Chapter Text
“Sandy’s been taken.”
"What do you mean, taken?" I asked, as Heyes gestured for his partner to enter the room. I hastened to finish rebuttoning my shirtwaist, but as the Kid came in, it was clear he wasn't likely to notice, in any case.
"Gone, disappeared,” Kid Curry looked frantic, something I never could have imagined until the very moment I saw it. His demeanor was ordinarily so low-key, and his rare anger displayed in a cold, calm manner that was so much more intimidating than mere bluster ever could have been. But now he looked shaken to his very core, his tanned skin ashen and his blue eyes unnaturally bright. I’d never doubted his feelings for Sandy, but I was deeply moved by the depths that this revealed. “Whoever they were, they just came, tied up Mary Ann, went upstairs and took Sandy. When I got there, Mary Ann was just starting to get one of her wrists loose, and Rachel was crying her lungs out upstairs. There were signs of a struggle -- Sandy put up a fight."
"Is Rachel all right?" I asked, a mother’s fears taking over from the more urgent concern.
"She's fine, now. Mary Ann is taking care of her," the Kid assured me. “And Mary Ann’s okay, just a little shaken up.”
"Could it have been her father?" asked Heyes, hesitantly. “Could he have kidnapped her?”
I bit back hard on my fury; Heyes hadn’t even met Albert Raintree, due to his preoccupations at work and Raintree’s reticence in putting himself too far forward into Sandy’s world. I didn’t speak, but he looked at me and saw it in my eyes.
Curry jumped in with a quick response. "It was a bunch of white men, Mary Ann said. Six of them, she thought, but she figured she might not have seen all of 'em. And Heyes, they left a little calling card."
"A note?"
"A note, and something else." Curry looked at me, uneasily. "Heyes, does she know?"
"Know what, Kid?"
"About Rick? Heyes, they left a dead rabbit in Sandy's bed."
Heyes looked thunderstruck. "After all those years?" He turned to me. "Ella, there's another secret I've been keeping from you. But it isn't one of my own --”
“What?” I asked, angrily interrupting him. “Just how many secrets can you keep from me? And what does Rick have to do with this?” I’d known Rick Johnson for years, and very well in recent years, since he was opposing counsel in almost every case I’d ever been involved in. But the link between a middle-aged lawyer in Blue Sky, Montana and a kidnapping in San Francisco was eluding me.
My husband touched me on the shoulder. “Let's get going back to the house, and we'll tell you along the way.” I continued to glare, and he spoke again. “Ella, I promised him. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I want to see for myself that Rachel’s okay.”
Though Curry’s reassurances had calmed me, suddenly all I could think about was Rachel abandoned, Rachel left alone and confused. I gathered my skirts in my hands, and began to run. Heyes and the Kid followed me, and we raced down the hallway, nearly colliding with a guest and a couple of workers. There must have been a number of employees at the Western Star Casino that night who wondered what had gotten into its two managers, as they didn't stop to acknowledge anyone's greetings or questions.
There was a carriage waiting outside the front door -- it must have been the one that the Kid had come in, because the driver seemed to be expecting us. Once we were inside, I opened my mouth.
“Do you think Sandy’s been hurt?”
The Kid never lost his look of profound agitation, but he turned to me and said, quietly “There wasn’t any blood. Although we can’t really tell.”
I continued. "And what in heaven’s name does Rick have to do with this, anyway? I know he’s annoyed some clients in his day, but I hardly think any of them would seek revenge by going all the way to San Francisco to kidnap his ex-daughter-in-law.”
Heyes gave Curry a quick glance, and then looked back at me, with the most serious expression I’d ever seen on his handsome, angular features. "The dead rabbit is the symbol of this gang Rick was in, when he was a young man back in New York City. He ran off on them years ago. He couldn't take the violence anymore, so he headed out West and became the man you know. I guess he brought a lot of their secrets with him."
Rick? In New York? In a criminal gang? This was all too confusing. "First of all, what in heaven’s name are you talking about? And more importantly, what does this have to do with Sandy?"
