By Any Means

Chapter 1

LAURIE

On paper, Lawrence Tulley was notorious.

Laurie’s face, thankfully, was not.

He could go where he pleased—or where his editor was pleased he go. And where Sam Sullivan “Steamship” Warren apparently wanted him was rural, cold-as-balls Downeast Maine.

Laurie pulled his cap farther over his brow—no use making an impression, anyway—and swung down from third class, putting heavy boots onto the platform that was all this rural freight station boasted.

No. He was mistaken. There was a bench, too. But nobody around, not even a ticket office.

As the whistle blew, he turned and raised a hand to the train constable. The man ignored him and even gave a snooty little shake of his head. Nothing the pointy-hat bastard could do about Laurie, though. He had an annual pass for just about every line east of the Mississippi.

Meeting the station platform was a path made from wagon-wheel ruts frozen in mud. One way trailed off northeast, over rolling winter fields, into stacked hills of evergreens. The other way went south, parallel to the tracks, toward whichever tiny one-road town was closest to the station.

Feeling contrary, Laurie went north.

A little while later and past two more wyes, he stood freezing in company of a herd of speckled granite boulders, surrounded by a crimson-thatch field. Snow streaked the thatch like a watercolor glaze.

He blew out a breath. Blueberry fields. Barrens, they were called. He hadn’t known they would be quite so red.

He hitched up his blue jeans and bent to sit on a boulder, waggling his feet in their boots so that blood trickled back into his toes.

Damp, early-spring chill seeped into his ass through denim and cotton long johns.

Cotton was miserable to pick and miserable to wear, but a laborer wouldn’t have had the means for fine wool underwear.

He crossed one leg over the other and pulled out his paper-wrapped bacon sandwich: courtesy of the chef on the last leg of the Boston Sam had looked mad enough to pull his mustache clean off.

So, why did he want Laurie poking around Maine, of all places?

Sam wasn’t always forthcoming with the whole intent of his investigative assignments, especially these more far-flung ones.

Said he preferred Laurie take a reading of his own before he steered the course.

He had his sources to protect, more likely.

After five years of writing for his front page, salaried and practically beholden, Laurie nevertheless knew there wouldn’t be much direction. He’d figure it out.

He crumpled the wax paper and chucked it like a baseball. The wind caught it, veered it right, and off it went, end over end across the crimson thatch. He wondered if it even mattered what he wrote. As long as it had his name upon it, it’d sell. Sam knew that, too.

He reached down and plucked a frozen, withered blueberry from its bush, one that even the birds had left behind, and pushed it between his fingers and then his teeth.

Sour. Leathery. Totally unripe. Crunchy with seed, and not the kind he preferred.

When he spat, it was alarmingly red. He felt a new appreciation for the wisdom of whatever bird it was that ate blueberries.

The whicker of a cold horse sent him to his feet, had him dragging a hand over his mouth. He turned to see hooves and fogged breath come down the south road over the barren’s edge.

No time to run. Two mares moved swiftly before a buckboard wagon occupied by one. The driver—a man in a top hat—spotted him and waved.

Hell. Laurie should’ve gone farther out from the road, headed into the pines, but he hadn’t expected to run into a single soul until he’d gone the opposite way again. Any farm’s surrounding population shrank to almost nil in the off-season.

So, who was this? Someone local? Someone important?

More importantly: who could Laurie be to him?

He waved and walked to the road’s edge. The man reined in his matched mares and tipped his hat.

Laurie’s first impression was of tall, modish slimness and fair, plain looks.

The second: wealth, and an excess of it.

Besides the horseflesh, the man’s fashionable black overcoat had a velvet collar and a cape, and he wore a puff tie with a jeweled pin stuck through.

No fur, thank god. Laurie had seen enough fur for the foreseeable future.

The man stretched out a hand gloved in tan calfskin. “Hello, and good morning. Charles Edward Wright.”

Laurie nearly startled. Ah, damn, he thought as he shook the hand. His target. Really?

At least the man was rich. He didn’t even pronounce half his r’s—and there were a lot of them in that ten-dollar name.

Sam hadn’t completely lost it, maybe.

“Laurie Moore.”

“What luck to have run across you, Mr. Moore. You must be rather uncomfortable?”

“Nah. I like a brisk walk.”

“Brisk,” Mr. Wright said, soft and precise; his breath frosted out in tiny puffs. “It’s the coldest day of March?”

“Is it?”

“It certainly seems so to me. But then, I’m not yet accustomed to a Maine winter.”

Laurie nodded. “New here?” Belatedly he realized he had no idea what would pass for regional vernacular—he hadn’t had time to immerse himself, of course, practically ambushed by his target—but it didn’t matter.

