A/N #1: If you've read the first part, you know what you're in for - improbable coincidences, historical anachronisms . . . it's a historical melodrama written on the fly (sort of).
A/N #2: Possibly the worst day of Myka's life. It will get better for her but not for awhile.
A/N #3: If any of you who read my stuff have ideas for B&W fanfics or want to co-write a fic, let me know.
She never slept this late. She didn't need to squint at the clock on Helena's dresser to know how late, she could tell from the angle of the sunlight streaming through the windows. She also didn't need to look at the other side of the bed to know that Helena hadn't come home last night. Maybe it had been as Helena had said, she was this very minute elbow-deep in invoices and receipts and account books. But she didn't need to visit Helena's office at the Spur to know that Helena wasn't there. She had only to remember the careful set to Helena's face, the too deliberate way Helena had held her gaze, as if her story about missing supplies was so flimsy, so hastily constructed that the least wobble in its delivery would bring it crashing down.
Putting on her dress, her fingers stiffening in the cold, Myka hoped that her father would still be asleep. She didn't want to add another lie to the day, which, despite the sun shining into the room, seemed hazy and indistinct, as though a fog had, somehow, rolled in from the prairie. Grimly she buttoned the last buttons and picked up her coat where she had draped it over one of the trunks that Helena had brought back from New York. Trunks that held books and other gifts whose purposes and properties Myka couldn't begin to imagine and, today, didn't want to imagine. It was so typical of Helena to lavish on her the things she didn't need while withholding from her the one thing she did want. Myka had known it wouldn't be easy to win Helena's trust; she had relied on herself for too long under circumstances, Myka knew, that punished rather than rewarded confidence placed in others. But Myka had hoped that their relationship was sufficiently different, that she was sufficiently different, for Helena to make the attempt. Even though Helena had discouraged her from coming to the house, Myka had crept in through the back door as she normally did, unable to stop herself from hoping that Helena might be waiting for her, ready to tell her the truth about what was troubling her. In the end, the only proof of Helena's trust was that she hadn't bothered to lock the kitchen door.
As Myka entered the kitchen, Leena was flinging open the door, racing into the room, her coat half-fastened and her scarf dragging behind on her the floor. Breathlessly she said, "I started to go to the Journal, but I turned around, thinking you might be here, waiting for her."
It wasn't the gust of cold air following Leena into the kitchen that caused Myka to clutch her own coat tighter to her. She had never before seen Leena look less than composed, but Leena's skin was ashen with more than cold, and the dark eyes blinking at Myka were too stunned to focus on her. For no more time than it took to draw in a single unsteady breath, Myka felt the fog that had seemed to obscure the sun and press against the windows enter her, and she knew then that it wasn't fog but fear, a fear that had had its start when she opened her eyes and realized that Helena wasn't next to her. But the breath taken, she straightened her shoulders underneath her coat and bit down on the inside of her bottom lip to prevent it from trembling. Compartments and file drawers that hadn't needed to be opened in weeks were yawning wide in her mind, and she was already busy stuffing her fear and questions in them. She could sort through all of it later.
"Tell me what happened to her." Myka was going to sit Leena down at the table, but Leena was grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the door.
"She came in with the sheriff, and they're at the jail." Leena hesitated, reluctant to say the next. "She was in handcuffs."
"Let's not think the worst," Myka said automatically, recognizing that it wasn't as difficult as it should have been to picture Helena in handcuffs next to the sheriff. At least she was alive and, it appeared, unhurt. Myka tried to concentrate on that. She shouldn't speculate – about anything – until she had more facts. "We'll ask Sheriff Lattimer if we can see Helena." Now she was the one leading, taking Leena by the hand through the yard and to the street. Most of Sweetwater was in church, but the few who weren't shifting in the unforgiving pews and listening to the unforgiving admonitions that were Pastor Wallace's sermons were congregating in front of the jail.
Myka had learned to make her way through a group of men with a flurry of apologies and a grateful acceptance of the doffing of their hats and the offering of their assistance. The more she would shrink into herself, the more they would expand, crooking their arms so that she could rest her hand on them and commenting with authority, as though the sun and wind and clouds had consulted with them, on the weather. But this morning, Myka had no patience for the social dance, moving against the men with an urgency that she didn't bother to excuse. Locking her arm around Leena's waist, she nudged and bumped through the small crowd until she was at the door, pounding on it.
"Pete," she shouted, then hastily amending it to "Sheriff Lattimer" because that lesson, the one she had learned with Sam, was burned too deep to ignore, "let me in."
The door opened, and Myka and Leena, arms still around each other's waist, squeezed themselves through the doorway into the room. Myka looked immediately at the cell at the back of the room, and Helena was there, sitting on the cot, her back to them. It wasn't seeing her in the cell as much as it was seeing the proud, unbending line of her neck and realizing, yet again, how slender and slight she was that caused Myka to swallow hard and feel, for just an instant, a stab of panic. This was every bit as bad as Leena's frightened rush into the kitchen and her shocked, staring eyes had suggested.
"Get her out." It was quietly said, but there was an edge to Helena's words that promised the next ones would come as a shout.
