A Lawman's Christmas Page 4

  Clay caught Dara Rose’s gaze again. “That’s your mother’s decision to make, not mine,” he said, so at home in his own skin that she wondered what kind of life he’d led, before his arrival in Blue River. An easy one, most likely.

  But something in his eyes refuted that.

  “We’ll see,” Dara Rose said.

  Both girls groaned, wanting a “yes” instead of a “maybe.”

  “I’d best be getting on with my day,” Clay said, with another slow, crooked grin.

  And then he was at the door, ducking his head so he wouldn’t bump it, putting on his hat and walking away.

  Dara Rose watched through the little window over the sink until he’d gone through the side gate and mounted his horse.

  “We don’t have to go to the orphanage!” Harriet crowed, clapping her plump little hands in celebration.

  “There will be no more talk of orphanages,” Dara Rose decreed briskly, pumping water at the rusty sink to wash her hands.

  “Does Mr. McKettrick have a wife?” Edrina piped up. “Because if he doesn’t, you could marry him. I don’t think he’d send Harriet and me away, like Mr. Maddox wants to do.”

  Dara Rose kept her back to her daughters as she began breakfast preparations, using all her considerable willpower to keep her voice calm and even. “That’s none of your business,” she said firmly. “Nor mine, either. And don’t you dare pry into Mr. McKettrick’s private affairs by asking, either one of you.”

  Both girls sighed at this.

  “Go get your shoes and stockings on,” Dara Rose ordered, setting the cast-iron skillet on the stove, plopping in the last smidgeon of bacon grease to keep the eggs from sticking.

  “I need to go to the outhouse,” Harriet said.

  “Put your shoes on first,” Dara Rose countered. “It’s a nice day out, but the ground is cold.”

  The children obeyed readily, which threw her a little. She was raising her daughters to have minds of their own, but that meant they were often obstinate and sometimes even defiant.

  Parnell had accused her of spoiling them, though he’d indulged the girls plenty himself, buying them hair ribbons and peppermint sticks and letting them ride his horse. Edrina, rough and tumble as any boy but at the same time all girl, was virtually fearless as well as outspoken, and trying as the child sometimes was, Dara Rose wouldn’t have changed anything about her. Except, of course, for her tendency to play hooky from school.

  Harriet, just a year younger than her sister, was more tentative, less likely to take risks than Edrina was. Too small to really understand death, Harriet very probably expected her papa to come home one day, riding Gawain, his saddlebags bulging with presents.

  Dara Rose’s eyes smarted again and, inwardly, she brought herself up short.

  She and the girls had been given a reprieve, that was all. They could go on living in the marshal’s house for a while, but other arrangements would have to be made eventually, just the same.

  Which was why, when she and the girls had eaten, and the dishes had been washed and the fires banked, Dara Rose followed through with her original plan.

  She and Harriet walked Edrina to the one-room schoolhouse at the edge of town, and then took the eggs to the mercantile, to be traded for staples.

  It was warm inside the general store, and Harriet became so captivated by the lovely doll on display in the tinsel-draped front window that Dara Rose feared the child would refuse to leave the place at all.

  “Look, Mama,” she breathed, without taking her eyes from the beautiful toy when Dara Rose approached and took her hand. “Isn’t she pretty? She’s almost as tall as I am.”

  “She’s pretty,” Dara Rose conceded, trying to keep the sadness out of her voice. “But not nearly as pretty as you are.”

  Harriet looked up at her, enchanted. “Edrina says there’s no such person as St. Nicholas,” she said. “She says it was you and Papa who filled our stockings last Christmas Eve.”

  Dara Rose’s throat ached. She had to swallow before she replied, “Edrina is right, sweetheart,” she said hoarsely. Other people could afford to pretend that magical things happened, at least while their children were young, but she did not have that luxury.

  “I guess the doll probably costs a lot,” Harriet said, her voice small and wistful.

  Dara Rose checked the price tag dangling from the doll’s delicate wrist, though she already knew it would be far out of her reach.

  Two dollars and fifty cents.

  What was the world coming to?

