Her native beauty was enhanced by a black lace dress with mantilla, under which her black hair was up; her black-gloved hands were folded before her, both businesslike and prayerful. She was in mourning, all right, but only some red filigree in the whites of her eyes suggested the sorrow she must have experienced through a long night.
“Mrs. Hammond, you have my sympathy for your loss, and my apologies for not coming personally last night. I am usually not prone to cowardice.”
She unfolded her hands just long enough to gesture to one of the chairs opposite. He settled into it, placing his hat on the desktop, which was otherwise bare.
“You were right not to come,” the low, throaty voice intoned. “Mr. Byers requested that you allow him to bring word, and that was proper. You are, after all, the person who . . . dealt with William last night.”
“I am.”
“For both of us to have to share the delivery of that news would have added mutual discomfort . . . don’t you think?”
“Yes. But it’s kind of you to have any thought for my feelings.”
A tiny, fleeting smile. “I admit to thinking more of myself in that regard.”
York shifted in the chair. He could smell her—or her perfume or maybe the aftermath of her bath . . . lilacs. She was lovely, this mother of the boy he killed last night.
He said, “If you wish the details, I will share them. I warn you they are unpleasant, but you have a right to hear of it from—”
She raised a silencing hand, a gentle gesture, yet firm. “That is not necessary. Mr. Byers has taken care of that.”
“Mr. Byers was not there.”
“No. But I feel he conveyed the facts adequately.” She leaned forward; the dark eyes behind the lace curtain of the mantilla were strangely warm. “You must understand, Caleb . . . may I call you ‘Caleb’? I have heard and read enough about you that I feel I almost know you.”
“If you wish. Certainly.”
Perhaps tellingly, she did not ask him to call her Victoria.
“Caleb, I have three sons, or I should say, I had three, and now two remain—a pair of fine young men, each of whom runs a family business. My eldest son, Hugh, is the president of our bank in your sister city, in Colorado . . .”
Colorado had a Trinidad, too.
“. . . and my middle boy, Pierce, looks after our ranching interests in those same parts. I had hoped, one day, that William might gain the maturity to take over the management of this ranch. It was not to be.”
“I am sorry.” Not for what he’d done, but for having to do it.
Her head tilted to one side. “I fear William’s fate was inevitable. If not you, it would have been someone else. If I might be frank?”
“If you like.”
“There had been many difficulties with my youngest son. He was a smart, sweet boy, which you may find difficult to believe. But he bore the curse of drink, something his late father shared with the youth, although Andrew had tamed that beast. After many wild years that, frankly, took considerable forbearance from me, my late husband gave up drink. He had achieved a certain respectability that went with the wealth he accumulated and he wanted to maintain both.”
“I see.”
Her husband’s reputation had been for building and maintaining his cattle ranch with beef rustled from Mexico. But under the circumstances, York let that pass.
“Make no mistake,” she said, chin high, “I will mourn my son. I will cherish his memory and, as mothers do, sweep aside his failings into some untended, rarely visited corner of my memory. But I hold you in no way responsible.”
“Very gracious of you, ma’am.”
Her smile was sad but it was indeed a smile. “Am I so much older than you? Must it be ‘ma’am’? You haven’t seen forty yet, and if I have, it’s not yet retreated into the distance.”
“If I am not out of line saying so,” York said carefully, “in this hacienda you are the image of the graceful señoritas who must once have dwelled here.”
“You have a poetic way,” she said, “for a gunfighter.”
That word—“gunfighter”—had just the slightest edge.
“But,” she said, “I am no señorita. That’s a happenstance of this dwelling I purchased. My mother came from Belfast and she and my father met in San Francisco, where they were both doing business. You may interpret that as you will.”
That didn’t seem to York to need much interpretation, although he couldn’t imagine why she’d be so frank with him, the small-town sheriff who killed her son.
She answered the question in his eyes. “Sheriff, my son’s tragic passing has brought us together, but we do not have to be adversaries. You’re aware that Mr. Byers, as my agent, has been purchasing the smaller spreads in the vicinity.”
“I am.”
“Do you have any idea why?”
He shrugged. “I would assume that farther north, in our sister city and thereabouts up in Colorado, you got hit even harder by the blizzards.”
Her nod was slow. “We did. That is a fact. What little stock survived we sold, and we divested ourselves of several other Colorado properties, and purchased this spread from the Gauge family, who had no interest in pursuing this difficult means of livelihood, and were only too happy to sell out reasonably.”
“The pickings here were favorable, I’m sure.”
“We mean to brazen it out, Caleb. To rebuild the cattle industry into something like what it was, before Mother Nature took her stern hand. It’s not a game for cowards or the weak.”
He gestured with an open hand. “Others are going a different way. Merging cattle ranching and farming on much smaller spreads. You aim to put together something grander, I take it?”
The big dark eyes got bigger. “I do. My youngest son is a casualty of his own weaknesses and of a part of the country where men carry guns to the grocer’s and church.
