“I have no interest in anything except a hot bath, a hot meal and a cool, soft bed. I am not interested in any mysteries and as far as I can tell, our guide is one long mystery. Chris, will you please sign the register so we can get a room?”
At the moment, Chris couldn’t have told anyone why she had been depressed for the last few days. All she could think of now was that there was a good story at her fingertips. Why was this entire town glaring at one man? Of course it had to do with Tynan’s having been in jail but what had he done that made the whole town watch him?
“Miss,” the desk clerk said, “would you like to register?”
“Yes,” she said absently. She started to write Christiana, but suddenly changed her mind and wrote Nola Dallas.
The clerk, bored, turned the big book around and then his eyes bugged. “The Nola Dallas? The one that went to Mexico?”
“Yes.” Chris smiled as sweetly as she could manage.
“But I thought you were really a man.”
“Many people do.” She kept smiling at the man. Once, she’d persuaded a guard to open a cell for her with just that smile.
Asher looked annoyed. “We’re just here for a little rest,” he told the clerk. “Please don’t tell anyone she’s here.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” the clerk said, his eyes wide. “I wouldn’t tell a soul.”
Still frowning, Asher took Chris’s arm and led her up the stairs as Chris kept looking over her shoulder and smiling at the desk clerk. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” Asher said when they were at the door of her room. “Your father was worried about some trouble from Lanier. Of course you didn’t actually publish anything about him, but just the same…”
Chris smiled at him. “I just wondered if people this far west had heard of me, that’s all.”
“Oh well, I guess that’s all right. You’d better rest now, Chris. I’ll have a bath sent up.”
Once inside the room, she looked in the mirror. Not bad, she thought, a wash and a comb should make her presentable.
“If you tell people who you are,” she said aloud to the mirror, “and they feel that they know you, there’s a good chance they’ll be willing to tell you what you want to know.”
It was an hour later that Chris was washed and she hoped the desk clerk had had time to tell the people who’d just arrived. When she walked into the lobby, people stopped and looked at her and she could hear them whispering, “Is that her?”
Smiling to herself, Chris went out into the bright sunlight. She seemed to remember a ladies’ dress shop on the main street. If there was anywhere to hear gossip, that would be the place.
• • •
“May I help you?” the clerk asked, but before Chris could answer, the shop door opened and in walked three ladies. The door hadn’t closed before two more walked in followed by four more. The little shop was packed with people as Chris made her way to a corner to try on a hat or two.
“You’ll never believe who came into town,” one of the women said loudly, directing her voice toward Chris. “Of course I couldn’t beli
eve it when Jimmy told me, but he said that Nola Dallas was in town.”
“You know, the lady who got herself put into an insane asylum to report on what it was like.”
“And she wrote that it wasn’t safe for decent women to walk the streets alone at night.”
“And she almost got herself killed in Mexico for what she wrote about the government,” said a third woman.
“How very, very much I’d like to meet her,” sighed another woman.
There followed a long, expectant pause and Chris knew they were waiting for her to make the next move. As if she weren’t aware of what they’d been saying, she tried on another hat, then removed it and started for the door. She had her hand on the knob before she looked back at the women who were unabashedly staring at her. “I am Nola Dallas,” she said softly.
The flood gates burst after that. Chris was bodily hauled back into the store and asked thousands of questions.
“Did you really write that series on divorce?”
“Did you really spend three days in jail?”
“Weren’t you frightened when you got that lobbyist and all those politicians arrested?”