Czytaj książkę: «Keeping Faith»

Chapter One

Dr. Victoria Fenway sat beside her young assistant in the opening of her host’s covered wagon, grinding herbs with mortar and pestle as she studied the tree-shrouded wilderness for a shadow, a shape or movement that might tell her their camp was being watched by a monster.

Broderick Thames, her husband’s murderer, was indeed a monster, and he was here in the south of Missouri. She had no doubt of that. For the past few days, after discovering the first unique track of the killer’s fire-red horse, she’d lived on the razor edge of fear. He’d come this way for a reason, but why?

A screech of youthful male terror reached her from a distance. She jerked, startled, spilling powdered chamomile everywhere.

Her fourteen-year-old helper, Heidi Ladue, dropped her empty teabags and caught Victoria by the arm. “Dr. Fenway, that sounds like Claude. Did you hear a splash?”

Victoria turned and tried to peer through the trees toward the roar of the flooded creek that had halted their journey today. “In that torrent? How could anyone hear a single splash?”

Another cry reached them from the direction of the creek. “The rope,” came a familiar voice. “Help me, please! Get the rope.”

Heidi scrambled from her perch on the wagon’s edge, long strands of her flax-pale hair dangling over her shoulders and the calico ruffles of her sleeves. “That is Claude. He’s in trouble!”

Victoria shoved her work aside and leaped from beneath the canvas of the Ladue wagon. “We don’t have the ropes. Your mother tied the horses with them.” They’d been unable to form a corral with the wagons on this narrow strip of land between cliffs and overflowing creek.

She ran toward the trees in an effort to catch sight of Claude but all she could see was muddy, churning water between giant trunks of oak and broadleaf evergreens. Heidi’s younger brother was not a clumsy boy. Could Thames be nearby? Could that wicked man have pushed him?

Heidi clutched Victoria’s arm and tugged. “He was with the Johnston boys earlier. Please come, Dr. Fenway. They had a rope. They were trying to make a pulley out of it to get the wagon across the water.”

Victoria allowed herself to be pulled forward. “They told you this?”

“No, ma’am, I could see it with my own eyes.” Heidi released her grip and turned toward the creek. “I heard them talking. I told the captain and he got on ’em, but they didn’t listen. They’ve been up to something, and I don’t see Claude, but right there’s the Johnston boys.”

She pointed toward Claude’s constant companions, blond-haired Buster and Gray Johnston. They stood across a narrow clearing beside a huge oak tree that shaded a section of the raging water. They were struggling mightily to straighten a tangled mess of rope that connected their wagon to the tree.

Despite stern reprimands, the boys appeared determined to float their wagon to the other bank before the floodwaters died down, like children taking a dare to prove they were men. They were proving just the opposite with their careless disregard for safety.

“Buster?” Victoria called out, clutching her funereal-black skirts and hurrying through treacherous mud toward the boys, Heidi at her side. “Didn’t you two hear your friend? He’s in trouble.”

“I know, but this here’s what he needs.” Buster held up an end of the rope in his hand. “It’s too knotted.”

Claude cried out again and Heidi turned to run toward the sound of her brother’s voice. “It’s the creek, Doctor. I know he fell into the creek!”

Buster tugged with more force on the rope, his face dripping with sweat. “I’m tryin’, ma’am, doin’ all I can, but he’s got to have this to get out!”

“Heidi, be careful!” Victoria turned back to the Johnston brothers. “Boys, please hurry. What is Claude doing in the water?”

“Hangin’ on for life right now,” Gray said.

Victoria could imagine all sorts of awful endings to this and it made her dizzy. “To what?”

“Old stump.”

“That isn’t good enough. We need your help right now.” Victoria wanted to stamp her foot. Did these young men have difficulty grasping the plain truth? She still couldn’t see the thirteen-year-old boy. “Find something else, a plank of wood, a branch. Something!”

“Gotta get this thing unwound to reach him.” Buster’s fingers slid on the muddy knots. “He’s way out there.”

Victoria wanted to thump their heads together as she watched the detritus being shoved along at a mighty pace down the widened creek. Couldn’t they get a little more excited about the threat to their friend’s life? “No stump’s going to protect him from being knocked to pieces if he’s in that creek. You need to try something besides the rope and do it quickly.”

As if he hadn’t heard her, Buster gave the snarl another tug, which made it cling more tightly to the tree.

