Seduced (7 page)

I shot him. I shot my husband. A man I've known since he was a boy following his brother to school.

She tried, after the initial shock wore off, to feel more guilt, but she didn't.

And that terrified her. Was she so dead inside that she couldn't even feel remorse for her soul? Was she so numbed, so hardened by her treatment at his hand that she couldn’t ache for things to be different?

But she didn’t.

He was dead and she'd killed him. Shot him.

And she’d never dreamed,
never dreamed
that she’d be capable of that. That she would
want
that bloody end for him at her hands.

But Cole had taken one look at her and pressed that gun into her hand.

What had he seen in her that made him do that? How had he known?
She felt naked, somehow, when he looked at her. As if he could see something far more shocking than the edge of her petticoat.

Parts of her she didn’t even realize she had were revealed.

To him.

Melody cleaned up the cabin, erasing any sign of Jimmy. And then she pulled his saddlebags onto the porch, sat, and salvaged what little clothing he had. What couldn't be saved would make rags. Annie was checking Steven’s wound and Cole was still in the forest.

Her face pounded, her ribs ached, but the laudanum was all gone. The bottle had shattered against the table when she fell.

“Mrs. Hurst.” Cole’s voice snapped her head up and she winced at the pain radiating down her neck.

“Call me Melody,” she said. “I have no fondness for Mrs. Hurst.”

Cole’s smile was brief, but surprising. His teeth were very white.

“You buried him?” she asked.

Cole put the spade against the porch and sat down, leaning against the pine trunk that made up the beam. She felt herself swimming in the air.

“I did. You really should sleep, Melody.”

She looked at him. There were two and then there were three and finally there was one of him again.

“I miss playing the piano,” she said. “I miss my mother. I miss garden parties and dancing. I was a very good dancer.”

“I think you've hurt your head worse than you might have thought.”

“What do you miss?”

“There’s nothing left to miss. I found my brother.”

He was lying. She'd seen it in his face when he handed her the gun. He had a well of grief inside of him. A black anger over all he’d lost. It was something they shared.

She sighed, looking over at Steven and Annie. Annie pulled a blanket up on Steven’s chest and sat back. Then she took off her glasses to better dig at her eyes.

“My sister saved his life,” she said. “She pulled out that bullet with her own hands.”

“I am grateful.”

She turned her head, lost him for a moment but found him again. He’d taken off his hat and dark hair stuck to his forehead in clumps. Over and over again she’d watched her mother brush the hair off her father’s head. He’d had a cowlick, right in the middle, and Mother would lick her fingers and pat it down before company came over.

“Are you grateful enough to be kind?” she whispered. “I miss kindness. I miss it most of all.”

COLE STARED AT his brother, sleeping beside the fire inside the cabin. The flames gave his Viking looks a gentle expression. The blond bear, that’s what they used to call him. The great blond bear. Cole wanted to wake his brother up and ask him if he remembered convincing Gavin that if he took the boat to the middle of the pond during a full moon, the fish would jump into the boat by the dozens. Of course, when Gavin got stuck out in the middle of the pond, the oars sinking to the bottom, Steven had been the one to swim out and tow him back. Did he remember tricking their sister into sleeping with yarrow under her pillow so she would dream of her true love, only to wake up hysterical and covered in hives? Father had given him a proper lashing for that one, not that it changed Steven at all.

Nothing changed Steven—there was no consequence that could be applied to his actions that would make him turn course.

“You never learn,” their mother had despaired, to which Steven had laughed and replied, “Who wants to?”

Steven shifted on his bedroll, the nightmare coming upon him again. “Yes,” he mumbled. “Yes! Of course, son. Of course. Yes!” He was yelling, and Cole slipped to the wooden edge of the shelf where Steven slept to wake his brother. “I will tell her. She will know, I swear it. I will go to her myself. It’s all right. You were a good soldier. A good boy.”

“Steven,” Cole said, giving him a small shake. Steven awoke on a gasping breath. His eyes wild, but his body eerily still.

“Where are the guards?” he whispered.

