Kerry had slipped her hand under her skirt’s hem. Her fingers could just brush the knife’s handle now. Just another inch . . . If he could just be distracted, even for an instant, she could reach farther down and get to it.
Her voice came strained from her crushed chest. “You’re behind all of it: the flyers promoting hate, the group in France and the people here you’ve been in contact with, the fear you’ve tried to fan.”
He eased back an inch, eyes sparkling with triumph. A hunter with a deer in the crosshairs.
Slowly, taking advantage of his leaning slightly back, she managed to lift her leg enough to slide the knife up out of the top of her boot with two fingers. “So,” she managed, “did you kill Berkowitz yourself or hire Farnsworth to do it?”
His lips stretched into a sneer. “So, you’ve landed on me as the killer, have you?”
She wasn’t at all sure she’d hit on the answer—Grant killing the man out of sheer loathing or a fear of what the reporter might’ve known that could’ve sullied Grant’s public reputation. For all his superiority and polish, Madison Grant seemed capable of attacking someone he loathed just like he’d smashed the phylacteries—and she had to see his reaction. Her hand wrapped fully around the knife now.
“Did he have particularly damning information on you and the LNA—something, perhaps, that could have hurt your public persona if the public knew what an utter scoundrel you are?” She began easing her right hand up.
One of his eyebrows lifted. “And what, pray tell, does a little kitchen maid know of the LNA?”
Her right hand was nearly in position for a clear strike.
But then he pinioned both arms to her sides. “No one, you understand, will believe a pretty little servant, dirt poor, over an Ivy League man from a prominent family of New York. Try it and I promise, I will ruin you.” He thrust himself hard up against her again, and her spine slammed into the wall once more.
The impact loosened her grip on the knife, and it slipped soundlessly to the room’s carpet.
Oblivious of what she’d just dropped, Grant yanked upward on her skirts and grabbed under them. Kerry ducked away from him even as she strained toward the knife he’d not seen.
But Grant wrenched her back. “You little slut.”
Just as he’d bragged in the bowling alley, Grant did know his angles. Clamping down at her wrist, he twisted one hand behind her back so hard she was sure it would snap and lowered his mouth to her ear. “You realize, of course, if you scream for help, you expose yourself as having snuck up to the bachelors’ wing—of your own volition. Driven, it would appear, by ambition and lust to the bedroom of a guest. A sullied end to a poor mountain girl’s employment.”
Kerry groped with the fingers of the hand he’d pinioned behind her, digging her nails into the soft of his wrist. Grant’s grip on her loosened only long enough for her to leap a few feet away and dive headlong for the knife, even as Grant dove to block the door. Snatching up the knife, she leaped for the far side of the room and flashed the blade now so that he could see.
“Ah, I suppose it should be no surprise that hillbilly trash would know how to put up a fight.” He looked entertained—not in the least wary of her or her weapon.
From the opposite side of the room, she braced for what she knew would be her one chance as he lunged at her. One sliver of a second to let fly the knife at a moving target.
Then all at once he was coming for her, and she was drawing back her arm.
Now came a pounding on the door that stopped them both in their tracks and turned them toward it.
“Everythin’s all right in there, is it?” came a voice from the other side.
Kerry spun back first and let the knife fly.
A bloodcurdling scream from Madison Grant.
Jursey had been right: sometimes, at least, she could gig a trout in the gills.
Her eyes not leaving him, Kerry stepped swiftly to unlock the door. Moncrief, the footman, swung the door wide.
“Bloody ’ell.”
Kerry, her hair pulled wild and loose from the maid’s cap that dangled by one hairpin, marched to the opposite side of the room. She yanked her knife from the wainscoting just a hair to the right of Madison Grant’s thigh. He stood frozen in place, face drained of all color.
“You have Moncrief here to thank,” Kerry told Grant over her shoulder as she drew even with the footman. “It’s only because he showed up when he did that I aimed”—she glanced back one final time—“to miss.”
Chapter 49
In the hours after they dragged his brother away, Sal faced what had to be done. Robert and Ella Bratchett had stepped forward from the crowd to volunteer to care for Nico for the night. Sal trusted them.
But he’d also seen his brother’s face: worse than an expression of horror.
Instead, Nico’s eyes had gone blank, insensible, just as he’d looked when Sal found him after the night of lynchings. Nico’s mind had clearly moved to a place where he could not feel, could not hurt, could not panic. But also, Sal knew, he would not eat or speak. For Nico to survive, Sal would need to break out.
Leblanc caught him staring at the bars. “Plan to gnaw through those with your sharp little teeth, guinea?” He turned to Wolfe. “I’d watch that one if I were you.”
Wolfe scowled. “Like I ain’t never learned my own job.”
“Apparently, you haven’t. A murder months ago at your train station and the killer still at large—unless it’s Catalfamo, in which case I did your job for you. In fact, I can’t trust a fumbling backwater piker like you not to muff up a simple thing like keeping a watch on the Italian for the night. I’m staying here myself, Wolfe, overnight. Then transporting Catalfamo tomorrow back to New Orleans for trial.”
“Thought you said he and the others already stood trial four years ago and got off.”
Leblanc looked Sal up and down. Then shrugged. “Bringing him in’s what I was hired to do. That’s what I’m doing. ’Cause some of us know how to do our jobs. What happens to him once I get him there isn’t my concern.”
Wolfe met the prisoner’s eye but addressed the detective over his shoulder. “No. I don’t reckon it would be.”
There would be no second trial, Sal knew. From the expression on the local lawman’s face, Sal gathered Wolfe knew it, too.
Leblanc made a show of moving one of the jail’s army cots near Sal’s cell. Sullenly, Wolfe served Leblanc and himself slabs of salted venison and a clear liquid Wolfe referred to only as “home brew” before shoving a tin cup at Leblanc.
“So, little man,” Leblanc said to Wolfe as they ate, “time to show you how to do your job.”
Ramming a metal dinner tray under the metal flap at the foot of Sal’s cell door, Wolfe said nothing. But he stood there unmoving at the cell as Sal picked up the tray.
Wolfe’s eyes dropped to the tray. Sal’s followed. A tin cup of water sat there. A tin plate of venison, mostly gristle by the look of it. One metal spoon. No fork. No knife. Both of those, presumably, could be used as weapons.
But under the upturned lip of the tin plate, two long, thin nails, one bent slightly at its point.
Sal’s eyes flew up to Wolfe’s, but met his only for an instant, Wolfe already turning.