The Styx (34 page)
Danny the arsonist? He thought about the possibility. Could his brother have gotten so deep with his schemes and maneuvering to be involved in burning down a community for some sort of payoff? Byrne couldn’t believe it. He’d never seen his brother as someone who could maliciously hurt innocents. Yes, he’d shyster some rube on the streets, trick a man out of his pocket money, steal a piece of food from a merchant, sweet-talk someone into paying for his drinks, even run a land scam like the one the binder boys described. But deliberately burn down people’s homes? Impossible. Maybe his brother was involved in the deal, maybe he blanched at someone else’s plan to burn the Styx and got a bullet in the throat for his refusal.
And where did Marjory fit in all of this? She knew Danny and had kept that from him. What did she know about his killing in her own back yard? And why was she so set on defending this Negro maid?
He looked up when he heard the train whistle from the bridge from Palm Beach Island and watched its trail of smoke crawl across the stubby townscape. He did not stand when it neared but observed the manipulations to the siding as the engineer and crew latched on to Flagler’s gleaming private car. Moments later he saw Flagler and his wife pass between the cars, entering their own. The old man attended to the careful steps of his wife and then looked up at the sun-touched wall of the station where Byrne sat. Their eyes met for a brief second. Byrne swore there was a momentary look of question on Flagler’s face just before he stepped into his car.
With a blast of the whistle and a huff of steam, the completed linkage of train shivered and clanked and groaned into motion. Byrne could feel the foundation of the station platform vibrate as thousands of pounds of steel moved southward toward Miami. Whatever you thought about the rich old coot, you had to admit it was a hell of an accomplishment bringing such things to this sleepy seashore world. Byrne watched for the rear platform and found Harris there, staring out. He could not tell whether it was a look of sadness or warning.
B
YRNE
took his coat off, pulled the bill of his cap down to shade his eyes and rolled up his shirtsleeves. But he remained seated at the train station, as he had been instructed. He nodded at those who greeted, trying to look nonchalant while the questions of reason and motive roiled in his stomach.
Why the hell was he here? Why was Flagler dismissing him from his personal guard duty? Why would anyone request him to go out with a group of the hotel elite on a hunting excursion? Hell, he knew it wasn’t his storied proficiency as a game hunter that prompted it…a tenement kid who’d rarely even seen a rifle. And Harris said there would be a guide. So what was the danger there? The party would also include Mr. McAdams, whose young daughter had just last night been swimming naked in the ocean with him and then disappeared. So what? Do they take young men who besmirch a lady’s reputation out into the swamp and shoot him? Ha! You’re stinking paranoid, he said to himself. Faustus was trying to get in to interview the Carver woman this day. Marjory was going to join him. Byrne would have to wait until he got back from this charade in the glades to find out what the Negro woman would tell them. There was too much happening to endure this shite. Yet, an hour after Flagler’s train pulled out, he sat there watching to the north as a hand-pumped rail cart creaked toward him. It wasn’t until he recognized Mr. McAdams that he stood, dumbstruck, at the site of the transportation he and the four others were obviously taking on this impromptu hunting trip.
“Hallo, Mr. Byrne!” called out Mr. McAdams as the flat-bed cart coasted to a stop. “I see our request was successfully passed on to you.”
Byrne hopped down next to the track, eyeing the cart, the men, the supplies and the stacked rifle barrels arranged on the small space. When McAdams offered a hand up, Byrne took it, stepped up on the hub of one wheel and was pulled aboard. At the center of the cart deck was a two-handled, see-saw contraption which Byrne recognized as the power behind the vehicle. And just to the front of the cart was a stiff and sturdy eight-foot-tall pole with fabric wrapped around it with sail line.
“Mr. Byrne, this is Mr. Birch and Mr. Pearson from the hotel and Mr. Ashton, a magnificent guide of the Everglades region.”
Byrne touched the brim of his cap in greeting and shook hands all around. Birch was the man Byrne had recognized at Flagler’s table the night of the ball, the man from New York who’d paid off Byrne’s commander during the prostitution raid. He shook Byrne’s hand with a simple politeness, his eyes holding no recognition.