"Helena, please tell me what happened." Myka tentatively approached the cell. Helena was a swan, not a lion or bear, but Myka instinctively employed a caution more suited for the latter, feeling that Helena might, at any moment, launch herself from the cot with the frenzy of a trapped animal.
"I told you to get her the hell out." Helena's voice was no louder, but it seemed to shake with the effort not to erupt into a scream.
Myka stopped, slowed not by Helena's words but by the fact that she had left the cot to stand at the back of the cell, pressing herself so closely against the bars that it seemed all too possible that she might slip between them. "Helena," she said, her voice dropping almost to a whisper.
Helena bent her head against the bars before flinging it back and yelling, "Get her out of here now!" The scrape of boots against the rough planking of the floor and then Pete had hold of Myka's elbow, not ungently but firmly, and was dragging her toward the door. Leena was abjectly following when Helena said, "Not you, Leena. You can stay." There was a catch in her voice, but it didn't undercut the implicit command. Leena halted, the indecision plain in her face.
"Stay with her," Myka said, summoning a weak smile. As Pete shepherded her onto the walk, closing the door behind them, she tried to peer around it as long as she could; her last glimpse was of Helena retaking her seat on her cot, her back bowed, and Leena at the bars behind her.
Pete hadn't relaxed his grip on her elbow, almost pushing her down the snow-covered walk, away from the gawkers and loiterers in front of the jail. The men began to follow them, until Pete turned and waved them back. "Go on home," he said. "There's nothing here you need to worry about." The men milled uncertainly; a few drifted away, but a small, determined knot returned to their places in front of the jail. "I can't take you back to the Journal," he said apologetically to Myka.
"I know," Myka said, resolved to say the word. "She's your prisoner." She met Pete's gaze squarely. "It's MacPherson, isn't it?"
He was cold, wearing no more than a long-sleeved shirt and vest and his hands were jammed deep into the pockets of his pants. Yet he removed one hand and rubbed his chin, looking away from her. "Are you asking me as her friend, or are you asking for the Journal? Because if it's for the paper, I can't tell you anything; the investigation's still preliminary."
Investigation. She didn't need for him to tell her, not really. "Her friend. If this were official, my father would be the one talking to you."
"MacPherson's dead, and she says she killed him." Pete seemed to wince as he said it, as if on Myka's behalf.
"How?" Maybe her lips were already numb with cold, because she found it difficult to get the word out. It didn't matter how, it only mattered that he was dead, yet she was a newspaperman's daughter, and it was ingrained in her to ask questions. Either that, or she couldn't bear to dwell on what Pete had just said and thought to shut it out by piling more words on top of it.
"Struck him from behind with a statue. Crushed his skull." Hands back in his pockets, he rocked on his heels, trying desperately not to shiver. "That's what it looks like to me. I've got Doc Collins out there to examine him, and he'll give the final word."
"From behind?" Myka repeated. She was trying to imagine the scene, Helena raising something large and heavy and hitting MacPherson with it when his back was turned. It wasn't at all like her storming of his house after the grass fire, rifle at the ready. The two images were so disparate, as if each contained a different Helena.
"I probably shouldn't tell you this, but Mrs. Wells, she hasn't said a word to me other than that she killed him. When I found her, she. . . she was . . . ." Pete leaned toward her, his voice quiet, although no one was close enough to them to overhear him. "She was practically naked, Myka. She was wearing his robe, and I don't think there was anything underneath it. Was she. . . did she tell you that she was. . . . Do you know if she was his mistress?" He burst out, at the same time yanking his hands from his pockets again and rubbing them together violently.
Naked? Why had Helena needed to be naked to kill MacPherson? Then Pete's question struck Myka full force, and she grabbed for a nonexistent post to keep herself from sinking to the ground. Pete steadied her and looked with frustration at the closed door and darkened windows of the shop beside them. It was the milliner's, where she had bought the fabric for the dress she had worn to the picnic, not willing to admit to herself then that she had bought it for Helena to see her in it. "We need to get you inside somewhere it's warm," he fretted.
More slamming of file drawers and, although the thumps of wood crashing into wood were entirely imaginary, her head was beginning to throb, all the same. "I'm fine. But we both need to get out of the cold." She had to answer Pete's question, cut off that line of thought before he could develop it further. It would only cause more problems for Helena, Myka instinctively knew, if everyone believed she and MacPherson were lovers. "I don't know why she was wearing his robe," she said, while explanations were banging to be let out from their file drawers, "but you know she blamed him for Joshua Donovan's death and the scheme to move the branch line to Halliday. She was his enemy, not his mistress."
"That's what I thought," he said as walked with her farther along the sidewalk. "But people are funny, they can be threatening to kill each other one minute and cozying up to each other the next. It's going to get out anyway. MacPherson's people, they saw her arriving last night and they saw her this morning, covered in his blood and wearing his robe." He turned back toward the jail, but reached a hand out to give her shoulder a comforting pat or squeeze. Something in her face must have stopped him because he let his hand drop. "I know it's a lot to take in, especially the way she acted when you came to the jail. But I don't think she knows just how much trouble she's in."
