Free Keegan's Lady by Catherine Anderson Page A

wouldn't be able to spare much money to make payments to the man, certainly not enough to appease his anger.
    She squeezed her eyes closed, her mind filled with images of Patrick out on the range someplace, shot in the back or beaten to death. If Keegan felt she’d tricked him, might he not kill Patrick just as he'd originally planned?
    The thought kept Caitlin awake and shivering long into the night. Unless she missed her guess, Keegan would be back, and she would be honor bound to fulfill her part of their bargain. If she refused, her brother's life could be at stake.
     
    ***
     
    Blowing in off snow that lay high in the Rockies , the night wind seemed every bit as cold to Ace as it had twenty years ago. Hunching his shoulders against the bite, he listened to the high-pitched wail and recalled how he had once likened it to that of a lonely specter. He guessed some things never changed; only now the ghosts had names, his own among them. For Jamie Keegan, the boy he'd once been, was long since dead.
    Tipping his head back, Ace gazed at the network of tree limbs above him. It hardly resembled the towering oak of his nightmares. As oak trees went, this one wasn't all that big, and it certainly wasn't sinister. He couldn't even recall for sure from which of the limbs Joseph had been hung. Of course, over a period of twenty years, the tree had grown and changed. If it hadn't been for other landmarks, Ace wouldn't have been sure this was even the same place.
    Ah, but this was it. No mistake about that. Just over the rise to his right was the meandering creek and bathing spot he remembered so well. To his left was the flat area where his stepfather had chosen to make camp that fateful night so many years ago.
    For the last three months, ever since his return to No Name, Ace had been coming to this spot in the evening right after the sun went down. He didn't suppose he could say that he actually came to visit with Joseph, for intellectually he knew he couldn't visit a dead man, but emotionally that was his intent. To whisper of his plans. To speak of things deep in his heart. To hope that in some way Joseph knew he was here and that it was only a matter of time until old wrongs would be set aright. As right as Ace could make them, at any rate.
    Tonight was the first time Ace had come here feeling any trace of doubt or uncertainty about what he was doing. Tacked to the massive tree trunk beside him, a tattered news clipping rustled in the breeze. He'd taken the clipping from the No Name Gazette and hung it here himself, a headline in bold block letters that heralded the financial death of Joseph's murderers, no name finally gets RAILROAD spur. It was the sort of retaliation Joseph would have approved of, a swindling of the swindlers. No violence. Only the predatory and the heartless would get hurt. An ironic twist at the end of the story.
    Exposed to the weather as it had been, the clipping was beginning to disintegrate, and much of the ink, diluted by rain, had bled into the bark. To Ace, that seemed fitting, a symbolic missive to the dead, a declaration of his intentions, so to speak. Only now, he felt as if he'd gone back on his word. Someone innocent had been hurt, after all.
    Caitlin O'Shannessy . . . God, he couldn't get the image of her face out of his mind. The fear in her eyes. The flaming spots of color that had flagged her otherwise pale cheeks when she'd begun unfastening the buttons of her nightgown. How could he have done such a thing?
    With each rise and fall of the wind, the tree limbs above Ace's head whipped and then settled, whipped and then settled, their leaves whispering loudly, then tapering off into a sigh. To Ace, they seemed to be calling Joseph's name, an endless litany in honor of a man whose passing had otherwise gone unmarked. Even the mound of Joseph's grave under the oak tree had been worn away by time, the wooden marker fashioned by a young boy's hands long since lost to the elements. It seemed so