Authors: Jodi Thomas,Linda Broday,Phyliss Miranda

A Texas Christmas (8 page)

BOOK: A Texas Christmas

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Sam looked at the man holding a Colt at his chest, but his words were for the sheriff. “Adler isn’t going to let you go, Raines. You’re as dead as I am.”

The sheriff laughed. “You’re wrong. Boss and I have become friends. He needs me. I’m the one who will explain everything to the folks in town. Old man Dolton came over here, found Maggie Allison in your house, and killed her. You came home, found her body, and went over and killed Dolton at his place, after you tortured him, of course. The older son must have seen you and shot you, then I confronted him in town, and unfortunately, I’ll have to shoot him before he tells us any more than what we can guess from the bodies.”

The sheriff smiled. “I retire a hero. Adler goes about his business without a witness to testify against him. Since you and Miss Maggie are both alone without any family, there’ll be no one to ask questions. By the time the snow melts no one will even care.”

“Only one problem.” Sam smiled. “Maggie isn’t here.”

Chapter 11

Maggie moved through the baby’s room feeling panic dancing in her veins. For a moment she searched the walls looking for the door.

Nowhere.

She tried to think. Sam hadn’t said a door. He’d called it a little passage, but she couldn’t remember what else he’d said.

It wouldn’t be in the floor or the ceiling. It had to be in the walls. She held a sleepy Webster close as she ran her free hand along the walls. When she reached the second built-in bookshelf, the frame gave slightly.

Maggie tugged and an opening appeared. She could hear Sam and the sheriff arguing downstairs. The moment she’d spotted Boss Adler coming through the door with his gun drawn, she knew they were in trouble. Her instinct was to run to Sam, but she knew he would want Web safe. That had to be her first priority.

Grabbing a blanket, she covered Web’s head and moved into the dark passage. Once in, she tugged the bookshelf back into place. It crossed her thoughts that maybe she could hide there and wait until she knew it was safe, but if the baby made a sound, they’d be found. Her best plan of action was to be as far away as possible when someone opened the passage. If it was Sam, he’d come after them. He’d know where she was headed. If it was anyone else, her life would depend on finding somewhere safe to hide.

Maggie crossed her arms over Web and moved slowly along a tunnel that must have been an underground spring at one time. Water, a few inches deep, still trickled in the uneven grooves at her feet. She bumped along trying to protect the child and keep her balance as she moved down slippery rock.

Listening, she prayed she didn’t hear a shot. The spiders and mud didn’t matter.
Just don’t let Sam die.
She knew Adler had come to kill them both. Maybe not being able to find her would buy Sam time.

She felt like she’d moved along the natural tunnel for half a mile before she saw light. Web hadn’t made a sound until he saw the sun reflected off snow; then he began to cry.

Maggie’s arms ached, but she held him close as she stepped from the blackness into the blinding light of snow. Wind whipped around her, turning the cold air to freezing. She couldn’t see anything. She had no idea which way to go and she knew it wouldn’t be wise to stay in the tunnel.

Sam had said something about being able to see the old woman’s dugout from the cave entrance, but all she saw was snow.

Webster held to her tightly but she knew the blanket wouldn’t keep him warm.

Panicking, she searched the horizon. All she could see was snow. Slowly she turned in a circle. Snow. A few rocks. The charred remains of what had once been trees.

Sam’s description of Nina’s place drifted across her panic.
Nothing left but burned tree trunks that stuck up like tombstones in her front yard.

She stared at the dead trees and spotted a tiny curl of smoke from a cabin built half in the ground. The place was almost completely covered in snow. It looked to be only a hundred yards away, but the wind had whipped snow around, leaving drifts almost to her waist.

Step by step she moved toward the cabin. The snow fought her progress. Web wiggled, wanting down, but she couldn’t risk it.

Finally, sweating and freezing at the same time, she made her way to the cabin door.

When Nina answered the knock, both Maggie and Webster were crying. Nina stepped outside and took the boy from Maggie.

For a moment, Maggie just stood still, trying to breathe as her muscles contracted in exhaustion.

“Come on, girl!” Nina yelled. “You made it this far. You can walk a few more steps.”

Maggie forced one foot to move and then another. When she finally stepped inside, a blast of heat hit her as painfully as a hundred bee stings.

Nina dropped Web into her old chair and pulled the wet blanket away. The boy was sniffling from fright, but didn’t look hurt. “Stay here and be still,” Nina told him. “Maybe the cat will come sit on you if you do.” She covered him with a quilt and shoved the chair closer to the fire.

