His Wicked Dream (Velvet Lies, Book 2) (12 page)

The front door banged open. The store's proprietress stood scowling on the threshold, her shotgun in one hand, a slice of watermelon in the other. Jamie and Amanda, their chins spattered with red juice, crowded in behind her.

"Lawd Awmighty," Claudia scolded. "It's loud enough to wake snakes in here. What's all the commotion about?"

Michael was breathing more heavily than usual as he packed his valise. "Eden took a misstep. Nothing serious. A couple scrapes and a bruised thumb. Would you fetch her some ice, please, Claudia?"

Claudia looked suspiciously at the glass shards scattered across the pinewood planks of her floor. "A misstep, eh?" She snorted. "It's more likely you two lovebirds were chasing each other around the room."

"Aunt Claudia, really." Eden was too worried about Michael to do more than glare at her kinswoman. "Jamie, will you fetch a broom and dustpan, please?"

The boy scampered into the rear room even as Michael stooped, his hands shaking as he retrieved pieces of glass.

"Michael, you really should sit down," Eden urged softly.

"For what purpose?" He paused to match her stare for stare. For a moment, those blue eyes were so unflinching, she might have doubted his malaise if she hadn't seen the tremor in his hands.

He dropped the glass into the trash barrel. Then, as if fearing he really was too weak to continue his charade, he hastily latched his medical bag and turned for the door.

"Hey." Claudia planted her fists on her hips. "You just got here. Where do you think you're going?"

"My office. I forgot about an appointment."

"But my shelves! You promised you'd build me some in time for the extra inventory I'll have to order for the jamboree."

"They'll have to wait." He gave a curt nod. "Ladies."

Claudia muttered an oath as the front door slammed.

Uneasily, Eden pushed back the shutter and looked out the window. Stazzie was dashing off the porch after Michael. The cat appeared to be mewing for his attention, but he ignored her as he hurried toward his office. Fumbling with his keys, he staggered inside, shutting Stazzie out so firmly that the window shade slapped against the door.

A minute passed, maybe two. Michael never turned the closed sign around, but he did light a lamp. She could see his silhouette as he grabbed the arm of a chair, sinking heavily onto its seat. Stazzie scratched at the door. Then she paced the mat. Finally, she hunkered down as if keeping a vigil.

Eden swallowed. Even if she couldn't always trust her own instincts, she could trust Stazzie's. Something was ailing Michael Jones.

An insidious panic crept through her. What cruel twist of fate had brought her, a healer who had sworn never to heal, to a town whose doctor needed as much help as his patients?

I'm not ready
,
she shouted silently.
I'm not ready to fail the way I did in Silverton. Let someone else salvage Blue Thunder's broken hearts and bones.

But Michael's in such pain
,
came the quiet response
.

She hugged her arms to her chest, remembering Gabriel.
Yes,
she acknowledged uneasily.
Yes, he is.

She gazed once more toward the silhouette holding its head in that lonesome doctor's office. What ailed Michael, she wondered.

Did he know?

Did Sera?

Chapter 4

Nearly ten days passed, and Eden saw no sign of Michael. Sera confessed she hadn't seen much of him either. He'd been arriving so late from the orphanage and waking so early to return, that some nights, she suspected he hadn't come home at all.

Eden didn't think it was wise for a physician to deny himself sleep, even if there was a measles epidemic, but she told herself Michael's health was a private matter. Besides, she preferred not to remind him, or anyone else for that matter, that she had once purported to be a healer.

Eden sighed. Honoring her truth, as Talking Raven used to call it, had been easier when the Cherokee was alive. Then Eden had had someone to champion her as she struggled to express—and believe—her innate wisdom. She couldn't always explain to her father why she'd instinctually known things about healing that he'd had to study for years. Most of the time, she couldn't explain her intuition to herself.

But Talking Raven had told her the feminine spirit was a powerful force. "Woman must speak and be heard," the Cherokee would say whenever Eden balked, fearing the disapproval of her father. "Unless Woman speaks, the wounds of the people will not be healed. It is the spirit of the Earth Mother that speaks through Woman, teaching the two-leggeds and four-leggeds how to live in peace. Would you silence the message of the Great Mother?"

So Eden would try her best to express her opinion, but her confidence always wavered in the face of her father's skepticism. Maybe that's why Papa had so often dismissed her recommendations as simplistic. Talking Raven had encouraged her to follow the teachings of the Female Elders, that the body and the spirit must be addressed to effect a complete cure; Papa, however, had seen illness strictly as a physical malfunction.

"A physician must look at empirical evidence," he'd counseled her and Talking Raven. "He must study which compounds are proven remedies for each complaint. I know you mean well, but prayers, rattles, and drums do not cure gout. Or dropsy."

Or pneumonia, unfortunately.

Eventually, Papa had learned to regard Talking Raven's shamanic rituals with amused tolerance, while Talking Raven had grudgingly conceded there was room for many approaches to the same cure.

Thus they had lived together, teaching each other to think in broader ways. But until they'd reached that accord in the last year of Talking Raven's life, their arguments had confused Eden, making her feel torn between their ideologies. In the end, she'd dabbled in each method of healing and had failed miserably at both.

Haunting her now was Michael. He was eerily similar to the man her father used to be. But she wasn't Talking Raven. And her mistakes had proved she never would be. As advantageous as it would be to befriend Michael, Eden wasn't sure she could endure his know-it-all attitude with the same aplomb that Talking Raven had learned to adopt toward Papa. Indeed, Eden wasn't convinced she ever could, not if Woman, as Talking Raven had claimed, must speak and be heard.

But I still have so many questions about Papa's death. And Michael's the most likely person to answer them.

