She thought they’d foreseen every eventuality. And to predict was to forestall. Confident about what was to happen, sleepy from the late hour and the sandwiches she’d eaten, Prudence leaned back against the white-linened headrest. She pictured the astonishment on Lena’s face when they told her the whole story of Everett’s cruel deception. And smiled.
Geoffrey let her rest. He went over the plan he’d sketched out until he was sure he’d thought of every incidental development that might scupper it. In the end, everything depended on being able to unlock Everett’s compartment without waking him up. The only moment of real danger would be as the door from the dimly lit corridor opened into the darkness of the sleeping compartment. For a few seconds Geoffrey would be outlined in the doorway, as tempting a target as any shooter could wish for. But Everett would be dead to the world, lulled into complacency by the rhythmic clack of the train wheels and his own arrogance.
Get past those initial seconds and Geoffrey would be home free.
He wouldn’t fall asleep either, but he closed his eyes to run through the plan again.
* * *
“It’s time,” Geoffrey whispered, nudging Prudence lightly. He’d considered slipping past her to capture Everett Rinehart by himself if she dozed off, questioning the idea as soon as he’d had it. She’d never forgive him for shutting her out of the resolution of a case she’d worked on as hard as he had. And she’d be right, he acknowledged, grateful that she hadn’t fallen asleep and put him to the test. What was it she’d said? I’m either your partner or I’m not. Make up your mind!
For better or worse, he’d made his decision.
Prudence sat up as cleanly and neatly as she did most things. She blinked once or twice, and then she was all business, all focus, the potentially deadly but undependably inaccurate derringer in her hand. Her skirts rustled as she stood up. “He won’t hear that with the compartment door closed. I’ll stand very still while you’re unlocking it.”
But Henry the porter wouldn’t turn over his key. “No sir,” he said, fingering the chain from which it hung. “Nobody takes holt of this ’cept me.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger,” Geoffrey whispered. They were huddled together at the end of the train car.
“Tell you what I’m gonna do,” Henry said. “Gonna turn that key as sweet and soft as you please. Then I’m gonna step on down to the other end of the car. What you do after that ain’t no bidness of mine.”
It was, Geoffrey thought, exactly what he had been about to suggest. Henry was a slender, agile man, but he had years on him, and Geoffrey wasn’t sure the porter would be able to get to safety quickly enough if something went wrong. There was one less thing to worry about if he was out of gunshot range when the door opened.
He nodded his agreement, then he and Prudence stood rigidly alert and silent, watching Henry slip his master key into the lock of Everett Rinehart’s stateroom. True to his promise, they heard not a sound, not even the snick of the bolt being withdrawn from the door frame. Henry returned the long chain to its place across his chest, touched one crooked finger to his cap, then disappeared as stealthily as a cat down the narrow corridor toward the next car.
Not even a whisper to break the midnight stillness against which the clack of the wheels was the only noise to be heard. So steady, so monotonous that any competing sound would be as out of place and alarming as the clang of a bell.
With Prudence behind him, Geoffrey inched his way closer to Everett’s door, their shadows falling on the wall beside them. Henry had shaken his head when asked if the lights could be turned off. They’d been dimmed for sleeping, but that was the best the porter could do.
One last glance at his partner’s pale, strained face, then Geoffrey curled his fingers around Everett’s brass doorknob, registering its cold smoothness, tightening the palm of his hand so it wouldn’t slip.
The bullet caught him in the vulnerable spot between chest and shoulder. Simultaneous with the echoing boom of the shot bloomed a starburst of red blood that spattered Prudence’s face. Geoffrey raised an arm to fire, but a second bullet tore the gun from his hand and sprayed more blood over his partner. She caught his body as it fell, bracing herself to lower him to the floor, holding on to the derringer for dear life, staring into the darkness of the compartment to find her target.
Nothing. She could see nothing, though she was sure Everett Rinehart had to be mere feet away from her. She could smell his hair oil and the heavy scent of the expensive cologne he wore.
