back? You’re not due for—”
He brought his fingers to her lips. “In time,” he whispered. It almost sounded as if he were crying, but she didn’t question him. She knew him well enough to know he would answer in his own time. They had grown up together, had spun their dreams for a life with each other forever.
He held her close for a long time, and then they made love again. Throughout, he whispered “I love you” so many times that she lost count.
And when she slept, it was in the comfort of his arms, basking in the love of their youth and their dreams for the future.
But in the morning he was gone.
She was amazed, disbelieving. She even went into town and asked if anyone had seen him. Sheriff Perkin looked at her as if she were plumb crazy.
“Why, Molly, my dear, you know he’s off on the trail with his hands. Honey, the man’s barely left. He wouldn’t be human if he’d made it back here so fast, now would he? Are you sure you’re all right out there? You’re looking kind of peaked. You ought to come in and stay with my Susie. With our boys off helping on the cattle drive, she’s right lonely.”
Molly thanked him but said that she couldn’t stay. She went home, completely perplexed. Lawrence had been there on what she’d come to call the night of the wolves, for that eerie howling. She knew it. She could still see his eyes, still hear his words, feel his touch. He loved her; he had made love to her.
It was two days later when Doc Smith came out with the sheriff and his sweet wife, Susie. All three were pale and drawn.
She knew something was wrong. She had actually known it from the moment she heard the horses’ hoofbeats. She stood on the porch, clutching the rail as they approached. By her side, Bartholomew let out a low and mournful howl.
Just like the wolves.
She was afraid. More afraid than she’d ever been in her life. And when the sheriff walked toward her, his old bulldog face filled with grief, she knew.
“No!” she said. “No, he’s not dead. Lawrence isn’t dead. He isn’t, he isn’t, he—”
“My poor dear!” Susie Perkin, pretty and round, hurried to Molly, taking her into her arms.
“They were attacked right outside town, just a few days after they left. Cattle rustlers, I’m thinking, ‘cause there wasn’t sight nor sound of any cattle to be found,” Sheriff Perkin said. “Cattle rustlers … Comanche or Apache, most like. We can’t rightly tell which. But there are some arrows at the site … some feathers, but—”
“No! Lawrence knew the local tribes and the shamans and the war chiefs. He didn’t die at the hands of any Indians, I know that!”
Doc Smith was as kind a man as you could ever want to meet, and he took Molly’s hand now. “You’ll come back into town with us,” he said.
“And Bartholomew, too,” Sheriff Perkin said.
“But he’s not dead. He was here! And he’ll be back. Anytime now, he’ll be back!” Molly told them. She was falling, but they were there to support her. “He was here, and that’s why I asked you if you’d seen him. He was home, but then he up and disappeared. He’s not dead, though,” Molly told them. “And I won’t believe he is. Not unless I see his body, I won’t.”
“Oh, Lord, she can’t be seein’ that body,” Doc Smith whispered.
“It’s not him. I know it’s not. I don’t care what you say, it’s not him,” Molly protested.
“There, there,” Susie told her helplessly.
In the end, they had to show her what was left of the body.
It was in Lawrence’s clothing. It held Lawrence’s pocket watch and his billfold. There was a gold chain around its neck with a big locket that carried a picture of her. The matted, bloody hair that remained was black. The body had been found with five others, and those men, she was certain, were their hands. Jody, who laughed all the time. Beau, who was big as an ox. Daryl, Steven and Jacob, too.
After insisting that she be allowed to see them all at the funeral parlor in town, Molly was horrified. At last it was more than her consciousness could bear. She passed out.
As she fell, she admitted that yes, the first man was Lawrence.
Immediately she told herself that no, it wasn’t Lawrence. Lawrence had come to her, had made love to her, after this … thing was dead.
It was about six weeks later when Molly knew for certain, at least in her own soul, that she had been right. She didn’t know how; it was a mystery she would never fathom. But Lawrence had come to her that night.
She was expecting.
She rented her house and land to a neighboring rancher, and thanked the Perkins for all they had done for her, then told them that she couldn’t stay, that she had to go home to what family she had, back to Louisiana, to the city. They wept when they saw her off in the stagecoach. She wept, too. They had been good friends. She knew they wanted her to stay, to fall in love again.
But she loved Lawrence. He loved her. And she would spend the rest of her life waiting.
He had come once; he might come again.
And meanwhile, she would have her child to raise.
CHAPTER ONE
Summer
1864
DARKNESS HAD COME to New Orleans. Though the detested Union military governor Benjamin “Beast” Butler had been removed from control over the city, the streets remained quiet by night, as if the residents’ hatred of the man were an odor, and that odor still lingered in the air. As he approached the office on Dauphine where he’d been summoned, Cody Fox was surprised by the sudden eruption of men, exiting headquarters and hurrying out to the street, rifles in their hands, faces pale, nervous whispers rather than shouts escaping their lips.
He was curious about what was bothering the men. New Orleans was solidly in Union hands and had been for more than a year. As the others hurried out, barely nodding in his direction, Cody went in, wondering what a Union officer wanted from a recovering Confederate soldier. The sergeant behind the desk took his name and bade him sit, then hurried into what had once been the parlor of Missy Eldin, daughter of Confederate Colonel Elijah Eldin, who had died at Shiloh, but was now a Union military office.
Cody had returned from the front lines nearly a month ago, and as far as he was concerned, he had healed from the wound that had taken him out of the battle and sent him back to the house on Bourbon Street where he had grown up. He was walking fine these days, he had no problem whatsoever leaping up on his horse, and all he had in mind now was getting somewhere far away.
He wasn’t afraid of battle; he wasn’t even afraid of the enemy, especially since he and his Southern fellows lived side by side with “the enemy” these days. Cody had discovered long before the war that there were good and bad men of every calling, and there were good men and bad on both sides of the present conflict. No, he was simply tired of the carnage, restless, ready to move on.
