Thea Devine (26 page)

“I don’t know. I can’t bear all this.”

“Tell me about all this,” Logan said gently, drawing up one of the rocking chairs to the side of the bed. “Tell me about the sheriff,” he added, because he saw she was about to protest there was too much to tell.

“He came the other day, asking questions about the morning A.J. died. He had a theory—it was to have been in Arch Warfield’s article in
my
paper last week but I cut it. He had this theory that it was possible that I had ducked out the back door, shot A.J., and then dashed back in and pretended to discover him. He asked me to
reenact the scene; he timed it. He suggested it was the first and best explanation he had. And then after the fire, he was right on the spot to imply that I could have set the fire to destroy evidence, that his earlier visit and insinuation had scared me.”

“All right. What else?”

“The end result of the fire is that I have been put in a position where I have to sell if I want to raise money to start up again. Or I can sell the property if I don’t. And it’s beginning to look like the only offer I’m going to get for either property is from Denver North.”

“All right. Anything else?”

“I had a whiff of a feeling someone set the fire just to put me out of business to make way for the
Clarion
. And let’s not forget that Dennis proposed to me again, and Reese has been making noises about wanting to … take over where Frank left off.”

“And don’t forget me,” Logan reminded her grimly.

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she nodded. “Yes. And you. You did ask me to marry you.”

“Anything is possible,” Logan said stoically.

“All right. And then I had this notion that A.J. might have been killed for one of two reasons: so somebody else could step into his place or so that I would be set up for murder. If I were convicted, someone else could move in and take control.”

“I had that thought myself,” Logan said.

“I remember.”

“Is that everything?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

He was quiet for a long time. “It’s a lot,” he said at last, but he didn’t say what he was really thinking, that it was Maggie herself who seemed to be the focus of all these incidents. It scared him. He didn’t want to ask if she were scared; he wasn’t sure she recognized the danger. He didn’t even know how to define it. “There is one
easy answer.”

“I know what it is, too. You want me to marry you,” she said, and a faint note of resentment crept into her voice. She didn’t want him to pursue it. She didn’t want to think about it, because then she would have to make a decision about it, and she was in no fit state to decide anything.

“I was going to say you could walk away from the whole thing,” he said mildly. “You don’t have to marry anybody if you don’t want to.”

“You mean disappear?”

“More or less.”

“And leave Dennis with all Frank’s money sitting in limbo? Don’t be silly, Logan.”

“It was just a thought, Maggie.”

“I suppose
your
limbo would be to immure me at the ranch?”

“It could have been,” he said regretfully. “You do what you want to, Maggie. You always have.”

“You just want to force me to say yes to your proposal,” she accused him.

“Not hardly. I don’t want to force you into anything. But you will be forced to deal with these circumstances, including the fact I want you and I want to marry you, and the fact that our lovemaking may produce still another complication in your life. I don’t think I’m going to touch you again, Maggie. I think you have too much to handle now.”

She was shocked by his abrupt attack. “That’s fine,” she said coolly. “Then you know what my answer to your proposal would be.”

“I’ve always known it, Maggie. You never would back down. Or notice that I’m in town almost as often as if I lived here. You wouldn’t be ‘immured’ anywhere, Maggie, but if you admitted that, then you would have no reason not to make up your mind, and you know we can’t
have that. I think we know where we both stand. Why don’t you rest before you go back to your mother-in-law and Reese? It’s probably the only peace you will get from now on.”

He got up and kicked the rocker back behind him. It thumped into the wall noisily, and the slam of the door emphasized his departure.

But what about her other needs? What about her sinking sense of abandonment? Never touch her again, oh God. And he didn’t care about the rest. He was like everybody else. He had the answer, he could only see that one solution.

And she couldn’t see any at all.

It was just one more thing she was not going to think about—for a while at least. There was no rush. Dennis had given her a month. Logan had sloughed her off altogether, and Reese was impatient and conciliatory by turns.

