Dust Devil (30 page)

"The Methodist circuit rider, Reverend
— what’s his name? He won’t be at the millhouse.”

Simultaneously the three women drew their breath in sharply. Stephen continued, "Oh, yes. I knew.” Then to Rosemary, "You should know better after all these years than to underestimate me. Sending Pedro to Las Vegas to visit a clergyman
— you should have realized it would not be going unnoticed.”

"Does Jamie know?”

"To be sure. He and I had a father-to-son talk. I think he understands now I will never allow a marriage between him and Inez.”

Rita bounded to her feet. "And for what reason? They are in love! Why do you stop them?”

"Because her background is not impeccable enough,” Rosemary answered tiredly. "Her ancestry must be as Anglo as Stephen’s Hereford cattle.”

"
Mierda
!” Rita swore.

Inez cried out, "Where is Jamie? I go to him. No matter what you say!”

"I think not.” Stephen’s smile was benign below the calculating eyes. "It’s already arranged between your father and Grant Raffin — you are to marry Wayne next year when he returns to practice law.”

"No!” Stephanie screamed. She sprang up and threw herself at her father. "I won’t let you control Wayne and myself. Not us, too!”

CHAPTER
33

There came only the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on the grooved road that groped its way in the night between Fort Union’s foothills and Cambria’s high plains. Beneath the heavens’ star-seamed canopy the wagon’s five occupants sat in silence, each preoccupied with Jamie Rhodes, wondering where he had gone when he had ridden out from the fort into the night’s concealing darkness an hour earlier.

"He’s just angry at being thwarted,” Stephen had said, mildly irritated at Rosemary’s smothering concern for the boy. "When he realizes I’ve done the best thing for him, he’ll turn up. Jiraldo and I will be coming home tomorrow som
etime after we’ve finished business here with the Englishman, Hubbard.”

Occasionally Inez’s muted crying would puncture the night’s silence. "We must find Jamie!” she would beg of Cody.

Only Stephanie felt her worry surmounted by other feelings. Bitterness. Betrayal by Wayne, her father, and even her friend, though she fully realized Inez had no part in the betrayal; that Inez’s love for Jamie was as deep as hers for Wayne. Still it hurt, like the sting of a scorpion, each time her imagination flashed a picture of Wayne and Inez sharing the bridal bed.

When the Castle finally came in sight, dawn tinted the sky a boiling orange. Inez and Rosemary did not wait for Cody to halt the wagon before the veranda steps but stumbled down from their seats as it was still rolling and ran into the house. Rita followed, cursing all the way. "Esteban and Jiraldo, they are
bastardos
! Pigs!”

Stephanie sat listlessly in the wagon, listening to Rita’s epithets trail off into the great house. What could she say to her brother that would be of any consolation? S
he knew too well how he felt. Helpless frustration and a killing rage. Had she a pistol she would have shot her father at that moment; yet she felt greater anger and hurt toward Wayne. He had sold himself, she was sure. How much had her father paid Grant and Wayne Raffin to accept Inez Sanchez y Chavez into their family?

Her fingers curled, biting into her palms, and she was unaware of Cody lifting her down from the wagon, guiding her into the house that had come alive suddenly with lights. Her mother stood at the foot of the stairs, her face as white as the plastered walls. It was the first time Stephanie could remember seeing her mother so distracted. She whirled on
her and Cody. "Consuela says Jamie has not been here at all.”

Rita came out of Jamie’s room and leaned over the banister. "There is nothing missing, Rosita. No clothes gone. His carpetbags are still here.”

"Jamie would not leave without me,” Inez said, coming up behind her mother. She bit her lip, looking at the man and two women below. "Where would he go?”

"It may be that he’s not up to facing everyone right now,” Cody offered. "He could be at one of the camps. I’ll saddle up and look for him.”

Rosemary put out a hand to Cody. "Calm him down. Tell him everything will work out all right.”

Cody was already saddling his horse when Stephanie caught up with him.
He eyed her blue satin gown bunched behind by the bustle. "Don’t tell me you’re going, too,” he told her coldly.

