Lynna Banning Page 2

  Come to Oregon, Jess, Papa had written. I need you here.

  She hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. She’d waited a lifetime to hear those words. She was twenty-six years old and unmarried. A journalist, inspired and nurtured by her father. And an acknowledged spinster. What on earth did she have to lose? Besides, her papa needed her. A siren’s call could not have pulled her more strongly.

  The day after she’d purchased her train ticket, a second letter had come. This time it was from a Dr. Rufus Bartel. Her father was dead.

  She glanced down to find her hands gripping the press lever. A thread of pain encircled her heart. Oh, Papa. Papa! I’m here now. I’ll run your newspaper. I’ll make it the best newspaper in Oregon. She shut her eyes tight.

  A low cough behind her made her jump.

  “Seems to me, Miss Whittaker, you ought to nail down some lodgings for tonight.”

  Jessamyn gasped. She’d forgotten all about Mr. Kearney. “Nail…what? Oh, you mean register at the hotel. I will, after I’m finished here.”

  “The good hotel fills up fast on Saturday,” Ben offered.

  “Then I’ll stay at the other one.”

  “I don’t think so, ma’am,” he said in a quiet voice.

  Turning her full attention on the man at her elbow, she folded her arms across her midsection. “Why not?”

  “The only women who frequent that place are fancy ladies.”

  “Fancy ladies?”

  Ben hesitated. “That’s what we call ‘em out here. Calico queens. That or—” he hesitated a split second “—soiled doves.”

  Jessamyn blinked. “Doves? Oh, you mean wh—”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ben said quickly. “So, you’d better hustle your bu…uh…baggage over to Dixon House, on the other side of the street.” He gestured over his shoulder with his left thumb.

  “Other side of the street,” she echoed. Her voice trailed off as she studied the man who stood before her. Blue denim trousers outlined slim hips and the longest legs she’d ever seen. A fringed buckskin vest hung loose over a crisp dark blue canvas shirt with silvery buttons that marched up the expanse of his chest and ended at the closed collar.

  Her gaze flicked down to the polished black boots and the jingly spurs, then moved back to his broad shoulders. Slowly her brain registered something she hadn’t noticed before. A purple scar ran from beneath one ear across his throat and disappeared inside his shirt collar.

  She caught her breath. “You were wounded in the war, weren’t you?” she blurted without thinking. “The War of the Rebellion, I mean.”

  The question hung in the lengthening silence.

  The fine mouth tightened. “We call it the War Between the States. Yes, ma’am. Now, about your baggage—”

  “The War Between… Oh!” Of course. He must be a Southerner! Her reporter’s curiosity battled with Miss Bennett’s lessons on propriety. Curiosity won.

  “Mr. Kearney, would you tell me about your battle experiences? As a reporter, I mean?”

  His entire body stiffened, then visibly relaxed, limb by limb, as if given orders to do so. “Won’t be time between now and the morning stage, Miss Whittaker,” he said, his voice low and rough.

  “Morning stage?”

  “Seven o’clock. I’ll ask Tom at the hotel to load up your trunks for you. That way you can enjoy your breakfast before you—”

  “Mr. Kearney, I most certainly did not come all the way out here just to pay a ten-minute call and go back to Boston in the morning. I came to Wildwood Valley because my father asked me to.”

  “Your father is dead, Miss Whittaker.”

  Jessamyn’s heart squeezed. “I know. He left me sole owner of the—”

  “Thad Whittaker was shot in the back.”

  “Wildwood Ti—What did you say?”

  “Your father was shot to death. Doc Bartel said he’d write you.”

  Jessamyn felt the floor tilt under her buttoned shoes. “He did write. He just didn’t tell me… Shot? You mean with a gun? Oh, my Lord!”

  Ben swore under his breath.

  Jessamyn clenched her jaw tight for a moment before she could trust herself to speak.

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “Don’t know yet. So you see, ma’am, you’d best—”

  She drew herself up to her full height and fisted her hands on her hips. The top of her head came just to his chin. “Do you honestly think I could leave? Especially now that I know my father was… Are you sure he was shot?”

