The Promise of Jenny Jones (8 page)

"The father is inCalifornia," the woman whispered. She lowered her gaze and sat on a bench against the wall.

"Then why did the witch take the train south? Explain that, Maria Torrez."

"South?" Shock clouded the woman's eyes.

"When Luis returns from the hacienda, you will hear it from his own lips. The witch abducted our little cousin for her own purposes. I say we go after the witch, kill her, and rescue Graciela. I say do not listen to a woman's prattle. My cousin would never entrust her daughter to a stranger. You know this. The honor of the Barrancas family and the honor of this village rest on saving Graciela from the witch."

Ty folded the penknife into his boot top,then drained the tumbler of pulque, letting it scald his throat. He set the tumbler down hard and stared out the side door at a swarm of gnats circling a tree lantern.

The witch business was clever nonsense. Emil played on the ignorance of superstitious villagers to refute Maria Torrez's contention that Marguarita had given her daughter to a stranger rather than family. That much Ty understood.

But there was much that he did not understand. One thing, however, was unpleasantly clear. The knot behind his rib cage told him that he had abetted in the abduction of his own niece. Now he knew the truth about the fracas at the depot in Verde Flores, and he cursed his role in it. Damn his hide, he had helped a female desperado steal Robert's daughter.

Cursing silently, he tossed some coins on the table,then stood. Cousin Luis was expected at any moment, and Cousin Luis wasn't likely to have forgotten the cowboy who came to the aid of the red-haired woman. Common sense urged Ty to step out the side door, fetch his belongings, and get the hell out of here.

Halfway to the stables, he spotted the muchacho who had carried his message to the hacienda. The boy slipped off his burro and ran forward, waving an envelope. Without breaking stride, Ty flipped the boy a coin and continued toward the lanterns hanging outside the stables.

After extracting two thin pages covered in flowing female script; he held them to the light. Dona Theodora Barrancas y Talmas begged permission to inform him that her great-niece, Señora Marguarita Sanders, and Señora Sanders's young daughter had unfortunately succumbed to the coughing disease three days since. Dona Theodora castigated her own rudeness but as much as she longed to offer her great-niece's brother-in-law the hacienda's hospitality, grief prevented her from opening her doors. She pleaded for understanding and prayed that Señora Sanders would forgive her for not receiving him at this desolate moment of dual tragedy.

In other words: Leave. You no longer have reason to be here.

For an instant, he considered returning toCalifornia. He could show Dona Theodora's message to Robert. Marguarita and the child were dead.

Ty crumpled the pages in his first. Frowning, he glanced back at the lights shining out of the cantina.

Inside, Cousin Emil was striving to incite the village men to rescue Graciela from a witch. Yet, Dona Theodora stated that Ty's niece had died with her mother.

The answer came in a flash. With Marguarita dead—and all parties agreed on that point—Graciela became Robert's heir. And Don Antonio Barrancas's heir.

His narrowed gaze slid down the squalid shacks flanking the main street of the village. What would Robert pay to ransom his daughter? Would he sell the cattle? The ranch? Ty didn't doubt it. He wasn't as certain about Don Antonio, as Barrancas had never accepted or acknowledged Robert and Marguarita's marriage. Still, the old man might turn sentimental when he learned his daughter was dead and this child was his only surviving family. If she survived. It occurred to Ty that the child's death would lead to an inheritance which was a less cumbersome solution than kidnapping and ransom.

The promise of a hefty inheritance or ransom would strongly appeal to villagers living in shacks built of sticks and mud. If honor didn't motivate them, Emil would eventually relinquish shares in the windfall and let greed work its persuasion.

Grim-faced, Ty saddled his horse and jerked hard on the cinch.

The Barrancas cousins didn't know it yet, but a new player had entered the game. If they thought Dona Theodora's message had duped him into returning toCaliforniawithout Graciela, they were in for an unpleasant surprise.

No longer was he inMexicoon a grudging errand undertaken on behalf of his brother. It was personal now. Dona Theodora had lied to him. He'd tasted Chulo's fists in Verde Flores. He doubted he was wrong about the cousins wanting Graciela for evil purposes. In the span of a few minutes, his motivations had altered.