Myka only nodded, not wanting to disagree with him, but Helena knew how much trouble she was in. Her refusal to turn around and then her moving to the farthest corner of the cell, a literal underscoring of her belief that wherever, emotionally, the killing of MacPherson had taken her, it was beyond any boundaries that Myka could cross. After a last sympathetic look, Pete started walking, very quickly, back to the jail, and Myka, more slowly, made her way to the Journal's office. It would be marginally warmer in her and her father's rooms, but she didn't care, the ice was inside her now, and no amount of time spent sitting next to the stove was going to melt it away.
Her father was still in his bed when she entered his room. He hadn't responded to her knock. A leg was flung out from under the quilts, the trouser covering it pushed up around the knee, and she thought it must have been an especially late night for him at the Spur if he hadn't bothered to undress. She crept out of the room and put more kindling in the stove. Not wanting to let herself think, she began preparing lunch since it was long past any breakfast hour. The coffee made, the bread sliced, the pitiful leftovers set out, and they were pitiful in their wizened, burned state, Myka sat at the table, absently chewing a slice of bread. Usually the smell of food or coffee or both would rouse her father, if only to complain, but he hadn't yet emerged. She was still trying very hard not to think, and her father's complaints, today, would be a welcome distraction. The images of the morning, the empty side of the bed where Helena slept, Leena's frantic face, Helena grasping the bars of her cell and yelling were intermixing with the images Pete's words had created, Helena swinging something heavy at the back of MacPherson's skull, his blood spattering her and the robe she was wearing. One part of her mind was anxious to make connections, to make sense of it all, while another part urged her to crawl under the covers of her bed and sleep for forty years. She would awaken, some modern day Rip Van Winkle, in a new century, and there would be no need to think about any of this. It would all be written down somewhere, and she could read it if she chose to or leave it, too entranced by the novelties of a new age, a new world to care anymore about what had happened in this one.
Her father started moaning, loudly, and Myka pushed her chair away from the table, more hastily than she would have done at any other time, because likely all he wanted was one of his bottles from the Spur or one of his headache remedies, which he kept in a dresser drawer and which were only alcohol, despite their labels with all the grandiose testaments to their curative powers. But he asked for neither of those, restlessly moving his limbs and complaining that he didn't feel good. Myka put her hand to his forehead, and it did feel hot. Patiently she helped him out of his clothes – at least he hadn't worn his frock coat to bed – and rearranged the quilts and pillows. He settled back discontentedly, refusing all offers of food and asking only for water. She sat with him as he drank it and put the empty cup on the dresser. Pulling the covers up to his chin, she left as he curled himself up in the center of bed and snuffled, the sound of it thick and congested and suggestive that he wasn't well.
Mrs. Grabel would be coming by tomorrow so Myka did little more than clean the dishes and put them away, throwing out only the leftovers. What needed her attention was the Journal. Her father was in no shape to begin readying the layout for the next edition, and given the central place that the story of MacPherson's murder would have in it, she needed to think about the placement of the other news, precious little of it that there was. Her father had all but given up visiting the town council and soliciting information from Sweetwater's businessmen; he had even fallen behind in requesting to reprint articles from other papers. If her father was too unwell tomorrow to talk to Pete, she would need to do it. Surely he would have something official for publication by then. She was at the desk, and she laid the side of her face on its surface. The wood was cold and hard, but she was tired, and she closed her eyes.
She had taken refuge in sleep when her mother had died. She had slept so late in the mornings that she had been late for school, and then she had fallen asleep during her lessons, which had caused the teacher to complain to her father, one of the few times in her life that she had ever given a teacher cause for complaint. At thirteen, she was almost finished with school, and her father, who was spending his time away from the newspaper in the city's saloons, thought she would find a better use for her time helping her aunt with Tracy and keeping up the house. But she had slept when she was supposed to be doing her chores, and her aunt, much like her brother in her general impatience with things, had surprisingly suggested that they have a doctor take a look at her. The doctor had taken her temperature and asked her to stick out her tongue, he had listened to her heart and tested her reflexes. Putting away his instruments in his medical bag, he had sat next to her on the bed she shared with Tracy and asked her how long it had been since their mother died. Two months, she had told him. He had nodded, and for a moment Myka feared that he was going to tell her that she had developed the same sickness that had taken her mother away, which had been long and painful, leaving her mother screaming or, what was worse to watch, trying to stifle her screams in the days before she died. "When it hurts less in here," he said, pointing to her chest, right above her heart, "that's when you'll wake up."
"But I'm already awake. I'm awake right now," she had protested.
He had only smiled and given her a candy. She didn't know what he said to her father and aunt, but her aunt stopped swatting her for sleeping when she was supposed to be beating the rugs or minding Tracy. Over time the daytime sleeping lessened, and when Myka's aunt announced some few months later, much to her brother's displeasure, that she was accepting an offer of marriage from the widowed dry goods merchant who lived down the street, it stopped altogether. She didn't have time to sleep, she was in charge of her father's house and Tracy now.