  “She comes with a trunk full of clothes,” the storekeeper put in helpfully. Philo Bickham meant well, to be sure, but he wasn’t the most thoughtful man on earth. “That’s real human hair on her head, too, and she came all the way from Germany.”

  Harriet’s eyes widened with something that might have been alarm. “But didn’t the hair belong to someone?” she asked, no doubt picturing a bald child wandering sadly through the Black Forest.

  “People sometimes sell their hair,” Dara Rose explained, giving Mr. Bickham a less than friendly glance as she drew her daughter toward the door. “And then it grows back.”

  Harriet immediately brightened. “Could we sell my hair? For two dollars and fifty cents?”

  “No,” Dara Rose said, and instantly regretted speaking so abruptly. She dropped to her haunches, tucked stray golden curls into Harriet’s tattered bonnet. “Your hair is much too beautiful to sell, sweetheart.”

  “But I could grow more,” Harriet reasoned. “You said so yourself, Mama.”

  Dara Rose smiled, mainly to keep from crying, and stood very straight, juggling the egg basket, now containing a small tin of lard, roughly three-quarters of a cup of sugar scooped into a paper sack and a box of table salt, from one wrist to the other.

  “We’ll be on our way now, Harriet,” she said. “We have things to do.”

  Chapter 3

  As he rode slowly along every street in Blue River that morning, touching his hat brim to all he encountered so the town folks would know they had a marshal again, one who meant to live up to the accompanying responsibilities, Clay found himself thinking about Parnell Nolan. Blessed with a beautiful wife and two fine daughters, and well-liked from what little Clay had learned about him, Nolan had still managed to be in a whorehouse when he drew his last breath.

  Yes, plenty of men indulged themselves in brothels—bachelors and husbands, sons and fathers alike—but they usually exercised some degree of discretion, in Clay’s experience.

  Always inclined to give somebody the benefit of the doubt, at least until they’d proven themselves unworthy of the courtesy, Clay figured Parnell might have done his sinning in secret, with the notion that he was there fore protecting his wife and children from scandal. But Blue River was a small place, like Clay’s hometown of Indian Rock, and stories that were too good not to tell had a way of getting around. Fast.

  Of course, Nolan surely hadn’t planned on dying that particular night, in the midst of awkward circumstances.

  Reaching the end of the last street in town, near the schoolhouse, Clay stopped to watch, leaning on the pommel of his saddle and letting Outlaw nibble at the patchy grass, as children spilled out the door of the little red building, shouting to one another, eager to make the most of recess.

  He spotted Edrina right away—her bonnet hung down her back by its laces, revealing that unmistakable head of spun-gold hair, and her cheeks glowed with exuberance and good health and the nippy coolness of the weather.

  As Clay watched, she found a stick, etched the squares for a game of hopscotch in the bare dirt and jumped right in. Within moments, the other little girls were clamoring to join her, while the boys played kick-the-can at an artfully disdainful distance, making as much racket as they could muster up.

  The schoolmarm—a plain woman, spare and tall, and probably younger than she looked—surveyed the melee from the steps of the building, but she was quick to notice the horse and rider looking on from t
he road.

  Clay tugged at his hat brim and nodded a silent greeting. His ma, Chloe, had been a schoolteacher when she was younger, and he had an ingrained respect for the profession. It was invariably a hard row to hoe.

  The teacher nodded back, descended the schoolhouse steps with care, lest she trip over the hem of her brown woolen dress. Instead of a coat or a cloak, she wore a dark blue shawl to keep warm.

  Clay waited as she approached, then dismounted to meet her at the gate, though he kept to his own side and she kept to hers, as was proper.

  The lady introduced herself. “Miss Alvira Krenshaw,” she said, putting out a bony hand. She hadn’t missed the star pinned to his coat, of course; her eyes had gone right to it. “You must be our new town marshal.”

  Clay shook her hand and acknowledged her supposition with another nod and, “Clay McKettrick.”

  “How do you do?” she said, not expecting an answer.

  Clay gave her one, anyway. “So far, so good,” he replied, with a slight grin. Miss Alvira Krenshaw looked like a sturdy, no-nonsense soul, and although she wasn’t pretty, she wasn’t homely, either. She’d probably make some man a good wife, given half a chance, and though thin, she looked capable of carrying healthy babies to full-term, delivering them without a lot of fuss and raising them to competent adulthood.