The Kid jumped in. "From the note, sounds like they made a mistake. Apparently, they were under the impression that Sandy's his daughter, not his ex-daughter-in-law. I guess the Andersons’ ball made the society pages, and they wrote about MissAlexandra Johnson from Blue Sky, Montana as one of the prettiest girls there. Some old friend of Rick’s must’ve seen it and made the connection. They left the torn-out article with the note.”
“But why’d they come after him after all these years?” asked Heyes.
“It says here he took $15,000 of their money with him, too. They want it back, with interest. The note says they'll get in touch."
"What are we going to do?" I asked.
"We're gonna get you home to Rachel," said the Kid, clearly in charge now. "Then Heyes and me are gonna make inquiries all over town, until we can figure out which way they've gone. After that . . . guess we'll get after them."
"And I'm supposed to just sit home?" I asked. "And do nothing?”
Heyes leaned forward, and put his hands on my shoulders. He looked me straight in the eyes. "Ella, someone's got to stick around for when the ransom demand comes in. And I guess you'll be wanting to coordinate with Rick, up in Blue Sky. He's got a right to know about this, too. He’s the real target, best as we can tell."
"Someone has to tell Albert Raintree," I said. “He’s got as much right as anybody else to know about this.”
Heyes and Curry looked at each other uncomfortably. They shouldn’t have forgotten him, but they still weren’t used to his being a part of the picture.
“You’re right. Do you know where he lives?” Jed asked.
*****
The carriage halted in front of the house, and we hurried inside. Everything was just as Kid Curry had described it. Rachel was crying as I’d never heard her cry before, and the maid, Mary Ann, was trying to comfort her, but was obviously on the verge of hysterics herself. After I’d held my girl and calmed her down a little, Heyes and I joined the Kid in the bedroom where Sandy ordinarily slept . . . where we saw something horrible. It was an ordinary brown rabbit, and its neck had been broken. The blood was congealing on top of the bedclothes. The only thing to be said for it was that the rabbit’s blood was the only blood in evidence anywhere in the house. There were signs of a struggle in the room -- the bedcovers had been disturbed, the washstand overturned, and a number of items from the dresser were scattered all over the floor. Curry had let the note drop where he’d found it, and when I retrieved the scrap of paper, it said just what he'd said it did.
O’Shaughnessy, did you think you could hide from us forever? We know where you are, Mister “Johnson.” You ran out on us all those years ago, but we never forgot. We took your pretty daughter and if you want her back, you have to pay. You stole $15,000 from our treasury, and we want it back with interest. You know what we can do. Wait and you will hear from us. The Dead Rabbits.
The paper was coarse and dirty, and the note was in heavy block printing, in black ink, though oddly, there were no misspellings. But that wasn’t the thing that concerned me most at the time. “O’Shaughnessy?” I whispered. “You mean Rick has really been someone else all these years?” All this time, I’d thought he was the child of Ohio farmers, but Heyes and Curry proceeded to tell me the little they knew of his true history as a poor immigrant, growing up amidst the dangers of the notorious Five Points district of New York City.
Nothing could have been a greater shock than Sandy’s disappearance, and they’d warned me back at the casino, but somehow the whole foundation of my world seemed shaken by the revelation. I thought I’d known Rick better than nearly anyone -- a good deal better than I knew the man I loved, for instance. I sat in a chair by the torn-up bed, holding Rachel close, rocking her and crooning to her. She’d begun to quiet down, but I knew that if I turned my attention away from her for a moment, she’d begin screaming again, the poor thing. How much harder it must have been for her, not understanding what was going on. Or maybe, how much easier. She kept saying Sandy’s name, over and over, as though saying it would bring Sandy back to her. I only wished it was that simple.
“Rick was a whole lot better at this alias thing than the Kid and me ever were,” confirmed Heyes. “We’re about the only ones who know, and we found out in a real peculiar way.”
