He looked over to the amber prescription bottles next to the sink and the half-drunk glass of water, then at the old-fashioned clock on the wall. Maybe it was time. An hour early for his medswouldn’t matter, and he’d try again tomorrow to stretch it to the full six hours.
“Could you bring me that?” He pointed his cane at the sink.
Without a word, Nimble fetched him the bottles and the glass, then disappeared with a flick of leather coat and black boots onto the landing and down the stairs.
Morgan took one pill from each of the bottles, washed them down with a swallow of water, and sighed. He just needed to keep going. One day he’d look back on all of this and shrug that it was in the past, so what did it matter.
One day. Not today. Today he was in pain, and life was shit, and he had a stranger staying with him until the storm passed.
CHAPTER 5
nimble
Now that Nimble was inside and moving, he was growing warm, and his clothes seemed wetter and heavier than they had been when he’d been cold. His boots weighed a ton, and the snow melting from his hair kept dripping into his eyes.
With the danger of the sheriff and his deputy gone, the idea that Morgan had not given him up pushed Nimble toward the edge of confusion. What now? Well, do what Morgan had asked him to do and earn himself a place to sleep for the night.
When he got upstairs with two more bags of groceries, Morgan was still sitting in the same chair, slumped forward, his cane in both hands.
“Were you stealing in town?” Morgan asked. “Is that why you hid from the sheriff?”
“Not exactly.” Nimble was used to playing it close to his chest, not sharing his secrets, not spilling the contents of his heart. He shrugged. “Just took some waters.”
“Well, you were trying to steal from me, it looked like,” Morgan said. An accusation.
Nimble had met guys like this before, where the judgment was almost instant. He had maybe ten bucks in bills and change. Morgan was looking at him as if being poor was a crime.
Nimble longed to be back on the train with Blue and Star, even as anger rippled through him. He’d not done anything to them, nothing to warrant that kind of betrayal.
“I was thinking about it,” he said.
Morgan didn’t seem like a guy who would be living over a store half stocked with all kinds of unrelated items: boxes of birdseed, dog food, bins of screws, coils of wire, sacks of what looked like grain, saddles on long arms sticking out from the wall. A country store for country people who needed odd things like that. He was as out of place as Nimble was.
Nimble’s leather jacket was sticking to his neck, tacky with damp, the collar of the flannel shirt beneath it starting to itch. When he pulled at the fabric with his fingers, he saw Morgan’s expression change, his gaze focusing sharply on Nimble. Then he shifted, moving his cane from one hand to the other.
“Why didn’t you just ask?” Morgan snapped.
He got up, as though to start putting away the groceries, like he’d said he would. He leaned heavily on the counter, one hand planted flat, the other gripping the hard rubber handle of the cane. Like his body was going to give out on him without warning, and he wanted to be ready.
“Ask?” Nimble replied, startled. He shivered as he felt a cold draft from somewhere and jumped when a whomp of wind hit the bank of windows that looked out over the yard.
“For a place to stay.” Morgan sighed heavily, as though Nimble had been irritating him for hours. “I could ask around town on your behalf, but that’d mean I’d get dragged into yet more conversations and probably have to endure questions from Mabel and Ambrose, and all those other small-town?—”
Morgan, for all his height and seeming strength, looked like he was on the verge of collapse. He stared at Nimble with hard blue eyes, his annoyance at Nimble, at everything, sparking off him like thin spikes of metal.
His mouth went tight, like he wanted to use strong words to describe a level of frustration so high it was coloring his cheeks bright pink.
“It’s just too much.” Morgan sliced a hand through the air. “Too much talking. Too much of other people getting up in my business.” With a shake of his head, he took a long breath.
Then he looked at Nimble as though Nimble might turn out to be the least irritating thing in town, or at least an irritation of short duration.
“I don’t have a spare room,” he said. “But there’s a couch in the parlor, and I’ve plenty of food, as you can see.” He waved at the four bags of groceries on the counter.
“I could just make a bed out of bags of grain, down in the shop,” Nimble said. It wouldn’t be much more comfortable than sleeping on the floor, but at least he’d be dry.
“A bed on the bags of grain?” Morgan asked, as fiercely as if Nimble had just spat at him. “And if Mabel were to come by with her stupid little dog and start asking questions? Or the sheriff, or, God forbid, those old geezers? How am I supposed to explain that to them? I can be hospitable. There’s acouch. A nice, long one. Plenty wide. You’ll sleep there. And in the morning?—”
Morgan stopped his tirade suddenly. “Maybe it’ll stop snowing and you can be on your way.”
