Chapter 12
“Shall we take this inside, out of the wind?” Elmer turned to open the door.
Clarence rudely shoved his way past all of them into the cold, empty room where he began sniffing into corners.
The first thing Owen noted was the ornate parlor stove piped into a brick chimney. That would take the bite out of the air, once it was lit. There were four wall sconces for kerosene lamps and heavy black drapes on the right-hand wall. A hefty table stood before the drapes, likely used to hold the coffin for viewing.
“Now there’s a bar.” Owen slapped the thick slab of cherrywood. He would have to raise it up and put a front on it, but it would be the prettiest in town.
Looking around the room, he judged there was enough space for at least two gaming tables where the benches would have sat for the grieving.
“What, um...” Temperance hesitated. “What happened to the undertaker?”
“The one from Auraria took him,” Owen said glumly. “It’s not a good story. We’ll have to think of something better.”
“He died? Here?” She pointed at the floor. “He’ll haunt the place!”
“I want to serve spirits.” Owen winked, pleased with that one.
“Murray actually expired in the privy,” Elmer said.
Temperance muttered something and stepped through the door into the living quarters.
Owen followed to see it was spacious, but empty. There was an alcove where the bed would go, a spot for a washstand and room for a table near the fire. Shelves hung on one wall as a pantry. There was a bench for preparing food beneath the window that looked onto the wagon house and john. On this side of the wall, the brick chimney held a cooking hearth.
“What do you think?” Elmer asked.
“Hmm.” Owen wandered back into the parlor. “What’s behind here?” He brushed aside the heavy drapes, revealing a pair of oversized doors like the ones on a barn. He turned the wooden latch and cracked one. Outside, a heavy post with a block and tackle was installed overhead. On the ground, a pair of cellar doors covered a big square hole. “Is this how the departed came in and out? Did he store them below?”
“In the cellar. Let me show you.” Elmer lifted a trapdoor in the corner beside the coffin table.
That’s why there was a tall, unfinished fence at the boardwalk, Owen surmised. To hide the deceased as they were moved. Owen latched the big doors, thinking he would remove them and fill this space with the bar shelves and a mirror.
“Coming?” he asked Temperance as he moved to the hole where Elmer was already descending.
“To see Frankenstein’s monster? No, thank you. Do not expect aid if you scream.”
“Chicken.” He went down the ladder.
The cellar was so shallow, he and Elmer had to duck their heads. The earthen walls and floor had only been dug out beneath a small portion of the parlor floor, providing just enough room for another sturdy table, this one rustic and scuffed. A canvas sling hung next to a similar pair of doors to the ones upstairs. There was a second block and tackle system here, mounted to the joists that supported the floor above them.
“I could store barrels of whiskey down here, maybe even learn to make my own.” The sling would make it simple to move the barrels in and out.
“Does that mean you’ll take this in exchange for clearing my debt with...” Elmer kept his voice low and lifted his gaze to where Temperance was murmuring something to Clarence. “Madame Beauville?” Elmer finished in a whisper.
“Bring me the registration proving this belongs to me, free and clear, and I will take over that debt, yes.” Owen shook Elmer’s hand.
“I’ll be back within the hour,” Elmer promised, rising up the stairs like a draught of smoke.
Owen followed, arriving in time to see Elmer tip his hat to Temperance.
“Miss Goodrich. I expect I’ll see you often.”
“In a town like this, there’s no avoiding it, is there?” she said with false cheer.
“I mean once this is a public house. I’ll come straight back with the registration,” Elmer promised Owen as he departed.
“No,” Temperance insisted after he was gone. “You cannot turn an undertaking parlor into a saloon. You want me to keep you in line? I am telling you that is undeniably wrong.”
“Why? I don’t even have to change the name.” He waved toward the window. “Imagine how delighted a miner will be when his friend says, ‘Let’s go see our old pal Amos at Murray’s Funeral Parlor.’ Then they arrive to see Amos sitting here, alive as can be, ready to buy them a drink and play cards. Married men can tell their wives they’re off to see a friend at the undertaker’s, and she’ll give him a tin of biscuits to bring along.”