  “I’m sure. Happened right in front of my office. So you see—”

  Jessamyn bristled. “Oh, I see, all right, Mr. Kearney. You think I’m going to turn tail and run, is that it? Just because my father…”

  Her voice broke. She struggled to take deep, even breaths. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Kearney. Papa…my father wanted me to come out here. I know he’d want me to run his newspaper. Surely you don’t think for one minute I’m going to let him down?”

  Ben sighed. “Give it up, ma’am. The living don’t owe the dead a thing.” He growled the words into an uneasy silence.

  “Give up?” Jessamyn heard her voice rise to an unladylike pitch. “Give up?” she repeated in a lower tone. “A Whittaker, Mr. Kearney, never gives up. Never!”

  Shaking, she clenched and unclenched her hands, then wrapped both arms tightly across her chest.

  “God almighty,” Ben swore. “You sound just like him! Stubborn as a mule.”

  Jessamyn flinched.. “Stubborn? Because I want to stay and finish something my father started? You haven’t begun to see ‘stubborn’ yet, Mr. Kearney.”

  Ben raised one dark eyebrow. “Yep, just like him,” he said softly.

  Jessamyn flashed a look at him, opened her mouth to reply and stopped short. The sheriff’s smoky blue eyes shone with tears.

  “Thad was a good man, Miss Whittaker,” Ben said in a quiet voice. “And a good friend. But he was so damned in love with Goliath there—” he gestured at the iron printing press “—he figured he was Moses on the mountain.”

  “You mean he was a good newspaper editor,” Jessamyn translated. Good heavens, couldn’t they speak the king’s English out here? She had to interpret practically everything the man said.

  “The best,” Ben grumbled. “That’s what got him killed.”

  Jessamyn gasped. “Oh! Do you really think that?”

  “Wish I didn’t,” Ben muttered. “Sure as hell wish I didn’t.”

  “Well, Mr. Kearney, if you are the sheriff, as you say, what are you doing about my father’s murder?”

  Ben sighed.. “Everything I can think of, Miss Whittaker. Every damn thing I can think of. And I don’t need some nosy newspaper lady in my way.”

  “I won’t be,” she snapped.

  Ben sent her a steady look. “I don’t want you thinking you have any say about my methods, either.”

  “I wasn’t,” she retorted.

  “And,” Ben continued, pronouncing each syllable with deliberate emphasis, “I’ll brook no comments from you, or your newspaper, until my investigation’s over.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it!” she lied.

  “May take months,” Ben warned.

  She met his hard-eyed gaze with one of her own. Sheriff Ben whatever his name was—Kearney—gave orders like an army officer. “You have my word as a Whittaker.”

  “That,” Ben muttered, “is just what I’m afraid of.”

  The door marked Sheriffs Office banged open, and Ben strode past the cluttered desk to the inner door leading to his private quarters. He twisted the knob and pushed the door inward.

  “Jeremiah?” Leaving the door ajar, Ben turned toward his desk. A stack of unopened mail sat on top of his logbook. Curled up beside it lounged a ball of marbled blackand-white fur. He scratched the cat’s underchin, then reached past the animal to rescue the coffee cup teetering near the edge of the desktop.

  “Jeremiah!”

  A square, bearded face a
ppeared in the doorway. “I’m right here, Colonel. What you need’n?”

  “Whiskey,” Ben growled.

  “Doc Bartel says—”

  Ben yanked open the top desk drawer and rummaged through the contents. “Rufus Bartel is a fussy old coot with an excess of irrelevant medical training.”

  Jeremiah nodded, his soft brown eyes twinkling. “Yessir, Colonel, that he is. Irrelevant.”

  “Nosy old sawbones,” Ben grumbled. His fingers closed over a small brown bottle.

  “Yessir, he surely is.” Jeremiah moved forward, his stocky frame quiet as a cat’s. “That doesn’t make the doctor wrong, though.” He snatched the bottle from Ben’s lips. “Truth is, Ben, you quit drinkin’ heavy. Thing is, you gotta stay quit.”

  Ben snorted. “Jeremiah, I don’t pay you to nursemammy me.” He sucked in a lungful of air as Jeremiah slipped the bottle into his back pocket.

  “No, Colonel. You don’t pay me a-tall, and I reckon you remember why.”

  Ben remembered. Both in the field and when imprisoned at Rock Island, he and Jeremiah had saved each other’s lives so many times the two men were like blood brothers. Half of Ben’s salary was paid to his faithful friend, along with considerable admiration and respect.

