Under a Gilded Moon(104)

More snapping of twigs from just below the ridge where the path dropped straight down toward the falls. The low nicker of a horse.

And then, the muffled sobbing of a child.

Kerry exchanged looks with her brother. Tully joined them, wide-eyed and braced, at the barn door.

At the crest of the path, Robert Bratchett appeared on his ancient horse. And huddled on the same horse just in front of him, little Nico. The hand of Bratchett’s immobilized left arm rested tenderly on the child’s shoulder as Nico curled in tighter and cried.

But most astounding of all was Bratchett swinging down from the horse, easing the child off after him, carrying him on his shoulders and steadied with his one good arm through the barn doors. Nodding to the three younger MacGregors, he didn’t stop until he reached their father’s makeshift bed.

Johnny MacGregor’s eyes blinked open.

He lay conscious for the first time since Kerry arrived, breathless, from Biltmore, as if the sheer force of Bratchett’s presence now and whatever past they had shared had ripped the clouds from the dying man’s mind. And not gently.

“Johnny Mac,” Bratchett said. The voice seemed to open some sort of secret door. Kerry watched, astonished, as her father’s eyes filled with tears and he lifted his right hand an inch or two above the tick.

“Bobby Bratch,” he rasped.

Little Nico set gently on the floor, Bratchett dropped his good arm to grasp the hand lifted, just barely, to him. “We need a place to hide this boy, Johnny. Ella and me, we can bring food, but you know better’n anyone, we’re no kind of safe place.”

Something passed between the two men, Kerry saw. Johnny Mac squeezed shut his eyes as if there were something he’d rather not see. “I do know,” he said.

“I figure,” Bratchett went on, “you owe not only me but also the world in general a favor.”

“Yes,” was all Johnny Mac said, voice crumbling to nothing but dust. And yet he managed the same word again. “Yes.”





Chapter 48

Kerry spent several hours getting Nico set with the twins, who made him a pallet beside their own near Malvolio’s stall and showed him where to pet the mule on the soft of his muzzle so that he’d flicker his eyes. She spooned wild peppermint tea and creamed corn down her father’s throat.

Kerry held up the photograph for him. And gently—more gently than she had since she’d come home—cradled his head to let him see better.

He smiled—a strange, distant smile. “Bobby Bratch,” he whispered. Then gave in to the weight of his head falling back.



Exhausted, Kerry slipped through the woods back to Biltmore the next morning. All she could see as she walked was Madison Grant, his suits perfectly pressed, hair perfectly smoothed. Somehow, surely, he was behind all this: the attack at the station, the blaming of innocent men, the child ripped from his brother and huddled now in her barn.

Not sure what she’d do or how, Kerry checked in first with the cooks. Rema stood in front of row upon row of glass Mason jars filled with spears of green. “I declare I can like a man who grows a good okra.”

Kerry didn’t point out that Vanderbilt didn’t weed his own fields or preserve his own produce, but only nodded absently. And slipped upstairs. Tracked the sound of Grant’s voice to the billiard room, the clack of the balls, the scent of cigar smoke emanating into the hall.

Which meant she had at least a few moments to slip upstairs to his guest room.

Kerry had no evidence of Grant’s part in the train station attack, only a sense deep in her gut. Maybe if she’d been able to track him like she’d hunted wild boar, or been allowed to pummel him with questions as the police should have. But that wasn’t an option for a kitchen maid supposed to be roasting potatoes right now.

Swiftly, she walked—never breaking into a run, which would attract attention—back toward the servants’ staircase, finished at last. Climbing to the second story of the bachelors’ wing, she looked both ways down the corridor. A kitchen maid shouldn’t have been there for any number of reasons, but she would hurry. She would not be found.

Every Biltmore guest room had a brass fitting on its door for the current occupant’s calling card, so the room Kerry was searching for took only moments to find. Grant had left his coat strewn over a chair near the fireplace. A patterned tweed. Heart pounding, Kerry checked its pockets one by one. Nothing but an old train ticket to Best, a receipt from Bon Marché, and a scrap of paper scrawled with words she couldn’t make out.

Kerry scanned the room. Nothing else out of place. A stack of letterhead stationery left on a small table. Approaching, Kerry flipped through: all the pages embossed with the Vanderbilt crest, but otherwise blank.

Except.

The top one bore the imprint of what someone had penned on the page above it. Kerry held it up to the light filtering in from the far window.

The letter F, she could make out. No salutation, just a word beginning with F . . .

Footsteps echoed outside on the marble. Heart hammering, she squinted at the imprinted lines.

F . . . Family . . . no. Farm . . . work?

The footsteps stopped in front of the guest room door. The metal click of a hand turning the knob.

Or a name, perhaps. Like . . . Farnsworth . . .

Someone else here Grant is influencing. Another of the pieces in the LNA puzzle.