Scarlet Devices
Page 10
To his credit, he kept his thoughts to himself. With a curt nod, he stalked back to his steam car and began to close the pump mechanism, while the Watchmaker did the same. Eliza had only to pull a lever to ready her car, and as she’d left it idling she was able to beat both men out of the stream and back onto the dirt-and-gravel road.
Matthew would have never let me see this, was her first thought upon arriving at the scene of the blast. Her second was that she would have been happier not seeing it.
That it had been sabotage was clear. The Victoria Dominion was known for its sinkholes, its perforated limestone underpinnings and karst lands, but this new chasm bore obvious blast burns around the edges. Flames still flickered here and there among the chunks of rubble, creating a hellscape in the midst of the otherwise beautiful bucolic scene. Eliza left her car, barely feeling her feet, buzzing all over again with fear that grew worse as she approached the still-smoldering edge of the hole and peered down.
The air scorched her lungs, and the smell of cordite was fading beneath the growing stench of burning tires and another odor that was horribly familiar. She couldn’t put a name to it; it was too far out of context. Then her mind identified it, and she ran for the nearest bush. By the time Matthew and the Watchmaker squealed to a halt behind her car, Eliza had already wiped her mouth clean and kicked some dirt and leaves over the evidence of her violent reaction.
“Don’t look!” she called to them, but it was too late. They were already at the brink, already gaping at the horrors the chasm held.
The Watchmaker froze, but Matthew backed away from the edge, one hand pressed firmly to his lips.
“I told you not to look.”
“It smells like—”
“I know.”
Burnt pork. Neither of them said it, but neither of them would ever forget it.
It was so obviously too late to save Van der Grouten and Lazaris that Eliza didn’t even raise the question. Not even for form. But what was obvious to one was not so clear to another, whose emotions might be more personally involved.
“Hans!” shouted the Watchmaker as he skittered over the edge, vanishing below the rim of the sinkhole in a flurry of dust and smoke.
“Jesus, it’s still burning. He’ll die down there!” Matthew tore after him, but stopped short of following him into the pit. “Watchmaker! Don’t be a fool, man, it’s too late!”
“No!” came the reply, the sound distorted by the cavern. And then a wail, piercing and anguished: “Noooooo!”
“He’ll burn too if he doesn’t get out of there,” Matthew muttered.
“Then what are you waiting for?” Eliza stepped past him, testing the edge of the pit with a stamp of her toe. “The footing’s firm enough here. Do you have a rope? I have one somewhere if you don’t.”
“Are you planning to lasso him?”
“Hardly. I was planning to go in after him.”
“You were—are you stark staring mad, woman?” Matthew’s face, already red from the heat of the blast site, grew redder still. Veins stood out at his temples. Eliza had never seen him so worked up.
“Well, one of us has to. While you’re standing there trying to prove your masculinity, the Watchmaker’s down there broiling!”
“If I wanted to prove my masculinity this is not how I would go about it.”
Her body felt as taut and strained as his looked, angled in for the fight, but conflicted as to motive. The heat between them was not entirely anger, not entirely fear either, but a dangerous brew of those and other instincts.
The shuffle of rocks drew their attention down to the pit again. The Watchmaker was climbing back up, tears streaking the soot that covered his face. He slid on the loose surface, losing purchase more than once. Matthew lay down as far over the edge as he could and reached a hand down, helping the other man back to safety.
“You’re on fire,” Eliza pointed out, feeling unearthly calm because she was buzzing with adrenaline again and time was passing so slowly. She flipped up the long tail of the Watchmaker’s black driving coat and used the fabric to pat out the flickering ember on his back.
“It would have gone out on its own,” he told her. “The coat is fireproof.”
He stumbled a few feet away from the pit and collapsed to the ground, pressing his head against his bony knees, and began to sob.
Still in shock, miserable that she had no help to offer the disconsolate man or the two who had died, Eliza turned away and found herself inches from Matthew’s chest. It seemed inevitable, taking that final step toward him, leaning into him for support. His arms encircled her as if they had been waiting to do that very thing, one hand finding its way to her waist and the other cradling the back of her head.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have shouted. I was frightened for you.”
“No, I was about to jump into a flaming pit. Feel free to shout at me any time I seem likely to do that again.”
She felt his chuckle more than heard it, pressed as she was against his waistcoat. Felt too the hitch of a sob that broke it halfway through.
“I would have gone in after you, you know. Even without a fireproof coat.”
Eliza squeezed him tighter, stroking his back to soothe him. “I know.”
The crunch of tires on rough road alerted them, and they pulled apart as another car swung into line behind Matthew’s and the Watchmaker’s. It was Moreau, who approached the scene with baffled horror on his face and backed away with a string of French profanities that Eliza had to pretend not to understand.
Madame Barsteau, arriving moments later, reacted in much the same vein. Whitcombe was next; he heaved his bulk over to the lip of the crater and stared down at the wreckage, scanning its perimeter and not saying a word.
Miss Speck and Cantlebury, evidently driving in tandem, pulled up behind Eliza’s steamer and joined the huddled group. Whitcombe soon pulled Cantlebury and Matthew away, however, leaving the women and Moreau standing over the still-weeping Watchmaker.
