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Rand nodded.
“Keep her safe if you can,” the older man said.
“You can count on that, Mr. Cloudman. If anything happens to Alice, you’ll know that I’m already dead.”
Rooney snorted. “Well, hell, mister, that’s what I’m afraid of!”
Dressmaker Verena Forester gasped, and the bolt of blue gingham in her arms tumbled onto the floor. “You want a what? Say that again, Alice?”
“I want a fancy dress like a saloon girl wears. You know, with lots of ruffles and a really low neckline. Red, maybe. With sequins.”
The dressmaker stared at her. “I suppose you’ve got some harebrained reason, Alice, but I don’t guess you’re going to tell me what it is.”
“I’m taking a job. I’ll be working undercover for the Pinkerton Agency, and I need a disguise.”
Verena’s mouth sagged open. “Pinkerton! Whatever for? You have a perfectly respectable job here in Smoke River as our librarian.”
But she no longer had her sister. Alice had spent most of last night mulling over what was worth doing in life. She did have a respectable job as the librarian. She had a perfectly respectable life in a perfectly respectable town. Maybe that was the problem.
Maybe she could ease the ache in her chest by helping to catch her sister’s killer.
“Do you have any satin, Verena? Red satin?”
The dressmaker pointed at a bolt of fabric halfway up a tall display shelf. “Scandalous color. When do you need this creation?”
“This morning.”
Verena gave a strangled cry. “Today? Why, I can’t cobble up a dress in that length of time. It takes real effort to sew on a lot of ruffles and sequins. That’ll take some doing. And besides, it’s gonna be Christmas pretty soon, and every woman in Smoke River’s wantin’ something new.”
Alice smiled at her. “Oh. Well, Verena, I can always go over to the mercantile and buy a ready-made dress.”
“Huh!” the dressmaker scoffed. “Carl Ness wouldn’t have such a shameless garment in his store. Nobody in town wears such things.”
“Except for the girls down at Sally’s,” Alice said calmly.
“Sally’s! How do you know about—?” The dressmaker recovered quickly. “The girls at Sally’s order custom-made gowns, and they give a body plenty of time to sew them.”
“Verena, please. Could you try? I am pressed for time.”
The dressmaker suddenly noticed the distress in Alice’s eyes and wilted like an unwatered houseplant. “All right, I’ll do it. Red satin and ruffles...it will be so outrageous you’ll be embarrassed to be seen in it.”
“Oh, I do hope so,” Alice murmured. “I need to be as un-librarian-like as possible.”
Verena rolled her eyes. “Give me until noon.” Then she shooed Alice out of the shop.
Alice went from the dressmaker’s to Ness’s Mercantile, where she bought a bottle of cologne, a boy’s wide-brimmed black Stetson, a lethal-looking six-inch hatpin, a gaudy pink satin garter, and a derringer pistol and a box of cartridges. Then she stopped at the sheriff’s office and talked Sandy, the deputy, into showing her how to load and fire the pistol.
Keeping busy helped ease the pain in her chest, but she finally ran out of errands. When she returned to Rose Cottage, Rooney and Marshal Logan were sitting on the porch swing and Mark was perched at their feet. Apparently he still hadn’t run out of questions because he posed another one as she came up the front walk.
“How come you don’t have a fancy uniform like a colonel or somethin’?”
Rand laughed. “Because it’s easier to sneak up on a criminal if you don’t look conspicuous.”
Even Rooney laughed at that.
“What’s ’spicuous?”
“Conspicuous is what a man wears when he wants to get noticed, maybe by a girl he’s interested in.”
Mark shot him a curious look. “Are you interested in a girl?”
“Nope.” At least he wasn’t before he laid eyes on Alice Montgomery. Now he wasn’t so sure. In fact, at the sight of her in that swingy blue skirt and the boy’s shirt that revealed she was very obviously not a boy, he felt a tug of awareness he hadn’t felt in years.
