“Actually, Frederick,” Vanderbilt interjected, “I’ve found the local populace refreshing. Their warmth and self-reliance. Their shape note singing in the chapels here. The banjos and fiddles they craft themselves. Their humor.”
Cabot raised his cup of wassail. “Their keen intelligence, too.”
All eyes turned to Cabot, and for a moment, he froze, hand in the air.
The right tip of Vanderbilt’s mustache quirked up in a half smile. “Cabot has been researching the Southern Appalachians. The manager of the Battery Park Inn tells me he’s pounded away at his Remington at such unseemly hours, the guests on either side and beneath his room have complained of the racket.”
“I’m no kind of pleasant hotel guest,” Cabot conceded. “Thank goodness Biltmore’s guest rooms have been finished before I’m tossed out in the snow.”
Emily Sloane, whose immediate family appeared to be flanking her now, spoke up. “Did George tell you about the murder we’ve had here? It’s been quite the game solving it.”
One of Vanderbilt’s sisters crinkled her nose. “Heavens, I’d completely forgotten. We read about it in the papers—covered because of George and Biltmore, of course. That poor Berkowitz fellow. Even if he was a Jew, I’m not convinced that’s a reason to be murdered.”
“I’m fairly certain,” Cabot murmured to his cup, “it is not.”
“I understand,” Frederick Vanderbilt offered, “that the fellow may have been sent by the Times to poke into some labor disputes.”
Another Vanderbilt brother looked alarmed. “Good God, I thought we had our people on that—those labor disputes.”
Frederick Vanderbilt shook his head. “Calm yourself, Willy. Not rail or steel. This was something to do with New Orleans. An old story the Times decided had never been fully told. Sent the Berkowitz fellow down to learn more. You know those newspaper types—their unnatural love for buried secrets and melodrama.”
“But why on earth here?” Emily Sloane’s mother asked. “Outside the realms of civilization?” She glanced about as if searching for knuckle-dragging men bearing clubs.
John Cabot’s eyes flashed to Kerry’s and quickly away.
Something, Kerry thought. He knows—or suspects—something he’s not told anyone.
Frederick Vanderbilt raised his glass now. “The issue we’ve not broached yet, quite aside from the admitted beauty of the Blue Ridge, is what George has provided for the populace here. A rising tide raises all ships, and the very existence of Biltmore will open opportunities for the benighted locals in their pitiable hovels.”
“Benighted?” Kerry blurted before she could clamp down on her own tongue. “Pitiable hovels?”
Arms froze in midlift of wassail to lips. All eyes turned to Kerry.
“Really, George,” Emily’s mother said, not bothering to lower her voice, “surely you’re going to reprimand your maid for that outburst.”
“Actually, I believe, Frederick,” George Vanderbilt said without flinching, “if you were to find the time to stay at Biltmore longer, you’d see what I do: a landscape of beauty and a populace with great talent and skills, the latter often passed down for generations.”
Frederick grunted rather than answered, his eyes passing over Kerry. “I’d love to hear, Cabot, what you’ve found of value in your research here.”
John Cabot forced a laugh. “Be warned. I have a great deal to say on the ways these mountains and their people have surprised and . . . impressed me.”
His eyes flicked to Kerry’s.
She kept her chin high. And looked straight ahead.
“I for one,” said one of the sisters as their host led them toward the banquet hall, “would like to hear more of this grisly, apparently unsolvable murder.”
At those words, Kerry skirted a palm with her tray of empty cups to find Marco Bergamini huddled, nearly hidden, just behind the door of the billiard room.
Waiting, it appeared, for her.
To confess something, she guessed, that she’d rather not hear.
Dread clenching her stomach, Kerry gestured for him to follow as she hurried back toward the dumbwaiters.
With those words, murder and confession, still echoing in her head.
Chapter 33
Trying to breathe, trying not to be seen, Sal watched from the door of the pantry where Kerry MacGregor was unloading the dumbwaiters. A roast turkey, sprigged all over with rosemary, hulked there in the platter’s butter and sage. But his need to tell someone the truth had taken any appetite he might’ve had.
At least Leblanc had not recognized him at the station. Sal had loathed the livery uniform when the new butler, Harvey, informed the stablehands they’d have to wear it while Mr. Vanderbilt’s family was visiting. But the low-sitting hat and high collar and gloves—and work that kept him turned with his back to Leblanc—had been a gift.
Leblanc. The bastard. Only he could have shown up on Christmas Eve. Four years of searching for Sal had only made the man’s jowls hang lower, the point of his beard sharper.
Kerry tipped her head back toward him. “I’m so sorry I can’t stop to listen at the moment. Seven courses and cleanup from now, I can come find you. Or if you want to stick close by, there may be a minute here or there.”
As the door swung open and closed from the servants’ entrance at the back of the banquet hall, Sal glimpsed the family, these Vanderbilts and Sloanes and Shepards and Barkers and Kissams, all glittering and gilded in silks and jewels, all gathered around the banquet hall’s table. Thirty or forty of them, it looked to be. Behind Sal, Nico huddled in the corner watching his brother with those big eyes and sipping the cocoa Mrs. Smythe had given him.
I trust you, the eyes said. Mi fido di te.
But that trust had not always served them well in the past.
Sal made himself breathe in and out. The butter and sage and rosemary. The fresh-cut greenery from the three giant mantles. The Fraser fir they’d hauled in on the sleigh. And the smell of wet, muddy dog from Cedric, poised hopefully, big furry head cocked, at a dog gate blocking off the next room.
Moncrief teetered by with compotes of apricot preserves. “It’s me legs would be wailing like bagpipes if they could blow through the knees.”
On the floor, Nico jumped as the dumbwaiter opened to show something red and white with great grasping claws.
“Lobster,” Kerry told him. “It’s more butter than meat, but rich people convince each other they love it.”
In time with a string quartet at one end of the hall, Christmas Eve dinner passed course to course. Sal looked for his chance to catch Kerry alone. He could slip away without any confession. But he wanted someone to know.
The footmen serving had their own kind of dance, rhythmic and graceful, a floating walk with no bounce or jostle to it, the dip at the left shoulder of a guest, the three-quarter spin away. The musicians at one end of the hall slid from tune to tune—“Coventry Carol” and “I Saw Three Ships” and “The Holly and the Ivy”—with the clatter of silver on china providing percussion.
Sal’s heart, though, thudded heavily in his chest. He and Nico wouldn’t have long to get a jump on Leblanc. Since he’d only just come to town and all would be quiet tonight and on Christmas Day, they’d surely have at least a day and a half to plan and then disappear. But they also needed help knowing where they could go in these mountains. Which was part of telling Kerry MacGregor the truth. Hearing what she had to say.