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Carter sighed. “Sheriff Hammond left your son, Lyle, as deputy, Mrs. Wentworth. You could get him to serve the papers.”
Margaret Potter stared down her long nose with a look that had been known to freeze truant students twice her size dead in their tracks. “He refuses to do it, Mr. Jones. He says we have to wait for the sheriff. Lyle has always been a difficult boy. And everyone knows he’s always been sweet on Kate Sheridan.”
Lyle Wentworth may be difficult, but he wasn’t a boy. He had to be at least, twenty-three, Carter reckoned. But in the few weeks since he’d arrived in Vermillion, he’d realized that Miss Potter continued to treat her former pupils as recalcitrant adolescents even though some of them had begun sprouting gray hair.
“Lyle’s not difficult.” Lucinda Wentworth defended her son in a voice so small it sounded as if she hoped Margaret Potter wouldn’t actually hear her.
“Sounds to me like Lyle has the right idea,” Carter said. “Let’s just wait until Del gets back to handle this.”
“Delbert Hammond will be no more eager to serve these papers than Lyle,” Miss Potter said with one of her chronic sniffs. “It’s your responsibility representing the interests of the territory to see that the decisions of the court are upheld.”
Mrs. Billingsley leaned over Carter’s desk, her formidable breasts perilously close to his face, and slapped down the sheaf of papers she’d been holding. “Those two Sheridan hussies have no business opening their home as a so-called boardinghouse in a respectable part of town. If they want to run something like that, they’ll just have to go down to Tinkersville and hang a red lantern in front like the others.”
Carter grimaced. He’d not met either of the Sheridan sisters since he’d taken over the post of district attorney, but he’d caught glimpses of both young ladies, and they had not struck him as likely candidates for the tawdry streets of the notorious Tinkersville district.
Miss Potter continued, “It’s taken us a month to get the order to shut them down. And now that we’ve got the papers, we’re not willing to have that situation continue one more night.”
“Have they been disturbing the peace in some way, ladies?” he asked mildly.
“They’ve been disturbing the harmony of this community,” Mrs. Billingsley huffed.
“And twisting the minds of the innocent schoolchildren,” Margaret Potter added, her words punctuated by vehement nods from her friend.
Carter stretched his long legs under the desk, then picked up the bunch of papers and looked at them with distaste. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
As he walked toward the neat white clapboard house at the end of Elm Street, Carter went through a mental rehearsal of the speech he was about to give, with little enthusiasm for the task. He knew that the Sheridan sisters had lost their parents and fallen on financial hard times recently. And if it was true that the younger sister was bearing an out-of-wedlock child, as the town rumor mill had it, then Carter would have preferred to stay ten leagues away from the entire situation.
The house was well kept up with a flourishing vegetable garden to one side and neat rows of geraniums along the front. No one could say that the Sheridan boardinghouse represented an eyesore. But, of course, that had nothing to do with the court’s ruling. Nor did the unwedded state of Kate Sheridan.
The ruling was based strictly on the town ordinances that had been passed not a year ago carefully separating the business part of town from its prosperous homes. It was the latest idea in city planning. Carter had never seen much sense to it, himself, but he was an ambitious man, and if zoning regulations were popular with the people, he would not be the one to argue against them.
As he mounted the front steps, he tried to get a picture in his mind of the sisters as he remembered seeing them about town. One had been striking, blond and tall, willowy. He wasn’t as sure about the other. She’d been shorter, he thought, with mousy brown hair. Rather nondescript, if memory served.
It was neither young lady who opened the door to his knock, but a young lad of about twelve. “Who are you?” the boy asked without a smile.
“The name is Carter Jones. I’d like to talk with Miss Kate or Miss Jennie Sheridan.”
“What about?” The boy had intense brown eyes that looked old in the middle of his youthful face.
Carter hesitated. It was absurd, but he almost felt as if he owed the boy an explanation. “I’ll state my business to the Misses Sheridan, if you don’t mind, lad,” he said finally.
“Come back later. Miss Jennie said I wasn’t to let anyone ‘sturb Miss Kate.”
To Carter’s amazement, the boy began to swing the door shut in his face. He put a hand out to hold it open. “Well then, I’ll talk with Miss Jennie.”
“Can’t. She’s gone to the store.” He paused and held up a hand to shade his eyes from the sun. “Oh. There she comes now.”
Carter turned to look down the street. Walking toward them with an almost childlike skip to her step was the Sheridan sister he’d dismissed as “nondescript.” Carter’s mouth dropped open.
