Silver Lies Read online

  "No, please." She set down the glass. "Don’t go."

  The reverend slowly tossed his hat and gloves back on the sofa.

  The room felt charged with an understood, but unspoken potential. In the fireplace, a piece of wood snapped loudly as it disintegrated in a leap of orange flame. The reverend took one deliberate step toward her. She drew a breath, almost gasping, "Would you like me to play something for you? On the piano?"

  He halted as if she’d suddenly slapped a line of fortifications between them. He considered her curiously, then smiled. Glancing over to the pile of books and sheet music heaped haphazardly on top of the parlor grand, he asked, "My choice?"

  "Whatever you want."

  "Whatever I want." He studied her a moment. She felt the room begin to whirl slowly around them, in a strange approximation of a dance.

  He walked to the piano and began leafing through the stack. "Mozart, Mozart, Bach, Bach, Bach…hmmm. No Stephen Foster. No hymnals. Ah, how about Mendelssohn?"

  Inez took the dog-eared music book from him and flipped through the pages. "‘Lieder ohne Worte.’ Songs without words. Some of the first pieces my mother taught me."

  "She didn’t force you to memorize ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’?" His gentle teasing gave her the space she needed to breathe normally again.

  "What do you expect from a woman who wanted to name her first two daughters Harmony and Melody?"

  "So you’re the third? Is that how you escaped becoming Melody Stannert?"

  "No, I’m eldest of two. Only two." She clasped the music to her a moment, as if hugging a baby. "Aunt Agnes let it be known in no uncertain terms that the first daughter would be named after her. No one ever gainsaid Aunt Agnes. Inez is a form of Agnes."

  "Aunt Agnes sounds formidable." He flipped up the tails of his evening coat and sat on the small sofa. "Pick whatever tune you fancy, Inez."

  She sat at the piano and slowly unbuttoned her gloves, aware that he watched her every move. She continued talking to fill the silence. "Mendelssohn said these songs were meant to arouse the same feelings in everyone. Feelings that can’t be expressed in words. My mother often said that music begins where words end."

  She laid the gloves on the piano top and opened the keyboard cover. "When I was young, she would test me by giving me the opus and the number. I learned to play them all on demand and to her satisfaction." Inez smiled wryly. "I can still play them by heart. Some things, when you learn them young, stay with you forever."

  She opened the volume and scanned the first score. "Opus nineteen, number one." She closed the book, positioned her hands on the keyboard and—just as when she was a child— held the silence inside herself for three heartbeats. With the first liquid notes, her own private universe opened to receive her. Her heart greeted each chord like an old friend.

  When the last notes shimmered and died, a wave of completeness settled over her. Inez kept her eyes closed to savor the moment.

  The reverend’s voice, directly behind her, broke the silence. "I’ve changed my mind, Mrs. Stannert. In that mural of yours, you should be painted with a piano instead of a sword. Hearing you play, Satan’s legions would lay their weapons at your feet." His tone was light, but hesitant, searching for the proper balance for the moment.

  She sensed that, if she leaned back, he would be near enough to touch. It was as if they teetered on the edge of a cliff, a cliff from which neither dared to jump.

  The cliff.

  Inez remembered. Her small, stubborn toes digging into the ledge above the swimming hole, stockings and shoes lying in a heap nearby. Below—far below, in her ten-year-old estimation—boys from neighboring summer estates splashing, screams of "Jump! Jump!" piercing the humid air. Then, one voice above the rest: "She won’t jump! She’s just a girl!"

  She leaped. The exhilarating fall was supplanted by the sudden impact, the cool water foaming about her. Boys’ screams, birds’ songs, all ceased. Opening her eyes, she saw her hair curling through the water in snakelike undulations. Her white lawn dress billowed in a green world of filtered sunlight and muffled sound. Triumphant, she pushed off the muddy bottom, rising toward the light.

  Ascension.

  Anticipation.

  The promise of release.

  Inez rose from the piano stool and turned to face Reverend Sands.

