Lawman

“Maybe, but you never know, brother,” Sam said, his grin and his drawl broadening. “Now, if you were to tell me it was Lucy Snow, for example, why, I’ve got good news for you. She’s been wearin’ black for some poor boy ever since Second Manassas, Ma tells me—”

“Sam! Lucy Snow is a wrinkled-up prune of a woman!” chided Annie, obviously trying to hold back a giggle. “Cal has better taste than that! Uh…it isn’t Lucy Snow you were going to look up, was it?” she added with a sudden anxiety.

Cal chuckled. “No, Annie, it wasn’t Lucy Snow. If memory serves, she was a wrinkled-up prune of a woman even before the war, wasn’t she? She never wore her bonnet out in the sun. But I believe she was sweet on the Tetersall boy, not me.”

Annie sighed in exaggerated relief. “Oh, Cal, they were all sweet on you! Everyone wanted to marry the bachelor preacher,” she said, with a fond smile at her brother.

“So who is it, Cal?” Sam persisted. “Come on, brother, you aren’t going to get out of telling us.”

“All right, all right!” Cal said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “I can see you won’t give me any peace till I tell you. But remember, it was just someone I thought about once I recalled who I was. I know she’s probably already married. You’ve all got to promise me this won’t go beyond the Devlin supper table.”

They all raised their right hands, an old family ritual that suddenly had all of them smiling, even Garrick. They felt like a family once again.

“All right, I’ll tell you. It was Olivia Childress.”

Silence hung over the table like a cloak for several heartbeats. Sam looked at their mother. Sarah looked at Garrick. Garrick looked at Annie. It was Annie who found her voice at last.

“Oh, Cal. I’m sorry. Olivia Childress married, all right. She married a man named Dan Gillespie, over at Gillespie Springs.’

Cal shrugged. That was that, then. The woman he’d dreamed about when he’d been in the Union army, right up until he’d been injured, and had started to dream about again these past two months, was taken. He’d just have to forget her.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s probably just as well,” he said with forced lightness. “She told me she hated me when she found out my uniform was going to be blue, not gray. She probably cusses every time she thinks of me, if she thinks of me at all. And if we never meet again, at least she’ll remember me as that handsome Devlin boy she hated,” he said, pointing to his eye patch.

But something in his sister’s face warned him there was more. “Annie, is there something you’re not telling me?”

His sister looked uneasy. “He’s dead. Dan Gillespie, that is. He died just last month.”

Hope flared anew. Gillespie Springs wasn’t that far from Bryan—just an hour away. He could ride over some fine day and pay his respects to the widow—with Annie along to make it respectable and all—and maybe, after a decent time passed…

“He—he killed himself, Cal,” Annie added, her face anguished.

Cal’s jaw fell. “How awful! Poor Livy—how hard it must have been on her!”

“Poor Livy, hell!” growled Garrick. “They say he put a bullet through his head ‘cause Livy was cheatin’ on him!”

Chapter Two (#ulink_d528a2f0-7a6a-5fd1-ba14-da92a4db705e)

The silence in the room was deafening. Out of the corner of his eye, Cal saw his mother shoot a disapproving glare at Garrick, but even she, apparently, could not find any words to say.

“Best shut yer mouth, brother. You’ll draw flies,” Garrick commented sardonically after an endless moment.

Cal did so, feeling foolish. “I—I don’t believe it,” he said at last, smothering a very unministerial urge to sink a fist in Garrick’s mocking face. “Livy wouldn’t do such a thing—not the Livy / knew, at least. She’s the kind of girl to honor any commitments she made. Especially the bonds of matrimony.”

“People can change, Cal,” Sam offered mildly, “and not always for the better. What’s it been—seven years since you last saw her?”

Cal said nothing, his mind filled with remembered images of Livy dancing with him at a local ball, her lovely face upturned to his, her eyes alight, the touch of her as smooth as silk as they whirled around the dance floor…Livy kissing him in the garden later that same night, the scent of her perfume mingling with the honeysuckle, her eyes now dark with a woman’s secrets… and later, her scornful blue eyes as she told him never to darken her door again.

“They say she’s carryin’ the other man’s baby,” Garrick said, just as Cal was searching for some topic, any topic, to change the subject to.

“Garrick, sometimes you don’t have the good sense God gave a jackass,” Annie hissed. “Why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut? There was no need to burden Cal with such—such gossip!”

“He’d find out soon enough, I reckon,” said Garrick, unruffled. “I just thought I’d better tell him before he gets a notion to ride over an comfort the widow.”

“I had no intention of doing that,” Cal insisted, though he wasn’t at all sure he was telling the truth. “And just how do ‘they’ know these things, Garrick, whoever they’ are?”

He wondered why he was torturing himself with the questions, when his brain screamed that he didn’t want to know the answers.

“Dan Gillespie put it in the letter he left near his body for his brother to find.”

“Oh? And did he also put in the name of the man who—” Cal glanced uneasily at his mother, his sister and sister-in-law, and rephrased what he was about to ask “—stole his wife’s affections?”

“Didn’t need to,” Garrick answered bluntly.

Cal raised an inquiring brow and waited.

“Everyone around knew who it was—a Mexican vaquero who’d been workin’ for ‘em for a spell. He’d been acting way too familiar with the missus. Dan shot him when he found out it was more’n that. Then he killed himself.”

Cal closed his eyes, feeling a familiar headache descending over him like. a black cloak. He’d had headaches at intervals ever since the battle that had robbed him of one of his eyes, though of course he hadn’t remembered the cause of his loss until he’d regained his memory. Headaches hadn’t come often, in recent years, but he could always count on one arriving whenever he was unduly tired or upset. And now he was both. He rubbed his forehead.

“I assume,” he said wearily, “that no one doubted Dan Gillespie’s say-so?”

“I’ve had enough of this conversation,” their mother said, and stalked from the room. Annie and Mercy followed, after giving the men at the table uneasy glances.

Garrick snorted as he lit a cheroot. “Of course not! The man shot his wife’s defiler, a greaser at that! A man has a perfect right to avenge his honor, doesn’t he?”

Yes, especially when the accused ‘defiler’ was a Mexican, Cal thought, sick at heart. No white man in Texas was going to stop and get a Mexican’s side of the story first. Nothing had changed.

“And just how is everyone so sure that the baby couldn’t be Dan Gillespie’s?” Cal found himself asking, just when he wanted nothing so much as to go upstairs and lie down in the dark.

“Gillespie said it wasn’t, in the note he left. Not that he needed to…He an’ Livy didn’t have any children in six years of marriage—”

“But the war,” Cal protested. “From what you’re telling me, they got married during the war. Wasn’t Dan in the army during the war?”

Sam nodded. “Terry’s Rangers.”

“Well, I can understand why they might not have had a child during the war, especially if he didn’t get home on leave much. But after—?”

“When he came home,” Sam said heavily, his eyes on the table, “it was pretty much common knowledge that Dan couldn’t…um, he wasn’t able—”

“Oh, Sam, just say it, damn it!” Garrick said with a snicker. “The ladies’ve gone out on the porch—they cain’t hear you! Dan had a war injury that caused him not t’be able to get his pecker up no more! That’s what our little brother’s trying to say, Cal!”

So Dan Gillespie had killed his wife’s lover and then killed himself, leaving Livy to face the consequences.

“What’s happened to Livy after all this?”

Garrick’s shrug of the shoulders was eloquent. He didn’t have to say. Who cares? “How am I supposed to know?” he muttered at last.

“You were remarkably informed up to this point,” retorted Cal. “Don’t stop now! You mean the gossip stopped with the sinful woman’s lover getting killed?”