Hummingbird (30 page)

"Jim doesn't seem to think so." Her eyes met his directly.

"I don't think Jim alone decided."

"No?" His expression was noncommittal. He raised the glass to his lips as if it really didn't matter to him.

She caught herself watching his full mouth upon the rim of the glass, his dark, dark moustache, which he brushed with a forefinger after he drank.

"Who are you?" she asked when she could stand it no longer.

"Jesse DuFrayne at your service, ma'am," he returned, raising the glass as if toasting her in introduction.

"That's not what I meant and you know it."

"I know." He now made a deep study of the lemonade. "But I don't want you to have to reestablish your commitment to me in any way, which may happen if I suddenly become a real person to you."

She drew a deep, ragged breath. "You are a real person to me and you know it, so I may as well have it all."

He continued studying the glass intently, swirling it so the liquid eddied into a whirlpool, leaving transparent bits of lemon meat on its sides. "I don't want to be a real person to you. Let me put it that way then." His disturbing eyes challenged as he at last raised them and looked directly into hers. "But nevertheless, you already know what I am. I'm a photographer, just like I said."

"Hired by James Hudson?"

He took a long pull while looking over the rim of the glass, then dropped his eyes as he swallowed, and said, "Yup."

"Why should the railroad protect you if all you are is a picture taker?"

"I guess they must like my stuff."

"Yes, they certainly must. I'll be anxious to see it, if I'm allowed. Your photos must be something really extraordinary."

"Not at all. They're graphic, but the only thing about them that might be considered extraordinary is the fact that they depict railroad life as it really is."

"That's not what you said the other night."

He smiled for the first time, a little crookedly. "Oh well… that's the one time I may have lied just a little.

But you can judge for yourself if you ever see them."

"And will I?" she dared, her heart in her throat.

"It's hard to say. Jim and I are going to tie up some loose ends around here tomorrow." He braced a dark arm upon the window frame and studied the road beyond it. "Then I'll be leaving town."

No, not yet! her thoughts cried silently. Already she felt an emptiness, realizing this was unwarranted after all the times she'd wished him gone. Sober eyes still on the road, he added, "If I ever get the chance to drop back in and show you my photographs, I'll be sure to do it."

Sadly she knew he never would. "Are you sure you're well enough to travel?"

He flicked a glance her way. "Well, you want me out of here, don't you?"

"Yes, I do," she lied, then finished truthfully, "but not hurting."

His eyes moved to her face and their expression grew momentarily soft. "Don't worry your head over me, Abbie. You've done all the worrying about me that you'll have to."

"But you've paid me too highly for it," she claimed. He noted her stiff posture on the rocker, the hands clutched around her glass as if still scared to death of him. He supposed she suspected the real truth about him, but leaving would be easier if he never verified it.

"It was the railroad who paid you, not Jim or me," he said convincingly.

"I know. It was just a figure of speech. I only meant it was too much."

"How much would you say my life is worth?" he asked, just to see what she'd say, knowing now how much it mattered that she value him in some way.

Her eyes skimmed the room in a semicircle, ended up studying the glass in his hand. "More than a glass of lemonade…" But at last her composure slipped. "Oh, I don't know," she sighed and slumped, resting her forehead on a hand, studying her lap.

"How much would you say it was all worth—all the things you had to do to save my life? I never really did find out for sure everything you did. Some of it I knew that night when I had you—" His eyes went to the bed, then he abruptly looked out the window again. Damn, but the woman did things to his head!

Staring out unseeingly at the summer afternoon he said gruffly, "Abbie, I'm damn sorry about it all."

Her head snapped up to study his profile. She saw him swallow, his Adam's apple rising, settling back down. He seemed intrigued by that yard out there, which was fine, for her face was burning and her own mouth and eyes seemed suddenly filled with salt.

"I… I'm sorry too, Mr D… DuFrayne," she got out.

Palm braced against the window frame, he turned his head to look across his biceps, resting his lips there against his own skin while studying her. Then he said one last, quiet time, from behind that tan arm, "Jesse

… the name is Jesse." He wanted somehow to hear her say it, just once, now that she knew he was no criminal.

