“Of course.” He dropped the Harper’s on the table in front of her. “No hurry in returning it to me, as I’ve had the chance to peruse it.”
Waiting until he’d settled himself back into his claret-colored chair, she scanned the letter. The messages like this had stopped when she’d left Biltmore before the holidays. But just as she was leaving her mother’s on Park Avenue, about to climb into the Sloane carriage headed for Grand Central Depot, the butler had presented this one. As if the horrid thing might disintegrate into the clouds and steam of the station if she pretended it wasn’t there in her handbag, she’d not so much as looked at it until now.
But now . . . Lilli scanned the letter. Again, only a handful of words:
Police come knocking. Stuck to my side of the story.
Found out why it was you wanted B- stopped. Reckon you’d wish I hadn’t.
The threat he meant to imply—the blackmail to come—was perfectly clear.
Lilli laid a hand at her own throat.
Chapter 42
At the far end by the fireplaces, all blazing tonight, three musicians played classical pieces. The cellist and flutist bobbed their heads in time with the strains of Strauss, one of the composers Kerry had learned to recognize during her time in New York. A fiddler who’d once owned a farm near the MacGregors’ gripped his bow sternly, as if he feared any minute it might break from his carefully executed violin part into a riff of “Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies.”
As Kerry unloaded the dumbwaiters to fill the footmen’s sterling trays, Moncrief kept up a running commentary peppered with Scots Gaelic. “They’re up to high doh—keyed up, if you’re asking me. And the one’s got an angry streak as long as me arm.”
She settled the charlotte russe onto his tray. “Which one?”
“The lawyer preservationist blether. I dinnae ken his name. It’s a peely walley face he has, pale as a poisoned ghost.”
Kerry laughed. “I got very little idea what you said. But I know who you mean: Mr. Grant.”
“It’s pale, his face is. Makes a sport of the trioblaid—of stirring up trouble.”
For her part, Kerry noticed Grant fingering the outline of something, a slight bulge, in his jacket pocket. Stirring up trouble seemed about right.
After dinner, Mrs. Smythe summoned her.
“They’ve decided to retire to the . . . bowling alley.” She said this last part as she might have discussed London’s sewer system—a part of the city best not mentioned. “As that divvy Scots of a footman is needed to reset the ninepins, I’m told, and all the rest of the staff occupied in the Oak Room just now, I’d like you to take the port to the guests who’ve chosen to”—she sniffed—“bowl.”
Moncrief was bounding about setting up the pins that had been left splayed all over the two parallel lanes. Kerry stood near the threshold until he could set up a table for the port—which gave her time to observe the group.
Lillian Barthélemy and Mr. Vanderbilt’s niece, Emily, had both returned. They stood in dresses more casual than their evening gowns, the jewels they’d worn to dinner stored away.
John Cabot turned as she walked in with the wine, and he held her eyes. When, after a few beats, Kerry looked away, Lilli Barthélemy tilted her head. At an angle that said she’d taken note.
Cabot studied his ball. Then, shoving three fingers awkwardly into its slots, he slammed it toward the pins, sending them flying.
Leaping horizontally several feet, Moncrief caught one pin in midair before he and it hit the wood floor. “Air leth, math dha-rìridh! Excellently done, sir!”
Madison Grant lifted a glass of port from Kerry’s tray. “As brutal with the pins as he once was with bodies on the gridiron.”
“Mon Dieu,” Lilli Barthélemy said. “Enough with the football.” Marching to the left lane, she sent a ball slicing through pins, leaving only one standing.
Grant lifted his glass in a mock toast. “A sport for the making of men. By which I mean not only football but also bowling, when Miss Barthélemy takes the lane.”
She ignored him.
“Football,” Emily Sloane pronounced, “will not catch on outside a handful of places. Not permanently. Mark my words.”
Grant shook his head. “I will say only this: to see a player like Cabot here leap with the grace of a gazelle over piles of fallen men, that was a thing of beauty. Although I’d forgotten—how clumsy of me.” He turned to the others. “Cabot prefers we not discuss that particular Harvard-Yale game. Issues, as I recall, of the extraordinary brutality of several players.”
Lilli Barthélemy waved this away. “Nothing that the introduction of the forward pass shouldn’t address.”
In the stunned silence that followed, she held a hand to her chest, delicately. “That is, I believe I read as much. Obviously, I’ve not followed the sport myself.”
Mrs. Smythe appeared sputtering at the entrance to Biltmore’s bowling alley. “Mr. Leblanc to see you again, sir.” She lowered her voice, the sophistication chipped off her accent when she was under stress and the Liverpool showing through. “I told the meff he’d not been invited, I did. But he pushed himself in, that one. As if!”
Kerry braced herself against the cold stone of the alley’s wall as Leblanc’s form hulked past Mrs. Smythe. He wasted no time with preamble.
“Against my own better judgment, I followed a lead out of town, a trail that went a whole hell of a lot of nowhere.” He leveled a glower at Emily Sloane. “Now I’m more convinced than ever there’s damn well got to be a connection between a killer escaping justice in New Orleans and what happened here—Catalfamo as the common factor. So, since the local police are incompetent rubes, who here wants to give me the official Biltmore version of the train station murder?”
Kerry kept her eyes focused directly ahead on the opposite wall. To her right, though, she sensed Lilli Barthélemy drawing herself up. Stiff. Defensive.
Vanderbilt began by meeting Leblanc’s eyes coolly. Then handed him a glass of port from Kerry’s tray. “Let’s agree, Leblanc, that this will be the last time you barge into my home uninvited, shall we?”
Leblanc’s upper lip lifted in the beginning of a sneer. But his gaze darted around the bowling alley and, as if suddenly reminded of Biltmore’s sheer size—and its owner’s influence—his mouth flattened. “Agreed.”
Briefly, George Vanderbilt recounted what happened.
When he finished, Madison Grant sauntered forward. “Mr. Leblanc, you have a point about the Italian.”
“My God,” Cabot muttered. “Here we go again.”
Grant’s hand brushed the lines of the square bulge in his coat pocket again. Perspiration dotting his forehead, he’d not shed his jacket like the other gentlemen, who were bowling in shirtsleeves. “The man slipped away out of sight, as I understand it, moments before the attack occurred.”
Cabot stepped to the right lane. “If that’s the criterion, they’d better suspect me, as well.”
Emily Sloane clutched a ball close to her chest but did not approach a lane. “No one, Mr. Cabot, suspects you.”