The Art of Love: Origins of Sinner's Grove by A.B. Michaels Read Free Book Online

to the Wells Fargo office on Second Avenue and tell them to bring two guards and a cart right away if they want the business of two of the Klondike’s wealthiest men. You got all that?”
    “Yes, but sir, the bank won’t be open this early.”
    “You knock on the door until someone comes to answer it,” Gus said. “And you tell them what I told you. They’ll open.”
    “Yessir.” Peter lifted one side of the broken suitcase and Gus hefted the other. Like spawning salmon on the Yukon, they worked their way back up the gangplank through the departing miners, with John Anderson hobbling behind.
    An hour later, Gus and John rode in a fine black carriage driven by two burly bank guards, one with shotgun at the ready. At their feet lay nearly one hundred and seventy thousand dollars in gold nuggets, bars, and dust. Ninety minutes after arriving at the bank, the two men walked out again, John using a silver-tipped cane borrowed from the manager of the branch.
    Gus walked on to the Madison Hotel, where he planned to get a nice hot bath, a shave, and a new set of clothes. He fully intended on looking the part of the successful man he always told Mattie he’d become.
    Then he’d go and collect his family.

    “What do you mean, she isn’t here?” Gus felt the already too-tight collar of his starchily ironed white shirt begin to tighten even further. His blood was starting a low boil. He stood up straighter, both to relieve the pressure and to assert his authority. “Where is my wife, Madam?”
    Mrs. Eugenia Partridge, a buxom woman of indeterminate age, didn’t flinch one whit in response to Gus’s posturing. She looked up at him with thinly veiled disdain. “I don’t know how much more clear I can be, sir. She’s been gone well over six months. Since last fall, as a matter of fact.” The woman went back to straightening the tatted white doilies on the parlor furniture of the Empire Rooming House, which she’d been doing when Gus knocked on her door five minutes before. As if he weren’t there, she shook her head, muttering, “You’d think a man would know the whereabouts of his own wife.”
    Gus reached out to get her attention. “I assure you, I do…or did know where my wife was, Mrs.…Partridge, is it? My wife moved in here with my daughter last summer.”
    Mrs. Partridge looked at Gus’s hand on her arm until he dropped it. “Indeed she did, and what a beautiful child that little girl was, and that’s a fact. But, as I’ve repeatedly said, they’re gone now.”
    Gus gritted his teeth to keep from throttling the prissy old bat. “And where did she say she was going?”
    “I believe she said she was going down to Los Angeles. She got along right well with Miss Bethany Jones, who lived next door.”
    “Yes, she mentioned the woman in her letter… to me ,” he emphasized.
    “Well, Miss Bethany had to return home to take care of her ailing father, and Miss Mattie, your wife , said she’d go with her. That’s all I know.”
    Gus scratched his jaw, which was beginning to itch from having been recently shaved. He thought fleetingly of his worn but comfortable flannel shirt. “What about her job? She had a job while she was here.”
    “Yes she did. Had to work to pay the bills, now, didn’t she?” There was judgment in her voice. “She worked at Mrs. Clements’s shop on Albermarle Street near the park. Mattie was right handy with a needle and thread.”
    “I’m aware of that,” Gus ground out. “Did she…did Mattie leave anything? Any letter or message for me?”
    “No, only that she was leaving with Bethany Jones and if anyone inquired about her—she must have meant you—that she would be residing at Miss Jones’s ranch in Los Angeles.”
    A cold empty feeling was beginning to spread throughout Gus’s body, and it had nothing to do with the temperature inside the room. “Do you know the name of the ranch, by any chance?”
    “Yes. I wrote it down, as a matter of fact.” She looked