“You ought to try and get a job on that new paper,” Maggie told him inflexibly. “I just can’t think about what to do right now.”

“Just keep away from that cowboy,” Mother Colleran warned.

“It sounds like a threat,” Maggie said.

“Just some advice.”

“It fell on deaf ears,” Maggie told her.

She rode out to the Colleran ranch just to be sure nothing had changed. Nothing was different.

Another day she went to visit Annie Mapes, and Annie was different. Sean was a worriment; Sean had made more money in the last few months than the ranch had made in a year. He was being seduced, completely and utterly.

“Are
you
seeing any of it?” Maggie wanted to know.
Somehow it seemed easier to deal with Annie’s problems than her own.

“A little,” Annie said reluctantly. “Enough. I’m sorry about the fire, Maggie.”

“Me too.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. What about you?”

“I think Sean’s going to want to sell up, Maggie, I have to warn you. I think he’s rolling into debt and that unctuous Mr. Brown is going to use it to lever us off the land. Sean’s been gambling too. There’s a red room upstairs at the saloon.”

“I understand,” Maggie said.

“And I’ll wind up boarding at Melinda Sable’s new house,” Annie said mournfully.

“Annie! What are you saying?”

“Well, you tell me, Maggie. What else will there be left for me? I haven’t got a man somewhere waiting to marry me. I don’t expect to get away from Colville, even after the extension line comes in. I won’t have any money. And the only man I ever loved doesn’t know I’m alive.”

“Who?” Maggie whispered. “Who is the only man you ever loved?”

“Don’t be stupid, Maggie. I always wanted Logan, from the time we were growing up. I thought you knew that.”

Her heart plummeted. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“You were the only lucky one, Maggie. You got Frank Colleran, and everyone was green about it. And Logan—well, he just never looked at me at all.”

“I’m so sorry, Annie.”

“Can’t make a man love where he doesn’t want to, Maggie. But there is a place to get it when you need it. It works both ways in that respect, you know? It doesn’t scare me. When a man needs enough, he doesn’t care what his woman looks like. And when she wants enough, she doesn’t have to be in love.”

“No,” Maggie whispered, “she doesn’t.”

“So I’ll be all right, Maggie. I hope you’ll be all right too.”

She swallowed hard. “ I will.”

But how was she going to be all right now that she knew Annie’s secret, and when she recalled that she had been blithely planning to hand Logan over to her, giving Annie her heart’s desire.

She rode out to the construction site where the supervisor welcomed her cordially. “Sorry to hear the news, ma’am, even if you was down on the train coming through.”

“I appreciate it. Where are they grading out now?”

“They’re down near the Mapes’ property line, ma’am. I’m hoping he’ll sell out; we can bypass a lot of work if we could go straight on through. But I expect you know that.”

“I know all about it,” she said dully. So the Mapes would go, and next was Logan, whose outlying pasture was flat, perfect. And then her, or that pie-in-the-sky detour they had mapped out around Gully Basin.

The work went on, as relentless as an oncoming locomotive. She saw Warfield in the distance, and someone beside him, sketching. She saw the women of the fields, flirting with this man and that. She saw Logan walking away from her, leaving her to the mercy of all of it. She remembered suddenly she had no business here; she had no forum for her observations.

She had instead Mother Colleran and Reese demanding an accounting for every move. “This is insanity, Reese,” she exploded at one point. “I might just as well…” she almost said, be married to you, but his expression was so hopeful.

“When are you going to be leaving?” she asked abruptly.

“What?” He was thrown off balance by her sudden
reversal. “Maggie, how can I leave you in such straits? I certainly won’t think of going before you’re settled somehow. I owe that much to Frank.”

She turned away.

The net, the net tightening so subtly …

Arch Warfield accosted her, triumphantly. “So you see, Miss Maggie Bitch, someone else thought what I was writing was worth printing.”

“And snapped up your mythical contract, I take it? Is he paying you as much as was Frank, under the table?” she flung out words again from someplace simmering inside her. And was that the crux of it, what Warfield had been hinting all that time?

