by Susan Wiggs
What sort of person was she, Deborah wondered as her father reappeared at her door, that she could be so calm about losing everything?
She noted that he had donned his best Savile Row suit and kid leather spats. Even in the face of disaster, he seemed determined to keep up appearances. He held his cane and the bulging case containing his most important documents. “Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes, let’s go,” she said briskly. “And I’m glad we’re together,” she added.
They hastened to the door, and her father stopped. He put out his hand and cupped her cheek. She froze in surprise, for he rarely touched her with affection.
“I’m pleased that you came to see me tonight,” he said with the gruff tenderness that never failed to remind her that she was all he had in the world. “This matter with Philip—we’ll find an accord. You’ll see that marrying him is the proper course of things. The proper course indeed.”
“Oh, Father.” She bent her cheek into the cradle of his hand. “We really must go.”
She stepped out of the room and he turned, his hand on the door handle. A look of pure and utter desolation settled over his craggy face. In that moment, she realized that, although there was nothing for her in this house, nothing for her to clutch to her chest and go running through the streets with, it was different for Arthur Sinclair. This vast mansion was his dream, his place in the world, built by his own hard work and ambition.
“Come,” she said gently. “This pile of wood and stone isn’t worth your life.”
Together they went to the head of the main stairway. Then Deborah stopped and glanced over her shoulder toward her private suite of rooms.
“What is it?” Arthur asked. “Did you forget something?”
“Mother’s lavaliere,” she replied, suddenly remembering the one thing she wanted to keep. “I know just where it is. Wait for me outside, Father. I’ll be right behind you.”
He nodded and went to the elevator cage. Deborah dashed back to her suite and hurried to the dressing room. She had no need of a lamp, for the ominous glare of the fire turned the darkness to unhealthy noon. An entire large chamber was devoted to her wardrobe, a forest of Worth gowns and Brussels lace bodices on wire forms, cuffs and collars of every description, stacks of bandboxes containing hats. In a tall narrow armoire that smelled of lavender sachets, she found what she sought—her mother’s lavaliere in a red velvet pouch tied with silken cords. Stuffing the treasure into her bodice, she rushed back to the stairs.
Her father waited in the foyer, brightly illuminated by fireglow streaming through the skylight. Arthur Sinclair looked as neat and precise as the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the floor. It was hard to believe that outside this elegant sanctuary, throngs of Chicagoans ran from the fire. But the clanging of alarm bells and shouts from the street hinted that the flames were racing ever closer.
“I’m ready, Father,” she called.
Just then, the heavy front door slammed open.
Deborah froze at the top of the steps, one hand on the newel post. A huge man, covered in soot, with blackened holes burned into his fringed buckskins, stood at the threshold. Behind him, the blaze flared up and roared with an inhuman howl. The wild man burst into the house, crossing the foyer with long, purposeful strides. Even from a distance, she could see the fury in his eyes and the smoke that rose from his smoldering garments.
A looter, she thought, her stomach clenching.
His relentless stride, his swirling dark hair and the gun in his hand made him the most frightening spectacle she had ever seen. She could not even manage to scream.
Arthur Sinclair didn’t move, but stared at the five-shooter in the stranger’s huge hand. Her father did not look up at her, and it took her only a second to realize why. He didn’t want her to make her presence known to the looter.
She bit her lip to keep from calling out.
“See here now,” her father said sternly. “If thieving’s your aim, you’ll find baubles a-plenty throughout the house. No need to harm me or—No need to harm me.”
“I’m not here to rob you, old man.” The looter’s voice was low and harsh.
Deborah’s father gestured with his brass-tipped cane. “The liquor and wine are kept in the basement. Just take what you want and be gone.”
“I want you to look at me, Sinclair,” the looter said. “I come from Isle Royale.”