"Can't sleep, Myka," she murmured, pushing herself off the desk. Besides, what had taken up residence in her chest wasn't the weight she had felt when her mother died, heavy and soft at the same time, as if a million feather pillows were pushing down on her, but ice, infinitely lighter. It was easier to work with, if she kept thinking of it as ice, the numbness that had succeeded the fear, when Helena screamed at Pete to take her away, when Pete told her that Helena had been wearing only MacPherson's robe, when she realized what Helena had gone out to MacPherson's ranch to do. An icicle, jagged and sharp, uncomfortably lodged at her core, it wouldn't let her rest. Only children could sleep and believe their troubles would be gone when they woke.
She was in the middle of laying out the Journal's next edition when the door to the office opened, and Leena quietly entered. Myka sensed her rather than heard her, perhaps because some part of her had been waiting for Leena to come to her ever since Pete had dragged her away from the jail. This was a Leena she recognized, the dark eyes steady and kind, and if there was no serenity in her face, the tension and fear that had been etched in it before had largely disappeared.
"She wanted me to tell you that she's sorry," Leena said, coming to stand beside her as Myka's hands slowed.
"About killing him? About not talking to me? About everything?" The numbness receded as the words spilled out, and as soon as she heard them, Myka regretted them. They sounded angry, even to her, and just as there was no point to sleeping her problems away, there was no point in getting angry. Anger was one of the emotions that upset her filing system, that made the things stuffed inside the drawers and compartments bang and jostle to get out; anger made it hard for her to think, and it was time to think now, to be rational, practical. When she had taken over their small household from her aunt, overwhelmed at thirteen with the care of a younger sister and a father grown rapidly too fond of drink, she had needed some place to store the fear and resentment that a few months before she might have buried in books or sleep. She wasn't sure when it was that the filing system, complete with gleaming file cabinets and compartments set in a large, almost library-like space had appeared in her mind, but she recognized what it was for, to help her establish order where it was absent. Tracy needed someone to make her breakfast and to see that she left for school on time, and their father needed someone to wake him in the morning and to send him off, complaining of his pounding head, to the paper. But for Myka to be that someone, the order had to start with her, in her. It had worked, the filing system, until Helena, who by simply being Helena had overturned all the compartments and tipped over the filing cabinets. Of course, it was because of the Helenas of the world that filing systems like Myka's existed in the first place. And hers, finally, had been righted. She would never again be so careless. "That's not being helpful," she said in apology to Leena.
"But it is being human," Leena said. "It's all right to be angry with her, Myka. I'm angry with her. It doesn't mean we can't still help her."
"The penalty for murder here in the Territory is hanging," Myka said, moving away from her toward the press. She listlessly touched it. Bessie never responded to her as it did to her father or Helena. "The sheriff said she confessed."
Obliquely Leena said, "It's my fault that she is where she is." As Myka looked at her questioningly, she shook her head and said with a wan smile, "It would take too long to explain, and you would never believe me."
Myka's smile was just as wan. "It couldn't be more unbelievable than anything else I've heard today."
"I suppose that's true," Leena ruefully admitted. "Maybe someday we'll sit down and have a chat." Approaching Myka again, she said, "About Helena's confession. There are bruises along her jaw and down her neck. She wouldn't let me look at her, but I'm sure there are other bruises as well. MacPherson beat her. She could have acted out of fear for her own life."
"Did she say that?" It didn't sound angry, but there was a challenging note to it that Myka wished she could have softened.
"No." Leena bent and peered into Bessie's workings. "I look at machines, and their levers and gears and bolts are a mystery to me. To Helena, they're only another kind of book, one as easy to read as nursery rhymes or fairy tales." Her hand tightened around one of Bessie's sturdy supports. "She wouldn't have killed him without provocation, Myka."
"Did she tell you how the sheriff found her?" Not angry or challenging but blunt, too blunt. "She was wearing only MacPherson's robe."
Leena stilled for a second, then she carefully straightened. Her gaze was just as steady, just as kind as it had been when she entered the office. "She told me she had gone out to his ranch to negotiate with him. You know what she was, Myka, what she had to negotiate with."
"And that's why it doesn't matter if he beat her." Myka spared a glance toward her father's bedroom door. He hadn't stirred in hours. "If people think she was his mistress or his whore, then she's just another thing he owned, and he had every right to treat her as he wanted. What's more, some here will suspect that she was a party to his plan to move the branch line."
"But she was the one trying to put a stop to it," Leena objected, and Myka heard her own, earlier incredulousness.
And she repeated, in essence, what Pete had said to her, all but shrugging at the vagaries of human nature. "Friends, lovers, family, they turn on each other all the time. People will think that she and MacPherson had a falling out, a lovers' quarrel, and that she turned on him in revenge." She had said it too flatly. Why couldn't she strike the right tone? "I don't mean to sound hard. I'm just trying to be realistic. Emotion won't help Helena but thinking clearly might."
Leena locked eyes with her until Myka looked away. She couldn't bear the sympathy she saw in them. "Emotion has its place, Myka." But she sighed in acknowledgment of the difficulty they faced. "I still think an argument can be made that she was acting in self-defense, but Helena, for whatever reason, isn't willing to help herself. Actually, that's why I'm here. I need your help to help her."
"Of course." Action was even better than thinking, and both were preferable to feeling.
