Under a Gilded Moon(22)

That was some time ago now.

Back before Sal had realized he could not go home to Palermo to live after Florence as he’d planned, that all of Sicily had become so hungry, the entire weary-soiled island had already eaten up anything short of the thoroughly putrid or soured or stinking. And now was starving slowly to death.

That was back before Sal had realized his own future—and Nico’s, once their mother died—would have to be scratched through and redrawn like the plans of the great house.

It had been six years at least since he’d taken the card from George Washington Vanderbilt II, Esquire, who could hardly be expected to recall the Sicilian who’d served him in Florence, or the boy’s mad dash after the hansom cab.

Sal would have to make him remember, then. Because Salvatore Francis Catalfamo—with Nicholas Peter barnacled to his back—would need some sort of future after tomorrow. After justice. And maybe also revenge.

Sensing he must be approaching the end of the drive now, Sal slowed his pace. The road was giving way to a vast opening up ahead, as if to announce the view of the house itself. High up through the trees was a flicker of something—some dark outline of a steeply pitched roof with a blur of moon backlighting it.

Sal stepped out of the tunnel of trees and into a vast promenade. At the far end of the expanse of a level lawn and circled by deep purple mountains gone nearly black now was a structure utterly unlike anything he had ever seen.

Sal’s jaw dropped, and he took a full step backward. Biltmore’s rooflines, just as Sal had sketched them, were pitched as steeply as the Alps. A reflecting pool in front.

“Mio dio,” he breathed into the silence. “Magnifico.”

But that breath was cut short by the cocking of a gun just behind him. And the cold metal shock of a muzzle finding the back of his neck.

Nico whimpered in terror as they both froze.

The voice, like the gun’s muzzle, was full of cold and of steel.

“Hands up,” it said.





Chapter 9

After walking three miles by the faint glow of a moon shrouded in clouds and by the memory of every curve of the brook, Kerry and the twins and Rema arrived at the cabin long after dark. Smoke, which Kerry could smell more than see, curled from the chimney.

“Who on earth,” she whispered to Rema behind the twins’ heads, “agreed to stay here with him?”

Because it was hard—impossible, really—to imagine a neighbor who’d been willing to keep watch on Johnny MacGregor while Rema and the twins went to New York to fetch Kerry home. They had almost no neighbors left now. And Johnny Mac had long ago severed all barn-raising, crop-sharing community ties.

Until his recent supposed homecoming and repentance, at least. And Kerry had her doubts about that. The approach of death up the front path had a way of making even old knaves gentle up, just in case.

Kerry wanted none of a deathbed, blubbering plea for forgiveness.

Someone had propped the door open, as everyone did here with no windows in a one-room cabin. From the flickering light of the fire inside, Kerry could see a horse tied to the porch railing, the creature’s silhouette badly swaybacked.

As Kerry stepped from the porch through the cabin’s one door, the ladder-back chair by the hearth creaked, Ella Bratchett rising from it. From the shadows at the foot of the cabin’s one bed, Robert Bratchett crossed to them in three strides.

Kerry’s jaw dropped. But before she had the chance to ask even one question, Ella had thrown her arms around Kerry’s neck.

“Welcome back, hon. It’s been an age. Dear God, I miss your momma bad when I see her in you.”

“How kind that you would be here. With him. Ella, I—”

Ella squeezed her hand. “No, don’t try to thank me for staying. I did it for you and Rema and for your momma, rest her soul. Can’t stand the old bastard myself, God help me, Jesus. And Rema, don’t go pushing on me all how he’s changed. Good thing for him the doling out or the not of mercy wouldn’t be up to me.”

Ella patted Kerry’s cheeks. “I told him you were coming, and that got him stirred up. Reckon he’s got things he’d like to be saying to you. Tell you the truth, I got things I’d like to be saying to him, before it’s all over. You rest now.”

With that, she swept out the door, Robert Bratchett following silently behind her. Ella sprang from the porch up onto the ancient bay horse. Clucking to the animal, her husband walked beside them.

“There was some trouble,” he was telling his wife as the horse moved away from the door. “Down to the station. Fella got murdered . . .”

Suddenly, the man in the bed clutched his bedclothes to his chest and cried out. As if he’d heard that final word, murdered. As if that word had some kind of dreaded connection with him.

No longer staring blankly upward, his eyes had gone crazed. Frantic.

Kerry forced herself to reach for his hand. “What is it?”

At her feet, something moved. And then growled. Romeo, her father’s old bloodhound. Kerry had named him as a pup, though he’d taken to no one in the family but Johnny Mac.

“Maybe,” Rema whispered, “it’s knowing you was headed home on a train that got Johnny Mac stirred.”

Kerry watched her father’s eyes drop closed again. Seems like, she thought, his thrashing had more to do with hearing that word murdered.