  Wanting a wife to carry over the threshold of his new house, come spring, and impregnate as soon as possible, Clay might have set right to courting Miss Alvira, pro vided she was receptive to such attentions, if not for one problem. He’d gone and met Dara Rose Nolan.

  Stepping off the train the day before, he’d been sure of almost everything that concerned him. What he wanted, what sort of man he was, all of it. Now, after just two brief encounters with his predecessor’s widow, he wasn’t sure of much of anything.

  Considerable figuring out would be called for before he undertook to win himself a bride, and that was for certain.

  Over Alvira’s shoulder, he saw a boy run over to where the girls were playing hopscotch, grab at Edrina’s dangling bonnet and yank on it hard enough to knock her down.

  The bonnet laces held, though, and the boy ran, laughing, his friends shouting a mingling of mockery and encouragement, while a disgruntled, flaming-faced Edrina got back to her feet, dusting off her coat as she glared at the transgressor.

  “Looks like trouble,” Clay observed dryly, causing Miss Alvira to flare out her long, narrow nostrils and then spin around to see for herself.

  Edrina, still flushed with fury, marched right into the middle of that cluster of small but earnest rascals, stood face-to-face with the primary mischief-maker and landed a solid punch to his middle. Knocked the wind right out of him.

  Miss Alvira was on the run by then, blowing shrill toots through the whistle every schoolmarm seemed to come equipped with, but the damage, such as it was, was done.

  The thwarted bonnet thief was on his knees now, clutching his belly and gasping for breath, and though his dignity had certainly suffered, he didn’t look seriously hurt.

  Clay suppressed a smile and lingered there by the gate, watching.

  Edrina looked a mite calmer by then, but she was still pink in the face and her fists remained clenched. She stood her ground, spotted Clay when she turned her head toward Miss Alvira and that earsplitting whistle of hers.

  “What is going on here?” Alvira demanded, her voice carrying, almost as shrill as the whistle. She reached down, caught the gasping boy from behind, where his suspenders crossed, and wrenched him unceremoniously to his feet.

  Clay felt a flash of sympathy for the little fellow. Like as not, he’d taken a shine to Edrina and, boys being what boys have always been, hoped to gain her notice by snatching her bonnet and running off with it—the equivalent of tugging at a girl’s pigtail or surprising her with a close-up look at a bullfrog or a squirmy garter snake, and glory be and hallelujah if she squealed.

  Miss Alvira, still gripping the boy’s suspenders, turned to frown at Edrina.

  “Edrina Nolan,” she said, “young ladies do not strike others with their fists.”

  Edrina, who had been looking in Clay’s direction until that moment, faced her accuser, folded her arms and staunchly replied, “He had it coming.”

  “Go inside this instant,” Alvira ordered both children, indicating the open door of the schoolhouse with a pointing of her index finger. “Thomas, you will stand in the corner behind my desk, by the bookcase. Edrina, you will occupy the one next to the cloakroom.”

  “For how long?” Edrina wanted to know.

  Clay had to admire the child’s spirit.

  “Until I tell you that you may take your seats,” Miss Alvira answered firmly, shooing the rest of her brood toward the hallowed halls of learning with a waving motion of her free arm. “Inside,” she called. “All of you. Recess is over.”

  The command elicited groans of protest, but the children obeyed.

  Thomas, clearly humiliated because he’d been publicly bested by a girl, slunk, head down, toward the schoolhouse, and Edrina followed in her own time, literally dragging her feet by scuffing the toe of first one shoe and then the other in the dirt as she walked. Finally, she looked back over one shoulder, caught Clay’s eye and gave an eloquent little shrug of resignation.

  He hoped the distance and the shadow cast by the brim of his hat would hide his smile.

  That kid should have been born a McKettrick.

  DARA ROSE MADE THE ROUNDS that morning just as she’d planned, swallowing her pride and knocking on each door to ask for work, with little Harriet trudging along, uncomplaining, at her side.

