Memory's Embrace (26 page)

Tess drew a deep breath, steadied herself. “Emma, wait, please,” she said gently. “Wait for Rod. It would be better if he went with you.”

“I can’t wait! I won’t! I did this, it’s all my fault!” Her voice wavered, tears welled in her wide brown eyes and trickled down her cheeks. “Mama must be so frightened, all alone in that dreadful place—”

“Emma, listen to me. You can’t—”

“No!” screamed Emma, suddenly, shrilly. “No, don’t try to talk me out of going, Tess! You’re always talking me out of things—and into things. I want to see Mama!”

Just then, the suite’s door opened in the near distance and Rod called out his wife’s name. There was no trace of the anger he’d borne Emma the night before in his tone; he might have been a bookkeeper coming home to have midday tea.

With him, looking cherubic and dapper, was Cedrick Golden. When Cedrick’s eyes touched Tess, a guarded sort of fury sparked in their depths and was instantly quelled.

Rod was staring at Emma, and it almost seemed that he had come to love her, so obvious was his concern for her. “Emma, what is it?”

“My mama—oh, Rod, it was my mama that shot Mr. Shiloh—”

“Keith,” Tess corrected her quietly. “His name isn’t Joel Shiloh, it’s Keith Corbin.”

No one, with the exception of Cedrick, seemed to hear her. Rod was embracing his trembling, tearful Emma, crooning words of comfort into her hair. Tess wondered, with an odd idleness, where Cynthia had gotten off to. Hadn’t Emma said that she was with Rod and Cedrick?

“She’s in jail, Rod!” Emma prattled, in hysterical horror. The full import of what she had done was penetrating then, and Tess was sorry for her. “My poor mama, in jail, with all those dreadful criminals!”

“We’ll go there, right now,” Rod promised rashly, eager to comfort. Very eager, for a man who had resisted the constraints of marriage even after the fact. “Everything will be all right, Emma. I promise you that.”

Tess felt Cedrick’s gaze upon her and shifted her eyes to his face. What she saw, in that unguarded moment, startled her. The actor looked as though he could cheerfully murder her where she sat.

Of course, being the consummate performer that he was, Cedrick suppressed the emotion so swiftly, so skillfully, that Tess could almost believe she had imagined it.

“Cedrick,” she said, in polite, belated greeting.

He inclined his too-handsome head. “My dear,” he replied.

Tess felt queasy and very uncomfortable. Given the circumstances, that wasn’t surprising, she supposed, but she did wish that Cedrick hadn’t come in with Rod. He never failed to disturb her, to make her feel off balance, like a person groping in the dark.

“Do you want to come along, Tess?”

Rod’s question, gently put as it was, startled Tess, made her jump reflexively in her chair.

“I don’t think that would be appropriate, under the circumstances. You see, I just married the man Cornelia shot.”

There was a charge in the room, almost a tangible thing, thick and threatening, and it wasn’t coming from Rod, who was, despite his invitation, completely absorbed in an equally oblivious Emma. No, it was coming from Cedrick Golden, that oppressive feeling of hatred, and Tess was stunned by the strength and scope of it.

Cedrick addressed Rod, though his eyes, unreadable and veiled, were fixed on Tess. “I’ll see you there in my carriage, of course,” he offered, ever the polite, accommodating friend.

And if he was a friend, why did he dangle the part in his play before Rod like a carrot before a dray horse?

“Won’t you let me drop you off at your shop on the way, Miss——Mrs. Corbin?”

Tess rose out of her chair, shook her head. Never, at any time in her life, had she felt so threatened, so unsafe. “No,” she blurted, too quickly. After a moment, she regained her composure and spoke more moderately. “No, thank you. I have my bicycle.”

“Did you tell her about the money you borrowed, Rod?” Emma chattered feverishly, into the heavy silence that followed. “Did you tell her about the money?”

The floor shifted and rolled beneath Tess’s feet.

“What money, Rod?” she demanded, glaring at her half-brother, trying to withstand the new and sudden
horror that was thundering against her like an incoming tide. “What money?!”

“I’ll explain later,” said Rod, avoiding her eyes, his tone brusque, clipped, his face flushed. “Can’t you see what a state Emma’s in?”

“You got into my bank account somehow, didn’t you?” insisted Tess frantically. “You—you loaned my money to this—this confidence man!”

