A Week From Sunday (10 page)

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath.

With every step, the bile in Quinn’s stomach rose ever higher. He dropped into the rickety chair behind his desk and watched the man who had followed him into the office. The space was small, little more than a glorified broom closet, and the tight quarters allowed no room for decoration. Besides the chair in which he sat, it held only a crate full of empty bottles near the door and a desk fashioned from a couple of boards and two stacks of leftover bricks.

Without a chair of his own in which to sit, Dewey paced back and forth.

“Let’s get this over with,” Quinn spat.

“What I have to say to you won’t take long,” Dewey began in a voice that was at once both restrained and confrontational. “My father sent me to speak to you about the money you still owe him.”

“I know all about what I owe your father. It was a sneaky trick for him to buy up my loan papers from the bank.”

“Sneaky or not, he’s becoming concerned about the loan,” the dapper man said sarcastically as he brushed dust from his sleeve. “I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the general idea of borrowing money from someone is that you will eventually pay him back. My father has been waiting for nearly a year, and I’m afraid that his patience is wearing a bit thin.”

Quinn winced inwardly. From the moment Dewey had come through the Whipsaw’s door, he’d known that he’d come to talk about the money that Quinn had borrowed from the bank. A year earlier, when business had slumped because of a depression in the lumber industry, Quinn had been at his wits end trying to keep the tavern afloat. With no other avenues open to him, he’d taken a loan from the bank, not knowing the bank had the option of selling the loan to an individual. Preston Fuller had stepped in, and Quinn had suddenly realized he owed his father’s old enemy money. He’d struck a deal with the devil.

“I’m working on it. I’ll have it soon—”

“In a couple of weeks,” Dewey cut in, finishing his sentence. “Isn’t that the same tired story you’ve told me the last three times that we’ve had this talk? You can’t possibly expect me to go back to my father and give him the same old line. He’d take me for a fool!”

“If the shoe fits,” Quinn challenged.

Dewey stopped his pacing and moved toward the makeshift desk. His mouth opened and his hand rose as if it were about to be used to punctuate a point, but it only hung in midair. Composing himself, he said, “This isn’t about you and me. This is about the money you owe and nothing more.”

“It’s about more than money.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Bullshit! It’s always been about the history between your father and mine. That was the reason he snuck in and bought my loan from the bank. He figured I wouldn’t be able to pay and that he’d get the Whipsaw.”

To that, Dewey had no answer except silence. Quinn knew he had heard the stories of how Preston Fuller had claimed that John Henry Baxter cheated him out of a business deal, and a friendship that had been thirty years in the making had blown away like so much smoke. This simmering dislike had in turn festered into something worse: out-and-out hatred. Even with John Henry’s death, forgiveness was not forthcoming.

“I need to give him something,” Dewey finally said.

“I don’t have anything to give.”

“Then do what you should have done from the very beginning and sell this dump to my father. He’ll get it by some means so you might as well recover something out of the bargain.”

“I’ll never sell the Whipsaw!”

“Who’s being the fool now?” Dewey argued as he came toward the desk. Gripping the front planks, he leaned down until he caught Quinn’s gaze and held it steady. A whiff of his pomade carried across the desk, but Quinn had become too angry to notice. “You and I both know that you aren’t cut out to do this work. You’re a lumberjack! You’re not the kind of man to stand behind a bar running a two-bit dive and you know it!”

“I’ve managed so far,” Quinn argued, even though the sharp blades of truth in Dewey’s words cut him to the quick. He’d had the same argument with himself since the day his father had died.

“Managed?” Dewey repeated incredulously. “All you have managed to do is drive yourself further into debt. Do you have so much pride that you can’t admit you’ve made a mistake? Do you want to have all this taken away from you?”

“Shut up!” Quinn bellowed, his voice echoing around the small room.

