Ashes and Memories (34 page)

“This man broke into my office,” Reece announced. “He and his partner beat me and robbed me. He tried to kill me. His partners are dead, and this man will be dead soon. No one -- no one attacks me and gets away with it.”

No one challenged him. Most of them probably thought he was mad. All of them were afraid of him, and a sense of power surged through him. He still hadn’t forgiven them for defying him, for freeing Garrett in the first place. But after today no one in this town would dare to cross him or defy him again.

Reece forced himself to remember what Garrett had done to him, the pain and the humiliation, the horror of having a pistol pressed to his forehead and hearing the hammer strike. He remembered Ralphy’s small body covered with blood and Emma huddling in the corner of her room, her eyes wide with terror.

He raised his glove and brought it down hard on the horse’s rump. The horse bolted and Garrett slipped out of the saddle. Suspended in air, he began to kick and thrash, his fingers clawing at the rope that tightened around his neck. His panicked attempts to breathe filled the quiet and grated along Reece’s spine.

“
I love you. I believe in you.
” The echo of Emma’s words drove the breath from his lungs.
 

Reece hardened himself against the memory, determined to enjoy his triumph. Garrett had slipped inside his defenses and viciously attacked him. He had vowed never to allow anyone that kind of power over him again, and now he had to prove that he hadn’t been defeated, that he was still in control, had to prove it to the town, to Garrett, to himself.

“
Let it go
,” Emma had said, as if that were a possibility.
 

All the way back to Providence he’d looked forward to this moment, hoping the rope wouldn’t do its work too quickly so he could watch Garrett die slowly. He should feel something, some purifying relief, some degree of peace, if not euphoria. Instead he felt nothing beyond a nagging shame and a sense of failure.

Why did he feel as if he’d failed Emma? She’d seen something in him that didn’t exist, and she had naively ignored the very core of his character. He was alive because he had hardened himself to life, and if he allowed his resolve to soften now he would die.

He turned away, unable to watch Garrett struggling against suffocation no matter how much he wanted to savor it, revel in his victory.

Glancing inadvertently at Ralphy, his throat tightened at the accusation there. He closed his eyes against it, against Emma’s haunting voice.

“
Killing will never fill the emptiness inside you or silence the screams.
” Her words echoed in his mind, blocking out everything but the choking sounds Garrett made as he swung back and forth, his legs flailing, his hands clawing at the rope. They mingled together, pounding in his brain, chilling his soul.
 

“
Let it go,
” she’d said.
“Let it go.”
 

Something powerful and explosive erupted inside him. Reece drew his pistol with a snarl, pointed it and fired, severing the rope, and Garrett fell to the ground with a thud.

For several moments Reece could do nothing but stand there in horror at what he’d done. He’d let go of his revenge, rejected the very thing he’d been living for. He felt the anger, the resentment, the hurt draining away, leaving an even deeper emptiness inside him because now he didn’t even have his hatred to cling to.

Slowly Reece became aware of the silence that surrounded him, a silence broken only by Garrett’s feeble attempts to breathe past the constricting noose. Reece gazed around him at the crowd, at all the faces staring aghast at him.

“Loosen the rope before he chokes to death, for God’s sake!” Reece ordered between breaths, and Wilson complied.

Reece gazed up at the darkening sky, breathing deeply against the tremors that racked him. What had he just done? He’d spared the life of a man who had tried to kill him, had taken his money and left him for dead. He’d turned his back on vengeance, on the one thing that might have relieved the pain and dispelled the anger he’d carried with him from that damned war.

It hadn’t worked. It should have worked, but it hadn’t. He had felt nothing. Nothing but a curious sense of shame at what he’d done, what he’d almost done. Something inside him had died, something so elemental, so much a part of him that he didn’t know if he could live without it. He didn’t know how to live without it.

He began to tremble, tremor after tremor rolling over his body as he tried to force his way through the paralyzing fog that enveloped him. Suddenly he wasn’t sure who he was anymore.

If ever a man deserved to die, it was Garrett. Yet he’d been unable to go through with it. All he could see was Emma’s eyes looking at him in horror, her voice pleading with him to stop destroying himself.

Drawing a ragged breath, he holstered his gun and strode toward the newspaper office. It was her voice that had stopped him, her voice and that damned expression in her eyes that he couldn’t forget, the one that told him more clearly than her words had that she believed in him, that she saw something beneath his cloak of anger and bitterness. And for the first time he wanted to believe she was right, because if she was not, there was nothing. Nothing but a gaping emptiness.

He needed to see her. Maybe if he looked deep enough into her eyes he would be able to see his reflection and understand because right now he didn’t even know himself any more.

“Emma!” he called, knocking loudly on the locked door. He waited, listening for some response before knocking again, more vehemently this time. “Open the door, Emma!”

She had twisted him into a knot, taken away his drive and left him with nothing. And now she wouldn’t even open her door. Did she intend to keep herself locked away forever? If she thought a locked door would keep him out, she was mistaken. Hell, it was his door anyway -- he had his own key. But he wasn’t about to trek all the way to the office for it. With all the frustration inside him, he kicked the door in. “Emma!” he called loudly enough to rattle the windows in the ominously empty room.

Reece stopped in his tracks, gazing around with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He knew even before he went into the back office and found the printing press missing that she was gone, but he didn’t want to believe it.

He bounded up the stairs to find her bedroom empty. The stark void echoed the ache in his own chest. Gone. How could she have just gone without a word?

Another part of him had been torn away and now there truly was nothing left, nothing but a paralyzing terror and a crushing emptiness that burned like fire in his gut. She couldn’t be gone, yet the evidence was right before him. He remembered the night he’d comforted her here while she’d wept over her father’s death. Was that when he’d begun to fall in love with her?

