Thea Devine Page 7

  All that would change in the space of an hour. Saturday was come-to-town day in Colville, and most everyone gathered at either the newspaper office or Bodey’s store. More than anything, they came to talk. Sometimes, for a rare treat, they took luncheon at the hotel; invariably they came away with an extra five-pound bag of flour and perhaps a changed opinion that they might unleash over the counter at the Morning Call.

  She knew them all and they had no quarrel with her, at least not until the Denver North project had gotten started. Now, she knew, some of her friends and neighbors were not so sure. They saw dollar signs where she saw strangers coming into their midst and moving onto their property and into their lives. They saw quick profits and she saw long-lasting problems, and she only wanted to contain the moment so that it would never change. She knew inevitably it would.

  She found herself standing before the dress shop window staring at the one mannikin on display in draped and ruffled finery. She backed away, horrified, and bumped into a terrifyingly broad body and two reassuring male hands that reached out and steadied her gently.

  She knew it was Logan, but still the fact of his presence behind her unnerved her, and the touch of his hands made her skittish. She shook him off and began walking determinedly toward the office. She didn’t have to talk to him, nor had she asked him to present himself this morning like some fool to whom she had given the merest encouragement.

  It wasn’t fair. The worst of it was, he kept up with her with good humor and never said a word until they reached the door of the office. And then she whirled on him.

  “Don’t you have a cow to herd or something?”

  “Nope. Just a cantankerous mare who needs corraling, but I know she’ll come around in her own sweet time.”

  She felt like spitting. “Why are you doing this, Logan?”

  “When was I to do this, Maggie? They’d have run me out of town if I’d come near Mrs. Frank before they’d well and truly buried Frank himself. I waited the proper time. No one can fault me there.”

  “I fault you for even talking this nonsense. We were friends.”

  “We’re still friends.”

  She had no response for that. She didn’t feel like he was a friend. Now he was her adversary who wanted to take something precious from her and give her something precious in return. She couldn’t even define if it were a fair exchange, and she was sure he thought it was.

  But this was Logan, with whom she had roamed the free range in and around Colville, whom she had leaned on when her mother died or her father went too deep into debt. The one in whom she had confided before she gave her soul to Frank and lost it forever. How could he want to change that?

  Nothing, she thought, would ever be the same. She pushed open the door to a frenzy of voices, and Logan followed her into the room.

  “Well, don’t that Danforth got a point?”

  “I just don’t see, Maggie, how things is gonna become so all-fired different after all.”

  “Yeah, a stranger’s dollar is just as good as a neighbor’s, Maggie.”

  Maggie covered her ears. “Gentlemen, you sure got over here almighty early to tell me how wrong I am.”

  “Well, that’s just it, Maggie. We ain’t gonna let nothing happen in town. Harold’s right: we gotta get on the bandwagon and make it happen, make it work for us and not the other way around.”

  “Under whose control? Whose rules? When will the town committee pass ordinances? After the damage is done? Please, gentlemen, take your money and run, but don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

  “Aw now, Maggie …”

  She looked around her affectionately. She thought of these men as her regulars, farmers and ranchers who stopped by like clockwork every Saturday to be first to get the news, chew it up, and work it over. She always had a pot of coffee on for them, and she always found A.J. most comfortably in their midst, as if this were really his element rather than the editorial desk.

  Logan watched her maneuver among them with amusement. They really adored her, he thought. This was a notion that both pleased and disconcerted him. She was Maggie to them, not Mrs. Frank; she was one of them, home grown and part of the Colville soil. To them, her father had never relinquished ownership of the paper: she carried on in his stead, not Frank’s. Because of that they respected her, even if they thought she were a mite wrong-minded about the railroad thing.

  She handled all their comments good naturedly as she pushed her way past the counter and closeted herself behind it.

  “Don’t worry, Maggie. We’ll take care of things. We’ll watch ’em closely.”

  “We won’t let Harold Danforth get too greedy, Maggie.”

  “You ever gonna sell up, Maggie? I still think you’re crazy if you don’t.”

  She shook her head despairingly and sent Logan an exasperated look, a conspirator’s look, he thought, one that delved into their long friendship and shared the moment. He wished he could capture the look and the feeling instantly in his hands so he could take it out and show her. Then perhaps she would understand what she needed and what he was feeling.

  But the comradely expression in her eyes faded as she met the intensity in his, and she turned away abruptly.

  He had a distinct sense of losing time as she moved away from him. Time was becoming precious. He had already lost five years, and now, when he should have been able to have the freedom to court her in a leisurely way, he felt instead as if he could not keep himself from taking her hostage and running away with her.

  Time. There was a subtle pressure ballooning time all out of proportion, and he didn’t understand what it was. It wasn’t only Maggie’s reluctance or her stress over Denver North. It was something else, something he couldn’t define.

  A moment later, three things happened simultaneously: Jean Vilroy approached her with something for her to look at, Dennis Coutts came in the front door, and Reese Colleran emerged from the back room.

