Lake of Fire (36 page)

With shaking hands, Laura belted Aunt Fanny’s rose silk wrapper. Reflected in the bureau glass, her hair hung damply over her shoulders. The bruise at her eye was starting to fade. Going to the bed, she lay down and stared sightlessly at the striped wallpaper until it seemed to dissolve …

She stood on the second-floor landing of Fielding House. Behind the door of the master bedroom, Forrest lay propped on pillows, a pale shadow of the robust man he’d once been.

Laura gripped the smooth mahogany rail and looked down upon a middle-aged man in a banker’s suit in the marble-floored foyer. He carried a briefcase and looked around the house as if he were estimating the cost of its contents.

She felt two spots of color burnish her cheeks.

The man paused to straighten a Degas, a picture of a seated dancer lacing her ribboned slippers.

“Don’t touch that!” Laura’s voice echoed in the high-ceilinged hall. Violet had chosen that painting for the occasion of her daughter’s first ballet lesson.

“Laura.” Forrest’s feeble voice barely penetrated the closed door of his room.

“It’s all right, Father.”

It wasn’t. At any moment, the man in the hall would look up at her and say, “I’m here to take the house.” That couldn’t happen.

Each room still bore the touch of Violet; here in a Tiffany vase she’d chosen, there in the burgundy silk chairs before the fireplace. A thousand fragments of the years, each a tiny shining facet in the mosaic of time: hiding from her nanny behind the porte cochere and getting a gentle swat on her diapered bottom; learning to play the piano in the parquet-floored, glass conservatory.

Or poised at the top of the marble stairs, a skinny Cinderella hearing the stroke of twelve. Skimming down lightly like a bird, across the foyer and down the lawn to the lakeshore where an imaginary pumpkin lay lonely in the coarse sand.

Cord returned to his room, but did not turn on the light or disrobe. He shoved the sash of the window high and took a seat on the wide sill, while he spun images of his two worlds.

Though many people in Salt Lake City regarded him as Aaron Bryce’s charity case, he believed the majority of guests at Excalibur saw him as a gentleman with European roots, as well as a respected local Mormon. He could recount how the angel Moroni appeared to fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith, instructing him to translate the message so that all could read.
How ironic that the leader of the non-treaty Nez Perce also bore the name of Joseph, biblical Joseph of the coat of many colors.

How many colors was Cord trying to wear?

Lightning flashed over the lake, revealing a pair of thunderheads, black towers against a slate sky. Shades of gray, like the fine line he’d walked this evening, trying to protect Bitter Waters from Feddors, but keeping his mouth shut when the impulse to claim his uncle as family struck him.

He reached to his trouser pocket and drew out his
wayakin
. Even in the dim glow from the hallway lighting over the transom, it took on a glassy sheen. As he had done a thousand times, he rubbed his thumb over the smooth surface, hoping the contact would calm him.

In 1877, he’d hated Bitter Waters and the Nez Perce, turned his back on them and all they represented, too youthful and insensitive to even consider their side … until he had approached the Wylie campfire.

Another lightning flash, and the thunderstorm looked a lot closer. Silver illumination revealed the lake, whitecaps roiling, while the air around the hotel remained stifling.

Dante hated storms.

The lobby lay quiet before Laura as she descended the stairs, the tulip lights on the redwood columns dark.
She’d sponged off her trousers and put them back on with Cord’s laundered shirt … in defiance of her family and Hank’s expectations.

Stepping across the polished yellow pine floor, she went onto the porch and dropped into a rocker. Pushing it with her foot, she listened to it creak, an empty, aching sound.

The aroma of lake water mixed with that of sage and pine on the rising breeze. A fingernail moon had risen in the east, while a flash illuminated a towering cloud bank to the southeast. And was that also lightning on the high ridges? Surely not, for the orange glow was steady.

It must be the forest fire, visible now by day from the hotel as thin tendrils of white drifting up from the far peaks. Smoke that obscured vision, but hers was coming clear.

Were the bank and Fielding House in danger? She might love her father for swinging her into the air as a toddler while Violet looked on, might wish he were well and whole, but how many times had he manipulated her thoughts and feelings to his advantage?

Hank viewed the hotel as his own. But, as a consummate gamesman, did he deserve the place more than Cord, who had a dream?

In spite of her father’s and Hank’s assurance of their claims on her, she rose from the rocker.

Just a few steps down the darkened hall, she stood before the heavy door of Room 109. Her blood thudded in her ears.

