Page 31 of The Promise of Jenny Jones

Conflicting views confused her, so she turned her mind to Uncle Ty instead, wondering if she would ever see him again.

Here, too, her mind tugged in differing directions.

Uncle Ty had been nice to her, and she liked him well enough, but she had an uneasy sense that Uncle Ty didn’t particularly like her in return.

This suspicion upset her badly. All her life she had been fussed over, petted, loved. Without a doubt, she knew that she had been the center of her mother’s life. She was her aunt Tete’s favorite. Until tonight, she had unquestioningly believed that she was loved and adored by all her cousins.

That she might not be loved by all the people in her life was a new and frightening thought that shocked her deeply.

Brushing a tear from her cheek, she closed her eyes tightly and wished the day’s exhaustion would carry her into slumber. But as her thoughts quieted, she became aware of low, tense voices rising and falling around the campfire.

“We know what has to be done,” she heard Jorje say. The harshness underlying his voice sharpened her attention. “Since the snakes didn’t solve our problem, I say we do it ourselves.”

“For the love of God. She’s just a child!” This was Favre, who had shot the snake before it struck, who had danced with Graciela on her last name day.

“Not so loud.”

“Luis and Emil have decided a certain person has to die,” Favre said, speaking so quietly that Graciela had to strain to hear. “So let them kill her.”

“And let them inherit all of Don Antonio’s money?” Tito said sharply. “Is that what you want?”

Graciela’s breath stopped and gathered around a pounding heart. They were speaking of her grandfather Antonio. And herself. Jenny had been right. Her cousins wanted her dead.

The idea of this was too devastating, too enormous and unthinkable to comprehend. Stiff with fear and fresh shock, she lay in the darkness, gripping her blankets and shaking.

“You’re fools if you think we’ll ever see a centavo of Don Antonio’s wealth.

” Carlos rose to his feet, silhouetted by the dying flames.

He waved his arms in an angry gesture. “Already Luis and Chulo are planning their journey to Norte America to tell Don Antonio that his daughter and granddaughter are dead. Who do you think Don Antonio’s new heirs will be?

You’re loco if you think Luis and Chulo will remember to mention us. ”

Jorje also stood. “That’s why I say we take care of this problem.

” He cast a glance over his shoulder toward Graciela’s bedroll.

“And we insist that one of us goes with Luis and Chulo, then they can’t cut us out.

We found her. If we”—he shot another glance over his shoulder—“dispose of this problem, then we have Luis and Chulo right here.” He pounded a fist in the palm of his hand.

“She’s a Barrancas,” Favre snarled. “Like you. Like me. You would kill a member of your own family? I spit on all of you.”

In the sudden silence, Graciela heard the thunder of her heart knocking against her ribs.

A torrent of tears streamed down her cheeks, and the hands gripping her blankets shook like dry twigs.

Panic and fear squeezed her chest accompanied by an ache that she was too young to recognize as the pain of betrayal.

What could she do? There was nowhere to run, no place to hide. Wiping frantically at the tears wetting her face, she tried to think of a way to escape, but no answers came.

“Help me,” she whispered, curling her fingers around the locket pinned to her chest. She could not have said to whom she addressed the urgent plea. To God? To the tiny portrait of her mother? Or did she hope that Jenny would find her again as she had in Durango?

When dawn tinted the sky with streaks of pink and blue, she rose reluctantly and silently, her eyes dull and bruised from lack of sleep. Now she, too, held herself distant and withdrawn. Now she refused to meet her cousins’ eyes for fear they would glimpse how profoundly frightened she was.

“Time to vamoose, ” Jorje announced after they had eaten and packed the saddlebags. He extended his arms to lift her onto his horse, but Graciela shook her head.

“I want to ride with Favre,” she whispered.

“As you wish,” Cousin Jorje agreed with a shrug. He gave Favre a long, narrowed look before he mounted his horse.

With a flourish, Favre bowed before her, then lifted her onto his saddle and swung up behind her.

Graciela longed to thank him for his words on her behalf, but she feared admitting she’d overhead part of their conversation.

She could almost hear Jenny saying: protect your backside, give nothing away.

When they stopped at midday to seek shelter from the blazing sun, Graciela shaded her eyes and anxiously scanned the rolling, empty horizon. Buzzards circled a cluster of cacti to the north, and she spotted a hawk diving through wavy shimmers of heat floating near the ground, but she saw no riders.