Web stopped crying and watched the three cats.

Nina moved to Maggie. “You took good care of that boy, but you look terrible. Take off those wet boots and frozen trousers. I’ll find you a blanket. We got to thaw you out a little at a time, so don’t get any closer to the fire.”

Nina helped her tug off her wet boots and trousers, then dropped a blanket over her head. “You got ice in your hair, girl. You came through that cave, didn’t you?”

Maggie nodded.

“Then I’m guessing there’s a world of trouble at Sam’s place if you’re here.” The old woman stood and bolted the door before she sat an old gun on the kitchen table. “I can’t do much about the trouble, but I can help you.”

The clock on the old woman’s mantel seemed to tick at half speed. Maggie finally sat by the fire, her hair drying wildly around her as she drank the strongest coffee she’d ever tasted. Nina fussed over the boy while she asked questions.

“They won’t come here.” The old woman was guessing the future. “Not that many folks know about my place. Not even Sam tries to stop by when it snows. The trail is too dangerous from above.”

The day aged and Maggie thought she might go insane with worry over Sam. She guessed that if Adler didn’t kill him outright, he’d start trying to beat her whereabouts out of Sam. She knew Sam would die before he said a word.

Nina circled past her and mumbled as if she’d read Maggie’s thoughts, “He’s alive, girl, don’t you worry. I can feel things. I know.”

“Would you tell me if you change your thinking?” Maggie didn’t know whether to believe the old woman or not, but she had to ask.

“Of course I will. If Sam’s dead, you’ll have to start worrying about this baby. He’ll be yours then.”

“Mine?”

Nina barked a laugh. “He would have been anyway. That first time I saw you, you know what I saw in Sam’s eyes?”

“What?”

“I saw longing. I saw need. The kind of need a man gets when he has to have a woman for a lifetime. I knew you were going to be his.”

“But I’m not his.”

Nina grinned. “Yeah, you are, girl, and if he dies today, you’ll mourn him like a widow.”

Maggie started to argue, but realized she couldn’t. The old woman was right.

Chapter 12

Sam took the first few blows Adler gave him without even trying to duck. It wouldn’t have mattered. The first time the Colt slammed against his head, the handle left a gash across his cheek and split his lip. The second time, he felt the blow at his hairline. Blood dripped in a steady stream over his left eye.

After that, Adler tied him to the worktable and took his anger out on Sam’s body with the butt of his rifle. He kept yelling for Sam to tell him where Maggie was.

Sam never made a sound. The icy wind blew in the open door, numbing the pain.

Finally, the sheriff yelled and stopped the beating. He grabbed Sam by the hair and lifted his head off the table. “If you’ll tell us where the woman is, I’ll make him kill you and her quick.”

Sam glared at the sheriff, thinking he was worse than the outlaw. Boss Adler was an animal, probably had been all his life. Rumor was he killed his mother when he was eleven and left his drunken father locked in the house to burn. But Raines had been a sheriff for several years, and before that he’d ridden with Colonel MacKenzie in the Red River Wars. He must have been a good man once, but something inside him had twisted.

“How about I cut a few fingers off?” Adler suggested to the sheriff. “That sure got old Dolton talking.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. He’ll never talk. Kill him and we’ll go find the girl. She couldn’t have gone far in this weather. I’ll search the house, you take the barn. We’ll find her.”

Adler widened his stance and pulled his hunting knife. With both hands on the handle, he raised the knife above Sam’s chest.

Sam closed his eyes and tried to picture Maggie holding his son. He wanted to walk into the hereafter with that one thought in his mind.

A blast of gunfire roared through the house like a freight train at full speed.

Sam jerked, thinking he was dead and the pain hadn’t hit him.

Gunfire answered from somewhere close and another blast rattled the walls.

Then silence. Absolute silence. Sam wondered if this was what dying was like. Not painful or messy, just silent. His ears were ringing, but beyond that he heard nothing but his heart pounding.

He opened one eye. If his heart was making so much racket, he couldn’t be dead.

Sam looked around the room and saw nothing. The sheriff and the outlaw seemed to have vanished. The door was still open, cold wind blowing in along with bright light.

Sam tugged at the ropes holding his hands and feet to the table.

“You still alive?” A voice came from nowhere.

