a mystery. Even so, that strength had quickly deserted her once she had married that tightfisted mercantilist and bully, Edgar Carew.
Thoughts of her poor mother prompted Libby to whisper, “What would you do, Shula, if a man ever lifted a hand to you?”
Her sister snorted. “I’d slap him back.” Her eyebrow arched in the mirror. “Or worse.”
Libby sighed. “I wonder why Mama didn’t”.
Shula shrugged now. “She was afraid, I guess. Who knows? I can tell you I gave our dear stepfather the back of my hand on quite a few occasions, along with several pieces of my mind.”
Libby’s eyes widened in astonishment. “What did he do?”
“He just laughed. The pig! I hated losing Mama, Libby, but I have to say I didn’t mind one little bit that that awful Edgar perished in that carriage accident, too.”
Shula sighed softly at her reflection, then turned to face her sister, her hands lifting to fasten on her hips. “We need to start packing, Libby. Where’s that old trunk of Mama’s I took to Italy with me?”
“I have no idea.” But what Libby knew was that she wasn’t prepared to argue now, here, and possibly wake Andy, who needed all the peaceful sleep she could get. Once thwarted, Shula wouldn’t be able to whisper, she would probably scream.
“Take a look up in the attic,” she suggested, hoping to occupy Shula temporarily and thus forestall their confrontation.
“I hate it up there,” Shula said. “It’s dark as a week of midnights, and all that dust gets into my pores and just takes up residence for days no matter how hard I scrub. I won’t even mention the spiders.” Shula shivered, sending her gown into a flurry. Then her expression brightened. “Maybe I could just order a new trunk. One with all those cute little drawers and…”
The heat of Libby’s glare withered her sister’s speech, as well as her enthusiasm.
“Well, they are cute,” she finished glumly. “We don’t want to look like two kitchen maids when we go to Texas, do we?”
As much as she felt like one sometimes, Libby thought there was nothing wrong in looking like one. But since she wasn’t going to Texas anyway, it didn’t make any difference. She continued to scorch her sister with her gaze, using her thumb now to indicate the door.
“All right. I’ll go,” complained Shula as she moved across the room. “But if I’m not back downstairs in fifteen minutes, Libby, it’s because I’ll have choked to death on all that dust”
“Maybe you’ll be lucky, sister,” Libby offered encouragingly as she bit back on a grin. “Maybe those big, hairy spiders will get you first.”
With a shudder and a strangled little moan, Shula swept out of the room.
As soon as the door clicked closed, little Andy jerked upright in the center of the bed. She rubbed an eye with one grimy knuckle, then mumbled, “I heard about Texas. I heard it’s real nice there.”
Her comment, cool and disinterested as it sounded, didn’t fool Libby for a moment. The child was terrified of being abandoned, or infinitely worse, of being returned to the clutches of her father. Libby left her chair and perched on the edge of the bed, reaching to smooth a pale hank of hair from the little girl’s forehead.
“Texas is nice,” she said, “but I’m not going there. I like it fine right here.”
“I do, too,” the child responded. “Especially when I’m with you.” Andy scuttled across the mattress now and wrapped her arms around Libby, burying her face in the pleats of her bodice. “Don’t let my papa take me back, Miss Libby. I want to stay here with you. Oh, please, don’t let him take me back.”
Libby hugged her tightly. “I won’t, honey. I promise I won’t let him get within a foot of you.”
Fine words, she thought, as she sat and rocked the frightened little girl. The Sisters of Charity had cautioned her only this morning that John Rowan, once out of jail, had every legal right to reclaim his daughter.
“And he’ll try,” Sister Josepha had said. “Sure as the devil’s prodding him from behind. They can’t keep the man locked away forever. Once he’s out, he’ll be needing her for his cooking and his cleaning and whatever other despicable things the man has on his mind.”
Libby’s reply had been forceful. “I just won’t let him.”
Sister Josepha had merely shaken her head sadly, as if to say “How can you stop him?”
“I wish I knew,” Libby murmured now. “Oh, Lord, I wish I knew.”
The pounding on the door was enough to loosen the mortar from every brick in the two-story house. By the time Libby got downstairs—after shoving Andy into a wardrobe and covering the child with a quilt—Shula was already there, leaning all her weight on one shoulder against the front door.
“Shh!” she hissed when Libby rushed to join her. “Just keep still and he’ll think nobody’s home.”
“Miss Kingsland, I know you’re in there,” a voice boomed from outside while fists continued to batter the paneled oak.
When Libby opened her mouth to reply, Shula hissed again, menacingly this time, so Libby kept still. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, she thought, letting John Rowan believe the house was empty. Surely the man’s fists couldn’t keep up that pummeling indefinitely. From the sound of him, he was already getting hoarse.
The sisters stood there for what seemed like an hour, feeling the door tremble and quake, hearing the doorknob rattle again and again. When it stopped, and when there was only silence on the other side of the door, they waited another few minutes before they spoke.
“Andy’s not safe here,” Libby whispered. “Oh, Shula, what in the world am I going to do?”
Shula draped a comforting arm around her sister’s shoulder. Certain as Shula was that their unwelcome visitor had been another bill collector—the most aggressive of them yet!—she was briefly tempted to allay Libby’s fears and tell her the truth, that little Andy was plenty safe from creditors. It would have comforted Libby, no doubt, but then it wouldn’t have done Shula herself the least bit of good.
So instead, she said quite somberly, “I only know one solution, Libby. We’ll simply have to take the poor child with us when we go to Texas.” She embellished her words with a lingering, sympathetic sigh. “I believe we ought to leave as soon as possible, don’t you? For little Andy’s sake?”
The big red-and-black Concord coach—its door branded with the famous Circle P—was a familiar sight on the streets of Corpus Christi. Amos Kingsland always came to town in style. He kept fresh teams at intervals along the forty-mile stretch. In the old days it guaranteed he could outrun whatever marauders lay in wait along the way. Now, with most of the rustlers and bandidos having been driven off, the coach’s speed wasn’t so much for safety as it was for its own sake and to let everyone in Corpus know that God, in the guise of Amos Kingsland, was down from Paradise.
Eb Talent was the reinsman. The grizzled sailorturned-landlubber had been with Kingsland since the steamboat captain had moved inland nearly thirty years before. Eb hadn’t been a young man then and the rigors of riding the range that first year had left him with what he called “permanent saddle sores,” so he’d carved himself out an indispensable niche as cook and coachman. The red-and-black conveyance was his spit-shined pride and joy.
On this afternoon, though, it wasn’t God who was riding in the closed coach, but his foreman, Shadrach Jones.
With a blistering crack of