Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

by Johnstone, William W.

  “What do you want from me, sir?” Quinn asked, voice quaking.

  “I want proof that Cheatham is down on whores, but that can wait,” Simpkins said. His breath smelled like raw onions.

  “But first I want your brother. I want to find him, get my hands on the murdering scum. I want you to tell me where he is . . . and don’t you try to claim you don’t know! I guarantee you know!”

  “I don’t . . . I swear.”

  “Well, it’s your ma who’ll be doing the swearing when she hears her little angel boy has been making himself an accomplice to a man who rips whores for fun.”

  “I am not, sir. I swear before Jesus and the angels that I’m not.”

  “Get used to saying that, because I can work things out to give you ample chance to say it a lot, to a lot of folk, including a judge.”

  “Don’t do that, sir, please!”

  “Why sure, it’s easy to shut my mouth. All you got to do is tell me where I can find that murdering brother of yours.”

  “I haven’t seen him, sir, haven’t talked to him nor got any word. All I know is he didn’t murder anybody.”

  “You know that for a fact, do you? Were you there when the Lundys were killed? Speak up, boy.”

  “No, no sir. But—”

  “But what? Go on—out with it!”

  Quinn, terrifically frightened now, found himself speaking when he didn’t really want to. “I know somebody who did see him.”

  “Was it your ma, you fat little turd? I’d welcome the chance to have a good conversation with that pretty mama you have.”

  “No.”

  “Somebody else in your family?”

  “No, sir. It was Dublin Willie.”

  “That worthless rummy? Hell, he probably dreamed he saw him and thought it was real!”

  “He said he found him hiding someplace, but he didn’t say where. He said Trace wouldn’t be there anymore, anyway.”

  “Running off, I guess. I figured he’d run off.”

  “He said that Trace told him to tell me that he was fine, and that he hadn’t done anything bad no matter what folks were saying.”

  “I never seen a lawbreaker yet who didn’t deny his crimes. Nor have I ever seen an innocent man run from the place a crime has been done. A guilty one, though, he’ll run as fleet as a buck deer.”

  Quinn felt like a betrayer for the information he had given this unpleasant officer, even though there had been no particularly significant information in it. He fought to hold back tears, knowing the policeman would doubtlessly find it amusing if Quinn cried.

  “I’m going to have me a little talk with Dublin Willie and see if he really does know anything worth knowing. And if I learn that he told you more than you’re saying he did, you little dogpile, I’m going to go visit your ma and tell her what kind of nasty things her little boy has been up to. You hear me, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Simpkins shoved Quinn away from him with contempt, then turned and walked back out toward the street. At the end of the alley he turned back to Quinn.

  “You mind what I told you, boy. If I want to, and I really want to, I can make your life a living hell and your ma’s, too.”

  “I haven’t done anything, sir, and neither has my brother,” Quinn said.

  Simpkins laughed, and turned to rejoin the street traffic.

  He walked right into an Irish blackthorn stick swung by Kate Kerrigan.

  The heavy shillelagh crashed into the man’s face, broke the bridge of his nose and split the thin skin above his eyes.

  His face bloody, eyes already closing, Simpkins hit the ground hard, twitched for a few moments and then he did not move.

  Kate didn’t wait to see the cop fall.

  She grabbed Quinn by the wrist and ran.

  “Hurry, son,” she said. “I’ve left oatmeal simmering in the pot.”

  Harold Simpkins would later say, from his hospital bed, that he didn’t know what hit him, but suspected that members of an Irish street gang were involved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Kate Kerrigan lived in one of the more decrepit sections of the city where, during the war, her house and the streets around it had been surrounded by a virtual tent city.

  The tents were inhabited by freed slaves and other wartime refugees and later a small church had been built by the Federal authorities to serve the spiritual needs of a black Baptist congregation.

  The church had burned a year after it was constructed, leaving only an arched stone entryway in the midst of a lot that since then had become covered with brush, poison ivy, and sapling trees.

  Ignored now by most, the ruin had become a refuge of sorts for Kate Kerrigan, who fancied that the arch had the look of an abandoned monastery cloister.

  It was a quiet place where she went when it was essential to clear her mind and be around no one else at all. With cramped living quarters and a family of children, privacy was rare.

  Kate considered her secret place, only a stone’s throw from her house, vital to maintaining a healthy state of mind.

  Here she counseled herself, talked to her dead husband and parents in the certainty they could hear her.

  Sometimes she chided God for allowing life to be so hard at times, but those occasions were few.

  To Kate’s knowledge, no one in her family or circle of acquaintances knew this was her spot. She’d never encountered another person while secreted away in the fire-blackened ruin among the sheltering brush and trees.

  That evening, as the older children looked after Shannon, she took a few moments to pray for the speedy recovery of patrolman Simpkins.

  Poor man, a blackthorn stick could do terrible things when swung in anger, and the talk of her neighbors was that the injured officer might be in the hospital for at least a week.

  “A gang set about him,” the neighbors said. “And left him all broken and bloody on the cold ground.”

