Amelia (32 page)

"Oh, brother Quinn! Why did he have to come today, of all days, with such news?" Enid moaned.

"Perhaps it is better to find the truth out while there is still time to save the situation, don't you think? Sleep well," Amelia said softly. She rose and went down the hall to her room, the one she would have shared with her new husband. She felt as if her heart were dead inside her poor body. All those glorious hopes that had risen in the past few days had been brought low forever.

 

King tied his horse in a thicket and stood watching the landscape until it was almost dark. In his mind he could see Alice's tortured body, feel the agony it had given him to know that she was dead and he had been unable to help her in her time of need. It had been worse, because the butcher Rodriguez could not be captured and punished. Now Rodriguez was within reach, and the best friend King had in the world was suddenly his ardent defender.

He broke a twig to pieces in his work-roughened hands while he fought to come to grips with his situation. If he tried to get to Rodriguez, Quinn would have him jailed. That would be an irony.

His mind was busy, wrangling with the problem, when something Quinn had said began to register. There had been a man, Manolito, who had been responsible for the murders. Rodriguez had killed him for leaving someone named Maria in a bordello.

His hands stilled. Maria was Rodriguez's adopted daughter, and Quinn was apparently in love with her. He'd had to arrest Rodriguez, and now Maria would surely hate him.

King let out a rush of held breath. He'd been so obsessed with the past that he hadn't seen his friend's anguish over the present. There was something else, too, wasn't there? Amelia!

He turned, striding back to his horse. He'd left Amelia almost at the altar, turned his back on her to go raving off after the murderer of a dead fiancée. Amelia would think he still loved Alice. She would be devastated.

He could have cursed himself for his shortsightedness. He reached for the horse's bridle just as the unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake sent him jumping back in the nick of time. The horse was spooked, however, and began to run madly away. King wasn't wearing his sidearm, so he had to walk wide around the damned snake instead of blowing his head off, as he would have liked. Here he was, miles from the ranch, with night approaching, horseless and gunless, feeling like a fool. He began to laugh. It was a poor start to a marriage, he thought ruefully. He hoped Amelia would be more understanding than he had been. He started to walk back to the path that led to Latigo.

 

Quinn wanted to ride back to Malasuerte and explain himself to Maria. But he felt obliged to stay in town and look after Rodriguez while he was imprisoned. He felt terrible about his falling out with King and causing Amelia grief on what should have been a happy day. He had never been quite so miserable.

It was dark when he got to town, and he was too tired to ride to Alpine to the barracks. He got a room in town and went to bed. Perhaps, he told himself, things would look better after a good night's sleep.

 

King, meanwhile, had decided that he'd do better to sleep than try to walk on in the dark to the ranch, through snake-invested brush and cactus. He made a small camp fire, built himself a bed out of what vegetation he could find, and with an empty belly, settled down for his wedding night. He wondered if anyone had ever had a more uncomfortable one.

He would have known if he could have seen Amelia's poor face when she got up before daylight and washed it. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and she was drawn and pale from her ordeal.

She packed her few things and begged a ride from Brant back into town.

King's father muttered all the way to El Paso. Enid had wept and tried to get Amelia to stay. But the girl was determined. She'd had quite enough of King's behavior. The fact that he'd stayed out all night had surely underlined his desire to be rid of her. He couldn't have made his feelings more plain if he'd ordered her, along with her brother, off the ranch.

"Idiot boy," Brant said audibly as they reached the city. "I'll have words with him about this. It's no way to treat a new bride, I'll tell you that!"

"I'm an unwanted bride, Mr. Culhane," she reminded him gently. "Perhaps it's for the best. He's spared my reputation, you know."

"It would hardly have been necessary to save it had he not ruined it in the first place. I tell you, Amelia, his behavior is incomprehensible to me. I never thought that a son of mine… !"

"Please," she said, stopping the flow of words with an uplifted hand. "It will all pass, like wind on the desert. He has made his choice, and I have been spared from having to live with a man who cannot love me. Yesterday certainly underlined the fact that he has never gotten over his feelings for Alice."

