Chapter 22 #2
“Yes, well, you didn’t even think to have it considered with me as a full partner. So once again, I must ask you to leave. I have no desire to see you, much less to discuss this further.”
“I know I should have handled things better. That’s why I want you to return with me to Chicago. We’ll be married and see a lawyer and arrange for things regarding our research. You’ll be fully credited, and together we will make history.”
“You’ll make history, all right,” Spencer finally spoke up. “But not for brain research. See it’s a little thing called bigamy. Carrie’s already married. To me.”
Carrie saw the strange look that crossed Oswald’s face and thought it rather satisfying. He was so used to having charge over everything and everyone.
“We married back in February before coming here to Cheyenne,” Carrie said, moving a little close to Spencer and lowering her arms. “So, you see, there truly is nothing here for you.”
“You can’t be serious. You married this . . . this actor?”
“He’s a Pinkerton and now one of Cheyenne’s law officials. He works with my brother and father.” Carrie smiled at Spencer as he put his arm around her shoulders. “We’re all one big happy family.”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m hurt, of course. You wasted no time at all in marrying him. I suppose you two were carrying on all the time, just as I suspected.”
“We were good friends. That much is true. Spencer, however, never lied to me about his goals, motives, and aspirations. He never pretended to love me so that he could use me for his career.”
Oswald scowled and looked to Carrie’s mother and father. “You knew this all along and yet let me go on and on about how much I loved her? How I’d come to talk her into coming home with me? I suppose this whole family delights in humiliating good people.”
Carrie’s father got to his feet. “I’ve had about enough of you, Nelson.
I never cared for you. Knew you were up to no good from the first moment I met you.
You might recall the conversation we had about my suspicions.
I told you then, and I’m telling you again, I’m mighty protective of my family and have no intention of standing by to let you hurt any one of them.
Now it’s time for you to go. I understand there will be an eastbound train out of Cheyenne tomorrow, and you’d do well to be on it. ”
“I’ll come help you,” Robert volunteered. “I’ll carry your bags to the station.”
Oswald looked as if he might say something, but instead, he gave a curt nod and headed for the front door.
Carrie turned to her family. “I’ll see him out.”
She didn’t wait for anyone to give their approval and followed after Oswald. She grabbed his hat from the side table in the foyer and extended it as he opened the front door.
He turned and snatched the hat out of her hands. “You’ve made a big mistake. I will ruin you.”
She smiled. “You will try, but when it comes to light that you can’t even figure out the next step in my research, which is probably what is already happening and has you feeling a bit frantic, then people are going to see rather quickly that you aren’t the doctor you claim to be.
Little by little, they’ll start to realize that you came up with nothing much on your own.
They’ll see it was only after teaming up with me—a female physician of all things—that you started having brilliant discoveries. ”
Carrie shook her head. “I feel sorry for you Oswald. But even more so, I feel sorry for your next victim. I’m going to pray no one else will be fooled by your false promises.”
She all but pushed him out the door and closed it behind him. Carrie leaned back against the door and glanced up to find Spencer and her father watching her. They had both been close enough at hand to rescue her but stayed out of Oswald’s sight in order for her to have her say.
Papa and Spencer both broke into grins. She could see that they were proud of her and pleased with the way she’d handled the situation.
She heaved a sigh and pushed off the door. “That felt good, and now let’s eat. I’m starved.”
Spencer put Astor’s ledger aside. The man had been clever, skimming bits of money from one place and then another, never taking so much as to be noticed.
He had started his career in bookkeeping, and numbers had been his area of expertise.
Then the war came, and Astor had walked away from a solid job in accounting to venture into illegal bounty jumping.
Why had he thought it so necessary to cross that line?
He supposed the Astor brothers felt they couldn’t risk volunteering to serve and then dying on the battlefield.
They loved their widowed mother so much that they couldn’t leave her childless with no one to fend for her.
Spencer had to admit they had taken very good care of her.
She never suffered in the way many widows did.
Certainly not the way his mother had. His mother had worried about paying the rent and keeping food on the table for her son.
The minute Spencer was old enough to work part-time, he had given her money to help with the household expenses.
But in considering his own mother, Spencer realized that there wasn’t much he wouldn’t have done for her.
If not for the help of Al, Spencer might have thought he had to go into something illegal to see her taken care of properly.
Not that it would have been the right thing to do, but it did give him an understanding as to why a man might sink that low.
Spencer figured he’d send Al a telegram on Monday and let him know about Astor. He’d follow it with a detailed accounting of his search and the outcome, but the telegram would allow Al to close the file on Eugene Astor.
Spencer still wasn’t sure what that would mean for him now. Would he resign from the Pinkertons? Stay on with the Cheyenne police force? Would he and Carrie move elsewhere? There were a lot of unanswered questions, and all because one old man had died.
It seemed strange to know that tomorrow Spencer would wake up and have nothing to see to . . . nothing to accomplish. He’d been after Astor in one way or another since that fateful day in 1865. What did he do with himself now?
He glanced into the dying embers of the fire. Carrie had long ago gone to bed, and Spencer missed her company. Were they living as husband and wife, he would have her to share his bed. Her company would at least allow him to not feel so alone.
“Lord, I need some direction. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”