Elizabeth Lane - Bride On The Run

What business would Caswell have with Harry at this hour of the night? Anna was weighing the wisdom of asking when the two men pushed past her without a word and hurried on. Only the startled flash of Caswell’s eyes in his sharp little weasel face indicated that he had seen her at all.

Partway down the stairs she saw The Russian hesitate, glancing up at her. For an instant the light from the open doorway fell on his long, pockmarked face, and Anna felt her heart contract with a sudden, nameless fear. He turned, as if to start back toward her, but then Caswell seized his arm, said something in a low voice, and the two of them vanished into the dark corridor.

“Harry?” Anna’s elegant kidskin boots clicked across the landing as she hurried toward the open door. “Harry, what on earth—”

The words died in her throat as she stepped into the room. Harry Solomon was lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood, among the papers that had spilled from his open safe. A large, bone-handled butcher knife protruded from his back, right over the spot where his heart would be.

Arizona Territory, May, 1889

They would never find her here.

Anna’s lips moved in silent reassurance of that fact as the buckboard creaked down the narrow dugway that had been blasted into the sun-colored sandstone cliff. The silent man who sat beside her, his massive fists keeping a tight rein on the mules, probably thought she was praying. She wasn’t. Anna had given up on God at roughly the same time God had given up on her. By what she judged to be mutual consent, she no longer asked heaven for favors. Not even at times like this.

Above the towering canyon walls, the sky was a blinding turquoise gash. Two great, dark birds, which Anna guessed to be vultures, drifted back and forth, circling and descending on the hot spirals of air. Infinitely patient, they seemed to be waiting for a misstep. For the man. For the mules. For her.

The man glanced coldly at Anna. His name was Malachi, like the last book in the Old Testament. Malachi Stone—a hard-hewn, righteous-sounding name if she’d ever heard one. Malachi’s lead-colored eyes flickered upward in the direction of her gaze. “Ravens,” he said. “You’ll see a lot of them here.”

Anna nodded, twisting the unfamiliar gold band that encircled her left ring finger. This was nothing but a bizarre and frightening dream, she told herself. Any minute now, she would wake up in St. Joseph, warm and secure in her cozy hotel suite. Harry would still be alive, and she would be planning their wedding, not fleeing from town to town in a constant state of terror.

Louis Caswell had known what he was doing that January night when he’d stopped his sinister cohort from killing her. By the time she’d realized her mistake, her clothes, shoes and hands were streaked with Harry’s blood. She had left bloody footprints all over the Persian rug, bloody fingerprints on the knife handle and on Harry’s once immaculate pearl-gray suit. She had wiped her hands on the papers that lay scattered on the rug. She had even left her bloodstained merino shawl at the scene as she fled, panic-stricken, from the room. No jury on earth, she knew, would believe her version of what had happened. She’d had no choice except to run or hang.

Anna had snatched up what little money and valuables she could lay her hands on, packed a few necessities and hired a driver to take her to the railway station. Omaha…Denver…no place was safe for more than a few weeks. She had planned to head for California or perhaps Mexico where no one had ever heard of Anna DeCarlo. But in Salt Lake City her money had run out. She’d been scanning the Salt Lake Tribune, looking for any kind of employment she could find, when she’d spotted the advertisement one Mr. Stuart Wilkinson, Attorney at Law, had placed on behalf of his widowed cousin: “Wife Wanted: Remote ferry location on Colorado River. Must get on well with children and be accustomed to hard work….”

The front wheel of the buckboard lurched over a rock, jarring Anna’s thoughts back to the present. From hundreds of feet below, hidden by rocky ledges, she could hear the rushing sound of the Colorado. Spring was high-water time. Malachi Stone had told her that while they were still trying to make polite conversation. Swollen with runoff from melting mountain snows, the current was too dangerous for any kind of crossing. Having planned for such a time, he had lashed the ferry to the bank, hitched up the mules and turned the buckboard toward the ranch where his nearest neighbors lived. All night he had hunched over the reins, arriving at dawn to meet the stranger who, by virtue of proxy marriage, was already his legal wife.

Anna studied him furtively from under her parasol. Malachi Stone was a big man. Big shoulders, big arms, hands like sledgehammers and, beneath the dusty felt hat, a face that could have been hewn from hickory with the blade of an ax. She liked big men. Always had. Not that it made any difference in this case. The contract she’d signed in Salt Lake City did not include marital duties. She was hired help, plain and simple. The so-called marriage existed only to suit Malachi Stone’s rigid sense of propriety.

That arrangement was fine with her, Anna reminded herself as the buckboard swayed around a stomach-twisting curve. She was not looking for love or permanence, only safety. And Malachi Stone looked as if he could fend off an army of Caswell’s thugs with his big, bare fists.

She ran the tip of her tongue across her front teeth, tasting gritty sand. “How much farther?”

“Not far.” He did not look at her.

“You left your children alone at the ferry?”

His hard gaze flickered in her direction, then returned to the road. “Didn’t have much choice. Not that they can’t look after themselves if need be. Carrie’s eleven, old enough to see to the boy for a couple of days. And the dog’s with them. Good protection in case a cougar or bobcat comes sniffing around. All the same, it’ll be a relief to get home.”

“How long has it been since their mother passed away?”

The silence that followed Anna’s question was broken only by the sound of plodding hooves and the low hiss of the river far below. “A year come this summer,” he said in a flat voice. “We’ve gotten by as well as you might expect. But the two young ones need more care than I can give them on my own. That’s why you’re here.”

“Of course.” Anna gazed past him toward the next bend in the road, where the long, thorny spears of an ocotillo, each one tipped with a bloodred blossom, rose from behind a clump of prickly pear.

Yes, it was all about the children. She had known that from the beginning, but now, hearing his words, she felt the truth sink home and settle in like a spell of gray weather. A man like Malachi Stone could live alone on the moon without wanting for love or companionship. But his two young children were different. They needed a mother.

And what did she know about mothering? Her own mother had died of typhoid when Anna was still in diapers; and there’d been nothing motherly about the rod-wielding women who’d run the orphanage where she’d lived until the age of fifteen. She knew more about faro and five-card stud than she did about children, a fact that wouldn’t buy her much with a man like Malachi Stone.

The buckboard lurched through a flooded spot in the road, its wheels splattering water that was the color of cheap Mexican pottery. The Colorado would be the same—too thick to drink and too thin to plow, the locals said of it. A river of mud, sunk into a canyon as deep as the mouth of hell itself.

Would she be safe here? Even now, a shudder passed through her body as she thought of Louis Caswell and his pockmarked companion. For a time she had hoped that, having blamed her for Harry’s murder, the police chief would allow her to disappear. By now she knew better. Caswell would not rest as long as she was free. He wanted her dead.