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Given everything that had happened to him, he wasn’t sure if his situation had improved or not. What would he tell Véronique when he replied to this letter?

Pop’s unsolicited advice hadn’t fallen on completely deaf ears. If he wanted his wife back, he’d have to do something. Susannah and whatever she decided to do about Tanner Grenfell would determine the answer to the question about Véronique’s letter.

• • •

“It’s a damned-all shame when a grown man can’t walk into a saloon and buy himself a drink. I could kick that Volstead’s ass all the way from here to the moon.” Jobie Rush stood in the rain at the back door of Miss Dorothy’s Soda Shoppe with Bert Bauer, waiting for two bottles of USP ethyl alcohol cut fifty-fifty with water and a little Coca-Cola syrup for flavoring and color. It tasted like hell but it was safe, and at one hundred proof, it got the job done.

Bauer, a recent guest of Multnomah County jail thanks to that bastard Whit Gannon, had been released three weeks earlier and drifted back to the part of the area he knew best—Powell Springs and Twelve Mile. Along the way, he’d hooked up with Jobie Rush, another occasional guest of the county facilities.

Dorothy, an old whorehouse madam who now earned more money in bootlegging and with less trouble, mixed her brew in a wooden washtub. Sometimes it came in a hair tonic bottle, sometimes a Fletcher’s Castoria bottle, whatever she had around. In the front of the building, she ran a soda shop that was so prim and proper and boring a body would have thought that “Miss Dorothy” had run a girls’ finishing school instead of a brothel.

“Thirty bucks, boys,” she said, reappearing with two Lydia Pinkham bottles.

They each gave her fifteen dollars. Then Rush took the bottles and looked at them. “Damn it, Dorothy, don’t you
ever
hand out a bottle that doesn’t have something to do with female complaints or bound-up bowels?”

“Don’t be so picky. Next time you might get a Lysol bottle with a little bit of the first stuff left behind.” She grabbed the money and slammed the door.

The men were in Twelve Mile, a town about three miles over and down from Powell Springs. It was raining to beat the devil out of a man and there weren’t a lot of options since they couldn’t sit at the counter inside. After scouting around, they decided to go take shelter in a stand of fir trees in a field with a canopy broad enough to keep out most of the rain. They found a couple of stumps to sit on and toasted each other with the female tonic bottles.

“You said you’re from around here,” Bauer began, “but I lived around here for a while and I don’t remember seeing you. I don’t think I ever saw you before we met up here a while back.” He’d met Rush at Dorothy’s back door a couple of weeks earlier, and since neither of them had any particular plans, they’d fallen in together for the time being.

“We probably weren’t here at the same time. Anyway, you just got out of prison yourself. Things change whether you’re here or not.”

“Got a wife, kids?”

Rush turned cold eyes on Bauer. A long scar, probably from a knife fight, ran from the point of his chin up the side of his face and disappeared into his greasy hair. “Do I look like that sort to you?”

“I guess not. Smart man. I did it and it got me a peck of trouble. I decided I had enough of that so I left. Two brats and a whiny
wife who could find nothin’ better to do for money than go into business for herself, if ‘n you know what I mean. Sellin’ her favors right up there on Butler Road, and every man in Powell Springs knows about it, including the sheriff. And who goes to jail? Me!”

Rush let out a paper-dry chuckle. “She’s on Butler Road?”

Bauer narrowed his eyes. “Yeah. Why do you want to know?”

“I know Em. She’s a good gal. A smart one too.”

Bauer nearly strangled on his own tongue. “You been with my Emmaline?
You?
” He struggled to his feet, a task made more difficult by the potent alcohol he’d been drinking. “Why, I oughta punch you right in the face! A man can’t turn his back for a second without someone sticking a knife in it!”

“You lay a hand on me and that’ll be the last you see of it. Sit down, Bauer, and drink this stuff before you hurt yourself. Em ain’t your wife anymore besides. She told me she divorced you when you was in jail. She’s got the papers and everything.”