“There are no guards.” Under his hands Steven’s skin was clammy. Slick. “You are in your cabin. Far away from Andersonville.”

His brother’s face melted with relief before he sagged back onto the thin linen mattress with the blankets of his bedroll spread across it.

“Cole,” he whispered. His smile was a shadow of what it had been in their youth. Ask anyone and they would say that Steven was the fun one. Always laughing. There was not much sign of laughter anymore. But his hand, familiar and rough, grabbed Cole’s and held on hard, as if Cole had come at just the right moment to save him from drowning. “I keep thinking this is a dream I’ll wake up from.”

Cole pushed Steven’s sweaty hair from his face, as Mother would have done. “I'm here. Are you hungry? I've heated the beans and venison from last night.”

“No. Thirsty, though.”

Cole got Steven to sit up against the wall and brought him a full tin cup. Steven’s cup was from the First Virginia Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The moment of opportunity, Steven had signed up for his chance at glory.

Cole remembered all the girls from town waving their handkerchiefs at him as he left.

Cole had taken more time. Joining the Northern Army months later. And only Jane, Mother and Samantha waved goodbye.

They never fought together. Not once. And for that Cole was grateful. He'd seen enough men die while he'd marched and marched, unscathed, through battle after battle. There had been nightmares of seeing Steven or Gavin fall, shot full of lead, bones turned to powder, intestines to liquid, all while he marched past, stuck in formation.

“Careful,” Cole said, helping his brother drink.

“I'm so weak.” Steven wiped his lips with a shaking hand.

“You've been unconscious for over a week, I'm told.”

Cole sat back at the table. The cabin smelled like his tobacco and the beans and steak he had eaten. The two women slept in the room on the other side of the fireplace.

The house was full and lived-in tonight and Cole found himself pushing at his own shrunken, miserly edges. Mrs. Hurst . . . Melody . . . had asked him what he missed from life before the war and he hadn’t answered. But the truth was this. He missed family in a house. Together.

“Who was Hurst to you?” He asked.

“A guard at Andersonville. He helped me escape.”

“Why?”

“I paid him. Money was easier to get in prison than fresh water.”

Andersonville—the thought of that camp made his blood cold. The thought of his brother there made him want to weep. The fire crackling was the only sound for long moments.

“Why did he shoot you?”

“After he helped me escape, I had told him we'd travel together so if anyone caught us he could say he was taking me back to prison. It wasn't the best lie, but if he was smart about it, most soldiers would've believed it. The war was almost over, most men were tired of killing. But once we started traveling, he was lazy and stupid and I knew if I stayed with him, we'd both be caught. So I left him. He must have been caught by the home guard not long after.”

“But you made it all the way to Virginia?”

“I made it home, as much as is left of it.”

Cole had made it home, too, or to the scarred and burnt earth where their home used to be. There was little left to salvage and he had not had the heart to try without his family, so Cole had left the land for the crows.

“How long were you in Andersonville?” he asked. “How did you get—”

Steven shook his head, his eyes on the fire. “Let's not speak of it, Cole. I would rather be glad you're here than think of that place.”

Cole nodded. He understood the way some things were too awful to put words to.

Andersonville, by all accounts, was just such a place.

“It’s a miracle I found you,” he said. “Hurst took almost all the letters, and if it hadn't been for that scar I don't know that I would've been able to track him.”

“Some nights,” Steven said, “I would think how unlikely it all was. That any of you survived, or got my first letter, or would follow me to St. Louis and receive the other letters.”

“It was a good thing you left three letters in St. Louis.”

“I left one for you, one for Gavin and one for Samantha in every city.”

“Sam is dead.”

There was nothing to do but tell him, though he could have been kinder. But he’d forgotten how to be kind. There'd been no need for it in the last few years.

Steven sucked in a deep breath, as if they were all at the pond again and Gavin and Cole had both tried to put him under water. “Gavin?”

“I haven’t heard, but…”

“Me neither.”

“Mother’s gone, too.”

Steven’s face curled in on itself and he lifted his hand to his face to hide his eyes. The tears. Cole stared into the fire, his guts so small they could fit in his hand.

