Fletcher's Woman (23 page)

There was no answer. Griffin shrugged and raised his collar against the gray drizzle of the morning. The boy was probably in the woods somewhere, playing the strange and lonely games his limited mind suggested to him.

The close silence of those woods appealed to Griffin that bleak morning, too, but for more practical reasons. He could save time by taking the narrow path leading through them and avoiding the main road, and it was unlikely that he would meet anyone there. He needed the brief isolation to assemble the expression and bearing his patients would expect to see.

Griffin's horse neighed with obvious impatience as they rounded the hidden pond Billy loved to explore and approached the two giant boulders just beyond it.

Griffin smiled, remembering that the boy saw soldiers inside those giant rocks and believed that they guarded the path. Instead, rising on both sides of it as they did, they made it barely passable for a man on horseback.

The men were upon him the moment he passed between the
boulders into a small, sunless clearing. He cursed as the damp, leaf-matted ground came up to meet him.

Dazed, Griffin raised himself to his knees. Just as he did so, a rifle butt caught him hard in the side of his head.

The blow blurred his vision, and the impact of it echoed, throbbing, through his skull. He raised himself from the ground again, conscious of the rain falling on his neck.

How many were there? He couldn't see clearly, but he guessed, from the shifting shadows, that there were six or seven men crowded around him.

“Watch those feet of his,” ordered a cold, calm voice.

Griffin reeled, unsteady. A boot landed in the center of his rib cage and brought him back to his knees. He spat a curse, tasted blood in his mouth. “Is this what you did to McKinnon, Jonas?” he rasped.

Hands grasped Griffin's arms, wrenched him to a standing position, held him fast. A thick, gray fog settled around him and the commands he gave his feet came to nothing. He sensed, rather than saw, Jonas's approach, but he did catch the blue-black gleam of a rifle barrel.

“Good morning, Griffin,” Jonas said affably.

The excruciating pain in Griffin's head and rib cage made speech impossible for the moment. He managed nothing more than an outraged groan. Somewhere behind him Tempest danced, bridle jingling, and whinnied in agitation.

Something hard—probably the butt of Jonas's rifle—smashed into his face suddenly. Pain exploded in Griffin's head, and he felt his knees give way again.

“Get him on his feet!” Jonas hissed.

Griffin tried to struggle as his ambushers wrenched him upright, but the effort was hopeless. He fought down the vomit that burned in his throat.

Jonas's rage surged toward him like an invisible wall, immediately followed by a fist. But he was beyond pain now, beyond any feeling at all.

He laughed, and his words came out in a soft rush. “You bastard, Jonas. You're too late—you're too goddamned late.”

“Let him go,” Jonas ordered, from somewhere in the throbbing void.

Griffin's knees buckled as his arms were released, but some of his vision came back as he slid part way to the ground, and he felt rage as Jonas's hand entwined itself in his hair and wrenched his head back.

Jonas bent, to smile into Griffin's battered face. “I'll find her, Griffin—I promise you that. Seattle isn't big enough to hide her. But Rachel is another topic, for another day. This little set-to was my payment for the beating you gave me last week.”

Griffin flailed one leaden, aching arm, to knock Jonas's hand from his head. The swearword he uttered was lost in the dismal drone of the rain.

Jonas was standing up straight now, smiling with satisfaction. “Now, my old friend, I have a little scripture for you. ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap.'”

An instant later, the toe of Jonas's boot slammed into Griffin's groin. The pain burst in his genitals like an explosion, and radiated into every fiber of his being. He fell forward, half-conscious, into the mud.

•   •   •

When the bad men were gone, Billy crept from his hiding place in the thick trees and scrambled toward Dr. Fletcher's motionless body. Kneeling, he dashed tears of fright from his face and whispered, “Doctor?”

Griffin groaned, stirring on the wet ground.

Billy pulled off his own coat, crumpled it, and, with gentle, trembling hands, placed it under Griffin's head for a pillow. He didn't know what else to do.

“H-horse,” the man muttered, the rain mingling with the blood that gleamed in his dark hair and coursed from his face.