Leena was searching a pocket of her coat when a series of groans came from the bedroom. Myka held up a finger and went into the room, leaving Leena craning her neck and trying to see what was wrong. Myka's father had worked off the quilts and was squirming in discomfort on the mattress. "I don't feel good," he said piteously. His head was damp with sweat, but his teeth were chattering.
"Leena," Myka called, "would you please come in here?" She tried to keep a comforting hand on her father's arm as Leena entered the room, but he moved away from her, looking wildly from Leena to Myka and back again. Myka crawled onto the bed and hugged her father to her. "You remember Leena, Dad, Mrs. Wells' housekeeper? She's a healer, and I want her to take a look at you."
"Don't need no healer. Just my headache remedy." He stared at Leena suspiciously as she sat at the foot of the bed.
"Would you let me look at you, Mr. Bering? I promise I won't be long about it."
He crowded closer to Myka, but he didn't object. Leena rose and Myka edged away from her father to give Leena room to examine him. She went to his dresser and took out one of the bottles containing his headache remedy. Leena was speaking to him in reassuring tones, and he was grumbling in response. Turning back toward the bed, Myka saw Leena tucking the quilts around her father. Glancing at the bottle in Myka's hand, Leena vigorously shook her head. Myka pantomimed pouring the contents out; her father, thankfully, didn't see it, having snuggled deeper under the covers.
Once the door was shut, Leena said, "He needs liquids but not alcohol. Keep an eye on his fever and let me know if it gets worse. Unfortunately there's not much I can do. It's been going around Sweetwater, coughing, fever, chills." She began searching the pocket of her coat again, withdrawing a piece of paper with a name and address scribbled on it. "I need you to send a telegram to this man at this address," she said, giving the paper to Myka. "You should send it to him in your father's name, as editor of the Journal."
Myka recognized the name, Henry Tremaine. The Journal frequently reprinted articles in which he was named, if only in passing. There seemed to be no figure in the national government with whom he wasn't associated, for good or ill, and if the articles weren't discussing his political influence they were extolling the profits and growth of his businesses. Once, long ago, she had overheard her father talking politics with a friend. It was a presidential election year, and her father's friend was asking him who he thought would win, and her father had said, with a cynical chuckle, "Whoever Henry Tremaine is backing, of course." Somehow she knew she wasn't going to like the answer to her question, but she felt compelled to ask it anyway. "You want me to ask Mr. Tremaine to help Helena?" She forced herself to look up from the piece of paper and meet Leena's eyes.
"He won't remember my name. If he gets a telegram from an editor, even one in far-off Dakota Territory, he might take notice. I need you to tell Mr. Tremaine that Charlotte Ramsey has been arrested for murder." There was an entreaty in Leena's eyes that Myka hadn't seen before.
"And he'll help her?"
"If he's still the man I think he is, yes."
Myka didn't want to see the name on the paper anymore, so she folded the paper into a tiny square. She had no illusions about why Leena was so confident that a man of Mr. Tremaine's stature would help a woman in a very small town very far away from New York. Helena or Charlotte, whoever she was, must have been a very special mistress. The icicle inside her chest twisted sharply, hard enough that for a moment she couldn't breathe. "What's her real name?"
"Helena Wells." Leena looked intently into Myka's face. "There are many things Helena hasn't told you, and I'm sorry you're having to learn them this way, but the person she has been with you is not a lie. You need to believe that, no matter what you may hear."
Myka didn't look away, but she also didn't want to listen to Leena's reassurances about how much Helena cared for her, so she said as quickly as she could, "As soon as the telegraph office opens tomorrow, I'll send it off."
Once Leena left, she hurried to her alcove and dropped the piece of paper on the table beside her bed as if it had burned her fingers. She had her father to attend to now, and she was relieved to put Helena aside, at least for a little while. She brewed more coffee and toasted bread and sat with her father on his bed and pleaded with him to eat. He said his throat was too sore to eat the bread, but he weakly nodded when she asked him if he would take some broth. It was an ersatz broth she made, squeezing the juice from some tinned meat and then adding water to it. But he seemed to have no problem drinking it, although the smell had her stomach heaving. To be fair, the thought of food had her stomach heaving, but it wasn't practical not to eat, so she made a sandwich from the tinned meat and bread and tried to gulp it down without smelling it. Her father's fever was no better, but it seemed no worse, and although he wasn't sleeping easily, he was sleeping. Irresolute she stood in the parlor and then, having made up her mind, she put on her coat and a stouter pair of boots and mittens.
There was a light on in the jail, but she stood to the side of the door after she had knocked on it, and when Pete opened it, she said quietly so that only he could hear, "It's Myka."
He stepped onto the walk, closing the door behind him. "I'd ask you to come in out of the cold," he said, huddling deeper into his coat, "but -
"I know." Trying for as businesslike a tone as possible, Myka asked, "How is she?"
"Seems the same." He shrugged. "She sits on the cot and doesn't say a word. Her housekeeper was down here a bit ago, bringing her some extra blankets and food." He said plaintively, "I do feed them and try to keep them warm, you know. But Mrs. Wells hardly looked at her."
