Under a Gilded Moon(56)
Chapter 22
Uneasy about Dearg ever since their talk at Biltmore, Kerry had kept an eye out for his lurking: in the shadows of the smokehouse, in the chestnut grove near the falls, in the town’s dark alleyways. Because something had changed him—the stabs at his pride from the millionaire outsiders, maybe, or her coming back from New York, but not returning the same.
Like a wild boar with a bowie knife lodged in his chest, Dearg Tate had been wounded by something deep in his core. And that hurt would likely come out less like a curling-up moan and more like a roar.
She knew this, too, about him: for all his size and strength, there was something childlike about him, something easily made afraid. And that’s what made him most vulnerable: being used as someone else’s bullhorn. Someone else’s pawn.
He’d avoided Kerry so far. Had brawled all over town in taverns and on street corners. The stories found their way back to her.
Dearg Tate’s gone to picking fights.
Says you and him is still likely to set up housekeeping one of these days.
But he’d given her a wide berth.
He’d not been in town when the attack occurred at the station. There was proof of that. But he’d been infected by some sort of fear and an anger that hadn’t been there before.
On this particular morning of her day off, she’d gathered the eggs and changed her father’s bedclothes. She fed him oatmeal with dried honeysuckle for sweetness—there was no more syrup from the ground cane. Despite his eyes looking unfocused today, his mind seeming to float in some other realm, she’d pressed a hot tea with dogwood bark down his throat for the pain. Halfway through changing his shirt to his one other, which Tully had brought in from the line, Kerry decided she had to confront Dearg. In person, she might be able to see in his face a shard of the truth.
“How come,” Jursey wanted to know when she announced she’d be making the trek to the Tate farm, “you ain’t marrying him? He used to be awful fixed on you ’fore you took off for New York.”
Tully gave him a superior look. “You don’t got to marry every man that goes fixed on you.”
Kerry smiled. “My little sister is wise beyond her years.”
She left the twins back at the farm stretching the squirrel skins they’d tanned over the banjo hollows they’d made from gourds. The neck of the older banjo their father had made had cracked after years of hard use.
“Mr. Bratchett said it’s got to be tighter’n that,” Tully insisted.
“Tighter’n this, it’ll split clean open.”
“Not if you do it right. Like mine is.”
They’d keep each other distracted, at least.
Kerry forced herself up the last climb of the path. Exhaustion from her work at Biltmore and caring for her father had been knocking her flat for the few hours of sleep she could steal. Today, her need for answers outweighed her need for rest.
A raccoon scuttled, then froze in place at the branch of the stream.
“What are you doing awake in the middle of the day?” Kerry asked him. The creature lifted both paws, then dropped to all fours and began following her. “Better go your own way, little guy. Where I’m headed, you don’t want to be.”
Out of old habit, she moved through the woods soundlessly, careful to step on the soft, spongy soil rather than dry leaves.
The Tate cabin sat just ahead in a clearing encircled by maples and a handful of small outbuildings: the smokehouse, the barn, the chicken house, and a privy. On all four posts of the cabin’s porch, raccoon pelts were nailed to the logs, heads and tails and all, as if the creatures were climbing up to the roof: eight in all.
Like the stone lions, she thought, on either side of Biltmore’s front entrance: a decoration with no function. A kind of welcome. And also the human urge to signal abundance and wealth. Whether or not it was true.
From the cabin’s back door, a path wound down along a moss-bound creek. From somewhere down that way came a clang of metal on stone.
Quietly, she slipped down toward the sound and watched Dearg from behind a stand of mountain laurel. Making adjustments, he bent over the spiraled copper tubing, spigots, and barrels.
When she stepped into view, he glanced up. Gave the jerk upward of the head that was the mountain man’s greeting.
“I need to know,” she said. Because there was no point in not addressing this thing directly. “What’s going on with you? Rumors all over about your brawling. Things you’ve said. None of it like the man I remember.”
Jaw working side to side, he said nothing.
She could see in his face she’d been right: a flicker of fear passing over what he always was—the laconic mountain man. And now also a fair piece of defiant. She felt like she was being sighted down a gun barrel. Maybe not the only target of whatever it was he was feeling, but the one standing there.
She braced her feet wider apart. “You don’t scare me, you know.”
He let several beats pass as he glowered, then looked away. “Sure way to get yourself hurt, if you ask me: acting like there’s nothing can hurt you.”
They stared at each other. A threat, it might be. Or a warning.
Suddenly, voices sounded from up the path, and the clomping of hooves.
Dearg glared at her—a look of betrayal. “You brung people with you?”