Mail Order Mayhem (Mail Order Romance Book 2 - Benjamin and Annie) (9 page)

Just then, a husky male voice startled her from the darkness of the trees.
Annie cried out in shock and almost dropped the coffee pot to the ground. “Get a move on, lady,” Ned warned. She tightened her grip on the handle of the pot to stop it shaking out of her hands. Ned tailed her back to the fire.

She set the coffee pot in the embe
rs and took her seat, clenching her fingers into her apron to stop her hands shaking. She listened attentively to the gurgling of the bubbles in the pot as it reached a boil. She couldn’t hear the conversation. One by one, the men filled their cups. Then they resumed their seats while they drank the coffee.

“Have some coffee, lady,” Ned offered.

Annie jumped in alarm. “No, no!” she declined, her teeth chattering. “I don’t drink coffee. Thank you anyway, though.”

Ned replaced the pot.

The crackle of sap in the firewood filled the silence. Annie thought she might go insane if she had to sit there any longer. To dispel her anxiety, Annie instinctively hummed to herself, but the sound she only intended to loosen her constricted throat immediately drew the ire of Carl. “Enough of that!” the bandit snapped.

Annie ceased humming instantly. “I can’t help it!” she
wailed. “I’ve done it all my life, and I can’t stop myself now. You want me to work, but that’s the way I do it. I can’t help it!”

“I told you before to stop singing!” he threatened. “Don’t make me tell you again!”

“I didn’t mean to offend anybody,” she blurted out. “I just don’t understand how it could offend anybody. I’m sorry if it offends you.”

“Well, it does offend me!” Carl barked. “If there is a God in heaven, I’d kill him with my own two hands for being such a heartless tyrant!”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t kill anybody,” Annie shocked herself by pointing out.

Carl stiffened. “I wouldn’t,” he retorted. “I don’t kill people, and that’s final.” He took another gulp of his coffee, and Annie almost burst into tears from the shame of kno
wing she
had
killed people.

“Then what are you doing, ravaging the countryside
?” she demanded. The men around her sat frozen at her audacity.

“I told you
. My brother was killed,” Carl replied. “He was murdered three years ago. I’m here to find his killer and bring him to justice. You see this?” He withdrew the photograph from inside his coat. “This is my brother and his wife. Some villain came onto their land under the guise of friendship and knifed my brother. Then he assaulted his wife before he killed her, too. The sheriff told me all about it, but of course they never caught the scoundrel that did it. They thought they had an idea of who did it, because some local took a fancy to my brother’s wife and couldn’t get close to her by any honest means. The sheriff told me it was one of the neighbors, but they couldn’t touch him. I know the whole story. So that’s what I’m doin’, ravaging the countryside, as you call it. I’m searching for my brother’s killer, and when I find him, I’ll take care of him the way the law can’t.”

Annie listened to this recital with a peculiar awareness of having heard it all before. She shuddered as Carl took another swig of coffee.

“And this,” he pulled the hunting knife from his belt. “This is my brother’s hunting knife. You see that?
T.I.
Those are my brother’s initials. He made this knife with his own hands. And I found this knife in
your
house. So how do you explain that, Miss Innocent Lady?”

Annie almost tore her apron, her hands jerked so violently. “But that’s Tom Iverson’s knife!” she cried.

“That’s right,” Carl confirmed. “
T.I.
stands for Tom Iverson. And this is his wife Maureen. And I’m Carl Iverson, his brother, and my son is Curtis Iverson. You know what I think? I think your husband killed my brother and his wife and took this knife home with him as a souvenir. That’s what I think. That’s the only explanation of it being in your house.”

“But you don’t understand!” Annie
cried in rising distress. “The man who killed your brother was Webster Forsythe, the only son of Banford Forsythe, from the ranch east of ours. He took that knife as a trophy when he killed your brother, and he attacked my husband with it in our own yard! He beat my husband senseless and left him for dead. He attacked me next, and in the struggle, I got away from him for just a fraction of a moment. I shot him in the head with my husband’s rifle.”

“You’re
lyin’,” he argued. “I don’t believe a word of it.”

“
You can ask the sheriff,” she told him. “We had to inform him when it happened and to arrange for his parents to collect the body from our house. That’s how the knife came to be in our house.”

