Page 61 of Taming Lady Temperance

“I’m also a murderer.”

The words echoed through the stone chamber like a gunshot. James’s ears rang from the concussive blow, leaving him disoriented as he tried to make sense of what had just happened. The feel of Noreen tugging her fingers away from his grasp broke through his confusion in an instant and brought one truth into stark relief. He couldn’t fail her. Not in this.

He chased her fingers and reclaimed them, squeezing them tightly against his palm. Her head lifted, and for the first time since he’d entered the cell, her eyes met his. Praying the shadows hid the remains of his shock from her, he held her gaze.

“I’m not one to be swayed by sensational headlines,” he told her. “I’ll make no judgment until I hear all the facts. Besides, I have a strong character witness who insists that the woman in question would never take a life without unavoidable cause. She’s no coldhearted killer.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Deputy. On the night in question, my heart was as cold as ice.”

Chapter

28

Noreen hung her head. The moment James had stepped through that cell door, she’d known what she had to do. For his sake.

A sudden chill beset her, and a tremor worked its way through her limbs. James, collected her blanket and draped it around her shoulders, then drew it forward like an overlarge shawl that surrounded her arms and pooled in her lap. So solicitous. So tender. So . . . loving.

Merciful heaven. He loved her. He’d said so, but more than that, he’d shown her in a hundred different ways. And how had she repaid him? By keeping secrets. Letting him believe her to be an honorable woman when she was anything but. How she wished she could accept his love and never look back, but he deserved better. He deserved honesty. Love built on selfishness and lies was no love at all.

“Would it be easier to talk if I lit the lamp?” There he went again, extending thoughtfulness and patience. He’d probably sit at her side all night whether she found the nerve to tell him the truth or not.

“No.” She’d rather confess in the dark. Protect herself from seeing his disappointment.

Grasping the edges of her blanket, she pulled it tight, as if it could insulate her from the jagged memories tumbling from the box of sharp-edged shards she’d hidden away after the night her soul shattered.

“My father . . . he was not an easy man to live with, even when he wasn’t drinking.” His face rose in her mind. Handsome. Strong. Eyes that matched hers. The broken glass of regret slashed her conscience. “He was quick to find fault and slow to offer affirmation. He criticized Mama despite her constant efforts to please him. I hid whenever he came home from the saloon, afraid I’d accidentally stir his anger. And his fists.”

She shrank within her blanket. “I grew to hate him.” Her voice cracked.

Strange to both love and hate someone at the same time, yet she had. Though as her hatred piled higher, the love became harder to find. Until it was too late.

“There were times when he rode off to the saloon that I wished he wouldn’t come back.” Saying the words out loud tore a piece of her heart open. She’d never admitted her darkest thoughts to anyone.

James sat quietly, offering no judgment. At least no verbal condemnation. She had no idea what he might be thinking. His arm still pressed up against hers. He hadn’t pulled away. But then, his kindhearted nature probably rooted him in place. Either that or shock.

She closed her eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled.

“Some nights he stumbled home well after dark, but that night he was later than usual. I made my final visit to the outhouse and noticed the barn door was open. Worried that our cow might have gotten out of her stall again, I went to check on the animals. I found Papa’s horse, saddle still on, standing in the tacking area. Then I found Papa. Passed out on the barn floor. Too drunk to tend his mount. Or himself. Particularly ironic since he had backhanded me earlier that afternoon for sloshing milk out of the pail onto the fresh straw he’d spread in the cow’s stall. Accused me of carelessness and said a girl who couldn’t properly care for her family’s stock didn’t deserve to eat her family’s food. The hypocrite.

“I despised him in that moment. I can still remember standing over his unconscious form and feeling my heart turn to stone. I felt no compassion. No honor for my father. Only disdain and disgust.”

“You were a child, Noreen.”

She shook her head, unwilling to accept youth as an excuse. “I wasn’t an infant, James. I was twelve, closer to being grown than not. Old enough to know right from wrong. Even in that moment, I knew that I should return to the house and tell Mama what I’d found. But I didn’t. Instead, I unsaddled Papa’s horse, brushed the animal down, and settled him in his stall, feeling quite superior all the while. After finishing that task, I strode back to Papa’s crumpled form. His clothing askew, his face flat against the same dirty floorboards where manure fell. He deserved to pass a night with the rest of the animals. Maybe Mama would finally get a good night’s sleep without having to tend to her drunken husband and clean up his messes. The mud he dragged in, the things he knocked over in his inebriated state, the vomit that invariably came when his body tried to rid itself of the liquor’s poison. Let him sleep off his drunk in the barn for once. Maybe waking in a pool of his own vomit would teach him a lesson.”

Noreen adjusted her grip on her blanket shawl, knowing what came next, yet wishing she could fend off the truth. But one couldn’t escape truth. It could be denied, ignored, or even buried for a time, but it never perished. It stood ready to testify at a moment’s notice, to exonerate or condemn without preference. Noreen had carried the weight of its condemnation in her soul for fifteen years, made all the heavier by her choice to wrap it in secrets. The weight pressed in on her with crushing force. She had to get out from under it before she collapsed.

“He never had a chance to learn from his mistake because . . . he never woke up.” Her voice cracked along with her heart as the truth tore free of the coils of secrets that had held it prisoner. “I killed him, James. My malice and derision killed him.” Her body folded forward as the confession clawed its way out of her throat in a raw rasp. “The doctor said Papa choked on his own vomit. He declared it an accidental death, but I knew the truth. It hadn’t been an accident. It had been murder. I could have saved him, but I left my father to die.”

A warm arm encircled her exposed upper back, and tender fingers stroked her right shoulder. How could he stand to touch her after what she’d confessed? She didn’t deserve his kindness, his understanding. She deserved outrage and scorn.

“You didn’t know he would die, Noreen.” His gentle words rained down on her like a shower of needles, pricking and poking and drawing tiny beads of blood all over her body. “There has to be intent for a person to be charged with murder, and you didn’t intend—”

“But I did!” She pulled away from his comfort with a jerk and scooted forward on the mattress. Pressing up onto her knees, she turned to face him. “I wanted him gone. Out of our lives. I didn’t have Luella’s pure heart. I didn’t pray for my father’s healing, for him to break free of liquor’s hold. Maybe I had once upon a time, but I gave up on those petitions when they went unanswered. I prayed selfish prayers instead. That God would protect me and Mama. That he would take Papa away. I even prayed for God’s wrath to strike him down. What is that, if not intent?”

Shadows hid most of his face from her, but she could feel him lean toward her. “Those sound like the desperate prayers of a young girl trying to survive. Even David prayed for the destruction of his enemies.”

Oh, she knew the psalms he spoke of. She’d used them for years to try to justify her actions, but her soul had never accepted them as an adequate excuse. “‘Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.’” She quoted the verse that she’d never been able to rationalize away. “‘And ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him,’ First John 3:15.”