“Confidence man?!” snarled Cedrick.

Tess wanted to pursue the matter, but Rod was having none of that. He gathered Emma and bustled her out, Cedrick storming along behind them, red to his elfin ears, fury moving in every lithe line of his body.

“Rod Thatcher-Waltam!” Tess yelled. “You come back here, you thief! You——”

The suite’s door slammed and she was alone. Without even going to the bank, Tess knew that she was, thanks to Rod, stone broke. She trembled with the worst kind of rage, the helpless kind. She would never have been able to withdraw money had that account been Rod’s, but, because he was a man and her brother, the laws of the land apparently allowed him such a travesty!

Tess stood up shakily and left the suite in a stumbling state of blind, impotent rage. It hardly seemed possible that this was her wedding day; her husband was lying in a hospital bed, her best friend’s mother had attempted to murder him, and now her money was gone.

Tess’s bicycle still rested against the streetlamp. Glumly, she pedaled her way homeward.

Reaching her shop, she wheeled her bicycle inside, pulled down the shades on the windows facing the busy street outside, and locked the door. After a cup of tea
and a long interval of staring off into space, she went across the road to speak with the banker Asa had placed in charge of her account.

He was amazingly offhand, considering that she had been robbed. Clerks made mistakes, after all, he maintained, and if Tess wanted to recover her money, it seemed to him that she would be better off to approach her brother.

“My father didn’t arrange the account so that Rod had access to it, then?” Tess wanted to know, and mingled with her anger and her shock was a certain relief that Asa had trusted her.

“Oh, no. Though I did advise him to do so, of course,” replied the banker blithely. The implication was that a mere, mindless little fluff of a creature such as herself could not be entrusted with such a sum. Might squander it on hat pins and French cologne and other gee-gaws.

“This bank was responsible for my money!” Tess insisted hotly. “I’ve been robbed and it’s your fault! What do you intend to do about it, sir?”

“Do?” The banker shrugged. “I suppose you could press charges against your brother. Have him jailed.”

Tess might well have done exactly that, had it not been for the hardship such an action would cause Emma. “I may press charges against your bank instead,” she answered. There was a long silence, during which the banker didn’t even have the decency to look apologetic. Tess had to puncture his pomposity, she simply had to, and the only needle at hand was her new name.

“Won’t you please change the name on my account, if it’s not too much trouble?” she asked, with acid
sweetness and deliberately widened eyes. “I’m no longer Tess Bishop, you see. As of this afternoon, I am Tess Corbin.”

She waited for the statement to sink in and was buoyed when it did. The banker jumped as though she had prodded his well-cushioned backside with a sharp stick.

“Corbin?” he choked out. “I don’t believe you!”

Cooperatively, Tess took the wedding license, signed that very day by herself, Keith, and the justice of the peace, from the pocket of her skirt. She presented it with dignity.

The banker’s fat hand trembled as he took the paper, read it. His jiggling cheeks, rosy with well-being only moments before, turned parchment-white. “You’re married to Keith Corbin. Con-congratulations.”

“Thank you,” trilled Tess, taking back the license, folding it carefully, returning it to her pocket. “Of course, I don’t think my husband will be very pleased when I tell him how casually this bank views its responsibilities to depositors—”

“We’ll be happy to make amends, of course!” boomed the official, with sudden good will. “And you can be sure that such a mistake won’t be made again, Mrs. Corbin!”

Both triumph and quiet rage mingled within Tess as she signed papers changing her name in the bank’s records and was given a new passbook with the full amount Rod had taken from her written prominently inside. Triumph because she had made this pompous, impossible man restore her money and rage because a name could be so much more important than personal integrity.

“I’ll be moving my money at the first opportunity,” she said loftily, as she was leaving the bank again, her passbook firmly in hand.

“But we did everything we could to straighten the matter out!” protested the banker, frantic. Tess would have staked both her bicycle and her camera that he wasn’t worried about her modest account but about funds that the Corbin family probably had on deposit.

“You did,” Tess agreed, her chin high. “After I had proved to you that I am now a member of one of the most prominent families in the Pacific Northwest. You should have done it because it was right”—she paused and consulted the painted script on the bank’s front window—“Mr. Filbertson. Who I was should not have mattered in the least. The important thing was that I had been grievously wronged and the fault was partly yours.”