With her hand raised to knock, she heard the tick of a latch at the far end of the hall. Though she turned quickly, she caught only a glimpse of a tall man with dark hair as he exited and closed the door.

Her father and Aunt Fanny would call her shameless, society would censure, but she went anyway, down the hall, pushed open the door, and stepped out into the night. The faint moon rode in a patch of clear sky.

In the midst of the meadow, she caught a moving darker shadow. “Cord!”

Fifty yards out, he disappeared into the trees. To keep up, she had to pass through the dense grove, arms out before her to stave off the trunks. Another lightning flash revealed him exiting the forest.

The stables lay ahead; he opened one of the tall wooden doors and went inside.

Another bolt from the heavens made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Wind swept in off the lake, tearing through grass and scrub, tugging at her hair. She should go back to the hotel.

Moments later, she felt the rough boards of the stable door beneath her hands.

Inside, all was dark.

From down the way, she heard the rasp of a match. Lantern light flared, casting flickering shadows on the walls and into the darkened stalls. She could see Dante’s open gate.

“Cord?”

He appeared from behind his stallion, carrying the lantern.

Laura stood at the stall door wearing her trousers and the shirt he’d loaned her at Witch Creek. Her eyes were fever bright.

“Your father?” he asked.

“The bullet’s out, and he’s still alive.”

“The caliber?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not small, like a pistol?”

Laura shook her head. “No one told me anything.” She looked up, her eyes clear green in his mind’s eye even in the darkness. “It’s like that terrible night when I was ten. We waited and waited while Mama and my baby brother died.”

Cord hung the lantern on a nail in the vacant stall next to Dante’s, then lowered the flame until the stable was lit by the faintest golden glow. It was warm, with the earthy smells of sweet feed, horseflesh, and manure. The wind whistled up colder and louder through the cracks as the storm took aim at them.

“I hope he pulls through.” He meant it, even with Forrest Fielding against him. “Hank accused me of shooting your dad … in front of Manfred Resnick and Lieutenant Stafford.”

“I know you didn’t.” Laura’s voice was steady.

“I’m hoping you can convince them of that, since you’re the only other witness to Forrest’s collapse.”

“I’ll try.”

Cord stood where he was, legs apart. “A while ago, I went up to the third floor where your suite is. I wanted to tell you I talked with Constance.”

“And?” Her expression gave away nothing.

“She’s free to pursue Norman.”

That hadn’t come out right, especially as Laura had followed him all the way out here in threatening weather. “I mean …” He brought his hands out and moved toward her. “I mean we’re free, you and I.”

For a heartbeat, they gazed into each other’s eyes. Gauging, wondering, fearing.

Then their arms went around each other in a grip so tight he had trouble breathing; she probably couldn’t, either. Yet, it was such a relief, as if a band around his forehead had loosened. She fit him, the way he’d believed she could the day they went fishing in the lake.

They were quiet for a long time, her cheek against his chest. Then he felt warmth and wet there.

“Hey, hey.” He pulled back and tipped her chin up.

“Daddy wants me to help Hank, to keep you from buying the hotel.” Tears glistened on her lamp-lit face. “Hank wants me to find out where you got the documents you showed the railroad.”

“What do you want?”

Her hand came up; she placed her palm atop his breastbone and spread her fingers. Closing his eyes, Cord thought the intense feeling could have been pain or pleasure.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. And sealed the bargain by bending and blowing out the lamp.

Cord pulled a saddle blanket from where he’d folded it over the stall railing. Taking Laura’s fingers, he drew her into the vacant stall, fanned the covering, and let it settle onto the straw. The mix of faint moon and bright stars spread shafts of silver onto the stable floor, and he saw her clearly, her face aglow.

He drew her down with him onto the blanket. She smelled of lavender soap.

Outside, the weather front swept in. Clouds scudded across the sky, causing the stripes of light to waver.

Then the stable went dark, lit only at intervals … more flashes of dry summer lightning, the kind that ignited wildfires.

“No one I know would want me to be here tonight.” But all Laura felt was defiant joy. “Not Aunt Fanny, with her outmoded Victorian morality; not Constance, though perhaps she loves me enough to wish me happiness; not Father, who awoke from surgery asking me to promise I would help Hank defeat you.”

“Yet, you’re here.” His lips pressed her forehead.

“This afternoon at the canyon, when you and I were at the brink of the falls, I felt like I was on the highest cloud in a clear blue sky.”

He lifted her hair with one hand and moved it to the side of her neck, kissed her in the place where her
pulse fluttered. It was right, so right that they shed their clothes and lie together upon the bed of scratchy wool and straw.