Gunslinger's Child

  Gunslinger’s Child

  Cathryn Clare

  To my editor Anne Canadeo, with thanks for her sharp eye and many good suggestions

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 1

  Quinn McAllister took off his helmet and frowned. At first he’d thought his ears were ringing from the sudden silence after he’d shut the motorcycle off. The hushed quiet of Stockbridge, Illinois, could be a shock to anyone used to the noise of a city.

  But the ringing got louder, and after a moment he figured out that the sound was coming from the old St. John house. An alarm, he thought. A smoke detector maybe, or a burglar alarm.

  He had planned to take this slowly, maybe asking the kid raking leaves next door whether old Doc St. John still lived in the place, maybe just waiting until he caught a glimpse of somebody entering or leaving. But the alarm worried him. Nobody seemed to be responding to it.

  And then he saw smoke, curling up in front of a window in the kitchen. That was enough to get him off his bike and up the front walk, wincing a little as he tried too fast to stretch out the kinks from the three-hour drive down from Chicago.

  The front door was still painted deep green, trimmed with white. In spite of the shrill alarm bell inside the house, Quinn paused for a moment, shocked at how utterly familiar this was. He knew exactly how the heavy brass door knocker would feel in his hand, solid and cool and imposing. As if it were testing anyone who came calling here, Quinn had always thought. Are you worthy to be associating with one of Stockbridge’s best families?

  Old Dr. St. John had considered Quinn an acceptable visitor ten years ago. So had David St. John and his sister, Carrie. They had all been very wrong.

  “Come on, answer the door, damn it.” Quinn lifted the knocker again, and brought it down harder against the door. He could hear voices inside the house. Kids’ voices, he thought, as distant high-pitched laughter mixed with the insistent ringing of the alarm.

  How likely was it that Carrie still lived here, with a family of her own? Quinn’s stomach clenched at the thought, and the familiar ache in his left side caught at him. You knew it was possible, he reminded himself. You could be about to run into her husband, her children. You knew it could happen.

  Well, no matter who lived here now, they didn’t seem to realize that they had a fire in their kitchen. Quinn abandoned the front door, and sprinted around to the annex where the kitchen was. He found the back porch door unlocked, just as it had always been.

  The kitchen was full of smoke, roiling up from the stove in the corner. “Damn!” Quinn muttered, as he propped the door open and set his helmet down on the counter. The bitterness of the atmosphere clutched at his throat, and he coughed. Coughing was one of the things that hurt his side the worst, and he gritted his teeth against the sharp pain as he headed into the room, waving his arms to clear the smoke and moving quickly toward the stove.

  The moment before he got there, he heard her.

  “Just turn it off,” Carrie St. John was calling, clearly, from another room. “And open a window. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Quinn stopped dead. Was she calling to him? Her tone was matter-of-fact, unworried. And it still had that slight huskiness that was as smoky as the air he was breathing and sexier than anything he’d ever been able to imagine. He tried to move, to shut off the stove as he’d set out to do. But the shock of hearing Carrie, of suddenly knowing he was so close to her, kept him rooted where he stood.

  Until the sound of approaching footsteps got him moving. He took in a deep breath, coughed again, and clamped an elbow against the sharp pain in his side as he straightened up, bracing himself for the sight of Carrie St. John coming toward him out of the smoke.

  The figure hurrying into the kitchen was the right size, compact and slender, but it wasn’t Carrie. It was a teenager, dressed in a baggy shirt and jeans. She stood on tiptoe to shut off the ceiling alarm, then turned toward the stove. At the sight of Quinn, she gasped.

  “It’s all right,” he said quickly. “I heard the alarm and came to see what was burning.”

  The girl put a hand to her chest. “You scared me,” she said, and added, “Are you a parent?”

  Quinn couldn’t imagine what the question meant. “A parent?” he repeated. “No, I’m—” What the hell was he, anyway? If he said I’m a ghost out of the past, the girl would just look at him as if he were nuts. Maybe he was, coming back here after all this time.

  He closed his eyes. A year ago, lying in a Chicago hospital room and realizing just how close he’d come to dying, this had all seemed very simple. He needed to come back to Stockbridge. He needed to find out what he could about David St. John’s death. And he needed—more desperately than he’d admitted to himself until a teenager’s bullet had nearly ended his own life—to see Carrie again.

  “I came to see Carrie,” he said finally. The girl nodded, accepting the explanation as she moved to turn off the stove and get a window open.

  “She’s almost done,” she said. “Don’t worry about the smoke. She does this every week or so. You’d think she’d give in and stop trying to cook, but—well, you know Carrie. She always thinks things are going to work next time. This’ll clear in a minute.”

  And then the girl was gone, leaving Quinn alone in the kitchen, rocked by his own memories of sitting here with David St. John, watching Carrie make and then burn an entire batch of peanut butter cookies. His throat ached from more than just smoke as he remembered how amused she’d been at her own ineptitude in the kitchen, and the way her glossy brown hair had moved when she’d tilted her head back to laugh.

  “Apparently I’m the first person in the history of Stockbridge High to be flunking Home Ec,” she’d said. “Mrs. Pearson says the janitors have a bet about how many more things I can set on fire between now and the end of the year.”

