Chapter 50
JOSEPHINE LOOKED DOWN at her right hand—and her throat went dry. How could she have been so careless. So thoughtless.
Struggling to see her tangled web of a life from a bird’s-eye view, she grasped for any excuse that might make her mistake seem reasonable.
But the longer the silence stretched, the more she realized that any explanation she would offer would only sound like the lie it would be.
And looking into Dodge’s eyes, she knew he saw it, too.
She didn’t want to lie to him. Not anymore.
When his hand closed firmly around hers, she didn’t pull away.
“You’re not married,” he said softly.
She slowly shook her head, and the pleasure in his eyes ignited something inside her.
“For what it’s worth, I’ve always doubted that part of your story. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part.”
His gaze lowered to her mouth, and she wanted him to kiss her. Right here, right now. It was all she could do not to lean in first.
“Still, I’d like to hear you say it out loud.”
She looked at him, confused. “Say what?”
“That you’re not really married.”
Whether it was the huskiness of his voice or the faint smolder in his gaze, warmth flooded her body. “I . . . am . . . not . . . married,” she whispered. “Nor have I ever been.”
“Good to know.” He cradled her cheek, his thumb tracing her partially open lips.
She wasn’t sure who reached who first or how her hands got into his hair, she only knew that when she deepened the kiss, his response took her breath with it. After a moment, he pulled back slightly, the blue of his eyes far deeper than she remembered.
She ran a hand over his beard. “You trimmed it.”
“Just this morning. Bethie got onto me again about it.”
“It looks nice.” She smiled, taking him in. She could look at him all day long and never tire of it. And although her single suffragist sisters would tell her to run and never look back, another voice inside told her this man was different. That he could be trusted. But could that voice be trusted?
“Josephine . . .” He covered her hand on his chest. “Whoever or whatever you’re hiding from, tell me, and I’ll help you however I can.”
Her pulse still thrumming, she briefly closed her eyes, imagining the disillusionment he would feel when he learned the truth about her. Once he found out she’d killed a man, she feared, in his eyes, she would become just another fanatic suffragist—the very kind he condemned.
She gently tugged her hand from his grip, hoping that would help her to think more clearly. It didn’t. “Dodge, I—” All semblance of thought fled, leaving only dread and fear in its place.
He fingered a strand of hair at her temple. “The easiest way to say something hard is usually just to say it.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “If I did that, I think you’d run.”
“Try me.”
The speed of his response and certainty in his voice, the solidness of him beside her . . .
“I killed a man,” she said, her voice barely audible.
He didn’t move. He didn’t flinch. He just waited.
“I was speaking at a suffragist rally.” She inhaled then slowly let out the breath. “In Atlanta, where I’m from. Not quite a month ago. Miss Anthony was there and had spoken right before me. It was outside. Hundreds of people had gathered in the street, not all of them supporters.”
She recounted every detail she could remember.
What she’d said in her speech, how a group of men in the crowd—one man in particular—began heckling her, how he’d thrown that first rotten egg, then the rock, then how a barrage of empty whiskey bottles had been unleashed.
“Utter chaos broke out. The police eventually arrived, but instead of stopping the violence, they started arresting the suffragists—who were behaving peacefully!”
She described how she’d avoided being hauled off to jail because of what Todd had taught her. Next, the painful memories of losing Todd poured out, followed by the agony of how he’d died and the crushing blow of losing her parents soon after.
Dodge clasped her hands between his, listening without interrupting. Speaking of Sarah and her fiery Irish spirit brought a fleeting smile to both their faces, but it quickly vanished as she relayed how Clay Darden dragged her into the alley.
Dodge’s grip tightened. “Go on,” he said quietly, voice strained.
“He . . . got on top of me and started beating me with his belt. I looked for something, anything, to defend myself with and finally found a piece of a brick and—” Reliving the sensation of brick meeting bone sent a shiver through her.
“I struck him in the head as hard as I could. And he just . . . slumped over. And didn’t get up.
By then, Sarah had found me, so she saw it all happen.
But he never came to. No pulse, nothing. So, we ran.”
“You killed that man in self-defense. A man who likely would have killed you.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know who he was? Why he came after you?”
“When he interrupted my speech, I was quick to put him in his place, and some people in the crowd laughed. He didn’t like it.
