Jackson's Woman Page 5

  Yet what could she do but follow blindly, while hoping and praying for an opportunity to flee?

  All her experience and training urged her to tread carefully. Pretend to believe his fantastic claims and bide her time until the odds of escape swung in her favor. She’d never felt so helpless, so vulnerable in her life and didn’t care for the feeling one bit.

  It took well over an hour to traverse down Dead Man’s Trail. When they finally, thankfully, reached the dry riverbed at the bottom, Vera started to shake with relief from the sustained tension.

  Jericho paused and waited until she drew up beside him. He unhitched her reins and tossed them back to her. “The worst is over,” he said with a trace of compassion in his voice. The inadvertent show of kindness was cut out quickly when his voice hardened once more. “You ought to be able to manage from here on in.”

  Sure, now that they’d left the lawmen far behind. No danger letting her have control of her horse now.

  Vera said nothing.

  He reached behind his bedroll and held up a canteen. “Thirsty?”

  She licked her parched lips and nodded. He might be the devil in black denim, but right now she’d sell her soul for a drink of anything—even devil’s brew.

  He handed her the canteen and she sipped the tepid, brackish water. “Ugh.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said with an insincere grin. “Didn’t have time to empty the old water out and refill it before taking off after you, er, Verity.”

  Vera wished he’d stop this mindless game and just tell her the truth; that he was wanted by the law and had taken her hostage to guarantee his freedom. But for now she kept her silence. This sliver of knowledge allowed her to stay one step ahead of him. She had to make him believe she accepted his silly charade of benign insanity.

  When she’d had her fill, she handed him back the canteen and watched as he tipped his head back and drained it. His unfathomable face was all hard edges and rough planes. Thick eyebrows that shadowed his eyes, a strong, forceful chin and firmly defined jawline. Daddy, coldly handsome. Only the occasional glimpse of light behind his charcoal eyes gave him humanity. And his incongruously soft mouth.

  Yet behind that roughly pleasing facade possibly lurked a cold-blooded killer. And she couldn’t forget that for a single moment. Maybe he’d shot a man in the back....

  He glanced up at the sun which was moving ever higher in the sky and nodded. “Enough rest. Let’s finish this.”

  Vera deliberately closed her mind against the vivid imaginings of exactly how he intended to “finish” with her. Sucking her bottom lip between her teeth, she tapped the horse’s belly with her heel and followed Jericho.

  After a short, uneventful ride, they rounded a curve at the base of the mountain. Jericho drew up his horse and pointed. The ramshackle shantytown of Jerome was dead ahead. She’d made it! Although she wasn’t much of a rider, surely she could make it into town and find the police before Jericho could catch her. Safety was in sight.

  “Damn, that sun’s hot,” Jericho declared as he pulled off his black canvas slicker.

  That was when Vera first noticed the gun belt strapped around his hips. Her heart sank. She’d have to let him play out his hand, whatever it was. While she might be able to elude him on horseback, she wasn’t foolish enough to think she could outrun a bullet.

  She knuckled back a tear of frustration and tipped up her chin. He would never see her fear. Nor realize her overwhelming sense of helplessness. Not if she could help it.

  Once again Jericho took the lead as they slowly rode up the dusty road into the vertically constructed town that reminded her of a Tinkertoy village perched on the mountainside. The narrow roads—

  Vera’s breath caught. The roads had been paved, hadn’t they? Now they were mostly dirt with cobblestone patches scattered here and there.

  An eerie feeling seeped into her bones and she felt chilled despite the sun’s warmth. Everything looked the same, yet somehow different. The rickety wooden structures looked faded and devoid of charm. Funny, until today she’d thought the brightly painted gift shops and restaurants were picturesque and inviting.

  Now Jerome looked like the stage set of an old western movie.

  Ah, she thought. Movie magic. “When did the film crew come in?” she asked conversationally. “It’s amazing what they can do in a few short hours.”

  He drew up and stared at her. “Film? Movies? What kind of jabber is that? Something else they do in the California of your dreams?”

