Chapter Thirty-Two
Logan stood at the top of the stairs with his hand on the banister and his ledger tucked under one arm. He should’ve gone to bed twenty minutes ago, except Grace’s and Jonah’s voices carried up through the floorboards from the back of the house.
You used me.
That landed differently from up here. From the yard, with trenches dug in his property and blood on Jonah’s face, it would’ve sounded like an accusation, like Grace turning on her brother the way Logan had turned on both of them.
But from the top of the stairs, alone, with nothing between him and the words but pine floorboards and plaster, it sounded like a woman whose heart had just gotten kicked out of her chest.
I didn’t know about the ad. Lord as my witness.
She’d said it in the yard. Jonah had backed it up. And Logan had looked right through both of them because the anger had needed somewhere to go, and Grace had been standing closest and—
Right.
He sat down on the top step. Put the ledger beside him. The numbers could wait. The numbers would still be terrible in the morning, and terrible numbers had never once improved just because he stared at them.
Below, Grace’s voice went thick and wet, like someone crying while trying real hard to talk through it, and the words came up through the floor in pieces. He’ll never trust me again. Then something about the letter. Something about every goddamn word.
Logan leaned his head against the banister post.
He’d read that letter a dozen times since Mason first slid it across the table, and every line of it—the plain food, the mending, the promise to make a home and not just keep a house—every line had Grace’s fingerprints all over it.
Not Ace Pike’s. Not Jonah’s. Grace’s. The woman who talked to tomato plants and threw buckets at gophers.
The crying got quieter. Voices dropped to murmurs he couldn’t make out, and then boots on dirt, and then just the crickets and the house settling the way it did every night, all those joists and beams adjusting to the temperature, which Logan usually found comforting but right now found—
He’d tell her in the morning. First thing. Before the coffee, before the eggs, before she salted the cast iron the wrong way—she always salted it wrong, too much on the left side, and—
In the morning. He’d sit her down and tell her he’d acted like a jackass and that the letter had always been hers and he’d never doubted that, not really, not in the part of him that mattered.
He picked up the ledger and went to bed.
***
Miriam’s scream cut through the dark like a blade on a whetstone.
Logan rolled off the mattress and had his feet on the floor before his eyes opened. Bad habit, relying on Grace to handle the night feedings.
He crossed the hall and pushed open the nursery door. Miriam stood in the crib, gripping the rail with both fists, face scrunched and streaming with tears.
Grace’s side of the house had gone quiet. Her door, across from the nursery, hung open on an empty room.
“Grace?”
He scooped Miriam up. She latched onto his collar with that desperate clamp-grip and screamed directly into his ear, which hurt like hell but at least meant her lungs worked fine.
“Grace!”
He carried Miriam down the stairs, bouncing her the way Grace had taught him—softer, not harder—and hummed something, his tuneless rumble doing exactly nothing to calm the baby down.
The kitchen sat dark and cold. No coffee on the stove, no skillet warming, no Grace at the counter with her hair half-braided and a pencil behind her ear.
A note sat propped against the salt cellar.
He picked it up with his free hand while Miriam yanked his collar hard enough to pop a button, and the words on the page went through him one line at a time like fence nails driven flush.
I have gone to find Ace.
His hand tightened on the paper.
Don’t come after me.
Like hell he wouldn’t.
This is my mess to clean up because Jonah is my brother. The only reason that man has any hold on this family is because of me, whether I knew it or not. I’m taking my fifty dollars because it’s mine, and you said so yourself, and I aim to use it to make him leave.
Fifty dollars. She’d gone to bargain with a gang boss—a man who ran thirty pickpockets and had beaten her brother half to death yesterday—with fifty dollars. Damn it. Wouldn’t she ever learn that her stubborn streak would be the death of her?
I meant every word of that letter. The one I wrote from New York. Nobody told me what to say.
I still mean it.
Pa appeared in the kitchen doorway in his long johns. “What’s all the commotion?”
