Free Cheryl Reavis by Harrigans Bride Page B

in a room at the very end of the last addition to the lengthy house. There were a few soldiers about, but most of them were sitting around the walls, asleep. Thomas had been half hoping it would be Gertie, though he couldn’t think of any reason why she wouldn’t give her name. This stranger was much older than Gertie, and had the hard look of someone who had been in her line of work for a very long while. Everything about her seemed to be in disarray. She was sitting on a washstand near the outside door, ignoring pointed remarks from the soldiers still awake, while she intently inspected her fingerna ils.
    “My compliments, ma’am,” Thomas said, and she looked at him sharply, he supposed for some veiled sarcasm on his part.
    “You took one of my best girls,” she said after a moment. “You—” she added, pointing a finger at his chest “—cost me a lot of money.”
    “I don’t see how,” Thomas said easily. “This army never gets paid.”
    She continued to stare at him, then abruptly laughed.
    “Now that’s the God’s truth—but you better have a dollar or two on you now, deary.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? Because I got me a grievance and you got to settle it.”
    “I think not, ma’am,” Thomas said, turning to go.
    “I know what’s become of the Reb girl,” she called after him loudly.
    Thomas looked at her. She smiled.
    “It’s going to cost you,” she assured him.
    “You couldn’t possibly know anything about that.”
    “Couldn’t I? Try me, deary.”
    “You tell me what you know, then we’ll see.”
    She laughed. “I get the money up-front, Captain Harrigan. I always get the money up-front.”
    “Not this time,” Thomas said. Once again he turned to go. “Send her back wherever she came from,” he said to the message runner. “And tell Noah I appreciate his…consideration.”
    “I talked to Gertie,” the woman said, still bargaining. “Yesterday,” she added as a selling point.
    And a very fine selling point it was.
    “All right,” Thomas said, capitulating. “Where is she?”
    “Gertie?”
    “No, damn it!”
    “Oh, you mean the Reb girl.”
    Thomas took a step in her direction and she hopped off the washstand.
    “The money, Captain,” she said, holding out her hand.
    He reached into his uniform pocket and brought out a coin—a silver dollar he could ill afford to part with—and tossed it to her without even looking at it. She caught it easily and made a great show of trying to decide if it was genuine. Then she dropped it down her cleavage.
    “Now,” he said. “Where is she? And keep in mind that there is a whole roomful of men here who would be delighted to do whatever it takes to get me my money back.”
    The woman hesitated, possibly calculating whether or not she could escape out the door.
    She apparently decided against it and smiled. “She’s gone home to Mama.”
    “Her mother is dead,” Thomas said.
    “Not her mama, Captain. Yours. ”

Chapter Five
    “D id you find her?” Thomas asked, trying to get as close to the fire as he could without setting his blanket ablaze. It had been raining again, heavily enough to seep through the pine-bough-and-canvas roof and drip onto his head. He was half-sick with what the surgeon loftily called “catarrh.” Thomas’s head ached. He couldn’t breathe through his nose. He couldn’t hear. And he was in no mood to be thwarted.
    “Yes and no,” La Broie said.
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    “Sir, it means Gertie is still here someplace in Falmouth, but I can’t find her. I reckon she’s hiding.”
    “Why would she be hiding, for heaven’s sake?”
    “Don’t know, Cap, but I think she is. Somebody may know where she got to, but they ain’t saying.”
    “Well, keep looking. I want to know how the hell Abiah ended up in Maryland.”
    “We ain’t sure she is there, are we, sir?”
    Thomas didn’t answer. That was true enough. Allhe had was the word of a camp follower, and he’d had to pay a