Someone pointed toward the stand of balsams.
“Everyone knows,” quavered the woman in mauve, “you can’t trust Italians. Not south of Florence, you can’t.”
Stepping behind a balsam, Wolfe shook its branches as if the man himself might fall like a pine cone from among its needles. “Well, now. I reckon we can make out his prints in the mud setting out toward the lodge there.”
Slowly, Jursey pulled the cap from his head. Then tossed it to the ground.
Kerry joined him. Rested a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing’s been proved, Jurs. Far from it.”
Jursey lifted his face, pale and drawn. “You don’t reckon our friend really killed him?”
Kerry again pictured the Italian with his phony last name yanking the cap lower onto his head and slumping down in his seat each time the vestibule door opened.
“Sure wouldn’t seem likely, Jurs, I’d agree. Sometimes people get blamed when they don’t deserve it. But also, sometimes people we don’t want to blame . . . sometimes they disappoint us.”
Cocking back his foot, Jursey kicked the cap, sending it and a glob of mud into the balsams. He turned to Kerry like he might bury his face in her neck, but then he seemed to remember his age and the manhood he was supposed to uphold. He slumped. And looked as if he might cry. “I just wanna go home.”
Kerry hugged her brother close. “I know.”
Tully sniffled. “The man on the train made hisself out like he was nice.”
Kerry bent to kiss the top of her sister’s head. The stationmaster’s lantern spilled yellow light toward the edge of the woods. Kerry’s eyes followed the strand.
Now she sprang toward the shifting light.
From the mud, she lifted two small black wooden boxes, each with sodden black ribbons attached to its base. With one finger, she worked away the mud from one side of a box to reveal a gold symbol. “Phylacteries. With a Hebrew letter on the side. These must have been in his jacket pocket when he fell.” Kerry held them up for her siblings to see. “I had a friend at Barnard whose father had boxes like these. Some people of the Jewish faith wear these on the arm and the forehead when they pray.”
“So,” Wolfe said, “the man who dropped these is Jewish.”
“Which,” Madison Grant pointed out, “we already knew.”
Her eyes filling as she let her gaze shift back toward the reporter’s unmoving form, Kerry turned to Wolfe. “We owe it to him to find out who did this, and why.”
“Why the hell do you think I come here in the middle of good catfish and corn? Only you got to let the men handle it. You hear me, Kerry?” Wolfe’s gaze swung over the crowd. “Somebody just said ole Robert Bratchett mighta been here right before the attack, then all of a sudden”—he snapped his fingers—“clean out of sight.”
“There were others who disappeared from the crowd just before the attack happened.” Kerry’s eyes shot toward John Cabot and Madison Grant a few feet away. “Shouldn’t you be talking with them, as well?”
From a few yards away, Cabot’s gaze swung to meet hers—as if he had heard.
“Men,” she insisted to Wolfe, “that perhaps no one would ever suspect.”
Chapter 8
With Nico clinging tight to his back, Sal struggled forward. He and Berkowitz weren’t scheduled to meet until tomorrow, and meanwhile, Sal and Nico needed a place to sleep. More than that, they needed a future here in Asheville after he and the reporter cornered their man.
It had been Berkowitz who’d found him working in the quarries of Pennsylvania, where he’d been since leaving New Orleans. Berkowitz who’d shown up with questions based on another Italian who’d been arrested four years ago in New Orleans and who, like Sal, had escaped. That one had passed through the quarries, one of the few places hiring Southern Italians, and worked alongside Sal for a time, then ended up in Manhattan. He’d evidently decided this fall that four years was long enough to not tell what he knew—or guessed—about the forces behind all those deaths in New Orleans. He’d gone to the Times. Which had sent Berkowitz out on a fact-finding mission, including to the quarries to find—and then to recruit—Sal.
Sal hadn’t been hard to convince. Four years in the cold of the quarries was hard on Nico, made his leg ache. It was time for a move. Sal had his own long-ago connection with this place that rich tourists flocked to in the Southern mountains.
And now, too, a chance at revenge.
He and Berkowitz would meet up tomorrow, and it all would begin.
Meanwhile, even before finding a small inn where he and Nico could stay, Sal had to see Biltmore. Had to see if the sketch from all those years ago had really risen up from the ink and taken on form.
His feet on the wet leaves slid and stumbled. Head pounding along with his heart, he doubled over to breathe.
Then suddenly, along with a stomping and snapping of branches, a horse plunged out of the fog. Its front hooves boxed the air as it reared, catching the light of the lantern its rider held. Sal leaped for the horse’s bridle and hauled it back to all fours.
Standing up in the left stirrup and holding the lantern high in her opposite hand, its rider brought the shank of her crop down hard on Sal’s head.
“Che cavolo!” he cried, letting go. Leaping out of reach of the crop, he swung Nico to the ground and slung an arm protectively over his shoulders. Angrily, he pointed to the crop she held cocked to bring down again on his head. “For what do I owe this?”
The rider backed her horse out of his reach. “How dare you grab my mount.”
Sal lifted both arms, palms up. “A horse on the hind legs, it needs to be grabbed.” He dropped one arm back onto Nico, who shrank in close.
“I can control my own mount quite well, thank you.”
“I see a horse with two legs in the air: I see a rider with need of the help.”
“I was not in need of help. And it was you who spooked my mount.”
The rider kept the mare pawing several feet back, as if ready for any attempt on Sal’s part to approach. As if saying she could run him and Nico over at an instant’s notice.
“I’m only out in the dark because . . . ,” she began, as if she’d rehearsed the line to herself. She stopped. “I’ve no reason to explain it to you. Although the rest of my group has just arrived at the station. I was hoping to welcome them there.”
Sal didn’t believe this for an instant—a fancy young woman like this out alone in the dark—but her motives for sneaking about in the fog were no interest of his. “You should not ride the horse so fast in this.” He pointed to the mud. “The feet of the horse, they are not a goat. They have the good footing, but not the perfect, not in wet such as this. You could have broken the leg.” He was not referring, he hoped she realized, to her leg but the mare’s as the thing to be cared for.
“You ought to be told,” she retorted, “that you’re on private land.”
“We are the travelers.” He pulled both Nico and the tube of paper in tighter.
“Oh? And what brings you here, Mr.—?” She lifted the lantern in front of her to better see his face. She studied him for a moment.