Another shot, and Geoffrey’s body in her arms jerked spasmodically. A third bullet had bitten into his flesh, knocking the derringer from her hand as it did so.
A heavy boot kicked the minuscule weapon aside, sending it spinning.
For a moment Everett Rinehart loomed over Prudence, gun aimed at Geoffrey’s head. Then he seemed to think better of wasting ammunition on a dying man. Heavy banker’s briefcase in hand, he tore off down the corridor, slamming against Henry and sending the porter crashing to the floor. Voices called from behind closed doors as groggy sleepers tried to figure out what had awakened them, what was happening just outside the small, enclosed spaces where they had thought they were safe.
A rush of cold air swept over Prudence as she pressed Geoffrey’s coat against the wound that was bubbling blood into her hand. She reached out for Henry, who was crawling along the corridor, trying to get to her, gasping as he fought to catch his breath.
“He’s jumpin’, miss. We’re slowing down to take a curve. He’ll be gone by the time we get around it.” Henry hauled himself painfully to his feet, lurching toward the emergency pull that would bring the roaring train to a halt.
“No,” Prudence shouted. “Let him go. We’ve got to get to a doctor, to a hospital. How far to the next station?”
“Twenty minutes. Mebbe a little more. You sure you don’t want me to pull this here cord?”
“I’m sure. Don’t do it!” she said angrily, despairingly. “The bastard isn’t worth it.”
Prudence bent over Geoffrey, whispering encouraging words while she continued to hold him, pressing as hard as she could on the wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding. His face was a pallid, bloodless gray, eyes closed, spasms of pain furrowing the skin. She could barely feel a faint whisper of breath against her cheek. An icy chill crept across his body, as if warmth and life were leeching out with the rivers of blood.
A clean white handkerchief fluttered down from Henry’s pocket, turning dark gray in the dimness as blood that would be red in daylight saturated its folds.
“I’m gonna go callin’ for a doctor,” the porter muttered. “Might be we got us one somewhere.” He hauled blankets from Everett’s compartment and draped them over Prudence’s shoulders and around Geoffrey’s legs, gathered pillows and another blanket to make a nest in which to cradle the injured man. Heaped towels where Prudence could reach them. Then he set off down the car, calling for a doctor as he went. Compartment doors were opening, men and women in long white nightgowns peering out, exclaiming at what they saw, the men enveloping the women in protective embraces, then gently pushing them back toward their berths so they wouldn’t have to watch a stranger take his last breath.
“Please, God,” Prudence whispered, “please don’t let him die.”
CHAPTER 31
In what was perhaps the only unplanned event in Everett Rinehart’s life, he leaped from the Montreal-bound train on which he had been fleeing New York City into the Adirondack wilderness. No time for second thoughts. Behind him Geoffrey Hunter lay hemorrhaging out his heart’s blood while his partner tried frantically to staunch the flow and keep him alive. Ahead lay darkness and a forest so thickly overgrown that ordinary humans seldom ventured into it.
Safety. He had to find a deserted cabin in which to shelter long enough to plan what needed to happen next.
He couldn’t remember how many shots he’d fired at the figure outlined against the ill-lit train corridor. Enough to take him down. A
nd then the moment when he’d realized that another bullet into the ex-Pinkerton’s brain might be the very one he needed to defend himself against one of the Adirondack black bears who should be hibernating at this time of year. But you never knew. And if he found an isolated cabin, would he need to rid himself of its hermit occupant? Whatever ammunition remained in the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson .38 and a handful of bullets in his jacket pocket was all he had.
So Geoffrey Hunter continued to bleed out his life and Everett Rinehart jumped into the next phase of his.
The luck that had always brought him out on top of every situation ensured that he broke no bones and didn’t lose consciousness when he landed on a deep bed of pine needles as the train slowed to take the sharpest curve of its run. He never lost his hold on the banker’s case into which he’d packed bundles of cash, a fortune in loose diamonds, and a sack of gold coins under whose weight he struggled to get to his feet. He was a rich man, albeit at the moment a disoriented one lost in the wilds of the back of beyond.
