Lake of Fire (40 page)

“Yes,” Laura agreed.

“This is ridiculous.” Hank glared at her. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

She got up. “I agreed to come, because Father asked me to. I am here to represent that if you should be chosen to buy the hotel, Fielding Bank will back you.” Her eyes met Norman’s and he nodded. “But I cannot deny I want Cord to win.”

Hopkins Chandler slammed his palm atop the table. “Everyone shut up!”

Everyone did.

“Hear this, and hear it good. This afternoon I am leaving for St. Paul and telling the home office that there is no one to whom I could recommend selling the hotel.”

Twenty minutes before noon, Cord waited and watched near Bitter Waters’s tethered Appaloosa. The blood was still raging through his veins.

He’d trusted Laura with his secrets. And only a few hours after they had parted from sharing everything that was right and good between a man and a woman, Hank had come to the table armed with all he needed to defeat him.

As the minutes ticked toward twelve, Cord scanned the woods for his uncle’s approach. If he’d bolted for the park boundary, Dante was many miles away. While there were people to whom horseflesh was simply that, Dante was …

A faint shush of moccasin on leaf, and Cord turned.

Bitter Waters stood with his weight balanced on both feet, a bag over his shoulder, and Dante’s reins light in his hand. A little boy’s impulse to run and throw his arms around his stallion’s neck seized Cord. “I fed your Appaloosa and watered him.”

The older man replied, “I had no feed, but Dante cropped sweet grass and drank from the lake while we waited for the hour.”

“That is all I might ask.”

This was wrong. There was so little time, there was no time, and they spoke in stilted tones.

Bitter Waters handed over Dante and walked to his mount. He bent and pulled up the metal stake and chain. “I thank you.”

Cord swallowed. “I … we are family.”

His uncle’s face softened. “That is what I have always hoped to hear from you. Speaking of family,” he gestured toward the hotel, “you will take the woman as wife?”

This morning, when he and Laura had left the stable, he might almost have considered it. Now, he shook his head. “She is set upon a different path.”

Bitter Waters stowed his tether and chain in his bag. He moved, lithe and quick for an older man, and mounted his horse bareback. “Something you must learn, Obsidian.”

Cord waited.

“Your
wayakin
is hard and tough, but also brittle and easy to break.”

Bitter Waters nudged his horse. “Always honor your people, the Nimiipuu, as well as your father’s, and as for the woman …”

He started to ride away, but looked back a last time. “You must find a way to change her path.”

Though the morning had dawned clear, rain was once again threatening when Cord approached the hotel porch. Intent on his mission of pounding on the door of Forrest Fielding’s suite, and camping out in the hall if no one answered, he almost walked past Laura as she exited the lobby.

“There you are.” He gripped her wrist.

“Let me go!”

He didn’t loosen his hold. “Not until I have some answers.”

The lake roiled beneath the overcast.

“What do you mean by spending the night with
me and then coming into the meeting on Hank’s side?” Cord pressed.

A pair of elderly women fled the weather, their beetled brows telegraphing disapproval as they passed.

Laura jerked free. Cord stepped closer; she retreated until a porch post at her back stopped her. “What could I do? Father may be dying, and he begged me to help Hank.”

The wind rose; a few fat raindrops landed on the porch. Laura’s skirt billowed.

Cord took her by the shoulders, his thumbs framing the hollow at the base of her neck. “How you could have faked … ?”

He stopped at the sight of Constance running up the drive toward the hotel. One of her hands was raised to shield her silken hair.

Laura had her back to her cousin’s approach.

“Faked?”

Constance bounded up the stairs onto the porch, brushing raindrops from her face and her pretty cretonne dress, printed with pink flowers. Her blue eyes went wide at the sight of Cord apparently manhandling her cousin. “William! What are you doing?”

“I am trying,” he gritted, “to have a conversation with Laura.”

The weather whipped up off the lake in earnest, a tearing gust swept chill rain in under the overhang.

“Talk about this,” Constance challenged. “That ugly Captain Feddors keeps telling everyone you’re a Nez Perce.”

Let it all be in the open, then. “It’s true.”

He straightened and stepped away from Laura.

“Yes, it’s true,” Laura echoed. Cord couldn’t tell if she meant to support him or cut him down.

Constance’s chest heaved; she struggled to pull off the ring she’d agreed to keep. Clutching it, she raked the stone down Cord’s right cheek.

He sucked in his breath. The slash mirrored the scar on his left; he felt once more as though he’d been sliced with a knife.

But he refused to flinch, just raised a hand and touched the trail of blood.

“To think I trusted you.” Constance’s voice caught.

Laura ducked away, slammed the screen door open, and disappeared into the hotel.

“You low-down cad!” Constance held out the garnet in trembling fingers.

He made no move to take it.

“I was so happy when you gave this to me.” She laughed, a bitter note.

