This Gun for Hire Read online

  Calico slowly shook her head. “Poor Ann. Isolated. Protected. It is little wonder she doesn’t want to leave. Promise me we will not do that to our children. I could not bear to see them caged by so much love and good intention.”

  Quill stared at her. It was hard to know exactly how to respond to that. Finally, he said, “But you are generally not opposed to loving them.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And just to be clear, you are not opposed to having them.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Really, Quill, I was the one who Beatrice cracked on the head.”

  “Uh-huh.” He rubbed behind his ear. “But sometimes . . .”

  Calico smiled. “It’s the same for me.” She started to rise, felt a wave of nausea, and dropped back into the chair. “But not at this moment.”

  Quill reached out to steady her. “Dizzy?”

  “A little.”

  “Stay there. Beatrice is not leaving town. There is no train until late morning. I am going to get Dr. Pitman and send him down. I will sit with Ramsey. I don’t want to disturb Ann yet.”

  Calico reached for Quill’s hand and laid hers over it. “One of us has to tell her what’s happening.”

  “I understand, but right now you need attention and I need to dress. I will bring your clothes to you as soon as Pitman tells me you are able to—” He stopped because it was clear from the look she gave him that there was no point in putting any conditions on her leaving the house. “Right,” he said. “I will bring your clothes.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Just to be clear,” she said quietly. “I love you whether or not you give me my way, but I think you will find I am easier to love if you do.”

  Quill regarded her with wry amusement. He was on the point of telling her what he thought of that when Dr. Pitman called down to them. “I’ll go,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

  The doctor was standing in the hallway when Quill arrived. Pitman gestured to Quill to hurry and then disappeared into the bedroom.

  “Has he come around?” asked Quill as he approached the bed. Before Dr. Pitman could answer, Quill saw movement behind Ramsey’s eyelids. A moment later, he opened his eyes. “And so he has.”

  Dr. Pitman put out his hand and waved it slowly above Ramsey’s face to see if his eyes would track. They did. “Mr. Stonechurch?”

  Ramsey slowly turned his head. His eyes were rheumy, his gaze still vaguely unfocused. His lips moved, but no sound emerged.

  “His color has improved,” said Quill, and by that he meant that Ramsey’s cheeks were no longer unnaturally flushed. “Does that mean he is finding it easier to breathe?”

  Pitman nodded. He wrung out a compress and carefully wiped the watery discharge from Ramsey’s eyes and wet his lips. “I called you as soon as I saw he was conscious. Where is Miss Nash?”

  “Still in the kitchen. I need you to attend her.” He explained what had transpired since Calico left. “I’ll stay with Mr. Stonechurch until you return.”

  Without a word, Pitman picked up his leather satchel and left.

  “Obliging, isn’t he?” Quill said to Ramsey. “And he saved your life. Keep that in mind when he starts ordering you around. He’s earned the right.”

  Ramsey tried to say something again and had to settle for giving Quill a sour look.

  “Noted,” said Quill. “Do you want some water?” When Ramsey nodded, Quill soaked a clean compress in water and put it against Ramsey’s lips. “Suck on that. You can’t have more until Pitman says you can. I know. It’s miserable.” He held the compress to Ramsey’s mouth until he indicated he’d had enough, and then he put it aside. “Did you hear what I told Pitman about what happened downstairs?” Ramsey’s nod was slight but noticeable. “Do you understand what it means?”

  Quill waited, but Ramsey did not respond. It was not possible to know what his silence meant, but Quill’s best guess was that Ramsey was as reluctant as Dr. Pitman to believe that Beatrice was culpable.

  “As best I can piece this together without a confession from your sister-in-law, Beatrice has been slowly, methodically poisoning you. She disguised her intent by using small amounts at first, only enough to give you discomfort and set a pattern of mild ailments that could have any number of causes. Headaches. Stomach distress. Fatigue. You rarely complained, but when you did, you took those complaints to Beatrice and unwittingly gave her further opportunity to poison you.”