  Jeremiah was more than Ben’s deputy. The solidly built man was the only surviving family Ben had left outside of his younger brother. In fact, he felt closer to Jeremiah than he did to Carleton. After the war, when he and Jeremiah had come West, the two had made a pact. Half of whatever one had belonged to the other—whether food, horseflesh, whiskey, or cash money. They drew the line only at women.

  “I need a drink,” Ben ventured.

  Jeremiah grinned, revealing a mouthful of uneven white teeth. “Talked to her, didja?” He nodded his head knowingly. “Thought so. Beats me how a woman can do that to a man inside of ten minutes jes’ by talkin’, but happens all the time.”

  “Jeremiah?”

  “Colonel?”

  “Bring two glasses.”

  Jeremiah executed a quick about-face and moved toward the doorway. “Damn troublous creatures, women.”

  Ben leaned his forehead onto his hands. Yes, damned troublous.

  He didn’t want Jessamyn Whittaker out here, poking about just like Thaddeus had, interfering with his job. A Yankee lady from Boston? She probably hadn’t the sense God gave a bird’s nest. She’d hamstring his progress just as surely as if she hobbled his horse. Thaddeus had been a constant fly in the ointment for years, and nothing Ben had said could deter him. “I got a good nose for news” was all the editor would say.

  That the crusty old man had had. Ben could see in a minute that his daughter was just like him. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He had to decide what to do about her, and fast. A starchy Yankee with soft green eyes was the last thing he needed right now.

  Jessamyn plopped the boar-bristle scrub brush into the pail of soapy water and sat back on her heels. She’d scrubbed everything in sight, including the plank floor, until it was clean enough to squeak. The rough oak boards had been so caked with filth she’d scoured them twice with lye soap.

  Next she planned to visit Frieder’s Mercantile to purchase the kerosene she needed to clean the iron printing press and order some other supplies as well—printer’s ink and more newsprint. She’d found her father’s storage cabinets almost empty.

  Tucking a wayward strand of hair into the loose bun coiled on top of her head, she scrambled to her feet and swatted the dust off her work apron. The hem of her blue poplin skirt and the two starched petticoats underneath were gray with cobwebby dirt. Jessamyn seized the garments in both hands and switched them vigorously from side to side.

  Clouds of dust puffed up from the folds of material, making her eyes water and her nose itch. If Miss Bennett could see her now, she’d have apoplexy!

  She studied her red, water-puckered hands. At this moment Boston and the refinements of civilization seemed as distant as the moon. Her bed at the Dixon House hotel the previous night had been uncomfortable, the mattress so thin the metal springs had pressed into her back. Sleepless, she’d tossed and turned, thinking of Papa, of all the years he’d praised her talent for writing, remembering how bereft she’d felt between his newsy, heartfelt letters.

  She also thought about the Wildwood Times. She would do anything to please her father, especially now that he was gone. Running his newspaper would keep him close to her.

  Jessamyn sighed. Her back and shoulders were as stiff as her whalebone corset stays, and her knees ached from hours spent kneeling on the floor. She would much rather set type than do housework, but the place simply had to be cleaned. She couldn’t stand walking on a surface that crunched under her shoes. Grabbing her skirt, she gave it one last, vicious shake.

  “Miss Whittaker?” A man’s low voice spoke behind her.

  Jessamyn gave a little gasp and spun toward the sound.

  Ben Kearney leaned against the door frame, one shiny black boot crossed casually over the other. “Sorry to startle you.”

  With one finger he shoved his hat back on his head. “Opened my mail this morning. I received a letter from an attorney in Portland regarding your father’s will. There’s something you should know.”

  Unaccountably, Jessamyn’s heart fluttered, whether because of his soft-spoken words or the steady blue-gray eyes that bored into hers, she didn’t know. She did know Sheriff Ben Kearney was a most disturbing man! Even with jingly spurs on his boots, he moved as quietly as a shadow, and his speech was terse to the point of rudeness. No “Good morning” or other social pleasantry, just a few succinct words growled from under his dark mustache.

