Jennie fixed Kate with a look. “Lyle Wentworth’s the deputy.”
Kate colored. Lyle had tried to court Kate since they were children, much to the wealthy Wentworths’ dismay. Before Sean Flaherty showed up in town, some people thought Lyle would go against his parents’ wishes and ask Kate to marry him. Kate had refused to see him since she had found out about the baby. “I suppose you could go talk to Lyle,” she said, her voice subdued.
“Me?” Jennie said, her hands on her hips. “I suppose you could go talk to him.”
“Jen, you know I can’t do that.”
“Criminy, sis. Someday you’re going to have to talk to people again. It doesn’t make much sense for us to go through all this effort to hold on to this place if you’re going to shut yourself away in here the rest of your life as if you’d been buried right along with Mama and Papa.”
Kate clasped her hands over her big stomach and looked down. “I can’t see Lyle, Jennie. Please don’t ask me.”
Jennie gave a little huff but didn’t pursue the matter. “I think I will tell the silverheels that those old biddies are trying to shut us down. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”
“And maybe you should talk to that Mr. Jones again. He’s a lawyer, right? At least he should be able to tell us what our options are.”
Jennie stared straight ahead as another quick memory of Carter Jones’s striking face flashed in front of her like the image from a stereopticon. How odd, she reflected. Perhaps it was somehow connected to her impending headache.
“I’ll go see him in the morning,” she agreed finally. “Tonight I’m going to let Barnaby help you with the dishes while I nurse one of my megrims.”
Carter Jones sat in his small office and stared at the bookshelf on the opposite wall as if willing one of the leather tomes to magically open up with the answer he sought. He’d been at it much of the afternoon, more time than he could afford to spend on a matter that, after all, was not even his concern.
Zoning ordinances were so new that it didn’t appear that there was much body of law on them. And, though he’d read the court’s decision half a dozen times, he’d been unable to come up with any ideas as to how to render it null. He had no doubt that the self-appointed moral guardians of the town, Mrs. Billingsley, Miss Potter, Lucinda Wentworth and their cronies, would be back tomorrow in full force when they learned that nothing had been done to change the situation at Sheridan House.
Carter threw his pencil down on the desk and pushed back his chair. His stomach was rumbling its disapproval of his decision earlier in the day to skip lunch. He hadn’t felt much like eating after his encounter with Jennie Sheridan. The prospect of one of the Continental Hotel’s shoe-leather steaks was not thrilling, but it would at least fill the hole in his middle.
He leaned back toward his desk to straighten the piles of work. No matter how hungry he was, he wouldn’t leave an untidy office. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind, he’d always believed. The pencil he’d thrown in disgust was carefully retrieved and put in its tray—on the used side of the tray, not to be confused with the freshly sharpened ones that he put there every morning.
He ran his hand over the neatly arranged writing instruments with a certain satisfaction. At least it was possible to inject order into a certain portion of his world. He didn’t want to admit how unsettled he’d been by his trip to Sheridan House. He still wasn’t entirely sure why. The girl was pretty. The young boy was engaging. But none of it was his problem.
There was a soft knock at the door. He jerked his hand away from the pencils and said, “Come in.”
It was the temporary sheriff’s deputy, Lyle Wentworth. Carter wasn’t particularly pleased to see him. Though they were both eligible young men in town, the two had not become friends. Carter found him overbearing and petulant. He’d seen Lyle kick back a chair and stomp out of the bar over a two-bit poker game. Of course, as the only son of the town banker and the pretentious Lucinda, Lyle had probably been raised to believe he was a cut above the rest of the world. Carter, on the other hand, had known at a young age that he’d better start climbing, because he was starting life at the bottom rung.
“Evening, Lyle,” he greeted his visitor.
“What in blazes are they trying to do to the Sheridan sisters?” Lyle asked without preamble.
Carter raised his eyebrows. The demanding tone was characteristic, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what interest Lyle Wentworth would have in the plight of the Sheridans. He leaned over his desk and put his hand down flat on the court order that he’d not served that morning. “The court says they can’t take in boarders in that location. They have to stop it or move to another house.”
“They don’t have any money to move. Or to survive if they can’t get that extra rent money. What are they supposed to live on with both their parents fresh in their graves?”
Carter let a stream of air out threw his nose, still mystified as to the motivation behind Lyle’s inquiry. “This order doesn’t concern itself with what they’re going to live on. It just states that the way things are, they’re in violation of the law.”
“It’s damned nonsense, fostered by a bunch of the town’s old biddies. The Sheridan sisters aren’t hurting a thing in that house.”
Carter slid his hand off the papers and grinned. “Well, according to the oldest Sheridan sister, the only way we’re going to get them out of there is to carry them out.”
Lyle’s scowl softened. “That sounds like Jennie, all right So you talked to them already?” At Carter’s nod, Lyle stiffened and asked, “Did you see Kate, too?”
“The younger one? No. Her sister said she was ill.”
Lyle’s head jerked up. “Ill? What’s wrong with her?”
The motive behind Lyle’s interest was becoming more apparent. It appeared he was smitten with one of the girls. Which one? he wondered. Carter was surprised to realize that he was very much hoping that it was not Jennie who held the rich young man’s interest, though she would be the most likely candidate. It would be tough for any man to be in love with Kate Sheridan under the current circumstances.
“What’s wrong with Kate?” Lyle insisted. The slight tremor in his voice gave Carter the answer to his question.
“I’m sorry, Lyle. Her sister didn’t elaborate. I assumed it had something to do with…” Carter hesitated. Surely Lyle knew about Kate Sheridan’s condition.
“With her having a baby,” Lyle finished for him, his voice tight.
“Yes.”
Lyle kicked the heel of his boot backward into the door frame, gouging the soft pinewood. “I don’t want them bothered, Jones,” he said. “Not by you nor by those old gossips who are trying to run them out of town.”
Carter pushed back his chair and looked up at the young man. After a moment he said, “I intend to see what I can do to straighten this out.”
Lyle nodded and spun on his heel to leave. Carter could hear the clatter of his fancy, high-heeled boots all the way down the stairs. This was an interesting development, he thought, since the way he understood it, one of the “old gossips” Wentworth had referred to was Lyle’s own mother. Carter wrinkled up his nose. Small-town politics. He had little patience for it. But if he had to put up with the foibles of the local denizens in order to proceed up that ladder he was determined to climb, he’d put aside his distaste.
And in the meantime, straightening things out meant that he’d have to pay another visit to Jennie Sheridan. Which was not such an unpleasant prospect.