Rexanne Becnel (22 page)

But the love between them … That would never disappear, and as Abby struggled through the last words, “For thine is the power and the glory …” he forced himself to look away.

He didn’t belong here, in this wagon with the two of them. Abby had made her father a promise that Tanner knew he could not let her keep. There was no way he would let her go off to Oregon with that preacher. Yet he stayed, unable to leave her to face her loss alone.

When the end finally came, Tanner knew at once. Robert Bliss’s struggles for breath ceased. Abby’s soft flow of words came to an abrupt halt. Then she began to cry, a nearly silent weeping that shook her bowed frame and pierced Tanner’s heart.

He crossed to her side and gently pulled her back from her father. When she turned her tear-streaked face up to his, and he saw the terrible pain—and fear—on it, he did the only thing he could. He pulled her into his arms and let her cry.

But with every violent shudder that wracked her slender body, he felt worse and worse. He was the vilest sort of lowlife, offering her comfort when he knew he could never let her fulfill that deathbed promise to her father. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her, and yet he knew he was going to do just that.

He rubbed one hand up and down her back. Up and down as he steeled himself. Tomorrow, after they buried her father, he’d have to tell her everything.

“I
CANNOT MARRY ON THE
same day I bury my father,” Abby told Dexter. She faced into the raw wind that blustered its way across the endless expanse of land. The four new graves stood out like a fresh wound upon the earth. The end of four lives, marked by four mounds of dirt, four piles of stone, and four crude markers.

She’d written her father’s name in pencil, though the lead broke repeatedly on the rough board. She’d seen the question in Sarah’s eyes when she’d written Bliss instead of Morgan. But she’d had no explanation to give her or anyone else.

Dexter had said words over the graves of the three new cholera victims, and a small group watched as they’d been lain to rest beside the grave of the little boy. But Abby hadn’t watched. She’d stared instead into the wind, across the desolate miles that lay before them still. To the west.

She stared unblinkingly toward a future that loomed before her with frightening immediacy. She was alone now, utterly alone. Four oxen and the contents of one wagon. That summed up her life.

There was her half portion of land waiting to be claimed in Oregon, she reminded herself. But that was small comfort to her today. What was the point of continuing on to Oregon? What had ever been the reason? Her father had died without telling her.

She blinked as tears formed in her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. She’d cried all her tears last night. There was nothing left inside her anymore. She was an empty, exhausted shell, and all she wanted was to sleep, to crawl into her bed, pull the quilt over her head, and sleep forever.

“Perhaps tomorrow
would
be better.” Dexter spoke in careful, solicitous tones from just behind her. He put a hand beneath her arm and tried to steer her back toward the wagons. The call to depart had come, and already the line of wagons had started forward. But Abby shrugged off his hand.

“I need to be alone. You go on with the wagon. I’ll catch up before very long.” She sent him what she hoped would pass for a reassuring smile. “Go along. I appreciate all you’ve done for me, Dexter. But for now I need to be alone.”

He didn’t want to go; she could see it in his hesitant expression. “Well, all right. But only if you promise not to fall behind the last of the wagons.”

“I promise,” she conceded, though at that moment she wished she could be rid of the wagon train forever. Just let them disappear in their slow, ponderous line over the edge of the horizon.

And then what?

She heard the few mourners leave. The dead couple’s children had witnessed their parents’ interment in mute shock. But now the youngest, a girl of about seven, began to wail.

“I want my mama. I want my papa!”

Someone shushed her, and slowly her unhappy keening faded away. But Abby’s heart had taken up the refrain.

I want my mother. I want my father.
Only they were gone from her for good. If she needed comfort now, she must turn to Dexter.

He had promised his aid as soon as he’d heard the sad news, and she, in her grief, had told him of her father’s deathbed request. He’d been so happy, though he’d struggled to contain it behind an appropriately somber mien. But Abby could tell, and it had depressed her even more. Her parents were dead and she was to marry Dexter. It felt like the end of the world.