Her father stiffened, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the handle of his cane. His jaw began to tic as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. He took an uneven step toward the narrow hallway that led to the alley in the back, where the phaeton waited. “Look,” he said, “if it’s about the copper mine, my claims adjusters will settle—”
“Yes, that’s why I’m here.” The man took a step closer, planting himself between the stair rail and Sinclair. “To settle with you. And it’s not about money.”
He planted his feet wide and brought his arm up, pointing the revolver at Arthur’s chest.
Sinclair raised the satchel like a shield. “Don’t be a fool. I can pay—”
“With your blood, you son of a bitch.”
Deborah didn’t give herself time to think. As nimble as she had been as a little girl, she propped her hip on the gleaming, waxed stair rail and shoved off. The much-polished surface was as slick as grease. In the blink of an eye, she zipped down the rail, seeing things only in flashes of awareness: her father’s astonished, openmouthed face, the man half turning, even as the gun went off.
She felt a terrible blow as her body collided with that of the intruder, and all the air rushed out of her lungs. The glass skylight over the vestibule shattered with an explosion of noise. The gun went sliding across the floor, then spun like a top in the middle of the foyer. Arthur grabbed a marble cherub from the statue in the curve of the stair and brought the white stone down on the intruder’s head. The wild man gave an animal bellow of pain and rage, then sank with a groan.
“By God, you saved my life,” Arthur said, regarding Deborah with astonishment.
“Father,” she said, gasping for air as she picked herself up off the floor. “Do you think you killed him?”
“It would be no more than he deserved. May he burn in hell.” Moving quickly despite his infirmity, he headed for the rear of the house.
Deborah put a hand to her bodice, and with a sense of dismay discovered that it was empty. There, at the foot of the stairs, lay the velvet pouch with her mother’s lavaliere. She went to snatch it, then moved to follow her father out to the phaeton.
But she felt a tug of resistance. Looking down, she saw the hamlike fist of the wild man clutching the hem of her skirt.
FOUR
His head pounded like a fist-sized heartbeat. The ringing agony made him want to puke.
The woman with the yellow hair stood like Joan of Arc over him. Her image blurred and melted around the edges, and for a moment he thought he was going blind from the blow to the head. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again and let out a shuddering breath. His vision was sharp and clear once again, but he didn’t like what he saw. The woman’s mouth formed a red O of abject horror. This was no Joan of Arc. He could see the uncertainty flickering in her eyes, could practically read her mind. Should she scream and alert Sinclair, or keep mum so he could get away?
“Go ahead and holler for him,” he said, letting go of her dress and giving her a shove. “You’d be doing me a favor.” She stumbled back against the stairs, lost her footing and fell like a broken doll, sinking in a puffy tangle of skirts.
Standing up, he grabbed the newel post as his vision swam and reeled. He forced himself to focus on his goal: retrieve the pistol, pursue Sinclair, shoot him dead.
His boots crunched over shards of broken glass as he crossed the checkerboard floor. Bad shot. The woman had slammed into him at the precise moment he had squeezed the trigger. Damned revolver. Five-shooters were for killing folks, and until now that had never been his business.
He stepped out into an inferno. Every rooftop in sight was in flames. A brooding burnt orange stained the smoke-laden sky. Flaming debris flew in a hot blizzard over the city. A brickwork wall along the side of the alley had sustained a huge crack, and great chunks of brick and mortar rained down into the narrow roadway.
Arthur Sinclair had climbed to the box of a phaeton and sat holding the leather ribbons. There was no driver in sight. Sinclair had clearly been expecting the blond woman to follow him out of the house, for his face registered alarm when he saw Tom rather than the woman.
Tom strode toward him. There was no time for the confrontation he had envisioned during the voyage to Chicago. Sinclair would never know exactly what his connection to Tom was, what crime he would die for. No matter. Let the bastard burn in hell on general principle.
Tom stepped to the middle of the alleyway and raised the five-shooter, holding it steady with both hands. The roaring heat of the fire stole his breath. His world narrowed to a florid-faced, well-fed Arthur Sinclair viewed over the notch of a pistol.
