Pieces of Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

a plate in front of her. “Shoulda aimed higher. Right, missy?”
    She looked in dismay at her meal. Chili. Again. She had a rather low opinion of Southwestern cuisine. What was recognizable was unpalatable and the rest was so spicy she doubted even a Frenchman would eat it. Disheartened, she settled for water and a biscuit, hoping that would sustain her until they reached their final stop of the day in Val Rosa. Wincing as Maude’s voice rose in a rambling denouncement of frontier justice and territorial prisons, she turned to Melanie, seated on her right. “Of whom are they speaking?”
    “Oh, a horrible, dreadful man. He burned his own parents to death.” The young woman gave a dramatic shiver. “Did you notice the man who was here earlier, the big handsome one with the odd-colored eyes and shoulders so wide they—”
    “Mr. Brady?”
    “You know him?”
    Heat flooded Jessica’s cheeks. “Only in passing. Is he the murderer to whom you’re referring?” Crude and ill mannered . . . but a murderer? Surely not.
    “Oh no, that’s Sancho Ramirez. Cook says he and Mr. Brady have been fighting for years over an old Spanish land grant. A blood feud. Can you imagine? And now after ten years in prison, Ramirez is back, thirsting for revenge against the hapless Mr. Brady and what family he has left. Isn’t it tragic?”
    Hapless? It was absurd, and about as plausible as a plot in one of Melanie’s frivolous novels. Jessica doubted that real people, even Colonials, behaved that way.
    Mr. Ashford must have shared her view even though he couldn’t have overheard their whispered conversation. “Perhaps we’re overreacting here,” he said in an attempt to calm Maude. “Over time such things often become exaggerated.”
    “Exaggerated?” Cook thunked his tray onto the table so hard two biscuits bounced off onto the floor. “Tell Brady that. Tell it to them folks on the eastbound. Them that survived, that is.”
    “Survived?” Maude asked in a quavering voice.
    Phelps sent Cook a warning look.
    The old man ignored it. “Last week out of Palovar. Ramirez locked six folks in the coach and burned ’em like cordwood.”
    Melanie’s eyes almost popped out. Maude paled. Phelps cursed under his breath.
    Bodine laughed. “The man does like a fire.” Pushing back his plate, he rose. “Potent chili,” he told Cook, offering as proof a sputter of intestinal wind before hurriedly exiting the cabin, leaving in his wake a foul stench as pertinacious as a wet coastal fog.
    Jessica watched a fly drone listless circles above the table and waited for it to fall dead into the lard. When it didn’t, she allowed herself to breathe again.
    “But we’ll never find space for a man his size,” Maude said in protest to something Phelps had said. “We’re crowded as it is.”
    “It’s a six-passenger coach, ma’am. And he’s only going as far as Val Rosa.”
    Maude’s chins quivered in outrage. “First you tell us a madman is lurking out there”—she waved toward the flyspecked window—“now you say we must make room for the very man he’s—”
    The door swung open. Maude froze as the man himself ducked inside.
    In hushed silence, six pairs of eyes tracked Mr. Brady to the bench at the opposite end of the table from Jessica, where he plopped down with a sigh. Seemingly impervious to their stares, he dropped his dusty hat onto the floor beside his foot and looked around, his gaze pausing on Jessica before moving on. “Afternoon,” he said, shattering the awkward silence.
    Maude closed her mouth. Melanie sighed. Jessica brushed biscuit crumbs from her skirt and wondered how a man could so completely dominate a room full of people without saying or doing a single threatening thing.
    “This here’s Wilkins,” Phelps said.
    Her head snapped up. Wilkins?
    “I thought his name was Brady,” Melanie said.
    “It is. Brady Wilkins.”
    Jessica’s lips went numb. The dolt could have corrected her rather than allow the