She lifted her eyes to his face, searching for a trace of humor, finding none this time, finding only that quiet intensity which threatened to undo her. The name hung in the air between them, and she wanted to echo it, but had she done so they'd both have been lost, and in that poignant moment they knew it. Her eyes traveled the length of that muscular arm, lingering at the point where his lips must be. His moustache glanced darkly back at her from behind the arm. It took a perceptive eye by now to tell that it had ever been shaved: Mr. Hudson knew this man very well to discern it. So, must he now know equally as well all those inner qualities he'd hinted at? Abbie wondered.

Minutes ago, studying Jesse from the doorway, it had been obvious that he followed his friend's progress down the street as if anxious to follow him out of here, back to the brawling, tough railroad life the two had shared for many years. She had absolutely no business wishing he didn't have to go quite yet.

The silence grew long and strained, but at last he dropped his arm from the window frame and glanced around the room, surveying it fully as if for the final time. "I want to thank you for the use of your room, Abbie. It's pretty. A real lady's room. I imagine you'll be glad to get back into it again."

"I haven't been uncomfortable upstairs," she said inanely.

"It must be a lot hotter up there these nights than down here. Sorry I put you out." Then he looked at the small double oval picture frame. He reached to pick it up. "Are these your parents?"

"Yes," she answered, following the frame with her eyes, watching a tan finger curve and tap it thoughtfully.

"You don't look much like her. More like him."

"People always said I looked like him and acted like her." It was out before she realized what she'd said.

The room grew quiet. Jesse cleared his throat, studied the picture, bounced it on his palm a time or two, then it hung forgotten in his fingers as he leaned forward and spoke to the floor between his feet, his tone as near emotional as she'd ever heard it.

"Abbie, forget what I said about your mother. What the hell—I mean… I didn't even know her."

She stared at the tintype and the familiar hand which held it. A lump lodged in her throat and tears formed on her lids. "Yes… yes you did. You knew her better than I did, I think."

He raised his startled eyes while his elbows came off his knees in slow motion and his muscles seemed to strain toward her even though he never left the edge of the window seat. For a heart-stopping moment she thought he would. She saw the battle going on in him while he sat poised in indecision. He uttered then the familiar name he'd spoken so often to tease her, but it came out now with gruff emotion.

"Abbie?"

The way he said it made her want to impress the word into a solid lump to carry in a locket maybe, or to press between the pages of a sonnet book. She should correct him, but those days when she'd chided him seemed part of a misty forever ago, for light years seemed to have passed during this conversation.

Here, now, with her name fresh on his lips, with his dark troubled eyes seeming to ask her questions best left unanswered, with his black moustache unbroken by smile, she silently begged him not to look as if he too hurt.

"Abbie?" he said again, soft as before: too beautifully threatening. And she shivered once, then broke the spell which should not have been cast in the first place.

"I have at least two more meals to feed you, Mr. DuFrayne, and not a thing in the house resembling meat.

I'd best walk over town before the butcher shop closes. What would you like?"

His eyes pored over her face, then slowly, thankfully, the old hint of humor returned to his lips. "Since when have you bothered to ask?"

"Since the buttermilk," she answered, knowing the exact moment.

He laughed lightly, enjoying her immensely, as he so often could. She was a pretty little thing, he had to admit as he scanned her crisp, high collar and swept-back hair. She, in turn, enjoyed his swarthy handsomeness and the imposing breadth of partially exposed muscle before her.

"Ah yes, the buttermilk," he remembered, shaking his head in amusement. They both realized the buttermilk had been a turning point.

"And for your supper?" she asked.

He allowed his warm smile to linger upon her bewitching eyes. His glance, of its own accord, lowered to her breasts, then raised again.

"I'll let you choose," he said, very unlike the Jesse she'd grown used to.

"Very well," she returned, very like the Miss Abigail he'd grown used to.