Pushed forward by the wind, a deep bank of clouds closed off the sky. Behind her, to the east, brief patches of blue sky still showed, but soon they would disappear and all would be gray. Rain threatened, but for now held back. When it came, however, she knew it would hamper their travel even further.

At least Eenie was well. He’d healed, as had Tulip. Her father was the only one who had not recovered.

“Abby?”

A shiver coursed up her spine at the sound of Tanner’s low voice, muffled by the rising wind. He’d comforted her in those first cruel moments, then he’d stepped back and let Sarah and Dexter take over. How she’d wanted him to stay, to shelter her from her pain and fear. But he hadn’t, and the practical side of her knew why. He didn’t want to encourage her to turn to him. He wasn’t the marrying kind. Whatever desire he felt for her was nonetheless tempered by the basically honorable side of him.

It would be so much easier, she thought sadly, if both of them could just throw caution to the wind.

He dismounted behind her, and she heard the high grasses part as he approached her. “Abby? Are you all right?”

She let out a long, pent-up sigh, and with it a large portion of her determination to keep her emotions under control. “Honestly? I don’t feel like I’ll ever be all right again. Not ever.”

She turned her head and met his watchful gaze. He had his hat in his hands, and the strengthening wind lifted his dark hair back from his face.

“You’re feeling all alone now. I know how that feels. But … it won’t always hurt this bad. Your loss is fresh and painful. But time … time will help.”

Abby shook her head. All of a sudden she was angry. At her father. At her mother. At Dexter. And especially at Tanner. “Time
won’t
help.” She turned her back on him and started to walk, not toward the wagons but out away from the trail and the river, into the vast emptiness that surrounded them.

To her surprise he fell into step beside her, easily keeping up with her angry strides. But that only fueled her anger. If he meant to comfort her, she didn’t need it. His comfort only made it worse, for he would never offer her what she wanted most from him.

“Go away, Tanner. I need to be alone.”

“Don’t marry him.”

At that startling request Abby stumbled to a halt. She faced him warily. “What did you say?”

He jammed his hat on his head before slowly meeting her gaze. But though she tried to read his face, he kept his expression deliberately blank.

“I said, don’t marry him.”

Abby drew a sharp breath. She was afraid to ask why, but she knew she must. “I promised my father. Why should I break my word to him?”

He hesitated and for a moment he looked past her into the distance, as if he gathered his thoughts—or perhaps his courage, she wondered with the tiniest flaring of hope.

“He exacted that promise from you under false pretenses.”

Now she was really confused. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“Your name is Abigail Bliss.”

Abby nodded. She’d put her father’s true name on the pitiful marker. For whatever reason he’d adopted an alias, it no longer mattered. It wasn’t a secret anymore.

“Your father dragged you west because your grandfather is searching for you.”

“My grandfather?” Bewildered, she shook her head. “I don’t have a grandfather.”

“Yes, Abby. You do have a grandfather. You just were never told about him. And he wasn’t told about you, either, not until your mother died.”

Abby heard every word he said, yet it was impossible for her to comprehend them. She stared at him, aware that he was watching her closely.

What was he trying to do? Why was he hurting her this way?

She turned away from him as anger muddied her grief. Wasn’t it bad enough that she’d just buried the last of her family? Must he provoke her this way, pretending she had more family when she knew she did not? “Go away, Tanner. Leave me alone.”

But he came nearer. “I can’t leave you alone, Abby. The fact is, your mother’s father, Willard Hogan, has been searching for you. For whatever reason that they were estranged, you are still his grandchild—his
only
grandchild.”

“But … No, this makes no sense. I don’t believe you. And anyway how could you know any of this?”

“It’s true. He hired me to find you and bring you back.”

Shock followed upon shock as Abby tried to make sense of his words. This wasn’t true. None of it. She didn’t have a grandfather. Her father would have told her if she did. No, this was some fabrication of Tanner’s, like some penny novel, a dreadful concoction of a plot that had absolutely no logic to it.

But Tanner’s expression was so serious…

She pressed one hand to her throat. Could it be true? Could she really have a grandfather? Could he have hired Tanner to find her—?

