Under a Gilded Moon(114)
“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.”
The words shot from her, scorching: “Like the bison.”
“Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Much like the bison. Endangered as it is without . . . intervention.”
“You’re a monster. And a madman. It was your mind, your influence behind the murder.” Kerry saw it all over again: the kind, idealistic reporter sprawled in the mud. “Aaron Berkowitz knew something about you through his work at the Times. Something, I’d imagine, that suggested you were the sort of man who would kill to protect your reputation as a preserver of wildlife and a cultured”—she spat the next word—“gentleman.”
“And yet, as we’ve seen, it was not I after all who culled the herd, so to speak.”
“You are truly despicable.”
“Apparently you thought me well worth pursuing up here—for who knows what lusty reasons of your own. Followed me here despite your knowing the little Jewish reporter thought I’d kill if necessary to protect my reputation.” He took a step toward her as if to demonstrate his willingness to do just that.