the distraction of their company, he lengthened his stride to catch up. A smile tugged his lips as he remembered the coins he’d given them to buy peppermint sticks at the store. Varina, he knew, didn’t have the money for such indulgences, but all youngsters deserved a treat now and then. He could only hope that, in the days ahead, Varina’s staunch independence would allow him to provide more than candy.
As he came abreast of the girls, Katy glanced up at him with a hesitant smile. Annie, however, seemed to avoid his eyes. Donovan swiftly saw why. Against her coat, she clutched a ten-pound sack of flour. They had not bought candy at all.
“Please don’t be mad, Uncle Donovan,” Annie said in a firm little voice that echoed her mother’s. “We like candy. We like it a lot. But we need this flour. Ma’s bin is almost empty, and I have to make bread this afternoon.”
Donovan swallowed the sudden tightness in his throat. “That’s fine, Annie,” he said, feeling frustrated and foolish. “But you should have told me you needed flour. I’d have bought a big sack of it, and some candy, too.”
“Oh, no!” Annie protested. “You’re our guest! Ma said we weren’t to ask you for anything!”
“In that case, I need to have a talk with your mother.” Donovan cursed Varina’s pride. The idea that her family was on the brink of starvation, and the woman would not even ask her own brother for help-But anger wouldn’t accomplish anything, he reminded himself. He had to find some other way to aid Varina. Something she would not reject as charity.
There was the mine—she had offered him a partnership. But the thought of grubbing away his days on Charlie Sutton’s worthless diggings was enough to crush his soul.
There had to be another answer, another possibility, lurking just out of reach. Something in the land, perhaps, or even in himself. He would give the matter some serious consideration. In the next few days, when he wasn’t working on the cabin, he would investigate Varina’s mining claim and the terrain surrounding it. He would keep himself fully occupied, leaving no room in his thoughts for the likes of Sarah Parker Buckley.
But even as he made his plans, Sarah’s image burst into his mind. His face blazed, recalling the sting of her slap on his skin. His body quivered with the memory of last night-her body straining against him, the silken feel of her hair, tumbling over his hand. Something clenched inside him—a hunger so raw and fierce that it almost buckled his knees. He stumbled, damning his own weakness.
“Hurry, Uncle Donovan! We’re almost home!” Annie called, and Donovan suddenly realized that the girls had left him behind. He hurried to catch up, breathing hard to clear his mind. He was thirty-six years old, he reminded himself, old enough to know that the woman who called herself Sarah Parker was pure poison. She’d deceived trusting friends and neighbors in Richmond. She’d betrayed Virgil, who had loved her with all the passion of his youth. And for all her virtuous demeanor here in Miner’s Gulch, Donovan knew better than to believe she’d changed. Beneath Sarah’s prim facade, Lydia Taggart was alive and well. She was his enemy. He would see her vanquished once and for all.
The Crimson Belle Saloon had seen better days. Its porches sagged where the unseasoned lumber had warped. Its paint, once a brazen red, was weathered and peeling. The men who drifted in and out of the double doors tended to have a whipped look, as if any spirit they’d ever possessed had been beaten away by the hard years. Even the piano sounded tired.
Not that Sarah was listening. The piano’s tinny, thunking tone had filled her ears for so many seasons that she scarcely heard it anymore. Besides, this evening her mind was on other matters.
Lifting her skirts above the mud, she rounded the corner of the saloon and slipped through the shadows toward the back entrance. Her free hand clutched the canvas valise that served as her medical kit. Her spectacles were in place once more, perched firmly on her narrow nose.
The rear of the Crimson Belle was expressly designed for discreet comings and goings. A cluster of bushy blue spruce trees screened the entry, which opened into a dim hallway with a narrow, inside staircase leading to the second floor. The door at the top of the stairs was locked, but Sarah’s knock—three precise taps, a pause, then two moretouched off a scurry of footsteps on the other side. The bolt rattled and, seconds later, the door swung inward to reveal a frowsy blond woman in a faded mauve silk wrapper. Her husky shoulders sagged as Sarah stepped out of the shadows.
“Ach, thank goodness it is you!” She spoke in a rough cello voice, heavily accented with German. “Marie is worse—the coughing, the blood—”
“Take me to her, Greta.” Sarah clutched her valise and followed the woman down the carpeted hallway, her eyes avoiding the closed door that indicated one of the girls had a customer. She had long since lost count of her visits to these rooms above the saloon, but all the same, she never quite got used to things here. The lamps in the hallway cast a hellish glow through their rose glass chimneys. The air swam with incense, its sickly-sweet aroma mingling with tobacco smoke. From downstairs, the muffled tinkle of the piano did not quite drown out the lustful grunts and whimpers that emanated through the walls of the locked room.
“Here.” Greta opened the second-to-last door to reveal, in the dimly lit space, a thin, dark figure lying on a wide bed. Sarah walked slowly toward her, weighted by a sense of helplessness. She could deliver babies, apply poultices and administer concoctions of whiskey, quinine and camphor, but in this case, there was nothing she could do. Marie, tragically young and no longer pretty, was dying of consumption.
Marie’s weightless hand fluttered like a leaf on the stained brocade coverlet as Sarah approached. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. “I wanted the chance to tell you before—” She broke off, overcome by a spasm of tearing coughs. The kerchief that Greta pressed to Marie’s mouth came away flecked with blood.
“Don’t try to talk,” Sarah murmured, her eyes welling with emotion. “Just rest. I brought more of that chamomile tea you like. The girls can brew it for you—” She fumbled in her valise for the packet, her vision blurred by tears. Marie belonged in a hospital, with real doctors and nurses, or in some warm, dry climate where her lungs could heal. Here, in this wretched place, there was no hope for her.
“She ain’t slept all day. Ain’t done nothin’ but cough, poor lamb.” Another woman, near forty, with gentle eyes and garishly dyed red hair, had stepped out of the shadows to take the chamomile. “I’ll start some water. Maybe this’ll soothe her some.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said softly. “You’ve been good to her, Faye.”
“We got to do for each other. Ain’t nobody else’ll do it for us—’ceptin’ you, o’ course, Miss Sarah. You been a real angel to us all.”
“Ach, ja,” Greta agreed. “But listen, we been fighting with that bastard Smitty again. He says that if Marie is too sick to work the customers, he can’t afford to give her room and board.”
“Not again!” Sarah sighed wearily, remembering the confrontations she’d had with the Crimson Belle’s miserly owner. Smitty treated his girls like livestock, with no regard for their welfare. They’d lived in the most abject dread of him until last year, when Sarah had stepped in. Conditions were somewhat better now, but the old man’s curmudgeonly heart was as hard as ever.
Sadly Sarah gazed down at Marie’s pale face. It was Marie, she recalled, who had triggered her first visit to these upstairs rooms. The poor girl had miscarried and was near death when a desperate Faye had come pounding on Sarah’s door in the middle of the night. Sarah had