“You’re not just failing yourself, you know,” Dewey pressed on, ignoring Quinn’s order. “If you think you’re doing Jesse some kind of favor by holding on to this rat hole, you’re mistaken.”

“Keep him out of this, you son of a bitch!” He struggled to contain his temper, but with every word out of Dewey’s mouth, he began to lose the fight.

“Why should I? You borrowed the money. You can’t blame my father because he bought up the note. Why are you trying to save this for Jesse? He’s going to be a cripple for the rest of his life!”

“He’s going to walk!” Quinn shouted.

“Goddamnit, Quinn! Face the facts! Jesse is never—”

Before Dewey could utter another word, Quinn was out of the chair and across the desk. His calloused hand found the softness of the smaller man’s throat and, with the strength of a wild animal, he hurled him across the room and into the door with a resounding crash. As he struggled to gain his balance, Dewey’s foot collided with the crate of bottles, setting the glass clinking.

“Let go of me,” Dewey struggled, one hand clawing at the vise that held him in place. The rage that had taken Quinn was beginning to ease off. When he finally spoke, it was more of a growl than a spoken word.

“Don’t you ever call Jesse a cripple again!”

“Quinn . . . I . . . I . . . didn’t mean any disrespect.”

Thoughts raced through Quinn’s head. A part of him wanted to break the man’s neck and be done with it, consequences be damned. But common sense prevailed.

Quinn had taken on the responsibility of running the Whipsaw for one reason and one reason only: so that his brother would have something to live on. He could manage the place even if he was still in the wheelchair. All the work that he had put into the tavern, all the hours that he and Gabe had spent trying to keep the place going, would have been for nothing if he lost it to the Fullers. He let go of Dewey, and the man crashed to the floor in a heap.

“Oh . . . oh . . . Jesus!” Dewey rasped.

Striding back toward the desk, Quinn kept his back turned to the younger Fuller. The only sound in the room was the ragged breaths Dewey sucked down his strained throat. Quinn expected the man to slink out the door and go running back to his father, but he surprised him by talking in a voice no louder than a whisper.

“The . . . the last thing . . . I wanted was to come here and talk to you about this, but my father insisted. He thinks that because we were once friends, I could talk some sense into you.”

Quinn turned and faced the fallen man. As they stared at one another, his mind raced back to a time when they weren’t enemies, no matter how badly their fathers spoke of each other. There were summers spent down by the river and in the woods. There were the laughs, tears, and occasional fistfights of fast young friends. But all that, as with their fathers before them, had changed. It was gone forever.

“Our friendship is dead,” Quinn said matter-of-factly.

Composing himself, Dewey rose to his feet and nodded. “Then it’s business.”

“I guess so.”

“Then we’re right back where we started.” Dewey sighed as he rubbed his hand against his damaged throat; the skin above his shirt collar was raw and red. “I need something to take back to my father.”

“I told you—”

“And I told you that my father is serious,” Dewey cut him off. “If you don’t give me something, he’s going to have the front door padlocked shut. He’s been talking with Sheriff Beauchamp the last couple of days, so I know this time it’s no empty threat.”

A heavy weight settled squarely on Quinn’s chest. He’d been pushed into the corner several times before, but never as soundly as now. There was no doubt that what Dewey was saying was true; Preston Fuller wasn’t the type of man to play games, especially not where money was concerned. If he tried to stall, he could lose everything. Deflated, Quinn walked back behind the desk and knelt to the floor. There, wedged between a pair of bricks that supported his meager table, was a small roll of bills. It wasn’t much, only a hundred dollars, but it was his last bit of emergency money. He’d hoped to use it to replace the liquor they’d lost in the crash with Adrianna, but this was more pressing.

“Here,” he said, tossing the bills to Dewey. “Tell your father that it’s all I’ve got. It’ll have to do for now.”

Thumbing through the bills, Dewey said, “I think this will hold him off, but only for a while.” He paused for a moment before adding, “I know you don’t see it the same as I do, Quinn, but you should really reconsider selling.”