  And as she turned from one to the other, giving each an instant of her undivided attention, he saw clearly the thing that had him so disquieted, the thing he feared: all three men wanted her, and he knew right then he had no time at all. He would have to use drastic measures.

  Chapter Five

  For Maggie, it was as if time stood still at that point. She had allowed Harold Danforth to have his say and he had swayed the impecunious ranching town to his side with reasonable arguments, not soaring promises. No one would have known how well Harold Danforth had made out as he sold his golden grass for the promise of a glorious economic future.

  Folks would talk about his letter for weeks, Maggie thought, and all she could do was become the voice of doom as each encroachment ate up Colville and revealed its darker side.

  “Well, what did you expect?” Mother Colleran asked smugly. “Now you see, Frank never would have made that mistake. Whatever he thought, he would have gone right with popular opinion. That’s why everyone loved him. I think you mishandled this terribly, Maggie, but that is water under the dam now, isn’t it?”

  Maggie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. There was no escaping Mother Colleran. She came up or she went down depending on where Maggie was at any one moment and what she felt she wanted to say in her gouging way. Maggie could not get away from the responsibility of her. Any suggestions she had ever made had fallen on deaf ears. Mother Colleran was in Colville to stay, mystically joined to the daughter-in-law she hated.

  “I wish you would write your own letter to the paper,” she said with deadly calm, “since you have no right to make an editorial opinion—at least no right that Frank’s estate gives you.”

  “You—” the old woman began apopleptically, and Reese cut her off tactfully.

  “I think Maggie did exactly what she should have done, and she did it honorably and fairly. Frank would have wanted it that way.”

  “Nonsense!” Mother Colleran snapped. “Frank didn’t want her two feet near that newsroom and well she knew it. I don’t know how she maneuv
ered things so that she was left everything, really I don’t.”

  “But you don’t have to know,” Maggie pointed out, a fact that she had hammered home dozens of times to her in private. She resented having to do so now publicly, in front of Reese. “Things are the way they are, and your words, Mother Colleran, will not change them. But you certainly have the option of leaving if things here do not please you. Dennis has already said that—”

  “I will not leave the place where Frank is buried.”

  Maggie had heard that before too, but Reese had heard none of it, and his head moved between them in lively curiosity as this conversation went on.

  Maggie decided to change her tactics. “What about you, Reese?”

  Her question startled him. “What about me?”

  “Surely this visit has some kind of time limit on it? What do you think your mother should do when you plan to leave? Since she so continually expresses her dissatisfaction with the way I run things and how she must live. Perhaps she might be happier with you?”

  She smiled at him, but she was interested to note that her question totally discomfitted him. His pale blue eyes flashed once toward his mother, and then met hers with disarming frankness.

  “Please, Maggie, I’ve only just arrived. How can I make long term decisions like that? Mother and I hadn’t quite decided how long she wants me to stay, and quite honestly, I’m thinking that Denver North may bring some opportunities for me that I hadn’t quite perceived before. Maybe,” he added with a warm smile at his mother, “it might be time for me to settle down.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” his mother said instantly. “You’re a wanderer, Reese Colleran, an adventurer, and you’re talking a whole lot of nonsense. The point is—”

  “The point is, as we’ve discussed endlessly, Frank left no specific instructions about the newspaper, and I plan to carry on in my own way. I think this topic of discussion is closed.”

  “It is not closed, Maggie; you know full well what Frank’s intent always was, and that goes for the ranchland too. And now you have this golden opportunity—”

  Maggie stood up from the dining table abruptly. “All of this is my business, Mother Colleran, and not yours. Reese, if you can accomplish one thing during your visit here, I hope it may be that you can convince your mother that Frank really intended for me to have control of the paper and control of the land, and that what your mother wants doesn’t enter into things.”

  “Maggie—” he said, but it was futile. She moved away from the table and left by the back room stairwell. Reese turned to his mother in irritation. “Don’t do that, Mother. You set up a family dinner and then you promptly go at her with a bullwhip about things that are obviously old arguments between you.”

  “That’s right. Frank would turn over in his grave if he could hear her refusing the kind of money Denver North is offering.”

  “But they are not offering it to you,” Reese said bluntly, and was gratified to see her small, squat body stiffen and her pursed mouth grasp for words that were not readily there.

  “Well,” she said at last, “Maggie has a duty to me, and to Frank, to see that everything is done just as he would have done it, and he would have taken the money. He might even have sold the paper, and we might have gone back to San Francisco.”

  Reese let that suggestion hang in the air for a moment. “Do you want that, Mother? I can take you back to San Francisco.”

  “No I don’t,” she said promptly, with a trace of a sob in her voice. “I wanted to go with Frank. What use would it be if I went with you?”

  It was a stunning question, one that presupposed plans and schemes of which he was not aware, and a relationship between his mother and Frank that shared secrets and dreams. He thought for one instant that he did not want to know, and he let the question fall into the silence, unanswered, as his mother wiped away a tear.

  He heard Maggie’s footfall finally, softly, behind the closed door, and he knew she had been listening. He reached across the table and patted his mother’s hand.

