Texas Blue

chapter 38



DUNCAN STOOD IN FRONT OF ANNA, FIGHTING THE urge to touch her. For a week she’d slept beside him, nursed his wound, bathed him. They’d shared hours of being together, locked in together, but he’d never learned to talk to her.

“Are you sure you want to stay here?” Duncan asked.

She nodded.

“Well, I’d rather you come to Whispering Mountain with me. My cousins would take good care of you, and you’d be safe there also. But I can’t very well order you to come with me. Appears to me you’ve probably had enough of people telling you what to do. The priest told me you took right to the order of nuns here, even been going to prayers with them.”

Anna took his hand in hers but didn’t say a word.

“I guess you got a right to make up your own mind. I’ve left money with the priest in case you change it. He said he’d see you had traveling clothes and he’d take you over to a rail station himself.”

Duncan shoved his hat back on his head, wishing he could persuade her to go with him. Nobody around here knew what she’d been through. Nobody knew how strong she was. Maybe, he told himself, nobody including him knew what she wanted. “If you come to Austin, the ranger station will know where I’m at. If you make it to Anderson Glen, somebody at Elmo’s Mercantile will bring you out to the ranch. I wrote everything down and left it with the priest in case you forget.

“Any chance you want to talk to me, Anna? I thought I heard your voice once, but maybe it was a dream.”

She shook her head, then stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

“I guess that means we’re friends.” He smiled. “Mind if I stop by now and then and check on you?”

Anna smiled.

She was tiny, he thought, but beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful creature he’d ever known. She might be nineteen, but he had the feeling she was just newborn.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” He tipped his hat and turned to leave, but she caught his hand.

Without looking at him, she slipped a piece of paper into his hand and ran back to the nuns working on fencing in what looked like a garden.

Duncan turned the worn paper in his hand. It looked like a corner of an envelope yellowed with age and smudged. He couldn’t make out the name at the top, but the address was a number on Lantern West in New Orleans.

He flipped the scrap over, and in a child’s block writing someone had penciled Anna Margaret Barrister.

Duncan smiled. He had her name and a clue. Anna wasn’t giving up on life and hiding out in a mission; she was giving him the key and waiting for him to return with an answer.

“I’ll be back,” he whispered. “I promise, if you have family left, I’ll find out.”

When he walked through the kitchen, he began his investigation. “Ladies,” he said to the cooks, “do either of you remember Toledo ever getting mail from New Orleans?”

Rachel shook her head, but Sarah J spoke up. “She goes to Mexico City every June or July, and once I seen her bring back a box of mail. Mostly things she ordered that we couldn’t get, but once I remember I saw a package from New Orleans tucked between the sewing notions and mail-order catalogs. She saw it about the same time I did and jerked it up. Headed straight for her office, and when she came out an hour later that package was nowhere in sight. One of the girls told me later that Toledo must be touched in the head because she built a fire in the fireplace in her office. No one in their right mind would do such a thing that time of year.”

Duncan thanked them and headed out to load up. He had his first clue and now a belief that Toledo might be corresponding with someone. It would take time, maybe years, but he’d solve the puzzle.

His gaze found Anna working with the nuns. She’d wait, he thought, for as long as it took. She’d kept a scrap of paper hidden for years. She’d never lost hope. She wouldn’t lose it now.

“Ready to load up?” Duncan yelled at Sumner.

The old man nodded, then moved closer. “You sure we should take those two cooks to Whispering Mountain? They could murder us in our sleep, you know.”

Duncan grinned. “Well, we can’t just turn them loose on the world. Who knows what would happen? I’ll stop at the Austin office and see if they can’t look up their crime. In the meantime, we can’t put them in jail just because they say they’re murderers and I wouldn’t feel right letting them go, so the only thing I can think of is to keep my eye on them.”

Sumner followed his logic. “They ever say who they killed?”

“Nope, but you can work on getting me a few names when we get home.”

The old man didn’t look happy about it, but he nodded.

Duncan thought he heard Sumner mumble something about first gamblers and now murderers. Houseguests sure weren’t what they used to be.

The two cooks came out with a basket of food and climbed into the wagon. Em followed, talking with the priest. Lewt and Wyatt were already mounted.

Duncan grinned. Now that everything had calmed down, he was ready for another mission, but he knew his cousins would insist on him resting up and healing. They’d also try to fatten him up.

Maybe he could take a few weeks off and stay home.