A Child to Melt the Sheriff’s Heart (Preview)

Prologue

May 21, 1868

Blossom Ridge, West Virginia

Elias Daggatt tried to contain his impatience.

“Sheriff,” he said, tempering his tone before his superior but unable, at the age of twenty-seven, to conceal his irritation at the older man’s cautious ways. “I remind you that I wore my nation’s uniform for four years. I fought from Philippi to the Shenandoah Valley. Under Sheridan,” he added, punctuating his claim with a brisk nod of his head. “I reckon I can handle that lone varmint who’s been terrorizing the townspeople from Boone to Wheeling.” He put his hand on the butt of his gun. “I can take care of this, Sheriff. You know I can.”

“I know you’ve got the swagger, Eli, and I know you can hit your mark. But we’re lawmen and we don’t shoot first unless the other fella has his gun out. You hear me?”

“We’re standing here flapping our jaws,” Eli pointed out. “Meanwhile, we’ve got good word that Roscoe Billings is coming this way. Either we’re gonna catch Billings or we’re not. If we’re not gonna bother to try, then let’s just close up shop and let him come on through and rob and kill like he’s done everywhere else. They say there’s a woman and baby dead because of him. You’ve got a daughter and a grandchild, you want them—”

“All right!” Sheriff Haines lost his patience. “You go on out and get him. And bring him back. I told you, don’t shoot unless he’s aiming at you. I want him put on trial for what he’s done, and I want the judge to decide what’ll be done with him. You listening to me?” he demanded.

Eli, who was loading ammunition into the rifle he’d taken from the gun cabinet, looked over his shoulder at the sheriff. He was smiling with the anticipation of action, and his brown eyes danced at the prospect.

He opened the door and went out of the office, but not before he heard Sheriff Haines’ voice yelling, “You need a wife and a family to settle you down! That’ll put some ballast in your britches!”

Eli wasn’t listening. He had been preparing for a chance to prove his mettle since becoming the town deputy. Eli went to his horse, Queenie, and placed the rifle in the saddle scabbard; his holster held two pistols, and he never went anywhere without his Bowie knife fastened to his belt in its case.

There were no trumpets or drums, no flags, as Eli went off to capture Billings, but the quick, hard thump of Queenie’s hooves on the backwoods paths that Eli took kept their own rhythm. Billings might know West Virginia; his exploits were famous throughout Wayne County.

But Eli knew his town’s side streets and alleys and those hidden back paths that traveled across the far boundaries of neighboring farms and plowed fields; they were as familiar to him as the fingers of his own hand. He was counting on cutting Billings off before he even crossed the boundary into town.

He found the spot he was looking for after he’d ridden just thirty minutes from town. The mountainside that bordered the town was alive with spring green tree foliage, branches all decked out in their prettiest shades of olive, sage, basil, mint, moss, and hues that he couldn’t even name. He spotted a tree closer to the road, its branches so heavy with leaves that they trailed upon the ground, offering cover to a man concealed behind its trunk.

Across the road was a field of flowers, their petals gently swaying in the pleasant spring breeze. A momentary memory of other fields Eli had seen, the grass slippery with blood from fallen soldiers, flashed into his mind and jarred his aplomb.

He blinked, and the gentle flowers, unmarred by war or bloodshed, returned to view. Eli exhaled, calming himself. The war was over. He wasn’t fighting the Rebs; he was waiting for an outlaw.

Then he heard sounds, a horse, the squeak of the leather of a saddle, the noise that was commonplace in town but not out here, where the road was less traveled. That brief spell of a war memory had cost Eli.

He began to move out of the circling branches, his gun drawn. He was as quiet as he knew how to be, but a branch cracked beneath his boot, and suddenly, from the road, he heard a man dismounting.

“Stop where you are!” Eli called. “I’m not aiming to kill you unless you try to kill me. But I’m bringing you in, Billings.”

A bullet whizzed past Eli, not near enough to strike him, but close enough to alert him that Billings, for it was surely he, knew where Eli was.

The time for concealment was past. Eli stepped into the open field, his gun raised. “Don’t add more murder to your record, Billings,” Eli warned. “I’m gonna take you in alive.”

A cackling and derisive sound of laughter that had no mirth in it answered him. “You ain’t the first one to say that,” Billings shouted. “You won’t be—” he said as he fired his gun, closer to Eli, “—the last!”

