"Sure, Tom."
And then, without any warning, she kissed him. Sliding her arms around his neck. Pulling him toward her with hard, childlike need. And he responded, remembering how good and tender a love she was. How playful she was at times. Again, like a child. And how many nights lying beside her he'd get caught up in her out-loud daydreams of the day when they had two or three children and Tom had gone into some safe business and was making a good name for himself. How easy it had been to share her sense of their destiny then. But always at the back of his mind there'd been a greater dream. And now, with any luck at all, that dream was about to be realized. A hero, a reward, a beautiful, rich girl.
He eased her away from him.
"So I've got to depend on you, Lucy."
"You know you can," she said, still shaken from their kiss.
"Get on your horse and head right back to town." She nodded. And then kissed him as impulsively as she had the first time.
He watched her for a good half-mile, till he was sure she wouldn't double back and surprise him again.
Then he tied his horse to a jackpine branch, grabbed his Winchester, and proceeded to the west, so that he could come up behind the farmhouse when he approached it.
Chapter Ten
Prine found road apples but no horses in the timber behind the farmhouse. He poked the apples with a stick. Fresh—not over three, four hours old. No posse would have put up in the timber here. That meant Tolan and Rooney had been here. But where were they now? And was Cassie all right? Had something happened and they had to flee?
Again, he thought of all the ways kidnappings went wrong sometimes.
He crouched and began his run across the grassy expanse between timber and farmhouse.
Despite the cool night, he was sweating hard by the time he reached the door. Nerves, mostly, and he knew it.
No trouble getting in. In fact, the damned back door nearly fell off its rusted hinges when he opened up. It also squawked like a parrot. It was a good thing he didn't give a damn about making noise.
The stench of the interior gagged him for a moment. Every kind of animal, large and small, that God had ever created had used this deserted place as a toilet. And some of them had died in here, of disease or nocturnal battles. Rain had stenched the wood, too; it smelled—there was no other way to say it—of the grave.
The house: kitchen, dining room, living area. Gutted by time, animals, and most likely hoboes since it wasn't too far from the tracks. For the 'boes this would be like dying and going straight to heaven. A roof over your head every night, even if it was leaky, was hard to beat.
The varieties of feces beneath his boots were hard as bullets. He crunched and crushed and cracked them as he went about searching for the trapdoor that would take him to the root cellar.
He moved through moonlit shadow, kicking aside newspapers, animal shit, odds and ends of the clothing as he searched for the outline of the trapdoor. Once, he thought he heard something below him, but he couldn't be sure.
He returned to the kitchen. That seemed the most logical place for the trapdoor. The farm wife doing a lot of her canning work up here and then carrying it down the ladder to the root cellar.
He got down on all fours and began moving his gloved hands quickly over every inch of kitchen floor. But nothing.
He did the same thing in the dining room and the living room. But again, nothing.
He was just about to walk back to the kitchen when he saw the closet off the dining room. He hadn't looked in there. But when he thought about it, he remembered that some of the early settlers constructed root cellar–like places where they could hole up during Indian attacks. Such places were dangerous. They made the white folk prisoners in a very real way. And if the Indians decided to set fire to the house, the people in the cellar could die from smoke. But when you were outnumbered, as was so often the case—just as the blue uniforms would soon enough outnumber the Indians—a cellar like that was better than standing in the middle of your living room.
In the closet, he found the trapdoor.
Lantern light flickered around the edges where it didn't close flush. Somebody must be down there.
He shoved the barrel of his Winchester down the opening and said, "This is Tom Prine and I'm a deputy sheriff. If anybody's down there, come to the ladder with your hands up. And right now."
"Oh, Tom!"
The voice was unmistakable. And, moments later, the woman was standing at the bottom of the ladder, looking up at him.
"C'mon up, Cassie," Prine said. "I'm taking you home."
"But Tom—"
"C'mon up, Cassie. I want to get you outside before they come back."
She wore a white blouse and brown butternuts that were covered with dirt. Her blonde hair was mussed, but not so mussed that, even under these conditions, she'd lost her beauty. Her face, dirt-streaked, was still radiant.
He wasted no time when she emerged from the cellar, her lantern in hand. Beneath her the opening was dark.
He took her hand and guided her through the back half of the house to the sweet smell of the night and the bloom of moonlight on the entire landscape.
Only then did he relax enough to ask all the obvious questions.
"Did they hurt you?"
"No."
"Did they—touch you in any way?"
"No."
"Did they threaten to kill you?"
She didn't look right, didn't look as if she'd been under the frightening strain that went along with being held for ransom. She looked . . . uneasy—as if there were something she needed to tell him but couldn't quite form the words.
"Tom, listen," she said, taking his hand, jolting him with the thrill he'd experienced a few other times with her. "I have to tell you something and trust you to keep it secret."
My Lord, what was she going to tell him? He was perplexed and half afraid to hear it.
"This kidnapping, Tom. It was my idea. I set the whole thing up myself."
When he still hadn't spoken a full minute later, she once more took his hand and said, "Aren't you going to say anything, Tom?"
But there was nothing to say. And this time there was no thrill in holding her hand at all.
"I ever tell you how pretty you are?" the old miner said to Lucy.
"I seem to remember you saying somethin' like that a few times, Clem."
"I hate seein' you, because when I do I wanna be young again. And Lord knows that ain't gonna happen."
"You need to hold still, Clem. I need to check your heart."
"How come you ain't got one of them new ones?"
"Hospital can't afford it. They gave me the old-fashioned kind." Clem referred to the part-wood stethoscope she used. "Now, be quiet or I'll have to get tough with you."
He grinned toothlessly. "That'll be the day."
She checked his pulse, his heart rate, his temperature. Then she spent ten minutes trying to clean up the cabin. Clem could live in a latrine—which he came darned close to doing—and it wouldn't bother him. He'd had one glass window, but that was smashed; rain poured through the roof; and the dirt floor hadn't been worked on in years. His food was usually about to turn deadly by the time she threw it out, and his clothes were stiff with dirt. He had an ancient tomcat who was just as unwholesome as he was. The thing was so scabbed up, scarred up, cut up that she assumed it went out and fought mountain lions at night. And probably kicked the hell out of them.
She was just checking to see if the bread she'd brought Clem last time had started to turn green anywhere when he said, "You don't look happy tonight, Lucy. And I'll bet it's that darned boyfriend of yours."
The bread would do for a while yet. Not that it would matter to Clem Randall. She set it down on the small, cluttered, wobbly table where he seemed to pile everything—a simianlike man of no more than five-two and one hundred twenty pounds who moved with an elbow-cocked swagger that reminded her of a twelve-year-old pretending he was a gunfighter.