  “But yesterday, there were cars and telephone poles and...” Her voice trailed off as he continued to stare at her face. Complete bewilderment mingled with a strange sadness in his eyes.

  He flicked the reins and they started moving down the dusty road once more. Vera’s head swiveled from side to side as she tried to understand the incompre-hensible changes since yesterday.

  There were no pedestrians strolling along the wooden sidewalks, but that in itself wasn’t surprising. It was too early for tourists and the town was mainly a tourist attraction with few full-time residents. Nor was the absence of cars disturbing. Because the streets were so narrow, parking was mostly confined to a couple of public lots at the far end of town.

  But there was a strange...smell floating over the small village. Not at all reminiscent of the aroma of Mrs. Beasley’s fresh apple pies that had previously emanated from her small bakery.

  Vera stopped and stared, not sure what she was looking for. “What’s that odd smell?” she asked.

  Jericho cocked his head. “You mean the copper smelter?”

  She swung around and stared at his ingenuous face. “But I thought the mines were all closed down.”

  He laughed. “I don’t know where you’d get that idea. If the mines closed, this place would become a ghost town overnight.”

  Exactly, she thought. From her readings, Vera knew mining had hit its heyday in Jerome in the late 1880s, then again during World War I when copper went up as high as thirty cents a pound. But the industry never quite recovered from the stock market crash of 1929.

  When the mines finally ceased operation in the 1950s, the locals had quickly fled to the valley for the few available jobs. Jerome had been a virtual ghost town for years before a few poor artists migrated to the hillside community and claimed it Then it was an impromptu artists’ colony until tourism picked up about fifteen years before.

  After that brief, largely unprofitable, flurry of mining activity in the fifties, the smelter had been closed for decades. Yet this morning the unmistakably acrid scent of copper fouled the air.

  Down the street a door creaked open and a young boy drifted outside. “The town’s starting to come alive,” Jericho murmured. “We’d better get you out of sight.”

  He stopped in front of the Gilbert Hotel and hitched their horses to the wooden post. Reaching up, he held out his arms and Vera obligingly placed her hands on his strong shoulders and allowed him to help her alight.

  “Come on, Doc Greavy’s office is around the corner, remember?”

  No, she didn’t remember and for the first time in her life Vera started to doubt her own sanity. The little boy who’d ventured outdoors was garbed in baggy brown trousers held up by suspenders. He carried a stick and a large hoop. An antique toy. The kind children played with in the late 1800s.

  A door opened and another boy ran out to join him. He, too, was dressed in the same peculiar clothing as the first.

  Jericho Jackson’s insane fantasies aside, there had to be a logical explanation for all these changes. She stopped the boy when he skipped by.

  “Excuse me, boys! Would you come here for a minute, please?”

  They stopped and stared quizzically at her jeans and sneakers. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Would you answer a question for me?”

  The first boy, obviously the braver of the pair, stepped forward. “I will if I can.”

  Question, question. What could she ask him that would prove once and for all
that she wasn’t in the Twilight Zone?

  “Who’s the president? Of the United States?”

  He laughed and nudged his buddy. “Don’t you know, ma’am?”

  “Yes, but my friend and I are having a little bet.”

  The boys understood betting. The second youngster inched up to stand beside his friend. “We just had an election. You want the name of the man going out or coming into office?”

  “Both.”

  Enjoying this silly adult game, the boys shrugged. The boy with the hoop ultimately answered. “Mr. Cleveland’s stepping down and Mr. William McKinley from Ohio will be the new president. Did you win, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” she said faintly. “I won.”

  The boys rolled the hoop down the street and Vera, her mind fogged in disbelief, stared after them.

  She suddenly recalled Jericho’s shock when she hadn’t recognized him. Her mind, still foggy from her fall, hadn’t made the connection. But Verity had often mentioned a Jericho Jackson in her journal. And a Rate! Verity’s stepfather.