  “Well, Mr. Kearney, what is it I should know? And don’t tramp dirt in onto my clean floor, please. I spent all morning scrubbing fifteen years’ worth of pipe dottle, tobacco juice and God knows what else off those boards.”

  The sheriff’s dark eyebrows arched. His mouth tightened into a thin line, then he cracked his lips and slipped out a few words.

  “Thad owned a house.”

  Jessamyn blinked. A house? Her father owned a house in Wildwood Valley?

  “I thought my father lived here, at the shop?” She gestured toward the back of the office where she’d found a cot, the bedclothes still tumbled, and a washstand and basin next to the small wood stove.

  Ben nodded. “He did. But he’d bought a house. Took the mortgage over from Mrs. Boult when her husband died. Let her live there as a kind of housekeeper so she wouldn’t have to leave. The place is yours now. Big white two-story house. Quarter mile past the livery stable.”

  “Mine? But what about Mrs. Boult?”

  “She’s expecting you. She knows you can’t live at the newspaper office, since you’re a lady.”

  Jessamyn’s stomach flipped over. A house! A house all her own! A house Papa had bought, that Papa had—Good heavens, she hoped it wasn’t the same shambles as the Wildwood Times office! She couldn’t face another scrub bucket for at least a month.

  “I’ll just sponge off my face and get my reticule.”

  Ben watched her disappear in a swish of skirt ruffles. Before he’d drawn three breaths, she was back. No bustle today, he noted. Just a long, dark blue skirt that flared over her hips, topped by a high-necked cream-colored waist, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows.

  She removed her white work apron—once starched stiff enough to stand up by itself he could tell, but now crumpled and dirt streaked—and hurriedly rolled down one blouse sleeve. She had the other sleeve down and buttoned at her narrow wrist before the door clicked shut behind them.

  Ben’s gut tightened. He hadn’t exactly planned to escort Jessamyn Whittaker to call on Widow Boult, but the longer he looked at the delicately feminine creature at his side, the better he liked the idea. Besides, keeping a close watch on the Wildwood Times editor was only prudent. If she was anything like Thad Whittaker, the minute he took his eyes off her, she’d be rooting around where she had no business to be.r />
  Except for her figure and that ruffly parasol she’d snapped open against the hot afternoon sunshine, she was the spitting image of Thad—same dark hair, same mossy green eyes. Same chattery, back-talking tongue.

  Troublous. Just as Jeremiah said.

  He glanced at Jessamyn’s face, shaded under the circle of black silk. Same…no, it wasn’t. True, her chin was slightly pointed, like Thad’s, but her mouth was rosy and full. God almighty, he groaned inwardly. Even if she was a Yankee, her lips looked soft enough to…

  Ben stepped hard off the end of the boardwalk, his spurs ringing. Odd thing about parasols, he thought. He hadn’t seen one for years. General Denton’s wife had one, back in Dakota Territory. The sight of it always made him homesick. Now the picture Jessamyn Whittaker made under the shadow of her frilly sun umbrella drove the breath out of his lungs. A lump the size of a musket ball formed in his throat.

  Damnation, but he was lonely.

  But not for any Lincoln-loving Yankee!

  “Miz Boult, Jessamyn Whittaker.” Ben stepped aside as Jessamyn extended her hand toward the buxom woman who filled the doorway.

  Mrs. Boult folded her two hands around the younger woman’s fingers. “Howdy.” She gripped Jessamyn’s hand tight, her callused palms warm and strong. Then she peered over Jessamyn’s shoulder at the sheriff, and the warm expression in the older woman’s snapping blue eyes turned wary.

  “You again!” she huffed.

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Jessamyn thought his voice held a hint of laughter, but his tanned face showed no emotion.

  “Get along with you, Ben,” Mrs. Boult ordered. “Miz Whittaker and I have some visitin’ to do.”

  Ben tipped his black Stetson, quirked one eyebrow at Jessamyn and strode off down the street, his spurs chinking with each footstep.

  “Pesky man,” Mrs. Boult huffed. “Can’t draw a breath in peace lately with him around. Nice-lookin’ man, just won’t stop askin’ questions. He’s been like a hibernatin’ grizzly bear ever since Thad Whittaker—Oh! Sorry, my dear. I plumb forgot that’s why you’re here. Come in, come in!” She drew Jessamyn over the threshold of the neat frame house.