Tully’s eyes saucered. “So your plan’s to knock on every godlovin’ door in the Blue Ridge?”
“Si.”
Jursey swept a hand over the cemetery. “If you all’d be looking here, sounds like you ain’t even sure this man Cernoia’s still alive and kicking.”
Tully smacked him. “You don’t got to say what’s strung up and salted right there in front of your face, Jurs.”
Kerry had already seen those words, the weight of them in Marco Bergamini’s eyes.
He shook his head. “Non lo so. He may be dead, yes. And also . . .” This part he seemed to consider whether to tell them or not. “There may have been the reason for the man to change what was his name.”
“Like you?” Kerry asked—but more gently now than she did on the train.
Hesitating again, he lifted his head. Then lowered it just a notch. A nod. Almost imperceptible. But a confession, she realized.
Kerry gazed out over the hill, rumpled and studded with gravestones. Then ended on her mother’s marker: Missy Murray MacGregor.
“Do you know any other names he might have been likely to use? His mother’s maiden name, maybe? Or maybe there are names in Italian that had meaning for him.”
“Like a profession, yes. In Sicily, we have many of these sorts of the names: Abate from the priest; Agricola from the farmer; Cavollo from the horseman . . .”
“And Bergamini?” Kerry asked.
“What?” He blinked.
“Your name.” The name you’re using, at least. “Is Bergamini from an occupation?”
“Oh. Our name. Carlo’s and mine. Bergamini. That, too, yes. From bergamino, the cowherd, or here you might say the dairy farmer. Grazie. I will think. And I will write to Palermo to ask.”
Without speaking again, Bergamini fell into step with them as they followed the river back toward town. At a bend in the river, Jursey picked up a piece of paper, crumpled and soiled, that the wind had blown to his feet.
Tully jerked her head. “What’s got your face screwed up like a dried turnip?”
Jursey held up the paper.
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!
DON’T LET YOUR JOB,
YOUR HOME
OR YOUR FAMILY
BE STOLEN BY THIEVING FOREIGNERS
Four caricatures illustrated the flyer, one in each corner. At the top left hunched a man, leering, with a shaved head and a long, thin black braid down his bare back. Disease had been scrawled across his forehead. In the top right was a man huddled with the Star of David emblazoned on one bare arm, a yarmulke on his head, the word Lies scribbled on it, and a fistful of cash in one hand.
And, Kerry thought, a reporter’s notepad stuck in one pocket. As if Aaron Berkowitz were somehow to blame for his own death.
At the bottom left was a man whose skin had been inked in dark and whose muscles bulged, his right arm wielding a scythe, the word Violence lettered over its blade. At the bottom right was a man with a grizzled chin and a head of black curls. Dominating his face were wildly bushy black brows, an enormous black mustache, and a menacing smirk with Anarchy spelled out across the bared teeth.
At the bottom center, like a signature, were the letters LNA.
Where had she seen that before?
An image clicked into her head. The telegram whose message she’d crossed through to use as her letter to ask for schoolbooks for the twins.
A telegram sent to Madison Grant. Something about the LNA growing in influence, especially among educated people. And the odd part about a rooster, a Reichsadler, whatever that was, and a bald eagle. And then that last line that especially stuck in her mind.
CONTINUE TO SPREAD MESSAGE: THE RACE WILL BE LOST IF WE CONTINUE THIS WAY.
So Madison Grant must be connected somehow with these flyers.
“Are these,” Jursey whispered, “supposed to be monkeys or real actual folks?”
Kerry lifted an arm over his shoulders. “I think that’s the point. I’m sorry all of us had to see this.”
Tugging at the paper to take it from him, Kerry risked a glance, just a shiver of one, at the faces of the two Italians. Only moments ago, she’d been shielding the twins from them herself.
She crumpled her end of the flyer. But Bergamini stopped her.
He ran a finger over the bottom right image. “My hair. It needs the cutting.”
She laughed, relieved. Plucking the paper from him, she shredded it into confetti she tossed into the air.
Lifting both arms, little Carlo turned in a circle, his face thrown back to receive the flurry of white falling around him. “Evviva!” he cried, an eight-year-old’s delight with pretend snow.
Jursey hoisted the child up onto his own skinny shoulders. “The bad paper’s all gone.”
Kerry smiled at Carlo, who was curling down over Jursey’s head as they walked together. A clatter from the street they were passing made her glance left.
Dearg Tate in a gray hat and red homespun shirt was just slipping behind a corner, a hefty stack of white paper in one arm. There, at the corner of the street, one of the flyers hung tacked to a lamppost and fluttering blithely in the breeze.
“Not all gone,” she murmured in little Carlo’s direction as the child giggled on Jursey’s shoulders. “Not all gone at all.”
Chapter 24
Kerry had the distinct sensation of being watched. But each time she spun around, no one was there.
If she hadn’t promised herself they’d try a kind of help for their father bought from the drugstore on Haywood, she’d have headed them all for home. But the image of her father’s skeletal face, the pain in his eyes that he wouldn’t speak, made her keep walking through town.
LNA, she mused. What might that stand for?
Jursey touched Kerry’s arm. “My stomach’s gone to hankering so loud I can’t hardly hear nothing else.”
Tully shot him a glance full of disdain. “Aunt Rema said mewling’s only for barn cats.”
Scowling, Jursey stopped. “You gonna let her talk to me that a way?”
Kerry waved him forward. “No skirmishing among our own troops, please.”
Asheville’s streets bucked up and down so that its shops seemed to be trying to hold tight, awnings braced and brick mortared thick against the pull, to keep from sliding to the bottomland of its valleys. A three-mile walk from Biltmore Junction’s sprinkling of structures, Asheville was bigger and more established, but still small enough to feel like a village that kept tumbling over and down the next hill.
Up ahead on Spruce Street, a gentleman steered a black horse. A shock of dark-blond hair fell onto the man’s forehead as he bent to adjust the bridle.
“Look!” Jursey pointed. “One of them rich men from the station.”
Tully tilted her nose in the air. “Aunt Rema said it was him caused a ruction by calling our Kerry the village milkmaid. You won’t catch me tradin’ howdys.”
The air smelled of maple wood burning in hearths and balsam from the nearby forest. Kerry could never think quite clearly with balsam nearby.
Reining in his horse directly in front of them, Cabot touched the brim of his top hat. “Good afternoon.” For all his big-city polish, he seemed to flounder for what to say next. “I hope you each are well.”
Jursey scraped his right toe on the street. “Could be a heap better.”