Billy looked around for the stallion with frantic eyes. When he whistled, the animal ambled out of the underbrush, the reins of his bridle dangling in the mud. Billy moved cautiously toward the horse, crooning soft words as he went.

Tempest balked when he grasped the bridle near the bit, and then settled down with a frightened nicker. “Easy, boy,” Billy breathed. “Real easy. The bad men are gone.”

As Billy turned, he saw Griffin raise himself to his hands and knees and then fall again.

He was shattered by the sight, by his own helplessness and fear. “I'll go get Ma—or Field,” he sniffled. “I could get Field—”

Griffin shook his bloody, rain-drenched head and tried again to stand. “No. Help me up.”

The boy obeyed, feeling the doctor's pain in his own body as he brought him to his feet.

Griffin raised his face to the rain, groped until he found the horn of Tempest's saddle, and held onto it. After a moment, he
forced himself to endure the increased pain in his rib cage long enough to grasp one of the reins in his right hand. With quick, costly movements, he bound his left hand to the saddle horn. “Lead him home, Billy.”

It was a long, agonizing process, stumbling back to the house beside Tempest. But Molly was there, sensible and calm, the rain plastering her copper-colored hair to her forehead and her neck.

“Saints in heaven,” she breathed, “What happened?”

“Jonas,” Griffin whispered, flinching as Molly untied his hand and positioned herself under his right arm.

Because of Griffin's size, Molly, even with the help of her son, could bring him no farther than the study. At Field's insistence, the room was still a fine mess of overturned furniture and scattered draperies.

While Molly trembled under the leaden weight of Griffin Fletcher's inert frame, Billy put the sofa right. Then, together, they dragged their burden toward it.

After depositing him there and covering him with the first thing that came to hand—a drapery—Molly took firm command. “Run and fetch Field Hollister, Billy. Don't stop looking until you find him.”

Tearfully, Billy ambled off to obey, casting an occasional wounded glance backward, at the still form stretched out on the leather sofa.

Molly went to the cupboard where supplies and instruments were kept. It had been untouched by the doctor's rampage, and not by accident, she thought.

From its shelves, Molly took a bottle of alcohol, clean cloths, tape, and a roll of gauze. These supplies secured, she placed them carefully on a corner of Griffin's upended desk and hurried into the kitchen for hot water.

It was only after she'd tended Dr. Fletcher's wounds that Molly Brady permitted herself to cry.

•   •   •

Rachel began her first day of work in a bustle of brave enthusiasm, even though she felt foolish and inept and, somehow, imposed upon Mr. Turnbull like a troublesome relation.

By noon, she had sold only a length of satin ribbon and a card of pearl buttons. No matter how friendly she was, her feminine customers seemed affronted by her presence, asking petulantly after someone named Poor Marie.

More than once, during the morning, Rachel had raised her
eyes to the grim, rainy bay and regretted her hasty flight from Providence. The dream of turning the saloon her mother had left her into a respectable boardinghouse still ached in a corner of her heart.

For a few minutes, as she drank her solitary noon-time tea in the cluttered storeroom behind the dry goods counter, Rachel dared to imagine herself buying passage on the steamboat,
Statehood,
and returning to the small town on Hood Canal.

Of course, she couldn't—not for the time being, at least. She needed time to heal, and to reassemble her broken pride. Until she had done these things, she could not reasonably expect to encounter Griffin Fletcher time and time again, as she undoubtedly would, and still retain her dignity.

Suddenly, as she munched dispiritedly on a lettuce sandwich snatched from Miss Cunningham's kitchen that morning, Jonas Wilkes loomed in her mind. Rachel again felt tremendous guilt for the way she'd left him behind at the picnic. How on earth would she apologize, when and if she ever saw him again?

I'm so sorry,
she imagined herself saying.
I didn't mean to abandon you like that, but I had to go up onto the mountain and lose my virginity, you see.

Rachel meant to laugh, but hot tears came to her eyes instead.

She turned her mind to memories of the night before. The trip to Skid Road had been fruitless, and dangerous in the bargain. There had been footsteps echoing behind her as she hurried along the waterfront, and she'd been mute with terror when a sleek carriage had rattled to a stop beside her and disgorged a lividly angry Captain Douglas Frazier.