Sam tried to see through the blood over his one eye that wasn’t swollen, but he saw no one. “I’m alive. Untie me.”

A shadow moved across the light at the door. The boy in the doorway couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. The buffalo gun he carried was bigger than him. Sam thought he looked like Dolton’s youngest kid, but he couldn’t be sure.

“I had to kill them,” the boy said as he sat the rifle down and picked up Adler’s knife from the floor. “You should have seen what they did to my pa.”

“It’s all right,” Sam said in a low voice. “You did what you had to do.”

As the kid cut the leather straps, Sam tried to sit up. As he did, he saw the bodies of both the sheriff and the outlaw. They’d been standing on either side of the table. The boy had shot them both in the head, and the buffalo gun hadn’t left much of the skulls intact.

“You look terrible, Sam Thompson.”

Sam would have smiled if he didn’t hurt so badly. “You know me.”

“Sure, my pa was always saying how he was going to ride over here and kill you one day. He hated you.”

“You feel the same?” Sam coughed up blood.

The kid shook his head. “I used to come over here and visit my sister when you were out. She said you were good to her. She said she wanted to have your baby ’cause you were a good man, and that’d make the baby good.”

Sam tried to breathe. He wished Danni had told him that once. Half the time he felt like she thought she was trapped in his house.

“What’s your name?”

“Eben.”

“Well, Eben, do you think you can get me to town? I’ve got an old sled that will hold us both.” Sam could see the room darkening and knew he didn’t have much time. “You’ll have to get there fast. I think I’m bleeding inside.”

“You’re bleeding pretty good on the outside too, Sam.”

The blackness claimed him before Sam could answer.

Chapter 13

Maggie waited at Nina’s for two days without word from Sam. She was afraid to try to go back to the house even though the snow was melting. Sam could be dead and they could be waiting for her.

With each hour she felt safer knowing they hadn’t found the passage. Nina’s cabin was far enough down into the canyon that the sheriff wasn’t likely to come down, and even if he did, Nina had a plan to meet him at the door.

The old woman kept telling her that Sam was still alive, but it made less and less sense. If he was alive, why hadn’t he come after her? He could have walked the passage and been here even with the snow and mud.

On the third day, a tall man who had the same coloring as Sam knocked on Nina’s door.

To Maggie’s surprise the old woman opened the door and yelled, “What’d you want, Andrew? I don’t have time to visit with no-good Thompsons passing by.”

The tall man didn’t seem to take offense. “I come by to see if you got the boy. We didn’t find his body.”

Maggie pushed past Nina. “What boy?”

The tall man was ten, maybe fifteen years older than Sam, but he had the same dark eyes. He removed his hat. “Sam’s boy. When I saw Sam’s old sled headed into town I knew something was wrong. I know Sam don’t want no one in his business, but all his kin know about the boy. I followed him to the doc’s place in town. The Dolton kid was with him and he told me what happened. A man named Adler pretty near killed Sam, but the Dolton kid stopped it.”

Maggie stood in the cold, trying to take in everything the stranger was saying. Sam was hurt, but he was alive.

“Well,” Nina shouted. “What else, Andrew? I swear, getting anything out of you men is harder than milking a squash.”

“I told the Dolton boy we’d bury his pa and whoever was in Sam’s house. Less said about it the better.” He stood swaying slightly like a tall pine, then he added, “It’s the Thompson way, I guess.”

Maggie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “We have to let the law handle this. Three men have been killed, and at least one of them tried to kill Sam.”

Andrew looked at her like she wasn’t too bright. “Town don’t have any sheriff right now. The men who killed old man Dolton are both dead. There is no one to try and no one to tell.”

“Where’d you bury the bodies?” Nina asked as if the matter of telling was settled.

“Over in the growth of trees between Dolton’s land and Sam’s. The ground was so frozen we couldn’t dig deep, but we covered them good with rocks. By the time the oldest boy sobers up in a week or two, the brother will have thought of a good story. Their pa was fond of taking off for parts unknown. As far as Adler, I doubt anyone will look for him, and the folks in town will just think the sheriff started his retirement early.”

“I want to go to Sam,” Maggie asked. “Will you take me into town?”

“I’ll take you home, but not to Sam. He wouldn’t want people seeing you come to him. He knows there would be talk. If he makes it through this, he’ll come to you. If he doesn’t, he wouldn’t want you to see him die.”

Nina agreed. “No one needs to ever know you were here. That’s how Sam would want it.”

