Susan Wiggs Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection

by Susan Wiggs

  In the distance, a bell clanged, and Nels looked over his shoulder at the settlement. “I have to go,” he said. “I got chores to do before supper.”

  “I’ll find Mr. Silver on my own,” she assured him, though she was not at all sure of herself.

  The boy slipped away to a clapboard house at the end of the rutted street. Deborah took a deep, determined breath and started to climb. It was a struggle to hold her long dress out of the way. Stumps and brambles caught at her skirts. No wonder frontierswomen wore such sturdy clothes. The moss and lichen covering the jagged rocks made for slippery going. She grasped at underbrush and tree trunks, pulling until her legs and shoulders ached.

  She couldn’t believe she was actually climbing a mountain on a wild island in the middle of nowhere. But since the night of the fire, everything that had befallen her was unbelievable, so this was no different.

  A low bush came up by the roots and she tumbled backward. Bumping violently against a huge rock, she decided she would rather read about adventures than have them. At least you knew an adventure in a book was going to end well.

  Except that there was something to be said for striking out like this, off into the unknown. True, she was scratched, sweating and terrified most of the time, but each time she took a step, each time she put one foot in front of the other, she felt a sense of accomplishment that was almost heady in its intensity.

  When she cleared the top of the rocky ridge, she nearly shouted with her victory. But what she saw there struck her mute.

  It was beautiful. Beyond beautiful. A sense of wonder broke over her. She found herself standing atop the very world, or so it seemed. From her vantage point, she could see the island’s untracked wilderness stretching out in a carpet of evergreen and changing leaves. Here and there, inland lakes glittered like mirrors. Superior, its surface on fire with the colors of sunset, embraced the island, invaded its coves and inlets. The broken shore surrounded a wilderness so enchanting that her heart caught at the sight of it.

  A feeling of complete solitude invaded her. She had never felt this way before, because she had never known a place like this existed. It was a pervasive enchantment, seeping through her; the sight of the water and the trees, the sounds of the wind and the wild birds, all drugging her with their seductiveness.

  The colors alone took her breath away. Sunset sky, blue lake, rock in every shade of black and gray, cloaked in rich orange lichen. This was a place of magic, she thought. An island so far removed from the rest of the world that she was half convinced the rest of the world did not exist.

  For some reason, it cheered her to think that way.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded a rough, angry voice.

  She nearly stumbled and fell. “Don’t startle me like that.”

  “Then don’t follow me around,” Tom Silver said.

  “Then don’t tell me terrible things and walk away without explaining them,” she shot back.

  He stood in a slant of sunlight from the west, glaring at her. Behind him lay a broad clearing, overgrown with bramble. He wore Levi’s, a plain broadcloth shirt and no hat. The wind toyed with his hair, and she could see the small wrapped lock with the eagle feather. Deborah had the same strange sensation looking at him as she’d had looking at the majestic island. Like the island, he was not threatening, but…imposing. And seductively wild.

  “I want you to tell me about your child,” she said. Then, aching for him, she added, “Please.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to understand.”

  He pivoted on a booted heel. “Follow me.”

  As usual, he didn’t look to see if she followed or if she was keeping up. When she stumbled and cried out, he didn’t turn. She didn’t resent him, though. The fact that he had lost a child explained so much about his anger and his bullying.

  Thorns and scrubby fir trees tore at her as she followed him to the center of the clearing. Before her lay a deep, rockbound pit. Blackened timbers littered the ground around it. A little beyond the scarred earth, a row of roses grew.

  “Isle Royale copper,” Tom Silver said, staring into the hole. “It’s not ore, but pure metal. Folks’ve been after it since before time was counted. There hadn’t been a working mine here since before the war. Your father wanted to be the first to make some fast money.”

  She caught her breath, beginning to understand what was coming next. “So he sent in his mining company.”

  “He wouldn’t have been the first, and he’s not going to be the last, but he got greedy. He sent in his team last spring as the claim was being surveyed.”

  “Then my father was not directly responsible.”

  “So that’s how he lives with himself? By paying other men to do his work for him, make his mistakes for him? Take the blame for him?”

  Her shoulders slumped. Silver was right. Her father was responsible no matter how far he was from the incident.

  “The islanders welcomed a new enterprise—at first,” Tom Silver continued. “They’re poor folks, loggers and fishermen. When the mining company came here with your father’s grand plan, they found a ready audience. He made promises to desperate men. They’d get rich overnight. They’d never have to work again after finding the big vein.” He shook his head. “Most had the sense not to believe him, but fifteen men and boys had their heads turned by all his talk. The team left a no-account supervisor in charge and promised bonuses if operations got under way ahead of schedule. Prizes for the first metal. They didn’t care about safety or caution or taking the time to do things right. They just cared about mining that vein.”

  A chill touched the base of her spine. Sinclair Mining had ceased operations in Lake Superior over the summer. She recalled reading a notice to that effect in the Tribune. Now she knew why. Yet her father had never spoken of any sort of disaster or tragedy. He had simply turned his attention to Sinclair Grain Futures or Sinclair Shipping or Sinclair Railways. He opened and closed enterprises like a fashionable woman trying on and discarding frocks.