He was about thirty paces away, and Eli knew that Billings could make the shot. So could Eli.

The two guns fired almost simultaneously. The bullet from Billings’ gun rocketed into the ground near Eli’s boot, shooting up a tuft of dirt, but not striking Eli.

Eli’s gun went off a second later, and much closer. He saw Billings grab his chest as his gun fell to the ground. Then Billings’ body began to circle, not falling all at once but more like the life was spilling from him as he sank lower. The front of his shirt was red.

Eli kept his gun in hand as he ran toward Billings, reaching the outlaw seconds after he fell to the ground entirely. His sightless eyes stared up at Eli.

The silence was funereal, and when it suddenly cracked with the sound of a baby’s shrill cry, Eli was jolted out of a numbing reverie of dread. He bolted to his feet and ran to the horse waiting patiently in the middle of the road.

The crying continued, the sound of an infant who was outraged at being ignored. The sound came from a saddlebag. Eli opened it and saw a red-faced baby, its chubby face crinkled in fury, tears glittering on long, dark lashes that ringed the blue eyes staring at him.

Awkwardly, he scooped the child out of the saddlebag and held it tentatively against his chest. It was wearing nothing but a diaper, and the diaper was wet. It nuzzled his shirt front, rubbing its cheek against one of the points on his deputy’s star. Eli scrambled to hold it with one hand while he unfastened his star with the other.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly to the child who had stopped crying in its fascination with this new person, “I didn’t mean to kill him, your pa, I mean.” His voice thickened with an emotion he hadn’t felt before, something rife with blame. “Leastways, I reckon he’s your pa.”

Clumsily, Eli patted the feathery dark curls on the baby’s head. Unbidden and unwanted, the not-forgotten remembrance of someone with raven-black feathery curls entered Eli’s mind like her picture had been catapulted past the barricades of his determination to forget her. Ophelia McKenzie, with her bright blue eyes and dark tresses, her lofty ambitions, and her disdain for any of the local boys, Eli among them, who worshipped her from afar.

This was a day when life and death, the past and the future, randomly decided to intersect at the crossroads of Eli Daggatt’s soul. He couldn’t bring Billings back to life, and he couldn’t resurrect the war dead. He couldn’t forget pretty, ambitious Ophelia McKenzie, who left Blossom Ridge for a New York career while he was off fighting.

It was still possible, Eli reminded himself as he stood in the field, feeling very much alone, that this baby already had a name and a family. Maybe even a mother. But if not, then his silent vow had been witnessed by the baby and the flowers of the field, and Eli would keep his end of the bargain.

All that mattered now was this child, and there was only one thing he could do. “I’ll do what’s right,” he vowed, meeting the child’s expectant gaze once more. “I’ll raise you myself. If there’s no one else who has a claim on you, I won’t fail you.”

Sheriff Haines’ words returned to him, loud as a tolling bell in the silent afternoon. “I know you’ve got the swagger, Eli, and I know you can hit your mark.”

Only one of those remarks was true now. Eli knew his swagger was gone.

***

He left the dead man in the field of flowers and, baby in one arm, Queenie’s reins in the other hand, he returned to Sheriff Haines’ office, considerably more subdued than he’d been when he set out to capture the outlaw.

“Sheriff,” he said without a pause, “there’s a dead man outside of town, thirty minutes or so, just when you get to the field where Olcaster’s farm used to be.”

“What?” The sheriff spat out the question.

“I found this child… by the side of the road,” Eli said hurriedly.

“If the man’s dead, then I reckon we’d best fetch Art Kendrick,” Sheriff Haines decided quickly, the immediate crisis of a dead man in the forefront of his attention.

Artemus Kendrick was the undertaker, not the doctor.

Sheriff Haines stood up. “What did you do?” he demanded, his face stern. “Didn’t I tell you not to kill him? You were to bring him in. Alive. And what are you doing with a baby?”

“Billings, he was shooting at me,” Eli said again. His voice caught on the words, and he had to stop talking in order to regain his composure. He didn’t know why this death was so unlike the ones in war, but it was different.

“Who would abandon a child that young?” The sheriff’s displeasure shifted from Eli to the supposed parents who had left the baby on the road. He scratched his head in thought. “I haven’t heard of anyone in the family way who suddenly didn’t have a birth,” he mused as he considered the females in town.