  He retreated a step, as if the boundaries had shifted beneath his feet, leaving him in foreign territory. She followed and placed her hands on his shoulders. Inez could feel that he too was holding his breath. Waiting to break through the surface to the light.

  She took his face in her hands and moved closer still.

  Their kiss, tentative at first, intensified.

  After a while, he gripped her arms and, with visible reluctance, pulled her away. "Inez, are you sure?" His voice, pitched low, held an edge of warning.

  She placed her fingers on his lips. No words.

  He took her hand, kissing each finger before drawing her to him.

  Lost in the passion of their mutual embrace, Inez dimly heard—as if from underwater or far away—faint musical notes, plinking out tinny and small. She realized her elaborate knot of hair was coming undone under his hands and the steel hairpins were falling, hitting the piano keys, the stool, the floor.

  Taking a shaky breath, Reverend Sands ran an exploratory hand along the back seam of her dress. He lifted a loose lock of hair from her shoulder and murmured into her ear, "This isn’t one of those outfits with a hundred hooks and eyes up the back, is it?"

  Inez placed his hand on the neckline of her dress, and guided it down the front of her bodice, along the fall of lace concealing the dress fastenings.

  His eyes never left her face.

  Lacing her fingers through his, she turned to extinguish the single lamp before leading him out of the parlor and across the hallway to her room.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Inez rolled to the side, sleepily aware that Reverend Sands had slipped his arm from beneath her head. The feather mattress shifted as he rose from the bed.

  Outside, the wind moaned and drifted into silence.

  "Wind’s rising," Sands observed.

  Inez sighed and rolled back, curling into the warm hollow he’d left behind. She watched him prowl about the bedroom, gathering his clothes. He pulled the undervest on over his head with an elegant economy of movement. He dressed like he danced—complete attention on the task at hand, physical grace in action. And not only when dancing and dressing.

  "You may dance with me anytime, Reverend." She smiled in the semi-dark.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, buttoning his dress shirt. "Just let me know when the music starts. I’ll be there." He was smiling as well.

  He glanced toward the window, now a gray rectangle behind the drawn shade. "It’s almost dawn, Inez. I’ve got to get the rig to the livery and be at church in a few hours."

  Reverend Sands draped the white necktie about his collar, then gathered one long strand of her hair, letting it slide between his fingers to the pillow. "Even though I’d rather stay," he added.

  She watched him through half-opened eyes. "Won’t do to have that rig sitting out there at first light. Your reputation as an upright man of God might not survive an all-night visit."

  "Next time, I’ll walk." There was enough of a question in his voice to cancel the presumption of his words.

  "Next time. I like the sound of that."

  "Me too." Still smiling at her, he began maneuvering the complicated loops and twists of the cravat.

  "I think," Inez ventured, with a stretch, "that we’re at the stage where first names are appropriate. You know mine. What’s yours? I can’t keep calling you Reverend Sands."

  He reached over her to retrieve his cuff links from the nightstand. "It’s on the church sign."

  "Reverend J. B. Sands." She meditated a moment as he worked the cuff links into the link holes. "What does the ‘J’ stand for?"

  "It stands for itself." Reverend S
ands snapped the last link into place.

  "Surely you have a birth name," she persisted.

  He leaned forward, tracing her eyebrows with one finger. "Very well. But this is just between us. Justice B. Sands. First part’s a bit heavy-handed for the ministry, I thought. Suits a man of the law, not of the cloth."

  "Justice B. Sands." She tried it out. "Nice. And the ‘B’ is for…?"

  He smiled and ran his finger down the side of her face, from temple to cheek to jaw.

  "Another secret, Justice Sands? How many do you have?"

  "Probably enough to match yours, one for one."

  "Hmmm." She curled her fingers into his shirt front and tugged. "So, will you tell me? Or do I have to coax it out of you?"

  He lowered his face and their lips touched, lingered. Inez took his hand and moved it down to her breast.

  Sands sat up. "That’s enough," he said with mock gruffness, tucking the flannel sheet firmly under her chin. "We keep doing this, there’ll be no minister to receive the congregation."