  Quinn felt quite sure she had attempted—and incinerated—more batches of cookies since then, and had still remained optimistic that one of these days she would catch on to the secret of how to get it right. That hopefulness of hers, that eagerness to reach out for the next time, was one of the things he’d loved most about her.

  And now he’d come back to remind her of the time in her life when things had gone most disastrously wrong. What right did he have, really, to disrupt the happy present that Carrie had obviously created for herself?

  “No right at all,” he muttered out loud. “Just these questions inside me that won’t let me alone.”

  He took a chair at the table and watched the smoke in the kitchen slowly clearing. There was a mirror over the sink, and he could see his face in it. You look like you came to demand the family silver, McAllister, he told himself. Lighten up, or she’s not likely to give you the time of day.

  Quinn took in a big lungful of air, concentrating on the impossible task of “lightening up” in this house where his most painful and most exhilarating memories were waiting for him around every corner. His breathing was almost back to normal when he heard Carrie again.

  There were two sets of footsteps coming across the big front foyer, and two voices echoing in the tall open space. One of them was a child’s. “If it burned, then we have to have pizza, right?” Quinn could hear laughter under the cajoling words, as though this was a familiar family joke.

  “Not necessarily. We could just make a big salad,” Carrie teased.

  “M om...” came the reply.

  “Hey, at least there’s no danger of overcooking it.”

  “But it’s Friday night.”

  “So?”

  “We can’t have salad on Friday night. It’s boring.”

  Carrie laughed then, and Quinn felt the warmth of the sound spread right through him. She still sounded as though the world was a good place and she was glad to be in it. Was it possible, after the tragedy she’d lived through, that she had kept hold of the simple pleasures her life had to offer her?

  He wanted to believe it was true. He needed to believe it, needed to know that promises weren’t always broken, that some dreams could come true. The music of Carrie’s laughter had always given him a kind of hope he hadn’t quite known how to handle. It had offered him a glimpse of something he didn’t fully understand but had clung on to during some of his darkest moments.

  All of that was still here, in the throaty sound of Carrie’s laughter. “You’re right,” she was saying now. “Salad is kind of boring for Friday night. Why don’t we call Susannah and see what she and the girls are doing? Maybe we could all go to The Kettle and have spaghetti.”

  “All right.”

  The voice was a boy’s, Quinn thought. The kid came into the kitchen first, enthusiastically bounding into the room. He was small boned but sturdy, like his mother, and he had Carrie’s brown eyes. His hair was lighter, almost a tawny blond, and his jawline was longer, more pronounced than Carrie’s. But their grin was the same. Quinn’s heart started to beat faster at the boy’s version of that wide, all-embracing smile he remembered so well.

  Carrie was a few steps behind her son. She was laughing again. “Someday, kiddo, you’re going to understand why I get so tired trying to keep up with you on Friday nights,” she was saying. “After a week of looking after little people who never slow down—”

  The boy had launched himself almost as far as the kitchen table, and Carrie was at the doorway. They saw Quinn at the same moment.

  “Hey,” the kid said. “Who’re you?”

  For a long moment Quinn could almost feel the silence in the room around them. He watched the smile leave Carrie’s face, and saw her reach for the door frame as if she needed its support. He shifted slightly in his chair, bracing himself to meet whatever her response might be.

  At first, he couldn’t tell what she was feeling. She was looking at him as if she weren’t quite sure he was real.

  “Quinn?”

  His name came out as a question, a whisper. Something loosened itself in Quinn at the sound of it, something he’d worked very hard to keep tied up and under control. He found himself breathing faster as he looked into Carrie’s eyes. It was an effort to keep from saying what was running through his mind. I needed to come back here. I needed to hear you say my name again.

  Instead, he said slowly, “Hello, Carrie,” and nodded at her son. “Hi.”

  The boy nodded back. Carrie didn’t move. She was wearing an outfit that made her look almost as young as the teenaged girl who’d been in the kitchen earlier—an oversize blue sweater over black leggings and a pair of sneakers. She looked as slender, as vibrant as she’d been at eighteen.

  Quinn thought he’d remembered every detail of that small, strong body. But he hadn’t.

  He’d forgotten the way her wide, generous mouth turned down at one corner when she was thinking hard.

  Even in his wildest imagination, aching for Carrie in the dark nights when he couldn’t stop thinking about her, he hadn’t been able to picture how long the dark sweep of her eyelashes actually was, fringing those unforgettable brown eyes.

  He hadn’t pictured the faint lines of laughter and pain at the corners of her eyes and mouth, either, because those hadn’t been there ten years ago. On the surface, Carrie St. John’s youthful radiance hadn’t changed. But she knew things now that she hadn’t known at eighteen. Quinn could see the proof of it in her face.

  She finally spoke. And when she did, there was no mistaking her reaction to the sight of her brother’s one-time friend, her one-time lover.

  She was afraid.

  Quinn didn’t understand it, but it was impossible to miss the fear that was making her voice tremble as she said, “Who let you in?”

