Fletcher's Woman (9 page)

The lamp light was bravely inadequate against the sullen glower of the day, but it was bright enough to reveal one woman to the other.

Griffin Fletcher scanned Rebecca's face once, with detached interest, and then quietly left the room.

“Come over here,” Rebecca said, and the words constituted both an order and a plea.

Knees weak, Rachel drew closer to the bed. In spite of the ravages of the illness, the beauty and grace she remembered were still there in that wondrous face, in those compelling violet eyes.

A sudden and disconcerting laugh tore itself from Rebecca's gaunt, hollow throat. “If that isn't the ugliest dress I've ever seen!”

Rachel could not stand up any longer, could not bother with matters so mundane as her brown woolen dress. She dropped to her knees beside the bed and cried out, “Why?”

Rebecca sighed and relaxed against the pillows propped behind her. “Why what? Why did I leave? Why do I live in this place? I left because I wasn't happy, Rachel.”

Rachel's anger and hurt were combining forces to choke her, but she managed a terse,
“This
makes you happy? Happier than living with Pa and me?”

“No,” replied Rebecca with wounding honesty. “No, but once I'd found that out, it was too late. I wouldn't leave you, Rachel, if I had it to do over again.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I couldn't be sure there would be food, among other things. I knew your father could provide the necessities, knew he would see that you had schooling. And he did, didn't he?”

Rachel lowered her head. She had been wrenched from one miserable schoolhouse to another, but she was educated. She could write a neat hand and read any book written in the English language. “Yes,” she said, after a long time.

Rebecca changed the subject rapidly. “You've got to leave Providence, Rachel. And leave it now.”

“Where would I go?” Rachel asked, and she was surprised by the reason in her voice, for she did not feel at all reasonable.

“Anywhere. San Francisco, Denver—even New York. Rachel, just go away.”

Slowly, cautiously, Rachel raised herself to her feet. “If you're worried that I'll disrupt your life here—”

Pain shadowed the sunken amethyst eyes. “My life doesn't matter anymore, but yours does. I'll give you the money I've saved, and you can start again somewhere else. My friends will sell the business when the time comes, settle my debts, and forward the proceeds to you.”

Rachel was at once appalled and touched. “I couldn't,” she whispered.

“But you will,” insisted her mother. “Rachel, you are a woman now, not a little girl. It is time you lived a decent, settled life.”

Rachel could not absorb the things she was hearing. “You're dying, aren't you?” she asked at last.

Rebecca seemed fitful now; she was beginning to writhe from the pain she had tried so hard to hide. “That's what Griffin tells me, and it can't happen too soon, as far as I'm concerned.”

Tears slipped, unnoticed, down Rachel's cheeks. She forgot her resentment and pain, forgot that this woman ran a notorious brothel. Rebecca was her mother, and she loved her.

“Come here, Child,” Rebecca said, reaching out for one of Rachel's hands, drawing her into an embrace.

Rachel allowed herself to be held, and when the spate of weeping had passed, she dried her face, straightened her impossible dress, and went downstairs in search of Dr. Fletcher.

Rebecca had weakened significantly during Rachel's brief absence, and she seemed almost to welcome the decline. Her eyes strayed from Rachel's face only once, when she heard the doctor opening his medical bag.

She shook her head as he drew out a vial and a syringe. “No, Griffin. I want every moment—every moment.”

Griffin dropped the items back into his bag without speaking and went to stand at a far window, looking out.

A last burst of fiery light came into Rebecca's hollow eyes as she clutched both Rachel's hands in her own. “You must go—promise me you'll go. There's a man, a terrible man—”

Rachel nodded, unable to speak.

Just minutes later, Rebecca McKinnon died.

Rachel was devastated. She stood, trembling, in a shadowed comer of her mother's room as Dr. Fletcher closed Rebecca's staring eyes and covered her face with the bedsheet.

A peculiar silence filled the room for a long time; muted sunshine crept across the bare floor, only to be blotted out again by some dark, distant cloud.

“I'm sorry,” the doctor muttered, as Rachel dried her eyes and raised her quivering chin.

