Fletcher's Woman (17 page)

Rachel struggled, sputtering, to her feet. Her silk blouse and wispy camisole were drenched and clinging, and musky leaves hung in her hair.

The rapt expression on Jonas Wilke's face made her look down. Her breasts, her nipples, even the small, distinctive birthmark—they were all as clearly visible as if she'd been stark naked.

Shivering with cold and embarrassment, Rachel covered herself with her arms and stood there, stubbornly, until Jonas laughed softly and turned his back.

“Wait here,” he said, his voice trembling with suppressed amusement and something indefinable. “I'll bring a blanket.”

As Jonas walked away, Rachel struggled out of the water and stood with her forehead resting against the rough bark of the willow tree. Desolate, muted sobs racked her. Griffin had struck out at her again, in senseless ferocity. And now she'd fallen into that nasty pond and spoiled the nicest clothes she'd ever owned.

She hadn't heard his approach, and his words startled her.

“Rachel, I'm sorry.”

Rachel turned, sniffling miserably, her arms still shielding her breasts, and looked up into the familiar dark eyes.

Griffin laughed tenderly as he plucked a soggy leaf from her hair. “You are so beautiful,” he said. “Even with moss on your head. Come on; we're going for a wagon ride.”

Rachel's mouth worked, but no words came.

His arm was strong around her sodden shoulders. “Hurry up, will you? I'm needed on the mountain, and if Jonas gets back here before we can get away, he and I will have a nasty disagreement.”

Numbly, Rachel allowed Griffin Fletcher to lead her through a tangle of blackberry vines, giant ferns, and hazelnut bushes. Beyond that was a sun-dappled clearing, where two horses, a buckboard, and one anxious driver waited.

It was wrong to leave Jonas like this, without even offering an explanation, but Rachel had no inclination, and no voice, to resist.

They were well up the rutted ox trail that led to the lumber camps before Rachel found her voice again. Wrapped in a smelly horse blanket, she bent toward the contradictory man sitting on the seat beside her. “Why did you bring me?” she
asked, hoping that the driver, who sat on her left, wouldn't hear.

Griffin looked down at her, smiled, and plucked yet another leaf from her hopelessly mussed hair. “I wasn't about to leave you there, Sprite. You would either have drowned or gotten youself ravaged before the day was out.”

She raised one eyebrow. “Of course, I'm safe
now.”

He laughed, shrugged, and looked away.

Rachel shook her head, and looked down at her ruined shoes, fervently hoping that the sun would penetrate that horse blanket and dry her blouse before they reached the lumber camp.

Time, coupled with the brightness of the summer sun, made it safe for Rachel to toss the horse blanket into the back of the wagon without fear of revealing her womanly charms to all and sundry. It was about four o'clock, she guessed, when the wagon jolted into camp; she might have asked the doctor the time, but she'd suspected that it would be wiser to maintain her silence. Words seemed to threaten the tentative, cautious peace they had established.

The camp was like many others Rachel had seen—a cluster of weathered shacks, wagons, and tents. The ramshackle cookhouse stood in the center, wispy gray smoke wafting from its crooked tin chimney.

An almost imperceptible grimace tightened Griffin Fletcher's jaw as the driver pulled the brake lever up and simultaneously reined in the team of horses. Clearly, Griffin hated this place, and Rachel wondered about that as the buckboard lurched to a stop. The camp was shoddy and, like most of its counterparts, extremely isolated, but still, it seemed that he should have been used to it.

The doctor jumped deftly from the wagon and reached up to aid Rachel. A primitive jolt went through her as his hands gripped her waist. As their eyes met, she saw an unmistakable
warning snapping in the stormy depths of his gaze. She blushed.

Griffin set her firmly on her feet, beside the wagon, and released her to take his medical bag from the wagon bed. “Stay close to me,” he ordered, in a terse undertone. And then he turned to stride toward the cookshack.

Rachel tarried only momentarily—her pride demanded that much—then scurried to catch up with Griffin. The eager, bluntly speculative glances coming from several of the men still in camp gave weight to his demand.

The inside of the cookhouse was dimly lit, and it smelled of stale bacon grease, kerosene, and sweat. A grizzled, wiry old man lay prone on the long, rough-hewn table in the center of the room.

