Wanton Angel (2 page)

The townswomen were outraged, for it did seem that Eli McKutchen, with his glowing prospects and his good looks, was as enamored of Bonnie as she was of him. “Uppity snit. Has a fly in her nose, that one,” they muttered into their teacups and their delicately painted fans. How could Josiah, Eli’s grandfather and a man highly respected in Northridge, permit such an unsuitable alliance?

The men of the town focused their jealousy on Eli instead
of Bonnie. “Lucky bastard,” they grumbled, into their warm beer and their poker hands.

Josiah, impressed by Bonnie’s spirit as well as her beauty, dashed the town’s best hopes for justice by approving wholeheartedly of the match. Bonnie’s humble beginnings did nothing to dissuade him; he’d been poor once himself, after all. He loved his grandson, and he saw in Miss Bonnie Fitzpatrick an indefinable something that made him feel quietly joyous. To celebrate Eli’s good fortune, for any good fortune of Eli’s was also his own, he built a two-story mercantile and handed it over to Jack Fitzpatrick, lock, stock and barrel.

Fitzpatrick, hungry for half his life and in debt for the other, was overwhelmed that the giving up of a single, troublesome daughter could yield such bounty. After the ceremony, conducted in the McKutchens’ fragrant garden, Jack had a mite too much to drink and waxed sentimental, weeping because his dear old mother had died just the year before, too soon to share in the joy of it all, and of course his own sweet Margaret Anne had gone on to glory, too, long since. He’d rarely thought of his lost wife, once the first terrible grief had passed, but this fortuitous turn of events brought her back to his mind and his heart. What a delight it would have been had that sainted woman lived to see her girl wed to such a fine promising lad as Eli McKutchen, with all the world at her feet. And here was himself, with a store all his own—filled with goods it was—and his name painted right on the window for all heaven and earth to see! Why, the pleasure of it was enough to swell a kind heart to the breaking, and a broken heart was cause for a good man to slip into his cups a bit, now, wasn’t it?

Indeed, when night had fallen and the wedding was over and the bride and groom were alone in their marriage chamber, there was only one person in all of Northridge drunker than Jack Fitzpatrick, and that was young Forbes Durrant, who knew a thing or two about heartbreak himself.

“… a splendid little war …”

S
POKANE AND THE
surrounding wheat fields were far behind now; the train, with its burdened freight cars and near-empty passenger section, labored slowly, clamorously along the banks of the fierce Columbia River, making its way ever upward into the high country of eastern Washington State.

Bonnie McKutchen sat with weary stiffness in her seat, a small, soot-covered bundle of quiet despair. Days of travel had left her dark hair lank and rumpled, and the smells of cigar and wood smoke clung to her clothes. Her blue broadcloth traveling suit and matching hip-length capelet, with its smart trim of jet beads, were both wrinkled, and her hat, despite repeated shakings, was rigid with dust.

Beyond the grime-streaked window rolled the wild Columbia, and Bonnie turned her attention to the torrent. Rushing and tumbling from its headwaters high in the Cascade Mountains of Canada, slicing through Washington, the river formed the boundary between that state and Oregon for some three hundred miles, until it reached Astoria and the Pacific.

Before the coming of the railroads, steamboat pilots had braved the treacherous river, with its stair-step rapids and vicious currents, but now, in early May of the year 1898, the great paddle wheelers, along with their captains, were mere
memories. The primeval waterway, though tapped by its mighty tributaries, the Kootenay, the Willamette and the Snake among them, thundered on, still relatively unchanged by man, toward the sea that had summoned it for millennia.

Bonnie sighed. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, often a guest at her table back in New York and, until his sudden resignation just a week before, Assistant Secretary of the United States Navy, had repeatedly and forcefully stated that the nation must take more care in protecting its rivers and conserving its wilderness lands. Such resources, Mr. Roosevelt maintained, while vast and bounteous, were not inexhaustible.

