It was the awful, shiny thing in his hand she wanted. The girl’s dark eyes appeared utterly transfixed by the muzzle of the pistol, glinting bright in the spring sun.
Ling made a choking sound behind Kerry and pushed past her. Dearg, though, swept his pistol arm to aim at Ling, then at the stunned crowd, then back to Ling, who froze in place, his eyes flitting in horror from his daughter to Dearg.
“Dearg.” The word came from Kerry strangled and dry. But she had to get him to hear—to really listen.
Head cocked, little Zhen kept on across the chapel’s clearing toward Dearg and his pistol, reached toward the flashing silver as if it were a toy.
Dearg’s hands shook, making the gun’s barrel quiver. “You,” he growled at the child. “Stay back.”
“Dearg. She’s just a little girl.” Kerry’s voice had returned to her. She took a step toward him, then another. Tried to keep her voice steady. “Put the gun down. Please. Listen to me.”
“I didn’t mean no harm to that Jew. You hear me? No real harm.”
“I know you didn’t, Dearg. Easy now. Put the gun down.”
“All I meant,” he cried, “was to rough him up just a little. Lady paid me to scare him back to New York was all. Just scare him off the story was all, some New Orleans story she said he’d gotten all wrong but wouldn’t let it go.”
Lilli Barthélemy. It must have been.
“Nothing but scare was what I was aiming to do. But then there he was, and I was thinking how it was folks like him that’s been pushing us out, all them coming and coming, infesting all the good here.” His voice had become plaintive. Almost childlike.
Kerry walked slowly on toward him. Step by gentle step. “Dearg. Please. Lower your gun.”
After landing on Grant for an instant, his eyes swung back and he pled with her. “He’s right, Kerry. Every last thing he’s been saying, it’d be right. It’s people like you and me, like all us around here, getting replaced, and by what? Not by people like us.”
“Dearg, no.” Kerry could hear the panic edging her voice. It was as if she and the little girl were locked in a dreamlike race toward the man and the terrible thing in his hand. She took another step closer, another. “Dearg, listen to me.”
Zhen’s eyes flitted once to Kerry, but then back, mesmerized by the pistol’s flickering silver.
“Dearg—”
His voice broke. “I didn’t, Kerry. I didn’t mean to.”
Kerry eased another three steps closer. Three more, and she’d almost have the girl. “All that fear,” she whispered to Dearg. “All that hate he wants you to feel.”
Shoulders slumped, Dearg shook his head.
“Dearg, listen to me. Just set your pistol down easy now. Right on the ground by your feet. Behind you, though. Don’t let that little one get to it. Then you tell me about it.”
Inch by inch, Dearg turned. Lowered the pistol. Inch by inch, Kerry eased closer.
But the girl’s slow progress continued, too—until, suddenly, she could bear it no longer. Stretching her arms out, Zhen leaped toward that peculiar, gleaming silver stick.
Startled, Dearg turned toward her, raising the pistol . . .
The shot rang out at the same instant that Kerry screamed. The same instant that Dearg’s mouth rounded into an O of eternal regret.
Zhen sprang back, crumpling, the dark gloss of her black hair splayed on the grass. Dearg Tate took a step toward the child but, seeing her lying still, stopped. Sank to his knees.
Behind Kerry, Ling Yong cried out. She heard him running toward his child, but Kerry reached the little girl first. Scooped the limp body up into her arms.
Zhen’s breath came soft on Kerry’s cheek. No blood anywhere on the child’s frame. Zhen was unhurt, knocked flat, no doubt, by the sound of the blast and by fear. With a sob of relief, Kerry held the child out to her father. Zhen in his arms, Ling dropped to the ground.
From behind them, Dearg moaned, an unearthly sound, as if pulled from his marrow. He knelt there, face contorted in misery, and turned the muzzle of the gun to his own head. “Look,” he cried. “Look at what all I done.”
Almost within arm’s length now, Kerry called out his name, the boy she’d known since childhood, who’d grown up to be the man so full of fear and of rage and now, suddenly here, of regret.
“Dearg, no! Dearg—!”
Kerry was still calling his name when the pistol fired again, and his body, destroyed, slumped to the grass.
Chapter 56
Breathless as she mounted four flights of stairs, Kerry reached the observatory.
Numb with horror, she’d stayed beside Dearg’s ruined body until Dr. Randall arrived. Randall wasn’t needed to pronounce Dearg dead: that was only too clear from the damage his gun had done to his head.
But somehow only with Randall’s arrival could Kerry stop being the stoic in charge of sending the twins away with Aunt Rema, the guardian of the corpse, the commander sending someone to break the news to Dearg’s younger brother, Jerome. Now, stepping away with a choking sob, Kerry could begin feeling the event for herself.
John Cabot had stepped forward. “Kerry. My God. Tell me how I can help.”
But this process of beginning to feel was sending her reeling, a white-hot rage, blinding and desperate.
“Could you tell me where Grant went?” Her voice sounded foreign: Deeper. Monotone. Some other person’s voice.
“Back to Biltmore, I assume. George had already left before . . . what happened with Tate. Please, let me take you back to your farm.”
But Kerry had swung up on Malvolio. The twins had asked to ride him down to the funeral, and it seemed a day to say yes, even to the presence of an old mule. Now she urged the mule into a slow trot up the Approach Road, faster than he’d gone in years. Not once did she feel the jolt of his gait. Not once did she stop to consider the danger of tracking down Grant now. Not later, when she’d had time to think how he might react, but now, while her blood burned in her veins.
It took only one question to only one servant at Biltmore.
“I dinnae ken what’s wrong with the man,” Moncrief swore. “It’s off his head for certain, I’d say. I took him the Scotch he asked for—a whole bloody carafe, mind you, not a wee glass—all the way up to the observatory. Up to high doh, that one, I’ve said.”
As she burst into the lower floor of the observatory, footsteps echoed directly above her on the uppermost level. She stormed up the staircase, a tight, iron spiral opening to a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view.
There he was, his back to her despite the racket she’d made climbing the stairs. Slowly, he turned, Scotch in hand. “I presumed it would be you.” As suave, as polished as ever. As if all his money, all his connections formed some sort of armor around him that let him leer at her now, triumphant, untouched, after all this.
Incredibly, he raised a glass in a toast. “Join me, Kerry. I’m celebrating a political victory of sorts. Messy as that can sometimes be. Approve of my methods or not, the general populace deserves to be informed of what’s coming if we continue to be overrun. The white race, every last one of our researchers will tell you, must be protected.”