"Has Doc Collins come back from the ranch?"
"He stopped by this afternoon. Said it was just like it looked, she bashed. . . . " Pete coughed. "Mr. MacPherson died from blows to the head," he said, with an unhappy formality. "Once I get the doc's report, I'll give the Journal whatever it needs."
"Leena said Helena has bruises, Pete." Myka still believed that, given the circumstances surrounding MacPherson's death, the fact that he had beaten Helena would weigh very little with a judge when it came to sentencing, but if it would cause him to show any mercy toward her, she needed to do her best to ensure that he was aware of it. Other than presenting it before the judge herself, which would never happen, she had to rely on Pete. If he hadn't seen the bruises, she would tell him to look for them, and if he had seen them, she would impress upon him the necessity of having Helena examined, of having Doc Collins sign a statement or agree to testify, whatever a court of law would require.
"I know," he said. She couldn't read his expression, but his exasperation was plain. "I asked her to let Doc Collins examine her, but she just about tore the cell apart when I suggested it. I suppose I could have forced the issue, but it won't matter in the end, Myka." A gentleness replaced the exasperation in his voice, and it frightened her more than it would have if he had suddenly grown stern. "I'm telling you this because you're her friend, so you can prepare yourself and her, if she'll let you. I'm going to be taking her up to Pierre sometime this week. It's the closest court to Sweetwater. A judge will sentence her there. Even if he can't get to her case right away, it's a more secure jail, with its own area for women prisoners." He laughed, but it held no humor. "I'm pretty sure she'll be the first."
Myka's throat had become so tight that all she could do was nod. But Pete couldn't see that, so she forced herself to say around the boulder lodged in her throat, "I'll be by to see her tomorrow." It came out as a croak, and she heard him sigh, but before he could say anything more, she was already hurrying back to the Journal.
There was no sleep for her – she spent the night in a chair next to her father's bed, alternately blotting the sweat from his face with a cloth and covering him with every quilt they owned when he began to shiver. When he fell into an unbroken sleep toward morning, unbroken except for mumbled complaints about being too hot, which were immediately followed by complaints about being too cold, Myka went back to her alcove to change her dress. The telegraph office would open soon, and she would be there with Leena's message to Henry Tremaine, a longer message now since she had thought she should provide some explanation for why the Journal's editor would take it upon himself to disturb such an important personage, referring to "their mutual respect" for Helena. At the last minute, she increased its length by noting that the sheriff would be taking Helena to Pierre to await sentencing.
The telegraph operator couldn't maintain his usual air of impassivity as he sent the telegram. "You don't say," he kept murmuring to himself. She ignored his comments and crumpled the paper into a ball, tucking it deep into her pocket as she left the office. She would throw it into the stove once she returned home, although she was sure that between MacPherson's staff, the loiterers outside the jail, and the telegraph operator, the entire town would be fully apprised of the situation. There was almost no need for the Journal to publish the story, except for the fact that gossip was neither accurate nor impartial, and Myka had no illusions about the townspeople's generosity of spirit toward Helena.
More blotting of her father's damp face, covering him up to his chin with quilts, and getting him to take a few sips of water awaited her when she returned home. At least this was a day that Mrs. Grabel came, and though she showed no inclination to assist Myka with her ailing father, she kept the stove filled with wood and she set about making a decent pot of broth. Her presence allowed Myka to leave the Journal again, this time for the jail. She ran, holding her hands over her ears because she had forgotten to bring a scarf, but Pete's greeting to her from the doorway of the jail was a grim shaking of his head. Jerking his thumb toward the shadowy cell in back, he informed her that Mrs. Wells wasn't speaking to anyone this morning either. As Myka trudged back to the Journal, she saw the boy who delivered telegrams from the telegraph office standing outside the door. She fished out a coin from the recesses of her coat to give him as he handed her the telegram. It was from Henry Tremaine, and it demanded of Mr. Warren Bering, editor of the Sweetwater Journal, answers to the following:
Whether Mrs. Ramsey had offered any defense of her actions
Whether an attorney had been hired to represent her
Whether Mr. Bering could recommend a hotel as he anticipated that he would be arriving in Sweetwater within the next 48 hours.
Myka was running again, this time to the telegraph office, to send a response, unable to tell whether she still held Mr. Tremaine's telegram as she could no longer feel her fingers. As she flew into the room, neatly divided by the counter behind which the operator sent and received the town's telegrams, he slipped off his stool and seemed to leap the one or two steps that separated the stool from the counter, holding out a pencil and paper for her to write her message. This time it was much more brief, consisting of No, No, and the Sweetwater Hotel.
Her breathing was shallow and rapid as she left the telegraph office and looked toward Helena's home at the far end of the street. Its gabled roof loomed above the trees, and smoke curled from its chimneys. She needed to tell Leena about Henry Tremaine's telegram, but her feet were unwilling to move in the direction of the house, perhaps because, like her hands, they had become blocks of ice, but in reality she knew it was because she was afraid, like she had been last night when Pete said he would have to take Helena to Pierre and she knew she was powerless to stop him. Mr. Tremaine was coming; she could almost hear his train rocketing along the tracks to Sweetwater, full of fire and speed and power. If her hopes and wishes were of little consequence to the law, they were of even less consequence to men like Henry Tremaine. He might be the only one who could save Helena, but men like him didn't attain the positions they held without expecting to be recompensed for their efforts. He would want something for the mountains he might need to move on Helena's behalf, and Myka would be powerless to stop from him from taking it.
