Her fingers thick, she undid the second knot, pulled her hand free, and slowly eased herself from the bed.
As she stood, the ruins of her dress slid down to pool around her feet.
Dizzy.
Damn! The room seemed to sway and dip. She braced a hand on the wall to steady herself.
Stepping out of the mound of cloth, she reached down, feeling the crusty dried smear of semen on her pubic hair and thighs.
Again the memory flashed of those violent thrusts, the banging against her buttocks, the gripping hands. She remembered his cry, how he’d tensed and jerked his penis this way and that.
But Bret wouldn’t …
A fog seemed to float through her blinding headache.
“Not Bret,” she whispered. And something in her soul sickened and curled.
She staggered to the door and stopped. Fought to understand what she was seeing.
Bret lay on his back, one of his feet out the door. He stared unblinking up at the ceiling. Cold as she was, he had to be chilled. Why didn’t he close the damn door?
The whimper came again.
Sarah squinted against the pain. A woman was sprawled facedown over the table, her arms tied by the wrists to the table’s back legs. Her dress was wadded around her feet. Hanging as she was, her knees were up off the floor. Red hair? Aggie?
What was she doing tied to the table?
Bret wouldn’t …
Sarah staggered sideways as the room spun. Braced herself on the doorjamb. Her stomach tickled with the urge to throw up.
God, if she could just remember …
But the pain, it just kept spearing through her head, drowning every thought that tried to form. Her vision kept swimming.
And then she bent double, throwing up as her stomach squirmed and spasmed. Her balance fled. She sagged down in the doorway, gasping, the world spinning …
Hands lifted her, and through her swimming confusion, she heard someone say, “Get her onto the bed.”
“Bret?” she whispered.
“’Tis Pat,” the voice told her in a familiar brogue. “Pat O’Reilly, Mrs. Anderson. Who did this?”
“Did this?” She stumbled over the words. Damn! Her head hurt.
“Was it Parmelee?”
Sarah blinked, opened her eyes to a stabbing of pain. Memory flooded back. “Win Parmelee. Shot Bret. Killed him when he opened the door. Never had a chance.”
“That piece of shit doesn’t know it yet, but he is dead,” a cold voice said from the bedroom doorway.
Sarah made herself focus in the dim twilight. Someone had a lamp going in the front room. In profile she could see the man. “George Nichols?”
“Aye,” O’Reilly told her. “Here, let me help raise you up and get a blanket around yer shoulders, Mrs. Anderson.”
“How’s Aggie?”
“We got her cut loose. Did Parmelee do that? Cut her face like that?”
The memory came back, the screams, the banging of the table against the cabin wall. Sarah had been tied, fighting the ropes, but she’d heard it all.
“Said she’d betrayed him. That he knew she was a lying cunt. Followed her here. Said he’d set her place afire. That it was burning to the ground. That she might have given him Bret, but he couldn’t let treason or desertion pass.”
She swallowed hard, fighting tears. “I couldn’t see what he was doing. But I … I could hear.”
“Well, he burned it all right. Mick and the girls barely got out alive. It’s ashes, lassie.”
She settled onto the bed as O’Reilly wrapped a blanket around her. It was coming back, tumbling into her memory like some eruption from hell.
Bret is dead.
She rose up again and staggered to her feet, shaking off O’Reilly’s restraining hands. “No, Pat. I’ve got to see my husband.”
“But Mrs. Anderson!”
“Let her go, Pat,” Nichols said, stepping back from the door. “She has to see with her own eyes.”
A bearded man was dabbing at Aggie’s face with a wet cloth, cleaning blood from a series of slashes. Aggie cried and shook at each touch. What had been beautiful was now a hideous mask of blood and gaping slices.
Sarah swallowed hard, wondering why Parmelee hadn’t done the same to her. The enormity of it didn’t seem real. She would wake from this nightmare. The world would be the same. It had to be the same.
Sarah walked over, heedless of the stunned men staring in the doorway, and bent over Bret’s body. Reaching out from the blanket, she ran her hand along his cold cheeks. When she tried to pull his eyelids down over his gray, staring eyes, they remained half-lidded, and in a way, more terrible.
His pants were damp from where his bladder had let loose. His lips, dry, were already receding to expose his teeth.
As she ran a hand over his chest where the muzzle blast had set the cloth on fire, it disintegrated and blew away in the breeze coming in the door. With her fingertips, she felt the bullet holes, dried and bloody.
Then, closing her eyes, she wept.
82
May 7, 1867
Hip propped on the desk in his surgery, Doc sipped at a cup of coffee and reflected on how peculiar his practice had become. “Mrs. B” as they referred to her, had come in the back way. She was one of Denver’s most prominent and respected women. Active in numerous causes including the Women’s Union Aid Society, she was the wife of an influential newspaperman in Denver politics and society. Nor was she the only well-placed and respectable patient he had; to his amusement, they all arrived through the back door rather than be seen entering the front.
Behind the privacy screen, Mrs. B now divested herself of her petticoats and stockings, laying them carefully upon the screen.
Thus prepared, but still wearing her dress, she stepped out, gave him a nervous smile, and settled herself onto his examination bench.
“Before we attend to the problem,” Doc told her, “I’m going to give you an examination. To do so, I need you to relax. First, I’m going to look into your mouth and ears. Have you had any trouble with your teeth?”
“No.”
“I’m going to use a tube
