Steel Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #2, Chloe and Matthew's story) (7 page)

             
"I can't think of any good reason for anyone to do this.  Jason Seth has what he wanted."

             
I sat up and frowned.  "Jason Seth bought the mine.  At a fair price to everyone concerned."

             
Matthew grinned.  "Not fair to him, but no one could convince him of that.  The mine's played out, Chloe."

             
I waved a hand.  "Jason Seth will take years to become convinced what you had isn't going to produce for him."

             
"Fine by me."

             
I ignored him, still frowning.  "He shot you," I said.

             
Matthew raised a brow.  "I do remember."

             
"He shot you because you escorted his sister."

             
Matthew looked a little more sharply at me.  "I remember that too."

             
I didn't hold up a hand to make him stop agreeing or disagreeing; sometimes, indicating you're pursuing a train of thought just challenges the Longren boys to interrupt it.

             
"Jason Seth hated you because you had a mine he wanted.  Now he has the mine."

             
Matthew was listening now.

             
"He hated you because you were with his sister."

             
The hotel had gone quiet again.  I could hear horses on the street.

             
"But he shot you to make up for that."

             
Matthew gave me a sardonic glance.  "Someone who shoots you to feel he's gotten his own back never really will feel that he has."

             
I nodded as if I understood that.

             
"He spent time in jail because of that.  Could he still hold a grudge?"

             
Matthew laid both hands flat on the table and spoke earnestly.  "I don't pretend to know anything about what Jason Seth might do."

             
Now I wanted to hold up my hand to shush him.  "But the fact that you didn't marry Elizabeth.  That you were seeing her and that you stopped."

             
Matthew contradicted himself.  "He got that out of his system."

             
And there was the point I'd been circling, hoping it would become clear not only for Matthew but for me.

             
"Did she?"

             
In the silence, the crow song outside and the horses moving up the street sounded loud.  When one of the carpenters dropped something in the other room, we both jumped. 

             
"Do you think she put someone up to it?"

             
But my eyes fluttered closed again and there, in memory, was the figure running from the back of the hotel, the curious gait, the graceful movements.  There was the face I couldn't make out at the far end of the alley, and the figure raising the bottle, face hidden under layers of scarf.

             
There were the bruises on my ribs, my legs and arms from being dragged by someone taller than me—everyone was—but not necessarily stronger.  There was the reason someone would set fire to the Faro Queen, when the Longrens shouldn't have enemies anymore in Gold Hill or in Virginia City.  Hutch and Maggie legally married, Maggie had saved more than one mother and child with her midwifery and Hutch and Matthew had sold the mine.

             
Elizabeth Seth.  Because when Matthew had stopped seeing her the previous summer, just before Maggie came to town, just before Elizabeth's overprotective brother shot Matthew, she hadn't let go easily.  She'd cried and clung and followed him everywhere, her face drawn and eyes red and Matthew had told me it was a small town and I was imagining it, that of course she might frequent the same plays or the same shops. 

             
"Someone pushed me in front of a carriage yesterday," I said. 

             
"What?"  He reached for me.  I was fine, but also more than willing to let him hold my hand on the table top.

             
"I went into Gold Hill to fetch groceries for my mother.  Coming out of the shop, I stepped into the street, couldn't see past the wagons and boards and horses and people and a carriage was coming.  Ow, Matthew." 

             
He'd squeezed my hand quite hard. 

             
"Someone pulled me back, some older man who was visiting his daughter, a caretaker from a ranch down in the valley.  He didn't see who pushed me, but he saw me lurch in front of the carriage and he pulled me back."

             
"You're not hurt?"  He almost made it a statement.

             
"No, I'm not," I agreed.  "But angry."  I met his eyes.  "The carriage belonged to Mrs. Hastings.  I came to Virginia City today to talk to Maggie.  I thought maybe—"

             
He shook his head.  "That Violet's mother wanted to run you down?"

             
"Or that Violet pushed me.  When the carriage stopped, I didn't see her in it but Mrs. Hastings didn't bother to get out and then, when the carriage went on, after their retainer replaced my parcels, she was there."  I spread my hands, waiting for him to see my logic.

             
"Violet is assured of her own beauty," Matthew said, despite the fact I hissed at him.  "And she is quite beautiful.  Stop that.  She is.  You know she is.  She likes to campaign for the unobtainable."

             
I stared.

             
"I don't think Violet Hastings ever really thought I was going to choose her.  I think, if she had thought it, she'd have run a mile to avoid it."

             
That was an image.  Violet was dainty, the type of girl who never had a hair out of place.  I couldn't imagine her running across the room to welcome her husband, let alone a mile.

