Rekindled (15 page)

She quickly counted eleven women, besides her, Annabelle, and a bountifully girthed woman laboring over the stove. The eyes boring into hers belonged to women of all ages, shapes, and sizes. Most were younger than she, but two looked older. Much older.

A common thread twined itself through the group. Kathryn couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but . . .

The joy inside her flickered. Her smile faded.

“Girls, this is Kathryn,” Annabelle announced, waving her hand in a queenly gesture. “She needed a place to stay last night so she took Marcy’s room. She’ll be with us for a few days till she lands some work.”

Gawking expressions darkened to frowns. All but one.

A small dark-haired girl at the end nodded, almost imperceptibly. Her cinnamon almond-shaped eyes flicked to Kathryn’s. Away. Then back again. A pretty smile curved her diminutive mouth.

“Well, she’s not takin’ my room!” a stout blonde declared with authority.

The aging brunette beside her banged the table with her fist. “Mine either. And I don’t appreciate Betsy hirin’ someone without talkin’ to us first!”

Heat poured through Kathryn’s body. She fought the impulse to get up and run. Her eyes darted from face to face as tainted images of what these women did—of what they were—turned her stomach. The aroma of eggs and bacon suddenly became fetid.

What on earth had Gabe been thinking? He hadn’t found her a room in a boardinghouse. He’d delivered her to a house of ill repute!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I
SAIAH ACCOMPANIED LARSON the first day of his journey, explaining that he wanted to make sure Larson found his way back through the obscure mountain pass that led to their secluded valley. Larson didn’t bother telling him he already knew the way. Instinctively. He’d grown up reading the position of the sun and had memorized the peaks of the Rockies. Never once had he been lost in this land. Ever.

Isaiah moved over the rocky terrain with surprising agility for a man his size, and though he purposefully lagged his pace, Larson had to work to keep up with him. Close to noon, Larson paused and leaned heavily on his staff, resting for a moment before attempting the steep climb before him. The cool mountain air felt good in his chest, but he still couldn’t seem to draw in enough of it to satisfy his lungs.

Watching Isaiah up ahead, he wondered again how the man had gotten him back to the cabin after finding him in the burned-out shack. Later that night he took the opportunity to ask.

Isaiah grew quiet at the question, smiling in that way of his that signaled his hesitance to speak on the matter.

“You’re a powerful man, Isaiah, I’ll grant you that. But I’m no trifling,” Larson needled him, edging back a good ways from the fire Isaiah had built. “Or I didn’t used to be.”

Isaiah laughed, then grew quiet.

“Seriously, how did you get me back there?” Larson asked again, his curiosity roused.

Isaiah rose, gathered timber in his arms, and laid it on the fire. White sparks shot up into the dark night sky, and the crackle of flame consuming wood sent involuntarily shivers up Larson’s spine. He appreciated the fire’s light and welcomed its warmth, as long as he didn’t have to handle the flames.

Isaiah took his time in answering, a wistful look filling his eyes. “A fine ol’ gal named Mabel carried you.”

Larson laughed. “Mabel, huh? She must be one brute of a woman.” Isaiah laughed along with him. Then, watching him closer, Larson felt his humor drain away. “What happened to her?”

Isaiah stoked the fire with a long branch. “I heard of a man looking for a good mule, so I sold her a while back . . . at a small mining camp not too far over the ridge there.” He pursed his lips as though trying to decide what to say next.

Larson stared at the former slave sitting across the fire from him, the words forming in his mind less of a question and more a statement of fact. “You sold her to buy what you needed to care for me.”

Isaiah shrugged a broad shoulder and stared into the flames.

Larson tasted the salt of his tears before he realized he’d shed them. Was there no end to this man’s generosity? He quickly wiped them away but knew that Isaiah had seen.

“Tears carry no shame, Larson. ’Specially not tears of gratitude. I’ve shed so many in my life I’ve lost count. I was afraid to cry in front of Abby at first, but she taught me that every person’s been hurt and has wounds. Some scars are just easier to see than others.” Isaiah’s dark eyes seemed to focus somewhere beyond Larson, on a memory long past. “The outward scars aren’t what determine what a man will become. It’s the inward scars that can keep a man from living the life God intended.”