The man wouldn’t remember him beyond the day.

His type never did, even if Laurie were a memorable sort of man, which he wasn’t.

“I’m from New York. New York City. I’ve only just inherited the farm.” Mr. Wright nodded beyond the evergreen edge.

Of course Gotham. Nowhere else, with that Millionaire’s Row accent. Strange inheritance for a Fifth Avenue type, though. Dead brother. Seriously, Sam?

“What’s in the wagon?” Laurie asked.

“Oh!” Mr. Wright turned halfway around. “Glass.”

“Glass?” Laurie laughed unexpectedly.

Mr. Wright smiled. “Well, it shall be. Right now, it is silica and feldspar.”

“Huh.”

Laurie had… no idea what to do with that.

But that smile, tremulous as it was, had made Mr. Wright better looking than Laurie had first allotted him.

Strong cheekbones. He was sharp around those, almost malnourished—strange, in the well-to-do.

Light-brown eyes shone with fatigue. Life had weighed on the man in such a concave way that Laurie imagined he would age well, tautly; though clearly young, he seemed to have done a lot of it already.

Dead brother, he thought again.

“It is aeolian sand,” Mr. Wright said, gaining enthusiasm.

“Wind-deposited and sorted. Hardly any clay at all. Of course, the feldspar is quarried. This is merely a small sample; I wanted to see for myself how it melts—” He stopped.

His tentative cheer faded. A different kind of flush came over his cheeks, cherry-bright.

He looked away. “Don’t mind my going on. ”

Laurie needed the going on from this man. At least enough information to be able to tell Sam he’d gone completely off the track, here. “Not at all. You’re a glassworks man?”

“Third generation, yes,” Mr. Wright said. “Wright Glass Manufacturing. East 9th and Avenue D.”

Laurie snapped his fingers, which startled the man. He was jumpy. “Yeah. Wright’s Improved Jam Jars. Heard of ’em. Weren’t very improved. Youse almost went under last year.” And good riddance, probably. What in hell did Sam think he could do with a near-failure of a glassworks baron? In Maine?

Mr. Wright wilted further. “Er. Yes.”

Damn it all. Laurie had even less business feeling remorseful for hurting a rich man’s feelings than he did finding one vaguely screwable, but he felt so anyway. Not that it mattered—he was sure this wasn’t a viable job—but sympathy made his job that much harder.

He was a nonfiction columnist. He sold serials, a little sensationalized.

He didn’t write character pieces and he didn’t write bias.

Only the truth. But he knew how it went, time and again.

Given an inch of leeway, an audience could—and would—read a new business owner, a capitalist, to be incompetent over malicious.

Eccentric. Mad. Two cubic yards of silica-feldspar mad. Harmless, even if he wasn’t.

But if the man were harmless, Sam wouldn’t have sent him there. Surely?

Laurie nodded to the sand. “Long wagon ride, though, for a small sample.”

Mr. Wright laughed a little, then cleared his throat.

“Oh, no. It’s my own hobbying, on my own time.

Say. Are you going into town? Berryfield?

” He scooched to one side on the bench, with an awkward, boyish wriggle more suited to a schoolroom than a buckboard wagon.

“There’s a hot brick; we might share it. ”

“Oh, no, sir.” Men liked being echoed. “You were goin’ the other way.”

Mr. Wright raised eyebrows, strangely pleading. “It’s no problem. Only another mile or so down the wye. You must be heading back soon?” Lines appeared at all angles across his face; in the gray March light, Laurie still couldn’t quite place his age.

“Alright.” Having done the requisite polite protests, Laurie hauled himself up. “I’ll do to the Berryfield station, as you said.” The passenger one this time. “Thanks.”

He sat. Mr. Wright pushed the lap blanket his way, then spread it across Laurie, tucking the edge under the meat of his left thigh. Laurie bit down on a startled inhale.

“Thanks,” he said again, stiffly.

Mr. Wright nodded and gathered the reins, then stared straight ahead, as though realizing his breach of familiarity.

His mouth opened—a finely cut, too-wide mouth, the smooth, flat lips were sloped, almost pretty in profile—but hesitated.

When Laurie said nothing, did nothing, only watched to see what he would do, his flush bloomed red again.

As the man’s mouth shut and his jaw tensed, the line in his left cheek deepened.

Not just smile lines, then. And maybe there was a different reason for that flush.

Laurie watched silky, matched horsetails swing over glossy rumps. Expensive horses for hauling sand.

Dead brother, he reminded himself, one last time. Target.

Mr. Wright snapped the reins, clicked his tongue softly, and on they went.