  Feeling dazed and uncertain, Vera took small, unwilling steps down the planked sidewalk. On the corner, exactly where the Blue Bonnet Café had been located the day before, a sign now proclaimed the building to be the Jerome Sentinel. The newspaper. But hadn’t someone told her that Jerome no longer had a local paper?

  Frowning, she stepped closer to the plate glass window where the latest edition was displayed. In a bold, ornate typeface, the headline proclaimed. “Local Girl Sought In Murder!”

  A fuzzy photo below the caption chilled Vera’s blood in her veins. The hair was different and the cheekbones were a bit higher, more prominent, but the girl in the newspaper was a dead ringer for Vera.

  Almost against her will, Vera’s eyes trailed upward, to the date. December 12, 1896.

  For the first time in her life, she fainted.

  Chapter Four

  Jericho was so stunned he barely caught the woman before her head slammed into the hand-packed earth. Verity was obviously in worse health than he’d credited, to faint dead away like that. No woman could survive years of living with a miserable scum-licker like Rafe Wilson without becoming a bit hardened. But this recent trouble seemed to have penetrated her hard shell; softened her.

  Her momentary weakness, even if it was based on her injuries, made him feel protective. And oddly proud. As if she’d trusted him enough not to take advantage of her unguarded moment of vulnerability.

  For the second time in less than a day, Jericho lifted the soft woman into his arms. Now what? She was light enough, but he wasn’t going to risk trundling her up that narrow, rickety night of stairs to Doc Greavy’s office. And he couldn’t leave her on the ground like an abandoned puppy. If any of the newly commissioned posse spotted her, Verity’s, er, Vera’s, life span wouldn’t be long enough to bother fetching the doctor.

  With a growl of frustration, he carried his unconscious bundle around the corner into the alley. Rich, red dollops of mud slathered Jericho’s black boots with each forceful stride. but he scarcely noticed. His attention was focused on the still alley, as he watched for any unexpected movement When he was finally convinced the narrow walkway was clear of onlookers, he looked around for a safe place to hide his charge while he went for the doctor.

  A handcart was parked outside the hotel’s back door, a stained canvas tarp concealing its load.

  Jericho propped his foot against the cart wheel for balance and shifted the woman’s dead weight against his body, freeing his right arm. Raising the edge of the tarp, he glanced inside at a pile of fresh-smelling hay. Perfect. He yanked the covering aside and deftly lifted the woman’s sleeping form over the wooden lip and lowered her into the hay pile.

  She stirred and moaned softly in her sleep. He fingered aside a strand of silky black hair from her eyes, startled at the softness of her skin. Few women of his acquaintance had skin as soft as rose petals. Too little water and too few comforts tanned the flesh of most frontier women into leather before their twentieth birthday. Yet “Vera’s” cheek was as soft and supple as that of an infant. This strangely unfamiliar woman was turning into an intriguing source of unending surprise.

  Jericho scanned the alley once more before loosely slipping the canvas back over the cart, leaving an open edge so air could circulate. He knew the hotel housekeeper would use the straw to fresher the bed pillows when she cleaned the rooms. With any luck she wouldn’t get to that chore until her breakfast duties were finished; that cart should remain undisturbed for several hours yet.

  Taking another surreptitious glance around to satisfy himself that his actions had gone unnoticed, Jericho whistled softly as he strode down the muddy alleyway to the doctor’s office.

  Vera COULDN’T REMEMBER ever being so tired. She wanted nothing more than to nestle deeper into the covers and sleep the morning away. But something kept poking into her cheek.

  Half asleep, she reached up and plucked away the offending straw. A blade of grass? In her bed?

  Her eyes fluttered open. She was startled to discover it was still dark. She reached for the bedside lamp, but her searching hand encountered a wooden board of some kind blocking the bed. Confused, she reached out to the other side and gasped. Another wooden board. She was crated up as if...as if she were in a coffin.

