McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [150]
“She had a rough time,” Holt admitted. “But Doc Brown was with her. He saw her through, with some help from the womenfolk.”
Gabe gave the bars an exultant wrench; Holt was surprised they didn’t come loose from the mortar in the floor and ceiling.
“Congratulations are in order for more reasons than one,” R.S. said, rising from his wooden chair and grinning. “Judge Fellows had himself a fine fit when he found out his verdict was on shaky ground, Holt. Far as I can tell, the case against Gabe here won’t hold water.”
Gabe’s eyes glittered. “For God’s sake, Holt,” he breathed, “get me out of here.”
“Some kind of ruckus going on down in the street,” R.S. said thoughtfully, standing at the window.
Holt got a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. “What?” he asked.
“How should I know?” R.S. countered reasonably. Then he called out to someone below. “Who’s that in the back of that wagon?”
Holt didn’t hear the answer, but R.S. did, and he let out a long, low whistle of exclamation before he turned to face Holt and Gabe.
“Judge Fellows,” he said. “Damned if he isn’t deader than a doornail.”
CHAPTER 37
LORELEI COULDN’T THINK coherently, couldn’t get beyond the simple fact that her father was dead. Her mind seemed swamped, distracted, assaulted by a storm of contradictory emotions—anger and pity, sorrow and yet a certain distance, as if this event, in some curious way, had no true bearing on her life. A sense that while this was an ending, the death of many secret hopes, it was also a setting-free. It was an ending, but a beginning, as well.
Mr. Templeton, quietly solicitous, sent a passing boy for the undertaker, and sat with Lorelei on the step until the funeral wagon came. She watched numbly as her father’s body was lifted, loaded into the back of that somber carriage like so much freight, taken away.
“Come with me, Lorelei,” Mr. Templeton had said reasonably, when the sound of the hearse’s wheels, rolling over the paving stones, finally faded away. He seemed so kind. How could he have been a party to the raid on her ranch?
But she’d shaken her head, refusing.
He’d left her, with the utmost reluctance, and she’d sat there on the step for a long time, her arms wrapped around her knees, mourning not the father she’d had, but the one she’d dreamed of having.
Presently, she rose, like a somnambulist, and wandered into the house, so familiar, and yet so curiously strange. It was cool inside those walls, full of midday shadows, and the only sound was the ponderous tick-tick-ticking of the long case clock in the entryway. Lorelei folded her arms, squeezed hard, as if to hold herself together.
She paused outside the closed doors of her father’s study, then, possessed by some bold and directionless compulsion, pushed them open, stepped over the threshold.
The scents of stale cigar smoke, whiskey and worn leather came at her in a wave, like ghosts. She took one hesitant step toward the desk, drawn to it by the same force that had propelled her into the room. There was something here that she wanted to find—had to find.
What was it?
She put her fingertips to her temples, willed the fog to clear.
Guided by some part of her mind that did not reason, she took the desk key from its hiding place beneath the judge’s humidor. Smiled faintly. He’d thought no one knew where it was. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known.
Her fingers trembled as she opened the first drawer. Her knees felt wispy as feathers, and she sank into the big leather chair. The throne of authority, where she had never dared sit before. The seat she had approached so many times, with such trepidation, and such despairing hope.
There was her father’s pistol, and the red leather box that held bullets. But it was the papers that drew her attention, and the reach of her hand. She took the documents out, unfolded them, one by one, read them with dazed eyes. At first, they made no sense. Property deeds. Loan documents. Letters. A ledger book.
Stop, warned a voice in her mind.
She ignored it. Opened the ledger to the first