Сьюзен Виггс – The Drifter (страница 16)

Jackson didn’t know the folks too well, but they all took a shine to Carrie. People generally did. She was as pretty as the springtime, and when she was in a talkative state, people found her entertaining. Her rapt audience consisted of Aunt Leafy, who was no one’s aunt, but an avid student of everyone’s private affairs; Battle Douglas, a shrinking man terrified of his own shadow; Zeke Pomfrit, the aging vigilante and miner who made Jackson nervous; and Adam Armstrong, a timber baron who was said to be fabulously wealthy. He was a guest while his steam-powered yacht, La Tache, was being refitted at the harbor.

Unlike Jackson, Armstrong didn’t trouble himself to do the work, but had hired a local shipwright to tinker with the engine and the wood-and-steel hull. Meanwhile, Adam spent his days wrestling with the unreliable telegraph at the post office, playing cards with the other boarders, or flirting with the girls at Nellie Morse’s dress shop in town.

Jackson knew the type—fat on family money and not real interested in breaking a sweat over anything. He had the polished smoothness that seemed to be bred in the bones of men born to wealth and privilege. It was as if his family money and power had been applied to him like the clear oil varnish applied to a ship’s woodwork. Armstrong’s hair, lacquered by bay rum, tumbled down over his forehead in an apparently casual way, but he’d probably spent an hour getting it that way.

Jackson shifted his gaze away from Adam Armstrong. The man didn’t interest him. There was nothing wrong with the fellow—except his unrelenting charm.

At the center of them all, wearing an organdy gown she’d begged Jackson to buy in San Francisco, Carrie sat like a queen amid her subjects. Her eyes shone, her cheeks were flushed, and her voice had a piping, animated quality as she chattered of everything and of nothing at all.

“…I had the most beautiful gown—it was tea rose moiré silk. And there was a woman who brought her little dog right into Antoine’s.”

“Imagine that,” Armstrong murmured politely with a smile Jackson wanted to pound off his face.

“I believe it was in New Orleans that I first heard ‘The Streets of Cairo,”’ Carrie went on. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it was New Orleans, at the Wildcat Club. The Cairo dance was so scandalous, but it couldn’t have been too evil, because my partner that night was a preacher. They had the most marvelous oysters there….”

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