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Looking back—an occupation that filled far too much of her time lately—Eleanor marveled at how any woman who had once been considered intelligent could get herself into such a fix. She’d been a whiz at mathematics, good at literature, history and geography, although not quite so good at the sciences. When it came to the subject of men, however, she was no wiser now than she’d ever been. In other words, dumb as a stump.
Rising, she swept up the covered basket that had been left on her front porch in exchange for the empty one she’d set out that morning, and went inside. The house smelled of lye soap. She’d scrubbed the floors and washed the curtains again that morning, more for something to do than for any real need.
Just last week someone had left her a quarter of salty, hickory-smoked ham. She’d been eating on it ever since. Today’s piece of fried chicken was a welcome reprieve. Still, no matter how hard she worked, she never felt much like eating. Years from now, she thought, bitterly amused, another generation of Millers would be bringing food baskets to the batty old woman who lived alone on Devin’s Hill, leaving them on her porch, dashing back down the hillside, giggling and telling yarns about her.
Probably call her an old witch.
Maybe she would grow a wart on her nose, cultivate a cackling laugh and practice riding her broomstick. Maybe she would send a note down the hill asking for a cat, preferably a black one.
Or maybe she would write a note, put it in a bottle and drop it in the narrow, whitewater creek that churned its way down the mountainside, where it would doubtlessly be panned up by one of the damned Millers downstream, who in turn would guard her closer than ever.
Now she rummaged through the basket again, in case she’d missed some little treat. The last time Heck had brought her supplies she’d been so desperate for someone to talk with that she’d asked him to stay for supper.
“Can’t.” Crossing his arms over his massive chest, he’d looked her square in the eyes. Not for the first time she noticed that no matter what he was saying, whether he was being friendly or noncommittal, his expression never varied. Blue eyes, clear as a summer sky and just as cool.
“Then let me go home,” she pleaded.
“Can’t.”
He didn’t have to explain. By now she knew all the reasons by heart. She’d heard them often enough. As Miss Lucy had explained, “Chile, they ain’t niver gonna let you go. They’re all a-wantin’ Devin’s share and you’re a-settin’ on it.”
“But I offered to give up any claim I might have,” Eleanor had explained countless times. “Besides, you keep telling me I don’t even have a claim.”
The old woman shook her head. “You do and you don’t, that’s just the way things is. We let you go back to the city, next thing we know they’ll be flatlanders a-swarming all over the place, lookin’ for old Dexter’s gold mine. If they’s any gold left, it b’longs to us. My best advice is to take your pick of the men here, hitch up and commence to breedin’.”
And so they kept her here. Knowing she wouldn’t have any one of them, they all watched over her lest she escape, for if that happened, Alaska had told her, the first single man who saw her would want her.
A fallacious argument if she’d ever heard one. A woman wearing gowns that had been several years out of style three years ago, that were now so faded as to be colorless? A woman whose hair had grown wilder than ever for lack of decent care? A woman valued only for her property—a three-room log cabin perched on top of a hill that was riddled with more holes than a gopher farm?
She was twenty-seven years old, for heaven’s sake. Too old to want to attract another man even if by some miracle she could, but far too young to spend the rest of her days in isolation.
In desperation she had offered to deed them all her interest in everything her late husband had once owned. “As a widow, I can certainly do that.”
“Might be, but that’d take a lawyer. Once he got a whiff of gold, he’d move in with his fancy papers, and then first thing you know, he’d be a-holdin’ his papers agin’ us and a-driving us out, just like what happened to the Cherokee.” It had been Heck who had explained it to her, patient and enigmatic as ever. “Short o’ shootin’ him and buryin’ the evy-dence, there ain’t much we could do ’bout it.”
She’d been playing the same game ever since. Trying to escape, and when that failed again and again, trying to reason with the world’s most unreasonable people.
“There has to be a better way,” she told herself. “No one can keep a woman prisoner in her own house, not in these modern times. Not here in the United States of America.”
The trouble was, the modern times had never reached Dexter’s Cut, much less Devin’s Hill.