I could see he was embarrassed, but I was determined he wouldn’t get the best of me.
” She gave a humorless laugh. “Ironic, isn’t it?
” She watched a branch being whisked along by the creek’s current until the momentum finally pulled the branch under and it disappeared downstream.
“What I didn’t know until Sarah found me in the alley was that he was the son of Frank Darden, the mayor of Atlanta. A man as anti-suffragist as they come.”
Dodge was silent for a moment, looking at the ring on her right hand before turning her hand over. He frowned and traced a forefinger over the healed cuts on her palm. “What’s this from?”
“I tried to shield my face from his belt.”
Slowly, he brought her hand to his mouth and pressed soft kisses on the faint scars. The gentleness she felt in the act, his understanding and compassion, pushed tears to the surface.
“Josephine, I—” His voice caught. “I’ve thought so many times about what I’d like to do to the man who did this to you. And even now, part of me wishes he were still alive so I could do it. I’m so sorry this happened. I’m sorry we live in a world where a man would do this to a woman.”
Josephine stared at their hands, fingers intertwined.
“A fellow suffragist, Adelaide Stewart, a good deal older than me, we marched together on several occasions . . . She used to say that the worst thing you could do to a man was to laugh at him, to make fun of him. I always thought she was wrong.” Her throat tightened. “I don’t anymore.”
The distant rumble of a wagon slowly made its way toward them.
He finally looked over. “Surely, if we went to the authorities in Atlanta and explained what happened—”
“Mayor Darden routinely arrests women who support suffrage, and the conditions for them in the prison there are harsh, Dodge. They’re treated like criminals.
If they refuse food, which some do, hoping to draw attention to the cause, Mayor Darden has them force-fed.
Three women I’ve known personally nearly died from the liquid being pumped into the lungs instead of their stomachs.
They suffered cuts to their mouths and their throats, then had high fevers and sickness.
Can you fathom what he would do to the woman who killed his son? ”
“And so you ran,” he said softly.
“With Sarah’s help, I got on the first train I could and got out of Atlanta. By the time I got to Chattanooga, authorities were already looking for me in the station. Same for Tullahoma. Slim Poyner helped me get by them and out of the station there and . . . well, you know the rest.”
She smiled but he didn’t.
“I treated you rudely that first night, Josephine, and I’m sorry. Especially knowing now what you’d been through. But I looked at you and . . . I think I saw all the pain and mistreatment Kathleen had been through. Then when I saw that sash sticking out of your coat pocket . . .”
“That certainly didn’t play in my favor, did it?”
That earned her a hint of a smile, at least.
“When we first pulled into Lynchburg that night, and I saw how small a town it was, and how remote, I thought I’d be safe. Especially when I found out there was no newspaper, no telegraph.”
“Cut off from the outside world.”
“Something like that. Then I learned that a ‘very wealthy man in town’ had the Chattanooga newspaper delivered to him.”
He shook his head. “Good ol’ Uncle Jack.”
“So after hoping I might be safe, the clock started ticking on that very first night. And every day since, I check The Chattanooga Times before Mr. Daniel gets in, hoping nothing about the incident will be in there.”
He peered over. “Is that why you took to making sure his newspaper is all nice and pressed?”
She gave him a look.
“Very clever, Miss Dunham.” He hesitated. “Is that even your real name?”
She nodded. “Something else I wasn’t planning on using . . . until Mr. Poyner did, with you. There was no going back after that.”
A breeze stirred the trees, and a leaf fluttered and dipped and twirled before finally landing noiselessly at their feet.
“Do you think Mayor Darden had your brother killed?”
“I do, although I have no proof. But my parents believed that, too.”
A moment passed, and he started to say something when someone called his name from a good distance away. She turned and looked behind them.
“It’s all right.” He smiled. “Even in winter, you can’t see this spot from up on the hill.
But it’s probably best if we get back. Just in case anybody saw us coming down here.
You’re a married woman, after all.” He stood and offered his hand, and pulled her up.
A slow smile tipped his mouth. “Don’t be looking at me like that, Mrs. Dunham. You have no idea what that does to me.”
“Oh I think I have some idea.”
He closed the distance between them and kissed her, but much more slowly this time, his hand on the nape of her neck, the other tracing a slow path down her back that awakened every nerve in her.
“You not being married,” he whispered against her mouth. “That’s about the best news I’ve ever gotten.”
