CHAPTER 34

By the time Gunnison returned to the hotel almost three hours after he had left, his wife was overwhelmed with worry.

“Thank God!” she said as she embraced him. “I was afraid that Kevington had gotten you. He was here … right in this hotel, in the very room we’ve rented. At least, Rachel is sure he was. We found a handkerchief with his monogram that had been left on the dresser.”

Gunnison, so laden with news of his own, could hardly find room in his mental basket to accommodate yet another item. But he knew there was not an immediate need to worry about Kevington, because he knew where Kevington almost certainly was.

“Where’s the doctor?” Roxanne asked, only just then noticing that Gunnison had returned alone.

“The doctor is very occupied with two patients he has bedded down in his clinic across town. How is Rachel?”

“Doing better on her own, I’m glad to say. She’s sleeping now, and her fever is down. But tell me why these two patients are so important that the doctor refused to come see a sick woman?”

“Don’t judge him harshly. From a medical standpoint he made the right decision, I have no doubt, because these patients are quite injured. One of them is a little street boy named Stockton Shelley, who has—listen to this!—been in contact with Kevington himself. And he is reasonably sure he knows where Kevington has gone … and where Kenton is. The other patient is Billy Connery.”

“Billy! Why is he being treated?”

“Because somebody—one of Kevington’s hired agents—cut his throat. He was left for dead in an alley, but survived, thank God.”

“Oh, mercy! He’ll live?”

“Amazingly, yes. The doctor said he was fortunate to fall in the way he did. The cut in his throat, maybe not as deep as his attacker thought, was held closed by the angle of his head when he passed out in the alley. Someone found him and got him to the doctor, and he’s slowly getting better.”

“How did he manage to get into a row with one of Kevington’s agents?”

“It’s a long story, one built of this piece and that, most of which I’ve only just learned. Billy has provided me what he knows and experienced, and the little Shelley boy has contributed what he knows—including his witnessing of the murder of his own father by an agent of Kevington.”

“Murder! Oh, Alex! This grows worse by the moment.”

“Yes. And it may grow worse yet. Kevington may have already found Kenton and Victoria. And he has three hired guns with him.… They wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“I think I need to sit down.”

“Do. Let’s both sit down, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. This is cobbled together from assorted pieces of information, like I said, and I’ll try to order it for you as, I go. Forgive me if I backtrack some; it makes it easier to give you the context of what has happened.

“We already know from Rachel how the English side of this affair fell out: Kenton enters the house, finds Victoria but is caught by Kevington and made a prisoner, but still he manages to sneak word out to Rachel that she should flee back to the United States. She does, but her ship goes down off the coast. She is injured and goes into an extended, anonymous hospitalization in New York, unconscious much of that time, and of course is unable for a long time to contact us. When at last she does, you have also returned from your trip to Colorado, and have stumbled across that sketch that makes us realize Kenton is hiding here in Culvertown.

“All right. So I send Billy Connery to Culvertown, and he manages to learn very quickly, mostly from this little Stockton Shelley character, that Kenton really is in Culvertown and hiding out in the mansion of Jack Livingston, who, if I recall, has family ties to Victoria. Kenton never talked much about that, but I’m sure I’m right. Anyway, Billy doesn’t realize that an agent of Kevington’s had already been sent to look for clues in St. Louis among Kenton’s professional and personal circles, and this agent, named McCurtin or McCurden or something such as that, learns that Billy has run off to Culvertown and figures out that he might be coming because of Kenton. So McCurden follows right on Billy’s heels, apparently follows Billy around town in secret, and learns along with Billy that Kenton really is holed up in the Livingston house.

“McCurden intercepts Billy before he can get up to the mansion and leaves him for dead with his throat cut in an alley. My guess is McCurden had come up with the idea of capturing Victoria for himself and holding her hostage, making Kevington pay him high dollar to get her back. But something goes wrong, and McCurden gets himself killed up in the mansion, along with Jack Livingston. My guess is the pair killed each other. Kenton and Victoria disappear, knowing now that Kevington is very seriously pursuing them. They head across the mountain for an abandoned mining town called Caylee. We guess this, anyway, because they happened to be spotted by young Shelley, heading in that direction, and apparently Jack Livingston had a sort of secret second dwelling there, a place they might logically go to hide in.

