No Other Will Do (Ladies of Harper's Station #1)(47)
“Corks,” Tori clarified.
“How marvelous!” Emma bent down to address the four-year-old on his level. “I’m certain you’ll be an excellent shot in no time.”
“As long as he doesn’t practice in the store. Right, Lewis?”
He nodded his blond head with admirable sedateness. “Yes, Mama.” Then he turned his impish eyes toward Emma and winked—or tried to. Both eyes closed instead of just the one, but the conspiratorial air was sufficiently conveyed despite the misfire. “I’ve already started collecting targets to practice with. I’ve got a whole box of ’em under my bed.”
“Do you?” Emma enthused. Lewis was such a darling boy. So full of life and adventurous spirit. And at the moment, the perfect excuse to postpone the awkward conversation that loomed on her horizon. “What kind of targets?”
“A curved piece of tree bark that’ll stand up all on its own. A scrap of ribbon with a button on the end my mama made me from the leftovers in her sewing box. It’ll dangle real good from a branch or fence post. She’s been saving empty food tins for me, too. Wanna see?” He took a few eager steps toward the narrow staircase that led to the sleeping rooms upstairs, but Tori stopped him.
“Not right now, sweetheart. Miss Chandler and Mama need to talk.”
His little face fell, making Emma want to go to him, scoop him up, and insist he show her all his treasures this very minute. But she didn’t. Tori was right. They really did need to talk.
“Why don’t you set them all up in your room,” Emma suggested, “and when your mama and I are done, I’ll come up and see if I can hit any of them.” She reached in her skirt pocket and pulled out her coin purse. After opening the clasp, she pulled out a copper coin and held it out to Lewis. “With this penny. You can practice with it while your mother and I visit. If you end up hitting more targets than I do when I come upstairs, you can keep the penny. What do you say?”
His short fingers closed around the coin. “Deal!” Lewis fisted his hand around the money, then spun around and shot up the stairs like a squirrel scrabbling up a tree with a stolen nut.
“Nicely done.” Tori quirked a half smile. “He’ll be up there for hours now, determined to win that coin from you.”
Emma chuckled softly. “Maybe not hours, but hopefully long enough for us to have a bit of privacy.”
Tori moved toward the stove. “I’ll get the tea.”
“I’ll fetch the cups.” Comfortable in Tori’s kitchen, Emma opened a high cupboard, stood on tiptoes, and pulled down two hand-painted teacups with saucers. Tori had kept the pair when the moss-rose tea set a customer ordered had arrived with a few pieces chipped.
The customer had refused three of the saucers and, as a consequence, the cups that went with them, one of which had a lost a handle. Tori had given her a discount, still managing to preserve a bit of a profit, then kept the remainders for herself. She couldn’t sell damaged goods, after all. And being a practical sort, she wasn’t one to let good china go unused. The handle-less cup held her thimbles and other small sewing notions atop her sewing cabinet in the parlor, and the worst of the chipped saucers was now a soap dish on her washstand upstairs. The other two perfectly whole cups and only slightly flawed saucers were used for company tea. Something Emma had missed in recent weeks.
Emma carefully set the china on the table and turned back for the sugar bowl. “It’s been too long since we’ve just sat together and visited, hasn’t it?”
Tori nodded as she added tea leaves to the kettle. “It has. All this business with masked outlaws, shootings, fires . . . it certainly interferes with a lady’s routine.”
Emma smiled then sobered. “I wish Malachi had had better luck running them to ground, but the scoundrels seem to know how to stay out of sight. At least Mal found more than the sheriff did.”
“Probably because he spent more than five minutes looking,” Tori said, her displeasure with Sheriff Tabor no secret. “Mr. Shaw stayed out there for hours. Of course, he nearly had them stopped before they left town.”
Emma turned, a brow raised in question. “He did?”
“Oh, yes.” Tori nodded as she collected her tea strainer from the drawer left of where Emma stood. “Lewis had rushed to the window to watch, thinking it all some kind of grand game. Frightened me half to death, seeing him standing in front of the big shop window as if the glass would keep him safe.”
Emma shivered, recalling the terror that had surged through her when the bullet had shattered her office window. If she hadn’t been at the back of the room, staring through the doorway and trying to figure out what she’d done to send Malachi running, she could have easily been struck. The thought of such a thing happening to Lewis . . . No, she wouldn’t even consider the notion.
“I pulled him away from the glass and made him duck down with me behind the wall closer to the counter,” Tori explained. “Horses’ hooves pounded as the riders raced past the store. I looked behind them, afraid for you, knowing that the bank and telegraph office were the only two buildings they could have been shooting at. That’s when I saw Mr. Shaw. He stood outside the bank, gun raised. He had them in his sights. But then someone screamed. And the shot missed.”
“Someone screamed?” Emma lifted one of the cups, holding it still while Tori poured the tea through the strainer. She placed the filled cup on its saucer and distractedly reached for the second, her mind paying little attention to the task. “Could you tell who it was?”