“What's the matter?” Griffin snapped, setting his bag down with an unsympathetic thud.

“I've got this here fearsome ache in my belly, Little Fletch. It's like I'm gonna die.”

Griffin's response was a hoarse chuckle. His hands began to prod the old man's middle, causing him to cry out.

Rachel turned her back and stood stiffly at the murky, grease-coated window, looking out. There weren't many workers in camp, since it was Sunday—only those who tended tools or horses or saws. The great oxen, used to drag mammoth logs to the inevitable ‘skid road' slanting down the mountainside to the sound, were nowhere in sight.

The old man was groaning. “Stop that pokin' and pushin' afore you kill me!”

Rachel closed her eyes.

“Shut up,” Griffin said.

“What's the matter with me, Doc?” There was a whiny, pleading note to the words.

“You're a greedy old bastard, that's what's the matter. You've been eating too much of your own lousy food.”

“I ain't got a ruptured bendix?”

“Your appendix is fine.”

When Rachel turned from the window, the old man was sitting up, looking deeply disappointed. But then his eyes caught at her shoes and traveled the distance to her face with frank appreciation.

“Damn,” he breathed. “You got anything in that bag that'll take twenty or thirty years off me, Doc?”

Griffin's eyes touched Rachel's face with an amusement that
was almost tender. “This is Rachel McKinnon, Jack. Rachel, Jack Swenson—the worst cook in the Pacific Northwest.”

Rachel's name gave the old man obvious pause. “McKinnon, you say? Any relation to Ezra?”

“His daughter,” Griffin said, and something in his bearing cautioned Rachel to silence.

There was a guarded look in Swenson's eyes, and they swept swiftly away from Rachel. “Oh. Well, I ain't seen McKinnon around here.”

Griffin leaned back against another table, and folded his arms. “Nobody asked if you had,” he pointed out.

Swift alarm quivered in the pit of Rachel's stomach, though she couldn't have said why. It had more to do with Griffin's quiet restraint than the old man's remarks. Before she could say anything, however, the dark eyes stayed her tongue with a sharp, flashing admonishment.

“Is there anybody around here who is
really
sick?” Griffin asked the old man, in a gruff, taunting challenge.

Swenson looked properly affronted, then answered the question grudgingly. “Dobson ain't feelin' real chipper. That's that redheaded feller that you tangled with last time.”

Rachel's eyes shot to Griffin's face, and she watched in wonder as his expression hardened and then became completely unreadable.

“Where is he?” Griffin bit out.

Swenson gave terse directions to a certain bunkhouse, and Griffin set out for the place in strides so long that Rachel nearly had to run to keep up with him.

The bunkhouse was a crude structure, composed of four leaning walls and a sawdust floor. The man, Dobson, lay still on a cot in a far corner, just out of reach of the dust-speckled sunshine shafting in through one grimy window.

Dobson's crop of unkempt red hair was matted to his flesh, and awkward black stitches glared, garish and misshapen, against the paleness of his forehead. The knuckles on his great hands looked raw, and there was a filthy, ragged cloth binding his massive rib cage.

Griffin shot a dangerous look backward, to Swenson. “Why didn't you send for me?”

Swenson shrugged, glanced once more at Rachel, and walked out.

Pity ached in Rachel's throat as she surveyed the half-dead
man stretched out on the skimpy cot. “You did this?” she whispered, appalled.

Griffin was already bending over the man, examining him with swift hands, undoing the makeshift bandages, scowling at the ugly stitches above Dobson's eye. “Go back to the cookhouse and get me some hot, clean water,” he ordered.

Too stricken and sick to argue, Rachel turned and stumbled out. She returned, minutes later, with a basin full of steaming water and the one clean cloth Swenson had been able to find.

Griffin took the items and began cleaning the man's wounds with a gentleness that belied what he'd done. “If you're wearing a petticoat,” he said, without looking at Rachel at all, “I need it.”

After a fleeting, self-conscious glance at the window and the open door, Rachel reached up under her skirt and removed the requested garment.

With no word of thanks, Griffin tore the magnificent, hand-embroidered taffeta into wide strips and began to rebind Dobson's ribs with them. That done, he examined the jagged stitches again, and cursed.

“What is it?” Rachel dared to whisper.