  “Serves him right for frightening my child,” Kate wanted to tell them. But she didn’t, and settled for, “Well, that’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  She also prayed briefly for Quinn, who had come home from his work at the Cheatham house in a distracted, upset state of mind, but had declined to explain why.

  She worried sometimes about him spending so much time with Cheatham, who seemed to her, and many others, a very strange, withdrawn man.

  During all the times she’d left the house to visit the old church, Kate had never seen another soul. It was said that the ruin was haunted and that kept people away.

  But that evening she had two.

  The first was a ghost from a time gone and a noble cause lost.

  The moon had begun its rise and the rain clouds had gone when she heard the step of feet coming toward her through the gloom.

  Kate stood under the arch, and her eyes searched the crowding darkness.

  “Who’s there?” she called.

  She bit her lip. Probably yet another policeman, be damned to them.

  “Mrs. Kerrigan?”

  A man’s voice, low and unhurried.

  “Who is it?” Kate said.

  “If you’re Kate Kerrigan, you know who I am.”

  The darkness parted, and a figure wearing an old gray Confederate coat limped toward her.

  Kate felt a stab of excitement, not unmixed with apprehension.

  “Dear God and his Blessed Mother, Joe is it you?”

  “I’m no ghost, Mrs. Kerrigan,” the man said. “Am I not Mike Feeny, minus a leg and a cause?”

  Feeny stepped into a blade of moonlight.

  “Mike, I see it is you,” Kate said.

  “I’m not Joseph, more’s the pity. But I bring his last words to you.”

  Kate ran to the old soldier’s side.

  “Mike, I see that you are sore hurt. Did—”

  “Joe passed from day into night without pain,” Feeny said.

  He reached inside his ragged coat.

  “This is for you, Mrs. Kerrigan. I’
ve carried it this last five years and hoped one day I would find you. Then, by the grace of God, I saw you leave your house and followed you here. This is the end of the second month I’ve spent in Nashville searching for you.”

  Kate took the envelope and Feeny said, “The blood is mine.”

  “Mike, there is so much I want to ask you,” Kate said. “Will you come home with me and have a cup of tea?”

  Feeny shook his head.

  “No, I must be on my way.”

  His eyes softened and a faint smile touched his lips.

  “Joe’s letter will say all that needs to be said. And there are some things that need to remain unsaid.”

  Feeny turned away.

  “God bless you, Kate,” he said.

  Then, despite Kate’s pleas, he vanished into the darkness.

  The envelope, stained with blood, was still sealed after all the years that had passed.

  Kate hesitated to open it. She might misread Joe’s words in the faded light or drop the letter and not be able to find it again.

  But the truth was she feared to read it, lest she break down and return home with a tear-stained face and alarm the children.

  Kate shoved the envelope into the pocket of her dress for later, when the hour was late and everyone was asleep.

  Now it was time to make for home.

  Then the sound of feet rustling through brush.

  Had Mike Feeny returned?”

  “Don’t be frightened, Ma. It’s just me.”

  The voice was unmistakably Trace’s, and his tall, slender figure was coming toward her, like a gray ghost in the moonlight.

  Kate heard her son’s voice again, tinted with a smile.

  “Yes, I’m really here.”

  She gasped and then he was there.

  Trace still wore the same clothes he’d worn the day he’d gone off to work at the gun shop, and everything had gone bad.

  Perhaps he was a little more ragged, stained and dirty, and his sparse teen-years whiskers a little longer on his jaws.

  But it was Trace. This was no dream. It was him.

  Kate smiled and went to him, hugging him close and Trace doing the same to her.

  She kissed her son’s cheek, kissed him again, and tasted the salt of her tears.

  “Trace, where did you come from?”

  “I’ve not gone far, only a few miles out of town. I’ve slept in the woods, in sheds, barns. God forgive me, I even ate an apple pie that was cooling in some farm wife’s window. I’ve done well enough for myself, staying hidden. I’ve seen policemen looking for me, but they never saw me. I’m good at hiding, Mother. I’ve proven it, I think.”

  “How did you get here without being seen?” She looked around. “Did anybody see you?”

  “No, Ma. This is a fairly easy place to reach without being seen. The trees and undergrowth stretch all the way out of town, so I figured I could sneak through that way, keeping an eye out so I could hide if I needed to.”

  “How did you know I would be here?”

  “I didn’t. But I’ve known about this spot of yours for a long time now. I followed you out here a couple of times when I was twelve or thirteen, then slipped on back home without you seeing. I never stayed because I could tell this was a private place for you, and I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Oh, Trace, my son—are you hurt, sick, anything at all?”

  “No, neither sick nor hurt. And no matter what you may hear or the police may question people about, I’m innocent, too. See this bruise on my temple? It’s starting to fade a little now, but Alec Lundy gave that to me out behind the store. Hit me with a pistol because he was mad that his father had given me a special gun he’d wanted for himself.”

  Alarmed, Kate raised her hand and investigated Trace’s bruised temple in the thickening dusk light.

  “It’s fine, Ma. And I’m fine. But I was out cold when Alec and Mr. Lundy died. So I don’t know for sure how it happened. There was bad blood between them and I think they must have somehow shot each other but I can’t quite put it together in my mind.”

