by Martha Hix
“Susan, not a word.” Burke put a finger over her mouth. “Not ever.”
“I already promised.”
As dreadful as his confession had been, Susan felt a new closeness with Burke. A bond had formed. Serenity, in spite of the events outside their home, carried her through the rest of the day and into the evening.
Her calm was put to the test amid a Stephen Foster duet by the sisters O’Brien. Young Billy, the office runner, arrived at the door with an envelope. Burke didn’t open it. He called Susan aside in the library. “I didn’t tell you something last night,” he stated. “My hired sleuth is missing.”
“Monsieur Cinglure?” she asked, confused.
“Actually, the one I sent to track West, in Natchez.”
“Then by all means, do what you must. I am as eager as you to get this matter settled.” Susan hugged herself, chilled despite the warm evening. “For Phoebe’s sake, and for our own, I trust you can clear Throck.”
Burke stroked her face. “Can’t do anything until the guests leave. If our guests ever return to the hotel.”
Susan swallowed, cocked her head, and watched her husband’s expression change from benign to dark as she asked, “Does it hurt you that much, reminders of Antoinette?”
“What if they do?”
The sharp pain that went through Susan’s heart almost removed her to the guests. “Then I’m sorry that you can’t stop grieving for her, Burke.”
“I’m grieving for what was done to her.”
His bark, as well as the furrow on his brow, provoked Susan into saying, “You’ll always blame yourself for whatever happened to her, won’t you?”
“Leave it be, Susan. Just leave it be.”
He turned his back. Went to his desk. Taking a letter opener from it, he picked up the envelope delivered by Billy and sliced the top. His shoulder muscles tensed as he read the note.
“What’s wrong?” Susan asked.
“Nothing’s wrong. It’s wonderful news.” He slid the letter back into the envelope, then tucked it in a desk drawer. “My sleuth will meet me at midnight.”
Without another word he left the library and went to his family. He patiently waited for their departure, which occurred at the stroke of eleven. Susan and Burke waved them and Pippin good night before Keep Smile closed the front door.
But Burke took his own leave not five minutes later.
Curiosity drove Susan to a particular content of his desk.
St. Louis cemetery. Midnight. V—
It was definitely feminine penmanship. Was the sleuth a woman? Surely not. Susan rearranged the letter. And she couldn’t help but struggle with fear and superstition. Through Papa Legba she evoked the spiritual baron of the cemetery. “Samedi, why does the sleuth, male or female, call my husband to your domain at midnight?”
Twenty-four
Ghosts seeped beneath his skin, or so Burke imagined, and he’d yet to reach the midnight rendezvous in St. Louis Cemetery.
A wide-brimmed hat fixed low on his brow, he eschewed any form of conveyance but leather soles while making his way from rue Royale. He had plenty of time before midnight. The lights of the Quarter guided him through patches of fog. Rampart Street noise pulled him closer. His boots squashed into the rain-softened earth, eerily, as he entered the necropolis that held nary a tree but many thousand corpses in cramped environs.
Discombobulated by the graveyard dark, Burke allowed his eyes to adjust. He shuddered. He’d spent too much time there, saying good-bye to the fallen crewmen of the Delta Star.
His spine knotted with suspicions that Throck might have been party to those deaths.
The moon suddenly broke through fog, a dog howling in the distance. Burke set a path between the oven-shaped above-ground tombs; he knew the meeting place. The Harken family tomb. Where parts of Teddy Harken lay at rest.
“Vell,” Burke called quietly, repeating the name with more force as fog ribboned anew.
Nothing.
Shadows played havoc with his tokens of sangfroid. Even before a gust of unseasonable wind prickled the hair at his nape, the old saying “someone walks on my grave” took on a new meaning.
He heard an earthly noise. “Vell?”
Something, probably a fingernail, struck a lucifer. A plume, a crackle of fire. A male face broke into view, the hooked features of a bespectacled eel not seen in months.
Rufus West.
Shit.
Vell’s in trouble.
Standing beside the Harken tomb, clutching that lucifer between thumb and finger, West threw down the match and took a crooked cane from the rack of his forearm. “You’re early.”
