Touched Page 23

  Lillith Eckhart. I could almost feel the cool marble of her headstone beneath my hand. She’d died in 1885, only two years after Jeb had come to Fitler.

  “She was very young. How did she die?” Sadie hadn’t told me that part.

  “She was hanged.” He kept looking at the headlights dancing on the road. “The only woman ever executed in this part of the country.”

  I felt as if my breath had been punched out of me. “Hanged?”

  “They built a gallows in the main street of town.”

  “In Fitler?” I sounded dumber than dirt, but I couldn’t help myself. In all of the stories JoHanna and Duncan had told me, in watching Sadie and her love of the town, I’d never thought of a hanging. Especially not a woman just twenty-two years old. “What did she do?”

  “She was tried and convicted of murdering her husband.”

  The pain in my abdomen almost made me cry out, but I gripped the door handle of the car and gritted my teeth. Sweat popped out on my forehead, and I moaned slightly, but the wind from the open window whipped it away from Jeb, taking it back to the ears of a man who no longer heard. It was not a real pain I felt, only the memory. It passed as quickly as it came.

  “Edgar Eckhart was a son-of-a-bitch. He was a violent man, though he could be quite charming when he chose to be. Lillith loved him beyond reason.”

  “She was a fool.” I made my pronouncement with no sympathy for this long-dead woman. How was it that a woman could love a man who hurt her? This wasn’t something I could understand. I did not love Elikah, though I wanted to. At first. I learned quickly, though, that while I could not protect my body from his belt, I could safeguard my heart. “She was a stupid fool.”

  “No bigger fool than I.” He slowed the car, pulling off the road beneath the straight limbs of a red oak.

  The big leaves blocked out the clear night sky, and I felt a twinge of apprehension. I didn’t want to stop. We would already be arriving late, after dark. If we tarried long, I might lose my nerve and never return to Elikah.

  He sensed my apprehension because he turned to me. “Do you mind if we stop for a few minutes? Red doesn’t care.” He chuckled softly. “He was a patient man with his friends, but he told me almost forty years ago that I was a fool. He named me correctly.”

  Jeb Fairley had been a kind neighbor, an older man who minded his own business but who always had a nod and a smile for me. His voice was raw. Whatever grief he was suffering needed attention now. “Did you love Lillith?”

  “No, not Lillith. It was always Sadie that I loved. Even now.”

  I remembered the perky hat, the hint of lipstick. Sadie loved him, too. They had obviously spent the day together. The feelings were mutual. What kept them apart? “You’re confusing the dickens out of me.” I couldn’t help the irritation in my voice.

  “Everyone in Fitler soon knew the circumstances of Lillith’s marriage to Edgar. He would drink in the saloons and go home and hit her. At first she tried to hide it by staying home. But Sadie kept going down there and dragging her into town. She and Lillith would walk up and down the main street with both of Lillith’s eyes punched black and her hair pulled out in hunks.”

  My heart was beating too fast now. Jeb Fairley had stumbled on dangerous ground. He lived too close to us. How much had he heard? How much did he know of my marriage?

  “Sadie thought for sure that someone would intervene. But once Lillith had married Edgar, she was his wife. Folks didn’t interfere with a man punishing his wife and children. It was private business.”

  I could feel him looking at me as he spoke softly again. He knew—I just didn’t know how much. I swallowed and said nothing.

  “Even when it shouldn’t be, it’s still private business. And that’s how it came to be that Lillith poisoned Edgar. When no one else would help her, she killed him.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more of this story. “And they hanged her for it.”

  “Indeed they did. In front of the entire town. And not a man amongst us tried to stop it, even though we knew that she was only defending herself.”

  “So Sadie wouldn’t marry you.”

  “I wish that had been the case.” He drew a ragged breath. “You might as well hear it all. I never made the offer. You see, Sadie climbed the scaffold with Lillith. Sadie looked down on the men of the town and called us the cowards we were. Sadie stood by her friend and tried to defend her, and for her troubles she was ostracized and shunned. Sadie didn’t marry me because I didn’t ask her. And neither would any other man.”