Moreau made the first move, crouching near the man and murmuring to him until he lifted his head enough to whisper a response. As they talked, Eliza explained what little she knew to the two other women. Mostly they all tried not to stare at the wreckage in the pit, and failed.
“Definitely a bomb,” Whitcombe confirmed, returning after a few minutes of reconnaissance with his colleagues. “The tripwire’s still attached to that tree over there, and there on the other side as well. The blast marks suggest the charge itself was buried, and I think the road surface may have been treated with an accelerant, based on the char. They may not have bargained on the sinkhole being triggered, but there’s no way to know for certain at the moment.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about it, monsieur,” Madame Barsteau pointed out, her implication clear.
Whitcombe shrugged it off. “My family ran a munitions factory during the war and I came up there as an apprentice and journeyman. Then the war ended, we retooled to peacetime production and eventually I went off to read classics. But if there’s one thing I know about besides the ancient Greeks, it’s explosives. Which means if I wanted to get away with sabotage, they’re the last thing I’d use. I’m not fatally stupid.”
She nodded her concession, and Whitcombe continued. “This was subtle, though. If I hadn’t known what to look for, I probably would have thought this was just another sinkhole, with tragically coincidental timing. Most people would assume the fall made the cars explode, because they wouldn’t realize the blast marks indicated the presence of other explosives. They’d have attributed this to accident, not sabotage.”
“We need to reach the next town and alert somebody,” said Cantlebury. “And send somebody to deal with . . . the remains.”
“It would be faster to go back to that last city we drove through,” suggested Miss Speck, to the disapproval of a
ll the others.
“Perhaps that’s what they’re expecting!”
“Why give them what they want?”
“What if some of the others took a different road? We must go ahead to the checkpoint to warn them.”
And so on, the arguments continued. Eliza let the words wash over her as she gazed across the newly opened chasm to the road beyond. At its edges, the gap encroached on the surrounding scrub and forest, but she could see a way around on the right-hand side. It would be harrowing, and she would simply have to hope that the ground didn’t give way any further under her steam car’s weight, but it was as good an option as any other. And this was still a race; the only way to go was forward.
“Eliza! Where are you going?” Matthew called after her, inevitably.
She had already started her car and backed up to turn off the road when he reached her window and gripped the frame.
“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
She threw the car into gear and revved it gently, allowing the boiler time to reheat. “The same thing all of you will decide to do when you’re through discussing it. I’m driving on to St. Louis and then to the checkpoint. We can’t help Lazaris or Van der Grouten, and we need to get to a town and let somebody in authority know what’s happened to them. There’s no point in lingering here. For all we know the saboteurs are out there in the woods, waiting for us all to assemble so they can wipe out the rest of us at one time.”
“Or they could have set any number of these tripwires up ahead. You need to think, Eliza. This is the flaming pit all over again, already.”
“Or they could have rigged an avalanche or set a dam to burst and flood the roadway somewhere past Dodge City, or perhaps they’re behind that tree there with a bloody big shotgun. Perhaps they know the truth about the tainted air over the Sierra Nevada and they’re already on the other side now, ready to have a good laugh when we start plummeting from the sky like so many downed geese. We can think all we like, but we can’t know. In this case the flaming pit is the entire circumstance, Matthew, and you’re in it too. It’s either go on or stop the race. So I’m going on.”
“Will you wait for me, at least? Let me follow you.”
“You will be following me,” she pointed out, “because I’ll be ahead of you. I’ll see you at the checkpoint, Matthew.”
• • •
WHEN HE FINALLY caught sight of her car again, that reassuring blaze of red, they were already past St. Louis. He assumed she had stopped in the city to notify somebody of the accident, but the authorities must not have detained her for long. From the city limit they had another two hours’ drive or so to the checkpoint where they would make camp for the night, but it seemed to take days. His mind was full of the horrors he’d seen earlier, the scorched and smoking remains in the charred hulks of steam cars, boilers twisted and skewed into shreds by the force of the explosion. The smell seemed to linger in his clothes.
How could she be so calm, so resolved? For the first time it occurred to Matthew that Eliza had a strength he’d never fully appreciated, one that had nothing to do with physicality and everything to do with determination. Whatever she chose to do, she did with such singular focus and intensity that he wondered if she would ever have the attention to spare for another person in her life.
Dexter should have set Eliza to guard him instead of the other way around. If he had, she would have stuck by him with the same bullheadedness she was currently using to beat his time to the checkpoint. She’d been right, of course. They had all decided to continue, in the end, because there was really no other viable choice. Any decision to stop the race would have to be made by the rally committee, not by an assortment of frightened drivers at the side of the road. None of them were willing to backtrack and risk forfeiting the race. That meant proceeding to the checkpoint camp at the very least. All they’d lost by their discussion of what to do was time.
On the other hand, she’d turned to him at the most extreme moment and let him hold her. The simple truth of that gave him hope. But he knew he must borrow a page from Eliza’s book, and take a risk if he wanted to advance. He needed to tell her how he felt.
