Mail-Order Groom (18 page)

T
he first thing Savannah noticed when she awakened were the mingled smells of kerosene, cigar smoke and perfume. The next thing she noticed was that her skull ached something fierce.

With an unsteady gesture, she put her hand to her head. The movement made her realize that whatever she was lying on felt decidedly lumpy…and a little unsavory, too. Curiously and confusedly, Savannah thrust out her arms. Clumsily she patted.

A mattress. She was lying on a bed, she realized. Which only served to confuse her further.

Could Mrs. Finney truly be so poor a housekeeper that she
never
properly turned her mattresses? That seemed unlikely. But where else could she be, except Mrs. Finney's house?

Muzzy-headed, Savannah blinked. The room around her came into view, wrought of cheap lumber walls and sparingly decorated with two beds, including the one she occupied. She could glimpse only the foot of the other bed,
so she couldn't discern if it also offered its dubious lump-filled comforts to someone else from the party. The room contained a single curtained window, offering a view of the dark night outside, and several chairs.

Six
chairs, she counted. But who needed that many chairs?

Surely Mrs. Finney and Doc Finney, whose children had already grown and moved into their own households, didn't require that many chairs. Or if they did, they would have used them at the party. Wouldn't they? Except, Savannah realized, she couldn't hear the party. The music and frivolity had vanished.

Either that, or
she
had vanished from the party.

Sitting up in alarm, Savannah swayed. The movement made her head hurt worse. Somewhere not too distant, a baby started wailing in a way that Savannah wished she could mimic…but something warned her not to. With effort, she tried to pay closer attention to her surroundings. She was rewarded when other sounds gradually drifted nearer. She made out the
clip-clop
of a horse moving down the street outside. Then a burst of piano music. Judging by the bawdy tune—one she recognized from her days on the stage—the melody was coming from a saloon.

Then she glimpsed a woman in the room, crouched before a banged-up potbellied stove as she tended the fire inside. The woman was dressed in a very practical fashion—a fashion definitely not intended for the party—and Savannah surmised that she must be one of the Finneys' neighbors. Perhaps someone had found her in the yard, alone in the blackness, and had brought her inside? And this woman was here to care for her?

All at once, she remembered the two men who'd assaulted her. Their faces returned to her in a rush, along with their
coarse voices…and the memory of what the second man had said.

You don't look like no “Seductive Sensation” to me.

Someone here knew who she was! Savannah realized in a panic. Those two men… What could they possibly want from her?

Her first thought was that Warren—her former fiancé
and
former stage manager—had somehow used his considerable influence to find her here in the Arizona Territory. Maybe Warren wanted to punish her for leaving, Savannah thought. She was under no illusions that he pined after her in some lovelorn fashion, but she
had
cost Warren a significant amount of money when she'd refused to perform anymore. And he
was
the vengeful type.

Still, as far as she knew, Warren did not have associates all the way out west. If he or his lackeys had ransacked her outlying telegraph station, he wouldn't have bothered hiding afterward. Above all else, Warren Scarne was a man who felt entitled to whatever he wanted. Including—at one time—
her
.

No, Savannah decided, this attack had to have been the work of someone else. But who? Searching for clues, she scrutinized her surroundings. The crude walls, the sparse decor, the close proximity to the saloon and to horse traffic… They all told her one thing, now that she was alert enough to realize it. This was
not
, as she'd first thought, a neighborly dwelling where someone had taken her to recover from her attack outside the Finneys' party. No, this was a
secret
place—a place where no one would ever think to look for her…or find her.

She had to get out. Fearfully Savannah examined the room again. To her left stood a single door, but it was closed. Maybe even locked. Unfortunately the sleight of hand she'd
honed on practicing minor magic tricks was of no use with lock picking.

If the door
were
locked, she couldn't simply run away. The window appeared latched, as well.
Where was she?

Uncertainly Savannah looked toward the woman at the woodstove again. Maybe she had been brought here against her will, also. Maybe if they worked together, they could escape?