Long into the night, Larson lay awake thinking about what Isaiah had said. And when Isaiah laid a hand to his shoulder the following morning as they said good-bye, the wisdom had taken firm root.

“You’ve been led down this path for a purpose, Larson. It’s not one you would’ve chosen—I know that.” His laughter mixed with a sigh. “I wouldn’t have chosen most of what’s happened in my life either, but I’ve come to trust that my sweet Jesus can see things better from where He is than I can from here . . . as hard as that seems sometimes.”

He pulled Larson into a hug and Larson returned it, unable to keep from smiling at how uncomfortable he would’ve been hugging another man before this. He squeezed his eyes tight against the emotion rising in his throat.

From the slope of the afternoon sun, Larson estimated three more hours of light. He and Isaiah had covered roughly four miles yesterday, and today he would push his body to its limit to cover three. His progress was gratingly slow, and it goaded his pride when he recalled how he used to walk twenty plus miles a day without fatigue. He reached down and massaged his right leg. It was already paining him, but he pushed on.

Near dusk he stopped, his leg throbbing. He eased the pack from his shoulders and sank to the ground. After a quick dinner of Abby’s biscuits and jerky, he filled his canteen from the stream running in a fury down the mountainside, evidence of the spring snow melt. Isaiah had told him this particular watercourse fed the lake by their cabin, then flowed all the way to the lower towns at the base of the Rockies. Larson dipped his finger briefly in the icy water, watching it flow downstream and wondering if that same water would soon churn down Fountain Creek past his cabin.

Tipping up his canteen, he drank deeply of Adam’s ale, recalling the first time he’d used that phrase with Kathryn.

“What are you calling it?”
she’d asked, grinning.

“Adam’s ale.”
He’d pushed back a damp strand of blond hair from her shoulder, enjoying the smirk of disbelief on her face.
“It flows out of the mountains, fresh from the heart of the earth, clear as crystal.”
She’d used the term ever since.

Larson walked back to where he’d left his pack and pulled the wrapped bottle of liniment from the pocket. He shed his pants and long johns and rubbed the dark brown mixture into his aching muscles. The welted reddened flesh bunched and rippled beneath his fingers. He winced, wishing again for Abby’s firm but gentle touch, and for Isaiah’s conversation.

Dressing again, he unrolled his bedding and lay down. He would have liked to continue reading in the Bible Isaiah and Abby had given him but light was fading, and he let the matches at the bottom of his pack lay untouched. The chill from the ground seeped through to his bones, but he shut his mind to the cold.

Instead, he turned his thoughts back to the first time he’d pictured Kathryn as an older woman—one Abby’s age, and again the image touched him. As Abby had tended him one afternoon, he’d found himself studying her features and had quickly decided she’d been a beauty in younger years. Abby still possessed a comeliness about her, but it shone now more from within.

He closed his eyes and Kathryn’s face came into view, her warm brown eyes and honey hair, the silk of her skin. He’d long appreciated her outward beauty, but he suspected that Kathryn’s beauty would one day deepen into a radiance similar to Abby’s, and the thought warmed him. His body responded, and he hungered for the intimacies shared between a husband and his wife.

In an unexpected moment of hope, he allowed a fissure in his heart wide enough to entertain the possibility that he might enjoy that with Kathryn again someday. If she were able to look past who he was on the outside now, to what lay beneath.

He slowly turned onto his back to study the night sky and put his hand out as though reaching for the handle of the Big Dipper. How could he have ever doubted the woman Kathryn was? Or her loyalty to him?

But he knew the reason, and his chest ached with the truth of it. Kathryn had borne the brunt of his suspicion and distrust stemming from his mother’s faithlessness. Images of mistreatment at his mother’s hand, and at the hands of her countless lovers, crowded the night’s stillness. One particular memory stood out, and Larson’s stomach hardened as he relived the scene. . . .