             
"When I told her I was going to ask you to be my wife, she was completely willing to offer advice."  He met my eyes.  "I can't imagine she'd try to harm you.  And the burning—"

             
"—The burning came before I was hit," I said.  "Though, perhaps…"

             
"Perhaps, nothing.  Let's not imagine there are so many girls pining for me and willing    to—” He’d started lightly but ended somber.  "Willing to hurt the one I love."

              In the interlude, before Maggie and Hutch came back, before we realized we needed to find Sheriff Gannon and tell him what we suspected, what I now remembered seeing and the face that was falling into place, in that interlude we made the most of our time together in the empty kitchen, hands and mouths and eyes, touches and kisses and whispered plans.  We'd marry in spring.  We'd marry in summer.  We'd marry the next day and, in the meantime, as long as we were going to marry, why didn't we—

             
"You were the one who went away last night," I reminded him.

             
"Sometimes, I have no sense," he admitted.

             
"May I get that in writing?"

             
"Wench."

             
Sheriff Rick Gannon was actually in his office when we went there sometime later.  The potbelly stove put off a welcome heat.

             
"Is the Queen on fire again?" he asked when we came through the door.

             
"Not yet," Matthew said.  "And maybe not again."

             
Rick Gannon looked from Matthew to me.  "Did you remember something?"

             
"I know who hit me," I said.  There was nowhere to sit in the Sheriff's Office and I felt like a schoolgirl, called upon to recite.  My hands automatically laced in front of me.  "And why I couldn't place the face.  She was dressed like a man."

             
The Sheriff started, moving forward in his chair but not quite coming to his feet.  "
She
?"

             
"It's Elizabeth Seth, Sheriff," I said.

             
His expression didn't instantly resolve into understanding.  It had been Sheriff Bill Townsend in Gold Hill who had dealt with Jason Seth shooting Matthew and who had accompanied Mr. Seth when he tried to evict Hutch and Maggie before the bank actually foreclosed on the house. 

             
But, the towns aren't that far apart and people talk.  He turned to Matthew.  "Mr. Seth bought your mine?  And he was the fellow who shot you."

             
Matthew agreed.

             
"Awfully good of you to sell him your mine after he shot you," Sheriff Gannon said contemplatively.

             
"And may he have all the luck he deserves with it," Matthew finished.  "Mr. Seth shot me because I'd been stepping out with his sister, Miss Elizabeth Seth, for a little while last winter and spring.  Miss Anders and I were…"  He glanced at me.  "We weren't."

             
That seemed to satisfy the Sheriff, who didn't seem to care as much about Matthew and I as about Matthew and Elizabeth Seth, which was as it should be.

             
"She didn't take it well, Sheriff, when I stopped courting her.  She made a fuss and didn't care who knew about it."

             
"I see.  And did Mr. Longren stop seeing Miss Seth because he was seeing you again, Miss Anders?"

             
"Yes.  Elizabeth was upset.  I might not have seen much of it except she followed Matthew—Mr. Longren," I corrected, but it seemed silly to call him that, I'd known him for so many years.  "She behaved…"  How could I put it delicately?  "Quite badly."  Not that she had put things delicately.  The young lady could teach the Longrens' carpenters a thing or two.

             
"You're sure?"  The Sheriff was standing now, ready to head into the cloudy, darkening afternoon after the now-elusive Miss Elizabeth Seth.

             
And I was.  Since talking to Matthew and sorting things out, I could remember her face above the scarf, the way she'd been dressed like a man, in trousers, boots and a big coat, but that the clothes had been too big for her, her movements too wrong for a man's, her face too familiar but out of place above the scarves. 

             
I told him that, briefly, and I told him that she'd dragged me, awkwardly, because she might be tall but she wasn't necessarily strong.  I tried to delicately tell him I was bruised but, when he didn't understand, Matthew simply said, "Chloe said she has bruises.  It sounds like Miss Seth banged her about because she was too heavy for her."

             
"Likely, there will be a bottle of lamp oil there, too, at Miss Seth's residence, or at her brother's."  She still lived with her mother, though her brother didn't.  One of them would have the oil, a sloping sided glass bottle with blue printing.  There were shards of the other that had been collected from the alley near the outbuildings.  The bottle had looked strange to me, not the same type my family used.

             
"More than one person can use the same kind of lamp oil, Miss Anders," Sheriff Gannon said.  "If Miss Seth says that she was somewhere else on the afternoon in question?" the Sheriff said.  It seemed a bit rote, the question, as if he'd made up his mind already to, if nothing else, go ask questions, but he was asking this one of me anyway.

             
Even Matthew didn't know this.  "Then ask to look at her hands," I said, and when Matthew turned to look at me, surprised, and Sheriff Gannon raised an eyebrow, I said simply: "I bit her."

              Miss Seth was home when Sheriff Gannon arrived at her parents' house in Gold Hill, accompanied by Sheriff Bill Townsend.  Her widowed mother protested briefly and Elizabeth claimed to have been with her brother the day before, the two of them spending the day going over the accounts for the mine.