  In the darkness I didn’t see him move, but I heard his car door open as he got out to crank the old car. It lurched several times, then smoothed out as he climbed back behind the wheel.

  We rode the rest of the way to Jexville in silence. Jeb had revealed his past to me, but he had also given me a fistful of terrible truths.

  Instead of going to the undertaker, Jeb looped around by my house. He braked the car in front and let the engine run. “Want me to go in with you?”

  There was a lamp burning in the kitchen, but other than that the house was dark. Elikah was probably at a card game. “No.” My voice quivered, and I couldn’t help it. I was afraid.

  “Mattie,” his hand brushed my cheek, turning me to face him. “I hope it doesn’t ever come to this, but you have my word. I won’t be a coward twice. You come to me if Elikah hurts you again.”

  “I’ll be fine.” I opened the door and inched out, wanting nothing more than to climb back in the car. In the backseat Red Lassiter had slumped against the opposite door, a drunken mummy. It struck me suddenly that not a single member of his family had been at the river to hunt for him.

  “Does Red have a wife?”

  Jeb cleared his throat. “No, and I don’t know this for a fact, but I think he fell in love with JoHanna. When she married Will, he just sort of determined that he was happier by himself.”

  I stepped back away from the car. “If they need me to help with him, I’ll come.”

  He eased away from my yard. “Take care, Mattie.” He drove away, leaving me standing in front of my darkened house.

  Twenty-four

  “MATTIE.”

  My heart stopped beating as the blood rushed into my ears with the roar of a train. Elikah’s voice had come from the front porch. Dear God, he was sitting on the swing in the dark. I’d never known the man to frequent the porch for any reason.

  “Are you going to stand in the yard or come up?”

  I couldn’t answer him so I started up the steps with the intention of going in the front door.

  “Come over here and sit in the swing with me,” he said. “I’ve been sitting out here in the cool night air thinking when you were going to come home. I was beginning to wonder if you might never come back.”

  No matter how hard I searched for the warning edge of anger in his voice, I couldn’t detect it. He sounded sad, a little beaten. An Elikah I didn’t know—or trust. The true test would be his breath. If I got close enough to smell it.

  “I’m tired, Elikah. Mr. Fairley and I brought Red Lassiter back with us. They found him in the river today.”

  “Terrible tragedy.” The swing creaked as he shifted his weight. “Everybody liked Red. He was a little strange, living up there in Fitler by himself when five dozen women chased him for the past thirty years. But nobody ever said he wasn’t as honest as the day is long.”

  I put my hand on the screen. What he said didn’t require an answer, and he made me nervous. This new Elikah, so quiet and introspective, sitting out on the swing alone. I didn’t trust this at all. The last time Elikah had decided to show me another of his faces, well, my body still flooded with shame at the thought.

  “Come sit out here with me a spell.” He patted the swing. “I’ll push us both. What did you think of Fitler?”

  Where was his antagonism toward JoHanna? Why wasn’t he mad at me for leaving the way I’d done? Had he really believed the note that JoHanna had sent him?
Maybe he just wanted to get hold of me, save himself the trouble of having to chase me so he could hit me. My fingers holding the handle of the door had grown stiff and old. I could not let the handle go; it was my lifeline, yet I could not pull the screen open.

  In the darkness he fumbled on the seat beside him. “I’ve got something here,” he said, his voice shimmering with a soft darkness. “I was sitting out here smelling your hairbrush. Your hair always smells like rain, Mattie. At night, when I wake up, I like to smell it on the pillow beside me.”

  I looked out to the street. Had I come to the wrong house? Was Elikah so drunk that he had forgotten the way of our marriage?

  “Come over here and let me brush your hair.”

  Dear Jesus, I was too afraid to move. This was worse than his anger, worse than his cruelty and bullying. Worse than his strap.

  “I’m tired.” I managed to croak out the words, hating myself for my cowardice.

  “You lost the baby, didn’t you?”