“Damn it, Dewey! Just give me a receipt for this money and get out.”

Without another word, Dewey Fuller wrote out a receipt, set it on the desk, shrugged his shoulders, passed a hand through his slicked hair, and left the office. As the door clicked shut behind him, Quinn was left to himself and the thought that raced through his head.

What the hell am I going to do now?

Chapter 9

A
S
A
DRIANNA AWOKE
from a night of fitful sleep, her eyes wandered around the room. In the early morning light that came through the window, she could make out the faded wallpaper, the walnut chest, and an ancient-looking washstand, absent the pitcher and bowl that had once sat upon it. For a long moment she wondered what she was doing in this strange place, then rolled over in the soft bed and closed her eyes.

A feeling of dread pressed hard against her chest at the thought of going downstairs to face that formidable man and his spiteful housekeeper. She’d always been the sort to get along well with others, but this was different.
I’ve never met anyone as belligerent as the woman who works in this house!

Her body was tense and achy. The night before, she had come up to the room after washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, a chore she had not done since she was a child. The work had been harder than she’d remembered, and she’d been dead tired as she climbed the steps. No sooner had she washed herself, put on her nightdress, and stretched out on the bed, than she was asleep.

“Nothing has gone as I’d hoped,” she whispered into the sheets.

When she’d left Shreveport, she’d had such high hopes of quickly getting to her aunt’s house in Mississippi. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined she’d be sleeping in the house of a strange man and planning to play the piano in his tavern.

Oh, my Lord! Wouldn’t Richard Pope have a fit if he knew?

The sudden sound of footsteps on the stairs reached her. Throwing back the sheet that covered her, she swung her feet to the floor where they rested on a faded rag rug that lay beside the bed. Knowing that she would have to dress before she could go downstairs and use the bathroom, she hurriedly pulled on her stockings, slipped her feet into her shoes, and reached for the dress she had thrown over her open suitcase. Taking out her hand mirror, she glanced at herself and began to pull a brush through the tangles in her shoulder-length dark brown hair. The face that looked back at her was fresh. She had slept soundly and was well rested, ready to take up her duties and pay for the damage she had caused. Once her debt had been repaid . . .
I’ll be out of here like a shot!

Opening her door, she stepped out into the hall and listened. The murmur of voices rose from the kitchen below. That
man
was talking to his housekeeper. A flicker of a thought ran through her head, and she wondered if he was sleeping with the woman. With a shrug, she realized that even if he were, it wasn’t any of her business.

On her way to the stairs, she passed an open door and glanced inside. She knew at once that it had to be
his
room. Clothes were hung over the chair. The covers were thrown back from the bed as if he had just climbed out of it. There was such a mess that she wondered if yesterday’s storm hadn’t stopped by on its way out of town!

Adrianna passed on down the hall. Somehow, the fact that his room was so close to hers bothered her. It wasn’t that she feared he might force his attentions on her. The doctor wouldn’t have suggested she stay here if there had been a danger of that. Still . . .

She continued on down the steps. The door to the bathroom was ajar. She opened it and went inside, making sure to lock it behind her. The room was steamy and smelled of soap and shaving cream. A straight-edged razor and a shaving mug with a brush sat on a shelf above the lavatory. After relieving herself, Adrianna pulled the chain to flush the toilet, fastened her clothes, and looked around. Everything was filthy! She was sure the room hadn’t been cleaned in quite a while. The linoleum floor was in need of a good scrubbing, as was the lavatory. The towel that hung on the rod was dingy and damp when she blotted her face with it.

Adrianna glanced at her reflection in the mirror above the shelf, looked down to make sure the bodice of her dress was buttoned correctly, then opened the door and went out into the hall. Making her way to the kitchen, she paused hesitantly in the doorway. Quinn sat at one end of the kitchen table, Lola at the other. When he looked up to see her, Quinn stood.