Noelle. Diana Palmer
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out to national headlines in Tombstone, Arizona, in the fall of ’81. It had seen the last reprisal skirmishes in the Great Plains and Arizona, following the Custer debacle in Montana in ’76. It had seen the death of freedom for the Indian tribes of the West and Geronimo’s bid for independence—and subsequent capture by General Crook in Arizona. The last of the great cattle drives had played out with the devastating winter of ’86, which cost cattlemen over half their herds and all but destroyed ranching.
Simultaneously in 1890 came the frightful massacre of Indian women and children at Wounded Knee and the closing of the frontier. The old cow towns were gone. Gunfighters and frontier sheriffs, feathered war parties intent on scalping and the endless cavalry chase of Indians in search of old ways, all were vanished off the face of the earth.
Civilization was good, Jared reminded himself. Progress was being made to make life simpler, easier, healthier for a new generation of Americans. Social programs for city beautification and welfare relief, children’s rights and women’s right and succor for the downtrodden were gaining strength in even the smallest towns. People were trying to make life better for themselves, and that was better than the lawless old days.
But a wildness deep inside the man in the business suit quivered with memories of the smell of gunsmoke, the thick blackness of it stinging his eyes as he faced an adversary and watched townspeople scatter. He’d only been a boy then, in his late teens, fatherless, spoiling for a fight to prove that he was as good as any son of married parents. It certainly hadn’t been his poor mother’s fault that she was assaulted one dark evening in Dodge City, Kansas, by a man whose face she never saw. She had, after all, done the right thing—she’d kept her child and raised him and loved him, even through a second marriage to a Fort Worth businessman that saddled Jared with a stepbrother he never liked. His mother had died trying to save him from the wild life he was leading.
On her deathbed, as he visited her in Fort Worth—before she followed her beloved husband to the grave with the same cholera that had done him in—she’d gripped Jared’s hand tight in her small one and begged him to go back East to school. There was a little money, she said, just enough that she’d earned sewing and selling eggs. It would get him into school, and perhaps he could work for the rest of his tuition. He must promise her this, she begged, so that she would have the hope of his own salvation. For the road he was traveling would surely carry him to eternal damnation.
After the funeral, he’d taken her last words to heart. He’d left his young stepbrother, Andrew, in the care of their grieving grandmother and headed East.
He had a keen, analytical mind. He’d managed a scholarship with it, and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. Then a college friend had helped him find work with a prominent law firm, that of Alistair Brooks, senior and junior. His particular interest had been criminal law, and he’d practiced it with great success over the past ten years, since his graduation from college. But along with his success had come problems, most of them with Andrew at the root. The boy had run wild in his teens; it had been left to his poor grandmother to cope. Jared had helped get him into the army just before the Spanish-American War broke out. Andrew had gone to the Philippines and discovered something he was good at—exaggeration. He made himself out to be a war hero and lived the part. He had a swagger and an arrogance that kept Jared in New York. He rarely went home because Andrew irritated him so. He rued the day his mother had married Daniel Paige and added his young son Andrew to the family.
Andrew had no idea of Jared’s past. Grandmother Dunn never spoke of it, or of Jared’s parentage. That was a life long ago, in Kansas, and had no bearing on the life Jared had made for himself. For all anyone in Fort Worth knew, Jared was a practicing attorney from New York City who did nothing more dangerous than lifting a pen to documents. He’d been quite fortunate that his infrequent contretemps with angry antagonists over points of law hadn’t made their way into the local paper; Jared tended to intimidate curious reporters, and most of his adversaries weren’t anxious to admit to their idiocy in pulling a gun on him. There had only been a handful of incidents, quickly forgotten, since he’d put up his gun in the ’80s. He was still a dead shot, and he practiced enough with the weapon to retain an edge when he needed one. But he hadn’t killed anyone in recent years.
His eyes narrowed as he thought about that wild, early life, and how reckless and thoughtless he’d been. His mother must have worried about his restlessness, the dark side of him that had grown to such proportions before her death. She had no idea who his father was, and she must have wondered about him. Jared had wondered, too, but there was no one in Dodge City who resembled him enough to cast any light on his lineage. Perhaps his father had been a drunken cowboy in town on a trail drive, or a soldier home from the war. It didn’t really matter, anyway, he told himself. Except that he’d like to have known.
He looked out the window at the bland expanse of grassland. News of this woman who’d been taken into his family disturbed him. He paid the bills for his grandmother, and, necessarily, Andrew. It would have been politic to ask if he minded another mouth to feed before they dumped this woman in his lap. He knew nothing about her, and he wondered if they did. It had apparently been Andrew’s idea to send for her; she was actually a distant cousin of his, which made her no relation at all to Jared.
He remembered so well the wording in his grandmother’s letter:
…Andrew feels that she would be so much better off with us than in Galveston, especially since it holds such terrifying memories for her. She would not go back there for all the world, but it appears that her uncle is insisting that she accompany him now that the city is rebuilt and he has work there again. While it has been a year and a half since the tragedy, the poor girl still has a terror of living so close to the sea again. I fear her uncle’s insistence has brought back nightmarish memories for her…
He wondered about the remark, about why she should be afraid of going to Galveston. There had been a devastating flood there in September of 1900. Had she been one of the survivors? He recalled that some five thousand souls had died that morning—in only a few minutes’ time—as the ocean swallowed up the little town. And didn’t he remember that his grandmother had written of Andrew visiting the Texas coast only recently? Connections began forming in his mind. He was willing to bet that this so-called cousin of Andrew’s was little more than a new girlfriend upon whom he was fixated. If that was the case, Jared had no intention of supporting her while his stepbrother courted her. She could be sent packing, and the sooner the better.
As the train plodded across the vast plains, he pictured the woman in his mind. Knowing Andrew, she would be pretty and experienced and good at getting her way. She would probably have a heart like a lump of coal and eyes that could count a wad of money from a distance. The more he thought about her the angrier he grew. His grandmother must be getting senile to even allow such a thing. That feisty little woman, who’d moved in with his stepbrother after he left for New York, had never been known for foolish behavior. Andrew must have pulled the wool over her eyes. He wouldn’t pull it over Jared’s.
The train pulled into the station late that night. He got off at the platform with only his valise and made arrangements to have his trunk delivered to his home the next morning. Although it was late, he was still able to find a free carriage to hire to take him around to the sprawling Victorian home, on a main street, where his grandmother and Andrew now lived.
He felt his age when he disembarked at the door, valise in hand. He hadn’t wired them to expect him. Sometimes, he’d reasoned, surprises were better.
He walked with a pronounced limp after the exercise his wounded leg had been forced to endure on the long passage from New York. His dark, wavy hair was covered by a bowler hat, tilted at a rakish angle. His vested navy blue suit was impeccable, if a little dusty, as were his hand-tooled black leather boots. He looked the very image of a city gentleman as he walked up the flower-bordered path to the porch.
Although it was dark, he could see that the elegant house was in good repair. Light poured in welcome from its long, tall windows, spilling onto the gray porch where a swing and settee and some rocking chairs with cushions sat. He had never lived in this house, but he’d visited it on occasion since he’d bought it for his grandmother