His mother sat in the corner of the dimly lit bedroom, her expression like a mask, her dark eyes glazed as she watched the man grab her son by the scruff of the neck and shove him down. Larson could still hear the jarring crunch of his bony knees as he hit the bare wooden floor, then the sound of the door latching behind him.

“Take off your shirt.” A sickly smile wrapped itself around the man’s voice. Then he’d lit a cheroot and slowly inhaled, the smoldering end flaming redder with each exaggerated draw. . . .

Larson shifted to his side on the hard ground, still able to smell the acrid stench of the cigar, and of what followed. His eyes burned.
God, erase it from my memory
. Wasn’t it enough to have endured it once? How could a woman—his own mother—be so cruel and void of compassion? What had he done to lose her love?

But Kathryn wasn’t like his mother. He knew that now, and he planned on spending the rest of his life proving it to her.

Kathryn huddled closer to the boardinghouse doorway to avoid the rain pouring off the slanted tin roof. A cold droplet somehow found its way past the protection of her coat and trickled down her back. She shuddered at the chill. The barren land needed the rich moisture to green the brown prairie grasses and nurture coming crops, but the heavy, overcast skies did nothing to lift the gloom in her heart.

She knocked again and smoothed the wet hair back from her face. Her gaze shot up at the door’s creaking, but what she saw wasn’t heartening. “May I speak with the proprietor, please?”

A tall bone-thin woman blew a gray wisp of thinning hair from her eyes and shifted the load of soiled linens in her arms. “I’m the proprietor.” She eyed Kathryn, her eyes narrowing. “We’re all full up on rooms right now, if that’s what you’re wantin’. Check back with me next month.”

She started to shut the door, but Kathryn put out her hand. The thought of spending a second night at the brothel bred uncustomary boldness within her. What she’d heard last night was enough to have kept her slogging through the rain and mud all day. She wouldn’t be easily deterred.

“Please, ma’am. I don’t need a big room, nothing fancy. Just a place to stay.” Kathryn nodded toward the laundry. “And I’ll work for you. I can do laundry and clean and cook and—”

“I said I got no rooms right now. I’m full up. And I ain’t got no money to pay tenants to cook and clean. This town’s hit hard times. Folks have to pull their own—”

“Oh, I don’t expect any pay for it. I’ll do it plus pay you for the room.” As long as it wasn’t more than the scant amount she had left after seeing Mr. Kohlman that morning.

The woman’s gaze traveled the length of her. “You in some kinda trouble, girl?”

Yes. But not the kind you think
. Kathryn shook her head. “I just need a place to stay.”

“Well, can’t help you none with that.” She moved to close the door, then must have read the desperation in Kathryn’s face because she paused. Her lips pursed. “You might check across town with the preacher. Sometimes he and his woman take in folks who’s hit hard times.”

Kathryn nodded, feeling a tear slip down her cheek but doubting the woman noticed. She was wet to the bone as it was, and besides, the woman had already closed the door.

She started back down the boardwalk, her pace as sluggish as her hope. This was the last boardinghouse in town, and she’d already been to the preacher’s house first thing that morning. A passerby had said they were away visiting family and had directed her to the boardinghouses in town. Late afternoon relinquished its fading vestiges of light to the laden pewter skies, and though everything within her rebelled at the thought, Kathryn turned back in the direction from which she’d come that morning.

She waited for a wagon to pass, then crossed the muddy street, avoiding the deeper puddles and deposits as best she could. Back on the planked walkway, she stomped the mud from her boots and quickened her pace as she passed the saloon. Kathryn avoided eye contact with two men lurking just inside the doorway. One of them let out a low whistle, which she didn’t acknowledge, but her cheeks burned at the lewd remark that followed.

Minutes later she passed the bank and recalled her meeting with Mr. Kohlman earlier that day. He had laughed—literally laughed— at her suggestion of paying him back the loans. Remembering his flat denial to offer her a payment schedule brought a scowl. But he
had
acquiesced upon discovering that she’d brought enough for one monthly payment—Mr. Hochstetler at the mercantile had paid her a goodly sum, and Jake Sampson at the livery had been generous in buying back their tackle and gear—but even then Kohlman had accepted the money with a begrudging air.