She couldn’t be gone. There was so much he wanted to say to her, so much he needed to hear from her.

She’d said she loved him, believed in him. How could she just leave him?

He’d begun to care for her, to need her, and now she was gone like everyone else he’d ever cared about. How could he have been so careless as to let his guard down? How could he have been foolish enough to believe in her warmth, her light, her love?

His heart pounded with the fury roiling inside him, fury directed at himself. He knew better. How many times did he have to learn the same lesson?

He’d depended on her, despite everything he knew about the pain of loss, depended on her to be here when he returned. Yes, it was a selfish expectation, he realized, but damn it, he could only deal with one thing at a time, and if he hadn’t gone after Garrett when he had, the outlaw would have escaped justice. Why couldn’t she understand that?

And why did it matter. He tried to force himself not to care, tried to bury the feelings welling up inside him, but it was no use. They’d broken through his control, shattered his defenses and left him with nothing but a pain so deep he thought he might die from it.

How confident he’d been that he could make her understand, that he would be able to maintain his distance and have her on his own terms.

His breath came in painful gasps. “What do I do now, Emma?” he asked the empty room.

He ran a hand over his bearded chin, forcing himself to think rationally, to stem the flow of panic that clamored inside him. He’d been all right without her before she’d come here, and he’d be all right without her now. But he was not the same, not the same man he’d been before Emma, and he didn’t know how to get that man back.

“What do I do now?” he asked the empty room, struggling against the numbing darkness that threatened his dazed mind.

He had to get out of here, out of this place that spoke so loudly of Emma. He retraced his steps down the stairs and out the front door, staggering into the darkness without purpose, without direction.

Eventually he found his way to the saloon, entering by the back way so that he could reach his office without having to see anyone. Once inside, he stood in the dark, hesitating to light a lamp and look at this part of his world, a world where he didn’t belong any longer.

He was being foolish. It was just a room, after all. But the last time he’d been here he’d left Emma in bed, and the things she’d said to him, the loving comfort she’d given him, the world-shattering intimacy they’d shared still reverberated in this room, as did the other, darker memories, memories of degradation and pain.

Reece released a growl of frustration as he thought of Garrett in jail instead of in a grave. He’d had Garrett in jail once before and the son-of-a-bitch had escaped. What if he got away again? He’d just have to track him down again, if that were to happen, but he was worrying about things that hadn’t happened yet, wouldn’t happen. Garrett was well-guarded. Garrett would stand trial before the circuit judge in due course and he would hang.

“
Haven’t you ever heard of the American judicial system?
”
 

Reece smiled, remembering Emma’s words. Yes, he’d heard of the judicial system. It had let him down, just as everything else he’d ever believed in had failed him.

Finally he struck a match to the lamp on the desk, throwing light on the empty room. His gaze fell on his grandfather’s pipe where it lay next to the lamp. With a trembling hand, he reached for it.

Tears stung his eyes, and he tried with all his will to push the emotion back down where it belonged, back into the darkest part of his soul, the part he had never allowed himself to examine. It was in that place that he’d buried all the hurts, all the sorrow, all the emptiness.

But along with the pain and sorrow, he’d buried every memory of his family, and they’d stayed buried until Emma. Somehow her presence alone had been enough to force them to the surface. And it was becoming more and more difficult to suppress them. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to any longer.

“
Everything dies
,” his grandfather had told him.
 

They stood over the grave of his beloved thoroughbred, the first thing he’d ever loved and lost to death. At the age of twelve, he’d thought he would die from the pain.

Grandfather rested a hand on his shoulder. “But because you loved him, he will live on in your heart.”

“I’d rather forget,” he said with all the vehemence of youth. “I wish I’d never known him.”

“Loving, even loving a horse, is how we know we’re alive. The pain will dull in time, and then the memories will give you joy.”

Reece wiped away the tear that trailed down his face, covering his mouth to stifle the sob that rose up in his throat. He hadn’t learned anything. He was still that twelve year old boy, wishing he’d never cared because the loss was so unbearably painful. He’d cut himself off from the memories that might have helped him heal, and now they bombarded him from every direction.

A grief so powerful it nearly drove him to his knees clamped down on his heart and stripped away the layers of protection around his soul. He fell into a chair and covered his face with his hands, giving in to the cleansing sorrow that shuddered through his body.

They were dead, his grandfather, his mother, Sarah. Had they lived, they would have loved him. They had died loving him, and they lived on inside him because he had loved them. And once the sorrow diminished, he found that it was not so hard to think of them any more. He could think of his life before the war without the fear that he might die from the pain.

“You were right,” he whispered, as if Emma could hear him. “You were right about everything.”

He’d purposely built a wall around himself, not allowing himself to think of the people he dealt with as individual human beings because to do so would dampen his resolve and stand in the way of his ambition.

It was harder to kill a man once you’d looked into his eyes. He’d learned that in the war. The more distance he could maintain, the easier it was to do the things he had to do in order to realize his goals.

The result was that there were two kinds of people in Providence, those who feared him and those who worked for him and respected him. But not a one of them would shed a single tear if he died today.

“
Fear is the beginning of respect
,” his father had told him, and over the past years Reece had embraced that belief.
 

“
Respect is not something you take by force
,” Grandfather’s voice countered. “
It is something you earn.
”
 

He clamped his hands over his ears to silence the voices. He’d been listening to those two disparate voices all his life, like a devil and an angel each whispering in a different ear. At twenty, he had been on his way to finding his own voice. War had refined his identity and honed his personality. Prison had robbed him of that identity, so he’d become his father in order to survive.

He had been very effective in killing everything that might be considered soft inside him, the things his father had so disdained. He had recreated himself in his father’s image. Like his father, he had become ruthless and implacable, detesting weakness and worshiping strength.