The Ruby Brooch (The Celtic Brooch Trilogy) (39 page)

“His name is Donald Shelly. He owns a fleet of ships, and he’s rarely in town. Phillips went to Boston following Abigail’s funeral. Until he comes back, we’re not likely to learn anything more.”

“I’ll send him a telegram when I get to Kentucky.”

“I’m going with you. In your condition—”

Cullen touched his friend’s shoulder. “If you leave town while Phillips is gone, the business will fail. This has been our dream since our early Harvard days. You’re the one who said, ‘people who dream small dreams, live small lives.’ Don’t let our dream die.”

CULLEN DIDN’T SLEEP well. He rolled over in the large four-poster cherry bed in Braham’s guest room and reached for Kit. Her taste, her scent were forever embedded in his memory, but she might never be beside him again. Not in this world.

His splintered heart cracked wide open, and he wept into the pillow where her head should have rested. When the tears subsided, he reached for the half-full bottle of painkillers. He needed to ration the Tylenol. After today, he’d only take them at night.

He sneaked out of Braham’s house before the sun rose, before he had to face his friend and another round of arguments he might not have the will to win. The pain in his head made logical thinking damned near impossible, and he needed all of his wits to focus on what lay ahead—a sixty-day trip to MacKlenna Farm. The difficult journey would take him across the Isthmus of Panama during the rainy season, into the Caribbean Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Mississippi River. Not an easy journey for a man physically fit, but if he waited until he was well enough to travel, he wouldn’t reach the farm before Thomas MacKlenna died in January.

He arrived at Long Wharf and discovered the
Golden Gate
was scheduled to depart for Panama with the morning tide. He booked the last stateroom. As he trudged up the gangplank, fighting a bout of dizziness, he wondered if he had set himself on a fool’s mission, and a very dangerous one. Someone tapped his shoulder and he turned aside to make room on the gangplank. When he looked behind him, his heart pounded with surprise.

Cullen was too emotional to speak, and Henry too was silent. Finally, he said, “It’s my fault we didn’t find you. Kit begged me to cross the river and search the other side. I didn’t think …” His eyes glistened, and he cleared his throat. “You’re weak. You need help, and I don’t give a damn what you say. I’m going with you.”

At one time Cullen would have sent Henry back to Oregon, but that was before his ordinary life became unordinary. That was before the tightness in his chest immobilized him, before waves of grief consumed him, and before headaches temporarily blinded him.

He leaned on his friend for support. “We’d better board. Don’t want this ship to sail without us.”

And they trudged up the gangplank together.

Chapter Forty-One

TWO DAYS FROM Panama, the ship ran into gale-force winds that tossed Cullen and Henry about their stateroom. White-capped waves swamped the ship, and it groaned as timbers torqued almost beyond endurance. The main mast snapped, sending shudders through the heart of the vessel.

The ship’s rain-soaked captain burst through the cabin doorway with a four-sided glass lantern. A sliver of light washed over them. “The ship’s holding her own. We should pass through this in a few hours.” He stormed out as quickly as he had burst in.

Henry took Cullen’s arm. “Get in your berth. I’m strapping you down.”

Cullen knew he couldn’t huddle on the water-soaked floor, but standing triggered nausea. ”Leave me alone.”

“Next time you hit the wall you might just kill yourself. Come on, I’ll help you.”

Cullen didn’t have the strength to resist.

High waves battered the ship throughout the long night, but the ropes kept his body immobile and the pain tolerable.

The ship arrived in Panama on the seventeenth day. Cullen sat on deck and waited with Henry for a smaller vessel to pick them up. Cullen paid the transportation company to arrange his and Henry’s travel across the Isthmus to the harbor in Chagres.

As they waited to disembark, they watched the sunrise peek out of grey mist. Cullen rubbed his arms, tingling with memory of the beautiful sunrise following his wedding night. That was a magical morning, not only because Kit lay naked in his arms, but also because it had been the first full day of their life together.

A life cut much too short.

“You two found each other before. You’ll find each other again,” Henry said.

“If you can read my mind, then we’ve been traveling together too long.”