“The only ones other than the kidnappers,” I pointed out, and he nodded agreement.
“Yeah, other than them.”
I wanted to know how and why Heyes and Curry had found out something so vital about one of my closest friends and colleagues, something nobody else knew, but this wasn’t the time to ask. Right now there were only two things of importance in the whole world: the little girl who lay safe in my arms, and the young woman who had been snatched violently outside of the charmed circle we inhabited. Not even Rick’s mysterious past, not even the situation back at the casino, were important now. Rachel was safe and Sandy wasn’t, and until they both were, nothing else existed in the universe.
Kid Curry was pacing back and forth, extremely agitated. “I want to get after her right now, but we don’t know which way she’s been taken.”
“Maybe we should wait for the ransom note,” suggested Heyes. “It don’t sound like she’s in immediate danger.”
“She’s got to be scared to death. And she’ll be expecting us to come after her. She’ll be expecting me to come after her.” Curry’s voice was so tense I could imagine something snapping inside him as he spoke.
I piped up. “I don’t think Sandy would like you to put yourself in so much danger. What about those Bannerman agents you’ve called in for the job at the Western Star, Heyes?”
The two men gave each other a look, before Heyes responded. “That’s a thought, Ella. But probably we’re better off on our own. The Bannermans can be clumsy in a situation like this. And the Kid and me aren’t exactly amateurs. All those years on the outlaw trail taught us the skills we’ll need to track the kidnappers, and face them.”
“Albert Raintree’s nearly as good a tracker as an Apache. He’s told me stories. And he’ll be as worried as you are, once he knows.”
Kid Curry nodded. “I’ll go and see him,” he said.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. “Heyes, do you have any kind of network left from the old days? Folks who might have made it their business to know about an out-of-town gang showing up on their turf?”
He looked thoughtful. “I was just thinkin’ about that. There are one or two people we can still call in a favor with. And if not, Silky knows folks who might be able to help.”
*****
The Kid and I took the carriage, and left Heyes to make his own way. We weren’t going to get a cab that would be willing to take us into the neighborhood where Albert Raintree lived. I knew he’d been working some construction projects since he’d been in town, and the pay wasn’t bad for workers’ wages. But an Indian didn’t have his choice of where he could live, and the area where Raintree rented a room was far more squalid than his circumstances would otherwise have allowed.
I hadn’t wanted to let Rachel out of my sight, and anyway, Mary Ann had been given some brandy and some smelling salts, and put to bed in a room which we let her lock from the inside. So I was holding my child on my lap when our carriage stopped in front of a decrepit rooming house. I’d called on Raintree once before, and he’d been ashamed for me to see how he’d been forced to live. He’d been almost pathetically grateful that I hadn’t brought Sandy with me -- that she didn’t have to see how the prejudice of her mother’s people had confined her father.
The entryway smelled unpleasantly of cabbage cooking and of something else that I chose not to let myself identify. The Kid’s expression was one of dismay, and I reassured him that Albert Raintree could have afforded better, if only someone would have rented to him. After I said it, I wondered whether it was comforting or not. We stepped over a passed-out drunk on our way up the staircase, and I clutched Rachel tighter than ever. She protested with a cry, but I certainly wasn’t going to let her go now. “It’s all right, honey. Mama is just keeping you safe.”
She began to call Sandy’s name again, for the hundredth time, and I had no idea how to respond. When a haggard woman in a faded, torn dress cast an envious glance at her, I only clutched her all the more firmly. I’d always disliked guns, but I found myself looking thankfully at the Colt Kid Curry was wearing strapped to his thigh.
Albert Raintree lived on the top floor, where at least he got some light and air. The Kid pounded at his door, but there was no answer. “Open up in there, Raintree!” he shouted. “We’re friends -- it’s important!”
Nothing stirred. And then I noticed the staircase that lead to the roof. We made our way up it. Curry could see that Rachel was getting heavy for me. He apologized for not being able to take her, but he didn’t want his gun hand occupied. I didn’t, either. I thought I knew what we’d find, but what if I was wrong and there was a rooftop encampment of ruffians?