A bitter laugh escaped her to mingle with the sounds of birds, the soughing of the wind in the trees and the distant yapping of those dratted dogs.
Nice dogs, actually—she’d lured one of them up here a few times for something to do. Something to talk to. He’d even allowed her to scratch behind his long ears. But the dog was free and she wasn’t, and so she railed against the dogs, and against her gentle and not so gentle backwoods prison guards.
Devin’s Hill, every wild, wooded acre of it, including the creek and the three-room cabin, was still a prison, no matter how lovely the surroundings in the springtime.
No matter how cold and lonely in the winter.
At least she was finally learning to control her anger and resentment, knowing it only made her poor company for herself. But on a day like this, when spring was more than a promise, she was frustrated beyond bearing. Was she fated to grow into an embittered old woman here all alone?
Scratching idly at a poison ivy blister on her wrist—her first of the season—Eleanor sat on the edge of the porch again, her limbs spread apart in a most unladylike fashion, and tried to think of some means of escape she hadn’t yet tried. She couldn’t think of a single thing. Lacking stimulus, her brain had ceased to function.
Maybe she could bribe them by offering again to hold classes. The last time she’d offered, Miss Lucy, spokes-woman for the clan, had told her the Millers didn’t want her teaching them any of her highfaluting notions. Miss Lucy herself taught any who wanted to learn how to make their letters; their parents taught them whatever else they deemed worthy of knowing. All the rest was the devil’s handiwork. A more narrow-minded lot she had never met.
It explained a whole lot, to Eleanor’s way of thinking.
And now another winter had gone by. Two years since she’d become a bride, five months since she’d become a widow and a prisoner.
It was spring again, and she was so blasted lonesome she could have howled. Beat her fists on the floor, kicked rock walls—anything, if it would have done her a lick of good.
“A lick of good,” she whispered. She was even beginning to talk the way they did—a college educated woman.
Some days, she questioned her own sanity. What if by some miracle she did manage to escape? Where would she go? She had no money, no relatives—she certainly would never beg from her friends—but unless she managed to secure a position immediately, she would have no place to live and no way to support herself.
Here, she at least had a roof over her head and enough to eat.
But if she stayed here she would eventually turn into that other woman. The Elly Nora who went barefoot and talked to herself—who whistled back at birds and carried on conversations with chickens. The Elly Nora who’d been known to stand on a stump and loudly recite poetry to keep her brain from drying up like a rattling gourd.
She was just plain lonesome, dammit. And growing just a wee bit strange in the head.
Fighting a sense of hopelessness, she licked her fingers, greasy from eating fried chicken. “Miss Eleanor, your manners are shocking,” she said dryly. “Simply shocking.”
She shrugged and stared out at the hazy blue ridges in the distance. “Miss Eleanor, you can take your blasted manners and go dance with the devil, for all the good it will do you.”
She shook her head. “Talking to yourself, Eleanor?”
“And who else would I talk to? Oh, I do beg your pardon—to whom would I speak, if not myself?”
Lord, she missed the sound of another human voice. Days went by between the briefest exchanges. After nearly half a year of living alone, she would even have welcomed Devin’s constant carping again.
From the day a few weeks after they were married when he had rushed in all excited, claiming to have struck a tiny new vein of gold, all pretense of being a loving bridegroom had disappeared. Gone was the handsome, charming young man who had come down from the mountain in search of a rich wife. In his place was a taciturn stranger who came up from his precious mine only when hunger and exhaustion drove him above ground. He even…stunk! No time to bathe, he’d claimed. No time to do more than gobble down whatever food she had cooked and look around for something else of value that he could sell in order to buy more equipment.
She would see his measuring eyes light on the slipper chair that had belonged to her mother, or the little desk where she had once graded papers. Then, in a day or so, one of the Millers would roll up to the front door with a wagon, and Devin would apologize so sweetly.
“It’s just an old chair, Elly Nora,” he’d said when the slipper chair had disappeared. “A few more months and I’ll be able to buy you a whole set of chairs and a table to match. We’ll drive right up to the front door of that factory over in Hickory and you can pick out anything you want. If it don’t fit, we’ll build us another house to hold it all,” he promised.
