Excerpt

Chapter 1

I don't know what first made me conclude that the western frontier was about as good for me as kissing a rattlesnake, but I narrowed it down to two possibilities.

Number one: it might have been the grisly sight of a dead man hanging from a battered oak outside Atchison, Kansas. My train had made a brief stop there on my trip to Abilene, and I'd looked out the passenger car window and seen the corpse dangling like old laundry blown into the tree by the wind. It jolted me, yes, but only for a second. I've seen my share of corpses after all, but the swollen, blackened tongue protruding from the man's mouth, the tautness of the rope digging into his neck, and the carrion crows filling the branches were unusual even to me.

Which led to number two. Not wishing to linger on the gruesome sight, I'd gone to the baggage car to collect a novel from my steamer trunk—and found the trunk gone.

In the West for under a day, and already I'd faced undignified death and brazen theft. What more evidence did I need to prove I might not belong out here in this featureless land that barely even pretended to be civilized, as shown by the publicly executed dead man who'd been left to rot on his branch for all to see?

I had immediately assumed the loss of my trunk was theft. I may be jaded, but I'm also a realist. I'd watched it being loaded in Boston, so I knew it had been there, but it was definitely not there now. Frantically, I'd explained to the porter my situation, and he'd graciously spared me all of thirty seconds of sympathy, assured me there'd be a search, and asked where to send the trunk if—if—it was found. I had not yet figured out where in Abilene I'd be staying, as my trip had been planned hastily amid much distraction and grief, and had to settle on wiring my location to the railroad once I knew where I would be.

When I asked the porter what could possibly have become of my luggage, he offered vagaries; maybe it had been stolen, maybe it had been accidentally mistaken for someone else's and they would soon return it. In any case, he'd said, there was nothing he could do to make it manifest. It had taken every ounce of willpower within me to refrain from asking him if he could be any more useless. That wouldn't have found my trunk, nor would it have made the rest of the journey to Abilene any less frustrating.

I could have turned around right then and reversed my course to Boston. I'd never believed in signs and forbidding portents, but if I had, I could hardly have needed anything clearer to encourage my retreat. The length of my stay out West had yet to be determined, so I'd brought enough to fulfill my needs for at least a month. How long could it take, I'd wondered, naively, to find the man I was seeking? And just as naively, I decided to continue on, luggage or no luggage.

This development had occurred yesterday. Then, this morning, as if the universe had plans I was not following and needed to be punished for ignoring, my frustrations had doubled. While stopped in Topeka, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway informed its passengers going on to Abilene that the train tracks had been damaged. The remainder of the trip would have to be undertaken by stagecoach.

Now, seated in the dusty coach that bounced so hard and unforgivingly over ruts and bumps along this so-called road to Abilene that I wished human anatomy had no such thing as a vestigial coccyx and my backside were merely a balloon of fat and tissue, I knew it plainly. I was more out of my element in this smelly, hot, unnervingly quiet landscape than I had been the first day I'd set foot in medical school and everyone there, man to the last, had stared at me as if I were the cadaver they would later be dissecting during lab.

By train, we'd have been in Abilene in under three hours. By stagecoach, it would take nine. Plenty of time to think, and to be honest, indulge in a bit of self-pity.

As the time passed, I realized why precisely I'd become so unsettled upon seeing yesterday's hanged man. It wasn't the dead man himself that had done it. It was the oak he'd been dangling from, his shirt already shredded by crows and vultures seeking the best of the juicy morsels hidden behind its folds. Dead people were a part of my profession. Though I'd never lost a patient, I worked in a hospital where people died, and died often. I'd long since learned to accept death as an unavoidable conclusion to, or perhaps a consequence of, all life.

Why had the old oak ruffled me so? It was thicker around than three barrels, its dead canopy spreading out like the wings of an eagle over a parched-looking plot of soil. Every inch of the old tree was gray, as lifeless as the flesh withering on the dead man's bones. However, except for being utterly dead, the tree was a duplicate of the great oak that grew outside the house I was raised in in the little community of Worcester, outside Boston.

The tree back home, originally healthy and vibrant with every bough leafy and ripe with acorns, had been split violently down the middle by lightning two weeks ago during a fierce rainstorm. One half had keeled to the side in an avalanche of thick limbs—crushing my Uncle Patrick beneath them. I'd come home just as Thomas and several neighbors were chopping through the tree to reach his still-living form, Aunt Ada keening nearby so loudly I'd known who was beneath the tree before I saw him. I have no idea why he'd been outside in such a storm, but the image of the dead man's tree outside Atchison, set among the empty fields of Kansas, had resembled nothing so much as a macabre afterlife replication of the last time I'd seen my uncle and the destroyed oak. Fancifully, I imagined the Atchison tree to have been mocking me with his death.

Gloomy as I looked out over miles of plains—was it corn that grew here? wheat? I knew as much about farming and ranching as I did about the Native peoples I'd been warned would kidnap me or scalp me—I sighed. I missed home. I didn't belong out here.

But I was not the type to give up, and home wasn't home anymore, not without my uncle. Despite having nothing but the clothes on my back, now seven days dirty, Uncle Patrick's battered carpetbag and his journal, and the money I'd hidden in a secret pocket that hung from a girdle beneath my chemise, I wouldn't be leaving this lonely prairie where the wind sounded like the moans of the pitiful dead without first finding and speaking with the man I'd come here for. The man whose name Uncle Patrick had whispered in my ear from bloody lips, "Go to Abilene, find Toxicore Darkheart, Lula. He's the only one who can protect you now."

