The Devil You Know (6 page)

“No.”

“All right. I don't pretend to know the extent of your injuries. I know what I can see, and I know what can be done about that, but there's things I can't see and wouldn't know what to do about if I could. You took some hard knocks to your head, and you have a couple of knots under your scalp that might be something or nothing. You have not said anything about your head, so maybe it doesn't hurt as much, or at least any worse, than your shoulder or your ribs or your eye or—”

“Or my knee,” he said. “My knee's wrenched.”

“Or your knee,” she repeated quietly. “Or any other part of you that's scraped, cut, or peeled away. Some injuries are going to pain you worse before they get better, so you have to be prepared for that. I think—”

“If I live,” he said. “I have to be prepared for it, if I live.”

“That's right.”

He turned his head a fraction toward her and opened his eye. “But you're more worried about my head.”

Now that he could see her, she nodded. “I don't know how to judge the state of your faculties without asking you questions and hearing your answers.”

“So annoying me with them was intentional.”

“Yes.”

“But the number of questions you asked . . .”

“To keep you awake.”

“And the kind of questions . . .”

“To learn as much as I could as quickly as possible.”

“So you will know where to send the body.”

“Do not flatter yourself that I would go to the trouble or spend the money. I am only sending notification. You'll go in the ground here.”

He stared at her with his one good eye, and then a chuckle began to vibrate his chest. Wincing, he pressed the arm in the sling against his injured ribs to hold them steady.

Willa smirked. “About the only thing you have not strained, sprained, or swollen is your funny bone, but you keep laughing like that and it's going to kill you.”

He caught his breath and waited until the pain in his side passed before he spoke. “I take your point.”

“Good.” She sat up. “Now tell me about your brother. Does he still live in Illinois?” Willa was not certain he meant to answer her, but it turned out that the reply was only a long time coming.

“Whatever happens, you don't involve him.”

“But—”

“I mean it.”

She did not understand, but she acquiesced. “All right.”

“Ever,” he said.

“All
right
.” When he continued to eye her, she said, “I am not taking a blood oath.”

“Hmm.” He blinked once and then turned his head to stare at the roof.

She said, “When Cutter gets here with the poultice, you can rest. Sleep if you like, at least for a while. Zach will know how often to wake you.”

He nodded, said nothing.

“Do you want more white willow tea?” The cup had been empty when Cutter took it away. “Zach can brew more.”

“No. It was enough.”

“I am going up to the house to see what's taking so long. Don't let Cutter rile you when he comes back with the poultice. Rest. I'll look in on you tomorrow morning.”

“Elm Street,” he said suddenly. “Twenty-two Elm Street. Herring, Illinois. The Reverend and Mrs. James McKenna.”

Willa's lips parted. She stared at him while he continued to stare at the rafters.

“My parents' address,” he said. “In the event you need it.”

“I don't think I will. I've changed my mind. You're too ornery to die on us.”

Israel Court McKenna did wake the next morning and had to sort through several simultaneous thoughts to make sense of any one of them.

First and foremost, there was the fact that he was awake and wished that he was not. For the time it took to draw a full breath, he wished he were dead and meant it. There was no part of him that did not hurt. His hair hurt, for God's sake. Every strand.

He grasped at another thought, scrabbling the sheet with his fingers as though the thought had real weight and texture and substance. The woman—Willa—had said he was too ornery to die, and she might have been right. Probably was. He had been cursed all his life for his disobedience, his willfulness, and he had never been in a position to claim he stood opposed to things as a matter of principle. Mostly he did it out of sheer perverseness.

Now he wondered what perverse thing he had done this time. It was not a thought he wanted to dwell on. Not at all. It pained him more than his hair, but he had to consider it. He'd been honest with the girl. The young one. Annalea. He had been truthful about the kind of man he was. A bad one. And he had also been honest with her sister. He did not know what happened to bring about this mean justice. He had no memory of Jupiter, although when Cutter suggested that he might have arrived by train, it resonated.

Why would he have gone to Jupiter when his destination was a ranch outside Temptation?

Cutter said Jupiter was a spur that started in Denver, which meant the town was on a dead-end route. It made no
sense that he would have boarded a train to nowhere when there was somewhere he particularly wanted to be. But then again, he had done foolish things before, so there was precedence for this.

He had meant to change, had really believed he could, even thought he had begun, but here he was without ways or means, clearly past redemption. Was it an irony that he had actually, finally resisted Temptation, or only egregious wordplay? That errant thought made him chuckle, wince, and then recall that Willa had warned that his funny bone would kill him.

Israel removed the poultice from his eye and gently explored the puffy skin around it. If there was any change, he couldn't tell. He searched for the cloth Willa had put over his eye before the poultice arrived, but he could not find it. He used a corner of the sheet instead to try to clear the crusty matter that filled the seam between his upper and lower lids. He did the best he could, but he needed a damp cloth and stopped before he did more injury.