There also remained the possibility that even his influence wouldn't be enough to save Helena. Although it was all but settled that the Territory would be accepted into the Union as two states, North Dakota and South Dakota, its inhabitants prided themselves on their independence, their distance from the "cesspool" of the nation's capital and the fleshpots and dens of iniquity that passed for cities in the East. Henry Tremaine would represent all of it, and the assumption people would draw about the nature of his relationship with Helena would only fix in their minds that she was a whore, a foreign whore at that, and thus automatically guilty of any crime one wanted to attribute to her. No one would see that she was someone's daughter, sister. . . mother. Christina. Myka forced herself to breathe in as deeply as she could, the cold burning her nose, making her teeth and her eyes water. She focused on Helena's house; it wasn't just bigger, it was set apart from the other homes, too grand for its surroundings, much like Helena herself. Her feet began to move, clumsily, painfully because they were wood not flesh, but Myka urged them to go faster. She had no time to waste; it would take several days, a week or more, for a letter to travel that far. It was already too late – Helena might be sentenced before they responded, if they responded – but she had to try.
She banged on the kitchen door and then, once a startled Leena let her in, she brusquely swept past her, down the hall, across the foyer, and into the library. Tracking snow over the expensive rug, Myka went to Helena's desk, so dark, so massive, in the gloom, and began to open each drawer. Helena wouldn't have thrown it away, she would never throw away anything that Christina might have once touched, breathed upon, looked at. Myka found it in one of the large bottom drawers, a sturdy, oversized envelope big enough to hold the picture on Helena's desk and, on the back, an address. Myka copied it, her chapped, reddened fingers almost too stiff to curl around the pen.
Leena had followed her into the room. "She wouldn't want her family to know, Myka."
"Does she know that you had me send a telegram to Henry Tremaine?" Myka asked coolly. Leena looked away. "He's coming. I think he must have replied to my telegram as soon he got it." She studied the picture. It had been a long time since she had looked at it. It was probably only a trick of her imagination, but she thought that she saw a challenge in the pose Christina assumed for the camera; her chin was up and a little outthrust, and she seemed to be leaning toward the lens, as if daring the photographer to capture her at less than her best. Myka devoutly hoped that it was more than a girl's playful adoption of a role, a flirtation with the camera. She was counting on Christina being her mother's daughter. With a return of her customary earnestness, she said, "They ought to know. If it were my family, no matter how bitterly we may have quarreled, they would want to know."
Leena only turned away. Clutching the address and rounding the desk, Myka called to Leena's retreating back, "You think this isn't my place. But judges take into account pleas for mercy, and her family ought to be given the opportunity to plead for her. Whether they do, or not, should be up to them."
Leena paused, turning to face her. "I'm not passing judgment on what you're trying to do, Myka. But Helena won't see it the way you do. She won't understand." They were standing in the foyer, and Myka remembered the first time she visited the house. She had been impressed, but she had been impressed even more by its owner. "To have her family find out . . . it will be a bitter blow for her."
"I don't expect her to understand," Myka said curtly. And she didn't. She knew how proud Helena was, and she knew how much shame was mixed in with the anger and grief about Christina that Helena still carried. Helena would view any communication with her family as a betrayal, and although Myka tried to squelch the thought that then came into her mind, she couldn't find a compartment to stuff it in fast enough and it was out of her mouth before she could stop it. "She'll have to learn to live with betrayal just like the rest of us." She flushed at how dramatic it sounded; she wasn't dramatic. She was sensible, practical, and, more importantly, numb. She was an icicle. Again there seemed something perilously close to sympathy in Leena's eyes, and Myka almost fled down the paved walk, slipping on the snow but not slowing until she was far down the street.
When she returned home, Mrs. Grabel had left, but the broth was still on the stove, and she ladled a cup and brought it into her father. His bedroom had begun to smell like a sickroom, and Myka wished she could open a window to freshen the air. Instead she plumped his pillows and shook the quilts. She took an ancient nightshirt from his dresser and carefully worked him into it, leaving his sweat-soaked union suit on the floor. She would gather it with the rest of his clothes for the laundry that had needed to be done days ago. He was still feverish, but he seemed marginally more interested in the broth than he had been yesterday, although that might have had something to do with the fact that Mrs. Grabel had made the broth; he even had enough spirit to grump at her briefly for helping him to hold the cup to his lips. He quieted after that, and once she was sure he was asleep, she went into the office and rummaged through a box that rested dusty and undisturbed in a corner. It held odds and ends of stationery and card stock. In other towns, her father had taken the occasional printing job, invitations, announcements of special events, and the like, and he had kept the leftover paper. You never knew when it might come in handy.
