Excerpt from Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Her eyes snapped open and she pulled away when she realized that he was tracing with one finger—lightly, lightly—the bruise developing on her cheek. "I— It was my fault," she stammered. "I shouldn't have— Johnny doesn't usually . . ."

The man stared, his face unmoving.

"Honestly! It was my fault!" she insisted. And she meant it. She knew that she'd embarrassed Johnny. She just wanted the house clean when Wyatt Earp came for lunch, but then somehow it turned into another fight about Albert, and she'd made a mess of everything. "I'm unreasonable. I argue, and I always want my own way, and . . ." She fell silent under the wordless scrutiny, the heat of shame rising in her face.

"You have terrible taste in men," he told her. "I am no prize, and I have friends who treat their livestock better than Mr. Behan treats you." He retrieved his hat and cane from the table. "Raise your sights, sugar," he advised as he walked toward the door. "Aim low? All you'll hit are rats, snakes, and rock bottom."

She stood, furious, and considered throwing that crystal ashtray at his bony old spine, but he stopped, leaning on his cane, head down.

"If you had the money," he asked, "could you go home?"

There was something about his voice. An unexpected kindness.

"They think— I told them Johnny and I were married."

He snorted softly. "My people think I am still a dentist." He straightened then, as much as he could. "There will be fifty dollars deposited in your name at the front desk of this hotel. If you ever decide to leave that presumptuous, third-rate, overdressed Irish bigot, ask for the envelope, y'hear?"

Mouth open, she watched him leave the music room. The swing doors creaked on their hinges. He stopped at the front desk for a brief conversation with Mr. Bilicke, the hotel owner, who glanced at her and nodded.

When the man was gone, Mr. Bilicke left the desk and pushed the swing doors to the music room aside. "Do you know who that was?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Doc Holliday," he told her.

She looked sharply toward the street, hoping to catch another glimpse of the notorious gambler Johnny had argued with yesterday, during the stagecoach journey the two men had shared. Johnny was fetching his eight-year-old son back to Tombstone to live. Holliday was, presumably, coming in from Tucson to play cards. He had a fearsome reputation, but Johnny Behan was convinced he could make friends with anyone. Things seemed to be going well until a short, sharp dispute erupted over the Non-Partisan Anti-Chinese League. "All I did was invite him to join when he got to town," Johnny cried. "I never heard a white man take on so about Chinks. He just tore into me, and with a little kid sitting right there! No consideration at all for Albert."

Johnny had been tedious on the subject, and he turned the conversation toward it whenever she tried to find out why on earth he expected her to raise his ex?wife's child, just because Victoria was getting married again.

Mr. Bilicke spoke again: "Word is, Holliday hates your . . . husband."

Always. That little hesitation. That tiny pause. Angry again, she was tempted to snap, "Well, that makes two of us!" but it would have sounded childish. "Kwand meem!" she said breezily in what she believed to be French. "It's all the same to me!"

Mr. Bilicke shrugged and went back to the front desk. Soon he was busy with a guest's query about telephone service to the silver mines. "Just between the pits and the stamping mills, sir, but more wires are going up, and the Cosmopolitan is on the schedule for early '81. Shall I arrange for a messenger in the meantime?"

Their voices faded. Alone, homesick, overwhelmed by the shambles she'd made of her life, she began to cry again.

From Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell. Copyright 2015 by Mary Doria Russell. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.