"No, I’m telling you I don’t think you need the horse!” she snapped. "I think I know where he is.”

He sighed. "All right. Where?”

"At the millhouse. Remember how we used to hide out there when mama threatened to paddle us?”

Within minutes they covered the distance that separated the corral from the mill. It loomed dark and forbidding against the morning sky. "He’s here,” Cody said and pointed to the grazing pinto. Cody looked down at her. "You wait here.”

"Let me go with you.”

"Not this time. A hysterical female ain’t going to help his disposition none.”

"You know I’m not that way.”

Cody looked into her eyes. "No, I don’t know that. Not anymore, at least. Now do as I say and stay put.”

S
he fidgeted, feeling the cool morning air ice her clothes. Even her skin. The early dawn’s mist cast an eerie haze over the sun. After a few moments she heard Cody’s spurs clink on the mill’s wooden stairs. Then another silence. Impatience seized her, and she ran inside. Whatever Jamie could tell about Wayne, she wanted to hear. The cornmeal dust coated her skirts as she ran up the first flight of stairs. On the second floor it was warmer.

"Cody? Jamie?” she called, out of breath. She could not see anyone in the darkness among the paraphernalia of rotted saddles, greasy blankets, and worn hides.

"For God’s sake, Stephanie,” Cody bellowed from the floor above, "go back downstairs!”

S
he heard the agitation in Cody’s normally lazy drawl and took the stairs two at a time, ripping the lace at the hem of her dress.

"Dammit, I told you to
— ” But he broke off, knowing she had seen the horror he tried to conceal.

The scream tore through her, echoing again and again throughout the tower. From above and behind Cody’s tall frame a man’s body swung gently, suspended by a rope from the timbered ceiling.

* * * * *

The glass exploded in purple-dyed shards against the office wall, and Stephen’s belligerent and drunken voice could be heard throughout the house. "Consuela! Linda! Pedro! Another wine bottle.
Ahorita
!”

Stephanie huddled deeper against the window seat. She had always considered herself brave though she stood in awe of her father’s black Irish rages. Now, she felt only an angry grief as gloomy as the late summer rain that fell outside her window, streaking the panes in dusty rivulets.

For three weeks, since the morning after Jamie’s burial beneath the cottonwood, she, along with the rest of the household, had listened to Stephen’s drunken bellowing that mixed with his morose soliloquys and occasional bouts of crying.

Only her mother seemed unperturbed by Stephen’s frightening behavior and dared enter his chamber of mourning.

For Stephanie it had been three weeks of a loneliness she had not known existed. All her life Cambria had been a fairytale land. Hundreds of her father’s employees to adore her and thousands of acres to roam with no restrictions. Oh, the dreams she and Jamie and Wayne had created there. The buffalo they had shot and the Indians they had vanquished! The pirates they had dueled. When she had gone off to school, she had felt a pity mixed with dismay at the cloistered lives led by her schoolmates. Years of needlepoint, piano, and singing. Boring!

But now there was only the vast emptiness of the land to swallow up the house. Jamie was gone forever. And Wayne, back to Virginia. But then, after he finished law school, he would be returning to marry Inez. Inez and Rita had at least escaped the forlorn atmosphere that claimed the Castle like quagmire, pulling it and its occupants ever deeper into despair.

The weeks of accumulated inactivity were more them Stephanie could bear, and at last she sprang from the window seat and went to the wardrobe. There in the back of musty, long-unused clothing she found her yellow slicker. She would ride. Ride until she had ridden the bitterness and hurt and grief out of her system. She would let the rain wash away the ugliness that seemed to eat away her insides. Then, maybe then, she could think of Wayne without the terrible hurt.

Maybe then, and her spirits began to flicker with life again, she could think of a way out of all this, think of a way to regain Wayne. She would not accept her father’s dictum for her as docilely as Inez accepted her ordained marriage to Wayne. Rita wrote that Inez had lost all will to live, walking about the hacienda like a zombie of All Souls’ Day. Worse, Jiraldo had suffered a stroke and was not expected to survive.