Victoria nearly growled aloud. “Buster, now!” She could hear only Claude’s cries for help over the flood-stage roar of Flat Creek—which was anything but flat at the moment. It sounded as if an invisible giant rampaged through this southern Missouri valley, tearing trees from their roots to thrust them out of the racing, muddy water. And now Heidi, too, ran dangerously close to the edge of the steep bank.

Victoria turned, slid and nearly fell in the thick mud. “Heidi Ladue, you get away from the water! Help me find something long enough to reach him.”

Heidi came rushing back, her dainty, even features tight with fear, pale hair flying out behind her in the breeze. “He’s too far out, Doctor. We can’t reach him.” She grabbed Victoria’s arm. “I’m scared,” she said, her voice catching.

“Round up help from the camp. Now, my dear.” Victoria gave her a quick hug and urged her up the hill, but as she looked over the girl’s shoulder she finally caught sight of Claude. He was being flung back and forth in the water, choking and spitting, his head barely above the surface as he grasped the stump. “Get the adults quickly!”

As Heidi ran up the muddy track, Victoria raced along the side of the creek. “Hold on, Claude, we’ll get you out!” She searched for a thick limb or a length of vine she might use to reach the boy, but the limb she picked up immediately broke. The vine fell apart. Everything was too soaked to hold up under Claude’s weight.

She glanced over her shoulder to see if the Johnston boys were having any luck with the rope, but Buster and Gray were now in some argument she couldn’t make out.

“Boys, grow up and get to work!” she called, but they didn’t seem to hear her. With the sound of the water, she could barely hear herself.

She closed her eyes and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Gentlemen! Help!” Those young men should never have been allowed to leave home without their father. Instead of eighteen and sixteen, they behaved like eight and six. Why had Joseph chosen them to help build his town in Kansas?

She turned and ran toward Claude again. “We need more men on this trip,” she muttered to herself. How would this group cross the state border safely into Kansas Territory if the Johnston boys kept pulling stunts like this?

With a glance uphill, she searched for the one man who claimed to always be there for help and protection, though she couldn’t see proof that he practiced his assurances. “Captain Rickard?” she called at the top of her voice. “Trouble! Help us, please.”

But Joseph was nowhere in sight. According to Heidi, he was helping collect wood for the fire, a job Claude and his friends were supposed to be doing. Instead of helping, Claude had hovered near the creek with Gray Johnston, both of them in apparent awe of Buster Johnston’s glowing presence.

Victoria scowled at the thought, but she realized that, deep down, she’d been as hopeful as Buster that there would be a way past the flooding so they could cross, though they each had widely divergent motivations. She knew Buster wanted a fresh start as far from home as he could get, and he was in a hurry to get there. He’d suffered deeply after knocking over a lantern where he worked and burning down the general store in their town. A man had died because of Buster’s clumsiness. Anyone his age would go in search of a new life after that. What she feared was that the clumsy bear cub would leave a path of destruction behind him.

She, on the other hand, wanted to scout ahead of the others and scour the fresh mud for familiar tracks. For the first couple of weeks she’d been able to put aside her thirst for revenge as she’d settled in with the friendly people of the wagon train, especially the Ladues. Last week, however, she’d seen evidence that the killer, Thames, had been through the town where the Johnston boys had joined them. She’d seen the unique hoofprint three times along the trail they now followed—a horseshoe that had an inch of length broken off on the right front hoof of Thames’s crimson-colored horse.

She owed Matthew so much; finding his killer was the least she could do to honor his memory. She knew Joseph had wanted her to come with them as their physician—though she felt herself to be a poor substitute for her late husband—but she had her own reasons for coming, and the murdering slaver was never far from her thoughts. He terrified her and he enraged her, and she couldn’t tell which emotion controlled her at any given time. What she knew, however, was that she could not rely on her emotions. They could betray her as ruthlessly as Joseph had done a decade ago.

But Joseph didn’t belong in the same league as Broderick Thames. A man who killed for the simple pleasure of beating his political opponent was a monster, indeed. What would he do if he knew this wagon train was filled with abolitionists set on building a slave-free community in Kansas Territory? He would find a way to destroy them all, and he had the connections to do it.

“Someone, please!” Heidi’s high-pitched voice echoed down to Victoria as she searched around the camp. “Dr. Fenway, look!” The girl’s voice spiraled upward in terror, echoing against the cliffs that halfway surrounded the wagon train on the eastern side of the flooded creek.