But Rachel was hearing another voice, her mother's. “There's
a man, a terrible man—”

She remembered the angry, almost hateful way Rebecca had greeted Dr. Fletcher, the mean things he'd said and done from the first moment she'd met him. Perhaps the man of her mother's warnings was this one.

But Rachel couldn't be certain; in spite of outward appearance, she had sensed a sort of gruff, irreverent affection between the two of them. And there was, at the moment, no room inside her for any emotion other than the boundless, tearing grief she was feeling.
I lost you twice,
she raged inwardly, gazing at the thin form lying so still beneath the bedclothes.

Rachel grappled with the knowledge that there was no shining hope to cling to now, no chance that Rebecca would reappear in her life, repentant and prepared to be her mother again. Somehow, she felt even more bereft than she had at seven years of age, and more alone, too.

Griffin knew that Becky's death was a mercy, but still, he mourned her. He would miss her boundless friendship, her blunt honesty, her magnificent wit.

Yet he would have laughed aloud, had it not been for the shattered
girl
huddling in a corner.
Damn it, Becky,
he thought.
You managed it after all, didn't you? You're gone and Ezra is on the mountain and I'm stuck with the kid!

Griffin allowed himself a heavy, audible sigh. He reviewed the facts in his mind and came up with the same disturbing result every time: he could not leave Rachel there, at the brothel; places like that had a way of absorbing the bewildered and making them their own. Of course, she couldn't be dropped off at Tent Town and forgotten, either; he might as well hand her over to Jonas himself as abandon her there.

“Damn it!” he said, and the words startled him as well as Rachel.

The girl came bursting out of the shadows suddenly, her amethyst eyes clouded with shimmering tears, her perfect skin pale with outrage. The grief she felt was so tangible that Griffin could feel it mingling with his own.

“How dare you swear like that—here, now?”

He started to apologize, but before he could even frame the words, Rachel raised her hand and slapped him, hard. He swayed slightly and stared down into the pinched, furious face, stunned.

But, then, Griffin understood. He drew the girl into his arms and held her close as she sobbed into his shoulder.

Something hard and cold within Griffin Fletcher began to thaw. He nearly thrust Rachel away from him, the sensation was so alarmingly familiar; but his need to shelter and comfort her prevailed.

•   •   •

Jonas paced the inlaid hearth in front of his parlor fireplace, heedless of the shattered crystal grinding beneath the soles of his boots. He'd beaten the Indian too well; her bruises and cuts were visible, and the sleep that encompassed her now was not a natural one. There were too many catches in her breathing, and when she stirred on the brocade sofa, frightening, guttural sounds came from her swollen lips.

The slut could die. The thought stalked Jonas like a snarling beast; he could not outdistance it, no matter how much he paced.

He paused, resting his elbows on the ornate, gilded mantelpiece, and caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror gleaming above it. He turned from the sight and glared at the woman groaning on the sofa.

Jonas was a man of almost limitless influence, but if this girl died, he would undoubtedly stand trial for her murder. He might even hang.

The parlor doors opened with a hesitant creak, and Jonas
looked up to see Mrs. Hammond standing there, her full face etched with furious worry as she studied the girl. “I'll send for the doctor,” she said, after a long, stiff silence.

Jonas averted his eyes and walked to the liquor cabinet on the other side of the room to pour himself a generous dose of brandy. “I think that would be a good idea,” he said.

All the while, Mrs. Hammond's condemning gaze dug into his shoulder blades like invisible claws.

“You are a monster, Jonas Wilkes,” the woman breathed, fearless in her long tenure. “A brutal monster!”

Jonas flinched slightly, but did not turn around to face the woman who had raised him. Hammond would forgive him, as she always had. “That will be all,” he said, with an authority he didn't feel.

•   •   •

Griffin strode up Jonas's walk, the medical bag swinging in his right hand. He remembered his earlier visit, that morning, and in spite of everything, he smiled. The animosity between himself and Jonas Wilkes went back a long way and was so fathomless that either man would have been wholly changed without it.

Jonas answered the crisp knock himself, and his bearing was that of a concerned, distracted friend. He led Griffin across the wide hallway and into the parlor.

The summons had been a brief one, delivered tersely by the henchman, McKay. Griffin had been told only that he was badly needed at Mr. Wilkes's house.

