Читать книгу Legacy of Secrets - Sara Mitchell - Страница 17

The Grand Hotel, Philadelphia

The rowdy bunch playing poker at a nearby table erupted into another argument. Gray and his friends, lounging up at the bar, turned to watch.

“My money’s on the gent with a beard.” Carl toasted his choice with his half-full glass of ale. “Looks mean enough to settle the fight with fists.”

“Nah…too civilized here. We’re not in Denver anymore,” Dan said. “I’ll go for the tall guy with the prissy middle part in his hair and too much pomade. Probably a lawyer. Fork-tongued pettifoggers can talk their way out of a hornet’s nest after convincing the hornets to sting the innocent bystanders. Whaddaya think, Falcon?”

Gray clapped a hand on Dan’s broad-as-a-barn-door shoulder. “I think I know better than to place bets on anyone about anything. How ’bout having the barkeep send a round to the winner of their…What’s this one? The fourth shouting match?”

“Sixth,” Carl replied with a sloppy grin. With his carrot-red hair and youthful face, he looked more like a tipsy leprechaun than Gray’s old buddy. “It’s the sixth altercation,” he repeated. “But who’s counting? I’ll pony up an’ send ’em a round, pal, but only if you pick the winner first. I wanna see if your luck’s still as bad at wagering as it’s good at shootin’.”

Gray elbowed him in the ribs, causing Carl to stumble against the man on his other side. Everyone apologized and toasted each other…a companionable assembly of gentlemen enjoying a few after-dinner drinks in a high-quality tavern across the street from a quality hotel. No prickly sensibilities, no irrational reactions, or raucous tempers itching to explode like the ill-mannered foursome playing poker. Why couldn’t females understand a man’s need to fraternize with other men without feeling guilty about it?

“Quit stalling, Gray,” Carl jibed.

With a good-natured snort Gray gestured across the room, toward the saturnine man holding his cards in a white-fisted hand. His unmoving silence presented a stark contrast against his arguing fellow card players. “I’ll take the quiet one,” Gray said. “Been my experience the ones who make the least noise wind up the most dangerous.”

His two friends solemnly nodded. Ten years earlier they’d all signed on as army scouts at the same time, then maintained a deep if largely disconnected friendship after they’d left the army. Periodically they’d meet somewhere between Kansas City and New York—wherever each could travel within a day’s time—to catch up on each other’s lives. Gray mused with fuzzy sentimentality that he hadn’t realized until now how lonely he’d been since Marty’s death.

“I think we should consider establishing some kind of business together,” he announced, smacking his palm against the bar with a resounding thud. “Settle down in one place. Get respectable.”

“Settle down? Get respectable?” Dan swiped a strand of wheat-colored hair off his forehead. “You been letting your aunt sweet-talk you into giving up your sinful ways?”

“Not a chance. Aunt Bella knows better.” Gray spread his arms wide, almost knocking Carl off balance again. “She just welcomes me home like the prodigal son.” Then he scowled, for a brief moment remembering his motive for joining his friends in this saloon. “Sure wish I’d known there’d be a curly-headed little hornet in the jar this visit.” He swore ripely over the subject, not for the first time, causing Carl and Dan to roar with fresh laughter.

“Never known you to react like this to any woman outside your mother,” Carl observed between chuckles. “Some of ’em you treat like they’re another man, and some a foul-tasting tonic you have to imbibe. Never understood why they all still flutter ’round you.”

“Some young ladies seem to thrive on dreams of taming us wild ones.” Dan nodded sagely. “Did I ever tell you about this schoolteacher I saved from a scalping when—”

“Yes!” Gray and Dan chimed in together.

Unabashed, Carl grinned. “So how ’bout when Dan brought his purty little cousin to Richmond, two years ago, wasn’t it? Thought he’d finally found someone to pull the thorn out of Gray’s woman-hating heart.”

“Don’t hate women,” Gray muttered, feeling heat steal up the back of his neck. Not even the one who irritated his memories, with her thick mass of hair he wanted to bury his hands in, whose voice tantalized his thoughts with its soft Southern drawl. Neala Shaw was the only woman in years who didn’t cower.

And Gray didn’t want any part of her. Or any woman. He could enjoy a woman same as any other man—without allowing her to take over his life. “Just…don’t ever want to be tied down to one,” he finished, the words delivered almost defiantly. The clinging…the tears…the hurt looks calculated to instill permanent guilt—never again. No, sir, never again. He was a man, not a six-foot little boy, and he did not need mothering, or managing.

