“That’s it?”
“That’s all the hell that’s needed.”
“Seeing as how it’s Christmas Eve, most of my customers today have added a greeting of the damn season.”
A snort: “So I can pay extra for the Have a hell of a Merry Christmas—that I’m having to spend in some godforsaken mountains hundreds of miles from any form of civilization?”
“I assume that is a no on the greetings of the season, then.”
The groom or footman or whatever he was in that ridiculous livery, Leblanc noticed, looked like he’d walked out of a damn storybook. Hat pulled down over his eyes and collar up high. Gold embroidery on a red coat.
“Looks like a damn Buckingham Palace guard. Here in this backwater.”
The telegrapher looked as if he might take offense but then shrugged. “George Vanderbilt’s got his people all fancied up for tonight. Got a house here, just now getting finished. Whole pack of his family’ll be arriving on the next train.” He nodded toward a slim man with a neatly trimmed mustache who’d stopped to talk with the guy in livery. “Why Vanderbilt himself’d be here.”
Leblanc huffed on the muddy edge of the street, his breath coming in puffs of steam. “So. Any hotels here fit for a man of taste? Looks to me like nothing but pine trees and snow.”
“Should’ve gotten off one stop later for Asheville. ’Bout three miles up is Kenilworth. Battery Park Inn. Some others.” He pointed to a road leading west.
“So now I’m supposed to walk three miles in the snow? Here to catch a dangerous criminal, and you’re telling me I got to walk three miles to a decent hotel?”
On the other side of his window, which hadn’t been cleaned for some time, Farnsworth glanced up indifferently from the metal arm. “Do I look like I’m paid enough to send messages for outsiders showing up here all rude and then solve their problems?”
Leblanc took stock of the man. “Fortunately for both of us, I’m paid well enough both to be rude and get the answers I want.” Pulling a money clip from the breast pocket of his coat, he peeled off two bills, which he shoved through the opening where the glass ended and a narrow wooden shelf began.
The telegrapher slid the money into his pocket without comment. “Livery stable’s a block that way”—he jerked his head east—“if anybody’s still there this time of evening, night before Christmas. So what crime’s he wanted for?”
The detective paused for dramatic effect. Then pronounced the word slowly, in two separate parts, as if he’d rolled both around in his mouth, tasting them: “Mur-der.”
The telegrapher narrowed his eyes. “Who’s he supposed to have killed?”
“Not supposed to have. The victim himself named his killers before he died.”
“Said the man’s very name, did he?”
“Identified the killers, let’s just say. This was one of them that got away.”
Farnsworth crossed his arms. “This was what year?”
“Ninety—when it happened. Ninety-one when the bastard slipped the grasp of justice.”
“Hold on. You’ve been chasing this guy for four, five years?”
“’Bout the size of it, yeah.”
“So this guy’s kept you bumbling around for half a decade.”
Leblanc clipped his words. “Pinkerton detectives do not bumble around.”
“Just surprised you hadn’t caught the fellow is all.”
“Jackass,” the detective muttered as he stalked away.
Farnsworth gave two taps to the metal arm of his machine. “Message received,” he called.
But now the ground was shaking, the hemlocks shivering branches of snow to the ground. A train’s whistle echoed off the mountains and drifted through the valley.
By the time Leblanc returned on a hurriedly rented horse, its saddle blanket rumpled under the pommel, a front hoof pawing at a snowdrift, the train had been unloaded. Through billows of steam he could make out what appeared to be several brown bears balanced up on two feet. The sallow light of a lamppost, though, showed them to be women in head-to-toe furs.
Out of curiosity—which was his damn job, after all—Leblanc kicked his nag forward to where he could both see and hear.
The oldest of the women was reaching for Vanderbilt’s hand. “George, dear. We cannot wait to see your Biltmore in all its glory, son.”
Vanderbilt kissed her on the cheek. “A bedroom has been designed specifically for you, Mother. How good to have you back.”
The groom—or whatever he was—had been joined by others unloading trunks and hatboxes from the train into a second and third sleigh pulled now behind the first.
Bundled in their furs and clutching the servants’ hands, the Vanderbilts piled into the first two sleighs, their towers of trunks being hauled into the third.
Another of the women, this one younger, perhaps in her forties, had been gazing in a full circle about her. “Oh. Heavens. How remote a spot, George. How do you bear the isolation from society?”
Leblanc couldn’t make out what Vanderbilt murmured to the woman—something boringly bland and polite from the tone.
“Still, it’s a relief to be out of New York,” the woman said. “Really, George, three-fourths of the city now are foreigners. Good God, their goulashes and garlics, their pigs and chickens and hordes of children, half of them reeking of disease. And the smells. A complete dearth of simple hygiene.”
Letting the servant in the ridiculous livery hand her up into the sleigh, she paused at its running board to address the others. “This mystery home of George’s will be a lovely respite, I’m sure—if only for the pure, unpolluted air.”
The servant’s arm must have slipped then, nearly dropping the woman flat into the snow. But he recovered in time to catch her fall.
The sleighs loaded, the Vanderbilts and their furs and trunks went jingling off toward a break in the trees and a big, hulking arch of an entrance of some sort.
“Waste of my damn time watching all that,” Leblanc muttered. He kicked his horse into a trot, snow winging out from each step, heading in the direction the idiot telegrapher had pointed.
Chapter 32
It took only the one sentence whispered to her from the doorway, and Kerry’s hands went unsteady, which she realized not by a look down at them but by the sterling flashing in the firelight. Gold and red and green sparked from the edges of the platter that her hands gripped, wobbling.
Tully and Jursey had been invited to spend the night at Biltmore tonight in an empty servant’s room with Kerry since she would be working late. Ella Bratchett had offered again to care for Johnny Mac in Kerry’s absence.
Kerry had held her arm. “Please let me pay you for your time.”
“If mountain folk can’t take care of each other—especially with us about the only two farms in these parts not already bought up—and you all living here in this barn, then the world’s gone clear to hell and took us with it.”
“Please. It’s the only way I’ll feel comfortable staying over at Biltmore.”
“We’ll talk about it later. I’m just glad Rema finally let on to me about the roof collapsing so we’d know you could use some help. Y’all go on now.”