Under a Gilded Moon(88)
Now Leblanc, clutching a lantern, sat his horse in the sleet that speared down on them and surveyed the dairy barn from a hill above it. A clock tower rising over its main door was just visible in the faint glow of the moon reflecting off a snow-covered roof and the pastures below.
He spat to one side. Who had so much money to burn they built a clock tower for cows? Rich people like this funded his work, made the thriving of his professional life possible—but sometimes he could not stand them.
Leblanc guided his nag in a circle of the barn, quiet here well past midnight. Gripping the lantern in one hand, he held it out from his body to search for footprints. Even being unfamiliar with snow, he was certain a man and a crippled child walking all the way from the main house or stables would surely have inadvertently left some indentations, if not actual tracks, if they’d come this way. In fact, he calculated now, the chill in his bones growing to a positive ache, a man and a badly crippled child probably couldn’t have made it this far at all through the cold.
Still, he would search. Quickly. Before his feet froze into solid blocks.
Dismounting at the entrance to the barn, Leblanc tied the nag to a post just under the tower and eased open the big barn door. Inside, he tried not to breathe in the smell of hay—he despised barns of all sorts, and his having to actually enter a stinking dairy barn on Christmas Day felt like an especial affront.
He stood still to listen: silent but for the shifting and breathing of cattle and scuffling of mice. Leblanc’s sense of hearing was, if anything, sharper than his eyesight. No person, much less two, was hiding here in the barn.
Ignoring the nag, whose head lifted slightly at his approach, as if this might be a sign they could leave, Leblanc circled the barn’s exterior again. Covered delivery wagons with the name Biltmore painted on the side stood in a row. Growing colder, angrier, and more exhausted by the moment, Leblanc checked each one: nothing but silver metal canisters. And no footprints anywhere.
Only a hay wagon at the barn’s northwestern corner sat alone. He approached, but now he could no longer feel his own feet. He and the nag still had to make it back to Asheville to get a few hours of sleep before dawn.
For good measure, though, and because he was a thorough man, he snatched up two pitchforks leaning against the side of the barn. He hurled the first with such force that its prongs sliced deep into the hay. The second he threw even harder, its whole handle disappearing. Just as he thought: no sound. Nothing at all.
So, then, Catalfamo and his little brother, wherever they were tonight, had better plan to die of exposure. Because by tomorrow when Leblanc finally found them—and he damn well would find them—he’d make them sorry they’d cost him not only four years but now, here at the end—Leblanc knew he’d closed in—nearly a whole night of sleep and, in a few moments more, the use of his toes.
Leblanc retraced his steps to the entrance. In jerks that tried to put feeling back into his hands, he untied the nag, mounted, and aimed its nose toward the delivery road. With only the circle of light his lantern threw and the pale fuzz of moon, he couldn’t see the mountains, but he knew they were there, and they made him nervous, pressing in and crushing like mountains did.
Passing under the clock tower, he scowled up at it—a clock tower on a damn barn. As much as he loathed the criminal lowlifes he spent his days chasing, and as much as he detested dagos and mountains and barns, he decided he might just hate rich people worst of all.
Chapter 39
Sal heard the rumble and jangle and crunch of a wagon approaching. But it was the wrong time of day.
The dairy barn at Biltmore had come alive this morning before dawn, a platoon of local men arriving while it was still dark to light the lanterns and arrange the stools and gather the tin pails. He and Nico had burrowed themselves into the loft above the barn, which lay down the hill and across the lagoon from the main house, in the estate’s bottomland near the French Broad River.
At first when they’d run from the stables, they’d hidden in the conservatory behind mounds of orchids and palms, but only for a few hours that night before Christmas. Sal knew Leblanc would search there before long, so they’d left sometime in the dark—well after midnight, Sal guessed—and trudged through the woods to a far pasture, stopping again for warmth in a run-in shed, open on one side but blocking the wind on three others. They burrowed underneath mounded hay and kept each other if not warm then at least alive. Down the hill from the shed was the sprawling dairy barn.
“Off past the barn is a hay wagon,” Sal said to Nico. “We’ll hide there just in case he comes to search the—”
In the quiet, they both heard the crunch of Leblanc’s horse over the icy crust of snow before they could see his lantern round the bend in the delivery road. They stayed where they were while Leblanc searched the barn then reemerged with the lantern and glared around him at the barnyard. They exchanged wide-eyed looks as he hurled two pitchforks into the wagon’s load of hay.
Once Leblanc remounted his horse, standing up to its fetlocks in snow, and rode out of sight, Sal and Nico hobbled inside. Sal was limping now, too, his feet numb from having crouched, unmoving, there in the woods for so long—and he carried Nico, who was nodding asleep from the cold. It was the cows and the blessed heat they threw off that warmed them. That and burrowing themselves together deep in the hay of the loft.