“Good,” Annalea said. “You're awake. I brought you breakfast.” She set a tray on the table. “Oatmeal and more tea. Oatmeal on account of Willa thinking you should have soft food and tea for your pain. I guess you had some trouble chewing the meat in the stew last night. Could be you have a couple of loose teeth. Better to keep them in your mouth.”

“Where is your sister?”

“That's all you have to say?”

“It's a start.”

“So is ‘good morning.'”

“Good morning. Where is your sister?”

“She rode out to the place where we found you.”

“Already? She said she was going to look in on me.” He wondered if he sounded disappointed. He was. A little.

“She did that earlier. You were sleeping and you were fine and she has chores. Cutter's gone to Jupiter, and Zach is in the barn putting fresh hay into the troughs. Pa's snoring. He's the only one here who sleeps in. Willa says things go better if we let him.”

Israel cast his eye past Annalea to the doorway. “I don't see your dog.”

“John Henry sniffed out a rabbit. He'll come back eventually.”

“With the rabbit?”

“Probably not. He doesn't have the bloodlust. I do, though. That's what Pa says makes me so good with my slingshot. Your eye looks awful, by the way. Do you need help sitting up? Willa said you might but that you probably wouldn't ask. Was she right?”

“I need you to leave.”

Her face crumpled and she thrust out her lower lip. “Why?”

“Because.”

“But I'm supposed to make sure you eat your breakfast.”

“And you can do that, but first you need to leave.”

Annalea's lower lip began to quiver.

He was unmoved. “Can you also cry at will?”

She blew out a breath hard enough to make her lips vibrate and then gave him a saucy grin. “I can, you know.”

“I figured. It's a gift. Now go.”

Annalea rolled her shoulders so her twin braids fell forward. She tugged on them as she backed out of the bunkhouse, her gaze never straying from his. “I reckon I got it in my head now why you need privacy. Holler when you're done. I'll be right outside.”

“Wonderful,” he muttered. Lord, he would be grateful when he could walk to the outhouse.

*   *   *

Willa made a striking figure on horseback. She sat tall and straight in the saddle, relieving her mare of the full burden of her slight weight. She was a skillful rider and learned most of what she knew from her father before he became a slave to the bottle. He had her in the saddle before she could properly walk; at least that's what she had been told. It might even have been true because she felt the most at ease while she was riding, whether she was flying with the wind or resilient in the face of it.

It was another cool morning, the fourth they'd had in a row, and Willa stopped once to pull a black woolen scarf out of her coat pocket and wrap it around her neck and the lower half of her face. In the east, the sun was climbing in a cerulean sky but not offering much in the way of heat, and to the north there was a front approaching, an endless gray cloud carpet unrolling in her direction.

Willa's mount was a sleek, cinnamon-colored mare with an ebony mane and dark brown eyes as expressive as those of a heroine in a dime novel. Willa named her after her personal favorite, Miss Felicity Ravenwood.

Willa guided Felicity along Potrock Run until she came to the place where Annalea had found Israel McKenna. She dismounted, searched the area for what they might have missed the day before, and found a short length of rope, still knotted in the middle, with blood on it. She guessed that it was what had bound his wrists. There was nothing extraordinary about the rope itself—she had coils of the same back at the ranch—but the knot intrigued her because she hadn't seen one like it used by cattlemen.

Deciding that it was worth studying later, she stuffed it in the pocket where she had kept the scarf and remounted to cross the run. Felicity picked her way across the shallow stream with the same delicate care for her hooves that her namesake might have shown for a new pair of kid shoes.

“You have the sensibility of an Eastern debutante, don't you, girl?” Willa gave her a light pat on the neck as Felicity climbed out of the run. “And the heart of Joan of Arc. Let's go.”

Willa followed alongside the trail of crushed grass and scattered rock. Twice she saw narrow strips of material torn from Israel's jacket and trousers, and both times she left them where they lay. The trail divided in the midst of a stretch of old boxelders, and Willa reasoned the riders did not follow the same trail through the trees on their return trip. She found evidence of Israel's passing in the heavily furrowed bark of several boxelders, threads of fabric snagged by the gray-brown trunks, and she kept Felicity moving slowly in that direction.

When she reached the clearing on the other side, she saw
what Cutter had observed in the multiple hoofprints, the movement of restless horses, and the damp outline of shoes that did not belong to any four-legged animal. She did not pause there long but kept going, taking the route the riders had used when they fled in hopes of finding where they had come from and where they had gone.

She was crossing the meandering run a second time when she saw two riders approaching from the northeast. Willa urged Felicity forward until they were on the other side of the run and then held her up. She recognized the men as much from their mounts as she did from the manner they rode them. As a precaution, she opened her coat to put her Colt in easy reach and unstrapped the holster. She also had a rifle in the tooled leather scabbard if there was need for it, although she reckoned that if she were serious about using it, she would be taking aim right now.

