trickled down her face and she began to tremble, hearing echoes from some hidden, shadowy part of her mind. A bed—this bed that Dove Triskadden sat upon—rattling hard, slamming against the wall, springs screeching.

There had been groans and cries. It was Jay Forbes; he was killing her mama.

Willow stood helpless in the doorway, screaming.

Steven, strong, gentle Steven, had taken her hand then, and led her away. “He’s not hurting Mama,” he’d said, but there had been a quiet fury in his voice, all the same, and his blue eyes had burned with an ancient hatred.

“Willow!” The voice was Dove’s.

Willow looked at her father’s mistress with dazed eyes, feeling almost as though the woman had slapped her, which was impossible, of course, since they were all still bound at the wrists. “I was here before,” she said woodenly, when she could speak. “I know I was here once before.”

Both Daphne and Dove looked at her with puzzled sympathy, and then the door opened with a crash and
Vancel Tudd came in. He’d deign to untie their hands and permit them to breakfast on the dried beef and stale cornbread he presented.

Wildly hungry, despite the upsetting effects of their ordeal, they ate, hardly noticing when Tudd left them again and once more bolted the door.

17

Vancel Tudd had made a dire mistake, and he clearly knew it. Consequently, as the long day crawled by, he came and went from the room, fidgety, growing more and more irascible with every passing hour. On one occasion, ignoring glares of warning from Daphne and Dove, Willow smiled at him. “You’ll go to prison for this,” she said, “if the good citizens of Virginia City don’t hang you first.”

Tudd had been sucking at a bottle of Irish whiskey all afternoon, and he took a long gulp to finish it off. His skin was an odd shade of gray, and there was spittle gathering at the corner of his mouth. “Never met a Gallagher yet that knew when to shut up,” he said. “And you’re no exception.”

“You’d better let us go, Mr. Tudd,” Willow persisted.
“My papa might look more kindly on your crimes if you release us, before any real harm has been done.”

“Crimes!” spat Vancel Tudd, glowering at Willow, swaying on his feet. “I ain’t done no crimes! And your daddy aside, the railroad wants Steven Gallagher bad enough to overlook everythin’ else.”

“Do you know who the railroad is, Mr. Tudd?” Willow pressed, not daring to look at her friends. “As far as you’re concerned, the Central Pacific is two men, my husband and Daphne’s father. Do you seriously think they’re going to condone what you’ve done and blithely pay the reward, whether they want to see Steven prosecuted or not?”

Tudd grew a little grayer of flesh and sucked in a whiskey-rasped breath. “You hold your tongue!” he barked, gesturing with one unsteady hand.

Willow lifted her chin and started to argue, but Daphne and Dove each caught one of her arms, somehow willing her to be silent. They didn’t release her until Tudd left them alone again and fixed the bolt on the door.

“Are you insane?” demanded Daphne, her eyes wide, with big shadows underneath. “That’s a madman out there, Willow Marshall, in case you haven’t noticed!”

Willow stiffened, then thrust out her chin. “He’s also a drunk. Another few minutes and we might have been able to overpower him!”

Dove sat despondently on the edge of that sagging bed, still clad in her dressing gown. “Overpower him? He’s big as this mountain!”

“There are three of us!” retorted Willow.

“You know, Vancel Tudd was right!” Daphne shot back. “You don’t know when to shut up!”

It was Dove who sounded the voice of reason. “Let’s get some sleep if we can. We’re not going anywhere tonight.”

Stoically, they all lay down on the musty bed, trying not to think of the creatures that had probably nested there before them.

*   *   *

Gideon was exhausted from the long ride north to Helena with Jack Roberts, and he’d wondered every mile of the way there and back whether he was doing the right thing. It came as a profound surprise to him to find Steven Gallagher pacing the length of Devlin’s study.

“It’s about time!” the erstwhile outlaw bellowed at the sight of Gideon.

“Steven,” Devlin said, in gruff reprimand.

“Tudd’s got the women, for Christ’s sake!” blurted Steven, glowering at Gideon and the heavy man who stood beside him.

Gideon’s weariness was literally jolted out of him; he forgot why he’d gone to Helena, what he’d accomplished there, everything. “What?”

Steven was pacing again. “Are we going to talk all night?” he roared, casting furious, ink-blue glances at his father.

Devlin was amazingly calm, a virtue Gideon didn’t share. “We can’t afford to do anything rash,” the judge reasoned. “Tudd’s brain has finally melted down and seeped out his ears. He’ll kill one or all of the women if we push him that far.”

Jack Roberts had broken out in a sweat, even though dawn hadn’t arrived yet and it was still cool, and he sank into one of Devlin’s chairs, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, wheezing. His lips took on a blue tinge. “Lord God,” he whispered.

Devlin poured a generous helping of brandy into a snifter and extended it to Roberts. “You’d better stay here, Jack,” he said, with the compassion that one father feels for another in such moments. “We’ll see that Daphne’s safe.”