“Not hard to tell what you’re thinking when you get that misty-eyed look.”

Cullen cleared his throat. “I couldn’t have made it through the storm alone. Thanks for tagging along.”

His old friend puffed on his pipe. “It’s during storms we need friends the most.”

As they disembarked, a messenger met them with their overland itinerary.

“Let me see that,” Henry said.

With his blurry vision, Cullen couldn’t read anyway. He passed the envelope over.

Henry read the piece of paper then huffed. “A five-day trip across the jungle, and two of those days we’re riding damned mules. If we survive those willful beasts, there’s a flat-bottom boat ride down the river, then a train ride to Chagres. If we survive that ordeal, we’re booked on the
Philadelphia
to New Orleans.” He turned the paper over. “Looks like we’re on our own from there.”

“We’ll catch a paddleboat to Louisville.”

The overland trip was a dreadful week of fighting mosquitoes, eating bad food, and sloshing along muddy roads. Without being robbed or dumped in the jungle, Henry’s biggest fears, they arrived in Chagres and, after a four-day layover, boarded the steamer
Philadelphia
for the ten-day voyage to New Orleans.

Henry and Cullen were sitting on deck when the ship sailed into the Gulf of Mexico. “Have you thought about what you’re going to say to the MacKlennas?” Henry asked.

“I’ve thought of nothing else,” Cullen said.

“Are you going to tell them about Kit?”

“I don’t know.” Cullen closed his eyes and let the sea breeze drift over him. The headache lessened since leaving Chagres, and he was resting better. The dizziness still bothered him, but he could walk without squeezing the blood from Henry’s arm, and his appetite had improved. The water was his healing place, and he felt it at work now. Although he had no memory of falling from the cliff into the river, he sensed Kristen’s presence. Maybe she’d been there. Maybe she had rescued him, just like in his dream. Maybe.

Henry lit his pipe. “Never been to New Orleans.”

“Braham and I were there four years ago.” Cullen remembered very little about the visit other than bottles of bourbon and several faceless, nameless French women. He winced at the memory.

At New Orleans, Cullen booked passage on the
A.L.Shotwell,
and although Henry wanted to spend a couple of days in the city, Cullen was pleased the paddle wheeler was scheduled to depart for the upriver trip the next morning.

Six days later as they neared Louisville’s port, Cullen was standing on deck humming.

“What’s that music?” Henry asked.

“One of Kit’s songs,
I can feel you all around me, sweetening the air I breathe.
I feel her, Henry—in here.” Cullen tapped his chest. “I will see her again.”

Henry’s jaw stiffened. “Come on, let’s go ashore. We’ve a train to catch.”

Cullen took a deep breath.
I will see you again.

The train stopped in Midway, Kentucky, and they disembarked.

“Quaint little town,” Henry said.

“I hope this quaint little town has a livery to hire a horse or carriage.”

Henry glanced down the street. “Wait here.” A few minutes later, a carriage stopped in front of the depot. Henry opened the door and leaned out. “We have a ride.”

Cullen climbed aboard glad for the bit of warmth inside the carriage. The weather was brisk. Autumn had shoved summer aside, leaving the day dressed in a glorious, red-golden coat.

“Where to, suh?” the driver asked.

“MacKlenna Farm. Do you know it?” Cullen asked.

“Yes, suh. Everybody know they MacKlennas. Law, they rich folk. Old Mister Thomas, he look like he having the finest time now his granddaughter come a home. You’n go there now, not a speck a interest in dying no more. He gone be a great-grandaddy fore spring.”

Cullen let the driver talk while he settled into the seat and made a notation in his journal:
November 11, 1852, noon, arrived Midway, Kentucky. What will I find?

Chapter Forty-Two

BRAHAM’S WORK, LIFE, and even his house sagged under the heavy weight of guilt. Leaving the wagon train became the mistake he had feared, and allowing Cullen to sail alone compounded one mistake with another. What kind of man abandons his brother not once, but twice, then has the audacity to call himself a friend, an
anam cara
?

Braham shook his head with disgust.