  Quill observed a slight widening of Ramsey’s eyes and stillness in the rest of his body. “So that is how it was,” he said. “She had the means to end your life at any time.”

  Ramsey’s eyes darted past Quill to the door. He lifted a hand and placed it against his throat. “Ann? She’s all right? Safe?”

  “She’s the one who found you in your study and roused the rest of us. She refused to leave your side until we insisted that she rest so she could have a turn sitting with you later. I’ll get her in a moment.”

  Ramsey’s features contorted slightly as a stomach cramp seized him. He sucked in a breath and drew up his knees. His hands briefly curled into fists. When it passed, he swore softly. The clarity of the cursing pointed strongly toward his recovery. “Goddamn Pitman,” he muttered. “What did he give me?”

  “A purgative. I watched him force it down your throat and I still don’t know how he did it. You were not cooperative.”

  Ramsey grunted. He carefully unfolded his body in anticipation that another cramp would eventually pull him taut again.

  Quill waited for him to settle. He said, “What did Beatrice offer you earlier? Tea? Wine? Was she still with you in the study when you collapsed?”

  Ramsey said nothing.

  Quill allowed the silence to linger, hoping it would prompt Ramsey to speak up. It did not. He said, “I suppose you have your reasons for wanting to protect her, or at least not think the very worst of her, but she tried to kill you, Ramsey, and without the intervention of your daughter and Dr. Pitman, she would have succeeded.”

  Ramsey’s mouth twisted as his stomach contracted again. It required considerable effort on his part to speak, but he forced the words out. “I want to see Ann.”

  In spite of his frustration, Quill merely shrugged. He was gone from the room before Ramsey’s grimace had faded.

  Ann did not call out to Quill when he knocked. He had not thought she could actually fall asleep, but it seemed that she had. He knocked more loudly the second time. When she still did not answer, he opened the door just enough to put his head inside. Her bedcovers were turned back and she was not under them. That prompted Quill to step inside.

  Ann’s room was larger than the guest bedrooms, but it shared dressing and bathing areas with the bedroom on the other side. Quill, because he had made it his business early on to learn the layout of the house, knew that neighboring bedroom belonged to Beatrice, and that the arrangement harkened back to the days when the common area had been a nursery and then a sitting room. Until now, he had never considered how the configuration contributed to Beatrice’s attachment to Ann and the influence Beatrice had over her.

  Concerned, but not yet alarmed, Quill called out before he entered the bathing and dressing rooms. They were empty. He did not announce himself as he moved through to Beatrice’s bedroom. Ann was not there.

  Quill stopped at the foot of Beatrice’s bed and stared at it, trying to make sense of something he was seeing and not quite understanding. The bedcovers were turned back but not disturbed in any other way. Beatrice had not been sleeping when Ann had gone to get her to bring her to the study. Quill returned to Ann’s room. He had seen that the bedcovers were turned down, but he had only been concerned that she was not in bed. He had not fully comprehended then that she had not slept in her bed either.

  He cast his mind back to what she told him earlier. I was r
estless, couldn’t sleep. That seemed to confirm his observation. Had she and Beatrice been talking late into the night? Calico had mentioned there was discussion about Boone Abbot. It was conceivable that the conversation could have still been going on, especially if Ann was excited and Beatrice did not want to discourage her. Ann seemed to suggest she had found her father because she had gone downstairs in search of something that would help her sleep.

  Could he believe her?

  Quill recalled the panic in her voice when she asked, If this is because of something he ate, will he recover?

  “Christ, Ann,” he said, shoveling his fingers through his hair. “What the hell did she persuade you to do?”

  * * *

  Calico was impatient and doing precious little to hide it. She prepared Pitman a cup of coffee to demonstrate that she had her wits, but when he insisted on a medical assessment, she snapped, “You can tap my skull and examine my eyes and hit my knee with that little hammer of yours as long as you understand it does not make a bit of difference what you say about any of it. As soon as Quill gets down here with my clothes, I am leaving.”