Sheriff Haines knew everyone in town. He knew whose wheat crop had failed last season and whose tobacco had thrived. He’d lent a hand at planting time when a widow had no means of putting in seeds. He knew the secrets too, secrets he kept to himself unless it was important for Eli to share the news, and when that was the case, Eli was sworn to the confidence.

“I reckon we better get hold of Reverend Pearson,” Sheriff Haines decided. “He can bring the child over to the orphanage—”

“No—I’m—I’m going to raise her,” Eli stammered.

The sheriff studied him as if Eli were a stranger. “You? You’re going to raise a baby?”

“Yes. I found her, well, I heard her, as I was on my way back to town. I couldn’t leave her there—”

“You didn’t see anyone nearby? No one on the road who looked like they might have left the baby?” Sheriff Haines interrupted.

“No.” Eli didn’t want to disclose that he’d found this child in the saddlebags of the outlaw he’d killed.

The sheriff exhaled as if breathing were more trouble than he could manage. “How are you going to raise the baby? And how do you know the baby’s a girl anyway?”

Eli’s cheeks burned red beneath his bronzed tan. “I—she was sopping wet,” he said truthfully. “I had to put something dry on her.”

“Whoever left her on the side of the road didn’t leave any diapers for her? Did they leave a note or something?”

“No. Nobody left anything.” The saddlebag had a few things, nothing that seemed of use for an infant. “I used my bandana.”

“You used—” Sheriff Haines shook his head.

“It was the bandana or my shirt,” Eli exclaimed in exasperation. “I figured it was easier to go without the bandana.”

The sheriff scratched his neck as he considered this development.

“I reckon you did what you had to do,” he said gruffly. “At least where this little tyke is concerned. I’ll keep my ears to the ground. It coulda been a lot worse, an abandoned child and a shooting on the same road. Still, that place don’t see much in the way of people since the Olcasters died. I reckon your Aunt Rhody can help with caring for the child. She’ll likely know of someone who can nurse the baby. I suggest that you get yourself over to the general store and buy some material so your aunt can make diapers. In the meantime, I reckon Mattie has some she’ll spare under the circumstances. But first, tell Art he’s got a body to pick up. I’ll send word to the sheriffs in Wayne County that Billings won’t be troubling us anymore.”

***

Aunt Rhody was a good listener. He told her his story, the truth and all of it, rapidly, as the baby cried. Aunt Rhody had never had children of her own, but she was the town midwife nonetheless.

“We’ll talk about all of this later. It’s just as well if the sheriff thinks the baby was abandoned, but since she was found in Billings’ saddlebag, that means there’s some connection. It’s best no one finds out who the real father is; no child should have to grow up being known as the daughter of a killer. She’ll be safe and cared for here with us, and we’ll love her. Right now, this child must eat. I’ll go over to Sarey’s. Sarey’s nursing, and she’s got milk to spare.”

She put on her bonnet and left on her unlikely errand.

When Eli sat down in his chair again, he imitated his aunt’s motions and began to rock the crying baby with his aunt’s back-and-forth movements. At one point, the baby stopped crying to stare at him.

The little blossom lips of the child moved in what seemed to be a half-smile. It wasn’t an all-the-way smile, though. “What’s that, little girl?” Eli asked, moved by the sight of her smile. “You reckon that even a man who diapered you with his bandana, and didn’t know how to feed you, still deserves a bit of a smile? Is that it, little girl? Shoot, child, we gotta give you a name.”

Images he wanted to forget pushed their way into his thoughts. The clusters of daisies just a few yards away from where this child’s father had breathed his last, their pure, simple petals giving way to the gentle pressure of the spring breeze, came to mind.

“Daisy Daggatt,” he said, trying the sound of it on his lips.

The little baby’s smile widened. Even though she was hungry, and probably wet again, she managed a smile, a full one this time.

 

Chapter One

Late May 1872

Blossom Ridge, West Virginia

“You’ve got visitors,” Sheriff Haines told Eli when his deputy came back into the office.

Eli looked past the sheriff to where Aunt Rhody and Daisy were waiting for him. He was tired from helping Mrs. Cranston cut her hay, and his shirt was damp with sweat. But when he saw his daughter, his smile showed no tiredness at all.