His ability to analyze problems and make decisions made him a good lawyer, but those abilities failed him now. Cullen’s dilemma had him stymied. His current predicament would puzzle even his philosophy professor at the University of Edinburgh. Braham visualized the old scholar standing before the classroom, wagging both his finger and tongue.
Knowing what the dilemma is not, what the wrong answers are, is the first step toward knowing what the answer may be
.

Groaning at the thought of the irritating little man, Braham tossed the treatise he was reading to the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed.

What is the dilemma not?

Wearily, he dragged his hands down his face. “Damnation.” It was not about his inability to sleep for five days. He knew that much.

He stomped off to his library, where he lit a cigar and paced.

How can you search for something, if you think you know?

Pacing didn’t calm his restlessness or remove the professor’s voice from his head, so he tried a shot of brandy. Then another. He stepped to the bookshelf and pulled out Volume 1 of
The Republic.
If the professor intended to haunt him, Braham might as well read Plato and try to free his mind of preconceived impossibilities.

No answer is an answer if it doesn’t come from within yourself.

He sat in the wing chair with the book and poured another shot.

Risk being ridiculed to change your way of thinking.

Thoughts tumbled through his head. He threw out questions, argued with himself, even allowed the professor to interject comments before finally, closing his eyes and dosing.

The sound of the grandfather clock’s descending bells woke him at two o’clock
.
He rolled his head, relieving the neck strain from sleeping in the chair with his head cocked. His eyes shot open.

“That’s it.”

He stepped to his desk and after tapping his pen against the glass inkwell, began his missive. His words scratched across the fine writing paper. He felt calm. No, that was a damnable lie. He felt himself sinking into anticipatory angst.

His hand shook as he licked the teardrop-shaped flap on the envelope’s back, and then wrote the addressee’s name.

BRAHAM WOKE TO a gorgeous fall day in San Francisco. Warm, sunny, and the fog had cleared. He was not one to give credence to omens, but today he did. After a leisurely breakfast while reading his daily newspaper he slipped thes letter into his jacket pocket and left the house.

An institution was the logical place to hold the letter for one-hundred-sixty years, and the institutions most likely to be operating in the twenty-first century were banks and universities. He intended to start with local banks with eastern connections. His most pressing problem was convincing someone he was serious, but negotiating was his forte. Besides, Kit had given him the one piece of information that would leverage his position, at least with one particular banker.

He headed down the sidewalk with a solid and determined stride, hands clasped behind him, lips pursed. He knew where he was headed and didn’t need to watch the ground to see his way. Shortly, he entered the lobby of Lucas, Turner & Company.

His eyes adjusted to the darkened room as he glanced around. The lobby’s fixtures and furnishings appeared perfunctory, but miners didn’t care about a well-dressed bank. They wanted safety and convenience. He agreed with that, but would add longevity to the list of requirements.

William T. Sherman met him at the door. “Good morning, Mr. McCabe.”

“Good morning.” Braham removed his hat. “If you have a moment, I have a business proposition to discuss.”
You’d think the lean grizzled man would give some thought to his appearance.

Sherman ushered Braham into his office and closed the door. “What can I do for you?”

Braham took a seat, throwing one leg over the other. “You’ll find this to be a strange request”

“Not much I haven’t heard.”

“This might be a new one.” He cleared his throat as he pulled the letter from his pocket and tapped it against his fingertips. “I’d like you to put this in your vault with a note that the bank and its successors and assigns hold it until such time as it is to be delivered to the addressee.”

Sherman appeared fully attentive, eyes wide. “And when will that be?”

Braham willed his heart to hold a steady beat. “The twenty-first century. The specific year and address are on the envelope.”

The banker sat back in his chair, crossed his arms, and looked down his long, slim nose. His face turned as red as the hair. “A very strange request indeed. Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

Braham shook his head. “I hope you will understand my need for confidentiality.” He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, and tugged on the cuffs peeking out below his jacket sleeves. “I believe, possibly a decade from now, you’ll need a man with my credentials. I’ll be prepared to repay you for honoring this request.”