When she rose, her knees felt curiously watery, as if she'd run a long way. Yet she ran again, though her steps were slow and measured as ever. She ran from the smile in Jesse's eyes… to the umbrella stand, to arm herself with a daisy-trimmed hat and a pair of gloves that bore smudges of dirt from leather reins and a creek bank.

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The town was buzzing with the news. Miss Abigail knew it. She sensed eyes peering at her from behind every window of the boardwalk. But she carried herself proudly, flouncing into the meat market as if unaware of all the curious stares following her.

"Why, Mizz Abigail," Gabe Porter plunged right in. "What do you think about that man up to your house turning out not to be a train robber atall? Isn't that something? Whole town's talking about this railroad feller that come in today to pay off your patient's debts. Seems we had him all wrong. Seems he works for the railroad after all. What do you think of that!"

"It's of little interest to me, Mr. Porter. What he is has no bearing on how he is. He is not fully healed and shall be under my care for one more day before he's ready to leave Stuart's Junction."

"You mean you're gonna keep him up there even though he ain't got to stay if he don't want to now?"

Miss Abigail's eyes snapped fire enough to precook the meats hanging on the hooks of the huge tooled iron rack on Gabe's wall. "What exactly are you implying, Mr. Porter? That I was safe with him as long as he was a felon but that I'm not now that he's a photographer?"

That didn't make much sense, even to Gabe Porter. "Why, I didn't mean nothin' by it, Miss Abigail. Just lookin' out for a maiden lady's welfare is all." Gabe Porter couldn't have cut her any deeper had he chopped her a good one with his greasy meat cleaver, but Miss Abigail's face showed no trace of the stark ache his words struck in her heart.

"You may best look after my welfare by cutting two especially thick beef steaks, Mr. Porter," she ordered. "Meat is what builds one up when one has been weakened. We owe that man some good red meat after the blood he lost because of this unfortunate incident, wouldn't you agree?"

Gabe did as ordered, all the while remembering how Bones Binley had said that Gem Perkins had said that Miss Abigail had been out in a trap with that photographer, riding in the hills, and right after young Rob Nelson had seen the man prancing around Miss Abigail's backyard dressed in nothing but pajama pants, mind you. And from the sound of it, he had took to having presents shipped in to her by railroad express from Denver. It had to be from him. Hell, she didn't know nobody else from Denver!

But if Gabe Porter was white-faced at all that, he had the jolt of his life still coming. For on his way home Gabe heard that on her way home Miss Abigail had stopped over to the bank and deposited a check for no less than one thousand dollars, and it drawn against the Rocky Mountain Railroad Company, which, everyone in town knew by that time, the man up at her house took "pitchers" for.

Coming around the corner between the buildings, Miss Abigail was disconcerted to see Jesse waiting for her on the porch swing again. She controlled the urge to glance up and down the street and see if anyone else had seen him there. Ah, at least he has his shirt on, she thought, and coming nearer saw that it was buttoned nearly to the point of decency. But when she mounted the steps she saw that his feet were bare and one of his legs half slung across the swing seat, causing it to go all crooked when he set it on the move.

"Hi," he greeted. "What did you decide on?"

Sheepishly remembering the bugging eyes of Blair Simmons as she slid the check under his cage at the bank only minutes ago, she answered, "I kept it."

Confused, he asked, "What?"

"I kept it," she repeated. "I deposited it at the bank. Thank you."

He laughed and shook his head. "No, that's not what I meant. I meant what did you decide on for supper" The thousand dollars didn't seem to faze him at all. He scarcely seemed to give it a second thought, as if he really thought it was her due, and that was the end of that.

"Steak," she answered, pleased now at how he played down that thousand.

"Goddamn, but that sounds good!" he exclaimed, slapping his stomach, rubbing it, rumpling his shirt and stretching all at once.

All of a sudden she found it impossible to grow peeved with him for his coarse language, and harder yet to keep from smiling. "You are incorrigible, sir. I think that if you stayed around here any longer I might be in danger of failing to note your crassness."