“Westfield!” Frankie gasped and LeGault shushed her.
They watched as the tall man, Leander, drove away—but there was no other man in the carriage with him.
“Where did he go?” Françoise asked when the carriage was gone, as she turned around to lean against the rock.
“Hidden,” LeGault said thoughtfully. “Now, why would our righteous, do-gooder doctor be hiding a man in his buggy in the middle of the night?”
“Isn’t that a coal mine down there?”
“Sure, but what does that matter? Think he’s plannin’ to steal a couple tons of coal?”
“He and that bitch of his stole dynamite from somewhere, probably from the coal mine.”
LeGault played with the tip of his mustache. “He’s awfully familiar with coal mines.”
“You can stay here all night with your puzzle, but it’s too cold for me. We have much planning to do yet, and not much time to do it in.”
LeGault didn’t say a word as he followed Françoise back to the horses. “This woman Westfield married,” he said, hands on the pommel, “she’s a Chandler, isn’t she?”
“Like the town name, yes.”
“Very much like the town name. The most respectable, unsuspected name in the town.”
“What are you thinking?”
&
nbsp; “You saw Westfield and his bride together. What would you guess she’d be likely to do for him?”
“Do?” Françoise thought of the way the woman’d looked at the doctor, as if he might disappear at any moment—and if he did start to fade, she was going to grab onto his coattails. “I believe she’d do anything—everything—for that man.”
LeGault gave a smile that showed perfect, even white teeth. “I don’t know what we saw here tonight, but I’m going to find out. And when I do, I’ll see how we can use it. We need a way to move that shipment out of Chandler.”
Françoise began to smile also. “And who better to do it than a Chandler?”
Leander and Blair worked on the clinic for three days, along with several crews of workers, before they got it ready. On the evening of the third day, Lee climbed a ladder and nailed up the big sign: Westfield Infirmary for Women.
When he stepped down from the ladder, he saw Blair grinning up at the sign with the expression of a child who has tasted ice cream for the first time. “Come inside,” he said. “I have a celebration planned for us.” When Blair didn’t move, he caught her hand and pulled her inside.
Under an oak lid, inside a galvanized sink, were two bottles of champagne in ice.
Blair backed away. “Lee, you know what happens to me when I drink champagne.”
“I’m not likely to forget,” he said, as he popped the cork and grabbed a crystal glass, filled it and handed it to her.
Blair took a cautious sip, looked at him over the rim, then drained the glass and held it out for a refill.
“Not upset about St. Joseph’s? Don’t wish you could intern there?”
She kept her eyes on the wine Lee was pouring into her extended glass. “And miss working with the man I love? Hey!” she said, as Lee kept filling and the glass overflowed. She looked up to see him watching her with hot eyes.
“For how long?” he whispered.
Blair tried to be nonchalant. The words had come out unexpectedly. “Maybe forever. Maybe I’ve loved you since I first met you. Maybe I tried everything I could to hate you, probably because Houston claimed you first, but nothing seems to have worked. No matter what I did to you, you always came out on top.”
Lee was standing a foot away from her, but the heat in his eyes was drawing her closer. “So I passed your tests, did I? Rather like Hercules and his tasks.”
“It wasn’t quite that bad.”