  “I never thought it would be otherwise. In fact, he warned me that would be the case. I am here because it is important to him.”

  She sighed. “It is. He cannot help himself.” She pointed to the lump on her skull that he needed to look at. “Well, have at it.”

  Pitman took his time making a thorough examination. When he was done, he closed his medical bag and said, “Good luck.”

  Calico regarded him suspiciously. “That’s all? Good luck?”

  He shrugged. “Just saving my breath since what I have to say doesn’t matter.”

  “To me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me. What are you going to tell Quill?”

  “Oh, well, I am going to tell him to stay close to you. I cannot predict which way you will fall, but he should be prepared.”

  “I think you are being overly cautious.”

  “See?” he asked, holding up a hand. “Waste of breath.” He picked up his bag and headed for the stairs.

  Calico made a face behind his back.

  “I saw that,” he called out.

  “You did not,” she said, but there was part of her that was not entirely sure.

  * * *

  When Quill returned to Ramsey’s room, Pitman was sitting in the chair at his patient’s bedside. “That did not take long,” he said. “She didn’t argue with you?”

  “I didn’t argue with her.”

  Quill nodded. It was a good strategy. “And? What do you think?”

  “She has a concussion. She should rest but not sleep. And no, I did not tell her that. I said I would tell you to stay close.”

  “Already my intention.” Quill glanced at Ramsey. He was lying on his back again, but his head was turned and his eyes were alert. He was following their conversation. Quill said, “Would you excuse us, Doctor? There is a matter I need to discuss privately with Mr. Stonechurch. It won’t take long. You can wait in the hallway. Just close the door.”

  Pitman did not immediately comply. He looked to his patient first. When Ramsey nodded, he got up and left.

  Quill waited for the door to close. “Ann,” he said. “It was Ann who visited you in your study, not Beatrice. She offered you something to eat, something she thought would temper your mood, perhaps make you amenable to what she had to say. Did she have a chance to tell you that Calico introduced her to Boone Abbot before you collapsed?”

  “Ann has nothing to do with this.”

  Quill ignored him. “I think Beatrice encouraged Ann to go to you, and I think Beatrice suggested that she take something with her. What was it? Toast and elderberry jam? A sliver of elderberry pie?”

  Ramsey’s features remain unchanged.

  “Whatever it was, Ann took it away when you keeled over. She was genuinely frightened by your collapse, but I think there was some small part of her that suspected the cause, and I believe that would have frightened her almost as much.”

  Ramsey breathed deeply, closed his eyes as he coughed. “Where is she? Why isn’t Ann here?”

  “She’s gone,” Quill said bluntly.

  Ramsey’s eyes flew open. He struggled to sit up, but Quill put a hand on his shoulder and did not let him rise. Ramsey had no choice but to lie down. “Find her. She will be with Beatrice.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  Ramsey nodded faintly. Tears stung his eyes. He blinked but did not try to hide them. “Why?” he asked quietly. “Why would Beatrice use my daughter so cruelly? Can she really hate me so much?”

  It was not a question Quill was meant to answer and he remained silent.

  “No matter what she’s done,” said Ramsey, “I believe she loves Ann. I have to believe that. I have to. You understand?”

  “I do.”

  “The threats? The attempts to shoot me? That was Beatrice?”

  “I believe that if it wasn’t by her hand, then she had a hand in it.”

  As soon as he heard himself say it, Quill felt a thread of tension pull his shoulders taut. His head came up and he stared away from the bed and in the direction of the window. He was not looking at anything in particular, but he was seeing things as he had not seen them before.