Now, as his gaze scanned the massive room and caught on Fawn Nighthorse's prone, unconscious form, a stunned hiss escaped him. “Jesus,” he muttered, approaching Fawn swiftly and checking the pulse point beneath her left ear. “What did you do to her?”

Jonas shrugged as Griffin felt the girl's rib cage with deft, discerning hands. “Didn't McKay tell you? She fell down the stairs.”

Griffin suppressed a killing rage as he lifted one of Fawn's eyelids and then the other. There could easily be internal injuries, and she would need stitches beneath her lower lip. “You bastard,” he breathed, without looking up.

Jonas stood at the foot of the sofa now, his voice an irritating drone in the throbbing tension of the room. “Indians are a disciplinary problem, you know.”

Griffin brought a bottle of alcohol from his bag and began to
clean the wounds on Fawn's battered face. “Shut up, you son of a bitch, and get me some hot water and a clean cloth.”

Jonas did not stir from his post at Fawn's feet. “Now, now, Griffin, I thought we were friends.”

Mrs. Hammond entered the room, shamefaced and stricken, bearing a basin of steaming water and several towels. The flow of the conversation was not interrupted by her presence.

“Friends, hell,” Griffin growled, making use of the materials Mrs. Hammond had provided—it was annoying, he thought, how she'd spared Jonas even that small effort—and then dipping a steel needle into carbolic acid and threading it with catgut. Fawn flinched as the sharp point of the needle pierced her flesh, then stirred and opened her wide, brown eyes as he tied off the last stitch.

Soft jubilance soared in Griffin's weary spirit. It was a valid thing to be happy about, he supposed, a good friend regaining consciousness; and after three deaths and the inheritance of a troublesome, grief-stricken girl named Rachel, Griffin was especially grateful. “How do you feel?” he asked gently.

Fawn shook her head slowly back and forth. “Not good, Griffin. And no lectures, please.”

“No lectures,” he promised.

Fawn smiled, and the effort was obviously costly. “How do
you
feel, Griffin?”

“I'll show you,” he replied. And then he raised himself to his full height, turned to Jonas, and aimed all the terrible pain and anger he felt at him. The thud his fist made as it landed, full-force in Jonas's midsection, was a satisfying sound.

Jonas doubled over with a windless grunt, and Mrs. Hammond cried out as though she'd been struck herself.

Slowly, Jonas straightened up again. There was hatred in his eyes as he surveyed Griffin's taut features, his shoulders, his half-clenched fists.

Then, incredibly, Jonas laughed. “Beating the hell out of me won't exorcise your demons, Griffin. Nothing will do that. By the way, Rachel was a fetching sight today, wasn't she? I ought to give her the rest of Athena's clothes.”

Blood pounded in Griffin's temples, aching savagery flexed and unflexed the muscles in his hands. Athena's name fell at his feet like a burning tree, the flames flaring up to sear him in the deepest recesses of his mind and soul. A cry of brutal, murderous fury tore at his throat, and he lunged toward Jonas, blinded by his despair and his rage.

But Jonas was prepared. A thin, silvery blade flashed in his left hand; the fingers of his right beckoned calmly. “Come on, Griff. Let's settle it all, right here, right now.”

Fawn's cry echoed in the room, and her words were distorted, washing over Griffin's mind like a low, tepid tide. “No, Griffin—please. Don't do it. . .”

But Griffin could not restrain himself; there seemed to be no reason in all the universe, no sanity. All that mattered was the hatred, the hurt, the betrayal. He relieved Jonas of the knife with one swing of his arm, saw the glimmer of the steel blade as it coursed through the thick air and fell soundlessly to the rug.

The next few moments were forever lost to Griffin Fletcher; when he came back inside himself, Jonas was lying on the floor in a crumpled, groaning heap, his hands sheltering his groin, blood streaming from the comer of his mouth.

Bile roiled in Griffin's stomach and burned in his throat, but he felt no conscious remorse, no pity.

Mrs. Hammond fell to her knees at Jonas's side, her considerable bulk quivering with fear and anger. She turned a scathing gaze to Griffin's face and spat, “You're no better than he is, Griffin Fletcher!”