  Was there a hint of accusation in his tone? I wanted to run, to dart down the steps and run screaming onto Redemption Road. I wasn’t quick enough. He’d catch me and drag me home. There was no one to help me. Jeb Fairley was still down at the funeral home.

  “Come on over here, Mattie. I’m your husband.” He patted the swing again.

  There was no help for it. I had to go. My fingers released the door handle and my feet began to move across the gray boards. When I was at the swing I turned and sat down, giving him my profile.

  “You lost the baby?” he asked again.

  “Yes.” I looked across the porch toward the blackness of the night.

  “That’s too bad.” He didn’t bother to hide his relief.

  I had thought he would be angry, but it was his relief that made it even worse. He didn’t want his child. He was as unnatural as I was.

  “Turn around.” His hands grasped my shoulders and shifted me so that my back was almost to him. “Now just be still.”

  I felt the brush grasp and tug at my hair. My scalp was still a little sunburned, but I didn’t flinch. Elikah was the kind of man who found excitement in a little bit of pain. I did not want him excited. “I can’t be a wife to you. Not for a while.” I spoke to the darkness and found that my fingernails were digging into my palms.

  “Says who?” He plied the brush with a slow, steady motion.

  “JoHanna talked with Doc Westfall.”

  “JoHanna likes to poke around in our business, doesn’t she?”

  There it was, that whisper of anger. “I was so sick I scared her. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. She called him because she was afraid I was getting worse.”

  “But the bleeding’s stopped now.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Mostly.” I wanted to bolt from the swing, to run and run until I burned away into speed. The brush moved through my hair slowly.

  “Your hair is so soft.”

  He leaned forward. I could feel his breath on my neck as he lifted my hair. My skin prickled. His breath was warm in the cool of the night. His lips were heated, barely brushing my skin. I felt the tears smarting in my eyes, but I willed them away.

  He retreated, bringing the brush back up again, moving it through my hair that had been tangled by the car ride. He worked the knots gently, the silence between us growing bigger and bigger so that it drank all the air on the porch.

  The brush came up again, the bristles whispering beside my ear.

  “I thought you might be running back home.” He never slowed the stroke of the brush, drawing it all the way to the end of my hair, then moving it up to start again.

  “No, I’m not going home.” Going home would solve nothing. At least in Jexville I had JoHanna. And Duncan and Floyd and Will. In Meridian my own mama couldn’t help me if I got in trouble. “No, I’m not going home.” I repeated the words without intending to.

  “When did Doc say you can ‘be a wife to me’?” He mocked me lightly with his tone.

  “Two weeks.”

  “That’s a long time for a man like me. I thought I married a good, healthy girl. You reckon your step-pa sold me a bill of goods?”

  “I suppose that’s something you’ll have to take up with Jojo.” I stood up suddenly.

  In the darkness his hand was quick. He grasped my wrist in a tight hold and drew me toward him with a steady tug.

  “Elikah, if the bleeding starts …” I didn’t resist him. I knew better.

  He pulled me into his lap, his hands now on my shoulders. “Simmer down, Mattie.” He spoke softly. “I just wanted to tell you that I missed you.”

  I sat on his lap, making certain not to move at all.

  “Didn’t you miss me, even just a little?”

  This was a new side of his torment. Never before had he tried to make me say things. Elikah was a man of action.

  “I was too sick to miss anyone.”

  “And as soon as you felt better, you came home to me.”

  I didn’t deny it. There was no point in provoking him.

  “You’ve grown up a lot since you came here.” His thumb stroked my cheek, the softest of touches. I’d seen Elikah shave a man before. He could be deft with his hands when the mood suited him.

  “You’re growing into a fine-looking woman, Mattie.” His thumb traced the edge of my bottom lip. “So soft.” He parted my lips with his thumb, barely touching my teeth. “Don’t you even have a kiss for me? Just a welcome home kiss.”