It sent him back painfully to St. Paul and a rose garden in spring; their mingled laughter had marked their retreat from the dinner party into the softness of evening. The perfume of roses had filled his head, along with the carnation scent he’d come to associate with her soft white skin.

On the porch, the rain came down harder, blowing in and splattering their shoes. He’d thought it was too good to be true the way she’d let him off the hook without a fight.

“You lied to me about who you are. You lied to everybody!”

Cord started to say he hadn’t lied, but he’d already concluded the sin of omission was as great as an outright falsehood. “I’m sorry for that, now.”

“Take it.” Constance offered the ring again. When he still did not accept it, she made a move to slip it into his pocket.

Cord wiped his bloody hand on his trousers, took the garnet, and laid it carefully on her palm. “All I can say is I’m sorry it couldn’t have turned out better.”

Constance ran until the breath burned in her chest, and she kept on running, heedless of the rain streaming down her face and soaking her pink-flowered dress.

Lightning split the sky, and she dodged, as if it would pick her out above the scrubby sage and meadow grass. The rain came down harder, silver sheets blowing sideways across the field. Almost to the shelter of a copse of fir, she turned her ankle on a tuft of sod.

She went down, full length in a patch of wet earth.

The tears started again, welling up from that place they had begun the other day when William had kissed her savagely and then turned away. Thunder rolled through the meadow, and she opened her hand, looking down at the ring smeared with fresh earth.

What was worse, learning he cared for Laura and keeping her head up, or finding him to be a lying masquerader
who’d tried to fool both her and her cousin?

She lay in the dirt, while the deluge began to let up. Though she knew she should rise, she didn’t have the spirit for it.

Suddenly, incongruously, a waft of smoke came to her on the wind.

Constance raised her head and looked into the copse.

Sheltering from the weather with a shoulder against a tree, Norman Hagen drew on his cigarette. He shielded the flame from the drips that made it through the needled canopy. Though not as wet as she was, his thick hair curled in the humid air.

“What are you doing out here in the rain?” she asked, knowing she looked a fright.

“I could ask you the same thing.” His cigarette made a crimson rose against the dark day.

As if continuing a conversation they had started the last time they were together, he smiled. “It’s done,

then?”

“The storm?”

“The storm is abating, but I was referring to your relationship with Cord Sutton. I take it you’re upset because you didn’t know about his background.”

Constance pushed herself up onto hands and knees and tried to brush dirt from her dress. She succeeded in smearing it into more mud. “Of course, I’m upset.

He didn’t …”

“He didn’t let a lot of people know, and I can’t say I disagree with him. Does it really matter so much to you that he’s Nez Perce?”

“Not so much that, but he should have told me if …”

“If you were the one for him, he might well have.”

He reached into the pocket of his brown vicuna jacket. “Smoke?” He extended a pack of Richmond Straight Cuts.

Constance shook her head, declining the harsh filterless tobacco. “Laura knew.”

Norman nodded. “He would have told her.”

The last of her sobs turned into a hiccup.

“You look like a drowned rat.” Norman threw down his cigarette and pressed it into the soft earth with his boot heel.

Constance felt tears start again, and she wiped her face with the backs of her hands. She’d imagined Norman found her desirable.

He burst out laughing, a big merry sound that seemed to bounce back and forth between the tree trunks. Kneeling before her, his eyes were kind. “I was laughing because you have managed to get mud all over your pretty face.”

He drew a silk square from the breast pocket of his jacket and scrubbed her cheeks. Taking her dripping hair into his hands, he squeezed the water from it. “I can safely say I have never wrung out a woman’s hair.”

She smiled through her tears.

“Come on.” He offered to help her to her feet.

Extending her hand, Constance realized she still held the ring. “I don’t need this.”

Norman plucked it from her palm. “When I first met you in St. Paul, I thought perhaps you and I …”
He used his pocket square to clean the stone. Then he bowed and handed back the ring.

Constance took it, but her gaze was on Norman’s face. “You thought …”

“Let’s discuss that later,” he said. “Now, I think you should get cleaned up and let me take you in to lunch.”

W
hen the rain subsided to isolated drops and dripping off the eaves, Laura left her room where she’d barricaded herself. Wearing one of Aunt Fanny’s shawls over emerald silk, she made her way downstairs, past the dining room occupied by the last luncheon stragglers, and into the dim east hall to Room 109. Without hesitation, she rapped. Cord had to believe she hadn’t been the one to tell Hank. She’d explain how she went to the meeting because she promised her father, never intending to say anything to undermine Cord’s cause. To prove it, she’d tell her father about them, that she’d chosen her man and it wasn’t Hank Falls.

She knocked again. “Cord! If you’re in there, open up!”

All was silent, within and without. It was the time of day when guests had checked out and their replacements weren’t due until the cocktail hour.