We emerged from the narrow staircase to a rooftop world of slate and tar and chimneys. Above, the sky was blue with rushing white clouds. And there was Albert Raintree, in his own tribal dress, seated on a buffalo-skin rug and chanting softly to himself. Kid Curry opened his mouth to speak, but I quickly gestured to silence him. I had the feeling that interrupting the ceremony was akin to blasphemy, and even though I hadn’t had much use for religion since Reverend Bliss had drummed me out of the church back home as a scarlet woman, I still had a feeling for other people’s reverence.
But just then, Rachel took it upon herself to start crying, and Raintree looked up quickly. The spell was broken.
Every time I saw him, I was struck anew by the resemblance between him and Sandy. I could hear a quick intake of breath, and I knew Jed Curry was thinking the same thing. Neither of us had ever seen Raintree in native dress before, or with his long greying black hair unbraided, and he seemed both completely alien and uncannily familiar.
He got directly to the point. “What’s the matter? Is Sandy all right?”
“How did you know we were here about that?” asked the Kid, suspiciously.
“It seems unlikely you would pay me a social call, Mister Curry,” Raintree responded, “unless it had something to do with Sandy. And if it were something good, I expect you would have given me advance notice.” I was struck again by the formality of his English, fluent but clearly not his first language.
“Sandy’s not all right,” I broke in. “She’s been abducted. We need your help.”
His face remained calm, but his eyes did not. They seemed to double in size, and they darted from right to left, almost frantically. His breathing was shallow, loud, and quick, as though he’d run a long distance. “What happened? When?” he asked, firing off his questions so rapidly that we’d barely replied before he was halfway through the next.
As Curry and I stumbled over ourselves telling him, he gathered up his things, and led us downstairs to his room. He took a large canvas bag, and began throwing his belongings into it -- a mixture of native and European clothing, a couple of books, a few artifacts. I realized that those, and the rug that he bundled up and secured with a cord, were all his worldly possessions – or all he’d brought with him from home. Then he took some money from his pocket, and threw it on the dresser, along with his key.
“Where must we go to find her?” he asked.
“That’s what we still don’t know,” Curry replied.
We returned to the carriage, and I noticed the driver’s eyes widen as he observed the deerskin-clad “savage” climbing in along with us. Raintree joined us in speculation as the carriage rattled up and down the San Francisco hillsides.
“This Johnson has much to answer for,” he said.
“It’s not his fault the papers got Sandy’s name wrong. And it’s not his fault that his son turned out the way he did.” I instinctively defended my old friend.
“But there is something he did in the past that started this all, isn’t there?”
“That was a long time ago,” Kid Curry said. “People change. A lot of people do things they’re sorry for.”
“People do not change that much,” said Raintree, pointedly.
I looked at Curry, wondering how he’d react to that from the man whose daughter he hoped to marry, but he was staring out the window, away from us.
Heyes still wasn’t home when we got there. Albert Raintree wanted to be shown Sandy’s room, and the evidence, which he examined minutely. I knew we had to decide whether to call in the police or not -- Curry was opposed to it, on the general grounds of mistrust for the force of the law that his outlaw years had bred in him. I was for it, on the general grounds that my years as an advocate of the law had bred in me.
Since we couldn’t reach an agreement, the Kid suggested that Heyes ought to be involved in the decision. He looked a little smug when I assented, since he knew his partner would agree with him. But he was forgetting something. He was forgetting that Hannibal Heyes would never have fallen in love with a woman who didn’t have a fair chance in an argument with him.
Raintree slipped into one of the other bedrooms, and emerged, a few minutes later, in a shirt, vest, jacket and trousers. He was neatly plaiting his long hair as he entered the room. “What do we do next?” he asked.
“I don’t think Heyes was gonna check down in the harbor. I wonder if that’s worth it?” Curry mused, and in another minute, Raintree had swept him out the door.
