Ruby smiled gratefully. “Yes, I do understand. It’s like smelling a faint perfume, maybe—very evocative. Or hearing an echo.”
Hearing an echo? I thought of the quiet humming I’d heard in the storeroom, and the vagrant scent of lavender, and the photo on the bulletin board downstairs. I shivered. I don’t like it when I’m confronted by things that are beyond my ability to explain. But I couldn’t deny that they had happened.
“Something like that, yes,” Christine said, replying to Ruby but answering my unspoken question. “I’ve felt it before, myself, in certain instances, when I was deeply involved with a piece—as if I were hearing an echo of someone’s excitement or her eagerness, or her grief.” She turned, regarding me with a small smile. “You’re skeptical about this, China?”
“Of course she’s skeptical,” Ruby said firmly, and Lori added, “Skeptic is China’s middle name.”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” I allowed, although I considered mentioning what I’d heard in that storeroom. But I wasn’t ready—at least, not yet. There was still a part of me that doubted what I’d heard. What I thought I’d heard.
Ruby reached out and patted my arm. “That’s all right, dear,” she murmured. “We love you anyway.”
Chapter Six
Pecan Springs, Texas
August 1888
Adam Hunt was not happy.
Oh, he was fully aware that his friends considered him a fortunate man, and he knew they had every good reason for their opinion. Hunt’s Feed and Tack was going great guns and promised to grow even faster in the years ahead. He had a pretty, sweet-tempered daughter, Caroline, who was his dearest treasure in the world. And a wife who was beautiful to look at and for whom he provided a nice house and a hired girl to help with the work. He was, as his friend Doug Duncan used to say, holding a royal flush.
But as he walked out to his rented stable to check on his horses that August evening, Adam felt as gloomy as the sky overhead, which was the greenish-purple of an old bruise. The air was hot and heavy, with the bitter tang of smoke from a neighbor’s cookstove mixed with the scent of wet leaves. A short, pelting rain had fallen that afternoon and another storm was brewing now, a bad one. It was likely to bring wind with it, and lightning. His big bay horses—Jack and Ace—were skittish about thunder and storms spooked them, even when they were safe in the stone stable, which was about as solid a structure as you could find anywhere. He’d give them some oats, settle them down. He opened the door and went into the stable, pulling in a deep breath of dusty hay and warm horseflesh. He was greeted by Jack’s anxious nicker.
“Hey, boys,” he said. “Just a little lightning and thunder. Nothing for you to worry about.” He slapped Ace on the rump and hung a bucket of oats on the feed hook, then went on to Jack. “You, too, fella. Good roof over your head. Stout walls. Best damn stable in the whole damn town, boys. Guaranteed.”
It was true, he thought, as he went out to the well and pumped up a bucket of water for each horse. Douglas Duncan had built the stable and the house and his small frame smithy in the year he and Annie got married. Doug had wanted a big house because he, like Adam, had planned to fill it with children. Then, when he lost his foolish bet against the railroad locomotive and his widow needed money to keep her going, Adam had been glad to lease the stable from her, even though Delia objected. But then Delia objected to pretty much everything he did these days. Nothing about him suited her.
Doug’s widow. Annie. At the thought of her, Adam pressed his lips together. He made it a rule not to think of her, although that was getting harder all the time—and especially when he’d had one whiskey too many, as he’d had tonight. It wasn’t Annie’s fault, of course. She always acted properly toward him, exactly as a widow ought to act toward her dead husband’s best friend. While Adam might wish to read something different into the way she sometimes glanced at him, he understood that it was his imagination and not her intent.
But so what if it was? Maybe it was okay to wish and want and imagine, as long as he kept himself on the straight and narrow. He had known Annie since she was a girl, but she had always been Doug’s girl, and out of reach. He had even managed to keep his thoughts in check—until Doug cashed in his chips, at which point it suddenly became a damn sight harder. Annie was not just lovely but deeply desirable, with that auburn hair and those large dark eyes, remarkable eyes that seemed to fasten on him. A glance from those eyes made his breath come short. And when he’d caught her in his arms the day he brought her the news of Douglas’ death, he couldn’t keep himself from touching her face and throat after he’d put her on the bed, and dropping a kiss on her pale lips before she’d come around. He’d suffered with her, too, when she lost that little boy. A tragedy, pure and simple, for he knew how
