The Bride in the Trunk
When the heavy wooden door shivered under the weight of three violent, deliberate blows, the last thing Samuel expected to find was a dying confession buried beneath layers of frontier dirt and carefully woven deception. The first thing Samuel had noticed about his new bride wasn't her beauty, striking though it was beneath the pale light of the Kansas lamps. It was the way she kept watching the door. Even after the local preacher had pocketed his fee and departed into the gathering dusk, even after the door was bolted and they were entirely alone inside the quiet timber cabin, Eleanor's gaze drifted relentlessly back toward the iron-strapped latch as though she expected a ghost to tear the hinges off. Then her sleeve slipped down in the draft. Samuel saw the bruises. And in that instant, he understood that he hadn't married a shy young …
