Chapter Seven The Longest Night
In which a hunter closes in, and a stranger keeps a watch he never asked for
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On the rear platform of the Chicago Limited, the thick-set man was already having second thoughts about the impulse that had put him there.
He had acted on instinct alone, watching that heavyset, chalk-smeared stranger sprawl flat on the platform while his own quarry pulled away into the dark — and now, with the cars gathering speed beneath him and a tangle of switching yards flashing past on every side, instinct seemed a good deal less reliable than it had a minute ago.
If he'd guessed wrong, he stood to lose not only his employer's reward but a great deal of his own professional pride besides.
He glanced down at the racing gravel bed, judging his chances of a safe jump, and drew back sharply as a freight engine tore past on the adjacent track close enough to fan hot air across his face.
That settled it. Too late to jump now, whatever he decided.
He would have to see this through, one way or another.
He sat himself down on the upper step to think it over properly, which was, for a man of his particular trade, an unfamiliar exercise in patience.
Had he truly followed the right man, or only a very convincing double?
He turned the evidence over in his mind, methodical as a man counting coins.
He had been first to the door the instant Halifax turned that paper over and the whole table saw the telltale red mark was missing.
He had seen the stranger climb into the waiting car outside — the only one of its kind on that stretch of street, surely the right one — and followed close behind on his motorcycle escort's tail the whole way to the church.
And yet the man who'd stepped out at the church door had looked, for one unsettling moment, like an entirely different person, so much so that he'd actually glanced back into the empty car to check whether his real quarry might still be hiding inside it.
He had watched the man married — married!
— in front of a church full of strangers, watched him hand his new bride into a car, followed that car to the reception, mingled unnoticed among the guests, and tracked the pair all the way to the station by way of a service alley only he, among all the wedding guests, had thought to watch.
Close up, on the platform, he'd been nearly certain the mustache and heavy eyebrows were false.
And yet — what manner of man, on his way to be married before half of fashionable New York, would gamble everything by accepting a stranger's dinner invitation first, with no guarantee at all of getting free in time?
It seemed a wild, reckless thing for any bridegroom to risk.
And yet the resemblance, and his own dogged pursuit of it all evening, argued the other way entirely.
He had learned, over a long and disreputable career, to trust his instincts absolutely, and his instincts told him now that this peculiar bridegroom deserved a closer look before he let the man vanish for good.
He had already come too far, and risked too much swinging aboard a moving train, to abandon the chase now on a moment's doubt.
He would ride a while longer and watch. An hour, perhaps, would tell him for certain.
If he was wrong, he could always claim a simple mistake of trains and get himself put off somewhere convenient.
He had money enough for whatever detour that might require, and he knew exactly where to wire for reinforcements if the need arose — as, indeed, he already had, the moment his motorcycle escort had watched him swing aboard.
With that settled, he cast one last glance back at the shrinking lights of the city and made his way into the sleeper car, keeping a careful eye out for the conductor. There was no sense burning bridges before he was sure of his ground.
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Graham had never in his life held anything so fragile, or felt so entirely unequal to the holding of it.
She lay slack and white in his arms as he carried her into the darkened drawing-room, and some instinct he didn't fully understand made him want, all at once, both to lay her gently down and never to let her go at all.
She is not mine to hold, he reminded himself, laying her carefully on the small couch.
She is a trust — no different, in her own way, from the paper against my chest — and I am answerable for both until I can safely set them each back into the hands that ought to have them.
What all of this might eventually cost him — what it might cost her, or the man she was meant to have married — he had not yet had one clear moment to consider.
The whole evening felt like a newsreel run backward and forward too fast to follow, one calamity tumbling directly into the next until he could no longer say which part of the wreckage was truly his doing and which had simply happened to him.
He went for water, and caught his own reflection in the little dressing-room mirror on the way — and started, badly.
One false eyebrow hung crooked and half-loose over his eye; the goatee sat askew.