  So Reese was on her side. She didn’t know how comforting that thought should be, after all. Perhaps his usefulness would extend solely to controlling his mother, in which case Maggie felt he could have her undying gratitude.

  For the rest, she didn’t know. She felt an odd emptiness now in place of that zealous ardor that had compelled her all these months, and she couldn’t see how to cope with it. Monday the routine would start all over again, and she felt she had nothing to fight for.

  Or did her distraction stem from something else?

  She didn’t want to think about that either, but she could not ignore the uncomfortable fact that everything had changed today in indefinable ways. Her life, which she liked very well the way it was, had been substantially affected.

  She was ready for a fight all right, but her enemy was amorphous, inhuman, and she had no weapons against the shifting winds of change.

  The sense of it was even present in the back room as she entered and encountered Jean taking apart the galleys. It was the usual Saturday evening task, and yet the difference was there: she was aware of the tension in him and the secret desire lurking beneath his calm, efficient exterior.

  Without a word, she took a type tray and joined him at the type case, but the air between them seemed strained, and she had all she could do to concentrate on removing the type and replacing it in the case. She almost felt as though she must say something, but she had no idea what to say.

  The silence became unnerving, yet on the surface everything was the same. She and Jean never had much conversation as they performed this ritual postpublication chore, but today unspoken words swirled in the air, never to be uttered by the proud man who was only the employee of the fiercely independent lady publisher. That wall, she realized, would always be between them, that and her own tangible horror of change.

  After an half hour during which they worked silently side by side, she sensed the tautness between them ease, and she thought she had imagined it all. He looked at her no differently than he usually did as he prepared to clean up and dismantle the press. He said no more or less than the usual commonplaces when they finally finished wiping down the machinery and he began his own cleanup at the backroom sink.

  He left her with his customary goodnight bidding, and she felt mortified that she had thought such things about him at all.

  It had to be because of Logan. She felt edgy, nervy, as if he were hovering in the shadows, ready to pop out at her to test the validity of her protestations. And if he did … Logan was a stranger now, she thought as she locked up behind Jean. She didn’t know this Logan Ramsey at all, and already his challenge had colored how she looked at everything.

  It wasn’t fair.

  She doused the lights in the main office before retiring to the printing room to pump up some water and tackle the cleaning of her own ink-stained hands.

  And there he was, as if she had conjured him up, leaning against the soapstone sink, waiting for her, sneaking into her home and her life where she did not want him.

  “Hello, Logan.” She was amazed her voice sounded so even, so calm. “I would have thought you’d have gone home by now.”

  He gave her an amused look. “Now how could you think that, Maggie? I had a lot of business in town today. I even treated myself to dinner at the hotel.”

  “You’re mighty busy for a man who hadn’t been to town in six months or more,” she said tartly. “And I don’t recall you had any business here.”

  “I disagree with you there, Maggie. My most important business is here.”

  She made a dismissive movement with her hand. “I won’t listen to this, Logan. You can’t just walk in here and change things around and expect me to fall down in gratitude.”

  “I hardly expected that, Maggie. I’ve had vast experience with how all-fired stubborn you can be.”

  She pivoted away from him abruptly as the double-edged meaning of his words struck her and echoes of t
he past erupted in her memory. Oh yes, he knew.

  Why on earth would you hang around that Frank Colleran, Maggie? He’s no good….

  Don’t let him buy out your father, Maggie; he’s up to no good. I don’t care how tired your father is…. Maggie, I’ll help you run the damned thing, but don’t sell out to Frank….

  Are you going to marry him? Are you sure? Why, Maggie, why?

  She had been so sure about everything—then. She was sure of nothing now.

  “Go back to your ranch, Logan,” she said finally. “There’s nothing for you here.” But she didn’t face him as she said the words; she wasn’t even sure she wanted him to do that.

  “Nonsense, Maggie. I plan to camp out in town until I have you where I want you.”

  He knew those words would do the trick; slowly she wheeled around to face him. “You’ll never get me anywhere I don’t want to be, Logan Ramsey.”

  “I wouldn’t issue such challenges, Maggie. I can be pretty persuasive.”

  His words sent a shudder through her.

  “Persuade someone else then. You want a ranch woman, Logan, not a town woman who’s used to running her own life. You need someone to share your life, not fight it.”

  “Are you going to fight it?”

  He asked the question so gently, and yet she sensed the steely resolution beneath his words. She felt as though he were rubbing her the wrong way deliberately, forcing her to retaliate to his provocative words.

  “I’ll fight it,” she said at last, because he left her no other choice, but she was disconcerted that her unequivocal response did not faze him in the least.

  “Good,” he said. “I expected nothing less.”

  “I expected more,” she retorted, stung. She felt like throwing something at him. It struck her that it wasn’t the first time in as many days she wanted to attack the threat he represented. And yet, her thrust was a goad, and in her heart of hearts she knew it.

  Instantly, the light in his eyes deepened. “But you could have had more, Maggie,” he said gently. “You chose Frank.”