Temperance was refusing to smile. “The fact that you’re having this much fun with it should tell you how wrong it is.”
“If the man’s wife comes in here to find him drinking,” he continued, “And shoots him dead where he sits, I’m prepared for that too.”
“You are completely without shame, aren’t you?” She spoke sternly, but her mouth twitched. She planted her hands on her hips and glanced to the door into the living quarters. “Why don’t you ask Jane to deliver babies in the other room? Make it a cradle to grave operation?”
“See? I knew you were wasted, working for Fritz.”
“I’m wasted working in a saloon,” she assured him. “If you want to hire me, ask me to write the railroad study.”
He ignored that and lifted his gaze to the rafters, thinking he’d have to get Emmett in here to build an upper floor.
“Lifting the roof will have to wait until the snow melts, but I could build at least three guest rooms up there, maybe four.”
“Then you’ll be a tavern and you’ll have to change the sign, won’t you?”
“I can tell you’re being sarcastic, but that’s exactly the sort of forward thinking I need. Have you ever shot a gun?”
“Lord help me.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, then dropped her hand and lifted her gaze to his. “Do you understand that suggesting I’ll have to quell a brawl by threatening to shoot people does not make me eager to work for you?”
“What else are you going to do? I mean for work. There’s really no other way to cool hot tempers.”
She stared at him for a full ten seconds, then huffed out a breath and paced across the front of the table.
“I don’t know.” She looked around, then set her hand on the table and tried to hitch herself onto it.
It was too tall for her to do it gracefully. She had to set her handbag aside and plant both hands on the table. Even so, as she tried to jump and lever herself, she failed twice.
It was too painful to watch. He walked over and boosted her, plopping her onto the edge so she faced him. They were nose to nose. The outside of her knee was pressed to his thigh. The memory of their kiss was abruptly alive in this charged space between them, making his lips tingle.
“If you think you can seduce me, I won’t let it happen,” she said, voice quavering.
But wouldn’t it be fun to try?
“I could say the same thing.” He made himself turn away before he did his damnedest to do exactly that. With one hand on the hardwood between them, he swung his ass onto the table so they sat side-by-side, legs dangling.
“I hate you,” she muttered.
“You have other skills.”
“Like what? Don’t say it’s my appeal to men.” She held up a warning finger. “In this town, that’s not exactly a talent. Clarence could walk around in a skirt and men would find him fetching.”
The dog heard his name and padded over to sniff their feet, then flopped onto the floor beneath them.
“A skirt on a dog is like spectacles on a cat. Or a hat on a donkey. You can’t help but admire them.”
“There’s an occupation I haven’t considered. Millinery for animals.” She tucked her fingers under her thighs. Sighed.
“Or you could help me with my books,” he suggested. “That sounds like a skill you have that I need.”
“If you believe I have that sort of skill, why won’t you hire me to do the report?” she challenged.
“All right, listen. Much as it pains me to be serious, I’ll give it to you straight. Virgil bends silver dollars in half, he hangs onto them so tight. He would never put you and your father up all winter in Denver. My guess is he offered to pay your father’s accommodation because he planned to put him in our bunkhouse and let our camp cook try to poison him.”
“I don’t have to do the full report,” she hurried to say. “Introduce me to him. We can work out something with a very low budget. I only need to finance my return to Chicago.”
“Why do you want to go back to Chicago?” He frowned. “I thought you wanted a stage ticket to bring your father here.”
Her expression blanked with shock, the way it might have if she had stepped into a deep hole of muck without seeing it and was suddenly up to her knee.
She snapped her attention forward, mouth pressed flat.
“What?” he asked with suspicion.
“He’s not coming,” she admitted on a wince.
“Who?”