Then Savannah realized that the plainly dressed woman was not tending the fire, as she'd first assumed. Instead the woman had crouched in front of the stove's fiery maw in order to methodically feed in stamped and addressed letters—letters that crisped at the edges, then sent up acrid smoke as they burned.

Those letters appeared curiously familiar, Savannah thought in a distracted fashion. The envelopes and seals seemed…

She took a second startled look. Those were
her
letters, Savannah realized. They were her letters to Adam, sent during their long-distance courtship. But how in the world…?

Had someone gotten to Adam, too?
Before she could consider that urgent question any further, the door opened. Clutching her lacy shawl protectively against herself, Savannah looked up.

A shabbily dressed man entered the room, taking exaggeratedly slow steps in an apparent effort to be quiet. His hair was pale and cut quite short. His face was lean, his cheeks raw with either windburn or sunburn. Overall, he gave an impression of someone who spent a great deal of time outdoors.

When he saw her watching him, he widened his eyes. “Oh! You're awake!” He hurried to straighten his suit
coat and shirtfront, then offered her a nod. “How are you feeling?”

Solicitously he headed toward the bed. Savannah jerked and lunged backward in fear, scrambling across the lumpy coverlet. She wanted a weapon, but nothing came to hand—not even her reticule, which, she noticed belatedly, lay at the other woman's feet, its contents spilling carelessly onto the grungy floor.

“Aww, I won't hurt you.” The man seemed dismayed. He hooked his thumb toward the open doorway, then kicked the door shut with his foot. “That was Curtis who hit you before. I'm sorry about that. I brought a rope, so we wouldn't have to do anything like that. But Curtis… He laughed outright. He said a rope was a dumb idea.” Apologetically the man offered a shrug. “Curtis has different notions about things than me, that's all.”

Cautiously Savannah held her position. She recognized his voice now. He was the first man who'd spoken to her in the yard. That meant he wasn't completely disdainful of her, at least. But she still didn't trust him. She didn't trust anyone here.

“Be quiet, Linus.” The woman glanced over her shoulder. Her impatient gaze took in Savannah, then shifted to the man—Linus. She frowned and fed another letter into the flames. She watched it turn black and curled at the edges. “I doubt she wants to hear about your brother right now. Did Curtis head out to collect Roy and the others, like he said he was going to?”

Linus gulped, then nodded. “Yeah, he did. Like usual, I didn't get to do it,” he grumbled. “It figures. The
one
time Roy's goin' to be happy about somethin', and I won't be the one what did it. Curtis will hog all the credit. I never get to take credit for nothin', not even nabbing one little lady.” He ducked his head, then cast an apologetic look at Savannah.
“Sorry, ma'am. But if you knew what I went through with my brothers—”

“Hush, Linus. You're going to get yourself in trouble.” The woman's gaze skated back to Savannah. “Until this matter is settled, I guess we'd both better just do what we're told.”

“I always do what I'm told!” Linus blurted. “Always!”

The woman narrowed her eyes, seeming—in that moment—surprisingly astute. She paused. “'Course you do, Linus.”

“That's right. I do! Don't let nobody tell you different.” Linus shook his head. “If Roy ever asks you, you be sure to tell him that, all right, Mariana? He'll listen to you. He'll—”

“All right, all right.” The woman, Mariana, sighed. She shuffled the letters in her hands. “Don't get all tetchy, now. I don't know how much pull I got with Roy these days, anyways.”

“Oh, I think you got
plenty
of pull,” Linus assured her kindly. “Plenty.” Lanky and uncomfortable-looking, he ambled nearer, then gazed down at the letters in her hands. “Otherwise, Roy wouldn't have trusted you with
them
, now would he?”

His encouraging tone seemed peculiar, given the situation, but it served to put Mariana at ease. She gazed down at the letters, then shrugged and fed another of them into the fire.

“I reckon that's one take on it. Another is that Roy plain don't want no proof layin' around for later. And I'm just—”

“Proof of what?” Savannah asked. Her heart pounded.