  It was no way to find the permanence he sought, she reflected. He craved the “old money” way of life, yet he wanted to use new money in order to buy it. She wished he could understand that it didn’t work that way. Families that had founded themselves in the style her father craved did so by building something lasting and true.

  She had no idea when she might see her father again. She had no idea what she would say to him after this ordeal. She had no idea, she bleakly admitted to herself, how her father would react to seeing this dead place, where his enterprise had ripped a wound in the earth and ended seven lives.

  She surveyed the roses, a few of them bravely blooming despite the late season, but most barren to bald rosehips. There were seven struggling rosebushes in all. These had been planted in honor of the victims; she knew that without asking.

  “Tell me about the accident,” she said.

  “Fifteen men came forward to work. They were lured by the promise of handsome wages, bonuses, perhaps a cut of the profits. But there were no profits. Seven died in the explosion. One of the dead was Asa. He was fourteen years old.”

  Asa. A Biblical name, a name for kings. The sickness that had been pushing at the back of her throat grew more sour and urgent. She was barely able to swallow. “Mr. Silver,” she whispered, “I’m sorry about your son.”

  “He was mine, and I was his, but he was my foster son.”

  She felt herself being drawn to this man, learning to look past the hard shell of his exterior and into his heart. She had accused him of being heartless, but now she knew that wasn’t true. She had probably known it since the moment he had given up his chance to shoot her father in order to save her from the flames.

  “How did he come to be your foster son?”

  “I knew a man in the war named Kane.” Tom gazed off into the misty distance as he spoke. “He was an adjutant colonel from Michigan. Told me to visit him after the war, and I did. He had a little farm on Battle Cr
eek, fresh graves in the side yard. He’d lost his wife and daughter to the influenza, and he was pretty sick himself. He and Asa didn’t have any living relatives. When it became clear Kane wasn’t going to make it, I promised him I’d look after his boy.”

  A long silence spun out, punctuated by secretive flutterings in the bushes, and the occasional chittering of a bird. Deborah’s throat hurt with sorrow. Tom Silver’s face said everything. The depths of his eyes held all the things he would not tell her. He’d suffered a loss she couldn’t understand, yet she could feel it, a soft ache in her heart, where her mother was supposed to be.

  Silver paced restlessly to the top of the ridge where the wind caught at his too-long hair and rippled through the sleeves of his shirt. “I can’t abide broken promises,” he said.

  She didn’t have to ask him what he meant. She knew. He felt that he had failed his friend, failed to keep Asa safe.

  “You said the boy was fourteen years old. A boy of fourteen is apt to get his head turned by the prospect of fast money,” she said, knowing there was no comfort in it. “I can’t imagine what you could have said to stop him. Some people are simply driven by the lure of possibility.” Her father almost never spoke of the past, but she knew he had been on his own from a very young age. He had once remarked to her that by the age of six he was selling apples and newspapers in the streets of New York City. “I’m just sorry he was lured to the mine by my father’s company.”

  “Asa thought it sounded like one big adventure,” Tom said. His voice was eerily without inflection. “Sinclair addressed him personally, told him how he’d be the boy at the top of the shaft, working the air bellows so the miners below would have fresh air. It sounded like a picnic to a boy who had just spent the entire spring doing shore work.”

  He picked up a loose rock and flung it so far she couldn’t see where it landed. “They never even took one ounce of copper,” he said. “Sinclair’s foreman didn’t bother reinforcing the shaft, so the minute they blasted, the thing blew like a bomb in a trench.” He turned back to face the blackened, narrow pit. “I was minding the post that day, but I heard it. We all heard the explosion and went running.” His shoulders were stiff as if readying for a blow that would never come. “They said Asa was the first to die because he was at the top of the shaft.” He hesitated. “I found part of his shirt in a tree.”

  Scalding tears poured from Deborah’s eyes, running unchecked down her cheeks until, finally, her vision was too blurred and she wiped them away with her sleeve. “I don’t know what to say to you.” She’d never expected to feel sympathy for the man who had kidnaped her. She pressed her fists to her heart as if it were breaking. “You have been in hell, and I can’t help you.”

  “I never asked for your help.”

  “It’s not helping you to hold me captive, either,” she pointed out.

  He ignored the suggestion. “Your father ceased doing business as Sinclair Mining. His solicitors and claims adjustors fixed things so that no one accepted liability for the accident. No restitution was paid. Those who died were buried in paupers’ graves, and if they left families behind, their wives and kids had to fend for themselves.”

  “So that is why you wanted to kill my father.”

  “It was never a question of wanting.” He subjected her to a lengthy, narrow-eyed scrutiny that made her want to hide. “Your ransom is going to force him into bankruptcy.”

  The wind dried the tears on her cheeks. “You don’t understand my father,” she said, and it occurred to her that she didn’t understand him either. It was as if they were discussing a stranger. When she thought of her father, she pictured a handsome man with a lame leg, a parent who indulged her every whim, an ambitious social climber who wanted the world for her and would stop at nothing to get it. Now, new knowledge was transforming him into a stranger. Yes, she had always known he was an ambitious businessman, but had he truly lied and cheated just to be the first to get his mine started?