“Pa!” Daisy exclaimed as she ran over to him.

Eli picked her up in his arms. “How’s my Daisy?” he asked.

“Growing like a weed, as you already know,” her Great-Aunt Rhody said. “We’re just on our way to Myrna’s to buy fabric for a new dress for Daisy, and nothing would do but for us to stop and see her Pa.”

“You weren’t here!” Daisy scolded him.

“I didn’t know you were coming to call,” Eli answered, tugging at one of her dark braids.

“He was helping someone who needed help,” Rhody told the child. “That’s what good folks do.”

Daisy’s attention was now fixed upon the silver star on her father’s chest. Try as he did, Eli couldn’t help but remember her as a baby when he’d first held her, and the point of his star had rubbed against the soft skin of her cheek. He tried to keep those memories at bay, but that wasn’t as easy in practice.

He and his aunt agreed that Daisy was still too young to understand the truth of how Eli had come to be her father. It was difficult enough to dodge her questions when she wanted to know why she didn’t have a mother.

Because she was just four years old, Eli had become deft at distracting her and because she was fascinated by everything—rose petals that fell to the ground and butterflies and the litter of puppies that Rhody’s dog had birthed and the different colors of the sky—it was easy to deflect her onto a question that Eli could give an answer to.

But how much longer, he wondered as he watched her trace the points of his deputy’s star with the tip of her finger, could he hold off the questions that deserved an answer? She wouldn’t be four years old forever. Aunt Rhody had determined that by the time Daisy came to them, she was likely close to three months old, so they had simply chosen February 1 as her birthdate. But not all of the mysteries of her birth would be so easy to solve.

“All right, Miss Daisy,” Aunt Rhody said. “I’ll let you pick out the fabric that you like best.”

“Can I sew my dress?” Daisy asked, her interest in the deputy’s star waning now that she had something else to capture her imagination.

“I’ll be teaching you to sew, and it doesn’t hurt to learn early, but we’ll stick to buttons at first, I think.”

“Can I have a pink dress?” Daisy asked as Eli put her down, and she took her great-aunt’s hand.

“Pink? Land sakes, child, do you know how pink shows the dirt?” Aunt Rhody proclaimed.

“Pink is pretty,” Daisy argued.

Eli hid a smile as she saw his aunt weakening. “Maybe a pink-checked fabric,” she proposed.

It was still pink, and still likely to get dirty when worn by a little girl who loved to play in the flower beds and climb trees and roll on the grass with the puppies. But Eli said nothing and not only because his aunt did the laundry. Between the two of them, Daisy didn’t lack for love.

Their visitors left, and Eli sat down at the second desk that had been brought into the office four years ago. He had suggested to Sheriff Haines that he could lend a hand with the paperwork that the sheriff was always behind on. He’d found that he had a knack for writing reports, submitting budgets, and sending correspondence to lawmen across the county. The two men worked well together, better now than ever.

“She sure is a pretty little thing,” the sheriff commented.

“Smart, too,” Eli spoke eagerly. “She knows all her numbers and can write them on a slate, too. She won’t go to school for another year, but by the time she does, she’ll be teaching those classes!”

Sheriff Haines smiled. “It’s a powerful thing, isn’t it?” he proposed. “Loving a child.”

Eli thought back to the cocky, swaggering young man he’d been that day when he rode out to capture Roscoe Billings. It was true that the swagger was gone, but Eli didn’t miss it. Helping Mrs. Cranston with the hay-cutting meant more than any of his old army tales, and listening while Daisy recited the alphabet had more worth than any medals of valor.

He didn’t miss the swagger. But he did regret that he’d had to kill Daisy’s father in order to leave his shallow younger self behind.

“It was a lucky day for that little girl when you ended up in her life,” Sheriff Haines said soberly.

Eli, stricken, kept his eyes on the report he was writing. It wasn’t a lucky day for Billings, he thought. The guilt never really left him. It was one of the layers that made him up. People wore their experience as if every stitch of clothing they’d ever owned was still on their backs, he thought.

The glib Union sharpshooter who had boasted about his marksmanship had evolved into the deputy who’d killed the father of Eli’s only child. That wasn’t how Aunt Rhody saw it, but his aunt believed in a depth of divine forgiveness that Eli would never understand.

The sheriff’s words were salt in an open wound.

