“Oh, that,” M-Four said. “Half the country wants to murder Cole. He won’t sell anything to anybody. Once he decides something belongs to him, he keeps it, no matter what he has to do, and that includes keeping money. Why, even with the thirty million he now has—Are you all right?” she asked when Kady nearly choked on a mouthful of sopapilla.
“Thirty million what?” Kady asked when she had recovered.
“Dollars, of course. Most of it in gold and silver. Haven’t you been listening? He owns three very lucrative silver mines, plus every business in town, so of course people are always trying to take that money away from him. They get so frustrated when he won’t sell anything to them that they just decide to kill him instead.”
“I can understand their reasoning,” Kady said. “So why doesn’t he hire bodyguards, men with guns who can protect him?” At that statement all the women drew back as though she’d said something shocking. “Did I say something wrong?”
In the next second Kady realized they had drawn back merely to fill their lungs with oxygen so they could let loose a string of descriptive phrases.
“Protect Cole Jordan?!” they gasped, then proceeded to tell Kady what she’d already seen. Cole carried so many knives on his person, concealed in every piece of clothing he wore, that once w
hen he walked past some boys playing with magnets, the magnets had flown out of the boys’ hands and stuck to Cole.
“Have you seen the whip he carries down his back?” M-Two asked. “He may have nothing to do with guns, but he makes up for it in other weapons.”
“And to think I thought he was a choirboy,” Kady muttered, which made the women laugh. But the way they laughed made her look at them speculatively. Why had they come to tell her this? If it was true that whatever they owned was actually owned by Cole, why risk his wrath?
She looked each of them straight in the eye. “How many of you tried to marry him?”
M-Three didn’t hesitate. “Why all of us, of course. What young woman wouldn’t try to win a handsome man worth thirty million dollars?”
The five of them sat there on the bed and looked at Kady as though they expected her to answer this question, but she could think of no reply.
Martha smiled prettily. “I can see that we’ve startled you. Two years ago the five of us were pursuing Cole with such vigor that we hated each other. And Cole—the skunk!—was playing us one against the other. He’d tell each of us what the other had done to try to win him so we’d try to outdo the other. We were dressing for Cole, cooking for him, studying ways to entertain him. Our lives were hell!”
“Martha!” M-Three said, shocked at the language, but the others nodded solemnly.
“It was my mother,” M-Four said, “who tricked the five of us into getting together—because, you see, by then we were sworn enemies—and letting us see what fools we were making of ourselves over one dreadful man. Cole had no intention of marrying any of us.”
“Yes, he was much too happy to marry one of us, because that would stop all of us from courting him. You can never change a happy man.”
“I . . . I guess not,” Kady said, never having thought of this before.
M-Two leaned forward, very serious. “What did you do to make him go to such effort to marry you?”
Kady wasn’t really sure. “He asked me to marry him, but I told him no. I said I was going to marry another man.”
“Ahhhhh,” the women said in unison and looked at Kady as though she were a brilliant strategist.
“No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to marry him. Didn’t anyway, and I do love another man.” Or maybe two other men, she thought, but didn’t say so.
“If it’s someone here in town, Cole will discharge him and send him away.”
“No, the man I love lives in Virginia.” And in my dreams.
At this the women looked at each other, then back at Kady, as though to say, Then what are you doing in Colorado?
“Look,” Kady said, “I can solve all of this. Do you know someone who knows where there are rocks with carvings on them? Something like this,” she said, then used a bit of bread to draw an elk in the honey on her plate.
When the women said nothing, she looked up at them and saw they hadn’t even looked at her plate. “What’s wrong?” she said in a small voice.
Martha looked at the others before she spoke. “You might as well know, Mrs. Jordan—”
“Kady, please.”
“Kady . . .” Martha took a deep breath. “Cole left early this morning, and he’s to be gone for days—heaven only knows where, as he can be quite mysterious at times—and he left word that you are not to leave town.”
Kady could feel her heart start to pound. “I don’t want to leave town; I just want to go for a walk, that’s all. I saw these rocks yesterday and thought it would be a nice place for a picnic. We could all go.”