Pearson, the general manager, had been pointed out to him before by Harris. “Tight assed and shifty” was the sergeant’s assessment. Byrne studied them all, as always, making note of each man’s facial hair, eye color, mode of dress. If they were nervous or uneasy with his presence, none showed it. Birch and Pearson gave nothing away. Ashton was the local. His eyes were pale and reminded Byrne of Captain Abbott’s in their stoic nonchalance. He had the look of a man simply performing a job.
“We’re going to go south a bit, Mr. Byrne,” Mr. McAdams said, looking the part of some explorer with a white bandana knotted around his neck. “Down at the Hillsboro inlet, Cypress Creek goes west into the great swamp. You will be amazed at the wild boar, the deer, wild turkey, honestly.” There was a friendly enthusiasm in the man’s voice, as if he were selling a new homestead to a customer. If he knew of Byrne’s assignation the night before, he wasn’t acting like a put-out father. Byrne relaxed, but only a bit.
“You may even get a shot at a snowy egret, Mr. Birch,” he said to the banker. “The kind with the wonderful feathers your wife loves to adorn her hats with. Treat them with a bit of arsenic for preservative and she can take them back to New York to her milliner.”
Birch gave McAdams a nod but did not seem to be in the mood for jovial repartee. The guide moved to the hand pump, and with elbows locked, he put all his weight on the fore handle. The cart began to crawl southward. When the handle reached its lowest level, he quickly jumped to the now raised side and did the same. The cart gained momentum. Byrne assessed the mechanics, and when he realized none of the others intended to assist the guide he took up position at one handle and copied Ashton’s labors. If Byrne expected a sign of appreciation for his assistance, he would be disappointed. Ashton simply kept pushing down at his turn and stared out at the passing landscape, his eyes seemingly searching the brush and tree copse for some movement or sign. On occasion he would turn his nose up into the air. Yeah, right, like you can smell the boar or deer or whatever the hell this group is supposed to be hunting, Byrne thought. Nice touch for the city swells. But after half an hour of steady and not overly strenuous pumping, the guide’s nose did indeed lead to advantage.
“Wind switch,” he said, mostly to himself, and stepped away from the pump handle. The dense vegetation had cleared somewhat and Byrne too could feel the breeze catching them from behind. While the handles continued to move up and down, Byrne kept pushing his end and the cart continued to roll. Meanwhile, Ashton unfurled the cloth from the tall pole and extended what he now recognized as a boom and voila! A sail puffed out and the cart became a land boat. The pump handle in Byrne’s hands started moving on its own, and he let go. The ingenuity made him smile and the feeling was infectious, for the other men, with the exception of Ashton, also began to grin.
“Hard work often inspires ingenuity, Mr. Byrne,” Mr. McAdams said, noticing the smile. “Even in as rough a place as this.” Since the statement was not a question, Byrne felt no obligation to respond. He instead looked out on what he now recognized as cleared land, not unlike that of the vegetable farmers farther north where he and Harris had encountered the would-be dynamiters.
“This area will someday be a massive grove of pineapples,” McAdams said. “A young Japanese man with dreams of a plantation has approached Mr. Flagler. Imagine, sweet pineapples by the crate going north to Manhattan. Some men know the possibilities of land, Mr. Byrne. That it is the foundation for everything else.”
Again, Byrne did not answer. If the guy was going to pontificate in vague phrases, so be it. Byrne knew a babbling man in the Bowery who stood on a wooden box and spewed verse and quotations all day for the sake of nothing more than the sound of his own voice. If Mr. McAdams thought he was imparting knowledge with his statements, it was going over Byrne’s head. The others simply nodded, as if they understood. Ashton adjusted the sail, ignoring or not caring.