Carl stared at her,
confounded. “Are you telling me that
you
killed my brother’s murderer?” he demanded.

“Yes!” she exclaimed.

“You?!” he repeated.

“Yes!” she maintained.

Carl listened to her story, considering. Then he drained the rest of his coffee cup. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. We still can’t let you go, not now that you know where our hiding place is. We couldn’t let you live after this, no matter what happens.”

“You won’t really kill me, will you?” she whimpered wretchedly. “Not now that you know who I am and what I’ve done? How could you do such a thing?”

“I have no choice,” he stated flatly. “It doesn’t matter. I found out who killed my brother, but I still can’t let you live. If I couldn’t bring myself to do it, then I’ll just tell Curtis to do it. He’ll be more than happy to. We’ll kill you when we leave here, and you’ll be the first person I’ve ever killed.”

Which is a lot more than I can say for myself, Annie thought sadly.

The other men finished up their coffee. Carl dangled her chain with its manacle in front of her. “Time to go to sleep, lady,” he grumbled. She dutifully shifted over to the log nearest his bedroll, and he secured her ankle to his own before he stretched out and settled himself into his blankets. A moment later, his eyes closed and his breathing slowed to its usual snore.

She watched them with a mixture of terror and grief as the
other men left the circle of the fire one by one and spread themselves out in their blankets at varying distances away. She wrenched her fists open and tried to loosen her fingers, but anxiety only made her clench them again. She gazed into the fire, watching the popping cones and branches slump down into embers. She didn’t dare move or fall asleep. She heard the voices drawling wearily in the darkness and finally dying away. As the light of the fire faded, Annie ceased to distinguish Carl’s features in the orange glow of the coals where his bedroll stretched closest to the fire, and only the steady tide of his breathing brought her any news of his well-being. He snored, and the odd cough or snort punctuated the night outside the circle. She panted for her own breath, so absorbedly did she follow the rise and fall of his inhalations. With the dying of the fire, the cold gripped her mercilessly, but still she didn’t budge from her log. Her legs cramped and tormented her acutely, but she didn’t move them or even hardly blink her eyes. Sometime in the night, the noise of breathing diminished altogether, the snoring and coughing subsided, and then she sat in silence.

Dawn inevitably came. She watched
the light creeping over the camp, along with the bird songs and the wind rushing through the tops of the trees. No movement of breathing or stirring of men waking up came from any of the bed rolls. Her trepidation at the possibility of getting caught and punished gave way to shame and grief that, for the second time in her life, she had taken human life. So this is your idea of serving God? she chastised herself. This is your idea of living a Godly life, of setting a positive example to the world? What happened to reminding them of their wrong-doing  and showing them the way? I’m no better than them. Worse, in fact.

From the depths of her misery, she began to ponder what to do next.
The first problem involved freeing herself from Carl’s manacle. She knew he kept the key in the inside pocket of his coat, along with his brother’s photograph, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of searching for it on his dead body, not even to save herself. Moving on to the next step in the plan, she still didn’t know where they hid their horses. Once she got free, she would have to leave on foot. Then she remembered Curtis. He would return soon. Finding his father and his friends all dead, and her gone, he would draw the obvious conclusion. Without the restraining influence of his father to prevent him, he would almost certainly kill her in revenge. If she didn’t get loose from the manacle soon and get out of this place, he would find her here, chained and defenseless. And, of course, she had no idea how to find her way home through this wilderness if she did run.

A snap of breaking wood sounded in her ear, and she heard a horse approaching through the undergrowth. She looked around for a place to hide,
but in the end, she just waited, stupefied. It could only be Curtis returning. Maybe a murderer like her didn’t deserve to live at all. Could she return to her happy life in Angelfire, with so many deaths on her head? How many men drank that coffee? Twenty? Not a soul moved in the whole camp, so they were all dead. She wished she were dead, too. Maybe a little coffee remained in the bottom of the pot. She only hoped Benjamin would never find out what sort of sinner she really was. Even though she didn’t like the idea of him wandering around the world not knowing what had happened to her, the knowledge that his wife was a cold-blooded murderer must surely be much worse.

Numbly, she stood up to meet her fate, but th
en she sat down again. The rider slowed as he entered the camp. Annie kept her back turned toward him, her aching hands locked in her lap and her eyes fixed blindly on the cold, dead charcoal where the fire once burned. The crunch of the horse’s hooves through the leaves and branches shuffled to an abrupt stop right behind her. Her pulse thundered in her temples.