Giving the cantina a wide berth, he rode out of the no-name village, grateful for a sliver of moon to illuminate the trail.

Near dawn, to keephimself awake, he focused his thoughts on the red-haired woman who had taken Graciela. What was her game? The people in the cantina referred to her as a murderess and implied that it was she who deserved the execution that had killed Marguarita. This didn't strike him as entirely implausible, he thought, rubbing a hand across his jaw.

However, at this point, his mind locked. Was the red-haired woman rescuing his niece? Or had she, too, seen a way to profit by kidnapping the child? Or, and this seemed extremely unlikely, had Marguarita known a woman convicted of murder well enough to entrust her daughter into the murderess's keeping? At present he lacked enough information to form a clear judgment of the situation.

As the glow of dawn revealed the low hazy silhouette of Verde Flores, Ty's lips thinned to a hard straight line. The Barrancas cousins were not going to hold his niece for ransom, and neither was the red-haired woman if that was her intention. This he swore on his father's grave. If he had to track her into the maw of hell, he would do it. He was not returning toCaliforniawithout his niece.

When the sun climbed out of the desert, Ty was sitting on a bench on the Verde Flores depot platform, hat pulled over his eyes, dozing while he waited for the first train south.

He no longer believed the red-haired woman had intended to go north. That had been a ruse meant to reach the cousins' ears and send them chasing in the wrong direction. She'd intended to take the southbound train all along.

He would find her.

* * *

"Crud on a crust!" Jenny was unaccustomed to indecisiveness, and she didn't handle it well. Nor was she a patient sort. Pressing her nose to the train window, she peered at cacti baking in the desert heat. "We're stopped again."

"They're fixing the track," Graciela said listlessly. She waved a torn paper fan in front of her heat red cheeks. "I haven't had a bath since I left Aunt Tete," she added in an accusing voice. "I want a bath."

"Have we been on this fricking train for two days or three days?" No wonder Jenny felt ready to explode. People weren't made to sit in one spot for three fricking days. Her tailbone hurt. The hot greasy food sold at various stops along the way was burning holes in her innards, and the heat trapped inside the car was cooking her outsides. Chickens ran loose in the aisle and left strings of stench that fouled the air. The noise of crying babies and bickering children were frazzling already frayed tempers.

"If we don't get off this hell train, I'm going to do damage to someone or something." Sweat pasted her bodice to her skin, and she pulled it away from her ribs with a grimace. She had to get off this train before she melted, and she had to figure out a plan.

None of the villages and towns they had chugged through had been large enough to hide a flea. Jenny wasn't sure if hiding out was the safest scheme anyway. Instinct insisted that she should jump on the next train headed north, but what if Luis and Chulo had mustered reinforcements and were sitting in the shade on the Verde Flores depot waiting for her to pass through again? Which she would have to do if she backtracked.

Chewing a thumbnail, she glared out the window at the heat waves shimmering above gray-brown dirt. She wished she knew what the damned cousins were doing. Were they in pursuit? Were they on a train somewhere behind this one? Or were they waiting for her to return to Verde Flores? This time there wouldn't be some foolhardy cowboy to help her. She'd be outnumbered. The cousins would grab Graciela as easily as plucking a flower out of a pot.

Right now, she thought, covering her eyes with a sooty hand, she was tempted to hand them the kid and good riddance. Graciela was driving her fricking crazy. Graciela wouldn't do what she was told, squirmed constantly in her seat, complained about everything, and if Jenny heard the word "why" one more time, she would go raving, flaming berserk.

"I want to go home," Graciela said mournfully. Accusation pulled her lips into a pout.

"Shut up. I'm trying to think."

"You have chicken manure on your shoes."

This was true. It was also a great mystery how the kid could walk to the curtained-off latrine without stepping in offal or tobacco juice but Jenny could not. Jenny scowled at the strands of heat-damp hair sticking to the sides of Graciela's superior little smirk. She was considering slapping that smirk into next Sunday when the train lurched, belched black smoke, and crashed forward. "Thank God."

Jenny waved down the conductor. "Por favor, Señor, what is the next town of any size and when do we get there?" His boots, she noticed, were as frosty with chicken crap as her own were. If there was any justice, some of the conductor's chicken manure would brush off on Graciela's hem. It didn't happen.