Such as now. She dug out heavy, cream colored paper that she would use for her letter to Charles Wells and, farther down, she found a pale blue card with a matching envelope. It looked like the kind of card young ladies might receive inviting them to a dance or party, or at least she thought it did. She had never received invitations like that herself. Young girls didn't receive invitations from strangers; Myka knew there was a chance that her letter would be thrown away, but she was betting that Christina's curiosity wouldn't be easily deterred. Disguising her letter to Helena's daughter as an invitation wasn't a deception she had wanted to engage in, but Christina was her best chance to influence the adult Wellses.
Taking the paper and a heavy book to write on into her father's bedroom, Myka sat in the chair she had placed next to his bed and tried to tell Christina about her mother. She had thought it would be difficult to write about Helena, and Myka had made sure that her more complicated feelings about Helena were safely stored in the resurrected Helena drawer, and before she put pen to paper, she tried to recall Helena in the first weeks she had known her, when Helena was simply, only the most fascinating person she had ever met, hauteur alternating with warmth, impatience with generosity. But as she recounted to Christina her aunt's "scientific experiments" with Claudia, her stable of horses rescued from the boneyard, her support of the Journal and her efforts to keep Sweetwater's railroad running through Sweetwater, Myka returned to the box of stationery and card stock more than once for extra sheets of paper, and she felt free of the anxiety and fear, and anger, that had threatened to overwhelm her since she woke alone in Helena's bed. She had intended to refer to Helena's arrest only in the vaguest terms, a "calamitous misfortune" that would "dishearten the stoutest of us" but she kept seeing Helena as she had first met her, head held high, standing amidst the sawdust and liquor bottles of the Spur as if it were the drawing room of a mansion, and she knew then with a certainty she didn't need to question that Helena hadn't killed MacPherson. Helena was capable of killing him, of that she was sure, and had Pete told her that Helena had been holding the gun that had opened a hole in MacPherson's chest or wiping the knife that had been plunged into his heart, she wouldn't have doubted him, wouldn't have wondered if there were two Helenas, the one who, often to her detriment, never retreated from a confrontation, and the one who had taken MacPherson unaware, attacking him from behind, as if she hadn't the strength or resolve to face him as she struck him. It had never set quite right with her, the manner of MacPherson's death and the character of the woman who, inexplicably it seemed now, had confessed to killing him. But she would puzzle that out later, why Helena had confessed, her immediate task was to convince Christina that her aunt couldn't possibly be guilty.
So "calamitous misfortune" became "accused of a heinous crime that she did not commit," and Myka expressed her fears that Helena's reputation would convict her more readily than the evidence in language that hinted at Helena's unconventional conduct without actually specifying it. Christina's aunt was a "liberal-minded woman" with an "independent spirit" and "all too frequently misunderstood by those who knew her only by what others said about her." Myka bit the end of her pen, unsure how to close the letter; finally she decided to be as honest as she thought possible with a fifteen-year-old girl, who, regardless of how precocious she might be, was doubtless sheltered and young for her years, in other words, worlds apart from a fifteen-year-old Myka Bering. Revealing that she was writing to her without her aunt's knowledge or approval, Myka acknowledged that
if Miss Wells has a single flaw, it is her pride. Deprived of her family's comfort in what is her darkest hour, she refuses to burden them with the knowledge of her situation, which is grave indeed. Unable to countenance such self-sacrifice, I have made it my duty to inform you of the misfortune that has befallen her and the utter miscarriage of justice that it represents. I beg of you to remind her that she remains a beloved daughter, sister, and aunt.
Myka grimaced as she reread the end of her letter. To importune a mere girl like this, it was shameful, and she was ashamed. But she was also desperate. In the middle of the night, with no one to witness her helplessness, except her sleeping father, she could admit that she didn't know where else to turn or what else to do. She unclenched the pen, dropping it into her lap, and tried to work the cramp out of her fingers. There was one more letter to write.
It didn't dwell on Helena's wonderful qualities. It stated the crime she was charged with, the likelihood that she would be found guilty although she was innocent of any wrongdoing, and the possibility that, if found guilty, she would be executed. At the end, her penmanship losing grace and legibility, its wild scrawl matching the rush of terror she felt at the thought of a judge sentencing Helena to die, Myka didn't hesitate to plead with Christina's father as well.
She bitterly regrets the estrangement between you but cannot bring herself, at this desperate pass, to attempt to end it for fear that pity and a sense of obligation would be the motivation for your response rather than love. I have neither her stiff-necked pride nor her doubts of your affection, so I urge you to reassure her of her place in your heart. I would also urge you to add your voice to those of us who will be clamoring to see justice prevail and your sister proclaimed innocent. I know that the brother of so fine a woman as Helena Wells would not sit idly or silently by when his sister's life hangs in the balance.
She sealed the envelopes before she could regret what she had written. Perhaps Helena's family would be offended at the temerity of a stranger addressing them so familiarly about their daughter, but she couldn't imagine them being indifferent to Helena's plight.
While she had written well into the night, it would still be hours before the telegraph office (which also served as the town's post office) opened. She could try to sleep, though the chair would prove no more comfortable tonight than it had last night. Or she could spend the time helping justice to prevail by trying to figure out what had really happened at MacPherson's ranch.