“Annie?” a deep voice called her.

She jerked around to see Benjamin and her heart almost stopped completely when her eyes met his. She gasped, and tears burst into her eyes.

“Are you alright?” he asked gently, glancing at the still forms arrayed around her.

The tears welled up and overflowed. She cast her eyes down into her lap, where her hands still held the fistfuls of apron in a hard knot.

He dismounted and stepped over the log to stand over her. Cautiously, he laid his calloused hand on her shoulder. He prodded the nearest
corpse with the toe of his boot. The chain attached to its leg clinked under the hem of her skirt. “What happened?” he almost whispered.

She couldn’t answer. Only the racking sobs shook her body. She wished she could bury her face in her apron and hide from him. She wished she could sink into the earth to cover herself where he wouldn’t see her. She wept
pathetically, the evidence of her guilt surrounding her and accusing her with their frozen, silent bodies. He ceased trying to talk to her through her choking gasps. He lifted her up and enfolded her in his arms until she calmed down enough to sniff and cough and bring her face out of the collar of his shirt. She wiped her eyes with her hand and sighed.

“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.

She glanced down at the manacle binding her and, in the act of moving away, the chain tinkled again.

“Do you know where the key is?” he inquired.

“In his pocket,” she croaked. “Inside his coat.”

Benjamin bent down, flipped open the lapel of the coat and reached into the pocket. He pulled out the photograph and the key on its ring. He inspected the photograph. “What’s he doing with this?”

She swallowed the last of her tears and prepared to tell him the story, but galloping horses streaming into the clearing interrupted her. Before either of them could move, five lathered horses surrounded them, their riders assessing the scene with widening eyes. “What the devil is goin’ on here?” Curtis demanded, frowning down at his father’s lifeless face.

Neither Annie nor Benjamin answered. Curtis slid down from his saddle. When his
boots hit the ground, he yanked his pistol from its holster and cocked the hammer with his thumb. He trained the barrel at Benjamin as he circled the log and stalked over to his father’s body. He kept his eyes locked on the motionless couple as he squatted next to his father’s head. He only glanced away long enough to rest his hand on his father’s chest for a moment, but he kept his gun barrel pointed at Benjamin’s chest.

When he stood up again to face them both, his jaw set hard and fierce, Annie hardly recognized the malicious fiend who took the place of Carl’s fawning young son. He pursed his lips and his fingers squeezed the hand grip of his pistol. Automatically, Annie slipped her
own hand into Benjamin’s, that they might meet their fate together, but before the inevitable event occurred, a shot rang out from behind the group of other riders watching and waiting nearby. One of them whirled in his saddle and thumped to the ground. His horse jumped into the air and squealed before charging away in the opposite direction. Three more shots exploded in the morning quiet. Curtis’s men drew their pistols and wheeled their horses around to face the unseen danger behind them. Benjamin grabbed Annie and sheltered her in his arms, crouching behind the log as best they could. They covered their heads with their arms for protection against the bullets whizzing over them. Horses whinnied in alarm and cantered away, one after the other, before a crushing stillness descended over the area again.

Imperceptibly, Annie extricated herself from Benjamin’s embrace and raised her head. Nothing moved, no birds sang, and even the very leaves seemed to hold their breath in fear. Curtis lay on his face a short distance away. Two others of his group twitched in their death throes farther off. Slowly, the couple stood up again and surveyed the
carnage. After a pause, another group of horsemen crept through the trees. When they saw the two people side by side near the burned-out remnant of the fire with only dead bodies for company, they advanced more boldly, until Sheriff Martin Christopher reined in his mount next to the log and slid down from his saddle.

He glowered at Carl. “He’s dead.”

“Yes, he is,” Benjamin confirmed. “And so are all the others.”

The sheriff cocked his head on one side. “What happened?”

Benjamin slid a sidelong glance at Annie. In answer, she bent down to the black sticks poking out of the fire circle, grabbed the coffee pot by its handle, and tamped out the contents onto the powdery ground at their feet. The two men gaped at the clump of damp coffee grounds with the outlined shape of the lizard, boiled black in the middle of it.

“
Behold and see the reward of the wicked,” Benjamin murmured under his breath.

