Under a Gilded Moon(87)
Then he opened his arms. “I wonder . . . might I ask you to dance?”
She saw awkwardness pass into his face as soon as the words were out. “That is . . . the waltz. I’m not sure if you know . . .”
She smiled up at him. “I did learn, yes. In New York. Part of my friends’ educating the backward hillbilly.” Just about to put her hands in his outstretched ones, she hesitated. “But if someone were to come . . .”
“Then they must grab a partner and join us.” He stepped closer, his evening coat smelling of wood smoke and leather book bindings and the outdoors. And a whiff, too, of Cedric.
Holding one of her hands, he opened the windowed doors from the library leading to the terrace outside. The moon lit the snowflakes like glitter sifting to earth.
With the distant strains of the quartet swelling, they stepped outside, faces upturned toward the bright flakes. Waltzing, they twirled through the falling snow.
Lifting her face as they slowly spun to a stop, Kerry stepped in still closer to John Cabot’s tall frame. Let herself sink into the kiss.
Sounds and sensations swirled around her, the deep stir of his kiss, the soft sifting of the snow on the pergola rafters and its withered wisteria vine. The far-off undulations of the violins. And from across the valley, the low bellow of a cow. She felt as if she had jumped from one of the mountain cliffs but found herself able to glide on currents of air. She moved still closer into the kiss, her arms twining tightly around his neck.
Slowly, slowly, she pulled her head back—but only to see his face. To see that his expression was inexpressibly tender, his eyes bright and intense on hers.
Standing there hearing her heart pound, Kerry suddenly went rigid.
“Marco Bergamini,” she whispered. Hardly the time to whisper another man’s name. But there it was, the words already out. “From bergamino.”
Cabot stepped back, his face quizzical—but not angry. He waited for her to speak.
“It’s a long shot. And Leblanc surely . . . But if they stayed in the woods while he searched it . . .”
“I’m afraid I’m not following you.”
“I think I know the place we ought to look for them next.”
Chapter 38
Leblanc glowered up at the night sky. Only moments ago, snowflakes had been fluttering softly down on his horse and him as they trudged through the estate. But now the flakes were landing with an icier, meaner plink, as if adjusting themselves to his mood. At least there was this: Catalfamo and that cripple of a brother of his could not travel far—unless they’d taken the train out of town like that chit of a girl, Vanderbilt’s niece, had said. If they were still here in this cold, they could hardly sleep outside without freezing to death from exposure.
That last possibility, he cheered himself, would at least expedite his mission. If he couldn’t drag Catalfamo back to New Orleans, he could at least deliver a copy of a coroner’s certificate.
Leblanc had no reason to distrust George Vanderbilt, who’d have nothing to gain by involving himself. And yet he did distrust him. Something about the man—a softness, maybe, around the eyes—made the owner of Biltmore look like someone who might just harbor a fugitive with some pathetic story and a cripple for a sidekick.
This estate of Vanderbilt’s was far too vast to ride over—something like a hundred thousand acres, maybe more—looking for a criminal. But the cold and now the sleet cut the scope of Leblanc’s search down immensely. If the two dagos were here on the estate, they’d have to take shelter somewhere indoors. For now, he’d done only a cursory search of the damn house, which was the size of a castle, and the stable, which was the size of a large house, since Catalfamo, like every criminal Leblanc had tracked, would have bolted as far away as he could from the one on his trail.
Only because Vanderbilt’s niece looked so stupidly sweet and innocent did Leblanc bother with checking the train station where she claimed to have seen the Italian on his way out of town. But the stationmaster and the telegrapher had both looked at him blankly, said they’d not seen the pair of guineas come or go lately.
The telegrapher, Farnsworth, had more to say when Leblanc slid another bill to him, but that only amounted to seeing too many guineas in these parts over the past several years, since Vanderbilt started building his house. And, yeah, one of those types, along with a limping boy, had been at the station the night of the murder that still hadn’t been solved.
“Good rooting out’s what they’d be needing,” the telegrapher had said, taking a long pull on his cigarette, then blowing smoke on the other side of his telegraph office window. “Sure as hell can’t let any more of them in. Whole country’s going to hell. It’s the good genes that’s imperiled.”
Leblanc had turned back at this last word with a smirk. “Imperiled?” Fancy words for a hillbilly cable operator in a backwater spill of a town. Where the hell had he picked that up?
After returning to the estate to search the conservatory and Vanderbilt’s piggery, which left Leblanc’s shoes stinking, he’d aimed his horse to his best target yet. Leblanc rousted a Biltmore nurseryman named Beadle out of bed to ask him about other outbuildings on the estate, and the man, at the sight of the Pinkerton badge, had groggily complied, then stumbled back to sleep.
The dairy barn. That made perfect sense. It would be warmer than most other buildings. It was more remote from the house than the stable or conservatory. And Italians would feel right at home in the conditions: primitive, fit for animals.