“Mrs. Corbin!” wailed the banker, spreading his hands, a thin film of sweat beading on his upper lip.

“Good day, Mr. Filbertson,” said Tess, leaving the bank in a sweep of sateen skirts and righteous disdain.

Mr. Filbertson followed her over the wooden sidewalk, across the busy, rutted, dung-dappled road.

“Won’t you please reconsider?” he pleaded.

Tess smiled as she unlocked the door of her shop, shrugged prettily. “I may, Mr. Filbertson. Then again, I may not. Would you like your photograph taken?”

Chapter Sixteen

M
R
. F
ILBERTSON BECAME
T
ESS’S FIRST CUSTOMER, SITTING
nervously for his portrait, his barrel chest plumped, his muttonchop sideburns bristling just a little. He harrumphed loudly when Tess told him that his photograph would be ready by the next day. She knew that he was burning to ask whether or not her account would be transferred to another bank, and she did nothing to ease his discomfort.

To Tess’s mind, he deserved it.

He paused in the shop’s doorway, letting in the sounds and smells of the afternoon traffic bustling by in the road. “I hope we’ll see you again soon, Mrs. Corbin,” he said gruffly.

The lie was so obvious that Tess nearly laughed aloud. Had it not been for her marriage into the powerful Corbin family, he would be hoping for something entirely different.

Giving no answer, she politely inclined her head. Mr. Filbertson reddened and took his leave. Watching as he weaved his way between the wagons, buggies, and carriages clogging the street outside, Tess smiled to herself.

The worry gnawed at him like the teeth of a frenzied beast. Where was Tess? Why hadn’t she returned? Had that mad woman, Cornelia Hamilton, hurt her in some way?

Keith sat upright, the muscles in his wounded shoulder screaming in protest. One thing was for certain: he was through lying around in this bleak hospital, passively allowing the events of his life to flow over him like a stream.

“Vhat do you think you are doing?!” boomed Sister Attila, when she swept into the room, her crisp black habit rustling. “Get back into that bed, Mr. Corbin!”

Keith was sitting on the edge of the bed. Cautiously, he eased himself over the side, to stand on his own two feet. The ward, empty except for himself and the German nun, seemed to sway and undulate around him. “I’ve got to—leave,” he managed to say, even as the enormous woman maneuvered him back onto the mattress and underneath the covers.

“Sleep,” ordered the nun, her mouth a tight line that barely moved as the word passed it.

“I can’t—my wife—”

“Your wife is right here.” The voice was like cool,
clean spring water flowing into a parched creek bed. Tess. Opposite the nun, her face moving in a shimmering fog of discomfort and incomprehensible fatigue, stood Tess.

“You’re all right,” he muttered wearily. The pain was deep-seated, overwhelming.

“Of course I’m all right. You, on the other hand—” She paused, smoothed his forehead with tender fingers.

He groped for her hand, held it desperately in his own. “Don’t go.”

“I won’t,” she promised softly, and he heard the nun leave the room.

And she didn’t. Each time Keith surfaced from the depths of weariness and hurt that kept pulling him under, Tess was there, her hand gripping his own, her scent fresh and comforting in his nostrils.

Yawning, Tess fumbled in her handbag for the key to the shop. It was so early that dawn was just climbing over the eastern mountains, all golden and pink, and the only traffic in the road was a milk wagon.

“Tess!”

She started at Emma’s cry of her name, turned to see her friend rushing up the sidewalk, looking disgruntled and afraid.

What now? Tess thought uncharitably. She was weary to the very fiber of her bones, having been up all night long with Keith. And she still had Mr. Filbertson’s photograph to develop, a task she wasn’t looking forward to. She had never done it before, and would have to depend on the instructions in the books stored in the back of her shop.

“Good morning, Emma,” she said, as she opened
the door and went inside, her friend following virtually on her heels.

“Good morning yourself, Tess Bishop!” retorted Emma furiously. “Where have you been all night? I’ve been frantic, just frantic—”

“I was with my husband,” Tess said evenly.

This announcement gave Emma pause—as Tess had guessed, she hadn’t been listening the day before, at the hotel, when Tess had briefly mentioned her marriage to Keith. Her brown eyes widened and her mouth pursed into an O, and then she bristled, like a little hen that has just been dashed with the dishwater.