The sudden implication of that drew Abby up with a gasp. If Tanner had been hired to find her … Did that mean the attentions he’d paid her had just been a part of his search? A way to find out if Abigail Morgan was indeed Abigail Bliss?

That possibility was simply too hard for her to face following upon her father’s death and Tanner’s far-fetched revelations. She searched instead for the holes in his story. “Why would he hire someone to find me—assuming he’s my grandfather at all. Assuming you’re not making all of this up.”

His dark eyes-—this morning more gray than blue—studied her intently, a trace of sympathy visible in their depths. “I’ve worked for your grandfather before. He’s a very powerful, very wealthy man. But his only daughter—your mother—married against his wishes. Now that he’s found out about you, he wants to provide for you. And he can provide well, Abby. He can
buy
you a publishing company, if that’s what you want.”

Abby shook her head in denial. She didn’t want to believe it. A grandfather? No, she would have been told if that was true.

Battered by too many churning emotions, she turned away from him and once more headed into the wind, almost desperate in her flight now. A low rumble rolled over the land; the storm would be a bad one, she noted vaguely. But it could not begin to compare with the storm of emotions that raged now in her chest.

Her heart thudded with painful regularity. Her stomach clenched with both outrage and an all-consuming sense of loss. Had she been allowed the luxury of solitude, she would have succumbed to the scalding tears that welled up inside her. But she refused to do that and instead took refuge in her anger. She had lost her mother, been uprooted from her home, and had just buried her father. And now this unbelievable tale of Tanner’s …

She stiffened, then turned her head just enough to see him still keeping pace beside her. “What reason do I have to believe this mad tale? What proof? It sounds to me that you would do better to publish
your
fanciful stories than I will mine. Mr. Charles Dickens should envy you your creative bent of mind,” she finished sarcastically.

He did not rise to her taunt. Indeed, she realized, he probably did not know who Charles Dickens was. He was, after all, just as her father had said: a man who lived by his wits and his gun. He’d spoken of a few mythological characters, and she’d made it into something more, because she’d wanted it to be so. He was exactly what her father had warned her about, she was forced to admit, an opportunist who could not be trusted.

She fixed him with a cold stare. “Just as I thought, you have no proof.”

“I have your father’s letter to your grandfather.”

Abby halted her angry progress, as all the starch went out of her. “My father’s letter? To my … to my grandfather?”

He pulled a faded envelope from a pocket beneath his slicker. The paper was folded and creased, but even before she took it from him, Abby knew with a sinking despair that it was all true. She could see her father’s strong, neat hand. He
had
hidden this truth from her.

She scanned the letter quickly; it was not long. Then she handed it back to Tanner with a hand that trembled. She had a grandfather. So many years she had wished for the large, extensive sort of family that other people had. But it had always been just the three of them, no one else. Now, however, she knew that there had been her grandfather.

But even though a part of her knew she should be relieved to find some remnant family, considering that she had just buried her father, it was impossible.

“Why does he look for me now?” she challenged Tanner, thrusting the letter back at him. “Where has he been these past twenty years?”

Tanner folded the letter back into its envelope and slid it into his pocket. A sharp crack of lightning split the sky, and behind them his horse Mac snorted in alarm. But Tanner kept his eyes steady on her.

“He didn’t want his daughter—your mother—to marry a poor schoolteacher. Fathers are particular about who their daughters wed, it seems,” he added in an ironic tone. “When she married him anyway, he was furious. By the time he recovered, though, your parents had left for parts unknown. Though he searched, he never found them. He’d given up until this letter came.”

“He was furious,” she repeated. “You mean, he disowned her, don’t you?”

Tanner shook his head. “I don’t know what happened between them, Abby. I wasn’t there. But even if he did, he wants to make up for it now. He wants you to come live with him in Chicago.”

Chicago. So that’s why Tanner had brought up the subject of Chicago. Though she knew she had no reason to feel betrayed by him, that was nonetheless precisely how Abby felt. Betrayed. Tricked. Foolish.