Victoria saw Heidi pointing and turned to find that Claude no longer held on to the stump. Only a lone hand stuck out of the water. It grasped upward, much farther downstream than expected. The stump floated away, roots pointing toward the sky as if they were hands grasping for a firm foundation. The water was carrying Claude.

Before she could catch up with his progress, he shoved away from the tumbling log and lunged toward the bank, at least fifty yards from where the Johnston boys continued to wrangle with their rope.

She raced toward him, stumbling over vines that had been washed ashore. The Ladue family had already lost their father. What a nightmare if Luella and Heidi were to lose Claude, as well.

Even as she ran, however, she heard solid footsteps coming up behind her. She could imagine she felt the shaking of the ground when she heard the rush of heavy breathing. She looked to find one of the older men, Mr. Reich, racing by her, slipping and catching himself on the wet grass and mud, paunch hanging past his belt. The wagon train’s scout, long-legged, raw-boned McDonald, ran barely a stride’s length behind Reich. Victoria tripped over another vine and finally lost her balance for good to land in a patch of muddy grass. Others rushed to her to help her up, but she urged them to follow Reich and McDonald.

There was a sudden throng of rescuers, including Luella Ladue with her daughter. Luella surpassed all but the two first men, her light brown hair flying. She jumped into the creek with her grip on a thick vine connected to a gnarled oak tree.

Victoria sat where she was for a few seconds, glad for the rescuers but still anxious. No one should be in the water. True, it wasn’t stagnant, but who knew how many stagnant pools and contaminated ponds now mingled with the running water? She’d seen too many cholera victims in her ten years of medical practice.

Mrs. Ladue locked her free arm around her son’s middle. Luella was a strong woman, as she’d had to be since her husband’s death last year, but Victoria feared she might not be strong enough to fight the water and the tossing logs and trees...even worse, the contamination that could lurk in the water.

“Luella, you’ve both got to get out of there now!” Victoria pulled herself to her feet. Despite her warning, others followed Luella’s lead and jumped in to help push Claude up. “Please, stay out of the water. It could be poison!” And yet, she saw no other way for them to haul the weakened boy from the fierce rush of the creek.

Mr. Reich and Mr. McDonald had flopped onto their bellies at the edge of mud, ready with arms outstretched to pull the others to shore. Typically the first person to help out when needed, Mr. Reich had a heft about him that suggested more padding than muscle, but he was as strong as a warhorse. Mr. McDonald, wiry and tall, matched his friend’s strength.

The men and women of their group stood along the bank or knelt over the side to help, and several made use of the same vine Luella had used to lower herself into the dirty creek water. It appeared to the onlookers, of course, that Claude was safe for now as his mother grasped him and their rescuers formed a chain to aid his rise from the flood.

Knowing Luella, Victoria knew Claude was in for the scolding of his life, after his mother had smothered him with kisses.

“Victoria?”

She heard the voice and turned to see the man who had, to her shame, held her heart captive for ten years. He came running through the camp with a load of wood in his arms, his strength making the load look insignificant. Captain Joseph Rickard was a title she’d never become accustomed to these past four weeks of tedious travel through unmarked hills and over rocky terrain. After the first few days of attempting to use the formal address, she’d felt so awkward she’d reverted to calling him Joseph, despite a few raised eyebrows. After all, had he not abandoned her in St. Louis with Matthew, they would be married. It was his decision, his rejection, that had helped her keep her distance from him...most of the time.

By now everyone who traveled with them knew that she and Joseph had been friends long ago. Few knew about the depth of that friendship. She was, after all, still in mourning, and women of society didn’t feel it seemly for a widow of seven months to spend her available hours with an unmarried man—not that she’d ever been particularly concerned about the women of society. A female physician would always be sneered at by those women, so why waste her time?

The last time she’d seen Joseph before he left for his father’s plantation in the South, she’d been sobbing in his arms, begging him not to leave, all dignity replaced by abject pain at the thought of losing him.

“I heard the shouts.” He tossed the wood beside the Ladue wagon and rushed to Victoria, his attention drawn to the mud on her dress. “What happened? Are you all right?” He brushed at some of the heaviest clumps from the black cotton.

“Never mind me. I slipped while trying to get to Claude.” She pointed toward the crowd, where everyone hovered around the boy, slapping his back as he choked up dirty water.

“He fell in?” He took her arm and started in the direction of the crowd.