Maggie hadn’t slept in two days. She was exhausted and frightened and worried. “What about Web?”

“I’ll keep him here for a few days. You go rest. Sam will come to you as soon as he can.”

Maggie could not bring herself to ask what would happen if Sam died. She couldn’t think about it without falling completely apart. As if watching her own life happen mindlessly, she wrapped in a black shawl of Nina’s and climbed up behind Andrew Thompson. He didn’t say a word to her on the ride to town or when he helped her off the horse at her back door.

She climbed the stairs to her rooms and collapsed into bed. Sixteen hours later, she woke to the sun shining in. Like a wind-up toy, she moved about her rooms, taking a bath, dressing in the same dull clothes she always had dressed in, tying her hair back in a neat bun at the back of her neck.

Her time with Sam seemed more a dream than reality. The dullness covered her as she cleaned the glass from the store floor and decided to leave the storefront boarded up for a few days. The sheriff must have kept his word and told everyone she was visiting friends because no one came by to check on her and no one expected the store to reopen until the new year.

Every ounce of her body wanted to walk to the end of town and visit the doctor. If Sam was there, she told herself all she needed to do was see him and know he was alive. She didn’t even need to talk to him. But deep down she knew she wouldn’t be able to leave him if he was hurting or even dying, and she also knew he wouldn’t want anyone to know.

Sam Thompson was a private man. Somehow if she told anyone her story of all that had happened since the robbery attempt, she’d be betraying him.

Three days passed, then four, then a week. Maggie no longer measured time. She’d set her logical mind in motion. She’d wait for Sam to come even if he only came to say good-bye. If he died, she’d somehow find Nina’s cabin and take Webster. She’d sell the store and go back East where no one would know she wasn’t the boy’s natural mother. She’d live as a widow, for Nina was right—that was exactly how she would feel.

On the third day of January, Maggie reopened the store. Christmas and the storm were over, though snow remained packed on most of the roads. Every woman in town seemed to need to shop. A few asked about her broken door, but none asked about how her Christmas had been.

Midmorning Maggie was busy adding up purchases with both of her part-time employees restocking as fast as they could. Several women were shopping while an equal number just seemed to be visiting when suddenly a child’s cry rattled the store.

Every mother reached for her children as a toddler shoved past ladies’ skirts and ran toward Maggie.

She jumped from her stool and ran around the counter just in time to catch Webster.

“Ma Ma,” he cried. “Ma Ma.”

Maggie hugged him to her. “It’s all right, Webster. I’m here.” The sun had just come into her world.

The mercantile was silent as a tall man walked slowly toward her. His arm was in a sling and she noticed his hat hid a bandage, but no man in the world had ever looked better. Even with a thick start to a beard, she saw only perfection.

Maggie smiled at him and for a moment there was no one else in the room. The hunger and love in his eyes told her all she needed to know.

Webster had stopped crying and was playing with the bun at the back of her neck. Though Sam only looked at her, Maggie became aware that everyone in the room was looking at him.

“Ladies,” she said in a bold voice. “I don’t believe you’ve met my husband.”

Before anyone could think of a question, Sam circled her waist and pulled her around the counter to her small office.

He leaned over carefully as if he were still very sore and whispered in her ear. “You’ll need your coat. I’m taking my wife home.”

Maggie didn’t hesitate; she turned to the coatrack and began pulling on her coat. The journal lay open on her desk to the page where she’d written
One wish—a loving man for one day.

“One day’s not enough. I’ll take a lifetime.”

“A lifetime of what?” Sam asked.

“Of loving you.” She smiled at him. “And of doing all kinds of things we’ll never speak of.”

“I don’t want to play a game, Maggie. If you come with me it’s for real. Forever.” He kissed her again with Webster wiggling between them. “And I’m not taking the time to shave before I kiss you again.”

“I’d like to go home now. It’s about time we had that Christmas we planned.” For the first time in her life, she feared her heart might explode. “The girls can handle the store until I get back.”

Sam took her hand and led her out the back door where an old sled waited. “On the snow, we can make it home in this, but as soon as I’m able, I plan to teach you to ride.”

“How hurt are you?”

“Doc says I need several days of bed rest, so I thought I’d better come get my wife.” He winked at her.

Maggie could hear all the ladies gossiping inside, but she no longer cared. After all, she was a Thompson now, and Thompsons keep to themselves.

BOOK: A Texas Christmas

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