He knew he’d been working too hard since he’d come to Vermillion, but up to now he hadn’t thought that the overwork had struck him blind. Had he actually seen this girl in town and not paid her any attention? He ought to make an appointment with Dr. Millard that very afternoon to have his eyes examined.
Granted, her sister with her statuesque blond good looks had drawn his eye, but this girl was exquisite. She was not as tall as her sister, but her figure was perfection, with curves that were tantalizingly outlined by the worn spots in her faded green dress. Her hair was not the least bit mousy, but a rich mahogany brown that glinted in the morning sunlight. And her face would stand out in the portraits of Godey’s Lady’s Book.
He closed his mouth and swallowed away the dryness. Busy with his fledgling career, he’d been without a woman for too long. And under normal circumstances, the delectable Miss Sheridan would have seemed to be a perfect victim for his well-developed skills in the art of seduction. Suddenly his present duty seemed more than unpleasant—it seemed downright inconvenient.
“This gentleman’s looking for you, Jennie,” the boy yelled to her. “And I wouldn’t let him ‘sturb Kate, just like you told me.”
The young woman’s pace became more sedate as she approached them. She smiled first at the boy, and said, “Thank you, Barnaby.” Then she turned the smile toward Carter, causing his heart to skip a beat. But her smile died as she glanced at the papers in his hand. “What can I do for you, sir?” she asked. Her huge brown eyes had grown wary.
“Ah…” Carter fished about for an opening gambit. It was an uncharacteristic hesitancy for his normally glib tongue. He prided himself on always knowing what to say in every situation. The consummate politician. Someday he hoped the skill would take him to the heights he had secretly dreamed of since he was a boy not much older than the lad who stood in the doorway staring at him.
The sudden childhood memory restored some of his power. The Sheridan girl was beautiful, but that didn’t mean he had to lose his wits talking to her. “Perhaps we should go inside and discuss it,” he said smoothly.
Jennie looked from Carter to the boy. “Barnaby, you go on in and see if Kate needs anything.” Then she mounted the four steps to the stoop to stand directly in front of Carter. She was several inches shorter than he, but somehow it seemed as if her eyes were level with his as she said gravely, “My sister is…indisposed. I’d rather talk right here, if you don’t mind, Mr. Jones.”
The sound of his own name surprised him. “Ah, you know who I am, Miss Sheridan. I apologize for not introducing myself immediately.”
“This town does not keep secrets, Mr. Jones. Everyone knows about the new young prosecutor from the fancy law school back East.”
“Harvard,” Carter put in with a smile.
“Harvard,” Jennie agreed with no softening of her own expression.
Carter blinked, trying to concentrate on the business at hand instead of the way the morning light brushed Jennie Sheridan’s high cheekbones with the faintest blush. Irrationally his heart was beating a tattoo inside his chest. Yes, it had been too long since he’d been close to a woman. At least a woman the likes of the older Sheridan sister.
He tried another of his politician smiles and willed his voice to sound smooth. “Nevertheless, it was remiss of me. We’ve never been formally introduced and perhaps you—”
“Mr. Jones,” Jennie interrupted. “It’s been some weeks now since anyone in this town has bothered to observe good manners with me or my sister. And this is heavy.” With her free hand she gestured to the basket of groceries hanging over her arm. “If you would be so kind as to state your business, I’ll let you be on your way.”
Carter tried to take a step back to distance himself from the intensity of those brown eyes, but his heel hit the edge of the stoop. He stopped himself just in time to keep from tumbling backward onto the ground. Jennie Sheridan watched him without blinking.
“I could come back if this is an inconvenient time.” His smile was not quite so self-assured.
“I guess that would depend on the nature of your business. Recently, my sister and I have had to deal with a lot of things that aren’t much convenient at any time. Is this that kind of business, Mr. Jones?”
Carter hid his chagrin at the coldness of her tone. With his tall good looks and practiced charm, Carter had been able to soften the hearts of the haughtiest of debutantes in Boston society. But he had a feeling that Jennie Sheridan was regarding him with no more interest than she had in the black ant that was crossing the wooden stoop at their feet.
“I guess you’d put this in the category of inconvenient,” he admitted, giving the papers in his hand a shake.
“It’s the court ruling, isn’t it?”
Carter met her eyes and nodded. She held her head stiffly, her delicate chin up, as if she were waiting for a blow. “They’ve turned down your petition. You’re not allowed to have a business in this part of town,” Carter said gently.
Jennie closed her eyes for just a moment, but when she opened them, they held anger, not resignation. “Three renters. That’s all it is. Three people to fill out the bedrooms in this big place.” She gestured to the house behind her. “Why, it should be a crime not to let the rooms out, with the silver boom in town. People need places to stay.”