But he didn’t hate all women. Fact was, he wanted to protect them, keep monsters from taking advantage, hurting someone weaker—no. If either of the species were weaker, it had to be the hapless male. Take himself, for instance. All he’d ever wanted was—

“Well, don’t fret about Roberta chasing you down.” Dan interrupted his sodden musing. “She married a train engineer last October. You’re safe from her fluttering eyelashes—and me, having to pound your head, for breaking her heart.”

“Ha! You’re the one who’s safe,” Carl interrupted with an inebriated guffaw. “’Cuz you’d’ve been the one getting his head pounded, not our friend here. Good ol’ Gray. Best man with a gun, best man with his stropped-razor tongue and falcon’s eyes, and best man with his fists.”

For some befuddled reason, the turn of conversation pricked Gray on the raw. Deep inside he knew his behavior toward women, and at times men, as well, could be disrespectable, and more often than he cared to admit, ventured perilously close to dissolute. The idealistic boy out to save the world from evil was long dead and buried somewhere west of the Mississippi River, and Gray told himself he didn’t mourn over him. But surely at the advanced age of thirty-two Grayson Faulkner had not transformed into a misogynist, as that prissy urchin had accused him of. Surely he retained enough family honor to justify the moniker of gentleman.

When he wasn’t three sheets to the wind, that is.

“On second thought,” he abruptly announced, “let’s call it a night.” He waved toward the massive wall clock hanging between the stuffed heads of an elk and a ten-point buck. “It’s after eleven. Closing up in less than an hour, anyway. Tomorrow’s Sunday, y’know. Can’t have drunkards and carousers spoiling the Sabbath, remember.”

“When’s the last time you sat on a pew for a church service, Gray?” Carl asked.

Before Gray could answer, the quiet poker player across the room shoved away from the table and surged to his feet. “You there!” he called in a flat nasal voice, the tone belligerent. “You there at the bar with your pie-eyed friends. You been staring at me, and I don’t like it.”

Ignoring the angry blustering of the other men at the table, the man tossed down his cards and started toward the bar.

“Uh-oh.” Dan glanced from Gray to the oncoming poker player. “Want us to take care of him for you, buddy?”

“Yeah, we’ll settle it,” Carl chimed in, slamming his drink down on the bar. “Shame for you to go visit your folks sporting a black eye.”

Weary to the bone, eaten up with a bitter sense of shame that would not leave him alone, Gray was tempted to give in.

Pride, and a sense of fair play, wouldn’t allow him. “I could go home wearing a blasted three-piece suit from Paris, with a carnation in the lapel, and the reaction would be the same as if I sported buckskins. And a black eye.” As casually as he could manage given his none-too-steady knees, Gray stiffened his back and shifted his stance. “My family condemns me for my actions.” Almost as much as he condemned himself.

The poker player stopped a yard away. “Got no use for rude drunks.”

“Me either,” Gray responded, flexing his hands. “Didn’t mean to stare. Sorry to cause offense and all that.”

Carl and Dan made a poor job of stifling laughter.

The stranger’s face burned brick-red. “Seems ta me you and your drunk friends need someone to teach you a lesson.”

“Ah…mm…” Gray struggled to retain a hold on his slippery temper. “Been out of school a while now.” He tucked his thumbs into his waistband and propped his elbows on the counter behind him. “I don’t want a fight, mister. Why don’t you go on back to your table and try to teach your friends a lesson. From the looks of it they need schooling more than we do.”

The man’s head lowered and he took another step forward. “You don’t want to make sport of me, you drunken lout.”

“Nope,” Gray cheerfully agreed. “Matter of fact, we were just leaving, weren’t we, boys?”

Grinning like maniacs, Carl and Dan nodded.

“And,” Gray repeated more softly, “I don’t want a fight. This isn’t the West, you know, friend. There are laws against public scenes.”

“I ain’t your friend. And if you weren’t angling for a broken jaw, ya shouldn’t have stared at me.”

Without warning, the man swung, coming in with a left hook that might in truth have broken Gray’s jaw if the blow had connected. But Gray read the action in the man’s glittering eyes, and in a few swift moves rendered the astonished fellow immobile, sweating with pain. Both men knew the slightest pressure could break either a wrist or an arm; only Gray knew how thin the thread keeping him from losing control was. He blinked, fighting the tremors and volcanic emotion that stretched his body as taut as a man on a rack.

“When you live around pigs too long, the stench tends to cling.” Sucking in a sobering breath, Gray released his victim except for a punishing hold that kept the man’s right hand at an angle that ensured his continued compliance. “If you knew me, you’d know better than to provoke a fight I don’t want. Now go on back to your poker buddies, and leave me alone.” With a contemptuous shove he released him.

Silence hovered throughout the room as the routed card player slunk between tables. Men shifted their gazes as he passed by.