             
The sheriffs had asked to see the oil the family used in their lamps, to the confusion of Mrs. Seth and Jason when he arrived, having been called by a family friend who rode to the mine to fetch him.  Elizabeth had protested to no avail.  Her mother didn't know; Jason didn't suspect in time.  The oil was produced, in its glass bottle with sloping sides and blue ink.

             
And then there was the neat circle of tooth marks on the back of Elizabeth Seth's left hand.

              Matthew and I didn't budge from the Sheriff's office, but we weren't needed once the Sheriff returned with Miss Seth.  I had expected deputies might want to compare the bite marks on her hand to my teeth, or that they'd ask her questions, or any number of things that happened in the mystery novels Maggie shared with me.

             
There was no need.  Despite having been told why she was being arrested (and truthfully, she must have known), the minute she was led into the Sheriff's Office, Elizabeth Seth went mad, clawing and scratching and shouting.  She raked her nails down the face of the deputy who held her by the arm, leaving bloody furrows in the instant before she yanked her way free of him and tore across the office at me, claws out, face twisted in a snarl.

             
Matthew moved fast.  He stepped directly in front of me, pushing me back with one hand as the other caught Elizabeth neatly.  The instant he had one hand captured and me pushed back, he reached for her other wrist, then held her as she spat and kicked until the deputies got hold of her and forced her into a cell.

             
"She can't stay there," Sheriff Gannon said gruffly.  "Jail's for men.  But we'll find a place to hold her." 

             
During the struggle, the bite on the back of her hand had opened; blood dripped from the outline of my teeth.

             
There wasn't anything else needed from us.  When a circuit court judge came through, we'd make statements and there'd be a hearing. 

             
"Will she be held until then?" Matthew asked.  He eyed Elizabeth the same way he'd eye a rabid coyote.  Elizabeth Seth was tall, taller than her brother, but slender enough, we both kept judging if she could slip through the bars.

             
Probably not.  But it would be nice to be even further from Gold Hill than Virginia City.  I think that's the first time the thought occurred to me.  Maggie had worried she and Hutch were running away when they chose to move to Virginia City.  I had no qualms about leaving the area.  I'd miss my parents and my friends.

             
But I wouldn't miss the Seths.

             
"We'll find a place to hold her," Sheriff Gannon said.  "Judge is due through soon.  Maybe they'll take her to Carson City if she's convicted.  There's a prison there for women."

             
And that was that.  A hearing would be set and, in the meantime, Jason Seth would be watched and Elizabeth Seth was behind bars.  Violet Hastings had never done anything to me, though in the back of my mind I was still wary of her.

             
Matthew and I stepped out of the Sheriff's Office into the lowering sunlight of the day and my knees gave way promptly.  Matthew caught me, almost as if he'd been expecting it.

             
"Easy," he said. 

  
              "Everything's over," I protested.  "Shouldn't I be—"

             
"—Upset someone tried to kill you?  Twice?"  He raised an eyebrow at me.

             
He had a point.  My life had been much calmer before Matthew Longren became such a big part of it.  Calm.  And dull.

              "Let's take a walk," he said, as if it were a beautiful spring day instead of the tail end of a freezing cold January day.  We walked half a block before my father, the Mayor, stepped from his office and demanded an accounting of our behavior—we'd been seen leaving the Sheriff's Office and, although he didn't preface his questions with "What have you done now?", the sentiment was there.

             
Until we explained … and told him again we were engaged to wed.  I promised that I would be home early, though there was no consensus on what constituted early.

              We met at Maggie and Hutch's for the dinner to celebrate.  Maggie briefly protested that celebrating the arrest of a young woman was uncouth, but she was outvoted by the rest of us.  We roasted a chicken with potatoes and cabbage and Maggie made a shaker lemon pie as I made biscuits, one of the few things my mother was able to teach me not to burn or bake into the semblance of building materials.  I thought it would be best if Matthew didn't learn until too late that his bride-to-be couldn't cook.

             
Annie came, back from visiting her son, Jacob, at the University of Nevada in Reno, and brought Sarah and Kitty, both of them bursting with ideas for going to University, if only for the number of eligible young men there who weren't miners.  At 16, Sarah was developing an unbridled interest in men.  At 14, Kitty still split her attention between catching lizards and catching boys.  Annie looked tired, as if the conversation had been running that way most of the train ride back from Reno, but once dinner was served and Hutch toasted Matthew and I and then explained that I'd be needing a wedding dress and would Annie care to assist, she woke completely.  Matthew dodged hastily out of the way as Annie, Sarah, Kitty and I met and embraced and began talking, fast and loud, about all the most important things.

             
The men left the kitchen. They'd be back, they said, when we were actually planning on eating.  And that took a while.