“Where’s Velma?” Burke demanded to know.
West waved the cane, Don Quixote at his windmills. “Is that all you have to say? ‘Where’s Velma?’ I expected something more to the point. Such as, ‘What have you done with her?’ ”
A sick feeling turned hopeful as Burke recalled her mention of an aborted midnight visit. Could be she’d written the note before leaving, and the Eel now trifled with Burke’s faculties. Foolish thought. To his marrow he knew West had her.
Burke damned himself for not carrying a firearm.
The Eel inched forward. “How are you faring, O’Brien? Do you enjoy your life?”
They were roughly the same height, Burke and enemy. But the thin man could easily be overpowered. Burke’s weight sat solid on heavy bones. West was marshmallow, pink and spongy.
“Get out of my way, Eel. Or I’ll break your neck like I did your fingers.”
“You won’t.” West laughed maniacally. “I have the upper hand—pun intended—with you.”
“My patience wears thin. Get Velma.”
“Not yet. You have a boy. Pippin, he’s called.”
Fear for the lad iced Burke’s veins, yet he spoke evenly. “You’d know. You took his mother to the Yankee Princess before killing his father.”
“Ah, the trapeze artist. But your bride isn’t the boy’s mother. His real mother cries for her brat.”
Angela Paget had turned up in Natchez, so this alliance didn’t surprise Burke. “What is it you want, West?”
“Money.”
“Forget it.” If he allowed blackmail, West would be back for more in the blink of an eye.
“You didn’t learn, did you, O’Brien? It wasn’t enough for the oh-so-weak shipping baron to know his men blew apart on the Delta Star. I thought you’d run to the whiskey barrel. A disgusting sight you were in your drunken days.”
“That’s my business.”
West went on, absorbed in his tirade. “How does it fare with Lloyds? Has Sir Joshua found out about the dynamite? Has he seen the bill of lading with your signature on it?”
“Tate knows a forgery when he sees it. He’s on to you.”
“You’re bluffing. You’d make a terrible poker player, O’Brien. Your face is too easy to read, even on a night like tonight. How I wish I could’ve seen your expression when you saw the Yankee Princess and all her finery blown to bits.”
It’s never too late to learn the gaming art, Burke decided. “Storey didn’t tell you?”
“Storey? I wouldn’t get within a hundred yards of his reeking breath.”
“You’re betting a losing hand, West. Storey is in with you. Why, he let the cat out of the bag. Not only to me. To Sir Joshua too.”
“Not likely. Storey is halfway around Florida by now, on a sailing voyage across the Atlantic.”
Storey’s landlady had said the same thing when Burke had called at the boardinghouse before leaving for Natchez. Didn’t mean it was true. “If you don’t get within yards of the man, how come you know where to find him?”
“Nothing escapes my notice.” West circled Burke, saying, “Let’s discuss your bride.”
“Let’s don’t.”
“Oh, but we will. You amazed me, taking up with your birthday present. After all your slobbering and slurping and caterwauling over the Lawrence girl, I figured you were t
hrough with the magic lamp.”
If there was ever a moment of regret over taking the first sip of demon spirits, it was now. But the lamp brought Susan, and Burke would never regret loving her.
So close that his breath gave off gas as putrid as a corpse, West said, “So the drunk married the snake charmer. What a pairing. But I can’t say I blame you. She is lovely.”
“Go to hell.”
“Mrs. Paget and I require thirty thousand dollars, or—”
“Forget it.”
“You have a nasty habit of interrupting. If you don’t have the money tucked in the bottom slot of the Harken tomb by tomorrow night, you’ll regret it. I can be quite vicious.”
Rich laughter rolled from Burke’s chest, forced up by determination not to give this bastard an edge. “You aren’t up to the challenge, Eel. If you can’t hit someone with a puny walking stick, you’re out of your element. Best stick to using your head for figures to steal other people’s money.”
A cane struck Burke’s neck, its wielder shouting, “I will make you a believer in the power of Rufus West.”
“Go to hell.” Burke turned in the mud, meant to depart, but something flew over his shoulder and into his path. That something fell on a boot. The moon beamed, never so brightly as when its rays landed on a mass of yellow.
