Mercury's Rise (Silver Rush 04) (24 page)

Lewis looked doubtful, then said, “Of course. If you prefer.”

He hefted the registration book, and turned back a page. “Mrs. Pace is in room 211.”

Just down the hall from Harmony and William.
“Thank you, Mr. Lewis.”

Once upstairs, Inez looked both ways. The hallway was quiet, deserted. Down the long arm of the hall, just before the the women’s staircase to dining room, a single gas lamp guttered in a sconce. She hastened in that direction, past Aunt Agnes’ lair, Harmony and Jonathan’s rooms, William and Lily’s dark door, and two more rooms, finally halting before Room 211. Inez paused, put her ear to the door, thinking that if she heard anyone stirring, she’d venture to knock.

Nothing.

Feeling somewhat foolish and oddly vulnerable in the light of the hissing lamp, Inez knelt and slid the folded paper under the door. Straightening up, she looked around. No shadows or shapes indicated that someone was watching. Then, somewhere off in the dark, she heard a soft click.

A door shutting?

It was impossible to know.

Moving out of the pool of light, Inez hurried back to her own room, unlocked the door, hastened inside, and locked it behind her with a sigh.

She turned and looked at the window. She’d neglected to draw the sash before leaving for dinner, and the night air blew in softly through the half-drawn up window. The blind tick-ticked as it swung against the glass. She moved to the window, to pull the sash down and draw the shade. Instead, she leaned upon the sill and allowed her eyes to adjust.

What had been a blank, unremitting blackness outside began to resolve—a night sky pricked with icy pinpoints. The gravel driveway in front of the hotel, joining with the dusty road called Manitou Avenue, and the silhouetted shapes of the rustic pavilions by the mineral springs. The dim path winding from the hotel cut across the road to a small bridge that led to the springs, and beyond.

She closed her eyes, breathing in the sweet scent of night-blooming roses and under that, sharp mint and the gunmetal scent of water over stones.
I hope these events that seem so impenetrable now will also become clear tomorrow.

Chapter Twenty-four

Leadville

The shots on State Street, ringing through the early morning air, didn’t wake her. Nor did the drunken shouts of a fancy man and his I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore whore, having it out at last, in the rutted hard-packed dirt of Stillborn Alley.

The whistle of the night wind, bitter to a fault, screamed down from Mosquito Range and prowled through the red-light district. The merciless breeze snapped up refuse and tumbled it through the streets, and embraced the helpless men, women, and dogs, caught outdoors, all shivering to their bones. Through it all—shots, shouts, sighs of air—Inez slept soundly.

It was the slight rattle of the doorknob, the hitch of locked latch, that brought her fully awake.

The same sounds in the same order had disturbed her sleep each of the previous few nights, always around four in the morning.

Just as she had done for every one of those nights, she reached over to the secondhand nightstand. Her hand curled around the comforting grip of her husband’s Navy Colt revolver, his prized possession from his days in the Civil War. She sat up in bed and steadied the gun with her other hand, using a two-handed grip that guaranteed accuracy. Or at least, accuracy enough to get the job done.

Eyes no longer shrouded by sleep or dreams, Inez narrowed her gaze on the doorknob. In the pre-dawn light, leaking in through a windowpane bordered by heavy velvet and filmed with lace, the crystal facets of the knob winked at her with a subdued gleam. The knob turned one way, then the other, going only to the limit of its lock before forced to a halt.

Inez’s world shrank to the knob and to the familiar heft of the gun in her hand. The barrel pointed unwaveringly at a spot about one foot to the right of the keyhole. She wondered, just as she’d wondered the previous times, if tonight would be the night she’d have to pull the trigger.

She didn’t speak.

Words were no longer necessary.

Inez cocked the gun. The metallic click was loud, louder in that small universe than the escalating argument of whore and pimp down the street. Louder than the steady thump, thump, thump of stamp mills echoing up California Gulch, deep into the heart of Leadville’s city limits, and up into the mining district. Louder than her own breathing or her own pulse thudding in her ears.

Loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door.

The knob stopped its tentative rotation.

Inez knew that, just as her own exhalations and heart’s blood took up all the space in the room and in her head, so it probably was for the man on the other side of the door: her husband, Mark.

The stillness stretched on for perhaps half a minute. Neither stirred on either side of the door—entrance and exit, barrier and breach. Finally, finally, she heard the squeak of footsteps as he turned and walked away. Inez counted the footsteps as they descended the stairs to the ground floor of the saloon, then lost them as they faded across the wide expanse of the silent, closed saloon. She heard the faint sound of the heavy Harrison Avenue door scrape open and shut. Inez would have sworn she could even hear the key turn in the lock, so attuned was she to this nighttime ritual of husband and wife.

Even though she was tired, exhausted with a weariness that was only partly due to having closed the saloon less than a handful of hours previous, she completed the ritual, rising and peering through the break in the curtain. The unmistakable form of her husband on the boardwalk below. He would have been instantly recognizable to her, even if he walked among a hundred other similarly clad gentlemen through Leadville’s business district. With a slight limp, he crossed the wide Harrison Avenue boulevard—wide enough to turn a team of twenty mules hauling a full load of silver carbonate of lead ore. She watched until he entered the Clairmont Hotel, before breaking the silence in her room.

“Bastard!”

She no longer flung that epithet or any others at him through the closed door. Saying anything at all just seemed to open the door to escalated screaming on her part and shouting or endearments, or entreaties, or explanations on his part. All of which, she had finally come to realize, only led to a hobbling fatigue, an inability to arise at the appointed time, burning eyes, aching head, and a churning stomach that refused the breakfast meals prepared by the saloon’s cook, Bridgette. The refusal of meals increased Bridgette’s hovering, concern, and offers of advice—none of which Inez had the patience to bear.