“Grace is gone.” Logan handed him the note. “She left in the night. Went lookin’ for Ace Pike.”
Pa read the note. His jaw set in that granite way it did when he’d formed an opinion, and the opinion involved somebody being a damn fool.
“Well.” He folded the paper. “She’s braver than she is smart.”
“Pa, I need you to take Miriam.”
“Son, I—”
“I’m ridin’ to town to find Jonah. He’ll know where Ace is holed up.”
“And you trust him to tell you straight?”
Logan’s gut turned sideways on that. Six hours ago, he’d thrown the man off his property, and now he needed him.
“I don’t trust him. But he’s all I’ve got.”
“You even know where to look?”
Logan shrugged. “Ain’t, what… three places with any beds to them in all of Pitkin. Gon’ start there.”
Pa took Miriam. She fussed at the transfer, grabbing for Logan’s collar, and he had to peel her fingers off one at a time. Each little finger that came loose pulled at something under his ribs.
“Bring her home, Logan.”
“I intend to.” He made for the bunkhouse. “Mason! Thomas! Saddle up!”
***
The boarding house on Main Street operated out of a two-story clapboard with a crooked porch and a sign that read MRS. DULCY’S ROOMS, which leaned at an angle that made Logan’s teeth itch. A man who couldn’t paint a sign straight had no business charging for lodging.
Logan pounded on the front door at half past five. A woman in a housecoat opened it with the expression of someone who’d gladly commit murder if only the law allowed it.
“Jonah Linton. Which room?”
“Top of the stairs, second on the left, and if you break anything you’re payin’ for—”
He took the stairs three at a time. Mason and Thomas waited with the horses outside. Logan needed to do this part alone. Besides, if all three Foster brothers showed up at a man’s door at dawn, it stopped looking like a request and started looking like a posse.
He knocked once.
Jonah opened the door. He looked worse than yesterday; the bruising had spread from his eye socket down to his cheekbone, and the gash had crusted over.
He blinked at Logan with his one good eye. “Logan?”
“Grace is gone.”
“What?”
Logan held up the note.
Jonah’s face went white under the bruising, which turned the green–yellow into something closer to gray, like old meat left out too long.
“The prospector’s cabin.” Jonah grabbed his coat off the bedpost. “South of the property, about a mile past the creek. Collapsed roof, half the walls missin’. That’s where he’s been meetin’ me.”
“And you think he’s still there?”
“Ace don’t move unless he has to. He’s a spider, Logan. He picks a spot, and he sits in it.”
Logan stepped back from the door and turned to leave. “Thanks.”
“Wait.” Jonah grabbed his arm. “Ace’ll have men with him. Two, maybe three. They ain’t gunslingers, they’re street rats, but street rats with knives are still street rats with knives.”
“I’ve got my brothers and a Winchester.”
“And I’ve got two good fists and a grudge the size of Manhattan.” Jonah set his jaw. “I’m comin’ with you.”
“Like hell you are.”
“Logan—”
“You led a gang boss to my ranch. You helped him dig up my property. You put my wife on that man’s map. Give me one good reason I should let you within spittin’ distance of—”
“Because I know him!”
“Yeah.” Logan pushed him back. “‘cause you worked for him.”
“Call it what you want.” Jonah pushed back. “I know how he moves, I know how he talks, I know which side he keeps his knife on—left hip, always the left hip—and I know—”
“That don’t help no one in a gunfight!”
“She’s my sister!”
Logan looked at Jonah. The man’s one good eye held steady, and the other had swelled completely shut overnight.
He’d buttoned his coat wrong—two buttons off, the left side hanging lower than the right—but he had a point.
Regardless of the mistakes of the past, Grace was his sister.
It would be beyond cruel for Logan to deny him a chance to help her.
“Fix your coat.”
Jonah looked down. Looked up. “Huh?”
“Your buttons. They’re off by two.”
***
They rode hard.