Burke retched.
It wasn’t a wig.
It was a scalp.
Velma’s, he knew as surely as his stomach heaved. You sent her to that, O’Brien.
West spoke. “I took her off the Edna Gal before she got to Natchez. The rest of the bitch was dinner for alligators. My, how they gobbled those teats.”
It was all too much—the threats, the murders, the collusion. “Goddamn you, West. I’ll kill you!” Burke reared his elbow and a fist.
“Get him, Throck!”
Not Throck. Surely not!
Cold steel rammed the base of Burke’s skull and lobbed his hat to the ground.
“Don’t shoot yet.” West stepped back, laughing in evil patches of glee and triumph. “Good work, Throck.”
Throck. Susan had been right all along. Burke didn’t breathe. Cold chills shook his bones. As West had turned on him, so had a blustering first mate once trusted beyond reason. What’s wrong with me that I can’t judge character?
Forcing an even tone, he said, “Tell me, Throck. Do you think my aunt will have you after this?”
West did the answering. “Fool. He uses her is all. As he did you. It was always Throck and me. Tell him, Throck. Tell him how you bathed his sick brow in the mornings so he could have another go at the dog that bit him the night before. Tell him how you laughed and tucked his money in your pocket.”
Burke didn’t want to hear it. “Enough small talk,” he thundered, his mind racing, his words taking a gamble. “I don’t give a damn about the past. Let’s do business. Give me two months. You’ll have the money.”
“A week.”
“Impossible. I’ll have to sell a riverboat. You’ll have the money in two months,” he lied. Don’t leave part of Velma in the mud. She deserves better. And it’s evidence of murder.
The Eel shoved his cane into Burke’s midsection and said, “A thousand in two weeks. Tuck it in the crack of this vault. Or I’ll have your bride’s scalp.”
I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch! I’ll shoot you between your eyes. Or beat you to death. You won’t have my wife. He started to lunge. The unmistakable click of a pistol hammer against his neck stilled him. If he died in this cemetery, what would happen to his family?
He must get the odds on his side. “All right. A thousand in two weeks.”
Acting casual, Burke reached to the ground, seemingly for his hat. Before he got the scalp, he caught a whiff of garlic, and knew Throck wasn’t West’s cohort.
But not before a brogan shot through the air, attached to a large man’s leg; it connected to the seeking wrist. Pain broadsided Burke’s arm even before his wrist slammed into a sharp corner of the tomb.
He hit the ground and rolled. Again the brogan struck, meeting ribs. The pop of bones, the agony of it, slammed into Burke. Reflex shouted to grab his pains; he didn’t curl in agony. The low light obscured everything but the blaze of a familiar bald head. He muttered, “Storey.”
Newt Storey backed away.
“Had you going for a while there, didn’t we?” West waved his cane in victory. “Hah!”
“You bastards,” Burke gritted out at both murdering traitors.
Storey took hold of the scalp and shook his wrist as though he carried nothing but a dusty rag.
“Had you fooled, didn’t we?” West laughed with triumph. “Thought your pal Throck betrayed you, didn’t you? Too bad we couldn’t’ve stretched that out for a while. I do get a thrill from seeing you suffer.”
“Go to hell.” Burke then shouted to the man who’d once held him back from suicide: “Why?”
Newt Storey halted, looked over a hulking shoulder. “You never valued my worth.”
West moved to Burke. “Look at you. Broken bones. Isn’t that a shame?” He stepped on the broken wrist. “What a pity it’ll be, you as maimed as I,” vibrated through Burke’s misery, both physical and of the mind. “Any tricks out of you, O’Brien, and I’ll have two scalps. Your bride’s. And the kid’s.”
They were gone before their latest prey could mount an attack or chase after them, leaving Burke sick with concern for Susan and Pip. She expects you to protect the two of them.
Somehow Burke had to find strength. No one would hurt his family. No one.
Half out of her mind. Mad. Witless. Where was he? Insane on several levels, Susan paced the floor and waited up for her husband. How dare he go to a cemetery in the dead of night? Didn’t he have superstitions?