  The image of JoHanna and Will came back to me, the way he’d grabbed her and kissed her when he’d come home from his trip. I felt the sob welling up in my throat. Leaning toward him, I kissed him lightly on the lips. To my surprise there was not the smell of alcohol on his breath.

  “That’s a good girl, Mattie.” He shifted, letting me know that I could stand up. “I’ll bet you’d like a nice, hot bath, wouldn’t you?” He stood alongside of me.

  I didn’t know how to answer him.

  “Mattie, would you like a bath? I’ll draw the water for you.”

  He was completely insane. This was all some evil trick, but I couldn’t fathom it. “I’d like that.” I stepped toward the door.

  “At last, you’ve finally said what you’d like.” He opened the door, ushering me into the house. All the way to the kitchen, he walked behind me. The house was surprisingly neat. Even the dishes in the kitchen were washed and put away. I turned to him, my amazement showing.

  “I’m glad you’re home, Mattie.” He picked up the big kettle for the water. “Now I’m going to see about fixing that bath for you.”

  “Who cleaned the kitchen?” I couldn’t believe he’d done it. Maybe he’d eaten every meal at one of the cafés.

  He stopped in the doorway with the kettle in his hand. “Oh, I guess I forgot to mention my cousin.”

  Elikah had no relatives. Or none that he’d told me about. “What cousin?”

  “Lola. She’s been dropping by to, uh, see to my needs. Since you’re not up to being wifely, maybe she’ll stay on a few more days. To help with your chores.” He came to stand beside me, the empty kettle swinging in his strong fingers. “Of course, if you’ve got any objections to this arrangement, Lola won’t mind making room for you in the bed.”

  He must have read my thoughts in my eyes because he laughed and ran his finger gently down my collar bone to my breast. “I always suspected you enjoyed that night in New Orleans. Once the shock wore off, you liked it a lot, didn’t you?” His hand molded around my breast, tightening slightly. “That was something to see, the two of you.”

  “Elikah …” I could barely say his name. There was nothing I could say if his mind was made up. I’d learned that in New Orleans. Begging would only excite him more. “I can’t … do anything. The doctor …”

  His fingers squeezed hard, once, then released me as he went to the bucket and filled the kettle before lighting the stove. When he turned back to me the laughter had gone from his face. The light from the lamp made his eyes
hollow, unreadable. But his voice was clear, and I understood that he enjoyed the waiting, the torment. “Maybe not tonight, Mattie. Or tomorrow night. But it won’t be long before you can do anything I tell you to do. Now get ready for your bath.”

  Twenty-five

  IT was not the fact that Lola came and went from Elikah’s bed that bothered me most. My feelings on that issue were strangely confused. My unexpressed anger came from the fact that he allowed her to come and go from my kitchen as if she were a guest. Elikah made it clear to both of us that this arrangement was only for the length of my recuperation. Once I was able to be “wifely” again, Lola’s role would change. And so would mine.

  The possibility brought only a bored shrug from her as her flat brown gaze roved over the cabinets, lingering on canisters and bins.

  She ate like a starved hound dog. And with about the same finesse. In the morning, when Elikah went to work, she vanished from the house.

  Where Elikah had gotten her and where she went when she wasn’t with him, I had no idea. She wasn’t local. Her destination, once she left our home, didn’t seem to trouble her. She was where she was for two purposes. To service Elikah and to eat as much as she could swallow without exploding. Looking into her vacant eyes, I couldn’t begrudge her the food she ate, but it stung me that I was left to cook the food, to wash the dishes. The terms of this arrangement were clear. If I could not perform my conjugal duties, I could maintain the house.

  Two days passed, with me cooking and spending as much time as possible in town. I went to the dry goods store and explored every dusty bin, every bolt of cloth, every box of lacy underwear. Olivia showed me the stockings that felt like air, drawing them slowly up her round, white arm to demonstrate their sheerness. Watching the other side of the store to be certain old Mrs. Tisdale was busy, she showed me how to roll the stockings just above the knee for the most fashionable look. I caught her watching me with a look of curiosity, but it was only kindness and an offering of friendship that she demonstrated.