I Found Her Hiding in My Wagon… She Whispered: ”Pretend I’m Your Wife Until We’re Out of Town”

Chapter 7

She waited until morning to ask, and she asked the way you ask about a thing you are afraid to hear.

“Who ordered these curtains?” she said, holding the kitchen curtain over her arm.

Elias looked at her, then at the curtain, and something in his face shifted. “My brother. When the house went up. He had them made in Red Willow — said a man ought to put his money into the hands of people who did good work.” He paused. “The seamstress was named Bell, I think. Mara Bell.”

“Bell,” Rosemary said.

He looked at her again, longer this time. “Your mother.”

“My mother.”

He was quiet for a moment. “The curtains in my brother’s room — the ones you said needed mending —”

“Her work, too,” she said. “I found the mark last night. She put her mark on everything she was proud of. I thought she’d only ever sewn for the town. I never knew she’d sewn for your family. I never knew she knew this house.”

“She knew more of this house than you think,” Elias said slowly. “My brother used to say the seamstress had a fair hand and an honest one. He paid her for the curtains and for a quilt — the one that’s still on the bed in that room.” He looked at the closed door of his brother’s room. “And there was a winter, a few years back, when she came to him with papers she couldn’t read. Pike’s papers. My brother read them for her, word for word, and told her what they meant.”

Rosemary’s breath caught. “He knew.”

“I don’t know what he knew,” Elias said. “He died the next spring. But I remember the night he came home after she’d come to him. He sat at this table and said there were men in this territory who built traps out of paper, and the only thing that stopped them was somebody who could read the paper first.”

“He read her notes,” Rosemary said. “He must have known what Pike was doing to her.”

“I think he did,” Elias said. “And I think he’s the reason she left something behind for you.”

He crossed to the brother’s room and came back a moment later with a folded sheet of paper. “When Nathan died, I went through his desk. I found a letter addressed to no one, written in a hand that wasn’t his — a woman’s hand. It thanked him for reading the papers, and it said that whatever happened, she would make sure her daughter never signed away the land. I put it back. I thought it was none of my business.”

Rosemary turned away and stood at the window with her back to him for a long moment. She read the letter standing there, the way you read a thing you are not ready to have witnessed. It was short — her mother had never been one for many words. Thank you for reading what I could not. Tell no one. Whatever happens to me, she will not sign away the land. And below it, in the same careful hand: She has my hands. She will be fine.

“Her letters are the reason I ran,” she said finally. “When I found Pike’s notes, I found the rest of the drawer. She’d written me a letter, too. She’d written it months before she died and hidden it where she knew I’d look. She told me what the credit really was. She told me not to let them use her to take me. She told me to run if I had to, and to keep the land if I could, but that I was worth more than the land.” Her voice shook. “I took that letter, and I took the one Pike wrote to his creditor in Cheyenne. I didn’t know what the letter was worth. I just knew it was the only thing of his I could take.”

Elias did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would have done the moment justice.

Winter settled deeper. The days lengthened by inches. And then, on a mid-morning in February, when the snow had settled and the sky was the flat white of a Wyoming winter that has decided to stay, six riders came up the valley.

Elias was at the barn when he heard them. He came out and stood in the yard. He did not reach for the revolver, because reaching for it first was not how he handled situations he had not yet assessed.

Pike was sixty years old, with the look of a man whose physical presence had once been considerable and whose authority had long since become sufficient that the physical presence was no longer needed. He regarded Elias with the expression of somebody who considers himself the most important element of any situation he enters.

“Ward,” Pike said.

“Pike.”

“I believe you have something that belongs to me.”