“Papa.” Her voice held the kind of agony that accompanied a tooth extraction. “The doctor told him he’d be reckless to come in his condition. He didn’t just fall on our way here.” She glanced at him, expression begging for leniency. “He fell because he had some sort of fainting spell. He keeps having them. He’s going home where my stepmother can look after him. He should be able to return to teaching.” Her feet swung with more agitation, almost as if she were trying to run away from this confession. “But I have to make my own way home.”
Owen might have been put out by her white lies, but he could see how distressed she was in the way her mouth trembled and her brow crinkled.
“I just keep thinking that if you introduced me to Mr. Gardner...” She pressed her lips together again, chin set and determined.
If she ever had been introduced to Virgil, she’d know that hardass was even less moved to pity for fools who got themselves into fixes than Owen was.
“I could take you to camp to meet him,” he held up a hand as she whipped her head around, expression glowing with sudden hope, “but it’s forty miles into the mountains. Even if you convinced him to pay for this report of yours, there’s nowhere for you to sleep there. There’s a bunkhouse full of men or whatever canvas tent you bring with you. I’m offering to let you stay here where there’s a stove, and your friend Jane is nearby, and you’ll have all the information you need to write this report of yours. If he hires you.”
“That’s true,” she murmured and chewed the corner of her mouth.
“Virgil will turn up here once he catches wind of what I’m doing.” He and Virgil were very different in many ways, but they came from the same squalid circumstances in the same unforgiving town in Virginia. They’d kept each other alive through many a rough time so Virgil would take it as his duty to make sure Owen wasn’t in over his head. “You can float your idea past him then. While you wait, you can work for me.”
“Helping with your books?” she asked skeptically. “You told the men at the corral I would be serving drinks.”
“That too.”
“Hmph.” She scowled at the blank wall across from them. “I don’t mind that, you know. Most of the men only want a friendly ear, but some think giving me a dollar entitles them to take liberties.”
“I told you?—”
“I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about other men. Mr. Fritz expected me to tolerate it.” She turned her head to stare straight into his soul. “Will you?”
“No,” he said abruptly and did his own glaring at the far wall. He’d seen plenty of women wronged in his lifetime, starting with his mother. At times, when things had been at their worst, she’d taken men in to keep a roof over their head. As Temperance might have noticed with Mavis, Owen did what he could to make amends for women being pushed into doing something they didn’t really want to do, purely out of a need to survive. “I want you to do more than serve drinks, though. I want you to keep my ledger. Do your budget thing to keep me profitable.”
He might not know how to do something like that, but he followed just fine when Ira read aloud the mine’s income and expenses. Owen understood the importance of tracking costs and returns, making sure everything added up.
“You don’t want to do it yourself?” she asked curiously. “Wait. Are you planning to open this saloon and go straight back to your mining camp? For heaven’s sake, Owen. I know as much about saloon keeping as I do about undertaking. You can’t leave me to run it.”
“I’ll be here through the winter.” He would need a manager come spring, but he would worry about that once he was open and had a sense of the business.
The bookkeeping part had hung him up all along. He had always known he would have to trust someone for that. Virgil thought Owen was gullible for the way he sometimes took people on faith, but he had to operate on his gut when it came to reading and writing because he couldn’t do either. Not well enough to know when the words or numbers didn’t match what was being said.
“Your budget will be fairly simple,” Temperance said thoughtfully, looking around the empty room. “Price out the upper floor, but don’t spend on it yet. Open the doors as soon as possible, so you can start paying down your expenses. You’ll need glassware and a few chairs. Whiskey, obviously. We’re going into winter, so you’ll need a lot of firewood. If you want to offer a plate of beans the way Mr. Fritz does, you’ll need dishes and cookware. Then it’s a matter of tracking your sales every day to see when you’ve paid down your outlay. It’s very straightforward. If you want to pay me to write that in a book for you, I’m happy to do it, but it wouldn’t take you more than a few minutes at the end of the day to do it yourself.”
The fact she was honest about that, and had admitted that her father wasn’t coming after all, tipped him into trusting her with something he rarely admitted to anyone.
