Sal would have to think quickly of a place they could hide that wasn’t too far away. Running through ice and snow alone would have been taxing, but with an eight-year-old boy on his back, Sal was already winded, and they were still within sight of Biltmore’s spires.
Nico pressed a frigid cheek against Sal’s neck, and the message was clear: Trust. That Sal would keep them safe and unhurt. That in this next place they’d no longer have to use phony names and fear strangers and wonder who might want the foreigners gone and do whatever it took to drive them away.
Trust, Sal thought with anguish, that had not been earned.
Lungs burning, Sal gripped his little brother’s legs harder at both sides and ran on.
Chapter 36
Kerry stared at Emily Sloane. Prayed she would suddenly lose her voice. Or keel over with a sudden palsy. Anything to keep her from speaking.
The girl stood before the detective. “The one Italian in my uncle George’s employ was in the stables, Mr. Leblanc. But he left yesterday. I saw him myself. Headed, I heard him say, for the train station. To leave town. Though I obviously didn’t follow the man to see him safely on.”
She laughed then, as easily as if she’d been raised on the stage. Her laugh let the detective see how much her word could be trusted, a young heiress who could not possibly have any motive to lie.
Kerry turned to find the twins creeping forward. She put a hand out to each of them, which they took.
Now, a couple of hours later, icy pellets of snow plinked on the stable roof as Kerry stood at the opening to the courtyard listening for snapping twigs, running footfalls, a voice from the shadows—anything. Though the fugitives would surely be long gone by now.
From inside the stable, a horse whinnied. Then silence again, except for the patter of sleet.
Footsteps now behind her: a man’s.
Kerry spun around, reached for a shovel propped against a wall.
Cabot stepped quietly through the doors leading to the porte cochere. “I should have been back at Battery Park by now, as I’d planned.”
Slowly, Kerry lowered her shovel.
“I confess I was slow leaving the estate—maybe not wanting to go be alone at Battery Park. And then when I saw Bergamini bolting out of the kitchen exit with his brother on his shoulders . . .”
Kerry was grateful for the silence. If he had questions for her, she had no real answers for him. It had been only instinct that made her side against Leblanc. And instinct could sometimes be wrong.
From the Approach Road came the clatter of steel on stone, a horse galloping. Which might have been Leblanc leaving. Or merely venturing deeper into the estate.
Head down, Kerry traced the perimeter of the courtyard, its eastern wall rounding toward the north where the arched barn doors opened to the stable. Without speaking, Cabot followed, his gaze tracking hers on the snow-dusted pavers.
“Only one set. He’s still carrying Carlo here,” Cabot said, looking at her.
“He’d have to. If he wants to make any time.”
Cabot looked away. “The owner of Bon Marché told George he’s been worried about a mob deciding who was guilty for the death of the reporter at the station. This detective on the hunt for Bergamini won’t help.”
Kerry twitched at the word mob, a distant memory flickering in her head—her father’s face in a crowd, men shouting, fists raised, axes held up overhead like weapons. Closing her eyes, she tried to recall more, but couldn’t.
Inside the stable, the outlines of footprints in snow disappeared. But it wasn’t hard to guess which direction they’d gone at this point. Staying anywhere connected to Biltmore’s main house would not be safe. And the far double doors were cracked open to the forest beyond.
It occurred to Kerry again that John Cabot might not be worthy of trust. But with the twins inside the house and Rema taking a shift back at the cabin, Kerry had no other allies. Except, perhaps, George Vanderbilt, who’d seemed oddly unconcerned, and possibly even approving of her letting Cedric barrel into the banquet hall and distract from the search for a killer.
Pulling her eyes from Cabot’s, Kerry stepped to the north doors of the barn that led into a clearing and then the woods. The small icy pellets of snow were turning into larger flakes, the sky gone the color of the inside of a summer cattail, a dazzling white. Temperature dropping, the wind whistled through the cracked door of the stable.
And there, disappearing now under the snow, were the tracks. Walking into the forest. Into the storm.
“If we hurry . . . ,” Kerry began.
But even as they watched in the dim spill of lantern light, the footprints were fast being covered in white.
Chapter 37
Taking one of the lanterns from its hook on the stable wall, Kerry steeled herself against the cold and followed what little she could still make out of broken sticks or crushed leaves or the edge of a shoe print on the path. Cabot followed closely behind.
Looking up into the falling snow, she shook her head. “I can’t track them in this. The last of their trail will be covered in another few minutes.”
Cabot fell in beside her as they retraced their path.
Kerry took a step toward the basement room she and the twins had been assigned for the holidays. She’d seen them safely asleep hours ago. She was exhausted. Yet in a few hours, at first light, she and the twins would trudge through the snow to spend Christmas morning with their father—in whatever state they might find him.
“Thank you,” she said, turning partly back. “For searching with me.”
But John Cabot touched her fingers. “It’s past midnight, so . . . it’s Christmas Day.”
She blinked. Tipping her face up toward his. “So it is. Yes.”
“Perhaps not the happiest Christmas we’ve ever known.” That sorrow that slipped over his face had fallen back. “But I do wish you good tidings. And peace.”
She stood there a moment, her fingers still just touching his. A current flowing between them—a jolt. And something else, something steadier that ran underneath. A shared sadness and loss and raw pain that somehow, instead of seeming out of place on Christmas, felt strangely fitting. As if sadness and loss and raw pain had a place inside joy—part of what made it real.
The whole staff and the entire Vanderbilt clan gathered to watch the owner of Biltmore disperse gifts.
Kerry’s thoughts kept winging off toward the Italians somewhere out there in the snow, and toward her father, who’d never come to consciousness this Christmas morning as she and Tully and Jursey cleaned his bedclothes. They’d tromped through the woods gathering more firewood for the stove and stoked it full, though only beside their father’s bed, pushed so close to the woodstove that the quilts could nearly catch fire, was it not miserably cold in the barn. Kerry repositioned the quilts they’d hung on the walls in order to block more of the north wind. They’d sung old Appalachian carols softly and tried to pour warm pine needle tea between his lips.
“For inflammation,” Kerry told the twins. “And he needs more liquid.”
Because the fiddle on the wall looked as if it ought to be picked up on Christmas, she’d leaned in to every haunting verse of “Greensleeves,” with Jursey on one of the squirrel-skin-and-gourd banjos and Tully on the singing bow. Jursey kept his head down so no one could see a young mountain man’s tears. Tully knew the words of the carol that had been set to the old English folk tune, and the notes of her soft soprano floated in the silence of the barn.