He would tell her tonight. And pray that he survived to see the morning.
The decision made him feel steadier, more purposeful. It gave him another mission to think about, one other than the hopeless task of finding Phineas and the risky venture of attempting to win the rally. A shorter-term goal, but with the potential for longer-term gain.
The mood around the campfire that night was strained. There was laughter aplenty, but it was too shrill and held a frantic edge. The tents were pitched around the edges of the clearing, but most of the racers and the few officials in attendance huddled near the fire far into the night, reluctant to leave the group.
Moreau had taken the opportunity to spring his surprise, opening several of his hampers and boxes to reveal a startling array of portable cooking equipment and all the makings of a feast for the full company. He’d stopped in St. Louis for fresh bread, but he’d brought everything else with him. Camembert with a fricassee of nuts and wild mushrooms, to start.
Matthew joined Whitcombe on one of the logs laid out for seating near the fire. Moreau had already secured Eliza a seat near his portable kitchen and seemed nearly as concerned for her mental well-being as he was for the Watchmaker’s. The food was clearly his way of offering comfort, and even in his foul humor Matthew had to admit the method wasn’t all bad.
“Je regrette,” Moreau announced to the group as they started on the creamy cheese and lightly warmed bread. “I intended a more festive occasion, and the wine I prefer with Camembert is champagne, so . . .” He uncorked the bottles with as little fanfare as possible, and from his seemingly bottomless hampers produced champagne glasses for all of them. It lent the already somber gathering an air of the surreal.
“Where has he been getting the ice?” Whitcombe wondered, studying the pale golden wine that glowed amber in the firelight. Condensation frosted the glass, testifying to the chill Moreau had somehow arranged.
“The hotels, I suppose. Or perhaps he’s wired ahead for some things,” Madame Barsteau said from the adjacent log. “He’s done it before. Four years ago at the Paris-Dakar, he treated us all to croquembouche after a meal of cailles en escabèche. I have no idea how it’s all managed, but I believe the consortium subsidizes his culinary flights of fancy to help cultivate his image as a suave madcap. And in this instance, I suppose to help him put weight on the competition.”
Looking around at the gathering, Matthew noted the dynamics revealing themselves under the increased tension. Cantlebury, who normally affected complete indifference to Lavinia Speck so as to avoid gossip, was sitting close to her and leaning in to talk quietly. It was just the two of them on their log.
Madame Barsteau and Miss Davis, who were normally quite companionable, sat together but looked wary of one another. Beyond them, Parnell and the other two Dominion drivers, Jensen and Jones, hunkered in a loose grouping that spoke more of isolation from the other clusters than camaraderie between themselves. Any other night, Jensen would be surreptitiously watching Parnell, copying his mannerisms. Parnell seemed to find the hero-worship amusing and occasionally threw out gestures that were obviously intended to gain Jensen’s interest, like adjusting the brim of his hat with a certain flourish, or brushing his coat back on one side as though revealing a six-shooter on his hip. Not tonight, though. Tonight neither of them had the spirit for that.
Everyone looked equally shaken. Matthew gazed from face to face, trying to discern whether any one of them might be a plant, an agent of whoever had killed Van der Grouten and Lazaris. He agreed with Whitcombe that the explosion had been large enough even without the factor of the sinkhole to destroy any vehicle that tripped the wire. The bomber had either intended a driver to die, or not cared that death might result.
Whitcombe had asked too quietly for anyone else to hear, and Matthew gave his question serious thought before answering. “I don’t know too much about poisons, but an agent that slow, one that also caused a fever and other symptoms of influenza? It seems unlikely, and damned inefficient, especially since it’s obvious whoever’s behind this doesn’t mind killing. No, I think it was just bad luck. I only hope none of the rest of us are incubating whatever Barnabas had. And as for Moreau, I think he’d feel it was a mortal sin to taint good food that way. I also don’t think he’d be stupid enough to try to poison us all at once if he wanted the win. Surely that would be grounds for disqualification.”
“That’s a relief.” The big man swilled half his glass of champagne in one go, earning a frown across the campfire from Moreau. “I would have hated to miss the main course; apparently he’s been cooking it up all day. Has a special pot rigged up in his boiler. It’s quite ingenious.”
The pot held a savory boeuf bourguignon, tender and rich, which Moreau served with a complex burgundy and a discussion of the merits of the pinot noir grape. He delivered that information primarily to Eliza, not to the group as a whole. But Matthew was listening. And watching Eliza, who smiled and nodded and seemed captivated far more than mere courtesy required. The Frenchman was a bit thick around the middle, and graying at the temples, but still exuded a smooth charm that ladies no doubt found appealing.
“He’s too old for her,” he muttered at one point, prompting a snort from Whitcombe.
“If you think she’s remotely interested in the chef, you’re more thick than I thought. And that’s saying something, Pence.”
Matthew socked Whitcombe on the arm in a friendly way and was surprised when the sudden motion sent them both swaying. He’d had too much wine, as they all had.
“Was that Phineas’s picture you were showing around back in Meridian, by the way? Is Smith-Grenville really still bent on finding him?”