“In the meantime,” Hannah added, rather stiffly, “please convey to her our love and prayers.”
Somehow the hours passed. As did the lingering storm, at last.
True darkness began to gather in, with a few tiny pinpricks of stars overhead to show the clearing sky. Camellia was puttering. She had lit lamps and candles; she had read a few pages of some nameless book; she had stabbed the needle through her fancy work with as much venom as if it were a knife she was plunging into Quinn Hennessey’s black heart.
Gabriel, who had cleaned out his medical bag on the kitchen table, to Camellia’s disgust, was now involved in hefting small chunks of wood and kindling to the parlor. “I just figured a fire would be nice,” he explained, retrieving several matches. “Y’ know, Cam, it’s way beyond suppertime.”
“I might have assumed,” Camellia, throwing aside her embroidery, immediately snapped, “you’d work a meal out of this somehow.”
My lands, thought the doctor, watching her warily over his shoulder, I can certainly understand why Miss Hannah Burton is often in such a testy mood. That same strain of spunkiness must run through every one of the girls.
“Ain’t there some kinda statement said somewheres about idle hands bein’ the—”
“Shut up, Gabe. I don’t need Proverbs quoted at me, as if you were some student of the Bible.”
When Camellia made up her mind to do something, she did it. With her whole heart and soul and every drop of energy in her blood. Thus, Gabe, his fire-making efforts a distinct success, was soon being treated to wonderful, appetite-enhancing aromas from the kitchen.
Beef steaks pounded to exquisite tenderness and fried with flour and sliced onions. Potato chunks cooked and thickened and flavored by fresh green peas. Warm corn bread, stewed carrots,
spinach wilted in vinegar, and peach cobbler.
“You are killin’ me here, girl,” groaned Gabe from his parlor chair. “Can you spare a few crumbs of what you’re fixin’ to save the life of a starvin’ man?”
Camellia, her emotional state as always tempered by the physical, managed a small smile. Just as he had intended. “Of course, Gabe. Tuck up to the table, and we’ll have a bite.”
The bite included more than one. In fact, the doctor was consuming, with relish, the last of his entrée, when the rattle and sprangle of horses approaching at the front caught their attention.
He was first to the door.
It was a weary, muddy, bedraggled cavalcade that had arrived, and it took quite some time, and a mass of confusion, before individuals could be sorted out and facts presented.
Paul, carrying what seemed to be a limp, unmoving bundle of old clothing, followed Camellia’s lead to the bedroom upstairs, and he was immediately followed by Gabriel toting the re-stocked satchel and harrumphing with every step.
Both Ben and Austin had discarded wet outer clothing onto the kitchen floor, semi-washed, and were in the process of wolfing down leftovers at the table when the sheriff returned to join them. He sank down onto a chair and watched with dull eyes. “I’m just about too wrung out to eat.”
“And that, my friend, is exactly when you need to get some food in your belly,” said Ben, handing over an empty plate. “Have I taught you nothin’ over the years?”
“Not much.” There could be no smile from the stubbled, rough-hewn face, having lived through today’s earthshaking events. But there was, at least, a very faint lightening of tension. “All right. Some corn bread, maybe. And coffee. I got a lot still to do.”
Paul hastily swallowed enough to bring just a bit of color to his lean cheeks (too much gobbling would not, he felt, have been seemly in this house, at this time). Then, packing up his gear, he and Austin made their farewells. He would, he told Ben, come back later this evening if it would be convenient.
“It will be, son, no matter how late,” Ben quietly acquiesced. “I’ll be awake. You come on over, and leave Colton in charge of county troubles. I’ll break out a good bottle of bourbon.”
It was an unusual—somewhat odd, in fact—scene to which the sheriff returned shortly before midnight. The air surrounding Turnabout smelled, as it always did after a drenching rain, fresh and clean as laundry pegged out onto its line. A moon apologetic for having hidden itself for so long hung in the night sky with an extra order of brightness, as if it, too, had just been washed.
A fire still burned low on the hearth, and lamps added a mellow glow not to Ben’s library, as expected, but to the parlor. There he found Ben sprawled half-asleep in one chair and Gabriel half-asleep in another. Camellia, unapologetically dressed in a soft cotton wrapper and satin slippers, had taken possession of the settee.
All three held glasses that were empty or nearly so. On a small side table stood, as promised, a good bottle of bourbon. Also almost empty.
Camellia’s greeting surprised him almost as much as had this parlor scene.
“Join us, Paul.” She lifted her goblet in salute; as he somewhat warily approached, he realized that her expression seemed muzzy, and that around her very definitely wafted the gentle fumes of alcohol. Amazingly, the woman was on her way to being inebriated. He guessed, given the circumstances, if anyone deserved the temporary solace of liquor, it was Camellia Forrester. “It has been a rough—a very rough day.”
“Uh—yes, ma’am. I gotta admit, it has that.”
Pressed by invitation, he helped himself to a generous pouring of that warm, soothing libation, swallowed, and sighed.
Ben roused. “Take a seat, Paul. You wanna report first, and then we’ll tell you what’s been happenin’ here?”