Carter ruffled through the papers in his hand. “You have an employee, it says…” he began.
“Barnaby?” Jennie gasped in disbelief. “He’s twelve years old. And he had nowhere else to go—”
“That boy is the employee?” Carter interrupted.
Instead of answering the question, Jennie backed down the stairs to the wooden walkway and pointed up the street. “You see all those fancy houses, Mr. Jones? There’s not a one of them that doesn’t have a servant of some kind. Gardener, maid, livery man. We have Barnaby. One boy and two women. We run this place. We muck the horses and grow the food. When the pump broke out back, I was the one who fixed it. When the roof leaked this June, I was the one on a ladder patching it up.”
She seemed to gather steam as she continued to talk, her features becoming more animated. Carter was so entranced that he found himself losing track of what she was saying. When she paused, evidently expecting a reply, he could only manage to say, “It does seem a bit unreasonable to classify that boy as a business employee.”
“Well then, tell that to your precious courts, Mr. Jones.” She marched up the stairs past him, her basket nearly knocking the papers out of his hand. “And tell them that if they want to force two orphan sisters, one of whom is ill, to leave their home, they’ll have to come in here with the sheriff and a passel of deputies and carry us out.”
As Carter tried to formulate an answer, she wrenched open the door, stalked inside and slammed it in his face.
“Well, what was he like?” Kate asked.
“Who?” Jennie was kneading bread dough. Lord, it seemed as if she spent half her time kneading bread these days. She couldn’t understand how just three men and a boy could go through so many loaves each week. Goodness knows, she and Kate hardly touched the stuff. Jennie was always too busy or too tired to eat, and Kate had had no appetite since she’d started getting sick early in her pregnancy. Her face had grown gaunt and, except for her now obviously protruding stomach, she was alarmingly thin. Jennie had pleaded, alternating tears and threats, but Kate still refused to be seen by Dr. Millard, which was not only dangerous to her health, but pointless, since by now everyone in town knew that she was with child.
“The new district attorney,” Kate said with slight exasperation. “What’s he like?”
“I don’t know…he’s…he’s just a man. Who cares?”
Kate sighed. “Just because he’s a man doesn’t eliminate him from consideration as a human being, Jen dear. There are good men in the world. Not all of them disappear leaving…problems in their wake.”
“Not all of them are like Sean Flaherty, you mean.”
As usual, her sister’s eyes chilled at the mention of her erstwhile lover’s name. Jennie hated that look.
“Think of Papa,” Kate said after a moment. “He was a good man.”
“He left us, too,” Jennie said under her breath, slapping the bread as if it were Carter Jones’s handsome face. The new district attorney had been handsome, she would admit that much to herself, if not to Kate. But then, Sean Flaherty had been handsome, too, and look where that had led her poor sister.
“Jennie! How can you say such a thing? Papa didn’t leave us—he died.”
Jennie stopped pummeling. Her shoulders sagged, and she gave the ball of mixed dough an apologetic pat. “Yes, he died. It wasn’t his fault, but he’s gone, nevertheless.”
“Well, maybe it’s not Mr. Jones’s fault either that they gave him those papers to bring here. If you’d been a bit nicer to him, we might even have gotten him on our side.”
Jennie used the edge of her hand to chop the mass of dough into loaf-size chunks. “Oh, I’m sure the fancy Haah-vard man would take the side of a couple of unimportant, disgraced, utterly poor women against the whole rest of the town.”
Kate looked gloomy. “I’m the one who’s disgraced, not you. It’s not fair that you should pay for my sins.”
Jennie smiled at her. “My sister, the sinner.”
“I am. I did.”
“You were in love, Kate, and falling in love’s not a sin.” She dropped the last loaf into its pan with a satisfying plop, then added, “It’s just stupidity.”
Kate shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ve soured you on men for good.”
“‘Twas Sean Flaherty soured me on men, not you. Not that I ever had much time for them in the first place.”
“Because you never met the right one.”
Carter Jones’s smile flashed through Jennie’s mind. She’d been thoroughly irritated by his smile, but beyond the irritation, she’d felt another sensation. Equally disagreeable, she decided, kind of like the prickling of a heat rash. “There is no right one for me, Katie dear,” she said breezily. “I intend to grow old as a happy and peaceful old maid.”
Jennie finished wiping her hands on the dish towel and hung it on the rack, then turned to look around at their tidy kitchen. “And what’s more, I don’t care how many Mr. Joneses they send after us—I intend to do it right here in my very own house.”
“So what are we going to do about the papers?”