  He nodded at the back door. “I saw the smoke and heard the alarm,” he said. “I knocked, but no one answered.”

  “We don’t—use the front door anymore.”

  She spoke as if her thoughts were somewhere else. Quinn frowned, and was about to speak when Carrie turned to her son. “Davey,” she said, “I want you to go and wash up. I’ll call Susannah and see about dinner.”

  Davey. Of course she would have named her son after the brother she’d lost. He wondered how old the boy was. Eight, maybe? He didn’t trust his own guesses about kids’ ages anymore. Too many of the young boys he met nowadays were packing deadly weapons. It tended to make them look a lot older than they really were.

  There was something familiar in the way Davey was setting his jaw now, getting ready to argue with his mother about the necessity of soap and water. That wasn’t Carrie’s expression, Quinn thought. Was it possible Davey’s father was someone he’d known when he’d been here before? Some high school classmate, perhaps?

  “How come I have to wash up?” The boy looked from Carrie’s face to Quinn’s, obviously picking up on the fact that Quinn wasn’t just a casual caller.

  Carrie walked to where her son stood and bent over to his level with her hands on his shoulders. The easy, motherly gesture made Quinn ache unexpectedly inside. You knew she might have a family, he reminded himself yet again. She always said she wanted a lot of kids.

  “You have to wash up,” she was saying, “because I’m asking you to.” There was a quiet force in her words, clearly conveying the message that this wasn’t something she wanted to argue about. Quinn wondered how the hell she managed to do that and still sound so gentle.

  “I want you to get changed, too,” she was going on. “Those pants are overdue for a trip to the washing machine.”

  “Mom...”

  The protest was halfhearted. Carrie cut it off by planting a quick kiss on Davey’s forehead and then giving him a little push back out into the foyer. The boy hesitated, unsure about the undercurrents flowing between his mother and this tall stranger in the blue bomber jacket. Then he took off toward the main staircase. His exuberant footsteps echoed in the big open space.

  Quinn waited until the sound had faded. “Either your father’s not still around or he’s revised his policy on running in the house,” he said.

  “My father died several years ago.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, but he could still hear that thread of anxiety running through it. “Quinn, whatever you’re doing here...”

  She was trying to get rid of him, he realized. There had always been the possibility that she would refuse even to talk to him, refuse to listen to his reasons for coming back.

  He couldn’t exactly blame her for that. But he wasn’t just going to get up and go, either. For Quinn McAllister, the road back to this place had been a long and rocky one. He wasn’t leaving Stockbridge again until he’d done what he could to make amends for his mistakes of ten years before.

  “That’s a nice-looking kid,” he said, cutting in on top of Carrie’s words.

  “Thank you.” Her voice sounded stiff, as if he’d approached forbidden territory.

  Quinn went ahead anyway. “Where’s his father?” he asked.

  “I—we’re not together anymore.”

  “Divorced?”

  “Separated.” She said the word quickly. It was clearly something she didn’t want to go into.

  So life hadn’t lived up to all its promises for Carrie St. John, after all. And yet she was still able to summon up that lighthearted laughter she’d been sharing with her son in the moments before they’d seen Quinn. Where did it come from, he wondered, that ability to keep hold of love, to keep believing in a better tomorrow?

  “Only one child?”

  “Yes. Quinn, you’ve got to go. Coming here was a mistake.”

  “How do you know that, when I haven’t said why I’m here?”

  Something very much like panic came into her brown eyes. Quinn was speaking quietly, but with all the sincerity he could muster. The effort of doing that, of sounding calm when what he really wanted to do was stride across the kitchen and take Carrie St. John into his arms, made his voice shake a little. Carrie seemed to notice it, and to know what it meant.

  She looked away from him and he had the feeling she was searching for escape routes. She didn’t seem to find any. Her eyes, when they met his again, were anguished.

  “I don’t care why you came,” she said. “I just want you to leave.”

  “Not until you’ve at least heard what I have to say.”

  “Oh, God, Quinn...”

  She shook her head. He recognized the frustration in it, and remembered the gesture from all the times she’d confided in him about her brother, and how worried and frightened she was for David.

  “Carrie?” He got to his feet slowly, telling himself that he was crazy even to be thinking about moving closer to her. “What is it that’s scaring you? Your son’s already seen me, and if you don’t have a husband who’s going to come home and find me here—”

  His mind jumped ahead while he was speaking. Carrie was separated from her husband, but what if there was someone else in her life? Was that what she was afraid of? A confrontation between a long-ago flame and a current lover?

  It didn’t fit with what he knew about Carrie St. John, unless she’d changed more than he had thought. The Carrie he’d loved had faced life squarely, refusing to run when things got difficult. But ten years was a long time. And she’d had some good reasons to learn to be suspicious.

  “Is that what it is?” He tried hard to keep his voice neutral, but a defiant edge got into it anyway. I know I have no right to feel this way about you, he wanted to say. I never did have any right. It’s just something I can’t seem to do anything about.

  Carrie shook her head again. He didn’t think she was answering his question so much as cutting off the conversation. She seemed to have come to some kind of decision, judging from the new firmness in her expression.