Then he'd given a strangled cough and gone quiet.

Surreal, wasn't it? Losing my uncle and learning I was in some undescribed danger, all in seconds. I'd draped the bedsheet over his face, taken a step back from the dining room table we'd laid him on after extricating him from the fallen tree and bringing him inside, wiped the blood from my hands on my torn skirt, and, for the first time in my adult life, I'd cried. I had saved dozens in surgery, was the top of my class and top surgeon at the hospital, but I couldn't save Uncle Patrick.

I'm not a frail woman. No woman who'd put up with what I had to attain my medical degree could be. I am pragmatic and rational, and it should have been easy to discount my uncle's words as the ravings of a dying man. Who could I have needed protection from? How unlikely was it a lightning-struck tree would be a murder weapon? But after I'd read his journal in the days following through eyes hazy with tears, I'd come to believe him.

My lingering gloom was pierced by the man across from me clearing his throat, and I welcomed it. Slowly, as if from a dream, my eyes wandered back to the inside of the stagecoach and found him smiling at me.

"You seem a trifle distracted, miss. First time on the frontier?"

"It is."

His smile took on a twist I didn't immediately identify, and his eyes—or rather eye, as he wore a patch over his left—traveled from my head to my feet, then back up to somewhere on my torso. With a jolt, I realized I was being appraised like meat, which was confirmed a moment later when he said, "You might make a few pennies a night once you get to Abilene, but I'd be willin' to pay as much as a silver dollar if you'd like to jumble our giblets right here on this coach afore we get there."

He was a well-proportioned man of above-average height, and he followed this obscenity up with an even more obscene wink from his one eye. I'd thought he was a gentleman when we'd boarded the coach, thanks to both the assistance up the high step he'd given me and his decent, if slightly worn, wool suit. His Irish drawl had reminded me of Uncle Patrick's, setting me at ease. But when what he'd just said sank in, I realized how mistaken I'd been.

For the slightest moment before I could react, I sulkily added this exchange to my quickly growing tally of reasons to loath the West, then did as I always did when men revealed themselves to be truly primordial in their "evolution." Darwin couldn't have been right about everything, after all.

"Sir, or should I say cyclopean toad, how dare you speak to me that way. I am no soiled dove. Though I suppose, given your beastly appearance, the only companionship you can attain is the bought kind, but I have more pity for the women who deign to—"

He stared at me with his singular eye widened in surprise as I went on, then raised a hand. "My apologies, madam!" he nearly yelled, raising his voice like a shield in his defense. "I meant no offense, I swear it on the… Holy Virgin!"

He wore no cross, I quickly noted, and I'd never have taken him for a Catholic in the first place. His pause before invoking Mother Mary proved he wasn't sure whether he was either. But he had sworn, and apologized, and I was too exhausted after all that had happened since my uncle's death to let the fire of my anger burn for long. One final drubbing should do it. I let the full force of my stare, honed to withering flame, hold him for a long moment before saying, "Apology accepted. But you'd do well to treat women with more respect." I huffed, then dismissed him completely and returned to contemplating the prairie.

Through the corner of my eye, I watched him relax, a little too much. His back slid down and his knees widened far enough that he'd have bumped one of my own if I hadn't crossed it over my other leg, studiously ignoring him. Still, I could see an easy smile spread over his wide mouth, and he rested his elbow on the seat back. More mischief was coming, I could smell it, and my jaw clenched.

"Can't blame me fer me mistake, though, can you? That dress looks like you slept in it all year, yer hair would make a comb run away in fear fer its life, and you have no luggage but that raggedy bag. Woman like you going to Abilene pretty much only ever means one t'ing. You got nowhere else to go, and no money to go there with. But you aren't dumb, I can already see that. In fact, there's somet'ing about you… I just assumed you heard that redheads make the highest—"

"That is quite enough," I seethed. "I'm a doctor, I'll have you know, and a lady with a fiancé in Boston. Perhaps you've heard of the Sargent family?" I chided myself for using Thomas's family as my bona fides, but at this point, I'd do what it took to get this loathsome man to shut up. "I was robbed, sir. And here I use the word 'sir' as a synonym for 'reprehensible little shi—'"

"Ah-ah-ah." His hand came up again, and I experienced a sudden odd misapprehension that I was somehow staring at two men, neither one in complete focus but both somehow occupying the same space. One was the man I'd been speaking with—brown-haired, about thirty, his singular eye a striking green. The other, somewhat less, well, manlike. He appeared smaller, somehow, and oddly warped, like pictures in children's books of leprechauns or other fairy tale sprites. His eye twinkled like a peridot.

"If you are a lady o' manners like you say," he went on, "you might pick words what prove it. Otherwise, yer not goin' to change my first impression of you. Can you blame me? Out here in the West, we have a sayin': if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck—"

"I know the saying. It's not as regional as your own so-called manners seem to be. Now if you would, do shut up and let us reach Abilene in peace."

That seemed to settle it, and we fell into silence. Mine fuming, his once more insouciant. Anytime I looked in his direction, his one eye would roll toward me, and his lips would turn up in a not-quite-impertinent grin. I managed to find a way to disregard him and resumed my constant shifting from one bottom cheek to the other, ruing my aching tailbone. Whatever phantom doubling of vision I'd experienced I put decisively from my mind. Instead, I focused on how I would find this associate of my uncle's, and what I'd need to say to persuade him to help me find his killer and get justice. Toxicore Darkheart, such an odd name…