“You ever think back on that day?” the sheriff asked.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think on it,” Eli answered. He kept his head down so that he could maintain an impassive countenance and a level tone.

“The daughter you rescued or the man you shot?” Sheriff Haines inquired matter-of-factly.

The figures on the page in front of Eli might as well have been some ancient language he’d never learned. He was looking at them, but he couldn’t see them.

“You were a soldier, Eli,” the sheriff pressed on. “You know to leave things on the battlefield.”

“That was different.”

The sheriff knew the truth of what happened that day when Billings was shot. Eli had told him, but not until the sheriff’s tireless efforts to find someone in the area who might know something about a baby that was missing had proved futile. No one knew anything. Eli told the Sheriff that he’d found the baby in Billings’ saddlebag. Then he’d adopted her quietly, so that the murky origins of her arrival in Blossom Ridge would gradually fade from the town’s memory.

“Can you imagine the life that child would have led if she’d been raised by Billings?”

Eli told himself that when the remorse threatened to overwhelm him. What kind of father toted a baby girl in a saddlebag, with no clean diapers? It didn’t even bear mentioning that she’d been hungry when Eli found her.

Someday, he’d have to explain to Daisy how he’d come to find her. He’d have to relive that bloody day by the field of flowers when he’d shot her father and then taken her home to raise because he was the one who’d orphaned her. She wasn’t likely to understand any talk about a saddlebag or diapers. He’d have to tell her that her father was an outlaw. He wasn’t looking forward to that either.

For now, Eli took comfort in Daisy’s young age and the way she accepted the world as she knew it, with questions that could be deflected and a boundless curiosity that quickly latched onto the next marvel that caught her eye. The day would come soon enough when he couldn’t dodge her questions so readily.

***

December 1872
Upper East Side, New York City

“I put your mail in your room, Miss McKenzie.”

“Thank you, Ida. My, but it’s cold out there!” Ophelia McKenzie slid out of her warm fur coat and shook the melting snowflakes from her black hair.

“Good to see you back home, ma’am. I have a warm fire going in your bedroom, and I’ll bring up your dinner. Mrs. Gregory said to be sure I kept it warm for you.”

“Thank you ever so much, Ida.” Ophelia handed her coat to the housemaid who greeted the boarders at the door when they arrived late at night, as Ophelia had done. Her landlady, Mrs. Thomas Gregory, was a widow who had fallen on hard times after her husband lost his fortune in the recent financial panic and died shortly after.

Mrs. Gregory had turned her brownstone into lodgings for upscale young professional women who liked living on the Upper East Side, close to Fifth Avenue, and had the means to pay for the address. Ophelia McKenzie was one of those women, although at the age of thirty years, she might not have been regarded as young any longer, despite her trim figure and vivacious personality.

No one would have been so ill-bred as to have inquired her age, but Ophelia had been living in New York City since she’d left Blossom Ridge, West Virginia, in 1862. She had begun her career as a reporter humbly enough, but an interview with General Ulysses S. Grant after he’d been named commander of Union forces in 1864 had established her as a trailblazer among women in the workforce, and she had never looked back.

Ophelia, having just returned from a Christmas holiday in the nation’s capital, was eager to settle in for the night. It was good to be home, surrounded by her own things and the various works of art and keepsakes that she’d picked up in her travels around the world. As one of the most celebrated female journalists, Ophelia McKenzie’s byline in the New York News World was a magnet for readership, and she was well paid for her articles. She had become a celebrity in her own right and not merely the reporter who interviewed New York’s famous.

Although she’d been on holiday in Washington City, Ophelia had still managed to meet various movers and shakers during her sojourn and was eager to begin writing the articles from those interviews. But when she began to shuffle through the stack of mail waiting for her on her writing desk, her sense of homecoming was ruffled by an envelope from Blossom Ridge.

She ignored the carpetbag she’d brought into her room and sat down upon the desk chair, as fashionably dressed and coiffed as when she’d disembarked from the train earlier. But as she opened the envelope, she was visited by the memory of her younger self, with her home-sewn dress and only one bonnet.

She’d put those days behind her. However, a letter from West Virginia was a reminder of the home she’d left, the home that still, in some unfathomable way, retained her roots. Only when Hattie, the kitchen maid, opened the door to bring in her meal tray did Ophelia realize she was not alone.