Brant couldn't argue with that. "I shall miss you," he said. "It has been very pleasant having a daughter in residence."

"I could not have wished for more congenial inlaws," she replied. "I shall write when I am settled, so that King will know where to contact me when…" She swallowed and started again, "when he is ready to proceed with a divorce or an annulment."

An annulment would require a lie from both of them, but only King would know that. Best to let everyone think there had been no real indiscretion. But Amelia was growing more certain by the day that she had conceived during that one intimacy. She was almost certainly pregnant. The child would be born without its father, never knowing him at all. She could hardly bear the thought.

"I must go," she said unsteadily.

Brant winced at her expression. He didn't know what to say or do. He helped her down from the carriage at the hotel and carried her valise in for her. Just as they got in the door, Quinn came down the staircase and spotted his sister.

He strode toward her and, seeing her face, simply pulled her into his arms and held her comfortingly while she cried.

"I'm sorry, sister," he said miserably. "I've done a lot of damage with Rodriguez's arrest, haven't I? I've lost the woman I loved, cost myself a best friend and you a husband, and all in one day!"

"Oh, Quinn, don't," she said, now the one to comfort him.

Brant tried to offer his own condolences, but Quinn waved them away.

"It's done," he told his best friend's father. "Maybe King can forgive us both one day. For the time being, I'll see Amelia settled here. Then perhaps I can manage at least a boardinghouse for her…"

"No," Amelia said firmly. "I shall go to Cousin Ettie in Florida."

"But if you stay here, King might relent," Quinn argued.

"It will not matter," she said, her face expressionless. "I shall go, and that is an end to it." She shook hands warmly with Brant. "Thank your wife and Alan, please, for their kindness. I shall never forget you."

"Nor we, you, my dear," Brant said miserably. He left them there, muttering all the way out the door.

Quinn saw his sister settled in a modest room in the hotel and went over to the jail to check on his prisoner. But when he reached the jail, a terrible commotion was in progress, men with guns drawn rushing around the building in a fever of industry.

Quinn immediately thought the worst. With his badge in place on his vest, he strode into the sheriff's office and stopped dead just inside the door. There, on the floor, lay Rodriguez. He had been placed on a stretcher. His expression was very quiet, peaceful, without strain or contortion. There wasn't a mark on him except for the small hole in his temple.

"Who?" Quinn asked the sheriff fiercely.

"That's what we're trying to find out. The pistol was lying on the floor of the cell, he was on top of it… "

Quinn bent down to examine the wound and then examined Rodriguez's hands as a terrible thought began to occur to him. He examined the outlaw's left hand. It was the left temple where the bullet wound was located, and it was known that Rodriguez was left-handed. Quinn pulled out his white handkerchief and wiped the slightly grimy hand. Sure enough, there were faint powder marks on the fingertips. He laid Rodriguez's hand back on his chest and bent his head.

"You won't find an assassin," Quinn said very quietly. "He was left-handed. There are powder marks around the wound, which certainly means it was done at point-blank range." He looked up at the sheriff. "This was suicide."

The sheriff nodded. "That's what I thought, but they," he indicated the deputies outside, "swore it had to be someone who didn't want Rodriguez to stand trial. Accomplices, maybe, in his rustling confederation." He shook his head. "I've been in this business a long time. Never knew an outlaw to do this."

"He told me yesterday that his victims had come back to haunt him," Quinn said heavily. "I never thought he'd do this. He was a religious man, and Catholic. Suicide denies him an eternal rest."

The sheriff moved closer, his hand in his vest pocket. He frowned. "You really think so?" he asked philosophically. "Seems to me that suicide is the act of a desperate mind, so maybe God makes allowances."

"That could be."

The sheriff shrugged. "All the same, saves the city the cost of bed and board and the trial. Kind of him."

"He was a kind man," Quinn said. But he wasn't joking. He had to ride to Malasuerte and break the news to Maria. He dreaded it more than the thought of death.

He got up from the floor, took one last look at the tired old man on the stretcher, and went out the door.

