Under a Gilded Moon(77)

“Spell that name.”

Leblanc sounded out the letters.

“Sender’s name?”

“L-E-B-L-A-N-C.”

A beat of silence. “And you’d like to say . . . what?”

“Followed here from Penn quarry. Stop. Closing in on Catalfamo. Stop.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all the hell that’s needed.”

“Seeing as how it’s Christmas Eve, most of my customers today have added a greeting of the damn season.”

A snort: “So I can pay extra for the Have a hell of a Merry Christmas—that I’m having to spend in some godforsaken mountains hundreds of miles from any form of civilization?”

“I assume that is a no on the greetings of the season, then.”

The groom or footman or whatever he was in that ridiculous livery, Leblanc noticed, looked like he’d walked out of a damn storybook. Hat pulled down over his eyes and collar up high. Gold embroidery on a red coat.

“Looks like a damn Buckingham Palace guard. Here in this backwater.”

The telegrapher looked as if he might take offense but then shrugged. “George Vanderbilt’s got his people all fancied up for tonight. Got a house here, just now getting finished. Whole pack of his family’ll be arriving on the next train.” He nodded toward a slim man with a neatly trimmed mustache who’d stopped to talk with the guy in livery. “Why Vanderbilt himself’d be here.”

Leblanc huffed on the muddy edge of the street, his breath coming in puffs of steam. “So. Any hotels here fit for a man of taste? Looks to me like nothing but pine trees and snow.”

“Should’ve gotten off one stop later for Asheville. ’Bout three miles up is Kenilworth. Battery Park Inn. Some others.” He pointed to a road leading west.

“So now I’m supposed to walk three miles in the snow? Here to catch a dangerous criminal, and you’re telling me I got to walk three miles to a decent hotel?”

On the other side of his window, which hadn’t been cleaned for some time, Farnsworth glanced up indifferently from the metal arm. “Do I look like I’m paid enough to send messages for outsiders showing up here all rude and then solve their problems?”

Leblanc took stock of the man. “Fortunately for both of us, I’m paid well enough both to be rude and get the answers I want.” Pulling a money clip from the breast pocket of his coat, he peeled off two bills, which he shoved through the opening where the glass ended and a narrow wooden shelf began.

The telegrapher slid the money into his pocket without comment. “Livery stable’s a block that way”—he jerked his head east—“if anybody’s still there this time of evening, night before Christmas. So what crime’s he wanted for?”

The detective paused for dramatic effect. Then pronounced the word slowly, in two separate parts, as if he’d rolled both around in his mouth, tasting them: “Mur-der.”

The telegrapher narrowed his eyes. “Who’s he supposed to have killed?”

“Not supposed to have. The victim himself named his killers before he died.”

“Said the man’s very name, did he?”

“Identified the killers, let’s just say. This was one of them that got away.”

Farnsworth crossed his arms. “This was what year?”

“Ninety—when it happened. Ninety-one when the bastard slipped the grasp of justice.”

“Hold on. You’ve been chasing this guy for four, five years?”

“’Bout the size of it, yeah.”

“So this guy’s kept you bumbling around for half a decade.”

Leblanc clipped his words. “Pinkerton detectives do not bumble around.”

“Just surprised you hadn’t caught the fellow is all.”

“Jackass,” the detective muttered as he stalked away.

Farnsworth gave two taps to the metal arm of his machine. “Message received,” he called.

But now the ground was shaking, the hemlocks shivering branches of snow to the ground. A train’s whistle echoed off the mountains and drifted through the valley.

By the time Leblanc returned on a hurriedly rented horse, its saddle blanket rumpled under the pommel, a front hoof pawing at a snowdrift, the train had been unloaded. Through billows of steam he could make out what appeared to be several brown bears balanced up on two feet. The sallow light of a lamppost, though, showed them to be women in head-to-toe furs.

Out of curiosity—which was his damn job, after all—Leblanc kicked his nag forward to where he could both see and hear.

The oldest of the women was reaching for Vanderbilt’s hand. “George, dear. We cannot wait to see your Biltmore in all its glory, son.”

Vanderbilt kissed her on the cheek. “A bedroom has been designed specifically for you, Mother. How good to have you back.”

The groom—or whatever he was—had been joined by others unloading trunks and hatboxes from the train into a second and third sleigh pulled now behind the first.

Bundled in their furs and clutching the servants’ hands, the Vanderbilts piled into the first two sleighs, their towers of trunks being hauled into the third.

Another of the women, this one younger, perhaps in her forties, had been gazing in a full circle about her. “Oh. Heavens. How remote a spot, George. How do you bear the isolation from society?”