“Apparently McCurden must have telegraphed Kevington that he’d found Kenton, because Kevington and a couple of agents show up in town and begin going around looking for McCurden and bringing up the name of Brady Kenton, too. Stockton Shelley learns about this and decides he’ll go tell Kevington—for a price—where he can find Brady Kenton. Kevington agrees to hire the boy for a guide to get them to Caylee, which apparently is a hard place to find, and the whole gaggle of them sneak up and hide out in the Livingston house, which of course is empty at that point. Stockton told me that one of Kevington’s men was sent to find out whether one of the two men killed in the mansion earlier was McCurden. The fellow comes back and says that it was.

“Later on, Stockton’s father goes hunting for him, and one of the places he looks is the mansion, because he knows Stockton has hid there in the past. One of Kevington’s agents kills the man, before Stockton’s eyes. Stockton attacks him, gets knifed up himself, but manages to get away. He’s hurt, weak, sick with grief over his father’s murder, and he goes to hide in a church, where the preacher found him earlier today. The preacher hauled him to the doctor at the same time I was there, looking for help for Rachel. And of course I’d stumbled across Billy Connery there as well and was getting a lot of this information from him even as they were coming in. After the doctor finished patching up Stockton, I interviewed the boy … and that’s how all the pieces came together.”

“It’s astonishing … but where is Kevington?”

“Gone. I suspect he and his agents decided to go find Caylee on their own, since they lost Stockton. And they’ve had about two days to find the place … and Kenton.”

She thought about that somberly. “Maybe Kenton and Victoria didn’t go there after all. Maybe they just kept moving.”

“We can only hope. But I’m going to Caylee to see, Roxanne. I have to know if Kenton and Victoria are there.”

“But Kevington is out there.… You could be in danger! You mustn’t go alone.… You have to take an officer of the law with you.”

“That option has been explored. All this news was borne to the town marshal before I came here, and he was uninterested in anything except that there is another corpse up in the mansion. As for Kenton, the marshal believes what the rest of the world does: that he’s dead. Besides, he said, Caylee isn’t in his jurisdiction.”

“But you can’t go alone!”

“I won’t. I’m taking a man with me. He knows where Caylee is, and he’s a good man in a fight. Says that when he fights, God fights with him.”

“Who is this man?”

“His name is Sammons. He’s the preacher who found the boy hiding in his church. And he tells me that when he has to be, he can be mean as the devil for the sake of righteousness.”

“Can you trust him? And can a preacher really be a fighter?”

“This one can, I believe. You’ll know what I mean when you see him.”

“Will he come here?”

“Yes. Before dawn tomorrow. He’s bringing me a horse and saddle and rifle. At first light, he and I will ride out for Caylee.”

*   *   *

Kenton opened his eyes and sat up in the bed, drawing in a gasp of air. He stared into the darkness, unsure what had awakened him.

Beside him, Victoria stirred a little but did not wake up. He looked at her, barely able to see her outline in the dark room, and said a quiet prayer of thanks that, since they had come to Caylee, she had allowed him to sleep in her bed.

Kenton remained quiet, unmoving, trying to figure out what had made him wake up. And he wondered, too, why he felt so afraid right now.

He’d spent a lifetime trusting his instincts, so he didn’t dismiss the alarm sounding in his mind. He quietly slipped out of bed and crept to the door. He opened it and passed through.

He was not outside. Jack Livingston’s clever interior construction involved what was essentially a house within a house, walls erected a few feet back from the actual exterior walls, creating a box that hid everything inside, including most light.

Kenton was outside that box now and moved carefully. He slipped toward the nearest window and looked out into the night. He saw nothing. He went to the other side of the house and looked out a window there.

Quickly he ducked again, his heart rising in his chest.

He crept back to the door to the inner part of the dwelling and reentered. He went to Victoria’s side.

“Victoria, dear, wake up … quietly. They’ve come. They’re here … and we must do nothing to alert them as to where we are.”

It took a couple of moments for her to comprehend.

“David is here?”

“Yes. With others. And they’re looking for us right now.”