Bonnie agreed, of course, yet as the train bore her relentlessly away from what meant most to her in all the world, the thought of Mr. Roosevelt sent a dizzying jolt of resentment through her. But for his radical views concerning the current conflagration with Spain, after all, she might not be on this train and Eli might not be on his way to Cuba.

According to the newspapers, the Spanish were inflicting unspeakable atrocities on the “childlike” natives of that hellish island of jungles and disease-bearing mosquitoes. Bonnie brought herself up short. She must not think of Cuba, or of Eli being there, until she was stronger.

In order to distract herself, she surreptitiously inspected the few other souls riding in the railroad car. Sitting directly across the aisle was a lone man, hidden for the most part behind a crumpled and probably outdated copy of Mr. Hearst’s New York
Journal.
Toward the front, a family of four got up to stretch, colliding with one another as they moved into the narrow aisle.

Bonnie studied the quartet from beneath lowered lashes.

The man and boy, both fiery redheads, wore cheap ready-made suits of checks and plaids, designs that did battle upon the person of each and then proceeded to arouse hostilities with their counterparts on the opposite body. The woman’s hair was yellow, elaborately coiffed and quite possibly populated; her dress was a scanty tatter of pink taffeta.

The daughter, whom Bonnie judged to be about twelve years of age, seemed oddly out of place in that busy vortex
of tattersall and houndstooth and sickly taffeta. Uncommonly pretty, with shiny brown hair streaming down her back, green eyes, and flawless skin, she wore a simple brown dress, trimmed in braid of a cocoa color, and the garment, though frayed, was crisply clean. Momentarily, as her family tried to return as a bumbling unit to the soot-encrusted seats, the girl’s gaze met Bonnie’s in a sort of resigned desolation that was heartbreaking in a person so young.

Saddened, Bonnie bit her lower lip and looked down at her hands.

“They’re vaudevillians,” a masculine voice confided suddenly, in low and wholly charitable tones.

Bonnie lifted her eyes as the man from across the aisle moved toward her. Tall and well-built, with bright chestnut hair and mustache, and royal blue eyes, he wore a gray suit with an embossed satin vest. His golden watch chain bounced against a middle that looked hard and fit. With neither ceremony nor permission, he sank into the seat beside Bonnie’s, giving the newspaper he had been reading an authoritative snap, and the pleasant scents of Castile soap and mint rose around him with the motion.

“Vaudevillians?” Bonnie echoed, careful to keep her voice down. She had a fascination with show people and their performances, though admittedly this enthrallment had brought her to dire regret on one tragic occasion.

The stranger nodded and there was a spark of amusement in his eyes. “My guess would be that they’re booked at the Pompeii Playhouse in Northridge. Most vaudevillians travel with a troupe, but there are exceptions, of course.”

Bonnie was wildly curious and thus willing to overlook the patent impropriety of speaking, let alone sharing a seat, with a man she didn’t know. She stole one more glance at the family of thespians and then turned widened, grayviolet eyes to the face of the gentleman sitting beside her. “My goodness! Northridge must have grown and prospered since I was there last—certainly there was no playhouse.”

The man smiled, revealing a set of enviably white teeth. “The theatre is the benevolent work of the Friday Afternoon Community Improvement Club, which, curiously enough,
invariably meets on Tuesday mornings. They’ve started a library, too, and have poetry readings on alternate Thursday evenings.”

For a moment, Bonnie remembered how she had yearned for books to read during her childhood. After she learned to make sense of the printed word, she still had only a dog-eared copy of McGuffey’s
Reader
—until Miss Genoa McKutchen befriended her and changed her life forever, that is.

“I grew up in Northridge, you know,” she said, frowning slightly and stiffening to keep her balance as the train careened around a particularly sharp curve of track and the loosely bolted seats threatened to come unfastened from the floor. “I don’t remember meeting you, Mr.—”

“Hutcheson. Webb Hutcheson.” The name was supplied with gruff pleasantry. “I’ve only lived in Northridge for a few years. My misfortune—if I’d been there earlier, I might have met you.”