Turning the store's key over and over in her hands, Eden paused on the threshold, deftly straddling the broken porch plank that had tripped many an unwary pedestrian and jolted countless packages from the arms of hurrying shoppers. The sun, spitting fire behind the jagged ridge of mountains, slashed lavender-pink ripples through unfurling wisps of clouds. She squinted westward, blinking toward the office with the boldly lettered, no-frills shingle: physician. Peach-colored streaks tinged the walls; for the first time in days, a golden glow radiated through the blind, that same blind which had silhouetted Michael as he'd sunk into a winged chair and so forlornly held his head.

Eden shook herself.

Michael Jones was a grown man and a university-trained doctor. He wouldn't want her to fuss over him.

Besides, she still hurt too much over Papa's death to bear her soul to a physician who was more likely to condemn than comfort her.

Squaring her shoulders, she thrust the key in the store's lock, twisted it, and turned eastward for the shady lane of elms that eventually gave way to a half-mile of forested road, and finally, her aunt's redbrick house. Usually Eden would be home feeding Stazzie by now, but she'd been delayed again by Amanda. Mr. Puppy, apparently, had stepped on a thorn.

The day before, Amanda had rushed into the store, worried because the raccoon that Mr. Puppy had chased into a tree wouldn't come down. Two days before that, Amanda had brought Mr. Puppy to Claudia's back door, complaining her pet had a dry nose. Eden had grown suspicious, demanding to know how many dogs Amanda really owned, since Mr. Puppy had mysteriously developed white speckles on his muzzle. Amanda solemnly swore that Mr. Puppy had always had the distinctive markings and that Eden just hadn't noticed.

Eden supposed the explanation was possible; however, she found it curious that Amanda had yet to bring the puppy back for a checkup, even though she herself appeared every day at the store, seeking a solution to some veterinary dilemma. Eden wondered if the child badgered Michael this way when he wasn't battling measles epidemics.

Passing Thunder Valley Bank on the other side of the street, Eden noticed Chance McCoy. His spine rested against a porch post, the heel of one dusty boot tucked comfortably beneath his buttocks. His stance was relaxed, almost indolent as he struck a match, cupping the flame and tilting his head so his cigarette caught fire. Smoke spiraled across the slouching brim of his Stetson; a whispery breeze riffled the red-checkered bandanna at his throat. He might have been the subject of a Frederic Remington portrait, the western cowboy that figured in so many schoolboy dreams, but there was one unsettling exception. He wore his holster too low across his hips.

Only gunfighters wore rigs the way that Chance McCoy did. After all the bullet wounds she'd helped Papa stitch out west, she'd become adept at recognizing the nervy, dangerous men who lived by the gun.

She stumbled at the thought, attracting his attention.

Although his head never moved, she knew the instant his gaze touched her, knew it with a trembly shiver. His eyes—a startling shade of green, as she recalled—probed her. Dismissed her. Looked beyond. Her breath released in a ragged whoosh.

A heartbeat later, she caught it again. Chance was staring into the alley behind her. Staring at the couple conversing so animatedly in the shadows. Staring at Sera.

"Miss Mallory."

She whirled, nearly biting her tongue in two. The call had come from a doorway she had recently passed. She was only vaguely relieved when she saw Blue Thunder's sandy-haired preacher emerge from the headquarters of the Ladies Aid Society. But at least the dark sorcery of Chance McCoy's spell was broken.

"Good evening, Reverend Prescott," she murmured as he doffed his black bowler and halted at her side.

Henry nodded, his nervous gaze sliding to Chance, who paid him only passing interest. Eden suspected the drifter didn't see a preacher as a threat, particularly a preacher with the fuzzless face of a babe. If not for the indistinct creases around Henry's blue eyes, one might have thought him no more than fifteen.

Eden had learned from Sera, though, that the lanky, dimpled preacher was close to twenty-five, a statistic which, apparently, failed to impress Sera. Like most folks in this town, Henry had grown up in Blue Thunder; he rarely rode beyond the city limits; and someday, he would be buried here. For an adventure-seeking belle, a stable, unambitious man like Henry was a dull prospect. In fact, Sera privately referred to her love-struck suitor as "Pestcott."

"I do beg your pardon, Miss Mallory," Henry said, his voice, at least, too sonorous for fifteen. "I was hoping to speak with you about Collie MacAffee."

Eden frowned.
Uh-oh.
Had Bonnie converted Henry into one of her minions? As president of the Ladies Aid Society, a meddling gaggle of matrons who had nothing better to do than pass judgment on their neighbors and bully them into stringent codes of behavior, Bonnie considered it her sworn duty to reform Blue Thunder Valley's "white trash."

Eden met Henry's gaze evenly. "Collie MacAffee, sir?"

"Yes. Sera—that is to say, Miss Jones"—Henry blushed like a properly smitten beau—"said Dr. Jones visited your aunt's store a week or so ago and found Collie. He mentioned there was some, er, misunderstanding over a cherry pie."

Eden casually maneuvered her stance so Henry's back was to Sera's tête-à-tête with Kit McCoy. "Yes, I recall the incident."

"So it's true the boy was making trouble?"

Eden eyed the preacher dubiously. She suspected Sera hadn't said
that
about Collie. "Collie was hungry. And I think he may be sick."

"You've befriended him, then?"

"Is there a reason behind these questions, Mr. Prescott?"

Running his bowler's brim through his hands, he cast another uncomfortable glance at Chance. "The boy's grown up ornery. Like his pa. He's been an outsider since the day he was born. I know he's had an unfortunate lot, what with his mama dying in childbirth, and then his pa dying in jail. Still, the boy's a problem. No one wants their sons and daughters influenced by his cussing and his willfulness. He defied the Ladies Aid Society's best Christian efforts to put him in an orphanage. And now that Berthold Gunther is accusing him of theft—"