“Direct,” he said, sitting up and leaning forward in his chair. “That’s another thing I’ve always admired about you. Very well, I want you to marry me. Not right away, of course. It might look bad if you got re-hitched so soon after your husband’s demise. Say, in a month or two?”

“In exchange for becoming your wife, my son doesn’t die? Is that what I get in return?”

“You’ll get more than that. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a very rich man. You and your daughter would be well cared for. You’d live here at the hotel, in luxury, and have anything you’d ever want.”

“What I want,” Dovie said bitterly, “is my husband and home back, and my son safe.”

Shipley pushed the fresh glass of whiskey across the desk. “We can’t always have everything we want, Mrs. Pritchard,” he said. “Sometimes, we have to settle for what we can get.”

“All that Samuel said about you was true,” Dovie said, more to herself. She looked at the glass of whiskey on the desk in contempt. “You’re a murdering bastard.”

“Still high and mighty, eh?” Shipley said. “Well, it’s a free country. You certainly don’t have to accept my offer. I’m sure you and your daughter can find lodging somewhere around Atherton. But you’ll need money to pay for rent and food, which means you’d have to find work. I’ve got a feeling nobody around here is going to hire you.”

“You’d see to that, wouldn’t you?”

“I could always use another gal down at the Sidewinder,” Shipley said.

The Sidewinder, Atherton’s main watering hole, like almost every other building and business in town, was owned by Shipley. The establishment featured drinking and gambling downstairs and two floors of “hospitality hostesses,” as he called them, in the bedrooms upstairs.

“Idelle is nine or ten years old now, isn’t she?” Shipley mused. “Kids grow up fast in these parts. Who knows? In a few years, she could start working at the Sidewinder along with you.”

Dovie knew Shipley had her cornered. She could consent to marry the man who orchestrated her husband’s death and had stolen their family’s assets, and her son could live, or she could refuse, which would condemn her and her daughter to a life of poverty, prostitution, and shame, and her son would die.

“I need to think it over,” she said, her voice barely audible.

“Don’t think too long,” Shipley said, extracting his gold watch from his vest pocket. “Dawn’s only a few hours away.”

Shipley repocketed his watch. He picked up the whiskey he’d poured for Dovie and extended the glass.

Dovie’s shoulders slumped. She accepted the whiskey and began to drink. When the glass was empty, she looked at Shipley with beaten eyes and nodded.

“Is that a yes?”