“When?”

“Charleston, last year of the war. The letter from Aunt Louisa said it was her heart. And it was fast.”

Steven breathed hard through his nose and Cole finally went to sit beside his brother while they grieved, shoulder to shoulder. After a while, Cole thought perhaps Steven had fallen asleep again. But when he turned he found the fire reflected in Steven's open eyes. The unblinking nature of that gaze worried Cole, and he wondered what exactly his brother was seeing in that fire.

“So you're an oil man now?” Cole asked, nudging his brother from his thoughts.

Steven's dry laugh lifted his chest and he winced. “I made the claim, thinking there might be gold, and if I was wrong I'd farm or breed horses, but I found these two seeps and it keeps me busy.”

“Is there any real money in that?”

“I sell two barrels of crude in Denver or Pueblo every couple of months. Between that and the trapping, it's enough for coffee and beans with a little extra to put in the bank.”

“The bank? You finally stopped spending your money on Alisha Blackstone and her daddy's rotgut whiskey? Mother would be so proud.”

Steven's smile was the saddest thing he'd ever seen. “Don't worry. Behind the barn, on the other side of the outcrop, there’s another clearing. You can plant all the apple trees you like. We’ll drink cider until it comes out our ears.”

I don't think I'm that man anymore,
he thought.

A log fell in the fire, sending up a shower of sparks.

“What are we going to do with the women?”

Cole sighed. “That is the very same question I've been asking since I rode into the clearing.”

“If one of them had pulled the trigger on me . . . ?” Steven’s voice was pitched low, though Cole was sure neither of the women on the other side of the wall was awake. It had been a very long day. “What would you have done?”

“Killed them.”

Steven flinched and Cole realized how cold he seemed. How cold he'd become.

“I'm a bounty hunter, Steven. It's what I do. There was no farm to go back to. And I had to keep moving, looking for you. For Gavin.” It sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “I was good at it. The war trained me well.”

He could feel his brother staring at him.

“I don't quite recognize you, brother.”

Cole met Steven's blue eyes—their mother's eyes. But empty and bleak where they'd once been merry. “I could say the same, brother.”

On the other side of the fire, the wall, one of the women rolled over, the rustle of blankets over clothing loud in the silence. A reminder that they weren't alone.

There'd been a boy—Cole couldn't remember his name—just a kid from Virginia, spotty and scared. Every night he'd wake everyone up crying and screaming for his Mama. Some of the men threw things at him, wet socks, hardtack, rocks. But the kid wouldn't shut up. Got so Cole was used to it.

When the boy died, torn to pieces by cannon shrapnel, Cole found the next night he couldn't sleep in the silence. In the silence he realized how badly he missed his own mother. His family. His farm. His goddamned dog. It was if those memories, those feelings had just been waiting for the silence so they could be found.

This moment, his pipe in his hand, his brother at his shoulder, the room warm all around them, he felt the same way.

I will never be alone again
.

He bit his lip against sudden tears.

“Maybe they have family they want to get back to,” Steven said.

But Melody
. Jimmy's words from dinner were a splinter under the surface of his memory.
She lost it all. Her parents, dead. Her brother, dead. Her fiancé, dead.

“Perhaps,” Cole agreed, but he didn’t think Melody was that lucky.

MELODY COULD FEEL her sister breathing in the dark beside her.

“You're not asleep,” Annie whispered, her voice pitched so low as to not travel past them. A trick learned in their beds as girls, refined at every chance as they got older.

“No,” Melody said, tracking the shadows across the cabin's ceiling.

“You heard?” she whispered.

Melody shook her head; she had not been paying attention to the men's conversation in the far room.

“He would have killed us, Melody.” Annie’s fear was a palpable thing, reaching cold fingers into the fog occupying Melody's head.

They were at the mercy of two strangers, one of whom handed her the gun with which to kill her husband as if it had been a canteen of water. This should concern her, she knew that.

But she could not feel any more fear. Her seams had torn and all of her fear and all of her worry—they were gone. She simply didn't care.