CHAPTER 32

Dr. David Kevington, tired, dirty, sunburned, and angry, swore loudly and sat down on a boulder beside the trail. Or was it a trail or just a path made by the passing of wild game? He and his companions had crossed the mountain in the darkness and lost the road in the process, and now they’d wandered so far and lost themselves so thoroughly in the wilderness that it was easy to imagine that there never had been a human presence in this region at all.

“We’re going to have to go back to Culvertown,” Evaline said. “This ain’t working. We’re not going to find that ghost town … if there is any such damn place. I think we’ve been lied to.”

“I’m hungrier than a redskin in winter,” Brown said. “We’ve ate up every bit of food we brought, and the last stream I drank out of tasted like a buffalo had pissed in it. I say we go back. If there really is such a town as Caylee, we can find out how to get there and not just wander through all the backside of Pharaoh’s Egypt to find it … or not find it.”

Kevington looked at him bitterly. “I’ll not turn back without finding Kenton.”

“Begging your almighty pardon, sir, and with all due respect to you for the good wages you’re paying us, it seems to me you’ll be a damn sight more likely to find Kenton by going back than by going forward.”

“And do you know the way back, Mr. Evaline?”

“I know where the mountaintop is. I know how to look for smoke plumes to tell me where the town is. The trouble with Caylee is that it’s a ghost town, and you don’t see smoke plumes from ghost towns.”

“He’s right, Dr. Kevington,” Brown said. “If there’s an abandoned town hereabouts, you’d think we’d find more trails. And if Kenton was holed up there, you’d think he’d build a fire every now and then. There’d be smoke. But there’s been no smoke on this side of the mountain.”

“We need to go back, sir,” Evaline said. “We’ll find Kenton a lot faster going back than going forward. If he’s here to be found at all. He’s had enough time he could have taken her a long distance. We’ve been looking out here for two days, sir.”

“We’ve got to go back,” Brown affirmed again.

“Go back?” Kevington said, chuckling. “So you think we would go back? Might I remind you what we left lying on the floor of that mansion? A dead body. Two days ago. That body surely has been found by now. And keep in mind that the boy got away. He fled, stabbed but alive, and fully able to talk. If we go back to Culvertown, we go back to face arrest.”

Brown and Evaline stared at him, frowning, apparently having not thought of this before.

Kevington looked back at them with contempt. “You were supposed to be the best, the most clever, the most persistent, the most heartless when the situation called for it. But now I must wonder. If you are representative of the best that this nation offers, then I stand astounded that the colonies managed to ever win the war.” He laughed coldly. “What do you think, Graham?”

“Actually, sir, I’m not thinking of much at all,” Graham replied. He’d been sitting in silence on a log nearby, smoking his pipe. “I’ve been too busy watching that smoke rise yonder.”

It took a moment for the significance to sink in. “Smoke?” Kevington stood and turned.

Miles away, a thin line of smoke rose toward the sky where none had been before.

Kevington smiled. “Gentlemen, I believe we just found the town of Caylee.”

*   *   *

Kenton knelt by the fireplace, slowly turning the spit upon which he had speared three rabbits. The scent was mouthwateringly good. He’d snared the rabbits during the afternoon, desperate to provide himself and Victoria with meat.

The little bit of food they had brought with them out of Livingston’s mansion was almost gone.

Kenton worried about the fire, though. He’d deliberately avoided building one as long as he and Victoria had been here … until now, when the necessities of cooking forced it. With any luck he would get the cooking quickly done and the fire out and no one would notice the plume.

In the absence of such evidence as smoke plumes, Kenton actually felt relatively safe here. With much searching and great exertion, he had finally managed to find the house that Jack had used for his illicit romantic dalliances. It was quite a feat of engineering, in its way: a house that looked run-down and barren from the outside but which was actually quite livable inside. It was funny, in its way, Jack having gone to this trouble just to keep his love affair secret. It reflected his eccentricity.

Now the place was protection for Kenton and Victoria. Kenton could only hope it was protection enough.

He was eager to leave here, but Victoria was tired, weak, not ready for travel. And where would they go? Anywhere they went, Kevington would follow.

For now Kenton refused to think further than the next hour or so. At the moment all that mattered was roasting these rabbits and feeding himself and his wife, who slept now on a bed in the other room of this two-room house. Then he would put out the fire and worry about the next hour when it came.

But at some point, this had to end. He would have to deal with Kevington in a final way. There would have to be a showdown.

But how, with Victoria to be protected? She was a woman strong of heart but not of body.

Kenton stared into the flames, watching the rabbits roast, and prayed for guidance, for help, and for rescue.

And he prayed that if Kevington was out there somewhere, still looking, he would not find this house.