The lead rider was a large man, not heavy, but heavily built, broad and big-boned. He held himself erect, although not stiffly. It was the natural posture of a man always at attention, but the effect was that he drew attention. He had a presence beyond what could be accounted for by his physical size. When she was a child, Willa had imagined that he could suck the air out of a room. As an adult, she knew it to be a fact.

Willa steadied Felicity as the riders drew closer. They had slowed once they recognized her. The follower in the pair was wearing a thick leather coat with a lamb's wool collar turned up to his ears. The coat added bulk to his lean, compact frame, but he still did not approach the size of his companion. Willa wondered if that had been the intent when he purchased it. Eli Barber had never really tried to step out of his father's shadow, and whatever space he had created for himself, the shadow he cast was in Malcolm Barber's image.

They wore identical hats, silver-banded black Stetsons that bore none of the sweat stains and grit of the hats worn by the men who worked for them. They shared the same coloring, fair skinned, sandy hair, and green eyes, but for all of that, they were not peas in a pod. Eli's features were better defined, not like his father's, whose were broad and flat. He had a narrow face with a clean jawline, full lips, and
faint hollows under high cheekbones. Eli's hair brushed his forehead while his father wore his swept back under his hat, and although Malcolm's face was carved by a less deft hand, he was as handsome as his son in a roughhewn way.

Willa tugged on her scarf, lowering to just under her chin so she could greet them. It was her practice to never give either of the Barbers the first opportunity to speak, and if she could have the last word as well, so much the better.

“Morning, Mal. Eli. What are you doing on my land?”

“Now, Willa,” Malcolm said patiently. “Is that really how you want to begin? A debate over whose land this is?”

“I said ‘Morning' first.”

“So you did.”

“And there's no debating it,” she said. “The only person questioning the survey, the government land office, and the judge's ruling is you.” When Willa saw Eli casually raise his hand, she added, “And your son. So I'm asking again, what are you doing on my land?”

“Looking for rustlers, or at least trespassers. Haven't determined if there are missing cattle, but my fence has been cut, so it seems likely. My men are counting head now. Trail led us here.”

“Huh. Rustlers. As it happens, I'm looking for a couple of cows that wandered off from the north pasture. I didn't consider rustlers. It's been a while since we had that kind of trouble.”

“Well, it's never not a possibility.”

“True.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the ground she had already covered. “There's no point in the two of your troubling yourself any further, especially seeing as how you are three miles deep onto my land and how I've been where you're heading and saw no evidence of rustlers or your cattle. I don't suppose you've seen my cows?”

Malcolm Barber's expression turned regretful. “Sorry, Willa, but no. No sign of them.”

“But you'd send them this way if you did see them.”

“Of course. I'll deliver them to your front door if you like.”

She shook her head. “You get within forty yards of the front porch and Happy will shoot you. You know that.”

“Your father could give lessons on how to hold a grudge.”

Willa said nothing. She looked pointedly to the ridge where they had first appeared and waited for them to leave. It was only when they brought their horses around that she spoke. “Always nice chatting with you, Eli.”

Yes, she reflected, as they rode away. She'd had the first word and the last. All in all, a satisfactory encounter.

*   *   *

Israel had alternated once between lukewarm white willow tea and cold oatmeal and was set to take his second sip of tea when he remembered that Annalea was still waiting outside. She had been quiet so he considered there was at least some chance that she had wandered off to find her dog. The hope that this was true decided him in favor of calling for her, although he hedged his bet by not calling very loudly.

He was not inclined to favor children, although he had nothing specific against them. True, they tended to be sticky and inquisitive and unruly and more often than not they got underfoot, but any of those traits, whether alone or in combination, was not enough to put him off them entirely. His awareness of his unsuitability as a parent did that. It made him a careful partner in bed, even with women who assured him that they were past their childbearing years.

He wondered again what he might have done in Jupiter, if indeed he had been there. Bedded the mayor's wife? The preacher's daughter? The sheriff's niece? Had he been so foolish or desperate or both that he had abandoned precaution for a tumble?

He was following this line of reasoning when Annalea burst in the door, throwing it open so wide that it slammed against the wall. That thud brought his head up and effectively put a period to his thoughts.

She was wearing an apple green gingham dress with a full apron stamped with tiny blue flowers. Those flowers fairly danced until she ground to a halt in front of him. Without preamble, she said, “What did you do with it?”

It took him a moment to realize she was asking about the piss pot. “No,” he said firmly. “Leave it.”

She took her hands out of her deep apron pockets and set them akimbo. Her chin came up in a manner he was beginning to think was a family trait.

The pot was under the foot of his bunk, and Israel realized he must have slanted his eyes in that direction because she was on it like a beggar on a penny. She had it halfway to the door before he thought of anything to say, and by that time it hardly seemed worth saying. In short order, she returned it empty, pushed it under the bunk, and joined him at the table. She rested her elbows on top and her chin in her palms and regarded him openly.