Part One

Eddie stood on the curb outside the gate of his parent’s Wyoming home and slowly took a drag from his cigarette. His worn canvas rucksack rested on the sidewalk at his feet, as he looked up apprehensively at the big brick house.

He squinted in the afternoon sunlight flickering through the cottonwood trees that lined the property. They swayed in the breeze, their shade covering the two-story house and much of the yard.

Eddie’s grandfather had built the house over fifty years before, around the turn of the century, and used the surrounding acres of land for his prosperous dairy farm. He tended a garden near the barn and planted several cottonwood trees along the front edge of the property. When he left to fight, but never returned from the First World War, Eddie’s father took over as head of household and continued to grow the farm into a full ranch despite the economic depression.

The house was three stories high, with large windows, and a white painted porch that wrapped around nearly three-quarters of the exterior. It loomed over Eddie as he dropped the rest of his cigarette on the sidewalk. A warm spring breeze picked up, and the ivy that grew up the façade of the house flapped lazily at him as he pushed open the black wrought iron gate and made his way up the sidewalk.

Before he had made it up the steps, the front door swung open and a young woman with long curly brown hair partially tied with a purple ribbon skidded across the porch and into his arms, knocking the cigarette out of his loosely pursed lips.

“Eddie! Why didn’t you phone us that you were coming for a visit?” the young woman exclaimed. “Mom and Pop weren’t expecting you for several weeks after the semester ended…” Her voice trailed off as she noticed the steamer trunk waiting upright on the curb, where the taxicab driver had left it.

Eddie shifted his feet, watching as her eyes lost some of their glimmer and widened slightly. “Oh, Eddie, you didn’t,” she began. Laura was two years younger than he at nineteen and she studied art at a local university. Not only was she full of youthful beauty, but she was intelligent and engaged to a wealthy banker in Cheyenne. She was everything their parents wanted that Eddie couldn’t give them, no matter how hard he tried.

“Aw, Laura, don’t worry about it.” He pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes out of the front pocket his tan trousers and lit a new cigarette. “I’ll deal with Mom and Pop. How about you run out back and tell Charlie to give me a hand bringing the steamer in?”

Laura smirked and lifted her long skirt to run off along the porch, the wood creaking as she scampered around the corner. Eddie sighed, took another look back at the large, gentle cottonwoods, and pushed open heavy mahogany door.

* * *

The soft tinkle of musical notes echoed around the large study as Eddie’s fingers poked lightly at the keys of his sister’s baby grand piano. Mom and Pop bought it for her after she dazzled the crowd while playing at the Mayor’s Ball four years earlier. Eddie knew Laura was talented, though he hadn’t heard the performance himself. That was the night Sheriff Brickham hauled him to jail for fighting the Carter brothers.

Pop had been furious. He had let him sit all night in a cell before coming to bail him out. Eddie was charged with misdemeanor assault, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that the judge played poker with his father every Sunday, his sentence would have been much worse. But to Eddie, a couple months in jail was worth breaking Robbie Carter’s face wide open.

The corner of Eddie’s lip tugged into a slight smile at the thought. He remembered the look on Robbie’s face after his elbow made contact. His eyes had shut hard in a painful grimace, then flown open and widened farther than he’d ever seen eyes open before, as the blood poured from the open gash on his eyebrow then down and across his already displaced nose. Sam Carter’s eyes were wide open, too, and shifted between his brother and Eddie. He wasn’t the brightest of the two, and with the pause in the fight Eddie took his chance to book it.

If Sheriff Brickham hadn’t taken him down to the ground so hard to cuff him, he would have made it out without a scratch. Eddie glanced at himself in the large Victorian mirror hanging beside the piano. He had made sure he had a fresh haircut before this visit. It was short, sandy brown, and neatly combed from the part on the side. His face was sun-kissed from years of chasing livestock on the ranch and a string of freckles danced across the bridge of his nose. He tilted his face up and examined the scar on his chin from that night. It was small and barely noticeable, but before last week he had worn it as a badge of honor.

Bitterly, he turned from the mirror but froze before he moved any further. A short, plump woman stood in the doorway, her dark brown eyes boring into Eddie’s own matching pair.

“Get a good look at yourself, Eddie?” the woman said, her lips pursed in a frown. “You always were so vain. Only that darn scar to blemish your face. Never mind that the poor Carter boy's face had to be sewn back together, you couldn’t stand having such a scratch on yourself.”

“Hello to you, too, Mother.” Eddie scowled. He never understood how she always seemed to know what he was thinking. He pulled the cigarettes from his pocket and sauntered over to the plush velvet sofa opposite the piano. “Where’s Pop? I have some news.”