The sheriff scanned their faces, first one and then the other. “Did you have anything to do with this, Moran?”

Benjamin’s eyes flew open. “Why, no! I just got here and found Annie sitting here, surrounded by bodies. Then the young fella showed up. I’ve been here two minutes, at the most.”

The sheriff noticed the photograph in his hand. “Where’d you get that?”

“It was in his pocket,” Benjamin nodded toward the sleeping form at their side. “Along with the key to this chain. I found it when I went to unlock her from him.”

“Ma’am,” the sheriff addressed Annie formally. “Can you tell us anything about why he’s got this photograph?”

“He’s Carl Iverson,” Annie revealed. “He’s Tom Iverson’s brother. He’s on a mission of revenge to find his brother’s killer. I mean, he
was
on a mission of revenge. That,” she looked across the clearing, “is his son, Curtis.”

The sheriff cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at her. “And did you tell him who you were? I mean, did you tell him that you were the one who…?” His words died in his mouth.

“I
did
tell him,” she moaned. “I told him last night. It was the first time I ever talked to him enough to find out who he was. But it was too late. He had already drunk the coffee. And he said it didn’t matter anyway, because they were leaving this morning and they were going to kill me before they left. That’s what he said when I told him.”

“Well, then, it’s just as well that he
did
drink the coffee,” the sheriff replied. “Serves him right, anyway.”

“Sheriff,” Annie squared her shoulders. “I am entirely at your disposal. I place myself entirely in your hands.”

His eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean, Ma’am?”

“I mean that I am submitting myself to your justice,” she elaborated. “I am prepared to travel back to Patterson in your custody, to stand trial for the murder of all these men that I killed.”

“What do you mean, ‘killed’?” the sheriff almost yelled. “Stand trial for murder? You think you murdered these men? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, a little confused by his reaction. “I calculated and planned to take their lives, and I executed my plan with clear intent to do them harm. I should face the consequences. And I am ready to face the consequences. I will offer you no resistance, and I can
promise you that Benjamin will not, either.”

Martin Christopher let his breath out resignedly. “No, Ma’am, no,” he soothed her. “This was no murder. Look, you’re still chained up to his ankle. He abducted you from your home, he kept you a captive, and he threatened your life. You said yourself that you were in fear for your own life. I hate to think what else he did to you or might have done, but I can assure you that this man,” he
spat down at Carl, “and his son and all his gang were going back to Patterson to hang. If any of them survived capture, the law would execute them with far more malice and intent to do them harm than you showed them. You did the law a favor by getting rid of them the way you did. You’ve saved me and the district courts a passel of time and work. You’ve saved the lives of any of my deputies who might’ve been killed or injured trying to capture them, and these men would thank you themselves for letting them die peacefully in their sleep instead.”

“But what shall I do now?” Annie flustered. “You can’t think of letting me go, scot free. There must be some repercussion
s for this.”

The sheriff shook his head mournfully. “You’re a good Christian lady, Ma’am
. Only someone as good as you could think that you should be punished or brought to justice for this, when you are the victim in this case. What you did was not only perfectly justified, but highly commendable. I applaud you for taking on yourself the burden of disposing of this riff-raff. Your method was both cleverly ingenious and very effective. I wish every victim of crime would show such initiative and creativity. I sincerely hope you won’t take up any of God’s precious time by begging him for forgiveness for this, because none is called for. He has far more pressing business to attend to, such as punishing these villains in the fires of eternity. You want to know what you should do now? Go home. Let your husband here take you home. He’s been following you and working to rescue you continuously ever since your capture. Did you know that? You deserve each other.” He smirked at Benjamin. Then he touched the brim of his hat, bobbing his head slightly. “I hope you have a pleasant ride home, Ma’am,” he chirped politely. “Benjamin Moran, I’ll be seein’ you around. Good day to you both.”

Benjamin nodded in return. “Good day.”

The sheriff climbed into his saddle, turned his horse around and, with a command to his crowd of deputies, departed through the gap in the rock.

Benjamin took Annie’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

Annie laughed happily. “Unlock me first.”

He unlocked the manacle from her ankle, led her to where his horse browsed in the undergrowth, and handed her up into the saddle before mounting up behind her.
They followed the sheriff’s posse out of the clearing and back along the steep way he came.

THE END

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