  Panic seeping into her bones, Vera tried to sit up but her head encountered a third obstacle. For a moment, she feared she truly had been buried alive but reason took control when she realized the top covering was flexible. Pushing aside the heavy material, she sat up and looked around. The sight of Jericho Jackson, long black coat flapping around his long black-clad legs, brought her predicament back into sharp focus.

  And the astounding conclusion she’d reached to explain this inexplicable situation. Unless she had completely slipped off the trolley track, in which case she should be institutionalized for her own safety, Vera believed that she’d somehow traveled through time and landed in 1896.

  She laughed, a nervous, frightened chortle that had nothing to do with humor. The entire idea was ridiculous, and yet...Vera was scared. As frightened as she’d ever been in her life. No bogeyman, no nighttime monster could compare with this sense of being caught out of her own time. As she thought over all the tiny signs she’d noted and discarded, she became even more convinced that the impossible had happened.

  She’d come to Arizona looking for Verity McBride, now somehow, she had become her own ancestor. At least, that’s what Jericho seemed to think, and he’d known Verity well enough to recognize her on sight. But if some cosmic abberation had caused her to change places with a girl who’d disappeared over a hundred years earlier, why did she retain her own sense of awareness? Her own memories?

  No, she hadn’t traded places with her notorious ancestor, though she was being tracked like a wild animal for the other woman’s alleged crime.

  As Jericho drew nearer, a ferocious scowl on his face, she thought briefly of confiding her predicament and asking for his help. The idea fled as quickly as she’d conceived it. This man had never seen a car or a telephone, much less a computer. Giving women the vote would be a novel idea to him; how on earth could he absorb a complex theory like time travel? Vera wasn’t sure she understood or believed it herself, and she was the one who’d been hurled into a parallel dimension.

  For now, she’d best keep her mode of transportation to herself and find another way to enlist Jericho Jackson’s help or she was liable to find herself hanging from a tree limb.

  Forcing a smile onto her face, she said, “Guess I fainted. Sorry to be so much trouble.”

  Relief flared in his eyes. “No trouble. It’s not uncommon for a lady to succumb to the vapors when she’s distressed. By the way, when was the last time you had anything to eat?”

  Oh, about a hundred years ago, she thought, wondering what his reaction would be if she blurted out the truth. The vapors? She ought to shake his world and tell him about the symptoms of PMS. Instead, she shrugged.
“Actually, it’s been quite a while since I ate. Do they serve breakfast at the hotel?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t reckon it’s smart for you to appear in public right now. Best keep you out of sight at my place ’til the doc gets back from delivering Mrs. Nesbitt’s latest little one.”

  “I really don’t need a doctor. Food would be good though.”

  He thumbed up the rim of his cowboy hat “Listen, Rafe Wilson was one of the most cussed, black hearted, ground-slinking dogs around these parts, but folks don’t take kindly to back-shooting. Unless you want to be guest of honor at a necktie party, you’d best let me tuck you away before somebody spots you.”

  Vera hesitated. Now that she was reasonably certain Jericho wasn’t a madman or a serial killer, she didn’t find the idea of relying on him as alarming as when she’d first met him. Nonetheless, she didn’t know a thing about this taciturn man. He said Verity had sent a message to him; that would indicate the girl had trusted him. Yet Verity had disappeared without a trace. Had her faith in Jericho Jackson been betrayed?

  Vera cast an appraising glance at his lean, sensually enticing face. Could she trust him? Did she really have any choice?

  Vera didn’t know another soul in this town, even in this century, and she couldn’t risk turning herself into the authorities. Her options were few and imperative. Somehow, she must clear Verity’s name and get these murder charges dropped. Only then could Vera hope to solve the riddle of how she’d come through time—and figure out how to get back.

  Noting Jericho’s impatient boot tapping, she raised a hand. “Okay, I give. Let’s go to your house.”

  He lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “Room, actually,” he replied as he easily hefted her out of the hay wagon. “I don’t have a house, remember? Since I spend about twenty hours a day working, I appropriated a couple of rooms over the saloon for myself. Can you walk?”