When the creak of the heavy front door broke like an anvil in her head, she moved to the gaslit vestibule. The clock struck four in the morning when Burke returned to 21 rue Royale.
The silt of the graveyard on him, his blood seeping, he stumbled from the street banquette to the flagstones of his home. His right hand hung at an odd angle, the wrist broken. Regrettably, a black alley cat ran in his path. Hadn’t enough bad luck befallen Burke O’Brien this night?
Susan rushed to him, chanting to offset the cat. Chanting for her husband’s returned health.
“Shut up that mumbo-jumbo.” He twisted around to brace himself on the wall. “Have Keep Smile go for Cinglure.”
“Later.” She laced her husband’s good arm around her shoulder, the brass of blood pinging her nose. “Let’s get you into the sitting room and make you comfortable. Lean on me.”
“It’s supposed to be the other way around.”
“Hush.”
Solid as he was, tall as he was, Susan had to struggle to get him indoors. He wilted onto the sofa; she tucked a pillow under his neck. “Close the drapes” was his pained demand. She did as bade.
By now Keep Smile responded to the commotion. In nightcap and britches, the serving man loped up to the sofa. His eyes went slumberous as he chanted, “Papa . . . Legba . . .”
Susan snapped her fingers to forestall his falling into a trance. “Awaken Zinnia. Tell her—”
“No. Get Cinglure.” Burke waved his good hand. “Lock the door behind you, man. Susan, don’t leave this house.”
Not disposed to argue, she ran to the courtyard, yelling to the third floor for the housekeeper, “Burke needs us!”
Susan hurried to collect fresh water, soap, and washrags. Quickly, she returned to give tender attention to her downed man. Already Zinnia had relieved him of his shirt and was mopping mud from his boots. When Susan ordered him to stretch out on the sofa, his wince evinced another injury, this one to his side.
“What went wrong?” Susan began to bathe his face.
“Second time my hand’s been done in since I’ve known you. Are you the purveyor of black magic, wife?” His attempt at levity flattened into: “Hell and damnation.”
“Mon Dieu! You
are a mess, O’Brien.” Remy Cinglure charged in, Keep Smile behind him. His curled fair hair crammed beneath a planter’s hat, the detective thinned his mouth into a frown and dropped to the wing chair. “Merde.”
“Hello to you too, Cinglure.” Burke then waved away the washing rag. “Keep Smile, go for the doctor. Zinnia, go to the St. Charles. Stay with Pip. Don’t let him out of your sight. Tell Fitz and Jinnings to help you.”
Jinnings? Susan couldn’t speculate on why her husband would want anything from the despised genie, for Burke added, “When Throck shows up, tell him I need him.”
Throck? “Do you mean . . . ?”
“He’s innocent.” Burke turned his eyes to Susan. “It’s Storey. Storey is with West.”
“Thank heavens.” Thank heavens! Aunt Phoebe had not made an unwise choice in her future husband. And Burke’s trusted friend had not let him down. But Storey, too, had held Burke’s confidence, as West once had. Poor Burke.
After some protest on Zinnia’s part, the servants set out, leaving Susan to wonder why Pippin’s safety concerned Burke.
Prone, he held the swollen wrist to his stomach. Agony reflected from his eyes, such suffering not experienced since the night he’d spoken of Miss Lawrence. He said to Cinglure, “It’s about Vell.”
Who was Veil? The “V” on the note, of course. From the agony of his simple statement, Susan realized Veil was no mere sleuth.
The detective peered from gray eyes at Susan before knitting brows at Burke. “Are you sure you wish to discuss your—” He stopped to take Susan’s hand and pressed a kiss of greeting to her knuckles. “Would you mind seeing after a pot of coffee, chérie? ”
Burke shifted his regard to Remy Cinglure, who now propped an elbow on a chair arm; one finger roofed his upper lip.
“She stays, Cinglure. This concerns my wife. And she needs to hear it.”
A brow had lifted with typical French dubiety. “It is indelicate, mon ami, discussing Mam’selle Harken.” He coughed behind his hand.