He stumbled over and then picked up a stout limb blown to the ground in one of the frequent storms that swept across the mountains. Holding it out in front of him like a blind man’s white cane, Everett began his long trek to freedom and the full enjoyment of the wealth he’d taken so many chances to acquire.
He deserved his new life.
God knows, it had cost him dearly.
* * *
Geoffrey was carried from the train on a hastily put together canvas stretcher, loaded into a horse-drawn ambulance barely large enough for Prudence to squeeze in next to him. The attendant sat across from her, one hand on his patient’s thready pulse, the other holding a compress against the chest wound that would have killed a weaker man outright.
As a young soldier, Robert Carmichael had been well taught in the terrible war that had trained him to sit beside the dying and ease their passage into the next world. Though he tried to keep the foreboding from his face, he wasn’t sure this newest victim of man’s brutality against his own kind would make it to the small country hospital where there was a doctor who had performed miracles in battlefield hospital tents. Older now, and committed to spending half his life in the oblivion of a prodigious whiskey thirst, Dr. McNulty was still steady of hand when he was sober. He was this casualty’s only hope. Carmichael prayed it was one of the doctor’s good days.
* * *
Halfway between midnight and sunrise, Everett pitched to the ground in exhaustion. The heavy bag in which lay his future had ground the flesh from the palm of his right hand. He would have given one of the precious stones within for the pair of workman’s leather gloves he’d left behind him on the train. And the heavy overcoat that might have protected him against the night’s biting cold. He was pouring sweat within his clothing and shaking with freezing chills at the same time. How was that possible?
He’d acted so quickly, not yet asleep when the brush of the porter’s sleeve against his compartment door alerted him to danger. Lying fully dressed on his berth, weapon in hand, Everett had prepared for trouble while not quite believing it would happen. He hadn’t seen Geoffrey Hunter and Prudence MacKenzie board the train; he’d thought his clever ruse of purchasing a ticket to Chicago would thwart anyone who might be following him. And then that dance on the quay as he stayed closer to the western-bound train than the northern-bound one. The burst of speed at the last moment that carried him across the platform and into the moving car where he’d gone to ground in a hastily purchased compartment. The train was no more than half full. Proof that destiny was on his side. Who wanted to travel to Canada in February?
He’d fired more as a reflex action than anything else, but once his trigger finger sent the first bullet on its way, he hadn’t been able to stop it from launching another. And a third. At least three, perhaps four. He couldn’t remember. But the smell of blood had stayed in his nostrils, that and the angry, frightened shriek that had burst from Prudence MacKenzie’s throat as she caught Hunter’s body in its backward fall. Her face had been illuminated just enough to make out the set of her features as he’d stood over the two of them in those brief moments when their lives were entirely at his mercy. A determination that knew no bounds. And a steely loathing that was both contempt and revulsion. He was less than nothing to her. And she would track him down. Make no mistake about it.
Too late now. He should have killed her while he had the chance.
* * *
Dr. McNulty’s hospital was four beds in what had once been the parlor of his family home on the outskirts of Waupaxit, New York. He had retreated there at the end of the war, battered, disillusioned, and more than ready to withdraw from most human contact. Into the depths of a whiskey bottle. But he remained a doctor. Over the ensuing years, as the desperately ill sought him out, he treated them as best he could, sometimes with such unexpected success that his reputation spread beyond the confines of the small village that lay five miles from the nearest railroad station.
The ex-Union medical officer had been passed out and dead asleep when Geoffrey Hunter was unloaded from the horse-drawn wagon that had jostled him over dirt roads little better than shallow wagon tracks. Alarmingly pale and unresponsive, the patient had already been pronounced a goner by the town doctor hastily summoned to the train station to evaluate him. Only the ambulance attendant’s insistence on the curative powers of the reclusive Dr. McNulty had persuaded Prudence to agree to transport him to where a miracle might be worked. The town physician who had declared him beyond treatment wished her luck, agreed to lend the war surplus ambulance that was the best this rural region could provide, and waved them into the darkness. He expected to see the body brought to his makeshift morgue by the end of the day.