  She smiled lazily, watching him pull on his shoes. "So what’s the sermon for today, Reverend?"

  "New beginnings." He stood and uncovered his black waistcoat from a tumble of stockings, petticoats, and drawers. "Appropriate for the coming decade. For Mrs. Rose. For us too, come to think on it. Will you be there?"

  "Of course." She turned to one side, propping herself with an elbow. "And while you’re preaching at the pulpit, you can imagine what I’m thinking about in the pews."

  "And you can imagine what I’m thinking about during the hymns."

  He finished buttoning the waistcoat, glanced around, and spotted his gun belt on the cedar trunk. After buckling on the heavy leather belt, he returned to the bedside and sat once more, adding, "Number one-oh-six is for you, Inez." His eyes lingered on her lips a moment, then he bent down and swiftly kissed her nose.

  As he stood and shrugged into his evening coat, he asked, "Do you have an extra key?"

  "Extra…" She blinked. "In the table by the front door. Why?"

  He laughed at her cautious tone. "I don’t want to leave your door unlocked when I leave."

  "You’re making too much of all this."

  "No. Just being careful. There’s too much at stake. Especially now." He paused by the bedroom door. "The get-together for the Roses is after the service."

  "I remember." She started to drift off.

  "I’ll walk you and the Roses home afterward." He closed the bedroom door behind him.

  She rolled onto her back, listening. The front door squeaked open and shut. A key turned and the bolt shot home.

  Inez floated in a pleasant surfeit of warmth, remembering her first encounters with Reverend Sands and her initial suspicions, which now seemed so distant, so foreign. How long ago? Not even a month.

  A month.

  Her smile faded. She counted backward, trying to recall the last day…

  "Damn!" Inez leaped from the bed. She grabbed the wrapper hanging on the bedpost and snugged it tight around her as she hastened to the cedar chest. Throwing it open, she began feverishly tossing out items of clothes, searching. It must be here. I haven’t used it since—

  Her hand closed on the small case holding her female syringe. Relief surged through her. But the various nostrums she had used with it were gone, casualties of her empty marriage bed.

  The pantry.

  She flew barefooted to the kitchen and fumbled along the pantry shelves, pushing aside tins of milk, coffee, and tea and almost knocking over the bottle of vinegar. Inez hugged its dusty brown glass with the fervor of a drowning man grabbing a life line and tried to recall whether vinegar was an effective douche or not.

  I don’t remember. But it’s this or water.

  Back in the bedroom, she filled the syringe with shaking hands and lay back on the bed, steeling herself for the cold liquid intrusion. Afterward, she moved off the bed and crouched over the chamber pot.

  From this bleak position, she stared through the tangled snakes of her loose hair, trailing to the floor, and remembered the aftermath of her plunge to the swimming hole twenty years earlier.

  A groom from her family’s stables had discovered her and hauled her back to the main house and her mother’s wrath. Her mother, bedridden for months, had stood before her, one hand clutching her dressing chair, the other supporting her swollen belly.

  "Inez! Look at you!"

  Inez bent her head to hide defiant eyes, dark hair dripping pond water onto the inlaid mahogany floors.

  "If your father were here, he’d whip you so hard you wouldn’t sit for a week." Her mother paced with a heavy, rolling gait, her fury building. "A lady does not jump into a swimming hole. Or ride astride. Or whistle. Or argue with her betters." She winced, gripped her belly, and sank onto the bed. "A lady must, above all, protect her virtue and reputation. If you continue this way, you will have neither."

  She rocked, hazel eyes boring in on her unrepentant daughter. "Your father and aunt want to send you to boarding school. Your Aunt Agnes says you’ve too good a mind to waste. Your father," her voice sank, contemptuous, "thinks the discipline will break your spirit. He doesn’t see how much like him you really are. Made of iron and steel, both of you."

  Inez looked up from her muddy toes to see her mother weeping. Terrified at last, Inez ran to her, promising she’d be a lady from now on.