  “Do you understand him?” Tom Silver demanded.

  Deborah flinched. “Well enough to know you can’t force him into bankruptcy. He is too diversified. I can’t begin to tell you the enterprises he’s involved in. Besides, even if you took every last cent from him, he would find a way to rebuild his fortune. He is that sort of man. A survivor.” She said this without any pride. She could no longer take pride in her father’s accomplishments. “Still, he is wealthy enough to make a full restitution to every family involved in the mining disaster. Including yourself.”

  “I lost Asa, not a lifetime of income. That loss can’t be repaid in silver and gold.”

  She wondered if he knew he had already done the one thing sure to wound her father. By taking her, he had accomplished everything he had set out to do. She was her father’s hope for the future, for redemption, for respectability.

  But only if she married Philip Ascot.

  She shivered, and the evening wind skirled up from the lake, tearing pink and amber leaves from the sugar maples and rippling through the brambles.

  “Best be getting back before dark,” Tom said.

  She turned to descend the way she had come up. The dry dirt path, littered with pebbles, was slippery underfoot, and she had to catch herself on branches and rock projections as she made her way back to the settlement. The whole way down, she felt Tom Silver’s presence behind her. He never touched her, never spoke, and when they reached the bottom, it was full dark on Isle Royale.

  FOURTEEN

  Deborah Sinclair reminded Tom of a soldier in the aftermath of battle. He had been observing her furtively for days, and unlikely as it seemed, she exhibited a moody wariness that evoked memories of the war.

  She was like a battle-weary, disheartened warrior. By the light of the fire in the grate that night, her face appeared drawn, her eyes overly bright and watchful. She put him in mind of—he couldn’t believe he was thinking this—of himself, when he had been so beaten down after the battle of Kenaha Falls that he almost could not make himself take the next breath. Why did Deborah’s eyes reflect the same shock and despair?

  Of course, even the most stouthearted soldier would be stunned by the violence and devastation that had swept through Chicago that Sunday night. The holocaust had felt like the wrath of God, and Deborah, like everyone else, had witnessed horrors beyond imagining.

  A burning log fell in the grate, sending a column of sparks up the chimney. Deborah didn’t flinch. Perhaps she blinked, but that was all. She had not gone into hysterics during the fire as he had seen so many do that night. In fact, she had kept a level head about her, even rescuing a dog and keeping it safe. Tom began to wonder if her nervousness stemmed from another matter.

  Maybe, he conceded, getting up to put another log on the fire, he might be misreading her altogether. Perhaps it was normal for a young woman like Deborah Sinclair to act so damned jittery. He had never met an heiress before. It was peculiar being alone without Lightning Jack around to act as a buffer. He had loaded his trawler with barrels of salt fish and gone off on the Duluth run.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked suddenly.

  He hadn’t realized she’d noticed his pensive stare. “Just wondering if all your kind are as jumpy as you seem to be.”

  “And what, pray, is ‘my kind’?”

  “High-strung, overbred heiresses.”

  “Is that what you think I am?”

  “If the shoe fits.”

  She didn’t say anything at first. Then she said, “So you think I’m jumpy. High-strung.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you have no idea why?”

  “I was thinking it might be the fire, but you kept your head about you that night.”

  She looked incredulous. “I’ve been kidnaped and dragged to the middle of nowhere. I have no idea what has become of my friends, my family, my home, my entire world. Do you wonder that I might seem a bit nervous?”

  “I thought that was the explanation,” he conceded. “But I was wro
ng.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something else is bothering you. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  She patted her lap, inviting the dog to jump up. “Your feelings are wrong, then. I’m sure my nerves will be just fine once you return me to…where I belong.”

  He frowned at the slight hesitation in her voice. “And where do you reckon you belong? That fancy house on Huron Avenue? That finishing school on the lake?”

  “How did you know about Miss Boylan’s?”

  “I heard you telling Lightning Jack. So where do you belong, Princess?”

  “Why do you ask? Are you planning on taking me there?”

  “If your father knows what’s good for you, he’ll come soon and take you there himself.”

  A strange, humorless laugh escaped her.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “It’s just an odd coincidence. My father and I were discussing what is good for me the very night you…burst upon our lives so dramatically.”

  He could tell from her inflection that she and her father had not been in agreement. “Did you and Sinclair have some petty spat about the proper fish knife to use or what to wear to the latest musicale?”

  She went stiff and hard with indignation. “You can’t imagine that a person like me might actually have concerns of importance, can you?” she asked softly, her hand stroking the dog’s head.

  “Woman, you can’t even answer a simple question.”

  “And you can’t even have a civil conversation.” She put down the dog, shot up from the wooden settle and paced back and forth on the hearth rug. “Mr. Silver, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that I can say to begin to comfort you for your loss. What happened in the mine pit was a tragedy no words could ever address. But I will promise you this. Treating me with cruelty will not assuage the hurt of losing Asa.”

  “Cruelty?” Amazed, he spread his hands in innocence. “All I did was ask you a few questions. It’s not my fault you refuse to answer them.”