I was beginning to think that forced inactivity was going to be my major role in this crisis.
It seemed like hours that I was alone with Rachel, waiting to hear something, anything. A couple of times she began crying, and I tried to comfort her. Her crying wore on my nerves, and as I ineffectually soothed her, I had to admit to myself that Sandy had a touch with my daughter that I myself lacked. Finally I tried singing to her, as I’d heard Sandy do again and again, and though my alto didn't have the sweet tones of her light soprano, it seemed to be enough for Rachel.
Finally, there was a sound of the front door opening, and Heyes’ voice calling, “Anybody home? Kid? Ella?”
I ran to the entranceway, from the back parlor, and practically flung myself into his arms. “Any news?” I asked him, drawing him back into the parlor.
“Daddy?” murmured Rachel, and he went to her, taking her onto his lap. I’d noticed he was becoming quite fatherly. At least, when he was anywhere around Rachel, which hadn’t been too often, lately.
“Nobody knows anything,” he said, absently stroking her fine dark hair. “I checked with a couple of old friends who are still on the dishonest end of things, and nobody knew anything about a strange gang from New York City. Then I went around to some of the more disreputable saloons, but no luck there, either.”
“The Kid and Albert Raintree went down to the waterfront.”
“Well, I hope their luck was better than mine,” Heyes said.
“Have you reported this to the police, yet?” I asked.
Heyes gave me a guilty look in response. “I’m still gettin’ used to the idea that I can go to the law without any consequences. And the San Francisco Police . . . that’s kinda like callin’ in an elephant. They’ll be all over everything, and squash any clues that we might find flatter than a pancake.”
“I was under the impression there were some fine detectives on the force,” I said. “Or so I’ve been told.”
“Guess we better contact them, or they’re gonna start gettin’ suspicious, huh? You watch, though, first thing some policeman is gonna do is take you aside, and hint that maybe, just maybe, me and the Kid are responsible.”
“Or her disreputable Indian father.”
“Or him,” Heyes nodded his agreement. “Then he’ll go on to wonder about the kind of company you keep, a respectable lady like you.”
“And then he’ll suggest that she probably eloped, or got homesick and ran off back to Blue Sky. Those half-breeds are awfully unreliable, aren’t they, being neither one thing nor another.”
“Since we’ve just had the entire conversation we’re gonna have with him, and gotten probably just the same results -- none at all -- can’t we just skip the police?” Heyes asked.
“We need to call in the police, precisely because you and the Kid have had your troubles with the law,” I pointed out. “They’ll think it’s suspicious if we don’t approach them. Anyway, I want to get it over with. I want to get the scene of the crime cleaned up. I don’t want that . . . thing . . . lying on Sandy’s bed, anymore. And the police have to see it first. Otherwise they will think we’re making this up.”
“Sometimes you’re just too smart for my own good,” sighed Heyes. “All right. Let’s get this over with.” He gently lifted Rachel down, and she tottered over to me, with shaky but determined steps.
*****
The police came and went, disclaiming their ability to do anything until we’d heard from the kidnappers. “They may be out of our jurisdiction, by now,” explained the detective who’d examined the scene of the abduction. He’d taken the note as evidence, and very kindly agreed to dispose of the dead rabbit, after the police photographer had taken pictures of it from more angles that I could have imagined at all necessary.
“I told you they wouldn’t do anything,” murmured Heyes into my ear, as we followed them down the stairs to the entrance hall.
But after the detective made his farewells, he added, “I’m glad you called us in, Mister and Missus Heyes. If you don’t mind my saying so, with your past and all, Mister Heyes . . . well, it’s good to see you’re a law abiding citizen now. Kinda gives a man hope and all that.”
As the door closed behind him, I turned to tell Heyes that I’d told him so, but as soon as I opened my mouth, he kissed me and left me too breathless to speak. Which was clearly the aim, but I couldn’t complain about the means he’d chosen.
