The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser Read Free Book Online Page A

picture and the one in the -wagon. The picture hadn't shown such light hair, but the picture had darkened. Corbin finally pulled up below her.
    "Who was that driver on the freight wagon?" she asked when she sat beside him.
    "Lon Maddon. You stay out of his sights. He's a bad one."
    "Maddon." Her mother's maiden name. Her twin uncles' last names-- Remy and Dan had this Lon's eyes too, as she'd had herself. Until last night.
    And Shay Garrett's hair (she seemed almost a different person now) was a similar color. It'd often been referred to as "the Maddon hair" in an otherwise dark-haired family. She'd just looked into the face of her grandfather.
    Brandy must unload Corbin and marry this Lon. She certainly has odd taste.
    Shay couldn't get all caught up in a life not her own, knowing too much and too little at the same time. What if Corbin Strock dies? That would leave Brandy free to marry again. Only, I don't want to be around when it happens.
    John McCabe said he'd send the mirror. When he did, Shay determined to have a long hard talk with it. The thought should have seemed silly, but nothing could be more incredible than the turn her life had taken since the night before.
    Corbin noticed the change in Brandy after he'd picked her up. She was silent, subdued. "Did Maddon say anything unkind to you back there?"
    "No." She eyed him with a sadness that made him uneasy.
    She was a strange one, there was no doubting it. Unlike John McCabe, Corbin couldn't believe she was feigning madness. The best of actresses couldn't make such swift changes in personality and expression, nor so convincingly. Real tears, then startling laughter, looks of an intelligence so intense they chilled him--not the sly look of insanity he'd have expected. But Corbin'd never approved of high intelligence in women. It made them troublesome. Brandy would interrupt herself in the middle of one of her wild fantasies to exclaim over a deer drinking at the creek, or a series of small rainbows in the sunflash of spray, common enough sights in a canyon she must have traveled often.
    In fact, the first time he'd seen this fey creature was at the end of this canyon, on the occasion McCabe opened the Brandy Wine. She'd been dressed in white and carried a tiny parasol, pretty and spoiled, the daughter of a wealthy man, but quite normal, playing with other children whose parents attended the ceremony. Her father had lifted her to his shoulder, announcing he was naming the silver mine for "this precious piece of baggage here."
    Even before the price of it'd dropped, the silver in the Brandy Wine played out, as had, apparently, the mind of the child for whom it was named. McCabe'd abandoned the mine and was now abandoning the child. Corbin felt shame at being a party to it, but he and Thora K. would look after her. It would have been easier on them all if Brandy were not such a beauty.
    Hard to believe she was the animated creature of a few hours ago. Or the girl with the brazen laughter and mischief in her eyes when they'd made that stop on Water Street, which he admitted now he'd had no business making. She'd stared about there as if she'd never seen it before. Boulder wasn't so large a place that even a well-bred girl could have missed at least a peek at the houses of that forbidden way. And it was common knowledge that the madams paid cumshaw to McCabe and others like him to stay in business at all.
    No, Brandy must suffer from memory losses as part of her affliction. That would explain why she'd looked at him as if he were a stranger this morning at their wedding, when he'd talked with her in that very parlor on the two previous Sundays. And why she did not appear the same person today. He'd believed McCabe's story of her pretense then. She'd been cold, resentful, blushed often--but today . . .
    To get the Brandy Wine, he'd indeed saddled himself with a demented wife. And the fault was all his own. He'd investigated the float around the mine, talked to a man who'd