The Rustler

“Who are you?” she’d managed.

Marjory ran a gloved hand along the keyboard of Sarah’s treasured piano. The sound was discordant, and bore no resemblance to music. From there, she proceeded to examine a painted porcelain lamp, a novel bound in Moroccan leather, a delicate Chinese fan with an ivory handle—all gifts from Charles.

“You really don’t know?” she trilled, after several long moments. Then she’d turned, hands resting on her hips, and shattered Sarah’s world with a single sentence. “I’m Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third,” she said, the words slicing through Sarah with the stinging force of a sharp sword.

Then, as now, Sarah had been unable to stand. She’d dropped into a chair, blind with confusion, pain and fear. Unconsciously, she’d rested a hand on her abdomen.

“Pack your things, dear,” Mrs. Langstreet had said. “As of tomorrow morning, you won’t be living here any longer. A backstreet whore belongs, you see, on a backstreet. If Charles wants to continue this dalliance, that’s his business, but I won’t be footing the bill.”

With that, she’d gone, leaving the suite door standing open to the hall beyond.

Sarah had been too numb to move at first. She simply sat, waiting for Charles to come and say it was all a mistake. That she, Sarah, would be the only Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third.

All day she waited.

But he didn’t come.

Sarah had finally closed the door, gone to bed and lain staring up at the ceiling throughout the very long night to come.

In the morning, a tentative knock sent a surge of hope rushing through her. She rushed to the door, opened it to find, not a smiling Charles, with a credible explanation at the ready, but one of the hotel’s porters. The fellow stood in the corridor, clearly uncomfortable.

He’d offered an anxious smile as two maids and another porter collected themselves behind him. “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving us,” he’d said. “Mrs. Langstreet asked that we help you gather your belongings. There’ll be a carriage waiting to take you to your new residence at ten o’clock.”

Sarah had not protested.

She’d simply watched, stricken, as her clothes were folded into trunks and boxes, her books taken from the shelves, her jewelry stuffed into valises Marjory Langstreet had evidently provided for the purpose.

By noon, she’d been settled in a seedy rooming house, one door of her tiny room opening onto a rat-infested alley.

And still there had been no word, no visit, from Charles.

Sarah waited a week, then began pawning jewelry, a piece at a time, to buy food. Twice, she wrote long letters to her unsuspecting father, telling the shattering truth, but she’d never mailed them.

She was too ashamed.

Too heartbroken.

Several times, when hunger forced her out into the narrow, filthy streets, she’d considered standing on the tracks when the trolley came. It would be over, that way.

In the end, she couldn’t do that to the baby, or to herself.

She finally sent a wire to her father, reading simply, I am in trouble, and listing her address at the boardinghouse.

Within ten days, he’d arrived, bent on taking her home to Stone Creek. She’d told him everything but the name of the man who’d sired her child, and patently refused to return to Arizona Territory. As much as she yearned for her own room, the sound of her mother’s voice, the soothing touch of her hand, Sarah simply hadn’t been able to face the inevitable gossip and speculation.

Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.

She hadn’t seen Charles again until a week before Owen’s birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles’s lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.

Sarah had had no choice but to comply.

She’d long since sold the last of her jewelry, her rich clothes and the books. Even the Chinese fan. And she’d promised her clearly disenchanted father she would finish college, no matter what.

So when her baby boy was born, she’d handed him over to Charles’s lawyer. The loss had been keen, brutal, as though she’d torn her still-beating heart from her bosom and handed that over, too.

She’d survived, somehow, doggedly arising in the morning, doing what was at hand to do, enduring more than living. She’d worked hard at her lessons, gotten her degree in music, and returned to Stone Creek just in time to attend her mother’s funeral.

Nancy Anne Tamlin had never known she had a grandchild, nor had anyone else in town, except for Ephriam, of course, and possibly his best friend, Doc Venable.

Now, ten years later, miraculously, impossibly, that boy was right downstairs, in her own kitchen, helping with the dishes.

“Sarah?”

She looked up, startled, and saw Ephriam standing in the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew by the way he’d spoken her name that he was enjoying one of his brief, lucid intervals.

“That boy I saw tonight. Is he—?”

Sarah felt for the book of lies, nesting, as always, in her skirt pocket, clenched it through the fabric. She swallowed, then shook her head. “No, Papa. He’s just visiting.”

“He looks like your mother’s people,” Ephriam said. “What’s his name?”

“Owen,” Sarah allowed, after swallowing again. “He’s Charles Langstreet’s son. You remember Mr. Langstreet, don’t you?”

“Never liked him,” her father replied. “Pompous jackass.”

She saw a change in Ephriam’s bearing, something too subtle to describe, but there nonetheless.

“Great Scot,” Ephriam gasped. “It was Langstreet, wasn’t it? He was the one who led you astray!”

“Papa—”

“And Owen is my grandson,” the old man persisted, sounding thunderstruck. Of all the times he could have recovered his faculties, it had to be now, tonight, when keeping the secret was more important than ever before.

Sarah simply could not summon up another lie. She felt drained, enervated, as though she’d relived her affair with Charles, her sad, scandalous pregnancy, the birth itself, which had been torturous, and, still worse, watched as Charles’s lawyer carried her newborn son out of her room in the college infirmary. She’d been permitted to give him only one thing: his first name.

And she’d never expected to see him again.

“Yes,” she said weakly. “You’re right, Papa. But you mustn’t let on. Owen doesn’t know who I am. He calls me Aunt Sarah.”

Ephriam pondered a while, silent and brooding. “I’d have killed Langstreet if I’d known,” he said. “I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me.”

Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, summoned her will, and stood. Doc and Owen had probably finished washing the dishes by then, and they’d be wondering what was keeping her.

She stood before her father, still looming in the darkened doorway, straightening the front of his long nightshirt as though it were one of the day coats he wore to the bank.

“Our secret, Papa?” she asked.

“There are too damn many secrets in this house.”