“I can’t do it myself.” He realized the line that was digging into his palms was the edge of the table where he was clenching it. “I don’t read or write.”
“Not at all?” she asked with surprise.
“Not much.” He scratched behind his ear. He could write his name and make out some words if he had time and privacy to sound it out. Mostly he read people.
“Not everyone has a chance to learn when they’re children. There’s no shame in it. Goodness, I’d bet half the men here struggle with it. I could teach you,” she offered. “I was starting classes at the seminary, planning to make a profession of teaching at a women’s college, before….well, before I decided to come away with my father.” She brushed at a wrinkle in her gown.
“I had a chance to learn and couldn’t. I’m not the brightest nugget in the pan.”
It was supposed to be a joke, but it fell flat because it was too true. Too sharp against his lungs. Virgil had tried to help him when they were boys at school, and, later, when they’d been in the army. They’d almost come to blows, Virgil had been so frustrated at Owen’s inability to grasp what Virgil claimed was ‘plain and simple.’
“I understand arithmetic if you tell me the numbers, but I can’t write them down.” When he thought of values, they came to him likes dots on a die. He saw patterns and groups that produced a result that was obvious and accurate, but he couldn’t put it on paper. “I love stories too. If someone is reading a book aloud, I’ll always sit down and listen. I steal all the fancy words I hear, but I can’t read them myself.”
“Oh.” That’s all she said, but he could hear what was going on in her head.
Like most people in Denver, she was under the impression the partners in the Venturous Mining Company were educated, savvy businessmen, given what they’d accomplished since arriving here.
In reality, they were a ragtag team of drudge-workers who’d fallen ass-backward into a lucky strike.
“The thing Virgil and I saw most in California was that the men who got in first, got up first. You grab the gold and invest it in something that will keep paying after the claim dries up. Things like shops and saloons and brothels. I refuse to profit off girls on their backs. Owning a mercantile is too much book work. You have to track every doodad and fiddlestick, write letters to order things. But a saloon sells one thing. A man without smarts needs to keep it simple.” He ran his hands up and down his thighs. “Plus, I’ve got the gift of the gab. Good whiskey and good conversation will always bring people in the door.”
“I don’t think you lack smarts,” she said with a gentle look that made the inside of his chest prickle. “Your intelligence shows itself in other ways.”
Sure, it did. He was a helluva shot with a long gun. That and fifty cents would buy him breakfast.
“I’ll work for you, but not for dance tokens and tips,” she said decisively. “You’ll have to pay me a proper wage. Perhaps two dollars a day?”
“Good luck,” he choked. “We pay laborers at camp two dollars a day for backbreaking work, sunup to sundown.”
“If you set the hours Mr. Fritz does, I’ll be working sundown to sunup,” she retorted.
“How does a dollar a day sound? Plus, whatever you make in tips. I’ll supply the food if you cook it for both of us.”
She pursed her mouth, then slid her gaze to his. “Where would I sleep?”
“Here.”
“Alone?” She narrowed her eyes.
“No.” He frowned. “I’m not going to pay for a room at the corral when I own a perfectly good building.”
“I mean will I have my own room?” she pressed.
“I’ll put in bunks,” he decided.
“Top or bottom? Oh, don’t,” she added quickly, blushing and looking away before he could assure her that he was comfortable in either position.
He smirked.
“As soon as I’m able to afford a ticket home, I’m leaving,” she warned.
There would be six feet of snow on the ground for the next five months. He accepted that condition with a shrug of unconcern.
She worried her lip some more.
“If we can afford it once we’re open, we could ask Jane if she wants to work here,” he suggested. What the hell. She seemed nice and Fritz was a terrible employer, given how he’d treated Temperance.
That was the final hook Temperance needed.
“I’d like that.” A smile broke across her face, then fell. “She’s probably wondering if I’m dead in the street. I should go find her.”
“We have a deal?” He offered his hand.
She slid off the table and set her hand in his. With a solemn nod and a single pump of his hand, she said, “Deal.”