Three days passed, in which there was no word of Sandy. “I can’t stand it,” Kid Curry said over and over again. “I want to go after her.”
“Kid, we ain’t got any idea where she’s been taken. What if we head up north and it turns out she’s been taken south? What if we ride inland and it turns out they’ve taken her out to sea? Besides, even if we found a telegraph office and checked in with Ella twice a day, we’d still get delayed in hearing if there was any news. The kidnappers want a ransom. They’ll contact us -- they seem to think this place has some connection with Rick.”
“Or they’ll contact Rick in Blue Sky, and he’ll let us know, right away,” I said. We’d telegraphed Rick days ago, and I knew he was standing by, ready to act in any way necessary. He’d cabled us to say so, and my former law partner, Jeremy Chadwick, had cabled me besides to tell me that the law was taking a holiday in Blue Sky, Montana so that he and Rick could be ready to respond on a moment’s notice.
Since the judge was fond of Sandy, I wasn’t surprised. Yet another of the advantages of living in a small town. I couldn’t help but think that if Sandy had been taken from Blue Sky, at least half a dozen witnesses would have been able to give us an idea of what direction her kidnappers had taken. Not to mention the fact that there'd have been a rescue party after her almost immediately. Here in San Francisco there could have been plenty of witnesses to the abduction who hadn’t come forward or probably didn’t even realize what had been going on.
But Kid Curry was going nearly mad from the inaction. He paced around the house, or he went outside and did target practice in the back garden, to the point that the neighbors would come around to complain about the noise or the perceived danger of the activity. When they saw the Kid’s expression, though, they invariably ceased their complaints, and either went away quietly, or inquired what they could do to help. Unfortunately, there was nothing anyone could do but wait.
Meanwhile, difficult though it was to think about anything other than Sandy, we turned our attention to the matter of the financial discrepancies at the casino. Things had progressed too far for us to call off the sting that had been set in motion, and besides, the situation was bad enough that it was threatening to blow up at any minute.
Heyes and Curry’s friend Harry Briscoe, a dark-mustached, ferret-faced man, turned up at the house. He was the much-anticipated Bannerman agent who was going to help expose whoever it was at the Western Star who was setting them up. But he turned up alone.
“Harry,” said Heyes impatiently, “I asked you to bring three or four men with you.”
“Well,” Harry hemmed and hawed, “you see, it’s like this. I’m not in favor with the agency at the moment and, well . . . you two aren’t exactly at the top of the agency’s list, either.”
“Even after we helped bust that crooked casino in Colorado Springs?”
“Memories are short,” said the detective.
“Yours shouldn’t be,” Curry interjected, in a low, almost threatening tone.
“It’s not. That’s why I’m here.”
Right now, Heyes was keeping everyone in line, but I knew that he was going to leave the investigation in my hands, as soon as there was any word of Sandy. Harry Briscoe and Silky O’Sullivan did not hit it off one bit. They were like oil and water, and that wasn’t a good thing, since Silky was one of the keys to this investigation. He had his finger on the pulse of the shady side of San Francisco, and he knew more about gambling, crooked, straight, or in-between, than nearly anyone alive. I could tell there was going to be trouble, as soon as Heyes wasn’t there anymore to smooth things over with his silver tongue and that disarming grin of his.
I wasn’t terribly impressed by Harry, myself. He tended to approach me with a certain slimy, condescending attempt at charm that must have been his idea of how one approaches a woman. No wonder he was out of favor with the Bannermans at the moment, at least if anyone female had played a central role in the last case he’d been investigating.
Silky, who’d never before had much use for this “respectable” woman Hannibal Heyes had inexplicably saddled himself with, had suddenly decided that I was all right after all. It was the most peculiar thing for me, after being the object of his undisguised scorn for so long. Now he couldn’t be friendlier. Partly, I think, he’d gotten used to me. He’d never seen me in action before, either, and he was pleasantly surprised to find I knew my way around an investigation. But mostly, I wasn’t Harry Briscoe.