Feeling lower than a snake’s belly in a deep pit, Gray muttered a curse beneath his breath. “Let’s get out of here. I’m sick of feeding fodder to the Faulkner gristmill.”

But as he stalked out, flanked by Carl and Dan, Gray lost the battle against the penetrating voice warning him that he was the perpetrator of the gossip, not the victim of it. For years he’d fought to free himself from suffocating familial chains, only to discover that in his determination to escape he’d trapped himself inside a cell without a door. He might as well wish himself on the North Star as to wish he could repudiate the Faulkner name, or change the person he had become.

Wouldn’t it be a fitting cosmic joke if Neala Shaw were right after all? Grayson Faulkner, youngest son of a prestigious family whose honor and philanthropy dated back four generations, was a misogynist. And on the way to becoming a public punching bag as well.

Isabella Chilton Academy

Tucked fifteen feet up in the notch of a massive oak, screened by branches and a cluster of leafy maples, a man watched the wiry Irishman and the girl—who should be dead—explore the edge of the cliff. Still as a hoot owl, he watched them discover where he’d patiently chipped the base of the boulder until one hard shove sent it over the cliff. Of course he’d been canny enough to wipe away the boot prints, so he wasn’t concerned with discovery. They would assume he’d climbed down the cliff and escaped in a boat up the river, or vanished into the forest. People were predictable and seldom thought their way beyond the obvious.

Nonetheless, the unpleasant truth scraped his mind like a hacksaw blade: Neala Shaw was still alive. Instead of preparing for a funeral, someone had decided to investigate. And even a brainless dolt would realize the significance of their findings. Sure enough, moments later he clearly heard the windblown voices, heard them reach the inevitable conclusion. The Irishman—Liam, he heard her call him—vented his spleen in a loud mixture of Gaelic and English.

“…and ye can be sure as St. Patrick’s cowl I’ll no’ be standing back fer that dunderhead of a sheriff. The black-hearted jackanapes who’d be after harming Miss Isabella’s girls will be answering to me, see if he don’t.”

“Liam…”

“Now, missy. You got eyes, and a brain underneath all them curls. You know same as me the way of it, here.”

Temptation cascaded through his veins; he wanted to finish her off now, right now, not even caring that he’d have to kill the Irishman as well. He wrapped his arms around the thick tree trunk to keep from giving in to the urge.

Frustration knotted his stomach and set his head to throbbing like a wound. The boulder hadn’t even struck the right girl. All his careful preparations, every second of his meticulous planning, the dark nights he’d sweated through preparing the site to ensure the supposition of an “accidental” death…and still she was alive. She might as well be rubbing his nose in the dirt, gloating over his failure.

How could he have known they’d change cloaks? Why had they done so? It wasn’t fair! It was not to be allowed!

He closed his eyes and struggled to remember his ultimate goal. Over the past several years he’d experienced other failures, but in the end patience and persistence always yielded success. Neala Shaw would be no different. And this time, the final act of retribution would bring about the final victory.

When he reopened his eyes, Neala and the Irishman had vanished. He could hear nothing but leaves scuffling in the breeze, and his own ragged breathing. Panic raced over his skin, freezing cold, like sleet in January. Then his ear caught the faint sound of voices. Ah. They were returning to the house, then. Not searching the woods or the path down the cliff to the river. He was still undetected, still safe. Still in charge of destiny, theirs as well as his own.

Carefully he climbed down the tree, dropped to the ground, then set off after them. Through binoculars he watched as they crossed the lawn and entered the main house.

Nothing to do now but wait. And maintain the watch.

For the next two days he prowled, a silent onlooker stoking resolve with a blend of righteous anger and bitter frustration. They knew the boulder was deliberate—but was there enough evidence to point to Neala Shaw as his target? The sheriff hadn’t put in an appearance, but that might be because the old woman who ran the school didn’t want to broadcast such disquieting news: either a student had been singled out for elimination, or the intent had been to kill whoever was on the path at the time.

Every now and then he wanted to laugh. Delicious temptation goaded him to ignite a whispering campaign, for the pleasure of watching all the other students flee like roaches escaping a fire. The hoity-toity Isabella Chilton Academy’s reputation would be as smashed to bits as the boulder he’d shoved over the cliff.

By the end of the second day temptation dribbled away. All he truly cared about was Neala’s reaction. Would she finally run again? He passed delicious hours hoping so. He was weary of this place, especially since it only served to remind him of his failures to eliminate Neala Shaw. And he’d been sighted at least once, which festered inside, more of a worry than he liked to admit. The longer he lurked about, the greater the likelihood of exposure, questions. Speculations that would force him to have to kill an innocent bystander.