“Are you worried that the red-haired witch is following?” Cousin Jorje asked, handing her a goatskin filled with water.

“A little,” Graciela said, not looking at him.

He laughed and puffed out his chest. “They won’t follow.” When he said “they” she remembered that Uncle Ty had joined Jenny. “Us,” he said, thrusting forward four raised fingers. “Them.” Two fingers lifted on the other hand, and he laughed again.

Slowly, Graciela nodded. Her heart sank beneath the weight of his words. Before she stepped into the shade, she again searched the horizon, lingering on the dips and rises.

Her cousins smoked or dozed beneath the shade of their sombreros. Occasionally they spoke in low voices among themselves. Made drowsy by the heat and a lack of sleep, Graciela found a spot near a low bush and had drifted into a light, restless slumber when two hands closed around her throat.

Her eyes flew open and she struggled to sit up, grabbing at the fingers circling her neck.

“It would be so easy,” Carlos murmured near her ear.

His fingers tightened steadily, pressing into her flesh and Graciela choked, fighting to draw a full breath. Black dots spun in front of her eyes and her lungs burned before a blur flashed across the side of her vision.

Favre’s body crashed into Carlos, knocking him away from her.

She toppled backward and lay where she had fallen, gasping for air.

When she could breathe again, she sat up, swallowing gingerly, and stared at the two men rolling and fighting in the desert dirt.

Jorje and Tito stood across from her, also watching, hands on the pistols at their hips.

Graciela didn’t know what happened because she turned away, her stomach churning, and she didn’t look at the fighting men again until she heard a gunshot.

When she dared to look, Favre lay in the dust, his bloody face unrecognizable.

Carlos sprawled on his back, Favre’s knife buried to the hilt in his chest.

Gasping, choking on horror and tears, Graciela doubled over and vomited in a clump of low cacti.

Jorje swore as Tito checked both men, then looked up shaking his head. He snarled something at Graciela, but her ears still rang from the shot and she didn’t hear.

She was too frightened to look at him or Jorje, and her throat made no sound when she tried to speak.

She darted one last horrified glance at the blood soaking into Favre’s poncho, then she ran a few steps onto the desert and stood with her back to the camp, shaking as if the hot breeze were a gale.

She felt as she had when she was ill, hot and cold at the same time.

Her teeth chattered. These were not the laughing cousins who had danced with her and teased her at the hacienda.

She didn’t know these men; they might have been strangers.

Gingerly she touched the bruises beginning to appear where Carlos’s fingers had circled her throat, and she swallowed the dark taste of bile and fear.

Without Favre, she was at the mercy of Tito and Jorje. Sooner or later they would kill her. She sensed this. She knew this.

Deeply frightened, she scanned the empty land baking in the midday heat. Jenny had promised, she told herself, and Jenny never broke a promise. Jenny would come and save her. She had to believe this. Jenny must be out there. Somewhere.

When she turned dragging footsteps back to the campsite, Jorje and Tito were hacking shallow graves out of the hard desert floor. She clung to thoughts of Jenny whenever she noticed Tito or Jorje studying her with hooded, speculative eyes.

She prayed that Jenny would arrive while she was still alive.

“There!”

Ty followed Jenny’s pointing finger, nodded, and they both urged their horses forward and down into the next dry gulch. Jumping to the ground, they crawled up the far side of the arroyo, and Ty wrestled a spyglass out of its case.

He spotted them at once, resting in the thin shade of some stunted scrub oaks. Silently, he handed over the glass. “She’s unharmed.”

“So far,” Jenny muttered. Stretching out on her stomach, she propped one elbow in the dirt and steadied the glass. A minute later her forehead dropped against her arm. “Thank God!” Lifting the spyglass again, she peered intently. “I only see two men.” She returned the glass to Ty.

“But four horses,” he said. “The other two are somewhere nearby.”

Ty slid down the incline and lifted a canteen from his saddle.

After a long swallow, he wet his throat and face.

The temperature must be near one hundred degrees.

His shirt was soaked with sweat. Not speaking, he watched Jenny break twigs from the scrub oak and construct a shaded area by draping her saddle blanket over the twigs, which she had driven into the ground.

Sensing that an offer to assist would offend her, he waited and watched her try and fail until the shelter was constructed. The view wasn’t unpleasant. Sweat molded her trousers around shapely buttocks, and her wet shirt outlined two handfuls of breast.