He had shouted at her in the street, shouted at her in the carriage, shouted at her in Miss Cunningham's dooryard. And he'd still been angry at breakfast.

This is not my decade,
Rachel thought.

•   •   •

Jonas Wilkes felt a disturbing sense of disquiet as he rode onto his own property, his men straggling, single file, behind him, their horses nickering in the rain.

Griffin Fletcher's words echoed in his mind.
“You're too late. You're too damned late.”

Suppose it was true? Suppose Rachel had not remained in Seattle, after taking the hasty steamboat ride Fawn had finally recounted to him this morning? If she had boarded another ship, she would be lost to him, perhaps forever.

Jonas stiffened in the saddle, his muscles still aching with the satisfaction and release of bringing Griffin to his knees.

Dismounting at the door of his barn, Jonas considered the element of time with cold logic. Today—he would begin the search today.

Striding toward the house, Jonas allowed his thoughts to shift to Griffin. He was badly hurt, Griffin was, but he wouldn't be laid up long. Two days—maybe three—and he would be as formidable as ever. That was all the more reason, as far as Jonas was concerned, to act with haste.

Griffin made a strangled, soblike sound, deep in his throat, as Field grasped him beneath the arms and lifted him into a nearly upright position.

“Hold him there, then,” breathed Molly, as she cut away the muddy suit coat and blood-soaked shirt. Then, tossing the garments aside, she gently washed Griffin's swollen, horribly bruised ribs and began binding them tightly with strips of cloth torn from a bedsheet.

Field watched her swift, capable hands with distraught admiration. She'd learned much, it was clear, helping Griffin with the patients who were so often brought, virtually in pieces, to his door. “Molly, you are a fine nurse,” he remarked wearily, as she finished her task and nodded to Field to lay his friend down again.

Molly didn't answer; her eyes swept Griffin's face with a gentle, wounded look, and she brushed the dampened, blood-crusted hair back from his forehead. Her lips formed the plea soundlessly. Don't
die
.

“He won't, Molly,” Field said, out loud.

On the sofa, Griffin writhed in an anguish that was shattering to see. Molly reached out to touch his face and, when she did, his twisting frame grew still beneath her hand. Her eyes were like polished emeralds, gleaming in the sun, when she raised them to Field's face. “This is the work of Jonas Wilkes.”

Field put his hands into his trouser pockets and sighed. “I'd guessed that,” he said. He did not add that, while it was vicious, the attack had not been entirely unprovoked. When would it stop, this ceaseless, mindless violence?

There was a long, terrible silence, broken only by the grating rasp of Griffin's breathing.

Finally, her eyes dark with misery, Molly drew herself up, squared her small, straight shoulders, and lifted her chin. “This will be a long night, I'm thinking. You'd best build a fire, Field Hollister, while I'm making tea.”

Glad of something practical to do, Field crossed the room and placed crumpled newspaper inside the fireplace. Then, kneeling, he took splintery sticks of kindling from the brass bin beside him and stacked them, teepee fashion, around the paper. Into this structure, he tossed a lighted match.

As the flames crackled and popped in response, Field laid a pine log in their midst, closed his eyes, and prayed devoutly that Griffin would not die.

Behind him, Griffin moaned in delirium and cried out. Thunder, relatively rare on Puget Sound, rumbled in the night skies overhead, and Field looked heavenward as he turned from the newly laid fire.

“I hope you're not saying no,” he muttered.

Presently, Molly came in carrying a tray. Field righted a small table and two chairs, and they sat down, facing each other.

Molly's eyes were oddly distant as she poured tea for Field, and then for herself. When her hands were free again, she brought a pale blue envelope from her apron pocket and laid it on the table. “I've gotten a letter from Rachel herself,” she said, in a tone that suggested awe.

“What did she say?” Field asked evenly, not really caring.

Molly shook her head, and the firelight danced, crimson, on the strong planes of her face. “I've had no chance to read it; all I know is that someone gave it to Billy while he was looking for you.”

Field averted his eyes from the neat, childish, and somehow hopeful handwriting on the face of the blue envelope. “She's gone, Molly—she's gone, and still it isn't over.”