“Before we leave,” Alice announced, “I have some parcels to pick up at the mercantile and the dressmaker’s.”
“Whadja buy, Alice?” Mark inquired. “Any caramel drops?”
Alice smiled at him. “No caramel drops, I’m afraid. I bought a dress. Some smelly cologne. A hat like yours. And a pink garter.” She saw no need to mention the derringer.
“Just dumb girl stuff,” Mark muttered. “No caramels?”
“No caramels.”
Rand rose and offered the seat next to Rooney on the swing.
“A pink garter, huh?” Rooney muttered. “Just what are ya thinkin’ of doin’ with a pink garter?”
She grinned and slid closer to him. “Rooney, I don’t think I should explain in front of Mark.”
Rand, however, very much wanted to hear the explanation.
Rooney draped his arm around Alice’s shoulders. “Honey-girl, I don’t mind tellin’ ya that I don’t like this idea one bit. Not one bit.”
Alice sent him a smile. “I know, Rooney. You’ve been saying that since six o’clock this morning.”
Mark hunched his thin frame closer to her knees and gazed up at her. “Golly, Alice, it sounds real neat, ’specially if Rooney doesn’t like it. Kin I come along?”
At noon, Rand picked up Alice’s travel bag and walked her over to the livery stable, then to the mercantile and the dressmaker to pick up her parcels. The dressmaker package was bulky, and Rand noticed a sprinkling of tiny sparkly circles escaping from one corner where the twine tie had slipped off-center. Saloon girl sequins, he gathered. Red ones. Another niggle of apprehension crawled up his spine.
They loaded the saddlebags on his bay gelding and her chestnut mare and then on their way out of town they stopped at Rose Cottage.
The porch was empty. Alice dismounted and went inside, and after a long ten minutes she came out red-eyed and stiff-lipped, climbed back on her mare and reined away without a word.
They rode side by side in silence until the town dwindled off into the occasional house and wide meadows of yellow dandelions and lavender desert parsley. The air smelled of pine trees and smoke.
They followed the slow-moving river bordered by cottonwoods and gray-green willows, and when the river split, they followed the branch flowing north and headed for the hazy purple mountains looming in the distance. The sun overhead was hot, even for October.
Alice hadn’t said a single word since leaving town, and Rand was starting to wonder why. He slowed his bay until she caught up.
“Alice, are you all right?”
“Yes. At least I think so. I had to leave the key to the library with Sarah. This is the first time since the library was built six years ago that I won’t be there in the morning to open it up. It feels strange.”
Rand did a quick calculation. If her sister Dorothy was the “little” sister at twenty, that meant Alice was probably around twenty-two. Had she been in Smoke River all her life?
“You been a librarian a long time?”
“Ever since I turned eighteen. It’s all I ever wanted to do, be around books.”
Aha. That would make her maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Before he could ask, she volunteered a piece of information about herself he hadn’t expected.
“I am a spinster, Marshal. I have nothing in my life but my library, so I have nothing to lose by going with you to a mining camp in Idaho to find my sister’s killer.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but that’s not smart thinking. I’m a lot older than you, and I figure I’ve got a helluva lot to lose.”
“How much older?”
“I’m thirty-four.”
“What will you lose if you don’t live through this trip?”
Rand blinked. She sure kept surprising him with her questions.
“You mean besides my life?” he said drily. “Well...” He waved an arm at the field of white clover and dogbane they were riding through. “I’d miss seeing meadows like this one. And I’d miss the smell of woodsmoke and mint. And roses. By the way, what kind of scent did you buy at the mercantile?”
She gave a soft laugh. “Why, I don’t even know! I didn’t smell it. I just picked out a pretty-shaped bottle.”
“Not very ‘saloon girlie’ of you, Miss Montgomery.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t. I’m going to need some practice in the ‘saloon girl’ area.”
Rand kept his face impassive. Was it possible she was unaware of how attractive she was? Nah. No girl as pretty as Alice would be blind to her effect on the male population. But her remark made him wonder.