Thankfully, Mason had remembered to take an extra horse for Jonah.
The road south dropped past the ranch gate—Logan made himself look straight ahead rather than the trenches—and followed the creek into the trees.
The aspens had started turning—gold at the tips—and under different circumstances the ride would’ve sat right with him.
The kind of morning his mother would’ve called a blessing.
His mother, who’d died because a man named Dawson had buried stolen loot on their property and shot her for finding him. And now a different man wanted that same loot and had Logan’s wife.
Jonah rode ahead, guiding them off the main creek trail and through a stand of scrub oak that clawed at their legs. The path—if you could call it that—was like a suggestion made by deer and bad decisions before it narrowed to single file.
Logan clenched the reins. “How far?”
“A quarter mile. Maybe less.”
“And you’re sure he’ll be here?”
“Like I said.” Jonah ducked a low branch. “Spider.”
Mason pulled alongside Logan. “You got a plan?”
Plans required information, and information required time, and time sat somewhere in a prospector’s cabin with Grace.
“We go in. We get Grace. Anybody tries to stop us, we shoot them.”
“That ain’t a plan, Logan.”
“Well, it’s the only one we’ve got.”
No one said anything else until they reached the cabin. They stopped far away enough for the bandits not to notice them.
“Thomas, take the east side.” Logan glanced at the roof. “Come through the back wall. It shouldn’t be hard, given that the roof has already caved.”
Thomas peeled off without a word.
Jonah reined up behind a thicket of chokecherry. Through the branches, the cabin—what remained of it—crouched in a small clearing. Half the roof had collapsed inward, and the front wall listed hard to the left with gaps in the boards wide enough to see through.
Three horses were tied to a leaning post out front. And through the gaps in the wall, movement. Figures. At least two, maybe three, shifting around in the dim interior.
Logan swung down, tied his horse, and pulled the Winchester from the saddle scabbard. He checked the load. Five in the magazine, one in the chamber. He’d cleaned this rifle last Tuesday, same as every Tuesday.
“Jonah.” Logan kept his voice low. “Where does he keep her if he’s got her?”
“Back corner. Away from the door. Ace always puts his leverage where you can see it but can’t reach it easy.”
Leverage. The man called people leverage.
“Mason, you’re on my left. Jonah, stay behind us till I say otherwise.”
“Logan, I can—”
“Behind us.”
Jonah shut his mouth.
Logan crossed the clearing in a low crouch with the Winchester against his shoulder.
The front doorway—no door, just the frame hanging crooked on one hinge.
The sight of that busted hinge reminded him of his own gate, which reminded him of his yard, which reminded him of Grace’s garden, and the flare behind his eyes woke up all over—
He stepped through the doorway.
Three men. Two flanked a makeshift table built from planks and sawhorses, both of them young and wiry, with the kind of hollow-cheeked look that came from eating bad food and sleeping worse.
One had a knife on his belt. The other held a pistol in his lap, the way a man held a tool he’d only half learned to use.
And, at the back of the room, Grace sat on the dirt floor against the only solid wall.
They’d bound her hands behind her back with rope and stuffed a rag between her teeth.
Her hair had come loose, and it stuck to the side of her face with dried sweat.
Her coat had torn at the shoulder, and a bruise had started blooming along her left cheekbone in a dark spread that made Logan’s vision go red at the edges.
She looked up when he came through the door, and her eyes locked onto his. Every single word he’d planned to say about trust and secrets and letters evaporated like spit on a hot stove.
A man who could only be Ace Pike sat on an overturned crate beside her with that greasy bowler hat tipped back and a pine splinter between his teeth. He grinned with the gaps in his mouth like a man who’d been waiting for company.
“Well, well.” Ace pulled the splinter from his teeth. “The rancher himself. Come on in, friend. We was just gettin’ acquainted with your wife.”
Logan leveled the Winchester at the center of Ace’s chest.
“Get your hands off her.”