“Your dinner, ma’am,” Hattie said as she lifted the lids from a steak emitting aromatic steam, and new potatoes glistening in butter.

“Oh, my, it all looks so delicious,” Ophelia said with practiced glibness, although her thoughts were not on the meal before her. “Please give my compliments to Mrs. Hennessey and assure her that nothing at the Willard Hotel can compare with one of her meals.”

“I’ll tell her, ma’am. You just put the tray outside your door, and one of the staff will be by to pick it up later tonight. Shall you want your usual breakfast tomorrow morning?”

“No, I’m planning to go to Five Points and interview some of the poor unfortunates who have no homes. I think it will be better if I am a bit hungry myself when I speak with them. I hope the missions were able to provide a Christmas meal for them at least.”

“Dreadful cold it’s been,” Hattie told her. She glanced over the fire, blazing its warmth throughout the spacious room. “If you need anything, you’ve only to ring.”

“I plan to go to bed and sleep soundly until morning,” Ophelia smiled. But after Hattie left, Ophelia’s smile faded.

Father didn’t write often. When she first left home, his letters had been filled with his rancor at the ongoing quarrels with their neighbors, the Daggatts, over the boundary that separated the two properties. Except for the vitriol inspired by the Daggatts, her father’s letters were rather clinical accounts of the harvest and the livestock, for he was a farmer, and he logged his time in accordance with his labor. He often said he didn’t know where she got her writing fingers from, for he was inclined to silence more than words.

A sudden rush of affection for her father rolled over her, just as the warmth of the fire pushed out the winter cold of the night outside. Father was so many things to her, a dear and loving parent who had indulged her determination to leave her hometown for the excitement of the city. He hadn’t understood the intense craving within her for something more than the tedium that a West Virginia woman could expect. He had never tried to dissuade her from following her dream.

But the letter wasn’t from her father. It was from Ed Lowry, the man who looked after the farm, the household, and just about everything that needed attending, including her father as he aged.

With mounting panic, she quickly read the letter.

Miss Ophelia,

I don’t want to trouble you, but I think it best I let you know that your pa has had a setback in his recovery from his heart troubles. He mostly follows the orders Doc Curtis gives him, but not always, and Doc said Mr. McKenzie needs to rest more.      

I don’t mean to worry you none, I just want you to know how things stand. You know your pa will never admit that he’s anything but what he’s always been, forgetting that he’s a man of sixty-some years and not young.

He’s mighty proud of you, Miss Ophelia.

Ed Lowry

Ophelia released the pent-up breath she’d held in her lungs. Father would recover. Despite Ed’s gloomy reminder about her father’s age, that didn’t mean that Father was…

Perhaps she’d go to visit him in the spring. She couldn’t leave New York City just now. New York wealth and influence were beginning to make inroads even among the European aristocracy, and there would be any number of stories to be written about that. There was new artwork coming to the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was drawing attention. Reformers and anarchists, artists and financiers, all were characters upon the stage that was New York City, and Ophelia McKenzie was the one to write about them.

Father would be fine, Ophelia told herself as she put the letter down. She had so much to do now that she was back. She would write to Father and make sure that he was feeling well. He loved to hear about the people she had met in her work, and even if he hadn’t heard of most of them, he knew they were famous and he was proud of her.

Yes, Ophelia decided as she got into bed. There was no need to rush back just because Father had been told to get more rest. He’d earned his rest, after all, she thought.

Then she smiled in the darkness. As long as Father was still ignited by the feud with the Daggatts, he’d have plenty of fire left in him. He’d told her that Eli Daggatt was set to be the sheriff one day when Sheriff Haines stepped down. Father’s outrage at a Daggatt in charge of enforcing the law had come through the ink on the paper of his letter as if his pen had set fire to it. Father was convinced that a Daggatt in charge of the law would imperil the McKenzie property lines the two families had been fighting over as long as Ophelia could remember. Eli Daggatt had not gotten involved in the rows back then. Of course, he was quite busy showing off his riding prowess and his wrestling skills and his marksmanship, too busy being the town’s favorite son to care about that disputed boundary.

