Margaret Brownley (7 page)

He looked surprised to see her and she could easily guess why. Bad blood flowed between her father and the doctor for as long as she could remember. Some old-timers insisted they had been childhood friends, but no one could tell her what happened to turn them into enemies. She doubted if anyone even knew.

Rocky Creek was an odd town. At times Lucy felt stifled. She couldn’t sneeze without being the topic of conversation. Still, no amount of gossip or lighthearted chatter could dispel the shadows that lurked beneath the surface, or the secrets that whispered from the past.

Now the doctor greeted her with a wary smile and tip of his bowler. “Miss Fairbanks.” Though he’d known her all her life, he never called her by her first name. He nodded his head toward Jenny’s store.

“It looks like opening day is a success,” he said.

She nodded. “It is, indeed.” She never thought to see the day Rocky Creek would have a store that specialized solely in women’s apparel. Thank God they were able to contain the fire before it did too much damage.

He regarded her with a thoughtful frown. His eye had been injured in a carriage accident in his youth. As a result, one iris was blue, the other brown, giving him a striking appearance that made strangers stare.

“I heard about your latest . . . escapade. You were lucky to escape.” He studied her in a way that only a doctor could. “Are you all right? You look pale.”

“I’m fine,” she said, though she was still shaken by the fire. Obviously he thought she sought him out because of a medical problem. “I bruised my shoulder and have a cut on my foot, but otherwise I’m none the worse for wear.”

“I’d be happy to look at your shoulder and foot.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. She glanced around anxiously. Her father would have a fit if he saw her talking to the doctor.

“Are you sure?” Doc Myers persisted. “It wouldn’t be unusual to have . . .
problems
after your shocking experience. You might notice symptoms like the ones some soldiers suffered upon their return from the war.”

That got her attention. The last thing she wanted was to start acting like Timber Joe.

“W-what . . . what kind of symptoms?” she stammered. Maybe the doctor could explain why she couldn’t stop thinking about her odd encounter with a certain handsome stranger.

“Sleep disturbances. That sort of thing.”

“I hardly slept last night,” she admitted. How could she? Each time she closed her eyes, she relived the nightmare. The robbery. The runaway stage. The gunmen shooting at her. But it was the memory of a stranger’s lips that commanded the most attention. She finally spent the night pacing the floor and trying to rationalize her own scandalous behavior.

“What other problems might such a shock cause?” she asked.

He thought for a moment. “Hallucinations. A person might start seeing things that are not really there.”

She frowned. Could she have imagined the stranger? She hadn’t even considered that possibility. She bit her lip. The doctor looked at her with such concern she forced a smile to relieve his mind.

“I’m sure that after a day or two I’ll be my old self again.”

“Yes, yes, of course. But if you still have trouble sleeping, let me know.”

He yawned. It was just the opening she hoped for. “It looks like I’m not the only one who had a bad night.”

He rolled his eyes. “Old Mrs. Brubaker is dying again.”

Lucy laughed. Mrs. Brubaker had more ailments than was recognized by the American Medical Association and gathered family and friends for deathbed vigils with the same regularity as other women held teas or hosted quilting bees.

Lucy braced herself with a deep breath. “Perhaps it would help if you had an assistant,” she said, weighing his reaction. She didn’t want to be brash, but she promised Caleb she’d talk to the doctor and she so seldom saw him alone.

Doc Myers’ brow furrowed. “An assistant?”

Lucy nodded. “It’s not right for one man to work so many hours.”

He drew back and studied her. “Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this than simple concern for my working hours?”

“Caleb asked me to talk to you,” Lucy confessed. “He wants to be a doctor.”

“Really?” He pursed his lips. “I thought his father was grooming him to take over the business.”

“Caleb hates working at the store.”

He tilted his head. “Your pa know that?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But he will.”
God help us
.

Doc Myers shook his head. “He won’t like it.”

Ignoring the doctor’s concern, she persisted, “Caleb would make a good doctor. I know he would. He’s always bringing injured animals home and taking care of them. He sent away for a brochure from one of those medical schools. One of the preliminary requirements is to read medicine with a doctor.”

“Reading medicine” was a fancy term for a doctor in training. Normally a doctor would jump at the chance at having an eager young man serve as nurse, janitor, secretary, and all-around handyman. Still, Doc Myers hesitated.

“I don’t want any trouble with your pa.”

“There won’t be,” she said, hoping she spoke the truth. “As long as Caleb continues to work at the store, I don’t think Papa will mind what he does in his spare time.”

Doc Myers wiped a hand over his newly shaved chin, his initial reluctance seeming to dissipate. “We could probably work something out. Maybe I could put him in charge of Mrs. Brubaker’s imaginary illnesses.” He winked and Lucy laughed. “Have him come and see me.”

“Thank you,” she said, resisting the urge to throw her arms around him.
Wait till Caleb hears this!

It rained for the next two days solid. It was a regular gully washer that turned the roads into rivers of mud.

Lucy paced the floor, anxious for the skies to clear and the warm spring weather of the last couple of weeks to return. She could hardly wait to get started on her newspaper assignment. At long last! A real job. Now if only the rain would stop.

On the third day she got her wish. Waking to find sunlight streaming through her window, she leaped out of bed with a whoop and a holler.

