Free Claudia Dain by A Kiss To Die For Page B

passed for a bed. She lay on her face, her skirts hiked up to her knees. She was snoring.
    "There she is," the doc informed him with a pointed finger.
    "She seems real broken up that her niece's gone missing," Jack mumbled.
    "She cares more for the bottle than she ever did for that poor girl," Malcolm said, turning the woman over.
    Jack studied her for a moment. She had the look of a drunkard, the bloating and the gauntness and the ashen color. And the filth.
    "There's blood," he said, bending down, touching his fingers to it to make sure.
    Carr hoisted the woman onto the bed and examined her. "She's broken off a tooth, probably when she fell on her face. There's some blood on her lip."
    Jack looked around and found the tooth embedded in the side slat of the bed. "Here it is. Don't guess she'll miss it since she drinks her meals." He threw the broken tooth in the cold ash of the fireplace.
    "Mary," the doc called. "Wake up."
    "Her name's Mary, too?" Jack asked. "Not much of a family legacy."
    The doc slapped drunken Mary on the cheeks lightly as he said, "She had a daughter once, named her Mary." Mary was not responding. Doc Carr dripped some cool water from the bucket onto her throat; that started her stirring. "Died in childbed."
    Jack made up his mind right there that if he ever had a daughter, he wouldn't be naming her Mary.
    Mary groaned a bit and then coughed. A new smell was added to the mix: sour whiskey. Jack waited while Carr got her full awake and then he moved out of the shadows to stand in the yellow bolt of sun, longer now than it had been. Mary was still too drunk to care that there were two men in her home when before there'd been none, and one of those men a hard-looking stranger.
    "We've come about your girl, Mary," the doc said.
    A few blinks and another wet cough was her chief response.
    "Mary's gone."
    "Gone where?" she rasped out, her voice hoarse with disuse.
    "Gone dead," Jack said, pulling her gaze to him.
    "Dead how?"
    "Dead murdered," Jack answered, more than a little disgusted at her reaction. He'd seen people show more emotion at the news of a missing cat than this woman showed for blood kin.
    "Hmmm." She scratched herself. "Drink?"
    Doc Carr handed her a ladleful of water. She rinsed her mouth and spat. The water lay in a puddle on her floor before sinking in to leave a dark brown spot just shy of the block of sunlight. This woman liked her chosen place in the dark.
    "How long has your niece been gone?" Jack asked, stepping through the light until he stood next to her bed.
    "I dunno," she said, scratching her head, the sound of it rough under her nails. "Where'd you find her? Not here?"
    Doc Carr got up from the edge of the bed and walked slowly to the open doorway. It looked like he had just about had his fill of Aunt Mary and her devoted care of her niece. Jack had seen and heard worse, though rarely from family.
    "She was out on the prairie, north and west of here. She wasn't alone," Jack said. "She been keeping company with anyone?"
    Mary slouched against the wall behind her bed, chewing on a dirty fingernail. Finally she shrugged. "She bragged on havin' a beau and couldn't stop telling me how sweet lookin' he was. She was far gone on him."
    "Who was he?"
    Another shrug. "I didn't ask. She's of an age to find her own man."
    Jack studied her with a ripple of revulsion. Blood kin and she didn't even have a care as to the girl's welfare.
    "Did you ever see him? Could you describe him?"
    Mary smiled, the hole where her tooth had been a newly opened cave in a crooked smile. "Sure I saw him. Little Mary couldn't stand not having me see the man who was courtin' her. Course, it was a fair distance and it wasn't a clean look, but I saw him."
    Doc Carr turned back into the room, listening.
    "What did he look like?"
    "Why, he was sweet lookin' right enough." She licked her thin, cracked lips and gave him a slow wink. "Like you, honey."

 
     
     
    Chapter 8

     
    "If she was saying that the man looks