She went with him. “I haven’t decided yet. Nobody seems to know what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“At this point, considering his choice of companions and their determination to prove to the grown-ups they could cross that water—”

“The Johnston brothers. Again.” Joseph looked up the creek toward the blond-haired boys, who had just managed to untangle the mess of knots in their rope and untie it from the tree. He frowned at the brothers, his dark eyes narrowing. “Claude wouldn’t just fall in for no reason.”

“That’s my concern.”

Joseph turned to her. “What concern?”

She pressed her lips together, sorry she’d been so quick to speak her mind. “Only that he could have been pushed.”

Joseph’s thick, black eyebrows rose. “You can’t think Buster or Gray could have pushed him.”

“Of course not, Joseph. Give me credit for a little common sense. Believe it or not, those boys are the least of our troubles if my suspicions are correct.” She shivered and glanced around them through the shadows of the forest once again.

“Victoria?”

There wasn’t time to get into that conversation at the moment. Soon, though. “Please disregard my chatter. I’m simply overwhelmed at the moment. Those boys were supposed to be helping gather wood for a fire to dry things out, and instead they’re doing what you told them not to. They need a firmer hand, Joseph, or they need to return to their father.”

Joseph crossed his sun-browned arms over his chest and shook his head. “All of us were supposed to pitch in, Doctor, and I’m not their nanny.”

She took umbrage at his defensive posture. “Not their nanny, but certainly their captain, and from what I understand, their father convinced you to bring them along. I thought you had nearly ten years of experience with captaining a wagon train.”

She pressed her lips shut at the brusqueness of her own voice and glanced toward the rescuers, who were having success in getting everyone out of the water. She needed to check on her patients soon and let go of this petty little ten-year resentment that had been doomed to cause friction between the two of them.

“I’m sorry, Victoria.” Joseph sighed, and the familiar deep voice that once whispered words of love in her ear held a note of sadness.

“Sorry?” Eyebrows raised, she turned back to him and was captured by the depth of those dark brown eyes, as she always had been. But she’d learned the hard way to look past a man’s words and mesmerizing eyes to the character beneath. His behavior had taught her to beware of other men, though that lesson had come too late for her to avoid his impact on her life.

“We seem to be at odds on this trip when we’re not avoiding one another,” he said. “It wasn’t what I’d hoped for.” Gone was the typical display of golden sunlight in eyes that were often touched with humor. She missed that.

She also missed the man she’d once thought Joseph to be. “Don’t lecture me about avoidance. I wasn’t the one who stayed away for ten years like a sulking child. You knew where Matthew and I were anytime you came to St. Louis.”

“That’s right.” He said the words with an emphasis that implied he’d explained it all, when in truth he hadn’t explained a thing.

“Don’t doubt my gratefulness, I do appreciate your arrival at the perfect time for me to escape an ugly situation, but I don’t understand why you asked me to join you on this trip.”

“I wanted you out of St. Louis. I worried about you all winter after word reached me about Matthew’s death.”

“Then where were you all winter?” She’d wondered that several times over the long, hard winter months, when neighbors became unfriendly and the sheriff tried more than once to convince himself that she had been the culprit in Matthew’s death.

“I was in Kansas Territory,” Joseph said, “bound in by snow.”

“Of course. My apologies. I heard the snows hit the Territory hard this past winter.” She couldn’t miss the fact that Joseph was studying her every expression with deep interest.

“I had hoped we could put old disagreements behind us,” he said, his voice softening. “I know you’re angry with me for some reason. You’re brooding.”

She wouldn’t try to deny that. “I apologize for making you uncomfortable.” She couldn’t tell him the truth—that guilt combined with old resentments made her awkward around him. While she grieved for her husband, the truth was Matthew had always known she didn’t love him the way a woman should love her man. Not the way he loved her. Not the way she’d loved Joseph....

“Matthew made me a top priority in his life,” she said. “You did not.” That was, indeed, a great deal of her problem, but it certainly didn’t explain why she’d been unable to dismiss Joseph the way he’d obviously dismissed her. “Indeed, you became engaged to another woman.” That, above all other things, still angered her when she allowed herself to think about it, and this was not the time to allow her temper to flare.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what made you think that, but—”

“Perhaps we could save this discussion for another time,” she said. “I have patients to see.” Without waiting for a reply, she strode away from him toward the crowd of wet and upset travelers. Why had she come on this trip? Now Joseph must think she would always be willing to simply drop everything and do whatever he wished.

How on earth could this situation get worse?