“I don’t suppose the person who observed it was moved to wonder if I play chess.”
Will Beatty chuckled. His grin spread easily, taking up most of the lower half of his face. Cradling that wide smile and lending it a mischievous, boyish charm were two deep, crescent-shaped dimples. He gave Rachel a nod and what passed for an appreciative salute by tipping his hat back with his forefinger. A shock of hair as light and feathery as corn silk was revealed in the gesture.
“I reckon you do play chess, Miss Bailey,” he said. “Probably good at it, too, ain’t you?”
“Do you play?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then let me just say I’m good enough to make the game interesting for my opponent.”
Beatty tugged at the brim of his hat so it settled securely on his head. “I’ll pass that along.”
She looked at him sharply. There was a decided lack of warmth in her coffee-colored eyes. “Pass that along?” she asked. “To whom? I’m sure I don’t like being the subject of anyone else’s conversation.”
“Now ye’re in for it,” Johnny told Will, clearly relishing the notion.
“I don’t need a Greek chorus tellin’ me what’s what,” Beatty said.
“Uh? That don’t make no kind of sense. I ain’t Greek.”
Rachel’s expression lost some of its chill. “Enough,” she said, sounding more than a little like a schoolmarm charged with settling two unruly boys. “Both of you. Look, here we are.” She stopped on the short flagstone walk leading up to her porch and spared a glance at her home. The sight of it warmed her and helped her draw deeper on her well of patience.
The small, whitewashed frame house beckoned as a sanctuary. The window boxes held a variety of herbs: dill, mint, thyme, and chive. Around the side was a modest vegetable garden that she’d already harvested and cleared in anticipation that a cold snap would be upon them soon. The greenery of morning glories covered the lattice that she’d painstakingly repaired and painted. She’d forgotten that she’d left the windows open at the front of the house. A breeze had drawn out both pairs of lace panels and they fluttered against the shutters as flirtatiously as a dewy-eyed coquette.
There was some talk in town when she painted her front door red, but folks had gotten used to it—more or less—and put it down to one of her many eccentricities. Come spring, she would paint the shutters.
“I’ll take my parcels now,” she said, turning to Johnny.
Johnny looked a bit longingly past her shoulder to the front porch and the intriguing red door. “It’s no problem, Miss Bailey. I’d be pleased to—”
“No, truly,” Rachel said, interrupting him. “I’ll see myself inside.” She held her ground, effectively blocking the path for both of her escorts, then held out her arms. “Pile them on.”
Johnny’s eyes darted to Will Beatty. “Ain’t there some law that says a fellow oughta help a lady?”
“Suppose we could pass an ordinance or some such fool thing, but that’d take time, and Miss Bailey’s lookin’ fit to be tied. Give her the parcels, Johnny, because neither one of us is goin’ to get on the other side of that red door today.”
Johnny Winslow’s expression was so perfectly hangdog that Rachel was moved to laugh. “I’m telling you, Mr. Winslow, that your imagination is far superior to anything you’d discover inside my home. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
Will Beatty didn’t wait for Johnny to object. He began taking the plainly wrapped packages from Johnny’s arms and placing them carefully in Rachel’s. “You don’t mind if we wait here to make sure you’re safely inside?”
“I don’t mind at all,” she said. She used her chin to secure the pyramid of parcels in her arms and gave them a smile that was at once warm and firm in its dismissal. “Thank you, gentlemen.” She turned away then, but not so quickly that she missed their preening, wanting to look every inch the gentlemen she’d named them.
Once inside the house, Rachel dropped her packages on the large dining table that she used for spreading material and cutting patterns but never once for eating or entertaining. She shook out her arms to remove the sensation of still carrying the parcels. Once the ghost weight was gone, she approached one of the windows at the front of the house but never went so close to it that she could be seen from the street. She was in time to see the deputy and Johnny Winslow turning away from her flagstone walk and heading to their respective destinations.
She nodded, satisfied that they weren’t going to loiter in front of her house until one of them arrived at an excuse to call on her. Stepping back from the window, she set her hands on her hips and looked around, trying to see her home with the fresh eyes of someone who’d never been in it. Since that accounted for almost all of the fine citizens of Reidsville, it wasn’t difficult to imagine how someone like young Johnny Winslow would be curious.
As homes in the mining town went, this one stood as something apart from the others. It was one of only a baker’s dozen of houses built on the north side of the main street. The south side was home to the majority of the town’s early settlers, mostly miners and their families, and a good many people still lived above their businesses, took rooms in the hotel or the boardinghouse, bunked near the livery, or, like Miss Rose LaRosa and her girls, lived and worked in the same place. There’d been talk that Ezra Reilly and Miss Virginia Moody were going to put up a house when they married, but that seemed to hinge on whether Miss Moody was going to give up whoring.
It made Rachel smile to think her closest neighbor could be a whore. There was a plot of land next to her that was perfect for a home about the size of her own. She’d considered buying it herself, even gone so far as to inquire about it at the land office, but since her only purpose in making the purchase would have been to further secure her privacy, she fought the inclination and made no move to claim it.
There was no point in worrying that she’d ever have neighbors on the other side of her. A pine woodland rose sharply up the mountainside on her left. No one in Reidsville wanted to build a house on a hillside when there was better land to be had east and south of the town proper.
Rachel knew the interior of her home was finer in its appointments than any of the homes she’d had occasion to visit. The denizens of Reidsville only suspected it was true as she did not issue invitations in response to the ones she received. It was certainly not because she thought they would be uncomfortable surrounded by imported porcelain vases, gold-plated music boxes, and rococo-styled parlor chairs, or that she was worried that these objects would be stolen or become the subject of envy. The nature of her reluctance to share the museum-like quality of her appointments was that so very few of the pieces bespoke of her own tastes that she was certain she’d be identified for the fraud she was.
Still, she could not help but feel a peculiar kinship with the objects that appointed her home. They evoked memories that were at times pleasant, at others, painful, but needed to be recalled to sustain her resolve.
Rachel wandered through the parlor with its gold-toned damask-covered side chairs and emerald brushed-velvet bench seat, dragging her fingers lightly across the elaborate scrollwork that framed the back of the bench. Her eyes fell on the Italian gold-leaf clock on one of the walnut end tables, and she made a detour toward it, pausing long enough