Such small town doings, she thought sleepily. No one would ever write any articles about Blossom Ridge. She remembered the day that Eli and the other young men had marched out of town to take the train that would take them to the battlefields of the war. He’d looked very handsome, she recalled. Not that she would have ever said so to her father…

 

Chapter Two

October 1875

Blossom Ridge, West Virginia

Eli watched as clods of dirt began to cover the wooden coffin that held Sheriff Haines. The funeral service seemed unreal, even though Eli had taken on more and more of the sheriff’s duties as his mentor became weaker with the wasting sickness that had consumed him. Still, the reality of knowing that he was now the sheriff and that the responsibility of enforcing the law was now on his shoulders was humbling.

Mattie Haines Eldridge, Sheriff Haines’ widowed daughter, who had lived with him and cared for him during his long illness, came up to Eli as the mourners drifted away. “I want you to know, Sheriff,” she said crisply, “that my children and I will be moved out of the sheriff’s mansion by the end of the week.”

“Mattie,” Eli said, “there’s no hurry. I’ve got a home, remember?”

Mattie’s composure fell. “You know that the sheriff lives in the Buell Mansion as part of the compensation for the job. It’s a fine house. You and your aunt and Daisy will be comfortable there.”

Eli was in no rush to move from his family farm. “Mattie,” he said again, “there’s no hurry.”

Mattie dabbed at her eyes. “You’re very kind, Sheriff,” she said, addressing him formally in recognition of the title that was now his. “But my father left me enough money to buy a house in town, and we’ll be moving. The Widow Nelson is taking us in until we find a place to buy. She’s a dear friend and she’s very fond of my children. I think it’s best if we all move forward.”

That was in April. Aunt Rhody supervised the packing up of the Daggatt household, and the family was moved before summer. The spacious house was a block away from the sheriff’s office, reassuring the town that there would be a lawman present within the town limits in case any disruption broke out or a crime was being committed.

There wasn’t that much crime in town, but Eli acknowledged the wisdom of having a sheriff who lived close enough that he could quickly respond to any threat. Blossom Ridge, although a small community, boasted a thriving business district whose commercial leaders valued safety. The bank itself was known for housing a number of sizable accounts, and the bank manager, who was the son-in-law of the bank president, was particularly successful in attracting revenue and granting loans. Eli made a stop at the bank twice a day when on his daily rounds. He knew every shop proprietor and entrepreneur by name and, like Sheriff Haines before him, Eli was privy to many a private secret that he never disclosed.

“Sheriff,” Deputy Walsh hurried into the office, brimming over with his news.

“Yes?” Eli asked with weary patience. Except for commendable willingness, his deputy showed little ability for the job of deputy. But even if he was not especially bright, or punctual, or brave, Deputy Cornell Walsh could be relied upon to have heard the latest gossip. Eli assumed this was one such instance.

“Emil Daughtery,” Deputy Walsh said. “He’s been at the bottle again.”

Eli rose from his desk. “Thank you, Deputy. I’ll see to it that Emil gets home safely. No matter how the Ladies Temperance Society tries to make this a dry town, those stills up in the hills have a lot of customers.”

It was Eli’s practice to turn a discreet blind eye to the stills where hardscrabble hill dwellers made some money brewing the Appalachian elixir. When a local fellow turned up in town, the worse for a visit and a libation, Eli sent a message to a male member of the man’s family to bring him home. Eventually, Emil and others who had imbibed too freely did get home safely.

But there was one violation upon which Eli was firm, as Sheriff Haines had been before him. If a man beat a woman, even if she was his wife, that man could expect a visit from the sheriff as soon as the word got out. There were those who said the sheriff had no business interfering in a marital couple’s differences, but Sheriff Haines had warned Eli that a man who used his fists on his wife was a man who needed to be taught a lesson that a woman couldn’t teach him.

So Eli was philosophical about the move to the big sprawling house with the front verandah and the trim white fence around the lush green grass, even though it was very different from where he’d lived. He had fond memories of growing up in the Daggatt farmhouse outside of town. However, those memories were tempered by the constant bickering and legal actions between his father and Cormac “Mac” McKenzie; Eli’s recollections centered not upon the boundary dispute, but upon the opportunities to see pretty Ophelia McKenzie on the front porch with her friends, or riding out at a gallop on her horse. But she’d been gone a long time now, and it didn’t look as though she would ever come back.