Bonnie colored slightly and looked down at her hands, which were knotted together in her lap. Unable to deal with the larger tragedy of her life, for the moment anyway, she despaired over the smaller: Her best gloves were so stained and smudged that they would surely be unsalvageable.

The silence lengthened as Mr. Hutcheson awaited her name. Bonnie didn’t like saying; anyone who was the least bit familiar with Northridge’s history would recognize it immediately. The smelter works had been built by Eli’s grandfather, Josiah McKutchen, and Eli’s sister, Genoa, was a prominent resident. Still, her arrival wouldn’t be a secret for long in any case, and she could hardly withhold her identity when her companion had so forthrightly offered his.

“I’m Bonnie McKutchen,” she said.

Mr. Hutcheson sat up just a little straighter, with no pretense of interest in the newspaper he held or anything but what Bonnie had said. “Eli’s wife?”

Bonnie swallowed and nodded her head, her eyes averted. A feeling of aching loneliness washed over her, as though there weren’t a whole world full of people all around her, and she came near to weeping—something she hadn’t done since that cold December afternoon when she and Eli stood
beside the grave of their infant son, Kiley, together and yet apart, each swathed in their dense and separate griefs.

They had traveled back from the cemetery at the head of a procession of carriages hung with crepe, plumes of black feathers nodding and bobbing on the horses’ heads, and Eli had stopped loving Bonnie that day.

Mr. Hutcheson cleared his throat, bringing Bonnie back to the here and now, and gave the headline on his bedraggled newspaper an emphatic thump with one forefinger. “What do you think of this war with Spain?” he asked, a mite too loudly.

Bonnie flinched, inwardly at least. Her traveling companion had unknowingly struck a subject almost as painful as the death of her child. It was a struggle not to crumple in upon herself, not to cover her face with both hands and wail. Through the shifting blur of the present, she saw the past: the cold distance in Eli’s eyes as he’d told her that he meant to go to Cuba with his friend Teddy Roosevelt. If she needed anything, he’d pointed out dismissively, she had only to ring up Seth Callahan, his attorney, and ask for it.

“I need you!” Bonnie had wanted to scream, but, of course, she hadn’t. She’d drawn herself up, using her pride as a handhold, and offered the argument that Eli was a businessman, not a soldier. Her calmness and logic had changed nothing.

Bonnie blinked her eyes and the misty vision faded. Conscious of leaving Mr. Hutcheson’s question suspended in midair, she drew a deep breath and sat up a little straighter. “The Spaniards did express a desire to avoid armed conflict,” she said. “Mr. McKinley put that fact before Congress, but they insisted on fighting, not only in Cuba, but in the Philippine Islands, too.”

Webb Hutcheson’s handsome face was expressionless; Bonnie could not read his convictions in his eyes or the set of his chin or a rising of the blood beneath his skin. “They did sink the
Maine,
Mrs. McKutchen,” he reminded her blandly.

“That has not been proved,” Bonnie insisted, warming to the subject. “It is possible, you know, that the Spanish forces were not responsible for the tragedy.” And a tragedy it had been, that explosion in Havana harbor, back in
mid-February. Two hundred sixty American seamen had perished in the blast.

They sat in stricken silence for a moment, the two of them, both as horrified and baffled as if the incident had just taken place before their eyes.

“Public sentiment demanded some form of retribution,” Mr. Hutcheson offered.

Bonnie cast a contemptuous glance at his copy of the New York
Journal
and scowled. “Public sentiment,” she said, “was created out of whole cloth by men like Mr. Hearst and Mr. Pulitzer.” She paused, tugged at the tops of her soiled gloves in an unconscious display of annoyance. “Two days ago our navy destroyed the entire Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Wasn’t that retribution enough, Mr. Hutcheson?”

He sighed and laid a finger thoughtfully to his mustache, then looked away. Perhaps he was hiding a smile; men could be so damnably superior when a woman spoke of international affairs. Once, months before, when Bonnie had ventured to offer an opinion on the growing crisis between the United States and Spain, Eli had laughed and shaken his head, disregarding her remarks as he might those of a child.