“See you in hell, you son of a bitch,” Tom said in a voice he knew was too low to be heard. Just as he tightened his forefinger around the trigger, he caught a glimpse of the woman running out of the building.
Above her, a huge section of the roof gave way. A tarred sheet of flame wafted down over the unsuspecting blond head.
Tom swore between his teeth, moving even as he spoke. He lunged at the woman, knocking her out of the way just as the burning roof crashed down upon the spot where she had been standing. Beams and timbers rained down, filling the narrow alleyway. The wind shifted, and a geyser of sparks erupted. The horses reared and whistled in panic. The carriage surged forward, racing out of control.
Holding fast to the reins of the runaway team was Arthur Sinclair. Flaming debris filled the alley behind the cart, forming a giant pyramid of fire. The cracked wall across the way crumbled with a crash of dust and rubble.
The entire rear section of the house teetered on the brink of collapse. The service alley was impassable, and so was the house itself. Tom’s only option was to go in the opposite direction and hope the narrow roadway cut through to the main thoroughfare.
He barely thought of the woman, this shrieking blond banshee who had cost him his chance at revenge. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her to her feet, pulling her out of the way of burning wreckage. Only after he had dragged her to safety did his mind register the word she kept screaming over and over.
Father.
* * *
Deborah wrenched her arm this way and that, but the wild man held her fast. She kicked out, stubbing her feet on his iron-hard legs. He didn’t even flinch. It was like fighting a wall of solid rock.
The murderer was a force of nature, as determined and unstoppable as the marching fire she and her father had so foolishly underestimated.
Father.
Dear God, what would become of him? Her last glimpse had been of a runaway phaeton with its canvas hood in flames. Now the wild man was dragging her off in the opposite direction. “Please,” she sobbed, unable to keep from pleading. “Please, let me go. I’ve done nothing to hurt you.”
He thrust his gun in its hip holster and stalked on, showing no indication that he heard her.
“I can pay you.” She tried to claw off her blue topaz bracelet. “Take my jewelry.”
“Lady, I don’t want your damned jewelry,” he said between his teeth. The alley angled to the left. He hauled her down the center of it as stinging sparks rained down on them.
Deborah dug in her heels and leaned back, rebelling with every ounce of strength she possessed. Admittedly, that was not much, but fright and fury added power to her resistance. She had never before fought anyone for any reason.
“Woman, I’ll drag you if I have to,” her captor said, barely slowing his pace. “Your choice.”
Her strength ebbed fast, and she went limp. Before she crumpled completely to the cinder-strewn pavement, he caught her against his rough, smoky buckskin chest. “Damn it,” he said between clenched teeth. “You can come with me, or stay here and burn. What’ll it be?”
“I’d rather burn in hell than go with you.”
“Fine.” He let go of her.
She staggered back, catching herself before she collapsed. The heat from the inferno battered her head. Sparks and cinders rained down from every rooftop. She could smell the scent of burning hair, could see small blackened holes appear in her full skirts. With the fringe of her shawl, she beat out a glowing ember. Casting a frantic glance backward, she could see nothing of the mansion that had been her father’s house, nothing but rubble shrouded in a thick fog of eye-smarting smoke. On both sides of her, the buildings burned out of control, turning the alley into a tunnel of fire. Her throat and lungs filled with hot smoke.
In the roadway ahead, Paul Bunyan marched heedlessly forward, not even looking back to watch her burn like a martyr. She hated that he didn’t look back. She hated him for not looking back. Most of all, she hated having no choice but to flee the fire in one direction—toward her captor. After last night, Deborah reflected, she had not been able to stop shivering. She had pulled the covers over her head and, lying in the dark, reflected that she had reached the bottom of a black pit of despair. Now that she found herself confronted by a crazed murderer, she was beginning to think there were worse things than that pit.