“Bring him inside,” Dr. McNulty said gruffly, taking a pull from the whiskey bottle he then shoved back into the pocket of a dirty white coat that passed in this wilderness for proper medical attire. The veteran climbing down from the ambulance was a thorn in his side and a pain in his ass. Carmichael had been nearly as good a wound treater as any doctor during the war, but he’d refused to leave McNulty alone after they’d both made their way home again. It was the cases this ex-orderly brought to his front door that roused McNulty from his despair and vaulted him into periodic stabs at sobriety.
And now this ex-Pinkerton with bullet holes in him.
“I know he’s been shot before,” Prudence explained as she helped cut off Geoffrey’s clothing. “Not this badly, and it was a number of years ago. He was still working for the Pinkerton Agency at the time.” She was babbling, pulling out odd bits about Geoffrey’s past that probably had nothing to do with his present, but her hands were caked with his blood and she was terrified that when they got his shirt off she wouldn’t see the rise and fall of his chest that meant he was still alive.
“If you don’t have any medical experience, you’d better get out of the way, young lady,” Dr. McNulty said, motioning to Carmichael to join him at the kitchen table where he’d pushed aside the night’s dirty dishes to make room for surgery. “Boil these, if you want to make yourself useful.” He put a pan full of instruments into her outstretched hand and nodded toward the stove and the wood box standing next to it. “Build up the fire. The pump is outside. Right by the door. There’s a bucket hanging on the spigot.”
Geoffrey had insisted that Prudence, as part of her training to be a detective, familiarize herself with what could be done to keep an injured colleague or prisoner alive until he could be gotten to the nearest doctor or hospital. On her own she’d read articles claiming that the relatively new idea of boiling everything connected with a surgery achieved better results than Joseph Lister’s carbolic spray. She shoved pieces of wood into the stove, jabbing them into flame with a poker, ignoring splinters and skittering bugs. Then she grabbed a bar of laundry soap from the tin sink where more dirty dishes had been piled and sped outside to wash her hands and fetch water to boil on the now stoked up stove.
By the time s
he got back inside, Geoffrey lay naked on the table, his genitals modestly covered with a dish towel. A strong smell of carbolic permeated the air; the doctor hadn’t waited for his instruments to be boiled before beginning to probe for the bullets that were draining away his patient’s life.
“He’ll stay unconscious,” Dr. McNulty predicted. “No need to use ether or laudanum. I’m not sure he’d survive either of them.” His fingers and a long, curved instrument disappeared into the hole he’d just cut in Geoffrey’s chest. “If we’re lucky, the bullet will have missed the breastbone.”
“And the lung,” commented his former orderly, wiping at the pooling blood with what appeared to be his own handkerchief.
“Too late for that. Be ready to pound on him if he stops breathing.”
Prudence placed the shallow pan of instruments on the hot stove, adding just enough water to cover them. She didn’t know how many minutes it took for water to come to a boil.
“How long?” she asked. “How long should I cook them?”
“It’s called sterilizing, and it usually takes thirty minutes, but this young man doesn’t have that kind of time. Five minutes from when you see the water simmering will have to be enough. Start another pot and throw some cloths into it. Whatever looks clean.”
Nothing in the doctor’s kitchen appeared to be anything but used up or dirty. Lifting her skirt, Prudence began to rip at the linen underskirt she was wearing, tearing off long strips that looked enough like bandages to pass muster.
“I’ve got it,” Doctor McNulty said.
Nobody moved or breathed as his forceps pulled out a slightly flattened piece of rounded metal. “This is what’s been causing most of the damage.” He dropped it onto the uneven tabletop, where it rolled unnoticed to the floor beneath.
“Did it go through the lung?” the attendant asked.
Death, Diamonds, and Deception Page 29