 

King was picked up by one of his cowboys returning from the branding pens on a chuck wagon early the next morning as he walked down the dirt road a few miles from Latigo. He was in need of a shave, and he looked as tired as he felt.

"I'll kill that damned horse and make barbeque of him when we get back," he told the cowboy furiously.

"Don't blame you, sir," the man, an Irishman, said with a grin. "Don't blame you a'tall. Horses is the very devil."

"All because of a damned snake." King still couldn't believe his bad luck. He settled down on the seat, grateful for the lift, because his feet were killing him. All the same, it was like being batted in the rear with a board every time the buckboard hit a bump. He hated wagons.

When he got to the house, there was no one about. He left the Irishman at the barn and strode up on the porch. Amelia was going to be furious, and he deserved her wrath. He didn't even have a decent explanation for his outburst.

Amelia was not in her room, and it was with a cold sense of foreboding that he walked into the kitchen where his mother was cooking a late breakfast.

His father was sitting at the table, looking worn and angry.

"So there you are," he told King with cold eyes. "You're a little late. Your wife has left you."

King let out a slow breath. He felt suddenly hollow inside, faintly fearful. "Already?"

"She is now convinced that you have buried your heart in the grave with Alice and want no part of her," Enid added without looking at him. "She is doing the decent thing and letting you go without any recriminations."

"Did I ask to be let go?" he burst out furiously. "My God, I'm not pining for Alice!"

Enid glanced at him, disapproving of his dusty clothes and unshaven face. "You look terrible."

"I should look terrible!" he raged. "My damned horse got spooked by a rattlesnake and deserted me in the middle of nowhere! I had to bed down for the night in the desert and hitch a ride with the chuck wagon this morning. I'm tired and cold and hungry and worn out, and now my wife's left me!"

"Which is no more than you deserve," his father said flatly.

King glared at him. "Quinn could have waited one more day for his disclosure about Rodriguez. He's ruined everything!"

"It seems to me that Quinn was just as upset over his own predicament," Enid said. "He was in love with Rodriguez's daughter. How do you think she will feel about him when she learns that her father is in jail because of Quinn?"

King sat down at the table and, reaching into his father's jacket for a cigar, also searching for a box of matches, lit it.

"I suppose Quinn must feel half as bad as I do," he admitted. "But it was poor timing. Where is Amelia?"

"Probably on her way to Florida," Brant said with cold pleasure.

King's fingers froze the cigar in midair. "What?"

"She is going to live with her cousin until you get a divorce or an annulment."

"An annulment?"

Brant glared at him. "Nonconsummation is certainly grounds for…" He saw the look in his son's eyes and stopped dead.

"There are no grounds for an annulment," King said icily, daring his parent to say another world. "Amelia is my wife. I do not intend letting her go to strangers when she may even now be carrying my child!"

He got up from the table and strode out the door.

Enid and Brant exchanged startled glances, but neither of them could manage to put their thoughts into words.

 

The trail to Malasuerte was longer than Quinn remembered it. He was tired and heartsick, but he had to go on. He had to confess it all to Maria, to tell her the truth, no matter how much it hurt. Then, if after knowing everything, she could forgive him, he would marry her. She wouldn't have to worry about Juliano, either, because he'd take care of him. He tried not to think about Rodriguez and what had happened. It hurt more than he'd imagined anything could. He'd grown fond of the old bandit. He regretted very much being the catalyst that had cost him his life.

He rode into Malasuerte late that afternoon. The pueblo was the same as always, except that when Quinn dismounted this time, people didn't gather around him. They hung back, looking at him with fear instead of affection. It took him a minute or two to realize what made the difference in their attitude. This time there was a silver star on his vest, denoting that the bearer was a Texas Ranger.

That wasn't the worst of it, though. Maria slowly came forward. She looked at him, and in her eyes was the worst kind of hatred and contempt.

"We have just received word that our papa has killed himself in the jail. He trusted you, but you betrayed him! You betrayed all of us.
¡Vaya
!" she spat, weeping. "Go away! You are not welcome here, Mr. Texas Ranger!"