His snide expression faded and he turned away from her as if he wanted to run.

She couldn’t get away from anything, from anyone.

She watched, some mornings, as a construction crew removed the debris from the fire. It was heartwrenching.

There was no sign of Logan and no blinding flash from the heavens to reveal to her what her next move ought to be.

The second edition of the
Clarion
came out, heralding the Denver North approach to Colville, track being laid so many miles a day to reach Colville by the end of the week.

Maggie couldn’t look at it, let alone read it, though Reese brought it in to show her.

She was a woman without a purpose, she thought. She just sat in those stuffy rooms or she made brief forays outside to walk, to think, to try to feel some inner pulse. But there was nothing; there was a blank.

The thing that hurt the most, she thought, was Logan’s defection. It was an ultimatum he had given her. Marry him or else. She had a fantastical notion that he could
have started the fire for the very same reason: to force her to make a decision; to destroy her livelihood so completely that she would have to turn to him.

Something in her protested that he couldn’t be like that. But even she didn’t know what men could be like. Look at how Frank had changed so radically in the second year they were married. Maybe Logan resented her working as much as Frank had. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it was possible she was misreading everything.

But even these thoughts could not blot out the memories of his lovemaking. She missed it. She wanted it. She almost didn’t care what he thought or wanted as long as he came to her.

And that made her as desperate as Annie Mapes, she thought. She had been a captive all the time she had thought she was free.

Dennis arrived. “I have an offer for the property, Maggie.”

“Which property is that, Dennis?”

“Don’t be difficult. The town property, let’s call it.”

“I haven’t said yet that I wanted to sell.”

“Nonetheless, there has been a lot of interest in it. I think you should at least listen.”

“I’ll listen.”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

Even her eyebrows went up. “My, my. Let me guess—Mr. Brown.”

His eyebrows arched in surprise.

“No one else is throwing around that kind of money, Dennis. Don’t be obtuse.”

“So?”

“You must let me think about it.”

“You can’t take too long to think about it, Maggie.”

“Why is that? Is there some other fire-razed property
on Main Street they want to bid on?”

“Let’s just say there are other properties.”

“Whose buildings they will have to raze, isn’t that so?”

He was getting uncomfortable. She knew too damned much for a woman. “It’s possible.”

“And they might offer as much if the location were as good as mine, but they still would have the expense of tearing down a building, am I not correct?”

“It is possible,” he conceded again.

“I need time to think about it.”

“Maggie,” he began, exasperated with her altogether.

“Dennis, this is Denver North; you didn’t expect I was going to leap at the offer.”

“I expected you were going to leap at the chance to replenish your finances, frankly.”

“Oh?” Now she was a little taken aback by his bald pronouncement. “What do you mean, Dennis?”

“I mean, you have been eating into capital with large bites, Maggie, and you have to consider selling to offset your expenses.”

“Such as?”

“The hotel, the clothes, your meals, and the removal of rubble from the building site,” he enumerated. “You really can’t keep on this way, Maggie, supporting your mother-in-law and Reese and yourself and expect the money to keep coming.”

“I see.” Pressure. She felt more pressure. And the thought that if she didn’t have to take care of the ever ungrateful Madame Mother,
and
Reese, who in all his mystery had taken to disappearing everyday, she could live quite comfortably off the income from Frank’s estate all by her blessed self.

“I still have to think about it, Dennis. Give me a day.”

He looked doubtful. “Whatever you say, Maggie.”

She looked at him curiously. “Are you afraid of
Mr. Brown?”

“No, no, no. I just want to do what’s best for you, Maggie.”

“With my consent.”

“I think you would be wise. What on earth would you do with that property? Even if you wanted to build a house, you surely wouldn’t want to be right in the center of town.”

“Probably not,” she agreed. “I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Yes,” she said, “you tell him.”

Pressure. Denver North was going to win one way or another. If they couldn’t have one thing, they would take another, but somehow they were going to get Maggie Colleran.