Aunt Rhody, ever the pragmatist, suggested that he rent the farmhouse out while he was sheriff. There was the obvious financial advantage to such a plan. The fact that with the Daggatts not in residence, having Mac McKenzie for a neighbor was no longer the relentless source of friction that it had been all through Eli’s growing-up years.

The new tenants, a young couple with a growing family, kept to themselves and avoided conflict with McKenzie as far as Eli was aware. They paid Eli some of their rent in cash, but two-thirds of it in produce and meat from the crops they raised and the beef and ham from their livestock. It was an arrangement that suited Eli well. The cash was for another reason: he and Aunt Rhody planned to send Daisy to the girls’ academy in Cabell County when she was old enough. The cost wasn’t cheap, but Daisy was smart and Eli was determined to see that she didn’t lack a proper education, more than she could expect from the little schoolhouse at the other end of Buell Street.

Daisy, now seven years old, was excited about the move because, with the hiring of a new teacher, school was in session again, and she was only a five-minute walk from the schoolhouse.

But she returned home from the first day of school with a thoughtful frown on her face. Eli was working late that night. He’d promised Daisy that he’d take her to Caleb Adams’ farm so that she could pick out one of the baby goats for her own. He had left work so that he could share supper with his aunt and daughter before returning to the office.

“How was school?” Eli asked as he scooped a helping of chicken and dumplings onto her plate. “Now that they’ve finally got a teacher.” The previous teachers who had come to town ended up leaving because they found husbands among the resident bachelors and widowers.

This new teacher had been given a one-year contract. Eli was relieved that Daisy would get a full year of schooling in. In the absence of a teacher, Daisy had been given instruction by Aunt Rhody, who fretted because she didn’t know enough to keep up with Daisy’s boundless curiosity.

Aunt Rhody poured a glass of milk for Daisy. “I sure do miss her during the day,” she said with a smile. “I was mighty glad that she’s close enough to the school now that she can walk home for lunch. But I’m glad that there’s a teacher again. What did you learn?”

“Teacher says she has to find out how much we know so she can tell what we don’t know,” Daisy explained. “Some can’t read or write.” Daisy was proud of her own prowess in those abilities.

“Some of the farm children have to help their folks with the planting and harvesting,” Eli explained. “They don’t have much time for schooling. Is your new teacher nice?”

“Yes…Pa, all the other children have mothers. Where’s mine?”

The biscuit that Eli had just swallowed felt like it got caught in his throat at Daisy’s question. Her wide blue eyes were intent upon his face, waiting for him to answer.

He’d staved off questions about her parentage over the years, allowing her to think that he was her father by birth, even though he’d vowed to himself that one day, when she was old enough, he’d tell her the truth. But as the years had gone by, folks in town had forgotten about Daisy’s unusual entry into the Daggatt family. Only Eli and his aunt now knew that Daisy’s father was a notorious outlaw killed by Eli seven years ago.

Eli swallowed a sip of coffee. It was fresh and hot from the pot, and the scalding temperature set him off into a fit of coughing. Eli was grateful for the interruption as he mentally scrambled to come up with a plausible answer. Aunt Rhody’s worried expression told him that she, too, shared his alarm.

“What was my mother’s name, Pa?” Daisy continued to ask for answers, her eyebrows furrowing into a V.

“Her name?”

Daisy’s curiosity had acquired a tenacity that never relinquished a subject of interest until she’d been given the answers she sought. “My mother’s name. What was it? Was I named for her?”

“No, you were named for the flowers in the—it was—you were named for the flower. The daisy,” Eli said at last, vividly recalling the flowers in the field where her father had died.

“Did she like daisies?” Daisy asked eagerly.

“Everyone likes daisies,” Eli hedged. “Who doesn’t like daisies?” He pulled one of his daughter’s black braids. “Me and Aunt Rhody have our very own daisy in summer and winter.”

His aunt’s face was set in lines of disapproval. He knew there would be no help from that quarter. He was digging himself into a hole.

“Then what’s her name?”

“She—it’s—Ophelia!”

“Ophelia?” Daisy’s pert nose wrinkled. “I’ve never heard of anyone with that name.”

Eli ignored his aunt’s stunned reaction to the name he had chosen. “No. No. It’s an unusual name. It—your dinner is getting cold,” he said as he pointed to her bowl. “Eat up. Now that you’re in school, you need to make sure you eat properly. Isn’t that right, Aunt Rhody?”

“Hmm.”

***