Something else puzzled him, too. She hadn’t asked one question about the journey to Silver City, how many miles away it was. How many days of travel it would take. And nights.
Maybe she didn’t care. But if that was true, he wondered why didn’t she care?
“Alice, do you know anything about Idaho?”
“Oh, yes. When Dottie first married Jim, her husband, and went away to Silver City, I read all about Idaho. I learned about mining camps and silver assaying. The library has lots of information on such subjects.”
He chuckled. “Then you probably know more than I do. I’ve never set foot in Idaho Territory.”
She turned toward him, a surprised look on her face. He couldn’t see her eyes under that black Stetson she wore, but her lips rounded into a soft, raspberry-tinted O. “You mean you’ve never been where we are going?”
“Nope. Does that make you uneasy?”
“Nope,” she shot back.
Rand laughed. He liked her quick humor. He liked a lot of things about Alice Montgomery.
But he didn’t plan to pay much attention to them. This was a damned dangerous mission, so he’d best keep his mind on the problem at hand.
Chapter Five (#u9199c2c6-69a5-525a-ab96-ba742cd122de)
The campsite Rand chose for their first night was nestled in a grove of pine trees and protected by a half circle of large gray boulders. A shallow, gurgling stream meandered nearby.
After more than eight hours in the saddle, Alice’s derriere was numb and her thigh muscles felt hot and jumpy. Never in her life had she ridden a horse for more than an hour at a time; she never dreamed she could be this tired. She slid off the chestnut mare and had to grab on to the saddle to keep her legs from collapsing.
The marshal surveyed her from the fire pit he was digging. “You’ve had a long ride,” he remarked. “Want some of my liniment?”
When she nodded, he rummaged in his saddlebag and thrust a bottle of brown liquid into her hand. It smelled like the furniture polish Sarah used on the dining table at the boardinghouse. Maybe it was furniture polish.
She stumbled down to the stream, dropped her skirt and her under-drawers and sloshed some of the smelly stuff onto her aching backside. When she returned he had built a campfire and was digging a frying pan and some bacon out of his saddlebag.
“Hungry?” he asked without looking up.
“That is a rhetorical question, Marshal. Of course I am hungry.”
“And tired, too, I bet.”
“And crabby,” she admitted.
He didn’t answer, just sliced off some bacon and laid it in the pan. When the bacon was crisp he dumped in a can of chili beans, and that was supper. She wasn’t complaining. She was so tired and hungry she would eat anything, even a bear if it lumbered into camp. She shivered at the thought.
He dished up the mess into two tin plates and handed her a spoon, and for the next half hour they ate without talking. Whatever he called this concoction, it tasted wonderful! She gobbled it down, and when her plate was empty she unrolled her blankets and sat staring into the fire while Rand tramped off to the stream to wash the plates.
When he returned a mug of coffee appeared at her elbow.
“You sure don’t talk much,” he said, settling himself beside her.
“Neither do you,” she retorted.
“I guess that’s because I usually travel alone. I do talk to my horse sometimes, though.”
“And since I’m a librarian, I talk to my books.”
He laughed at that, and then answered the question she hadn’t asked yet. “Three days. It’ll take three days of riding to reach Silver City.”
“You mean I cannot bathe for three whole days? By then I will smell to high heaven!”
He bit back a smile. “Nah, you won’t. First of all, you’ve got a bottle of fancy-smelling stuff in your saddlebag. And second...” He paused to toss the dregs of his coffee into the fire. “There are lots of streams and rivers between here and Silver City where you can take a bath. As long as you don’t mind cold water,” he added with a grin.
“How do you know that, Marshal? About the rivers and streams, I mean?”
“Maps,” he said with a chuckle. “Books are full of ’em. I should think you’d know that, being a librarian.”
She studied him in the firelight. It was too dark to see his face, but his voice was full of laughter. Thank the Lord! There would be nothing worse than traveling for three days with a man who was dull in the head.