Past the clearing, the wild growth filled back in, and within two hours Ashton’s focus shifted to the south. When he spotted some landmark he pulled in the sail and relashed it to the mast. Minutes later Byrne spotted a rail switch and a siding ahead. They rolled to a stop, and in the resulting quiet Byrne could hear the sound of moving water. Ashton jumped down, walked the rail to the switch and, after fiddling with a lock, shoved the mechanism, which swung a diverting set of rails to the siding. He motioned for Byrne to pump the cart forward, then used the switch to realign the rails. The men began to unload. Once armed and strapped with rifles and canteens and satchels of lunch, the group moved south along the rail bed that cut through a wall of pond apple trees and small cypress and then opened to the sandy shore of a narrow river.
“Mr. Ashton will lead us up the creek,” McAdams said. “But keep alert, fellows. The game is numerous and, might I say, diverse.”
Byrne singled out McAdams and finally asked the obvious: “If I may, Mr. McAdams. But what exactly am I supposed to do here?”
“Why, you’re to watch our backs, Mr. Byrne,” he replied as though the task was obvious. “You’re the Pinkerton. Security, young man, security.”
The creek narrowed, the palmetto thickened, and an uneven ground cover of sedge grasses, strangler fig and cypress roots caused all but Ashton to stumble and slog. Byrne found himself stepping into unexpected troughs of standing water, the thick mud at the bottom sucking at his now ruined brogans. He had to keep his eyes on the steps before him and take circuitous routes around obstacles. The air seemed to grow heavier and wetter, and he found it increasingly difficult to breath. Spanish moss hung from the trees like dark tattered rags, filtering the sun. This was the great swamp they talked about. Faustus had told him that it ran west to the horizon, a glade of enormous size, as mysterious as any deep forest. Less than an hour in, Byrne stopped to take a drink. When he looked up, there was no one in sight. The blue shirt covering Ashton’s back was gone. McAdams, with the white bandana around his throat, had disappeared into the green.
“Christ!” he said, moving off in the direction he thought they’d gone. He could make his way through a maze of backstreets and alleys in the dark, but there was nothing familiar here. He would suddenly step into a hole and feel water up to his knees, the smell of it like a ripe whiff of old Mrs. McReady’s vegetable cart. Each craggy cypress looked just like the one before. His landmarks were useless. He was moving around the hump of a root ball from a downed tree when he looked into a boil of grasses and swore he saw a huge log of marled wood with a row of teeth. He stopped stock still when the log’s eyes came into view and stared into his own. Byrne swore he could hear the beast breathing.
They were in a stare off, an eight-foot alligator and a tenement kid from the Lower East Side. Then, as if the gator heard or somehow presaged what was to come, the reptile lunged. Its wicked movement caused Byrne to dive in the opposite direction away from the maw of teeth. A rifle’s report sounded, and at the same instant, Byrne felt his left side pull at him like a whip had slapped his hip.
The sting came after he’d spilled to the ground and a burning heat followed. He watched the alligator practically crawl over him on its way to a nearby hole. Byrne saw the tail disappear, looked down for the hot spot at his side and saw a stain of blood on his shirt growing just above his hip and under his left rib. He swung his head around in the direction of the rifle shot and went decidedly quiet.
Whoever had fired did not call out. There was in fact no noise at first as he lay there. Then he heard a careful step, the snap of a twig, a slow slosh of water. If one of the hunters had taken a shot at the gator and had hit Byrne by accident, wouldn’t the man shout? But if Byrne was the target, would that gunman now move in to finish the task? Byrne sat perfectly still and listened. Another slosh. The sound of fabric brushed by a tree limb. Byrne looked for cover. The hole where the alligator had taken refuge was an arm’s length away. Another tick of sound, this time the light scratch of metal on wood. Byrne chose the gator over the rifle barrel and rolled quietly into the mouth of the hole. Again he listened, but the sound was muffled by the covering of muck and root and tangle of leaves. He closed his eyes and concentrated. Was that the sound of his breathing, or that of the reptile behind him? Was the animal cowering in the back of the hole, rattled by the explosion of the gun and this human chasing him into his hole?