She laughed, looking up at him. “And you letting me climb up into your wagon that night . . . without assistance, I might add—”
He groaned, which only deepened her smile.
“—you saved me from being caught and taken back to Atlanta, and to prison.”
“God saved you from all that. I just happened to be the conveyance he chose at the time.”
Hearing the conviction in his tone, she found herself wanting to believe that God still knew the details of her life, and that he cared enough to step into them.
They walked back uphill. Nearly to the top, he paused. “You’re going to have to keep being Mrs. Dunham, at least until we can figure out next steps.”
His use of the word we—and even next steps—made her feel not so alone. “Yes, I know. And believe me, I’ve been trying to figure that out.”
He looked pointedly down at her right hand, then back at her, and she quickly moved her mother’s ring to her left.
“Two are better than one,” he said quietly.
It took a minute, but she gathered his meaning. “I never knew that inscription was there until after my mother died. But—” She looked up at him, wondering what Miss Anthony would say if she could hear her now. “I’m beginning to think it may be true, as much as that frightens me.”
His laughter was immediate and warm. “Oh, I know it’s true. And if it helps, it doesn’t frighten me a bit.”
When they crested the hill, a farmhand, Jake—Josephine thought his name was—saw them and waved. “Hey boss, I don’t know who you talked to—” Jake gestured to a loaded wagon in front of the barn. “But the supplies for dipping got in a day early.”
The wagon’s driver, an older man with skin well aged by the sun, looked down at Dodge. “You Dodge Coburn, the man in charge of all this?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Well I hope you know what you’re doing with it, ’cause you could kill ’bout everything in Moore County with this stuff.”
“We’ll be careful. Jake, get some men and let’s get it unloaded. Everybody wears gloves. And every last box or bucket of this goes in the shed like we discussed. Nothing in the barn. Nothing anywhere near living quarters or animals.”
“You got it, boss.”
Josephine walked with Dodge to the back of the wagon. “I take it this is the arsenic?”
“This ain’t just arsenic, ma’am.” The driver joined them and lowered the tailboard. “It’s almost two hundred pounds of it, along with pine sap, and calcium oxide. Like I said, I hope you all know what you’re doing.”
Dodge peered at the wagon’s contents. “It’s for fighting Texas fever. The Department of Agriculture believes it’ll rid the cattle of ticks.”
“The Department of Agriculture? You mean the gover’ment?” The man spit a dark stream of tobacco. “We’ll all be dead by nightfall. Reckon I can’t make it outta here fast enough!”
Dodge laughed, and she did too. But the driver scowled.
Dodge gestured to her. “I’m going to be a while. Why don’t Bethie and I come by Miss Mary’s for supper. Maybe we can talk some more?”
“I’d like that.” She also liked the subtle meaning in his eyes, and the fact that he knew the truth about her now. No more pretense. At least with him. “But Dodge . . .” She glanced at the wagonload of chemicals. “Who’s going to mix all this up?”
“That would be me.”
“Is it even safe?”
The driver cursed. “No, it ain’t safe, woman! Ain’t you been listening to me talking?”
Dodge shook his head, directing his attention to her.
“I know what I’m doing. The Department of Agriculture sent thorough instructions.
And don’t worry . . .” He winked. “I’m good at holding my breath.
Besides, a few of the farmhands around here have been eyeing my position, wanting to take my place. They might just get their chance.”
“I ’bout plumb forgot . . .” The driver reached back up to the bench seat and grabbed an envelope. “Man by the name of Poyner from the train asked me to tote this on up to you. Said it looked official.”
Dodge took the envelope from him, read the front, and Josephine caught equal parts hopefulness and dread in his features.
“Is it good news?” she asked. “Or bad.”
“I don’t know yet.” He held it up, and she read the words Department of the Interior, The United States of America encircling a round emblem in the upper right-hand corner. “I’m assuming it’s about my land.”
“In Wyoming.”
He nodded.
“Perhaps you have a buyer.”
“Maybe.” He shoved the envelope in the back of his waistband and pulled a pair of gloves from a pants side pocket. “But it’ll have to wait.” He nodded toward the group of men headed their way. “I’ll come by Miss Mary’s later.”
If his clipped tone didn’t signal the end of their conversation, his turning to begin unloading the wagon did.