Under a Gilded Moon(4)

Outside the train windows, open a crack, the earth smelled of rain and pine and decaying leaves. A flood of longing and then of dread washed over Kerry, currents of emotion so powerful and so contradictory that only a journey home could stir.

The locomotive’s headlight cut through the mist, illuminating hillsides in patches of autumn red and yellow and green, like fold upon fold of bright quilts.

Kerry and the twins shared a bench again, this time at the back right of the first car. Rema knitted on the bench just ahead, alongside a young man with curly black hair beneath a yarmulke. He’d been in their car since the journey’s first leg from New York, Kerry recalled.

Turning, he smiled. “On holiday?”

Kerry forced a smile back. “Headed back home.” She smoothed Tully’s hair and Jursey’s trouser leg. “These are my sister and brother. And my aunt just beside you.”

He extended his hand. “Aaron Berkowitz. On assignment.”

Shaking his hand, Kerry took in his face, eager and wide-eyed, a small pad of paper and a fountain pen protruding from the outside pocket of his jacket, its tweed a bit frayed. “You’re a journalist, then.”

“Investigative reporter.” He craned his neck back toward her. Waiting, it seemed.

“Let me guess. For the Herald. Or perhaps Harper’s.”

He turned around on his bench to face her more fully. “The New York Times.”

“Ah. I am impressed. And this is your first big assignment?”

Blinking. “How did you know?”

She laughed. “You’re bursting with it. Your eyes. Your whole face.”

He deflated just slightly. “I promised myself I’d appear more jaded, like the veteran writers. But it’s what I’ve wanted to do since college. Or before: since coming to this country as a kid. The power of a free press. Guarding the integrity of a democracy. You must think I’m a little ridiculous.”

“On the contrary, I think everyone should love a job as you do. Where are you being sent?”

He hesitated. “I believe I can trust you, Miss . . .”

It was more forward than New York manners generally allowed, but they weren’t in a drawing room, after all. And Kerry couldn’t help but like him. “MacGregor.”

“I’m being sent”—he glanced both ways—“to Asheville.”

“Good heavens. Is there really anything glamorous enough—or diabolical enough—in Asheville for the New York Times to notice?”

“It’s more the people drawn there, you might say. People with secrets they’d like to keep covered up.”

“Don’t we all have things we’d like to keep secret, Mr. Berkowitz?”

“Sure. But you and me, we have our embarrassments, our peccadilloes. The secrets I’m referring to cost a whole bunch of lives and mountains of money.” He leaned toward her. “And now . . . now we’ve got new information to go on. And a surprise attack, so to speak. The key player who thinks he’s gotten away with it all will be caught off guard. Now the truth will finally come out.”

“That’s quite dramatic. And how do you plan to pry out the truth?”

He patted his pad and pen. “I know how to ask questions. How to observe.”

“Oh, Lord,” came Rema’s voice from next to the reporter. “How to observe. If that don’t sound like our Kerry.”

Kerry shook her head at her aunt. But Rema, her needles still clacking in time with the train, glanced back only once and pressed on.

“Lord, she’s always noticed the teeny details. And witched out the story behind. Her noticings, we called ’em. Got herself a gift, that’s what.”

“Is that right?”

“Not a gift,” Kerry said, more bluntly than she’d intended.

She knew what it was, this not-gift of hers: just a learned skill. Her fight to survive. To protect the twins. Only the art of paying attention, to glances and tones, to footsteps off rhythm.

The journalist nodded at her companionably. “What do you notice right now?”

“Only what everyone else would.”

“Such as?”

Kerry’s gaze wandered across the aisle to the bench that Tully’s feet bumped up against. A dark-haired man—the one in the tweed cap who’d chased after the boy in the depot—was turned slightly away, his body hunched protectively over the child asleep at his left and a tube of rolled paper in the crook of his right arm. Evidently feeling her eyes on him, he glanced toward Kerry and the reporter, then quickly looked away. His left hand dropped to the boy’s chest, as if just feeling the child breathe were a comfort.

“Like . . .” Kerry leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Why is the skin at the back of our fellow passenger’s neck and on his upper lip so pale? Everywhere else, his skin is tanned—fairly dark. He must have cut his hair and shaved off a mustache recently. His suit looks hardly worn, yet its shoulder seams are about to split and the cuffs fall well above his wrists, as if he’s wearing the clothes of a smaller, more sedentary man.”

“Ah.” The reporter raised an eyebrow. Then whipped out his pad with a playful flourish and whispered, “Now, Miss MacGregor, the question is why.”

As if on cue, the man glanced again, wary, unsure, across the aisle.