Her eyes moved to the north wall of the train station, where she’d pointed out to Cabot—meaning only to make a point about the softness of rich men like him who owned rather than worked on the rails—the line of tools that always hung there, always in the same order, when they weren’t in use. Leaning against the wall, the stationmaster held his lantern high, casting light around the body—and back on the implements.
“The rail dog,” she said.
The woman in mauve sniffed. “What breed is that? And what in heaven’s name does any dog have to do with this?”
Ignoring the woman, Kerry scanned the wall again. “The rail dog is always there. But now it’s gone.”
Turning to count one by one the tools on the outer wall, the stationmaster grunted. “Well, I’ll be damned.” To Cabot and Grant, he added, “Rail dog’s a big ole iron tool shaped like a T with a grip on one end for lifting up rails for repair. Takes two strong men to do it. Damned if it ain’t missing.”
Scanning the tatters of woods at the edge of the gaslight, Kerry kept her voice low. “Rema. That clump of boneset.”
“Hon, you got to speak up. You’re chirping faint as a one-legged cricket.”
Kerry gestured toward a four-foot mound of wildflowers, the little white blooms in clusters that in the far edges of the stationmaster’s light took on a faint glow. “Look where the line’s broken.”
Kerry walked to the edge of the woods, the stationmaster following behind her with his lantern. Sure enough, in the middle of the mound were broken and bent stalks, as if something had been hurled through them.
She pushed her way past. Bent down. Then straightened. With the rail dog in her hand.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd.
Madison Grant shook his head. “Intriguing. Although who’s to say this was used in the attack and not merely slung to the side last time the rails needed repairing?”
“It was there,” Kerry said. “The engine’s headlamp shone on the wall as we were rounding the bend to come into the station. It was on the wall. Just before.”
Grant smiled at her—doubtfully.
And she saw again that moment on the train when the reporter had gestured toward Grant and Cabot, then mouthed something to Marco Bergamini, words that looked like Watch out.
Rema turned to the gentleman, her voice slow as sorghum in winter. “Hon, I wouldn’t pit my rememberings against Kerry’s if I was you. Give you the allovers hearing what that girl can recall.”
Kerry examined the bluing face of the reporter, who’d trusted her, a stranger, with a hint of why he’d been sent here to the mountains. The gentle brown eyes stared up unseeing into the mist and the pools of light from the lantern.
People with secrets, he’d said, they’d like to keep covered up . . . And now we’ve got new information to go on.
With a hollowing sorrow that she already knew what she’d find, Kerry leaned in to feel again at Berkowitz’s neck for a pulse. Bent to feel for his breath.
It was Aunt Rema, not the strangers, whose eyes she met. Kerry spoke across the newcomers.
“He’s been murdered,” she said.
Chapter 7
Even as she said the word murdered, she realized she’d not used the more tame or politely vague dead.
The truth had simply slipped out before she could pad its sharp, cutting edges.
After the crowd stood a moment, stunned to silence, murmurs simmered and rose. Now came the recollections, the roiling of whispers and mutters, the remade rememberings of who had been where when the attack had occurred.
The woman in mauve suddenly wailed, “I knew this was a godforsaken backwater. I told Melvin, and did he listen?”
Rema rolled her eyes. “Lord, she’s gone pale as death eatin’ a cracker.”
Kerry said nothing. But John Cabot was still watching her face.
John Cabot. Who must have known the reporter somehow. Who’d disappeared behind the building just before the attack—which could have given him time to slip to the far, unlit end of the station where they stood now.
The same, Kerry realized, was true for Grant, who’d ducked into the fog a different direction. He was someone Berkowitz had felt he needed to mouth a warning about—unless that warning referred to Cabot.
Arms crossed—partly from cold and partly from a sudden, ferocious need to guard the reporter’s body—as if she could save him now from more harm—Kerry remained there by his side. Quietly, Tully slipped off Kerry’s one-armed coat and laid it over the reporter’s chest.
“We’re so sorry,” Tully said to him. “So sorry this happened here.”
Kerry, Rema, and the twins circled there together, unspeaking, as they waited.
Careening suddenly into the crowd, Dr. Randall arrived with a clatter of metallic pedals and wheels. He tumbled from the bicycle.
Ripping his trouser leg as he dismounted, Randall cursed. Then bent over the reporter’s body.
“I didn’t see,” Tully whispered. “Nary a thing. Will they be mad at me, Kerry? For not being able to give out what happened?”
Madison Grant lifted something round from the mud, shook it off. The reporter’s yarmulke. “Ah. It would appear the man was a Jew.”
Kerry turned. “More to the point, Mr. Grant, the man, who was a newspaper reporter on assignment, was killed.”
“Yet another newspaper man”—Grant smiled at her evenly—“who is a Jew. Or was, in this case. Extraordinary. Wouldn’t you say?”
Extraordinary? What exactly did he mean to imply? How could the fact that Berkowitz was Jewish have any possible bearing on . . . She gave her head a frustrated shake.
“My point,” she said, turning back to the victim, “is that it seems a reporter, by profession, might well know things about people, secrets they’d like to keep hidden, that could motivate someone to kill him.”
Silence. Only the suck and squish of mud as several villagers nervously shifted their feet.
John Cabot bent his head to say something to the doctor. Despite the cold mountain air, his face glowed with perspiration, and his hair, no longer covered by the top hat, flopped thick and damp on his forehead.
Randall held a fluted wooden tube to Berkowitz’s chest, his ear to the other end of the tube. With a flourish, the doctor held up his free hand for silence.
Rema cleared her throat. “Charlie, you can stuff a tube up your durn ear if it makes you feel better. But Kerry here’s already pronounced the poor blighter—”
“Dead.” Randall employed a bass note to deliver the verdict.
“Murdered,” Rema countered. “Have to side with my niece on that. Unless you’d rather be calling a spade just a club without the ruffling to it.”
“Reckon we can wait a piece until we get the law here to be saying what’s what. What might be called an accident and what might be called . . . something else. No point in rushing to judgment.”
“Unless folks need to get judged.” Rema planted her feet. “In which case putting some rush into it might just be a good thing.”
Ignoring this, Randall stood to face Kerry. “You seem to have all the answers today, Miss MacGregor.”
There was no admiration in the statement, and more than a hint of a warning. She’d overstepped—and into his territory.