As Stephanie passed by her mother’s room the sound of her name on her mother’s lips slowed her, and she paused at the open door, not comprehending at first.

"You never took the time to include Stephanie in your plans, did you, Stephen? You unwisely centered all your hopes and plans around Jamie. How unbusinesslike for a man such as yourself, placing all your eggs in one basket! I wonder if you even ever loved our son!”

Stephanie heard the tears of agony in her mother’s voice and turned to leave, when her mother said, "But I won’t let you do the same to Stephanie. I won’t let her be used as you did Jamie!”

"I’ll do what I bloody well please, Rosie! I haven’t come
this far to fail now.” He gave a short, mirthless laugh, and Stephanie shivered despite the warmth of the enveloping slicker. It was a cold laugh that warned like the rattle of the diamondback snake. "Stephanie’ll marry that Englishman. With his wife dead three years, Hubbard’ll be hot to bed Stephanie — given a wee push in the right direction.”

"You bloody son-of-a-bitch.” It was the first time Stephanie had ever heard her mother really swear. But her mother did not stop with that. "I’ve watched you manipulate all of us. You’ve used us as building blocks for your empire. But now ’tis all over, Stephen. Your pure Anglo empire ended with Jamie’s death. Stephanie is not your daughter! Did you hear me!” Rosemary screamed. "She’s not your daughter!”

"What the hell are you — ”

Her laugh was almost maniacal. "Tis good to see you stunned for once, Stephen. You, who always know everything, keeping your finger on every person. But you did not know that Stephanie wasn’t your daughter, did you? While you were out fighting your glorious Civil War, I was being raped by one of your friendly Apache tribes. Stephanie’s a half-breed, Stephen!”

Something toppled to the floor. Stephanie heard her father’s snarl, sounding like a cornered mountain lion. But she was finished listening. She spun from the door and ran down the stairs.

Old Miguel called out after her as her horse thundered through the mud-washed streets past the store, but she was oblivious to everything. Tears mingled with the drizzling rain that stung her face. It was not until she was safe within the forested foothills that she knew where she was going.

She would get roaring drunk in Las Vegas.

CHAPTER 34

It was a glittering saloon, one of the better ones of the twenty- seven saloons that jostled with the shops and office buildings for space around Las Vegas’s plaza. Still, hand-hewn rafters crisscrossed the room at a low height, and the earthen floor was strewn with refuse. Lighted candles shimmered through the haze of smoke.

Every gambler there smoked, from the elegant
caballero
with his Havana cigar to the humble
ranchero
and hired domestics; from the clerks and cowboys who rolled their own
cigarros
to the titled lady furnished with her
tenazita de oro
, the little golden tongs which held a cigar and prevented her delicate fingers from being polluted with the scent and stain of tobacco.

Cody’s eyes squinted through the haze. It was the fifth saloon he had tried that evening. And he worried now. Maybe the information that the Rhodes girl had been seen in one of the town’s gambling establishments had been a false trail. But it didn’t matter. If he didn’t find her here, he would keep looking for until he did find her. He would have come looking for Stephanie whether Rosemary had asked him or not.

Cody thought of Stephen, and his anger rose again in him like black bile. The man was back in Las Vegas, winding up the Encino Silver Mine venture with the Englishman. Cody could only hope their paths did not cross, because he did not know what he would do. But ending up at the end of a rope for murder was not what he had in mind when he first came to Cambria. He had planned to kick about for a couple of years. Until the memory of his wife and infant daughter’s deaths had faded from the homestead.

It had seemed to
him then that his wife’s lavender scent and his daughter’s cooing laughter had lingered about the one-room cabin like friendly and familiar ghosts. Perhaps that had been what first attracted him to Rosemary’s daughter. The child’s bubbling laughter. Her captivating smile, enchanting with just the hint of flirtation in it. Stephanie had inherited the smile from her mother but without that trace of sadness found in her mother’s. Or at least sadness had not been present until this summer.