Page 12 of The Promise of Jenny Jones

Halfway to the stables, he spotted the muchacho who had carried his message to the hacienda. The boy slipped off his burro and ran forward, waving an envelope. Without breaking stride, Ty flipped the boy a coin and continued toward the lanterns hanging outside the stables.

After extracting two thin pages covered in flowing female script; he held them to the light.

Dona Theodora Barrancas y Talmas begged permission to inform him that her great-niece, Senora Marguarita Sanders, and Senora Sanders’s young daughter had unfortunately succumbed to the coughing disease three days since.

Dona Theodora castigated her own rudeness but as much as she longed to offer her great-niece’s brother-in-law the hacienda’s hospitality, grief prevented her from opening her doors.

She pleaded for understanding and prayed that Senora Sanders would forgive her for not receiving him at this desolate moment of dual tragedy.

In other words: Leave. You no longer have reason to be here.

For an instant, he considered returning to California. He could show Dona Theodora’s message to Robert. Marguarita and the child were dead.

Ty crumpled the pages in his first. Frowning, he glanced back at the lights shining out of the cantina.

Inside, Cousin Emil was striving to incite the village men to rescue Graciela from a witch. Yet, Dona Theodora stated that Ty’s niece had died with her mother.

The answer came in a flash. With Marguarita dead—and all parties agreed on that point—Graciela became Robert’s heir. And Don Antonio Barrancas’s heir.

His narrowed gaze slid down the squalid shacks flanking the main street of the village.

What would Robert pay to ransom his daughter?

Would he sell the cattle? The ranch? Ty didn’t doubt it.

He wasn’t as certain about Don Antonio, as Barrancas had never accepted or acknowledged Robert and Marguarita’s marriage.

Still, the old man might turn sentimental when he learned his daughter was dead and this child was his only surviving family.

If she survived. It occurred to Ty that the child’s death would lead to an inheritance which was a less cumbersome solution than kidnaping and ransom.

The promise of a hefty inheritance or ransom would strongly appeal to villagers living in shacks built of sticks and mud. If honor didn’t motivate them, Emil would eventually relinquish shares in the windfall and let greed work its persuasion.

Grim-faced, Ty saddled his horse and jerked hard on the cinch.

The Barrancas cousins didn’t know it yet, but a new player had entered the game. If they thought Dona Theodora’s message had duped him into returning to California without Graciela, they were in for an unpleasant surprise.

No longer was he in Mexico on a grudging errand undertaken on behalf of his brother.

It was personal now. Dona Theodora had lied to him.

He’d tasted Chulo’s fists in Verde Flores.

He doubted he was wrong about the cousins wanting Graciela for evil purposes.

In the span of a few minutes, his motivations had altered.

Giving the cantina a wide berth, he rode out of the no-name village, grateful for a sliver of moon to illuminate the trail.

Near dawn, to keep himself awake, he focused his thoughts on the red-haired woman who had taken Graciela.

What was her game? The people in the cantina referred to her as a murderess and implied that it was she who deserved the execution that had killed Marguarita.

This didn’t strike him as entirely implausible, he thought, rubbing a hand across his jaw.

However, at this point, his mind locked.

Was the red-haired woman rescuing his niece?

Or had she, too, seen a way to profit by kidnaping the child?

Or, and this seemed extremely unlikely, had Marguarita known a woman convicted of murder well enough to entrust her daughter into the murderess’s keeping?

At present he lacked enough information to form a clear judgment of the situation.

As the glow of dawn revealed the low hazy silhouette of Verde Flores, Ty’s lips thinned to a hard straight line.

The Barrancas cousins were not going to hold his niece for ransom, and neither was the red-haired woman if that was her intention.

This he swore on his father’s grave. If he had to track her into the maw of hell, he would do it.

He was not returning to California without his niece.

When the sun climbed out of the desert, Ty was sitting on a bench on the Verde Flores depot platform, hat pulled over his eyes, dozing while he waited for the first train south.

He no longer believed the red-haired woman had intended to go north. That had been a ruse meant to reach the cousins’ ears and send them chasing in the wrong direction. She’d intended to take the southbound train all along.

He would find her.

