Jacaranda by Cherie Priest Page B

Fields…an accusation breathed with some of her very last words.
    Yes, there’d been a nephew—a boy orphaned when his mother died in childbirth, for his father had died in a ridiculous hunting accident, some years before. “Keep him for me,” his mother pleaded, as she bled to death in the fine feather bed. “Promise me you’ll raise him, and love him, and guard his fortune like it was your own.”
    Mr. Anderson had done his level best but there was so much money and no, the money and the boy were not his own; and the boy was sickly, and unhappy—difficult enough to like, much less love in a fatherly fashion. But the child enjoyed swimming in the tide, when it came high and close to the Strand. He liked the feeling of the sand and the salt, and on the rare occasions that he smiled, he did so on the beach.
    It was Mrs. Anderson, who’d been left in charge…back before she was Mrs. Anderson, when she was only an ambitious governess. She wanted a marriage but not without the money, and there was a child in the way of both these things. A weak one, frail and in need of constant supervision. It was a simple matter to look away. A simple thing, to lose track of him. Easy as pie, finding him floating against the pier, having exhausted himself in the waves. Easy as inheriting a fortune.
    Easy as a wedding. Easy as a funeral.
     
    Lean, clever Frederick Vaughn denied any and all knowledge of any curse, any deaths, any unnatural draw, or anything he might have done to find himself at the Jacaranda Hotel—except, perhaps, the idle lure of a holiday at an odd time of year, when the storms were cooking in the Gulf and the heat was often enough to wilt an oak.
    He stuck to that story until he’d had several drinks, and then several more.
    When the bottle was nearly empty, so empty he could see the table through the glass when he looked down inside it for answers, he confessed that there might have been a widow, once.
    There might have been a misunderstanding, with regards to her husband’s estate. Or perhaps the misunderstanding had more to do with Vaughn himself, and his intention to marry her for the money rather than swindle it away from her. Not that he swindled a damn thing, you understand. But misunderstandings did abound, and she died not long after their union, and his subsequent abandonment. Wrists slit, lying in a bathtub, that’s what the newspapers said. Not a tidy way to go, and certainly no fault of the salesman Frederick Vaughn, so his conscience was quite clean and his time at the hotel was entirely voluntary, he wanted the Ranger and the padre to damn well know.
    So the Ranger made note of it.
    Since Vaughn’s arrival, he’d only heard the widow’s voice once or twice, or perhaps a handful of times—mostly at night, when the wind rubbed itself shrieking against the windows and the drafty frame let little whispers inside the room. Sometimes, they sounded like her.
    Usually, they sounded like her.
    Maybe always.
     
    David and George McCoy were two brothers out of three. They were twins, though they looked little alike; and their older brother Matthew was recently deceased, so perhaps it could be said that now they were two brothers out of two.
    Matthew’s death had been a tragic event, and no one was clear on the specifics. Some kind of accident—there were no untoward suspicions, not cast upon David or George, and that was a fact. No investigation, no concerns on the part of any officials, anywhere.
    They wished to stress that point.
    At any rate, how could they be blamed, if their grandfather had left his manufacturing company to Matthew? And how was it any fault of theirs, that Matthew was no longer alive to take possession of it?
    Thank heavens for David and George, who were ready and willing to assume the responsibility. Thank heavens their grandmother had someone to rely upon, someone to manage the business and the finances. And never mind the gossips who wondered about Matthew, and some weird