"Buenos tardes, Señora, Señorita. We'll reachDurangoon schedule," the conductor announced blandly, "around seven this evening."

"On schedule my butt," Jenny muttered in English. The train had spent more time stopped for one reason or another than in rolling forward.At this rate, the train wouldn't reachMexico City , its final destination, until the next millennium. She would have said so except millennium was a new word, and she wasn't sure how to pronounce it in English let alone Spanish.

Frowning, she watched the conductor kick aside a rooster,then proceed down the aisle. The question was: Should she stay on the train all the way toMexico Cityor get off inDurango?

"A lady does not bite her fingernails."

"Shut up."

"I hate you! My mama never told me to shut up."

That did it. Jenny could not spend another day confined with a hot cranky kid, choking on the stench of chickens and an overflowing latrine. She could not endure another night trying to sleep sitting up with Graciela sprawled across her lap. For some unfathomable reason, Graciela weighed as much as a freight wagon when she was asleep.

"We're getting off inDurango," she decided. Even her stomach rebelled at heading farther south towardMexico Citywhen she needed to go north. At some point she had to risk getting off this train and turning herself and Graciela around.Durangowas as good a place as any to start putting things right.

"I miss my mama."

Graciela sank into another of those collapse routines, in which her bones seemed to fold in on themselves. Her shoulders drooped, her chest shrank, her hands went limp, and tears and snot flowed in copious streams.

Jenny watched and felt wild inside. She didn't know how to deal with grief because she had no experience to draw on, and as far as she was concerned, mother-daughter love was a myth. Love itself was a vast enigma. She had no idea how much time was required to recover from losing a mother you loved.

"Kid," she said helplessly, gripping Graciela's arm. "You're making me want to hit you. You've got to get over this. You have to forget about your mother and move on."

"I'll never forget." Graciela glared at her with drowning eyes. "You killed my mama."

"Damn it, we've discussed this a hundred times. You know I didn't kill your mother." Jenny shoved a hand through her hair, knocking the stupid bonnet to the back of her head. Changing the subject, maybe that would help. "Look, when we get toDurango, we'll find a place tostay, and you can have a bath. You'd like that, wouldn't you? We'll get something decent to eat, and we'll sleep in a real bed."

"Cousin Luis and Cousin Chulo are going to kill you and take me home."

"Huh! Let them try."

But after reflecting. Jenny decided that Luis probably wasn't the type to sit on the depot steps and wait. He'd chase after them. Chewing on her fingernails, which weremore tasty than anything she had eaten since she'd boarded the train, Jenny focused her thoughts. She had to make up in cleverness what she lacked in strength or numbers.

Nine hours later, when the train steamed to a halt in the outskirts ofDurango, Jenny had a plan. It wasn't the best plan she'd ever come up with, and risk was involved, but she felt better for having a strategy.

* * *

"I hope you can wash yourself, because I'm not going to do it for you," Jenny warned, eyeing the tub that had been delivered to their hotel room. A surly boy had brought them only enough water to fill the dented tub about eight inches and the water was tepid. Bits of grass and leaves floated on the surface.

Graciela removed her fancy little outfit and shook the dust and soot out then folded it neatly before she inspected the tub. "I'd like some rose oil, please."

"And I'd like a shiny blue carriage and a pocketful of diamonds." Jenny rolled her eyes,then tossed Graciela a cake of the soap Maria had packed. "Get in there, and hurry up. I'd like a bath, too."

"I need help." Graciela lifted her arms to be picked up, and Jenny sighed.

"You can't do anything yourself."

She picked Graciela up and placed her in the tub, then stepped back and stared. Graciela's naked skin was soft; touching her was like touching warm silk. Looking at the kid's slender, curveless body, Jenny wondered at the mysteries of nature. Somewhere inside the child, a woman bided her time, waiting to emerge. It impressed her as very clever of God to hide adults inside children.

Jenny watched Graciela picking bits of grass and leaves from the surface of the bath water, displaying the patience of a rag picker,then she turned and walked to the window overlooking a tobacco factory and the mountains beyond. The foothills of the Sierra Madres had yielded centuries of silver. Now that the silver was nearly played out, Durango 's miners plundered the earth for iron ore.