  "Inez, the baby’s coming soon—please God, a son—and I can’t handle you anymore." Her mother smoothed back Inez’s tangled hair with a tender but despairing touch. "When your father returns, I will tell him he may send you to board in the fall. Dear child, if only you’d been born a boy."

  Inez’s sister Harmony was born soon thereafter. The last of seven children, the only other besides Inez to survive childbirth and infancy.

  Two decades later, Inez opened her hand and watched the empty syringe roll across the floor. She covered her eyes and listened to a far-away roar grow closer.

  The approaching gale howled across the broad Arkansas Valley in the high Rocky Mountains and hurtled itself upslope to Leadville, rattling windows, setting unseasoned wood planks creaking, insinuating itself through thousands of unchinked cracks.

  The storm had arrived.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Dawn increased toward morning while Inez yanked the snarls out of her hair and listened to the winds wail. By the time she left for church, the gales had diminished to occasional gusts and the snow fell in earnest. The dark gray sky seemed in mourning, promising only sorrow.

  She stepped into the sanctuary of the church. The service was yet to start; Reverend Sands was nowhere to be seen. She moved up the pews and slid in beside Susan, Emma, and Joey.

  "How was the dance?" Susan’s cheeks shone red from the cold.

  Inez searched for the right word. "Wonderful," she said faintly.

  "Wonderful?" Susan prompted.

  "Yes. For the most part."

  Susan looked disappointed at her brevity.

  Inez suspected she didn’t present the appearance of a belle returning from a ball. Her eyes felt gritty from the stinging snow, and the alcohol and lack of sleep were catching up with her. She folded back the hood of her cloak and scanned the pews.

  No Cat DuBois. No Angel. None of Cat’s girls.

  Harry.

  Impeccably groomed as always. Yet there was something slightly out-of-focus about him. Haggard shadows around his ice blue eyes led her to believe he had also spent a sleepless and dissipated night. He glanced toward her. Inez turned away, not willing to read his expression any further nor let him read hers.

  In the front pew, Mrs. Titweiller whispered to a gaggle of women. In unison, they turned toward Inez, noses pointing like hunting dogs flushing out game.

  Inez lifted her chin and glared back, daring them to find easier prey.

  "Good morning! Today we greet the last Sunday of the year and the decade, and prepare for the next." Reverend Sands mounted to the pulpit and sorted his
notes as whispers and coughs faded to silence. He appeared as refreshed as if he’d had a full night’s sleep.

  "We have a change in our order of service. We’ll begin with hymn number one hundred and six." Above a sea of heads bowed over hymnals, Reverend Sands smiled at Inez.

  The stinging in her cheeks intensified. She thumbed through the pages until one-aught-six jumped out. The voices of the congregation rose in chorus. "Through all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing. It sounds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing!"

  Outside, snow and wind hissed. Inside, music enveloped Inez. "What though the tempest ’round me roars, I know the truth, it liveth. What though the darkness ’round me close, songs in the night it giveth. No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love prevails in heav’n and earth, how can I keep from singing!"

  999

  The somber social over, Reverend Sands escorted Inez, Emma, and Joey out behind the church to a lean-to that sheltered the same buggy as the previous evening, but hitched to a different horse. The reverend climbed into the front seat next to Inez, remarking, "It seemed a good day to hold onto a rig."

  His arm brushed hers as he reached for the reins. Despite the layers of wool between them, it might as well have been his skin sliding across hers. He clucked to the horse, then glanced back at Emma and Joey in the rear seat. "Looks like a big storm. Hope it doesn’t delay your departure from Leadville, Mrs. Rose."

  "As long as the passes stay open, the sleigh-coaches drive through all but the most impossible weather." Emma tugged Joey’s cap over his ears.

  Mid-afternoon was surrendering to early dusk by the time they reached Emma’s home. As the reverend set the brake, the curtain of snow thinned long enough for Inez to think she saw something not quite right about the front of the house.

  "I’ll come with you." She descended from the rig. The snow fell harder.

  She was nearly to the porch when the driving snow and wind paused. The curtain lifted. Behind Inez, Emma gasped.