the evening he’d met her at the lemonade social. He remembered how the deep green garment had set off her eyes and how the gloss of her red hair had rivalled the shine of the taffeta.
And then he’d been introduced to her husband. Ezra had shaken his hand with great gusto, and Delaney had hardly looked at Hannah again. Until now.
God almighty. He had no business here in her room, he told himself, then strode to the door, down the hall and down the stairs without looking back. If Doc Soames hadn’t been coming through the front door just then, Delaney would’ve been gone.
“What’s this I hear about Ezra?” the elderly doctor asked. “Dead by his own hand?”
“It looks that way,” Delaney said.
Abel Fairfax joined them. “He took a turn for the worse yesterday, Doc. You know how sick he was. I expect Ezra wanted to go on his own terms, not wait till he was too weak to open his eyes much less pull a trigger.”
The doctor nodded somberly. “And Hannah? Have you told her yet?”
“She knows,” Delaney said.
“Fainted dead away,” Abel added. “She’s upstairs, lying down.”
“Well, in my experience it’s best to put a goodly amount of sleep between bad news and reckoning with it.” The doctor patted his black bag. “I’ll just go on up and give her enough laudanum to let her get a healing rest.”
Delaney almost stopped him. In his opinion, facing tragedy was far better than sleeping through it. He sensed that Hannah would agree. But then it wasn’t for him to say, was it?
“Well, I guess that’s that,” he said. “I’ll be getting back to the office now.”
“Thanks for your help, Sheriff,” Abel said. “I’ll be sure and let Hannah know.”
“That’s not necessary, Abel. You just give her my sympathies, will you?”
“I’ll do that, Delaney. I’ll surely do that.”
The undertaker’s buckboard rattled past Delaney as he walked back to the sheriff’s office. Ezra Dancer’s body lay in back, covered by a dark wool blanket.
. “Dum shame,” Seth Moran called down from the wagon seat as he passed.
“Yep.”
There wasn’t anything more to say, so Delaney veered left, out of the cloud of dust the undertaker kicked up. Once inside his office, he aimed his hat at the hook on the wall and propped his shotgun against the desk before he settled in his chair. It felt like noon, but it was barely nine o’clock. Death did that, he mused. Made time feel different. Slowed it down. Speeded it up. He wasn’t sure which.
In the war, some battles seemed as if they were going on for several days when in fact they only lasted from dawn until dusk. Others, when they were over and the casualties counted, seemed to have taken place in the blink of an eye.
Hell, it seemed like months ago that Ezra Dancer had dropped by the jailhouse, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat just to chew the fat with Delaney, to ask him how he liked Newton after his six-month stint as sheriff, if he meant to stay or if he thought he’d be pulling up stakes once his year’s contract ran out. But that visit had taken place a mere two or three weeks ago. And Ezra hadn’t even struck him as all that thin or ill.
Now the man was dead by his own hand. Delaney closed his eyes a minute, refusing to entertain any thought of what he might have missed in the man’s conversation or an expression of hopelessness he might have failed to recognize on the older man’s face.
The truth was that Ezra had seemed just fine to him. He wasn’t a damned mind reader, after all, and he’d been directly responsible for enough deaths himself over the years to know that in this case he wasn’t to blame at all, either for what he did or failed to do.
Sick or not, Ezra Dancer struck Delaney as nothing but a damn fool to leave a woman like Hannah a minute, a single second, a mere blink, before he absolutely had to.
Chapter Two
Hannah wasn’t sure if she was alive or dead. Sometimes it felt as if she were deep underwater, struggling against strong currents, not drowning so much as already drowned, breathing water now rather than air. Then sometimes it felt as if she were soaring, lighter than air itself, invisible as wind.
Sometimes she thought that she was in her bed because she recognized the smell of sunshine in the linen sheets and felt the familiar caress of her favorite pillow, the way it tucked so perfectly between her shoulder and her chin.
Her bed, perhaps, yet every time she attempted to open her eyes, her room seemed different. It kept changing. Once the curtains were open and there was sunlight on the elm outside her window. Then it turned somehow to moonlight. And then the curtains were drawn tight, and the only light was the pale flicker from the lamp on the nightstand.
There was always someone in the rocking chair across the room. Once it was Miss Green. Hannah saw her clearly. Once it was Abel Fairfax. For a moment it seemed to be Ezra.
Ezra. Something about Ezra.
Then she envisioned Delaney, tall and somber at the foot of the stairs. His arms were going around her and she could feel the rough touch of his wool vest and all the warmth beneath it. There was the sudden scrape of his cheek against hers.
Hannah tried to speak, but she was under water again and the current was stronger than before, pulling her down relentlessly.
“There,” whispered Miss Green. “There, there. Just sleep now, you poor dear. You’ll feel ever so much better in the morning.”
Two days later, sitting beside Ezra’s casket in the darkly draped front parlor of the Moran Brothers’ Funerary Establishment, Hannah had to remind herself once again that Ezra was no longer in pain. She’d watched the cancer eating away at him, dulling the light in his eyes, creasing his forehead, and weighing down the corners of his mouth, especially when he thought she wasn’t looking.
But now he had freed himself of all that agony, hadn’t he? Rather than allow his illness to waste him away over the course of the next few months, Ezra had mastered his own fate. He had mastered his own death. Above all else, he had vanquished the terrible pain. That alone should have given her great consolation.
Hannah edged a hand beneath the folds of her black veil to wipe away one more tear.
How like Ezra to take fate in hand. His suicide shouldn’t have surprised her. She should have been prepared. She should have read it on his face the night before he shot himself or tasted goodbye on his lips when he kissed her good-night.
Or perhaps somewhere deep inside she had suspected Ezra’s intentions, yet had chosen to deny if not completely ignore her knowledge. Life without Ezra, after all, was unthinkable. They’d been together fourteen years, half of Hannah’s life.
“Mrs. Dancer, please accept my
