Family on the Range. Jessica Nelson
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Chapter One
June 1920
Oregon
“Bag the body and don’t forget to ink his prints.” Special Agent Lou Riley moved away from the man who had met his demise in the bowels of an illegal liquor operation. He slipped Wrigley’s peppermint gum into his mouth and gnawed on it as he thought through his circumstances.
This dead witness meant more time on assignment trying to track down the one who’d hired the foreign bootlegger to do his dirty work.
Prohibition in Oregon wasn’t a thing to be trifled with. After a decade of chasing murderers, traitors and thieves in his job as special agent for the Bureau of Investigation, Lou guessed helping the local police track speakeasies and distilleries served him well enough.
Better than the more dangerous spying he’d done until this past year.
He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the stress of a hard day’s work combined with personal pressures. Day before last he’d left his secluded ranch to tackle this assignment. His housekeeper, Mary, had everything under control at home, but he couldn’t shake his unease. Over a year ago his niece and his best friend, Trevor, had married, and ever since he’d been thinking about the past. About people long gone. And lately, when he saw Mary, a strange tension filled him, which was odd because they’d always had an easygoing rapport in the twelve years she’d been his employee.
Not that his job ever kept him home with her for long.
Grimacing at the kink in his left shoulder, he wheeled around and left the dim building. An overcast afternoon greeted him, heavy with mist and promising rain. He nodded to one of his field agents as he picked his way to the bureau’s automobile.
Summers in Oregon weren’t exactly sunny. Not warm, either. He missed the aridness of his home in east Oregon, the openness of the desert range. Small cities like this one tended to weigh him down with memories. Buildings pressed in on him....
He shrugged the morbidity away.
Every time he went home, saw Mary, he left feeling this way. Maybe it was her trusting smile or the way her eyes lit with welcome when he walked in the door. Like someone else’s long ago. Mary’s look stirred up memories, blew the dust of time off them—he stopped himself, stuttering to a halt near a gutter. He couldn’t go there. Not ever again.
“Hey, mister!”
Lou turned slowly at the intrusion, his hand moving to the weapon at his hip beneath his coat. “You talking to me?”
“That’s right.” A shadow slid out from an alley to Lou’s left, heavy Irish accent lilting the man’s syllables. “You the agent in charge down the road?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I got information on who was supplying the gig down there.” The man moved closer, and Lou caught a whiff of sour fish as well as a glimpse of green eyes and blond mustache.
“Let’s take this downtown. Put it on paper.” That pesky muscle cramped in Lou’s back again and he fought not to wince. He was thirty-six years old, but he felt sixty today.
“I’ll just slip you the information here, quiet-like.”
Lou’s brows lowered. He looked down the street. His agents were busy coordinating the bust, but something felt off. Every instinct warned him to draw his weapon.
He never discounted his instincts.
Drawing his revolver, he beckoned the man. “Come into the light.”
“And get pinned for bootleggin’? Not on your life, mister.”
“Then stay right there. I’ll get a pen and—”
“This won’t take long.” The man pulled back suddenly.
Lou’s skin prickled.
Shadows closed over where the man had been as he slipped from view. Alert, Lou spun away from the blond and faced the road. A sharp ping split the night before his chest caught fire in a familiar, unwelcome sensation.
Pivoting, he backed into the shadows. Shouts from down the road reached his hearing, but whoever had shot him took off. The sound of the shooter’s footsteps was distinctive, a smart uneven clip of metal against cobblestone. Almost like spurs.... The sound faded, merging with other, faster steps.
His shoulder burned. He groaned as the strength left his legs.
This was real bad. Worse than a shot in the leg or shoulder. Body numbing, he crumpled to the ground. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The sounds around him muffled and the last image he saw was Mary’s dark eyes, the curve of her lips when she opened the door to welcome him home.
Would he see her again?
* * *
Loneliness never killed a person.
Or so Mary O’Roarke tried to tell herself as she mentally prepared for a visit with her mother. Surely once she stated her wishes, her mother would then see reason and quit insisting on living by herself.
Oregon’s summer sun rolled above Mary, hot though not quite to its zenith. She slowed her mare outside the Paiute encampment where her mother lived. Alone. With no one to rely on. It was not the way an elderly woman should live, and she’d told her mother so many times.
Only now did she have the means with which to help her, and no one could stop her, not even her stubborn employer who owned the ranch where she worked and, until recently, lived. She’d bought an old friend’s house next to the ranch, the first home she’d ever owned in all her thirty years, and maybe that might convince her mother to come back with her.
Feeling hopeful, Mary turned the horse in the direction of her mother’s dwelling.
The encampment consisted of tents and campfires. The odor of rabbit flesh hung in the air. The government did not appear to care that native Paiutes preferred homes made from various woods and sagebrush, and instead provided them with only the means to make tepees. Mary nodded to those she passed. Some wore the rabbit robes for which her mother’s people were known. Others, mostly men, dressed in the white man’s garb. Trousers, hats.
She came to her mother’s tepee and dismounted. No hitching post for her mare, so she tied the reins to a straggly shrub nearby. Children whispered and giggled, circling but not coming close. A stray dog loped over and the children chased it, their ill-fitting clothes doing nothing to hinder their laughter.
A wistful smile pulled at Mary’s lips. She’d longed to have children many years ago. Before the trauma of her past had wrenched her from any chance of a normal life. Perhaps she’d grown too old now, too set in her ways.... She certainly knew nothing about the ways of motherhood. Sighing, she bent near the entrance of her mother’s tent.
“It’s Mary. I’ve come to visit.”
A rustle ensued. Then the grunt that was Rose’s answer. Mary twisted the flap to the side and entered the tent. The interior never failed to elicit a strange sense of distance. This was her mother’s life now, a return to her roots, but it had never been Mary’s life. The setting filled her with disquiet and a peculiar sense of displacement.
As a child she’d lived in the white man’s world. Her father was Irish and while he worked the docks, her mother had used her beauty to bring in money at various brothels. It had been an odd childhood, full of travel and sporadic learning. When she was twelve, her father had abandoned them, followed shortly by her mother.
Tasting bitterness, Mary swallowed and prayed for peace.
“You brought me something?” Her mother sat to the side, high cheekbones cloaked with lined, leathery skin. The map of her broken life.
“Yes, willow and sagebrush bark.” She placed the offerings next to the stack of intricate baskets Rose weaved to sell.
They lapsed into awkward conversation. Mostly talk