Had it looked like this the entire evening?
He tore both eyebrows free without ceremony, then wrestled the mustache and goatee loose as well, wincing at the sting of adhesive against his skin, and stuffed the whole ridiculous costume into his coat pocket.
He glanced back at Calie's still, white face on the couch and forgot the sting entirely.
He held the glass to her lips. Nothing. He wet his handkerchief and bathed her forehead, and a cascade of loosened hairpins let her hair spill, gold-brown and heavy, across his knee as he knelt beside her.
One small hand slipped from the edge of the couch and brushed his — cold, and utterly without response.
Panic seized him all at once, complete and unreasoning.
Suppose she is dying. He had no restoratives in his bag, no earthly notion what a man was meant to do in such a moment — only the sudden, overwhelming understanding of how much responsibility her family had unknowingly handed him, and how little he deserved their trust.
He laid her back gently and bolted from the stateroom into the aisle, nearly running down the conductor on his rounds.
"Is there a doctor aboard — anything for a fainting spell? There's a lady—" He stumbled, color flooding his face. "My wife. She's unconscious."
The word came out reluctantly, and struck him strangely even as he said it — not quite a lie, and yet not quite honest either, though for her sake, he told himself, it was the only word that would serve to protect her good name tonight.
The conductor's eyes narrowed, taking in the young man's flush, the disheveled evening clothes, the raw pink marks still visible around his mouth where the disguise had been torn free.
He had marked them for a wedding party coming down the platform earlier that evening, and needed no further convincing now. "I'll find someone. Go back to her."
It was in turning back that Graham passed, without quite registering it in his distraction, the thick-set man entering from the far end of the car — and it was the thick-set man, watching that pale, anxious, unmistakably marked face go by, who registered everything at once, with the quiet satisfaction of an instinct finally, completely confirmed.
He reached out to seize Graham's arm, but a lurch of the train and Graham's own hurried stride carried him out of reach before the grip could close, and by the time the little man had steadied himself, his quarry had vanished into the stateroom with the conductor and a doctor close behind.
He fell back to watch the door instead, cursing his own clumsiness.
A public scene on a crowded sleeper was no part of his plan — his employers valued discretion above almost everything else — and he settled instead into patient surveillance, already composing in his mind the telegram he'd send at the next stop.
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The doctor knelt beside the couch, touched two fingers lightly to the girl's wrist, and, satisfied, drew a small bottle from his bag.
A few careful drops between her lips, one long shuddering breath, and her eyes fluttered open at last, pale blue and bewildered, resting longest — Graham noticed, with an ache he had no right to feel — on his own face, before drifting closed again in evident weariness.
Graham stood back, hands useless at his sides, and let the strange thought settle fully into him for the first time: whatever claim tonight's ceremony had given him on paper, he had no earthly right to a single glance of real recognition from those eyes.
He thought, with something close to wonder, of Judy Bristol — of a whole imagined lifetime he had once, however halfheartedly, considered building with her — and found he could not now summon even the faintest echo of that old, comfortable inevitability.
It seemed, from here, to belong to some other man's life entirely.
I have no right to feel what I am feeling, he thought, watching the doctor work, and yet I cannot seem to stop myself from feeling it all the same.
The doctor administered a second, gentler draught and had the porter make up the berth at once, settling the girl among the pillows with the brisk, practiced competence of a man who had done this a thousand times.
Graham hovered uselessly nearby, wanting badly to help and finding no way to be of any use at all.
"Best not to disturb her more than necessary tonight," the doctor said, smoothing the girl's traveling dress with an unhurried hand.
"Don't let her fuss about her hair, or the wrinkles in that frock.
She needs quiet, plain and simple. This has all the marks of plain exhaustion — a long strain of some kind.
Worry, most likely, or anxiety." He glanced up, keen and assessing, at the disheveled young husband beside him. "Has she had some trouble lately?"