“Then what’s to prevent them from being stuck in the past?” Camille asked. This was a no-holds-barred conversation and we all knew it. Nothing was to be gained by avoidance. “If Marshall is with Ruthie now, I mean. What if…they’re meant to stay there?”
I could not accept this as truth. “No. No, we can’t think like that. Al and I have already combed through every archive and record book available in the special collections section at the library. There’s nothing to go on, no mention of them through all the decades until now. They didn’t stay in the nineteenth century, I know it.” My conviction blazed like acid in my veins, every bit as painful. It was blind faith and I hated being reduced to it, but what was the alternative? Allow the past to swallow my little sister and Marshall? Give up without even trying?
“That brings us to another subject.” Case gently released my hand and made a steeple of his fingertips, wishing he did not have to relay this further devastating news.
“The homestead claims,” Mathias understood, sitting straighter. “Clark told us some.”
Case nodded agreement and explained, “Thomas Yancy was killed in June of 1882, as Derrick revealed in court back in February. He produced an obituary posted in a Chicago newspaper from that month. Cause of death is noted as a gunshot wound. Derrick has no way to prove who pulled the trigger that day but he alleged it was Cole Spicer, a longtime enemy of his ancestor’s. To make matters even more complicated, the homestead documents my father and Clark possessed show dates of purchase near the end of August, 1882. More than a month after Thomas Yancy’s death, but somehow signed and dated by him. The deed Derrick holds, one he’d been searching for since he arrived in Jalesville, shows Thomas Yancy as the primary landowner, with no record of having sold the acreages in his lifetime. It’s a goddamn mess and a half.”
Case squared his shoulders in an unconscious gesture of defensiveness before continuing. “I will be the first to admit that my ancestors don’t have a solid track record in the character department. The ones I knew were slackers at their best and mean drunks who beat their kids at their worst, so who’s to say my great-something grandfather didn’t kill Thomas Yancy? I may never know the truth. But it doesn’t mean I’m going to roll over and let the Yancys take our land in this century. No way in hell.”
“If Cole Spicer killed him, he had a damn good reason,” Mathias said, and I loved him for his confidence in my husband’s family; in that moment, a good word from Mathias meant more than anything I could have spoken, which Case would surely interpret as obligatory on my part, as his wife.
I hated how Case’s troubled upbringing loomed now and again to broadside his sense of self, to make him question his heritage. Case’s father, Owen Spicer, was lucky he’d never met me; I would have given the son of a bitch a piece of my mind. Would have smashed him upside the head for hurting Case in any way, shape, or form; Case hadn’t always been the tough, physically-imposing man he was today. Long ago he’d been a despairing little boy who’d lost his beloved mother and was forced into the role of surrogate father to his younger brother, Gus. Just the thought of Case as a small, vulnerable child at the mercy of a cruel father made both my heart and gut clench. The metal flowers expanded yet again, rigid petals digging into my internal flesh.
I issued a sharp intake of breath, stomach acid ricocheting up my esophagus with the suddenness of a geyser. Covering my mouth with one hand I fled for the bathroom, hearing everyone exclaim at my abrupt departure. Case was there in an instant, kneeling to hold my hair as I vomited, gripping the toilet seat with both hands; at the corner of my vision I saw Camille framed in the open doorway. It took me a second to realize the baby I heard wailing in the background was hers and not the one she was talking about…
“Tish, why didn’t you tell me?” she implored, advancing into the bathroom. “I suppose I could have guessed, you’ve been so pale and tired, but I thought it was due to all this stress…”
Case’s head jerked toward my sister.
Hanging limp over a porcelain bowl, I struggled to put two and two together.
Mathias appeared next, cuddling little James, all five of us crowded into a space barely large enough for one. I supposed it was only to be expected; in our family there was never much for privacy. We kept nothing from each other.
Mathias pressed a soft kiss to his son’s forehead and murmured, “Sounds like you’re getting another cousin pretty soon here, buddy.”
Chapter Seven
The Iowa Plains - June, 1882
Axton.
Snared in the dark reaches of fevered sleep, his name was a soft exhalation of longing, a need hidden by day but which broiled to life each night, forcing acknowledgment. Watching events unfold on two separate planes of a recurring dream, I saw him from a distance, astride Ranger and riding closer at a galloping pace while I seemed to hover, both on a horizontal axis and a vertical one. Suspended perhaps twelve feet above the prairie I was reduced to nothing but mute observation. I knew he was in danger. Certainty pierced my transparent dream-body and I cried out in warning.
He could not hear my words – or would not heed them. Though damnable distance kept us apart I beheld his face as if only a breath away, cast in the fire of day’s end