Lambert Bauer was nearly apoplectic. Jobie Rush just glared at him, waiting to see how he thought he’d been insulted now. “Divorced? I gave her the best years of my life, the shirt off my back…”

He waved him off impatiently. “Bullshit, that’s not what I hear. And from what I’ve learned about you in the last few weeks, I don’t believe it either. You’re just a mean little pecker who likes to talk big. The best years of your life were spent on the road, in other women’s drawers, robbing dead bodies, or in jail. Mostly what you gave her was a reason she needed to take care of herself and no other way to do it. She did what she had to.”

“By God! I’ll just see about this!”

“Oh, hell, you won’t see about nothin’. You’re only pissed off because she didn’t curl up and die when you quit her. She got on with her life. You best do the same. She’s pretty well armed
besides. Leave her alone. You can’t win.” He pointed at the tree stump.

Bauer sat down again and made some grumbling noises but accepted his defeat for the time being, anyway. He took another long swallow from the tonic bottle.

“We’ll get this Braddock thing taken care of, get paid, and go our own paths,” Rush said. “Three hundred dollars will buy a lot of diversions.”

• • •

The domestic hubbub for Thanksgiving dinner began. Susannah, deep in preparations, spent two days in the kitchen baking pies, cubing bread for stuffing, and getting the turkey ready. She’d gotten it from the butcher in town earlier in the day.

She passed a lit candle over it to burn off the pinfeathers, using an old pie pan to catch any dripping wax. The stench was just rank.

“I hope that smells better tomorrow than it does right now,” Riley said. Looking up at sound of his voice, she saw him standing in the doorway, carrying a glass and a whiskey bottle by the neck in one hand. He limped in, pulled out a chair at the table, and put his cane aside to watch her work. With her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, she maneuvered the big, clumsy bird.

“I’ve got to get this finished so I can put it in the oven. It
will
smell better once it starts roasting.”

“Watching you here reminded me of Véronique Raineau, the woman who took me in. Even after the war ended, food was in short supply but she managed to come up with really good meals even though she didn’t have much to work with.”

She looked up and eyed the whiskey before going back to her task. The subject of the letter had not come up since the day he’d received it. Though curiosity about its contents burned in her, oddly she felt as if she had no right to ask him what it said, and he’d volunteered nothing. Now he’d chosen to introduce Véronique as a subject.

“You mentioned she had no family left. She must have been a lonely old woman before she found you.” This was the first time they’d ever really discussed Véronique in any detail.

“Lonely, probably, but she isn’t old. I don’t know why everyone has that impression. Cole assumed the same thing. She’s in her late thirties. Her father and brothers were killed in battle. She has a good heart and a strong will. Strong enough to live alone in that crumbling one-room farmhouse—I’d hoped to help her rebuild it.” He took a drink. “But without medical care, I didn’t heal very well. I was not as strong as I am now. Then the Red Cross found me and I had to leave her.”

Had to leave her.
Susannah considered him as he sat there, the light from the overhead kerosene lamps casting shadows under his eyes. She’d certainly wondered about the woman.

“What did she look like?”

He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Not pretty like you, but nice enough. She has russet hair that flashes red in the sun and light-brown eyes. Hard work gave her a sturdy form and roughened her hands.”

He’d lived with her for two years in close quarters, and Susannah hadn’t realized that the woman was so young. When she’d imagined her, she pictured a stocky farm woman with gray hair braided and wound around her head. Now she envisioned someone else.

“Did you want to stay?”

“She showed me the photograph of you that she’d saved. I didn’t recognize you—of course, you know that—but I was curious. She told me you were waiting here, and that you’d welcome me with tears and gratitude that I’d been restored to you.” He shrugged and lifted his glass again. “Well, she couldn’t have known otherwise.”

A wave of annoyed guilt rolled through Susannah and she looked at him. “Neither could I.”

He poured another drink. “No, that’s true.”

She aimed a sharp question at him. “Should you have married her? Or would that have been unnecessary?”

Now he fidgeted in his chair, and instinctively Susannah knew she’d gotten much closer to the marrow of his story. And it amounted to more than that of a chaste Good Samaritan sharing her one-room house. Strangely enough, she felt a definite twinge of jealous anger. She realized that it wasn’t logical, but sometimes the human heart didn’t recognize logic.

He became defensive. “I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t learn that you existed until just before I left. I didn’t marry her because I had no name. How could I marry a woman with no name to give her?”