“Crud on a crust!” Jenny was unaccustomed to indecisiveness, and she didn’t handle it well. Nor was she a patient sort. Pressing her nose to the train window, she peered at cacti baking in the desert heat. “We’re stopped again.”

“They’re fixing the track,” Graciela said listlessly. She waved a torn paper fan in front of her heat red cheeks. “I haven’t had a bath since I left Aunt Tete,” she added in an accusing voice. “I want a bath.”

“Have we been on this fricking train for two days or three days?” No wonder Jenny felt ready to explode.

People weren’t made to sit in one spot for three fricking days.

Her tailbone hurt. The hot greasy food sold at various stops along the way was burning holes in her innards, and the heat trapped inside the car was cooking her outsides.

Chickens ran loose in the aisle and left strings of stench that fouled the air.

The noise of crying babies and bickering children were frazzling already frayed tempers.

“If we don’t get off this hell train, I’m going to do damage to someone or something.” Sweat pasted her bodice to her skin, and she pulled it away from her ribs with a grimace. She had to get off this train before she melted, and she had to figure out a plan.

None of the villages and towns they had chugged through had been large enough to hide a flea.

Jenny wasn’t sure if hiding out was the safest scheme anyway.

Instinct insisted that she should jump on the next train headed north, but what if Luis and Chulo had mustered reinforcements and were sitting in the shade on the Verde Flores depot waiting for her to pass through again?

Which she would have to do if she backtracked.

Chewing a thumbnail, she glared out the window at the heat waves shimmering above grey-brown dirt.

She wished she knew what the damned cousins were doing.

Were they in pursuit? Were they on a train somewhere behind this one?

Or were they waiting for her to return to Verde Flores?

This time there wouldn’t be some foolhardy cowboy to help her.

She’d be outnumbered. The cousins would grab Graciela as easily as plucking a flower out of a pot.

Right now, she thought, covering her eyes with a sooty hand, she was tempted to hand them the kid and good riddance.

Graciela was driving her fricking crazy.

Graciela wouldn’t do what she was told, squirmed constantly in her seat, complained about everything, and if Jenny heard the word “why” one more time, she would go raving, flaming berserk.

“I want to go home,” Graciela said mournfully. Accusation pulled her lips into a pout.

“Shut up. I’m trying to think.”

“You have chicken manure on your shoes.”

This was true. It was also a great mystery how the kid could walk to the curtained-off latrine without stepping in offal or tobacco juice but Jenny could not.

Jenny scowled at the strands of heat-damp hair sticking to the sides of Graciela’s superior little smirk.

She was considering slapping that smirk into next Sunday when the train lurched, belched black smoke, and crashed forward. “Thank God.”

Jenny waved down the conductor. “Por favor, Senor, what is the next town of any size and when do we get there?” His boots, she noticed, were as frosty with chicken crap as her own were.

If there was any justice, some of the conductor’s chicken manure would brush off on Graciela’s hem. It didn’t happen.

“ Buenos tardes, Senora, Senorita. We’ll reach Durango on schedule,” the conductor announced blandly, “around seven this evening.”

“On schedule my butt,” Jenny muttered in English.

The train had spent more time stopped for one reason or another than in rolling forward.

At this rate, the train wouldn’t reach Mexico City, its final destination, until the next millennium.

She would have said so except millennium was a new word, and she wasn’t sure how to pronounce it in English let alone Spanish.

Frowning, she watched the conductor kick aside a rooster, then proceed down the aisle. The question was: Should she stay on the train all the way to Mexico City or get off in Durango?

“A lady does not bite her fingernails.”

“Shut up.”

“I hate you! My mama never told me to shut up.”

That did it. Jenny could not spend another day confined with a hot cranky kid, choking on the stench of chickens and an overflowing latrine.

She could not endure another night trying to sleep sitting up with Graciela sprawled across her lap.

For some unfathomable reason, Graciela weighed as much as a freight wagon when she was asleep.

“We’re getting off in Durango,” she decided.

Even her stomach rebelled at heading farther south toward Mexico City when she needed to go north.

At some point she had to risk getting off this train and turning herself and Graciela around.

Durango was as good a place as any to start putting things right.

“I miss my mama.”