  Without a word of his intent to Ramsey, he turned and strode to the door. Pitman was waiting in the hallway. Quill waved him in. “Stay with him. The cook and housekeeper will be arriving soon along with several others. Someone is sure to volunteer to sit with Mr. Stonechurch and relieve you. Don’t accept the offer.”

  The doctor’s mouth snapped shut so hard that his spectacles bounced and slid down the slope of his nose.

  Quill strode out, satisfied Pitman understood. When he reached his room, he changed quickly and strapped on his gun, but before he put on his jacket, he rummaged through the uppermost drawer in his wardrobe. He found what he wanted beneath a stack of handkerchiefs. He palmed the badge and attached it to his vest without looking down.

  It felt right. It was time.

  Quill shrugged into his jacket then his coat. He checked his pockets for gloves. On the way out the door, he grabbed the Stetson he had only rarely worn since coming to Stonechurch and put it on.

  He made quick work of gathering Calico’s clothes, weapons, and cartridges. Without a doubt, the only impediment to her leaving the house was the fact that she was not dressed for it, and that included her guns.

  “Finally,” Calico said when he dropped her belongings on the kitchen table. “Where is my Colt?”

  “Under the coat.”

  She found it. “Loaded?”

  “Mm-hmm. I left the rifle and the derringer behind.”

  She nodded, removed her robe, and reached for her drawers. “Are you going to just stand there?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” She motioned him to the stairwell. “Go there or I am going into the mudroom.”

  He sighed, shook his head. Once he was in the stairwell and out of sight, he said, “Do not expect this accommodation when we’re married.”

  She smiled. “Consider me warned.” She yanked up the hem of her shift and shoved her long legs into the drawers.

  “You realize that was a proposal, don’t you?”

  “You realize I accepted, don’t you?”

  “Huh. That was not nearly as hard as I thought it would be.”

  Calico rid herself of her shift and pulled a heavy cotton chemise over her head. “Oh, you will have to make a better one later. Even someone like me wants a pretty proposal.”

  Quill did not ask what “someone like me” meant. He said, “Ann is gone.”

  That riveted Calico. She was half in and half out of her shirt, her fingers frozen on the buttons. “Don’t you think that’s the first thing you should have told me?”

 
“We would not be any farther ahead than we are now. And we need to think, not react.”

  Although he could not see her, Calico nodded anyway. “Tell me everything.”

  He did, recounting his conversation with Ramsey, his search for Ann, and finally the conclusion he had reached that had prompted his abrupt departure from Ramsey’s room.

  “It’s all connected,” he said. “The shootings, the problems in the Number 1 mine, Ramsey’s suspicions that the men are organizing, and Beatrice’s very personal attempt tonight to kill him.” He stepped into the kitchen when Calico called to him and was brought up short by the sight of her. She did not merely take his breath away; she made his heart trip over itself.

  She was wearing the clothes he had chosen for her, the same ones she had been wearing when she arrived in Stonechurch. She’d told him then that she had dressed in that fashion because she was feeling ornery, but that was not the case now. Now she looked fierce, and he suspected she was feeling exactly the same way. Her buckskin trousers hung straight and loose until they disappeared inside her boots. She wore a white shirt similar to his and a dark brown leather vest that hid the small curves of her breasts. She was buttoning her jacket when she glanced up and caught him staring.

  “What?” she asked.

  He simply shook his head. “Nothing.”

  She shrugged and finished buttoning her jacket. She deftly plaited her hair and held the tail against the crown of her head while she slipped on her hat. When she reached for her scuffed and weather-beaten leather duster, she only grabbed a handful of air.

  Quill held up the duster. “Turn around. I want to put it on you.”

  Calico hesitated, genuinely nonplussed by the gesture. “No one’s ever—” She stopped, gave him her back, and let him be the gentleman he was. Standing there in her man’s shirt and trousers, a Colt at her hip, wearing a vest that disguised any hint of her long curves and a Stetson that hid what she thought of as her one true feminine glory, Calico felt utterly female as Quill helped her with her coat.