Soon she discovered just how worthless his promises were. Convinced he was only days away from the vein his grandfather had found and then lost, he had worked day and night. Too tired to eat, drink or sleep, he had soon ceased even pretending to be polite to Eleanor.
Eleanor was convinced that his exhaustion had contributed to his death. Hector said he’d miscalculated the length of fuse. For whatever reason, he hadn’t made it out of the drift in time. In a single moment, Eleanor had gone from being a disillusioned bride to being a destitute widow.
They needn’t worry about her marrying an outsider. Having once been married for her tiny savings account, a small house and a few pieces of old furniture, she would wither up and blow away before she considered marrying another man.
Wiping her fingers on a square of gingham that had been torn from one of her old aprons, she stood in the doorway and tossed the chicken bone outside. “You’re welcome, my friends,” she said, knowing that sooner or later some creature would come creeping out of the woods to snatch up the bounty.
In the distance, the dog barked again. Someone was firing a rifle. She’d heard several shouts earlier, but couldn’t tell what they were yelling about. Drinking again, no doubt. Run a few traps, plant a few rows of corn, pan for hours and dig more holes in the ground—that was the daily life of a Miller of Dexter’s Cut. After that, they would take out the jugs of white lightning and celebrate whatever it was such people found to celebrate.
Evidently they were celebrating now. Perhaps someone had actually discovered a few grains of gold, although the noise sounded as if it were coming from higher up on the hill rather than lower down, where most of the panning was done.
Curious, Eleanor sat and watched the shadows lengthen, watched the lightning bugs come out. She listened to the sounds of the dying day, to the bird that always sang just at dusk, whose name she could never remember. To the sound of some small animal thrashing through the underbrush.
Thrashing through the underbrush?
Not her animals. They crept. They clucked and scratched or browsed. They hopped or flew, and a few even slithered. None of them ever thrashed.
Swinging her bare feet, she continued to watch the edge of the laurel slick, searching for whatever had made the odd noise. It sounded almost like…a groan?
And then her eyes widened and she was on her feet. “Oh, my mercy!” Racing toward the edge of the clearing, Eleanor reached out to catch the battered creature that stumbled through the rhododendrons and staggered toward her. A few feet away, she stopped, suddenly wary.
Chapter Three
He wasn’t one of the Millers. Eleanor didn’t recognize the man as anyone she’d ever seen before. Barely even recognized him as a man, the way he was slumped over, his arms cradling his body as he broke through the laurel slick and lurched shoulders first into the clearing.
She reached him just as he collapsed, nearly carrying them both to the ground. Bracing her feet, she managed to lean her weight against his in a manner that supported them both until she could regain her balance.
“Steady, steady,” she murmured. “I’ve got you now—don’t try to move.” Oh, God, oh, God, what do I do now?
In the dusky light his hair appeared black. Or wet.
Blood? That wasn’t water dripping across his face. It was too dark. “Are you hurt?”
Of course he was hurt! This wasn’t the waltz they were doing!
“They— I—” Clutching her, he swayed, tried to speak and broke off. He tried again. “Damn,” he muttered.
Eleanor replanted her feet and braced herself to support his full weight. “Shh, don’t try to talk, just lean on me. Can you walk at all?”
If he collapsed she could probably roll him uphill to the cabin, but getting him inside would be another matter. Tie him in a quilt and drag him up the steps? Was it physically possible?
It might finish him off. Whatever had happened to him, he didn’t look as if he could survive much more punishment. Both his eyes, his mouth…his entire face was battered and swollen beyond belief. Dear Lord, it hurt just to look at him.
“What happened to you?”
“Mm.” It was more groan than answer.
“That’s all right, you don’t have to talk now. Let’s just rest a bit.”
“Mm!” There was urgency in the single utterance, enough so that she sensed his meaning. He wanted her to…
Hide him? “All right, we’ll try to get you inside, but if you have any broken bones, walking isn’t going to help,” she told him, reduced to stating the obvious. “Lean on my shoulder—steady now. That’s it.” He was a good half a foot taller than she was, and must outweigh her by fifty pounds. Hard as a rock, but a dead weight. “Don’t try to hurry—that’s it, one step at a time.”
