Fair Is the Rose (54 page)

She spun around, sure that Rollins or another marshal had seen her leave, but the face that met her was unfamiliar.
Yet familiar.
She thought for a moment the man was Mr. Glassie come to join her for some air. It was not. She looked at the man's eyes.

She knew.

"Oh, Christabel, at long last, our time has come."

The door closed behind him. She stepped back and briefly lost her balance on the precarious edge of the platform. He caught her arm and shoved her into the baggage car.

"Where is Henry Glassie?" she choked, suddenly realizing how they'd been duped. She stared at Didier. She hardly knew him without his trademark Vandyke.

"Our friend is napping among the mail. Shall I wake him and do away with you both?" He smiled.

Before she could answer, a commotion ensued outside on the platform. A woman was arguing with her husband.

"But I did bring it! We gave it to the conductor and he put it inside this car, right here."

"You didn't bring it, Martha, I would have remembered," he husband explained, exasperated.

"Conductor!
Open this car! We have baggage inside!"

Didier clamped his hand over Christal's mouth and drew her into the shadows behind the Chinese crates. The car door slid open.

"There it is!" the woman exclaimed, her arm extending into the car, pointing to an orange carpetbag. "I told you I brought it, Howard, you old fool."

"Yes, dear."
They heard the sounds of Howard as he climbed into the car and dumped the bag onto Abbeville's crude wooden platform.

"Anybody else
want
their bag?" the conductor cried out, looking for other passengers.

Christal struggled against Didier to call out, but he held her firm, crushed against his chest, his hand silencing her. In despair, she smelled the English lime water he bought from Lord and Taylor.
Only the best for Baldwin Didier.
She and Alana had bought a bottle for Didier as a wedding present when he was to marry their spinster aunt. She could still remember their aunt's face, so beautiful and serene, her dream of marriage come true at last. She wondered if her aunt ever knew she had married a monster.

The conductor slammed the door shut. They were in darkness except for the light shining through the roof where it leaked melting snow.

"You thought you had eluded me, didn't you, my darling niece?" Didier let her go. She fell against the side of the car when the train lurched to a start.

"My sister knows the story," she panted, trying to keep her balance in the moving train. Her mouth was dry from fear. "Before I ran from New York I wrote her a letter telling her everything about the night you killed our parents. If you kill me, it doesn't matter. The end will be the same. She'll see you hanged for your crimes even without me."

"If your sister had anything but your word against mine, her rich and powerful mick of a husband would have seen to that long ago."

"No doubt they couldn't find you to hang you with the evidence. I heard you disappeared shortly after Alana's wedding." It took all her courage to answer him. Trapped in a boxcar with her uncle was like being in the belly of the beast.

"I went looking for you, my girl. I went all over the damned world . . . looking for you. I spent all the money I had left to bring me here. Oh, well, there are other lonely, wealthy women like your aunt. I have a prospect in Paris, and there was a widow in Spain, a Basque with quite a gourmet appetite for the bedroom. I shall enjoy them all, as soon as I have rid myself of you."

"How do you think you mean to get away with this?" she asked, terror streaming through her blood like a narcotic. "There are five U.S. Marshals in the next car and one in particular—"

"Ah, yes,
him.
I've heard a lot about your paramour. He's almost legend out here, isn't he? Yet imagine his surprise when he jumps the train and enters Abbeville only to find you not there—yes, I did hear your plans as I took my little 'nap.'
" He
chuckled.

"Macaulay will know you got to me. He knows I would meet him unless I was unable to." She was glad it was dark and he couldn't see the doubt and fear in her eyes.

"On the contrary, my dear.
He will think he gave you a chance to flee, one which you embraced wholeheartedly. There will be quite a bad taste in his mouth, I imagine, when you don't meet him in Abbeville. Surely then he will know the heinous crimes they convicted you of in

New York
were
true. He will go mad thinking how you duped him."

"No . . ." she whispered, her terror springing to life anew. She shook her head, as if denying his words might make them untrue, but there was no fault to his logic. She was going to die by Didier's hand and the worst was that, in the end, Macaulay, her love, would believe she was a murderess.

"Don't think about it, lovely girl. You and your sister were always such lovely girls. I really didn't want it to end this way. I thought you would all die quietly in the fire. It's distasteful to me to have to take such an active role in your death. I hope you can forgive me." He touched her cheek, leaving the scent of limes, the same smell he left in the wake of a visit to Washington Square. It lingered in the parlor and trailed into the foyer, a presence unto itself.
The fresh, tropical scent of death.