When she reached his side, choking and sputtering on smoke and outrage, he barely acknowledged her except to seize her by the arm and yank her roughly along with him. She tried to demand what he wanted from her, what malice he bore her, but she was coughing too hard.
They emerged onto the main street, and finally she grasped the full force of the conflagration. A river of humanity flowed along the street, bobbing and surging forward like boiling rapids. She called to passersby for help, but no one responded. They were all too preoccupied with their own survival. Besides, the fire blazed with a deafening roar that made it seem almost alive. Deborah coughed and wheezed, starving for a breath of air. She staggered with dizziness, and only the oak-hard arm of her abductor held her up. Rushing people, smoke, cinders, flaming buildings, explosions—all filled her senses. But as she was pulled along, her larger view of the crowd narrowed and focused down to individual and heartbreaking detail. A mother holding a screaming baby and running down the street. A child standing on a street corner, turning in circles and crying until someone grabbed him and hurried off. A single shoe in the gutter. A tired old rag doll underfoot. Everywhere she looked, she saw the horrifying evidence of loss and destruction. A drunken man stood atop a piano, declaring the fire the friend of the poor man and exhorting people to help themselves to liquor. A thrown bottle struck him, and he stumbled and fell.
Armageddon had arrived, she thought. And Satan himself had come to escort her through the flames. To what purpose, she had no idea. Terror swept through her with the same swift and unrelenting fury of the firestorm.
Caught up in the flow of humanity, they surged with the crowd past grand buildings and residences with flames shooting out of the windows. Bundles of blankets were being dropped from upper storeys. To her horrified amazement, she realized that the hastily bound bundles of mattresses and bedding contained valuables. And some of them, insanely, contained children.
A little girl in a red nightgown fought her way free of one of the bundles and raced blindly into the street, wailing in terror. Panic-stricken, she headed into the path of a careening express wagon.
The wild man made a sound of impatience. He dropped Deborah’s arm and plunged into the middle of the road, snatching up the child with a single bear-paw swipe. Moving quickly for a creature of such immense size, he bore the crying child t
o the walkway.
For a moment Deborah was so surprised that she simply froze, though rushing people jostled her. Dear heaven, a kidnaper. He was a deadly madman, preying upon helpless women and children.
Deborah watched as he set the hysterical child on his shoulder. With his free hand he grabbed a black wrought iron light post and stepped up on its concrete base, rising high above the throng. The girl in red waved her arms frantically, and a man with a sweat-stained face broke free of the crowd and rushed toward her.
“Poppa,” the little girl squealed as the looter surrendered her to her father.
Deborah gathered her wits about her, covered her bare head with her shawl to conceal her blond hair and plunged into the thick of the crowd. She had no thought but to flee, to lose herself in the ocean of humanity surging through the streets. The maelstrom of noise thundered so loudly that her senses seemed to shut down, filtering out the chaos. Her only awareness was of the thin, high-pitched sound that came unbidden from her own throat. She had never seen a rabbit hunted down by a wolf, but knew now what the rabbit sounded like, felt like, when fleeing a predator. Two days ago she had understood her life. She had known who she was and where she fit in. And if, from time to time, she had felt a small, traitorous prodding of discontent, she had quelled it easily enough by reminding herself of all the unearned privileges she enjoyed. The past two days had disengaged her from that comfortable spot like a snail being pried from its shell. And like the snail she was uprooted, lost in an alien world, longing to crawl back into her shell but unable to find the way back.
She forced herself to look ahead to the open square of the intersection. Hurrying in that direction, she slammed into a stout, screaming woman wearing a housekeeper’s black muslin dress and a white lace cap. With a feather duster clutched in her hand, she stood paralyzed by terror except for the misshapen, screaming mouth. Instinctively Deborah grabbed the woman’s hand and propelled her along the walkway. She felt a strong urge to rush away, but the frightened woman clung to her. Ahead of them, a man pushing a heavily laden wheelbarrow slowed their progress.