“But if you had, what would you have told the Red Cross when they came looking for you?”

“I suppose I would have stayed.”

She stared at him, the turkey forgotten and the candle burning in her hand. “So it seems that you aren’t just the innocent victim of my supposed double-dealing in this. You didn’t know about me, and I was told you were killed in battle.”

He plunged a hand through his dark hair. “At least I didn’t lie to you!”

“No, you carefully omitted certain…facts.”

He emptied his glass in one gulp. “Well, yes, I suppose,” he muttered, unable to find his way around this important point.

She sighed and put the candle on the table. “Riley, are you willing to admit that none of us,
including Tanner
, is at fault? Who could have foreseen this? We’ve all been put in a difficult position, and we’re different people now.”

“Yes, I know.”

“We began as friends at that grange dance years ago. Maybe we should back up and start from there. It’s only been a little while since you even recognized me as someone you know.”

If this was not what he wanted to hear, he gave no indication of it. “You’re right,” he said, pushing out his chair and getting to his feet. He limped to her side of the table and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“It’s going to be a big meal, so bring your appetite.” She smelled the whiskey fumes that hung between them. “But leave the whiskey in the parlor. I have enough of that from Shaw.”

He looked at the bottle in his hand, then offered her a wry smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

A couple of hours later, Susannah sat on the edge of her bed in a long-sleeved flannel nightgown, following her nightly routine of braiding her hair. The turkey was in a covered roasting pan outside on the back porch, where frost had already begun forming. It promised to be a cold night, perfect for storing things that needed to be kept chilled. The thermometer beside the back door already read thirty-five degrees. She slipped between her sheets and snuggled beneath her down quilt, her toes frigid. She had a long, busy day ahead of her tomorrow and most of the work was on her shoulders since there were no other female relatives in the family. Well, there was Jessica, she reflected, looking at the
distant moon gleaming down on the bed through her window. But domestic jobs weren’t really her specialty. She tried, but…

Lying in the slice of moonlight, Susannah realized she was just plain lonely. Since Amy, Jess’s sister, had revealed herself to be interested only in trying to capture Cole’s attention, there had been no other close women friends in Susannah’s life.

Instead, she now had two husbands and felt disconnected from both of them. She had lost the companionship of marriage, the intimacy, and the friendship. She missed the Riley she had once known and she missed Tanner even more. Waiting for a pocket of warmth to form around her, she drifted off with a half dream of a big dinner spread out on the dining room table. The family lined both sides, including Shaw and Cole, and the man of the house was ready to carve the turkey. But she could see only his hands holding the fork and knife. Whose hands were they?

• • •

While most of Powell Springs gathered around family tables to share a big dinner and count their blessings, two men lingered at the distant edge of the Braddock yard. Just behind the overgrown privet and boxwoods, one held a rifle aimed at the doorway of the bunkhouse, using the crotch of a branch to steady the weapon. He squinted down the barrel, lining up the sight. The other man kept an eager eye on the same target.

“I hope this is over soon. I want that seventy-five dollars. I got me some big plans,” Bert Bauer said.

Jobie Rush didn’t answer, but maintained his grip on the rifle. He licked his upper lip in concentration, with his shoulder pressed into the butt of the stock.

“First I’m gonna show that Emmaline she can’t do whatever she pleases just because I ain’t around. She’s my wife, by God and—”

“Shut up, Bauer!” Rush hissed at him.

The door to the bunkhouse had opened and Tanner Grenfell walked out with Susannah Braddock. Both of them were clear targets for anyone of a mind to take a shot. Rush swallowed and held his breath just as he was about the squeeze the trigger.

“I am
not
! I’m gonna tell Aunt Susannah!” Two young red-headed boys suddenly appeared out of nowhere, one chasing the other, and ran right up the steps to the two adults. Their quarreling voices rang out over the whole yard.

“Shit!” Rush lowered the rifle and glared at Bauer. “You told me no one was here except those two.”

“There wasn’t!” Bauer protested. “How the hell was I supposed to know there’s kids living out here? Must be that woman’s nephews or something.” With a look of injured dignity, he added, “Anyway, it wasn’t
my
idea to come out here on Thanksgiving.”