  Kate said, “There’s been much gossip, Trace. A doctor said Alec’s neck had been broken by a wagon wheel, and he might have died from that. But he’d been shot, too, a head wound.”

  “I was knocked out,” Trace said. “I didn’t see or hear much.”

  “They say you fled, and you had a revolver with you.”

  “I did. It’s the one I carry now, the fine Colt I showed you at the house.”

  “Is it a cursed thing, now?” Kate said.

  “Steel can’t be cursed, Ma, it has no soul. If curses there were, perhaps they were on Arthur Lundy who thought higher of me than of his own son. And on Alec who was a dark, envious and violent man.”

  “Maybe he needed killing,” Kate said. “Some men do.”

  “Well, right or wrong, Lundy gave me the pistol, and Alec came in drunk and learned of it, and that’s when the trouble started.”

  Trace outlined a brief version of what happened, as best he knew it.

  “You’re innocent, then, no question about it,” Kate said. “Is that not so, Trace?”

  “I hope you never believed anything other than that, Ma.”

  “I did not,” she said, smiling and taking his hand. “I know my children.”

  “I have to stay hidden. For the same reason I had to run away from the gunsmith shop. Because nobody is going to believe the truth.”

  Kate thought in silence a moment, then nodded.

  “I wish that was not true, but true it is,” she said. “We will keep you hidden away, Trace, until we can leave here and put this behind us.”

  “We might have to travel a long way to do that, Mother. This is suspicion of murder we’re talking about. The law won’t let this drop until they have the Lundys’ killer behind bars. It’s a serious matter.”

  “It is. And travel a long way we shall, until it has no hope of catching up to us.”

  Mother and son talked quietly until the overgrown, ragged little lot was dark, keeping an eye and ear out all the while in case anyone should come near and find them.

  Trace declared then it was time for him to slip back out of town again and find another hiding place in which to pass one more fugitive night, but Kate would have none of it.

  “It is dark, and I have traveled between home and this place enough times to know there is a way to go that is very hidden. We will get you home, and inside, and no one but folk named Kerrigan will know it. Tonight you will sleep in your own bed, son. You must be gone from it and away even before the sun comes up, but tonight you will stay at your home. This situation I must explain to the entire lot of us, and you should be there to hear it, too.”

  “Ma, I can’t even dare go in the door. I would be seen by somebody, and the police would—”

  “You do not need a door, son. Not with a strong rose trellis rising along the back of the house.”

  They made their way home again without difficulty and without detection.

  Kate left Trace loitering in the shadows at the base of the rose trellis, and quietly went in and told the children that something was about to happen that might make them want to shout, but shouting must not be done.

  Quiet was essential because there were eyes that watched them and ears that listened.

  “I am going to say something now, and I want not so much as a gasp of surprise from any of you. We cannot risk an outburst that might rouse suspicions of those who might hear.”

  “What is it, Mother?” asked Niall, the youngest boy.

  Kate leaned forward and touched her finger to her lips. “Trace is here,” she whispered.

  Ivy almost squealed, but squelched it.

  Kate smiled at her children and thanked them for holding silent. Smiles beamed all around.

  “We must continue to be quiet as Trace comes in,” she said. “No one of us would want to be responsible for our brother being dragged away by the coppers because we made noise, now, wo
uld we?”

  Heads shook with great vigor.

  “Very good, then. Now . . . quietly.”

  They went to a rear window in the bedroom shared by the boys, and at Kate’s behest, Quinn opened it gently.

  He stepped back as the trellis that reached up beside the window began to shake. Moments later, Trace was sticking a leg through the open window, followed by the rest of him.

  They hustled him to a place where no windows allowed a view in from the exterior, and Trace received more hugs and whispered welcomes than a hero of soldier returning from war.

  Kate could not hold back her tears, and soon they flowed from every eye in the dwelling.

  Trace was alive and safe, and for the moment, anyway, he was home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Kate Kerrigan called for no interruptions, then took time to read the letter from her husband by dim firelight.

  By the time she finished there were tears in her eyes but hope in her heart.

  Five years had dulled the pain of Joe’s death, but hurt there still was and it remained an open wound that would never heal.

  As it was, the Kerrigan family’s celebration was of necessity muted and did not last long. Even excessive movement of human forms to and fro past the windows might be seen as an indication of excitement within the house, and draw a patrolman’s loud knock to the door.

  But every eye had been on Kate as she read the letter, and even little Shannon, her eyes as round as coins, had said nothing until she saw her ma wipe away the last of her tears and smile.

  “What is it, Ma?” Shannon said, upset because her mother was upset.

  “I’ll tell you in a moment,” Kate said. “Come closer, children, you, too, Trace, and listen to what I have to say.”

  She looked around the circle of attentive faces, the letter held on her lap.

  “God works in mysterious ways,” she said. “And this night that miracle came in the form of an old, one-legged soldier by the name of Mike Feeny who was with your father when he died.”

  Trace was confused.

  “This evening? You mean he came here?”

  “No, to the ruined church,” Kate said. She smiled. “Two miracles on the same night and in the same place, huh, Trace?”