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 appeared 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.