Who on earth could have done this awful thing? One of the Millers? God in heaven, she hoped not, but there was no one else around.
It took almost more strength than she possessed, but eventually they made it as far as the porch, moving two steps forward, falling one step back. “How on earth am I going to get you up the steps and inside?” she wondered aloud.
He held up a shaking hand, silently pleading for time to catch his breath.
Just as well, because she needed time to think. There was no way she could drag him inside without his cooperation—at least not without aggravating his injuries.
“What to do, what to do?” she murmured, not expecting an answer and getting none. She had managed to help cousin Annie from her bedroom to the front parlor so that she could watch the passersby, but by that time her cousin had weighed barely eighty pounds. This man was built like…a man.
“Who are you? Who did this terrible thing to you? It wasn’t the work of an animal, I don’t see anything that looks like teeth or claw marks.”
Might as well talk to a rock. The poor man was past answering. It was a wonder he’d managed to get this far.
“Where did you come from?” she asked.
Could he have been coming to help her get away? Had he somehow heard of her plight and come to help, and been caught on his way up the hill?
Lord, she didn’t want to be responsible for this.
She couldn’t even summon help from any of the Millers, not until she knew who had done this awful thing…and why. If it had been Alaska, he wouldn’t even need a reason, not if he’d been drinking.
“Now,” he panted after a few minutes.
“Yes, well—all right—we’ll take it slow and easy.” She eased her shoulder under his arm, conscious of the heat of his body. Aside from the coppery scent of blood, he smelled of whiskey, but something told her he wasn’t drunk. Could he have come to buy whiskey from Alaska and got into a fight over the payment?
At the moment it didn’t matter. He needed help and until she knew more, she didn’t dare call on anyone to help her help him. He was wet and shivering. Dirt and dead leaves were stuck to his clothes, his skin. He was barefoot. One sock on, one sock missing, which told her he hadn’t set out that way.
“Who did this to you?” she asked again as she helped him deal with the last step up onto the porch. Something was wrong with one of his limbs. It was either broken or badly sprained. If it was broken, moving him this way had to be causing irreparable harm, but what else could she do? She certainly couldn’t leave him lying outside with night coming on.
From the valley below came the faint sound of more shouting. Someone fired a gun. She had a feeling they weren’t hunting. They never shouted when they were hunting. At least, not when they were hunting wild game.
Hurry, hurry, hurry, she urged silently.
They made it through the door, and Eleanor took a deep breath and steered him toward the sofa, one of the few pieces of furniture Devin hadn’t sold. “I’m sorry we don’t have a doctor, but there’s a woman in the village below here who’s considered something of a healer.”
He caught her hand in a painful grip. Dark eyes glittered through swollen lids.
“What are you trying to tell me?” she whispered. “You want me to go? You don’t want me to go?”
He shook his head, his look so urgent that finally she got the message. “You don’t want anyone to know you’re here.”
His response said it all. What was it he feared, that this time they might succeed in killing him? “All right, just rest then for now. I’ll do what I can to clean you up, and after that…well, we’ll see.”
She gave him half an hour to rest before she came at him with a basin and cloth. She needed to know the extent of his injuries. If the man died on her…
He wouldn’t. She simply wouldn’t allow him to die.
Cleaning him up was embarrassing for her and painful for him. She was no fainting maiden, afraid to look at a man’s body, for heaven’s sake, it wasn’t that. Not entirely. But no matter how gentle she tried to be, there was no way she could discover where and how badly he was hurt without causing him further pain.
“My, you do have an extensive vocabulary, don’t you?” she said dryly the third time he let fly with a string of mumbled obscenities. At least he was speaking in words of more than one syllable now.
“Sorry.” It was more a groan than an apology.
“Never mind, I’ve heard worse than that from little boys.”
She hadn’t, but he didn’t need to know it. If she didn’t know better she might have thought the twitch of his swollen mouth was a smile.
