"Well," Wood said, stopping. "My dear Mrs. Parker. My dear Desdemona."
"Were you in the audience?"
He nodded, licking his lips. "You were wretched, you know. I do fear it's your last leading role. When I finish with you, you'll be fit for nothing but rouged character women. Hags."
She smelled the brandy on him. Her impulse was to bolt. It was the way she usually dealt with unpleasantness. But Wood's mass and height intimidated her. If she moved, he'd be on her instantly. She searched the corridor.
"Go on," Wood said, amused. He raised his yellow glove. He wore what appeared to be rings made of bent nails, the blued heads outward. "Run, yell. Before any of the guests wake and reach us, I'll have your face in tatters. Which is the way I intend to leave it." His left hand started for her throat, there at the door to her room. "The lovely Miss Parker. Lovely no more."
Willa flung herself back against the door. It opened, and she sprawled on the floor in the dark room smelling of furniture too long undusted. A sad little fir tree, totally brown, stood in a corner, its needles and tinsel strewn through the oblong of light cast from the hallway.
Wood swung his fisted right hand, and the sharp nailheads, down toward her face. Some intruder, some stranger who'd been hiding over in the dark window alcove, swept by above her. She saw light reflect from an eye, saw a multicolored cape swirl. Was it possible? Smelling the staleness of a smoked cigar, she knew it was.
"I heard you blustering outside," he said. "What do you want with this young lady?"
"There's a gentleman —" The clerk had tried to tell her. A gentleman waiting. He must have talked or bribed his way in with a passkey. "We're old friends. She won't mind."
"Stay out of this," Woods blustered, even though the man in the patchwork robe, a man with a ruffian's long beard in which the scab of a healed cut showed, now had him backed all the way across the corridor, to the wall.
"Charles," she called from the room, "that's Claudius Wood."
He turned his head, startled. "The man in New York?"
Wood's damp eyes bulged. Everything had reversed in a moment. He was wild to get away. Struggling up, Willa said, "Yes. He found me somehow and — watch out."
Wood drove his fisted right hand at the stranger's face. Though the bearded man looked worn out, he was agile and strong. He sidestepped the punch, grabbed Wood's extended arm, and pulled it back across the hall full speed. The clenched fist struck hard on the frame of Willa's door. The sharpened nailheads sliced yellow leather, sliced fingers like sausages. Blood spurted. Charles pulled Wood by the front of his overcoat to position him, then punched him once. Wood caromed off the wall and sat down, finished just that quickly.
The night clerk summoned two members of the St. Louis foot police. The police shouted at the guests milling in the corridor, silencing their complaints, ignoring their questions. The younger policeman handcuffed Wood, and Willa led the other into her parlor.
The bearded man gave his name as Charles Main. No local address as yet. He'd ridden in from the west tonight.
"And you're Mrs. Parker. The wife and I, we enjoyed you as Desdemona very much. It's gratifying to have culture in St. Louis," the older of the two policemen said, flustered in the presence of a celebrity. With her statement about Wood's attack and motive, and Charles as a witness, it took but ten minutes for the policemen to satisfy themselves about Wood's guilt. In the hall, Wood alternately mumbled obscenities and raged like an incoherent child, further convincing the policemen that the young woman and her bearded friend were telling the truth.
"You'll have to sign a deposition, Mrs. Parker," the policeman said. "You, too, sir. But I doubt you'll be going anywhere tonight, will you?"
"And no further than the theater tomorrow," she said.
"Present yourselves at the station as soon as convenient. We'll charge the assailant, and lock him up until then."
And so the threat of Wood came to nothing. The policemen hauled him off, his fine overcoat smeared with his own blood, and left Charles and Willa standing in the dusty parlor amid the tinsel and litter of brown needles. Willa was so stunned and so happy to see him, she wanted to cry.
"Oh, Charles," was all she could say as she went to his arms.
She had a little Christmas whiskey left and poured a glass to warm him. She took a little bit herself; it soothed away some of the pain in her stomach. She curled up on a settee and got him talking, because he had a strange, harried look. "Where have you been? What have you been doing?"
"Something that proved you were right and I was wrong."
"I don't understand. Is your son —?"
"Gus is fine. Hardly knows me, I must say. I saw him at Leavenworth for three days, then came to find you." He took her hand. "I went to the Indian Territory, scouting for Custer. I need to tell you about it."
She listened for an hour. It began to rain, the slanting downpour dispelling the mist. Charles had an odd, cold aura, she thought. An aura of the far plains, of deep winter, enhanced by a faintly rank smell that even his malodorous cigars didn't mask.
He needed a bath, and he certainly needed scissors taken to his beard; it was thick as overgrown underbrush.
The whiskey warmed both of them. He interrupted his story at the point where Custer and his men discovered Indians on the bluffs after they took the village. He said he wanted to make love to her.
Reddening, she said of course, but he caught the slight hesitation, and frowned. She told him she'd been ill for the last few days, and wasn't over it. Then love-making could wait, he said. But he was very cold. She led him to the bedroom. He undressed while she put on her flannel gown. They climbed under the covers and he put his arm around her and went on talking.
"I was wrong to chase after the Cheyennes, trying to cancel one death with another. Look what it got me." He held up the tarnished metal cross hanging around his neck on a thong. "The revenge of killing a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Isn't that a fine accomplishment?"
She brushed his lined forehead with her palm. "So you left —"
"For good."
"To go where?"
"I told you, to find my son. Find you."
"And what now?"
"Willa, I don't know. When I crossed the Washita that last time, I said to myself, there isn't a place for me anymore. I can't think of one."
"I'll find one." She leaned close, rubbing her palm on the raw brush of his side-whiskers. "I'll find one for both of us if you'll let me. Will you?"
"I love you, Willa. I want to be with you and my boy. That's all I want. I'm just not sure —" His bleak eyes showed the terrible doubt. "I'm not sure even you can find a place. I don't know if there's any place on this earth that I belong."
55
Two days later, at Fort Leavenworth, Maureen cut biscuit dough with a tin cutter in the kitchen alcove of the brigadier's quarters. During the night the direction of the wind had changed, clearing the clouds and bathing the post in a flow of warm southerly air. The sun sparkled in pools of melted snow in the garden patch below the window. Maureen had propped the door open with her flatiron to let the breeze clean out some of the stale smells of winter.
January thaw usually restored her spirits. This morning she still felt blue. She'd felt that way ever since Mr. Charles swooped out of nowhere almost a week ago, announcing he was through with soldiering. He declared that he wanted to marry that actress in St. Louis, if she'd have him, and settle down to raise little Gus. Maureen heard the boy playing with the building blocks Duncan had sawed and shaped by hand from pieces of birch.