Chapter Fourteen
THE MORNING HOURS DRAGGEDlike a stubborn mule in the fields. It was quiet in Perseverance today, which suited Hawk just fine. It wasn’t as if he’d slept much the night before, and half his mind was preoccupied by Lina and her stubborn refusal to confide in him. Something was most definitely wrong. But what was it? And how terrible could it be that she refused to tell him?
Noon came and went, and Lina didn’t appear with his lunch. He shouldn’t have been surprised. She was likely angry with him over the way he’d stomped off last night.
About two o’clock, Billy Morrell stopped in between his shifts at the diner. “It’s a good quiet day out there today, boss,” he said, setting his hat on the desk and taking a seat.
Hawk leaned back in his own chair behind the desk. “Why does it feel like the calm before the storm?”
Billy shrugged. “Might just be that chaos down in Mad Dog Gulch last night. It’s got us all on edge.” He stifled a yawn.
“You ought to get some sleep,” Hawk said. Billy had come back near dawn with the others, and Hawk doubted he’d slept at all before his breakfast shift sitting watch at the diner.
“I might do just that.” Billy stood and took up his hat. “It was nice to see Mrs. Rodgers out this morning.”
Hawk waited for him to ask about her escapades last night, but he said nothing. And not a muscle in his face belied that he knew anything. Hawk ought to have known that Jackson wouldn’t have spilled a word of what he’d seen to anyone else. “Did she appear well?” Hawk asked carefully.
“She did indeed. We had a nice conversation at Mrs. Garner’s. She got me talking all about last October, when we caught Grayson and his men up at the Pass.”
Hawk’s expression dropped. That was the same tale he’d been telling Lina last evening, right before Garland had come to the door. He hadn’t finished, and then she’d followed him to Mad Dog Gulch. There was something else, too, something just out of reach in his mind that felt very important to remember right at that moment.
“What did you tell her?” He tried to keep his voice even and conversational.
“Not a lot.” Billy picked up his hat. “Tales of gunfights and such might scare a lady. Only that you’d gone and talked to Grayson unarmed, and that Yount got twitchy and shot, and that we’d won.”
We’d won. Hawk wasn’t sure he’d put it that way. It hardly felt like winning when men died, even if they were outlaws. And while he’d never told a soul, he’d felt the worst about Grayson himself. The man seemed more concerned that his family receive a letter he would write to them than about his own fate. Hawk had spent many an hour since then wondering at the man’s motivations for the life he’d pursued.
“Well, thank you for entertaining her.” Hawk saw Billy out and stood by the door, turning the conversation over in his head. There was something to all of this—to Lina’s interest in that story, to her following him to Mad Dog Gulch, and maybe even to her getting herself locked up in his jail. But what was it?
He grabbed his own hat and locked up the office. His stomach was growling and he figured he ought to check on Lina. But when he arrived home, she was absent. Hawk followed his stomach to the kitchen, where he found the makings of cold chicken sandwiches sitting out. That was odd. Lina was normally fastidious with her work in the kitchen. Unless she knew he’d come looking for his lunch?
He put together a sandwich, and as he ate, he wondered where she might have gone and that led to the same thoughts that had plagued his mind back at the office. But he still couldn’t figure out what he was forgetting.
Last night, she’d looked at him with those clear blue eyes and—
Her eyes. Hawk nearly choked on a bite of chicken and bread. He’d dismissed the resemblance as merely a coincidence. But was it? Or was Lina somehow related to Joseph Grayson?
It seemed impossible and yet it made too much sense at the same time. And there was one person besides Lina herself who might know. He gulped down the remainder of the sandwich and raced back to the office.
“I didn’t know the man personally,” Pete Turley said when Hawk ran into the jail and demanded to know what Turley knew about Grayson’s family.