They both looked at her as though surprised to find her capable of speech. Still clutching her shawl, Savannah
raised her aching head.
In for a penny
, she decided,
in for a pound
.

“Who's Roy?” she pressed. “What do you all want with me?”

Mariana frowned. She looked away, clutching the letters.

“Those are
my
letters,” Savannah went on, growing increasingly bold as she pointed to them. These two, as odd as they were, didn't seem dangerous to her. “How did you get my—”

Linus silenced her by holding up his hand. Wearing an anxious expression, he hastened to take a seat on the other bed.

“I'm sure you're plumb full up with questions right now,” he said in a sympathetic voice, glancing over his shoulder at an indifferent-seeming Mariana, “but it's better for you if you just stick to givin' out answers, all right? When Roy gets here, he won't put up with no questions from the likes of you.”

“Why not? Who is he? What does he want from me?”

Linus exhaled. As though she were a simpleton, he gave an elaborately tolerant head shake. “Now see there? That's what I'm talkin' about. Those are just
more
questions. You can't—”

“What if I just leave?” Nervously Savannah glanced at the door. She didn't think Linus had locked it when he'd entered. If she could get up without falling flat on her face, she might be able to get away. “You can't stop me from leaving.”

“Now that's where you're wrong.” Reluctantly Linus edged his hand to his gun belt. His fingernails were chewed to the quick, but they were clean, and his grasp on his gun seemed frighteningly steady. “I'm powerful glad you ain't
hurt bad,” he said, “but that don't mean I won't stop you from leavin'.”

He shifted his gaze sideways, as though making certain that Mariana heard him make that threat. He scowled, too. Savannah hadn't noticed his gun belt before. But now that she had, she felt riveted by the sight. Carefully and slowly, she nodded.

“I'm a bad man,” Linus confessed. “I done bad things, and my soul is prob'ly lost forever because of it. So don't you go testin' me none, because I
will
make sure you do what you're told to do.” Still fingering his firearm, he bobbed his head again. “I'm sorry, but that's the truth, sure as shootin'.”

“Oh, quit scarin' her.” Mariana surprised Savannah by standing, then carelessly pocketing the last few letters that remained unburned. “You men and your blusterin'. I swear, it gets downright tiresome.” With a beleaguered sigh, Mariana sat on the bed beside Linus. In a curiously straightforward, almost mannish fashion, she leaned her elbows on her knees, then fixed Savannah with a determined look. “Here's the situation: you got yourself mixed up with a real sharper, Miss Reed—”

“It's Mrs. Corwin.” Wondering how these two even knew her name at all, Savannah raised her chin. “If you please.”

A look of illumination crossed Mariana's careworn face. For an instant, she seemed downright pleased. Which made not a lick of sense. Especially while Linus was still sulking. Even as Savannah had the thought, he took out his shooter and examined it. The motion drew Mariana's attention—and erased her curious expression of enlightenment, too. She sobered, then went on.

“When you decided to go wandering the telegraph wires lookin' for company a while back, my man, Roy, took notice
of you. He struck up a correspondence to see what he could find out. What he found out was that you was lonely for a man.”

“I was
not
lonely for a man!” Affronted to be described in such disagreeable terms, Savannah protested. “Not for just
any
man, at least. Besides, during slow times, the telegraph operators often talk to one another. It's not the least bit unusual for us to strike up friendships over the wires when we—”

“‘Friendships'? Is that really what you want to call 'em?”

What else would I call them?
Savannah wondered hotly. She had, after all, entered into her relationship with Adam under good faith. She didn't know how Mariana knew about her activities on the wires, but the truth was, she and Adam had simply been two ordinary telegraph operators, just passing some pleasant time together between transmittals. Their friendship had blossomed from there, to be certain. But this
Roy
person…

She still didn't know how he factored in.

Apparently Linus did.

“I don't know if this is wise, tellin' her all this,” he interrupted with a wary glance at the closed door. He frowned at Mariana. “I don't reckon Roy would be pleased.”