The Drifter. Сьюзен Виггс

he echoed, putting a wry twist on the word. “I guess you could say that. All right, Doc. You ready to help with the mast?”

      Surprised, she followed him up on deck. He’d put his outburst behind him. It was, she realized, the boat that seemed to save him. He forgot everything else when he worked on it.

      “Here.” He tossed her a line. “Grab onto that. If I did this right, the top section should drop into place.” He struggled for several moments with his end, breaking out in a sweat and cursing. He paused to peel off his plaid shirt and fling it aside. Leah stared, caught herself doing so, then forced her attention to the task at hand.

      As the tall fir topmast responded to the ropes and pulleys, she caught her breath. Jackson experimented with hoisting the sails, and with an unexpected thrill, she took heady satisfaction in the majestic loft of the canvas. She felt a curious tightening inside her, a sort of breath-held anticipation. Then, when the sail unfurled against the sky, the sensation uncoiled with a sudden warmth that made her part her lips to utter an involuntary sound of pleasure. How had she missed the excitement of seafaring when she lived right at the edge of it?

      Shading her eyes, she admitted the answer. She missed everything important because she was an outsider. It took a stranger on the run to show her the wonders right under her nose.

      She lowered her hand to find him eyeing her curiously. The sun glinted off the sheen of sweat on his shoulders.

      “Is something wrong, Mr. Underhill?”

      “You liked that, didn’t you?”

      “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I did find it…diverting.”

      “I mean you really liked that.”

      “Indeed. But how can you tell?”

      He briefly touched the back of his hand to her cheek. “You look like a woman who just made love.”

      “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She turned her back on him. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be doing this, feeling this.

      Yet her fascination with him grew each moment, became harder to cope with each day. Jackson T. Underhill was at once mysterious and seductive, shadowed by the weary indifference of a rootless drifter. She should keep a cool distance from him. Should keep her mind on his wife. Instead, she caught herself thinking forbidden thoughts, remembering dreams she had abandoned years ago, then despising herself for doing so.

      “You say you did business with this Jack Tower?” Joel Santana spread the Wanted poster on the shop counter. With quick, furtive movements, the chemist swept the poster out of sight, glancing around to be sure the other customers hadn’t seen it.

      Ratlike, his nose twitched. “I never said that, Marshal.”

      Joel rested his elbow on the counter as a great wave of weariness overcame him. He’d tracked Tower across Texas and into New Mexico where the Santa Fe wind blasted a man’s face with red dust during the day and chilled him to the marrow at night. “Look, mister, if I say you said it, than you damned sure did say it.”

      “But—”

      “I don’t like your kind.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Indian sleeping on the boardwalk outside. “I don’t like the stuff you sell.”

      The rat nose narrowed haughtily. “I assure you, my medicines are all of the highest—”

      “Horseshit. I’m not real fond of selling folks stuff that makes them stupid, keeps them coming back for more.” Squinting, Santana scanned the shelves behind the counter. Peyote, powdered psilocybe, laudanum, morphine crystals and Lord knew what else. Jail cells without bars, as far as Santana was concerned. They robbed a person of freedom, dignity and eventually life.

      Reaching past the chemist’s shoulder, he knocked over a stoppered bottle. The glass shattered, and a pungent herbal smell tainted the air. “Oops,” he said. “I’m just a bull in a lady’s parlor.”

      “Hey, what the—”

      “Just trying to read this here label.” Joel’s hand shoved another bottle off the shelf. “Damn! I don’t know what’s got me so clumsy all of a sudden.”

      A matron who had been perusing an array of sleeping powders scuttled out the door.

      “Now, how about this one?” Joel stretched his arm toward the shelf.

      The chemist stepped back, spreading his arms, trying to protect his wares. “All right,” he snapped. “I sold him something!”

      Santana lowered his arm. His shoulder burned, the bursitis kicking in. Too damned many cold nights under the stars, he thought. The quicker he found Jack Tower, the sooner he could retire. A place where the weather was mild, the scenery pretty. Find a woman who’d put up with an old saddle bum’s foibles…. Before his mind wandered too far, he stuck his thumb into his gun belt and regarded the chemist, waiting.

      “He got me up in the middle of the night,” the man said. “Woke me right out of a sound sleep.”

      Joel clucked in mock sympathy. “So what’d he want?”

      “I couldn’t even hear him at first. The woman he was with—his wife or whatever—was screaming hysterically.”

      Joel’s blood chilled. Even though he already knew the answer, he took out the photograph the sheriff of Rising Star had given him. “This woman?”

      “Yeah. Yeah, that’s her.”

      “And what’d you sell them?”

      “A tin of tobacco, Underhill Fancy Shred, I think…and a whole case of this.” The chemist brought down a box of patented medicine called A Pennysworth of Peace. The label made outlandish claims of its restorative powers. The user could count on everything from a good night’s sleep and regular bowel movements to perfect spiritual contentment. Joel cracked open the blue bottle and sniffed. A mixture of low-grade corn whiskey, molasses and opium, he judged.

      The chill in his blood moved into his heart. Jack Tower didn’t know about Caroline Willis. Didn’t know what she’d done in the past, what she was capable of.

      But Joel Santana knew.

      He had first heard of Caroline a few years earlier in the aftermath of a fatal fire in New Orleans. One of the more notorious French Quarter cribs had burned to the ground. The victim had been a local preacher who, it turned out, had a taste for dangerous games. At the time of the fire, he’d been dressed in leather chaps and nothing else. He’d been spread-eagled and bound to the bed with leg irons. And there, on a sweltering July night, he’d come to understand the true meaning of burning in hell.

      The preacher had been Caroline’s client.

      “Where’d they go after they left your shop?” Joel asked the chemist.

      “Took the train straight out of town, swear to God. That’s all I can tell you,” the chemist said, clearly ready for the interview to be over. “Honest to Pete, that’s all.”

      Joel lifted his hand to the brim of his hat. The chemist cringed, probably anticipating more breakage. “Mister, you’re a pretty nervous fellow,” Santana said. Spurs clinking, he walked to the door and cast an eye at the rows of potions. “You ought to take something for it.”

      Troubled and restless, Jackson sat on the front porch of the big house and stared up at the night sky. He’d been studying the stars because a good skipper used them to navigate by. He took out a tin of tobacco, rolled a smoke, and lit up, watching the lazy strands of gray mist weave in and out of the moonlight. He’d tried to interest Carrie in astronomy, showing her the drawings in the tattered book he’d found on board, but Carrie wasn’t interested in much lately.

      A small, forbidden whisper passed through his mind. Leah Mundy would be interested.

      He shouldn’t be thinking about her, not in that way, yet