"My aunt was in love with you. You fulfilled her every dream when you asked her to marry you. Did you ever make her happy? Did you ever like my parents? Have you no remorse at all for what you've done?" Her words were accusing, yet little girl-like. In her naiveté, she wanted answers. She wanted to take solace in the knowledge that all the pain in her life had been governed by more than one man's whim. If she were to die without even that, it would be a cruel death indeed.

"On the night your aunt died, Christal, she forgave me. If I never loved her, she at least loved me. And isn't that what brings us true happiness? To have what we love?"

"Did you kill her? Did you kill my aunt too?" The question had burned through her mind all the years since her memory returned.

"No," he whispered gravely. "In some ways, our marriage provided my happiness too. Your aunt was not an impoverished woman, you know, Christal. Her fortune gave me moments of pleasure—on Wall Street—and at the hotel where I kept my mistress."

He stepped toward her, his heavy build swaying with the motion of the speeding train. "But upon your aunt's death, I discovered my terrible appetite. I was a creature who fed on money. Your aunt's fortune was spent and there was no more to come. I was in dire straits. Unless" —he cocked one gray eyebrow, his words ending in a hiss—"unless I found a way to get the entire Van Alen fortune. With you and your family dead, I would be the one to inherit. Ah, what choice did I have but to kill your parents and torch their bedroom?"

"You're a monster," she said, her hatred finally overcoming her fear.

He smiled bitterly, still quite handsome for his age. "Yes, a monster. You've pegged me well, Christal. You're an intelligent girl, I've always known it. I want you to know I did not enjoy putting you in Park View. I did not enjoy breaking your spirit. It was a messy, unplanned end, even for a man such as me—a monster. You see, I wanted you and your sister dead. I wanted the Van Alen money without the Van Alens, but after the fire when I discovered both you and Alana had lived, I became too cowardly. Then, when you were convicted of the murders I, myself, had committed, I feared my fortune was too good to test by trying to murder the survivors. I left you and your sister alone, and now I pay the price for that, because look what it's brought me."

He stared at her. She found a strange intimacy for her in his eyes, like the intimacy of lovers. But this intimacy was tinged with blood. It was a killer's intimacy with his victim.

"It is not easy being a monster, Christal," he whispered.

She said nothing. She simply stared at him with grave blue eyes and searched futilely for compassion.

"I'm a monster cursed with intelligence. I understand all too well what I do and why I do it. And lo, it gives me night terrors I would not wish on any of my victims." He met her gaze. "I killed your father first. He was asleep. I hit him on the head with that heavy brass candlestick and he never opened his eyes. It's your mother who haunts me. She was so beautiful.
So land and gracious.
When I killed her I knew I was a monster. She awakened and we struggled. She begged me not to—"

"Don't—oh, God, don't—" she uttered, unable to hear it. Hurt and anger swelled in her throat like bile.

"Don't be like her, Christal," he whispered, drawing her against him. The scent of limes was overpowering. "Don't beg me for mercy. Let this be quick. I want you brave and pure and defiant, as you are now—"

She broke loose and ran for the door. She threw it open and screamed, but he yanked her back. He slammed the door behind them and silence reigned once more on the prairie, the only unnatural noise the
chug chug chug
of the train rolling over steel-girded tracks.

"What was that noise?" Cain looked up from his hand of cards and stared sharply at the back of the car.

"Nothing—just the squeak of wheels," Rollins answered hastily. "Go ahead and bid, Cain, you're winning. I can't afford to lose this hand."

"Look—she's gone." The three words hung in the air spoken with all the drama of a Shakespearean actor, not a U.S. Marshal forced to state the obvious.

Reluctantly, all five men raised their heads and stared at the back of the car, now devoid of their prisoner.

"Well, I'll be. She
is
gone." Rollins looked at his men.

"She just up and left the minute our backs were turned. How about that?" another marshal piped up.

Cain stood and ran his hand through his hair as if exasperated by their bad acting skills. "I'm going to check that noise."

"Ah . . . wait, Cain." Rollins scuttled up to him and whispered, "Let my men go back there. Then nobody can say you had anything to do with her disappearance."

Cain stared at the door that led out to the baggage car. "Where's Glassie? Did he get off at Abbeville? He told me he was headed for New Jersey."

"Maybe he went back to his own car—"