For the first three nights, that had been the pattern. Inez, locked in behind her barricaded door. Mark, locked out on the other side. Inez yelling, Mark placating.

“You were gone for over a year!” she’d shout. “Not a word, a note, nothing! How dare you come back now!”

Over and over, in murmuring counterpoint to her staccato accusations, he said, “Darlin’, I was bushwhacked, hauled out of the back alley, not even conscious, thrown in the back of a wagon and hauled out of town like a load of dirty laundry. I’d never leave you on my own. You and William are my world. The only thing that kept me going all this time was the hope I’d see you both again. It took months for me to even come to my senses. By the time I finally realized I was far away, in a different town, almost a prisoner.”

“If you had cared,
really
cared, you would have found a way to get word to me. I waited, and waited, until there was nothing left but despair. I was certain you’d died.”

“I wrote letters,” the disembodied voice on the other side of the door insisted. “You never answered. I thought you’d turned your back on me. Wouldn’t’ve been the first time. I thought you’d gone back East, to your family.”

“Oh, you always have a story ready, don’t you,” she sneered.

“I was ready to head to New York,” he insisted, “but then I saw the divorce notice in the
Rocky Mountain News
. You were still here, in Leadville, wanting a divorce, saying I’d deserted you. I hadn’t deserted you, I’d written, but you didn’t write back. Why didn’t you try to find me?”

“How was I supposed to do that when I had no idea where you were?”

The words went on and on until dawn, back and forth through the wooden barrier. On the third night, Inez realized that it wasn’t going to end until Mark wore her down and finally got his way and she opened the door. That third night, she’d cocked and pointed the revolver at the door, saying in a tone both deliberate and cold:

“Mr. Stannert. If you do not go away from this door tonight, this minute, I shall shoot. You always said I was no good with a knife, but with guns and words, I excelled. Do you remember? Since words do not seem to reach you, I shall shoot if I must. So listen, and listen well. Do not talk to me again, unless it is daylight, during business hours and about business and business only. Do not expect that you can waltz back into my life, just as you please, and take your place by my side. At first, I thought you were dead. And then, I thought you had deserted me.”

“But Inez, our son—”

“I have told you, I sent William back East to live with my sister. He is there now. Here in Leadville, I have rebuilt a life for myself after all the heartache and hell I went through after you left. There is nothing between us any more except the business. As you told me after you won the saloon in that card game, you, I and Abe own the saloon together: A third and a third and a third.”

“Darlin’, I—”

She fired the bullet into the doorframe.

With her ears ringing from the shot, her hands stinging from the recoil, she said, “That was a warning, Mr. Stannert. Next time, I aim three feet to the right.” The splintered wood showed where the projectile had entered. It lay buried in the heavier wood of the frame, a mute and leaden reminder of her final words to him that night.

***

After that, there was no talking, but the nightly visits continued. Only the stealthy twist of the knob, the silent testing, to see if she’d relented, rethought, forgiven, and forgotten.

But she swore she’d never forgive.

Or forget.

Chapter Twenty-five

Inez awoke in her Manitou hotel room, addled by sleep and utter darkness. Her hand flailed through the air, searching for a nonexistent night table holding Mark’s Navy Colt revolver. Wisps of her interrupted dream thinned and vanished.

She relaxed, dropped her hand over the edge of the bed, and tried to still her galloping pulse.

A sound.

She’d heard something, she was certain.

Inez rolled over, toward the window. The shade was drawn and still. No breath of air moved it. The moon had set, plunging the room into deepest night.

She rolled back in the other direction, then sat up slowly.

Listening.

The inner-spring mattress creaked beneath her, and Fountain Creek sounded in a pulsing, unceasing roar outside. Otherwise it was as if the entire world—all its creatures, the elements, the very earth itself—slept.

Or perhaps, like her, it was all awake, and holding its collective breath.

Then…

There!

A faint scratching at the door, like someone trying to wake her up, but too timid or cautious to knock.

“Inez?”

It was the smallest of whispers, hardly more than an exhalation. No clue to whether the speaker was male or female came through in that one faint word.

“Who is there?” Inez clutched her covers.

The scratching stopped. The whisper became incrementally louder. “Come quickly! It’s William!”

Oh no! William!

Bounding from the bed, heart skittering, Inez raced to the door in her nightgown. Throwing caution aside, she yanked it open, and peered down the long hallway of rooms. The wall lamp at the end of the hall was out, allowing no access into the gloom. She thought one of the doors might be the slightest bit ajar, which one she couldn’t be certain, the dark flattened all perspective. Was that a dampened light shining from underneath? Was it William’s room?

She started down the hall, hastening toward the ghost of a partly open door.

Inez pulled even with the grand staircase leading to the ground floor, all of her attention focused on the tunnel ahead of her. A shadow detached itself from the niche at the top of the staircase. It was as if the statue of Hermes had suddenly come to life. Startled, Inez only glimpsed a shape entirely cloaked, hood pulled low, before she received a violent shove that sent her reeling toward the staircase.

A misstep as she tried to regain her balance, and her foot met empty air.

The dark shadow fled down the hall, away from Inez.

Inez clutched in vain for the staircase’s banister, beyond her reach, and fell.

Jarring pain rocketed through her elbows, ribs, knees, and back as she tumbled down stairs. She yelped as the back of her head smacked a stair’s edge, and a burst of light tore through her vision. Inez grabbed frantically, trying to stop her downward plunge. Her hand whacked into one of the vertical balusters, and she grabbed hold. She felt, more than heard, a pop in her shoulder as her arm twisted and took her full weight. The pain was instantaneous, intense, deep. For an agonizing moment, she thought her arm would rip from her body.