“Where will I find this wagon road? You say it heads generally southwest?”
“West-by-sou’west. Switchbacks aplenty once it gits into Miller territory. Wouldn’t go there if I was you. Rough country.”
Switchbacks didn’t bother him. Neither did rough country. “How much I owe you?”
The old man named a figure that was several times what the goods were worth, and Jed paid without comment. From the looks of the place, he might be the only customer all week. So far, his traveling expenses had amounted to a dish of chicken pie in Salem and the cigar he’d bought to take to George, to celebrate paying off the loan.
This time the nightmare was slightly different. This time Eleanor was buried under tons of earth, unable to claw her way free, unable to scream for help. She waited for the dream to fade, and then she whispered, “I am not helpless! I am intelligent, resourceful and…”
Trapped. Still trapped, despite her determination to escape, in a world that lagged a hundred years behind the times, held captive by a people who were obsessed by gold fever. A people who wrote their own laws and lived by them. A soft-spoken people who were distrustful of outsiders, even those who came into the valley by marriage, as Eleanor had.
They were her late husband’s family. Cousins to the nth degree, inbred, uneducated, a few of them even vicious, especially after sampling the product of their own illicit distillery.
Once her breathing settled down, she slid out of bed and made her way to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of cool buttermilk. Back home in Charlotte—in her other life—it would have been warm cocoa. Turning the glass slowly in her hands, she studied the pattern etched into the sides. It was one of only three left of the set of tumblers she’d brought with her. The matched set of china had suffered even more. Two days spent jouncing in the back of a freight wagon, no matter how carefully packed, was lethal on fine china and crystal.
The silver that had belonged to two generations of her family hadn’t even begun the trip. Instead it had been sold by her bridegroom to finance yet another piece of equipment for his damn-blasted gold mine.
His mythical gold mine. No matter how they might carve up the earth in search of a new vein, the Millers were deluding themselves, Eleanor was convinced of it. Just because sixty years ago, Devin’s grandfather had found a lump of pure gold and a vein that looked promising, staked a claim and brought in his entire family to dig it out, that didn’t mean there were more riches still waiting to be uncovered. It meant only that the Millers, her late husband among them, were seriously deranged when it came to the subject of gold.
And just as deranged if they thought they could hold her prisoner here until she married one of them, who would then control what they called “Dev’s shares.” His grandfather’s shares—the major portion of their elusive wealth.
A hundred shares of nothing was still nothing, but try and convince the Millers of that. She’d been trapped in this wild, forsaken place ever since Devin had been killed, and she still hadn’t managed to convince anyone that letting her go back to Charlotte would not bring the world rushing in to steal their precious gold.
Tomorrow night she would try again. After last night’s fiasco, they might not be expecting her to try again so soon.
Later that morning Eleanor looked around the cramped log cabin, taking inventory of what she would be forced to leave behind. There was little left now, certainly nothing she could carry away with her. Devin had sold practically everything of value she possessed, most of it before they’d left Charlotte. He had obviously thought that because she owned her own home and dressed nicely, she must be well-to-do.
Nothing could be further from the truth. She had inherited the house from the elderly cousin who had taken her in after her parents had died, and could barely make ends meet on her meager salary.
But then, Devin hadn’t asked, and she certainly hadn’t told him how little a schoolteacher earned. The irony was that they had both been taken in. Devin’s charm had been no more genuine than her imagined wealth. Not that he hadn’t played his role well. Surprisingly well, considering his background. It would never have passed muster if she’d been more experienced. The proverbial old-maid schoolteacher, she’d been naive enough and flattered enough to swallow his line, bait, hook and sinker.
Looking back, she couldn’t believe how blind she had been. Not only had she invited a stranger into her home, she had practically begged him to make a fool of her. Loneliness was no excuse, nor was the fact that the day they’d met had been her twenty-fifth birthday and there’d been no one to help her celebrate. Cousin Annie had been dead several months by then. Her friends were all married, some with growing families.
The truth was, she’d been feeling like the last cold biscuit in the basket. Then along came Devin Miller, stepping out of the haberdashery just as she walked by with an armload of books. She had dropped the books; he had helped her pick them up, and almost before she realized what was happening he was courting her with flowers, candy and blatant flattery. And fool that she was, she’d lapped it up like a starving puppy.
Oh, yes, she’d been ripe for the plucking, her only excuse being that no one had ever tried to pluck her before. Which was how she came to be in a situation that nothing in her quiet, uneventful life could have prepared her for. Held captive by a bunch of gold-obsessed men—the women were almost as bad—who were convinced that any day now, they would all be rich as kings and never have to work another day in their misbegotten lives.
A place where women were considered chattels; education was the devil’s handiwork, and flatlanders—people from “away”—were looked on with suspicion bordering on paranoia.
Her first attempt to escape after Devin had been killed had failed simply because she hadn’t realized at the time that she was a prisoner. Couldn’t conceive of such a thing. She’d walked boldly down the crooked path to the settlement at the base of Devin’s Hill one morning a few weeks after his death, and asked if anyone was planning a trip to town, and if so, could she please ride with them as she needed to make arrangements to return to her home.
Her polite request had been met with blank stares or averted glances. Finally an old woman everyone called Miss Lucy had explained that as Devin’s widow—she’d called it widder-woomern—her home was up on Devin’s Hill.
For her second attempt, she’d waited until after dark and left a lamp burning in case anyone was watching. Sparing only a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness, she had hurried across the small clearing, her goal being to reach one of the outlying farms she’d seen only from a distance. Devin had once told her that they were not his kin, but they’d been allowed to stay anyway, as their families had been there for generations.
Allowed to stay?
At the time, she hadn’t understood the ramifications.
Now she did.
Like a thief in the night, she’d moved swiftly, slipping between gardens and outhouses, thankful for the moon that allowed her to avoid knocking over woodpiles or stepping in any unmentionables.
She’d made it past the first three houses, past two leaning sheds and an overgrown cornfield. Only a few miles to go and she would have been safe. Exhilarated to have gotten so far, she’d tried to plan—or as much as a woman could when she had no home, no relatives and no money.
As it turned out, all the planning in the world would have done her no good. Before she’d passed the last house, the one belonging to the Hooters, Varnelle and Alaska, whose mother had been a Miller, Alaska had stepped out from behind the outhouse, a jug of what Devin had called popskull in each hand and a grin on his long, bony face.
“Where you goin’, Elly Nora?”
She could hardly say she was going for a stroll, not when she was carrying all her