“Silk,” he snapped. “Those idiots used silk.”

Rachel swallowed, feeling unaccountably guilty—as though she'd put the offending sutures into Dobson's flesh herself. “That was wrong?” she ventured, as Griffin plundered his medical bag, took out a brown glass bottle, and began dabbing something on the crudely mended gash.

“Yes, it was wrong,” he replied impatiently, intent on the task at hand. “Silk is unsanitary.”

Unwittingly, Rachel touched the soft, deliciously smooth fabric of her wrinkled blouse. “I think silk is wonderful,” she said.

At last, Griffin spared her a quick, surprisingly tender glance. “For clothes, it's fine. But wounds call for catgut, Sprite.”

The lumberjack stirred on the narrow cot and groaned, low in his throat, the way an injured animal will.

“I—I think I need to go outside,” Rachel muttered, feeling sick.

“Go ahead,” Griffin said shortly, all his attention focused on his patient again. “Just don't wander off.”

“Just don't wander off.”
The order made Rachel blush hotly; he'd spoken as if she were a child. But there was no use calling
him on it; he would only become even more nasty and impossible than usual.

The sun was moving imperceptibly westward when Rachel scanned the blue sky. What time was it? Five o'clock, six? If they didn't start down the mountain soon, it would be dark.

She leaned back against the dirty, unpainted wall of the bunkhouse and breathed in the soothingly familiar, pungent scent of the pine trees towering around the camp. Half a dozen lumberjacks were gathered nearby, perched on stumps and tool crates and embroiled in a card game of some sort.

Rachel deliberated carefully before she approached them and bluntly demanded, “Have any of you seen a man called McKinnon in the past few days?”

There was an unnerving silence. Several of the men surveyed Rachel with insulting questions in their eyes.

“Who's askin'?” countered an older man, with massive shoulders and arms so thick that the muscles strained at the worn flannel of his shirt.

Rachel lifted her chin. “I'm his daughter.”

A blond man with gaps between his teeth rolled languidly to his feet. “What do you say we go off somewheres private and talk about it, Sugar?”

The burly man who had spoken first glared at him in warning. “Didn't you learn nothin' by what happened to Dobson, Wilbur?”

Wilbur sat down again, reluctantly. “You Fletcher's woman?” he asked, spitting out the words as though they tasted bad.

Warm color surged into Rachel's face, but she stood her ground. “Yes,” she lied, exuding ominous confidence. “And you'd better be polite to me.”

Wilbur paled and turned his attention back to the cards in his hand.

With great dignity, Rachel turned and walked in the direction of the cookhouse.
Fletcher's woman. Now that was an interesting thought.

At the cookshack, an eager Swenson served her rancid coffee and regaled her with boisterous tales about life in the lumber camps. He'd been working in the woods for almost forty years, he claimed, first with Big Mike Fletcher, and then for Jonas Wilkes.

Rachel's interest was peaked by the mention of Griffin's surname. “Was Big Mike the doctor's father?”

Swenson nodded, and scorn played in the worn expanse of his face. “He was a gentleman, Mike Fletcher was, but he was no dandy like that high-falutin' son of his, no sir. He had ships, and he sailed 'em—felled timber on this mountain, too. Damn near broke his heart when his own flesh and blood turned on him.”

“Turned on him?” Rachel prodded, with caution.

“Little Fletch sailed off to Scotland. He wanted nothin' to do with old Mike's lumber interests.” Swenson shook his grizzled head sadly. “But he weren't too proud to use the money Mike sent to pay for his fancy education. When the boy got back—him and that Hollister kid—he was so full o' bein' a uppity doctor that he couldn't be bothered takin' up a saw.”

Rachel absorbed the information without revealing her consuming interest. “I thought the mountain had always belonged to Mr. Wilkes,” she threw out, after a long, idle pause.

Swenson was warming to the subject; he was as gossipy and ardent as any old woman. “No, sir. Wilkes—Jonas, Sr., I mean—made his money in the China trade. Some say he was a bit of a smuggler, too. He built that grand house o' his and brought his wife and baby up from San Francisco.”

“Then how—” Rachel blurted the words, and then caught herself. “Shouldn't the lumber business belong to Griffin—Dr. Fletcher?”