  There were only half a dozen real houses in Blue River; the rest were mostly hovels and shanties, shacks like the one she lived in. The folks there were no better off than she was and, in many cases, things were worse for them. Thin smoke wafted from crooked chimneys and scrawny chickens pecked at the small expanses of bare dirt that passed for yards.

  Mrs. O’Reilly, whose husband had run off with a dance hall girl six months ago and left her with three children to look after, all of them under five years old, was outside. The woman was probably in her early twenties, but she looked a generation older; there were already streaks of gray at her temples and she’d lost one of her eye teeth.

  She had a bonfire going, with a big tin washtub teetering atop the works, full of other people’s laundry. Steam boiled up into the crisp air as she stirred the soapy soup, and Peg O’Reilly managed a semblance of a smile when she caught sight of Dara Rose and Harriet.

  Two of the O’Reilly children, both boys, ran whooping around their mother like Sioux braves on the warpath, both of them barefoot and coatless. Their older sister, Addie, must have been inside, where it was, Dara Rose devoutly hoped, comparatively warm.

  “Mornin’, Miz Nolan,” Peg called, though she didn’t smile. She was probably self-conscious about that missing tooth, Dara Rose figured, with a stab of well-hidden pity.

  Dara Rose smiled, offered a wave and paused at the edge of the road, even though she’d meant to keep going. Lord knew, she had reason enough to be discouraged herself, after being turned away from all those doors, but she just couldn’t bring herself to pass on by.

  Harriet, no doubt weary from keeping up with Dara Rose all morning, tugged reluctantly at her mother’s hand, wanting to go on.

  “How’s Addie?” Dara Rose asked.

  “She’s poorly,” Peg replied. “Been abed since yesterday, so she’s not much help with these little yahoos.” Still tending to the wash, which was just coming to a simmer, she indicated the boys with a nod of her head.

  They had both stopped their chasing game to stare at Harriet in abject wonder. Even in her poor clothes and the shoes she would outgrow all too soon, she probably looked as pretty to them as that doll over at the mercantile did to her.

  “Mama,” Harriet whispered, looking up at Dara Rose from beneath the drooping brim of her bonnet, “what’s that smell?”

  “H
ush,” Dara Rose whispered back, hoping Peg hadn’t heard the little girl’s voice over the crackling of the fire and the barking of a neighbor’s dog.

  Peg let go of the old broomstick she used to stir the shirts and trousers and small clothes as they soaked, and wiped a forearm across her brow. The sleeves of her calico dress were rolled up to her elbows, and her apron was little more than a rag.

  “Could you use some eggs?” Dara Rose asked, in the manner of one asking a favor. “I’ve got plenty put by.”

  A flicker of yearning showed in Peg O’Reilly’s care-worn face before she squared her shoulders and raised her chin a notch. “I’d say no, on grounds that I’ve got my pride and I know you’re having a hard time of it, too, but for the young’uns,” she replied. “The last of the oatmeal is used up, and we’re almost out of pinto beans, but a nice fried egg might put some color in Addie’s cheeks and that’s for sure.”

  “I’ll send Edrina over with a basket right after she gets home from school,” Dara Rose said.

  “You understand that I can’t pay you nothin’,” Peg warned, stiffening her backbone.

  “I understand,” Dara Rose confirmed lightly, though every egg her hens laid was precious, since it could be sold for cash money or traded for things she couldn’t raise, like flour. “I’ve got too many, and I don’t want them to go to waste.”

  “Mama,” Harriet interjected, “we don’t—”

  This time, Dara Rose didn’t hush her daughter out loud, but simply squeezed the child’s hand a little more tightly than she might otherwise have done.

  “Obliged, then,” Peg said, and went back to her stirring.

  Dara Rose nodded and started off toward home again, poor Harriet scrambling to keep up.

  “Mama,” the child insisted, half-breathless, “you already traded away all the eggs, remember? Over at the mercantile? And the hens probably haven’t laid any new ones yet.”

  “There are nearly two dozen in the crock on the pantry shelf,” Dara Rose reminded her daughter. Like the potatoes, carrots, turnips and onions she’d squirreled away down in the root cellar, along with a few bushels of apples from the tree in her yard, the eggs suspended in water glass were part of her skimpy reserves, something she and the girls could eat if the hens stopped laying or the hawks got them.