“They can go to the devil with their papers. I’m not leaving here. And since we can’t afford to stay here without the money from our boarders, they’re not leaving here, either.”
Kate slid awkwardly off the stool where she’d perched to watch her sister’s labors. Jennie refused to let her help much with the cooking anymore. The heaviest job Jennie would allow her was wiping the dishes after dinner. And even then, Jennie herself took over when it came time to put away the heavy pans. For weeks Kate had been too sick to argue with her sister’s proclamations and now, though she was feeling better, she seemed to have adapted to the unusual circumstance of allowing her sister to take care of her. “Are we going to tell them about it?” she asked.
“Tell the silverheels?” The silverheels was Jennie’s nickname for the three miners who had taken rooms at Sheridan House while they hired on at the Longley mine up the canyon. She’d called them that from the first day the three young men had arrived, joking that they hoped they wouldn’t track too much silver dust onto her mother’s prized Persian rug in the parlor. Jennie had laughed and welcomed their business and had never let on to them that a bit of silver dust would be a godsend in the Sheridan sisters’ lives at the moment
“Well, they’ll probably find out about it Especially if Mr. Jones takes you up on your invitation and comes trooping back here with the sheriff to shut us down.”
Jennie felt the pulsing behind her right eye that always preceded one of her headaches. “The sheriff’s away in California. They told me so in town today.”
“Well, they’re not just going to forget about it. Didn’t Sheriff Hammond leave a deputy?”
Jennie fixed Kate with a look. “Lyle Wentworth’s the deputy.”
Kate colored. Lyle had tried to court Kate since they were children, much to the wealthy Wentworths’ dismay. Before Sean Flaherty showed up in town, some people thought Lyle would go against his parents’ wishes and ask Kate to marry him. Kate had refused to see him since she had found out about the baby. “I suppose you could go talk to Lyle,” she said, her voice subdued.
“Me?” Jennie said, her hands on her hips. “I suppose you could go talk to him.”
“Jen, you know I can’t do that.”
“Criminy, sis. Someday you’re going to have to talk to people again. It doesn’t make much sense for us to go through all this effort to hold on to this place if you’re going to shut yourself away in here the rest of your life as if you’d been buried right along with Mama and Papa.”
Kate clasped her hands over her big stomach and looked down. “I can’t see Lyle, Jennie. Please don’t ask me.”
Jennie gave a little huff but didn’t pursue the matter. “I think I will tell the silverheels that those old biddies are trying to shut us down. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”
“And maybe you should talk to that Mr. Jones again. He’s a lawyer, right? At least he should be able to tell us what our options are.”
Jennie stared straight ahead as another quick memory of Carter Jones’s striking face flashed in front of her like the image from a stereopticon. How odd, she reflected. Perhaps it was somehow connected to her impending headache.
“I’ll go see him in the morning,” she agreed finally. “Tonight I’m going to let Barnaby help you with the dishes while I nurse one of my megrims.”
Carter Jones sat in his small office and stared at the bookshelf on the opposite wall as if willing one of the leather tomes to magically open up with the answer he sought. He’d been at it much of the afternoon, more time than he could afford to spend on a matter that, after all, was not even his concern.
Zoning ordinances were so new that it didn’t appear that there was much body of law on them. And, though he’d read the court’s decision half a dozen times, he’d been unable to come up with any ideas as to how to render it null. He had no doubt that the self-appointed moral guardians of the town, Mrs. Billingsley, Miss Potter, Lucinda Wentworth and their cronies, would be back tomorrow in full force when they learned that nothing had been done to change the situation at Sheridan House.
Carter threw his pencil down on the desk and pushed back his chair. His stomach was rumbling its disapproval of his decision earlier in the day to skip lunch. He hadn’t felt much like eating after his encounter with Jennie Sheridan. The prospect of one of the Continental Hotel’s shoe-leather steaks was not thrilling, but it would at least fill the hole in his middle.
He leaned back toward his desk to straighten the piles of work. No matter how hungry he was, he wouldn’t leave an untidy office. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind, he’d always believed. The pencil he’d thrown in disgust was carefully retrieved and put in its tray—on the used side of the tray, not to be confused with the freshly sharpened ones that he put there every morning.
He ran his hand over the neatly arranged writing instruments with a certain satisfaction. At least it was possible to inject order into a certain portion of his world. He didn’t want to admit how unsettled he’d been by his trip to Sheridan House. He still wasn’t entirely sure why. The girl was pretty. The young boy was engaging. But none of it was his problem.
There was a soft knock at the door. He jerked his hand away from the pencils and said, “Come in.”