She waited for her father and brother to leave for work before hauling her camera and equipment out to the wagon. Lord help her if Papa knew what she was up to this time. He would surely lock her up.

A photograph of hers on the front page of the
Rocky Creek Gazette
! The very thought sent a thrill down her spine. At long last, her dream of seeing her photographs in print was close to reality. But it wasn’t only for professional reasons that she was determined to track down the stranger. She wanted to make certain that the man did indeed exist and hadn’t been a figment of her imagination—or what Doc Myers called a hallucination.

If he
was
real, she needed to prove that kissing a stranger was not due to a lack of morality on her part but simply a result of her brush with death. Now that she’d had time to recover from her ordeal, she fully expected that the next time she came face-to-face with him the feel of his lips on hers would be the furthest thing from her mind.

As for Papa . . .

She hated having to go behind his back, but she was certain—more than certain—that he would never understand this compulsion of hers to track the man down.

She recalled with a sigh the frustrated look on her father’s face as he ranted at her, and his discouraged look later that same night as he sat in a chair staring at something only he could see.

She didn’t doubt for a moment that he wanted what was best for her, but he didn’t understand her passion for photography. Whenever he saw her lugging her camera or spending time in the old shed out back—which with Caleb’s help she’d turned into a darkroom—he shook his head.

“You shouldn’t be working around dangerous chemicals,” he’d say. Darkroom explosions were unfortunately common and he never failed to point out any he read about in the newspaper. “Why can’t you take up painting, like your mother?” he’d ask time and time again.

She had tried watercolors, had even dabbled in oils, but the truth was painting held no interest for her. She loved the challenge of taking photographs and preserving for posterity a telling look, a certain move, a fleeting moment of time that might never again be repeated.

Her father didn’t understand moments in time; he only understood time that could be measured in hours or days. Nor would he understand her need to capture a photograph of a man she barely knew.

Somehow she would have to find a way to make up for all the trouble and worry she’d caused him. Perhaps marrying Mr. Spencer or Mr. Crankshaw wouldn’t be as bad as all that.

She grimaced at the thought. What was she thinking? She loved her father dearly, but there had to be a better way to appease him than to marry a man she didn’t even like.

Sighing, she looked over her supplies. Wet plates or dry? Wet plates were considerably cheaper and the glass base could be cleaned and coated and used many times over.

Dry plates saved her the hassle of having to pack bottles of negative bath and vials of ammonia, acid, mercury, and alcohol. They also saved her the trouble of coating glass plates with collodion made from explosive guncotton. Dry plates also required less exposure time than did wet plates. After much consideration, she decided to go with the dry plates, despite the additional cost.

The last thing she wedged into the back of the wagon next to her photo equipment was a basket with cheese, a loaf of bread, and a flask of lemonade.

Heady with anticipation, she harnessed her horse, Tripod, and hitched him to the wagon. Moments later she was on her way.

The road was muddy, which meant she had to drive around large puddles of water, but the warming rays of sun cheered her as did the clear blue sky.

With a little luck, she’d have a photograph of the intriguing stranger by the end of the day, and maybe even some answers to her questions. She felt confident that everything would go according to plan.

Just don’t let him kiss me again!

Seven

Children should be seen—but not necessarily by the camera’s eye.
Only children with the mildest dispositions should even be allowed
to enter a studio lest their rowdy antics drive the poor
photographer to distraction.

—M
ISS
G
ERTRUDE
H
ASSLEBRINK, 1878

L
ucy scanned every tree, every bush, every shadow, but nothing stirred. Only the steady rush of the swollen muddy river broke the silence. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone, that someone or something watched from the distance.
Please don’t let it be the three outlaws
. She glanced around. Was she imagining it? Hallucinating? What?

Pushing her nervousness away, she shifted the satchel holding her camera into the other hand and followed the river upstream. So far, she had no luck. She found the ashes of a campfire but nothing more, and there was no way of knowing if it was his.

Red mud covered her shoes and splattered the hem of her skirt, but still she continued her search. The air hung heavy with the smell of damp earth and wet vegetation. She followed a trail through the woods that led her to a small clearing overlooking the river. Across the way, newly cut trees slithered down a metal chute into the churning water, and started downstream toward the lumber mill.

She set her camera down on a tree stump and lowered herself onto a fallen log to rest. She’d been to this particular spot often, but this time she noticed something that had previously escaped her.

The bend of the river and the boulder shaped like the head of an eagle were identical to one of her mother’s paintings. Not the ones displayed on the walls of their cabin, but the painting hidden in the back of the cupboard—the one her father refused to let her hang. The bushes were taller now than when her mother had painted the scene, which is why Lucy had not previously recognized the spot.

Shaken by the discovery, she tried to imagine her mother sitting in this very spot, working her brushes across the canvas, dabbling the yellow and gold on the leaves, the red soil, and the purple hue of distant shadows.

Unbelievable sadness seemed to emanate from the very soil at her feet. It wasn’t new, this feeling. Whenever she would sneak a look at her mother’s last painting, she felt the same oppressive gloominess. She blamed it on not being allowed to hang the painting on the wall. Maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it was something in the painting itself. What was her mother thinking when she painted it? And why was her father so adamant against hanging it?