A Study in Revenge
Page 38
He paused when he reached the corner of the reservoir. From atop the wall, quite a distance from Lean, came urgent voices. After a moment Lean’s eyes picked out the dark shape of Jason Webster, equally far away. The man was scrambling, unsteadily, up the slope of the embankment. Webster was only halfway up the side when the whole ground shuddered. A loud boom shook the air. Lean kept his feet under him but watched Jason Webster get pitched back through the night to land and tumble head over heels down the slope.
As the rumble subsided, Lean heard Grey’s voice shout something. He rushed forward in the darkness.
AFTER SHOUTING HIS warning to Lean, Grey had turned and raced back along the base of the reservoir wall. Ahead of him the runner covered the last few yards of open space to reach the corner of the reservoir close to Walnut Street. The figure was dressed like a laborer, but short and slight. If he hadn’t known that Phebe was disguised, he might have been fooled. Grey was only halfway along the base of the wall, and she was already at the corner, climbing the steps chiseled into the hard-packed earth embankment. Grey veered to his right, trying to use his momentum to carry him up the slope of the reservoir’s outer wall. After a few lunging paces, he leaned forward and continued scrambling upward on all fours, thrusting with his legs, scratching and clawing with his hands.
He gained the level edge atop the wall and pulled himself onto the five-foot-wide surface that ran along the entire course of the reservoir. He glanced to his right, assuming that Phebe had already raced past, headed to the northeast corner, but that way was empty. Grey turned back to his left, surprised at the sight of her bent down and handling some small contraption hidden from his view. It made no sense; he’d misjudged the location of the dynamite. Phebe was too close to the street. There were houses nearby, far too close for any sudden release of the reservoir’s water. He sprinted forward.
“Don’t!” he yelled.
Phebe looked up, paused, and then her right arm made a sudden movement. Grey saw a small spark near the ground. He watched her stand as he slid to a halt on the gravelly pathway. He was still five or six strides from her. His mind hadn’t settled on what exactly to expect, but it wasn’t this, an eerie stillness. A long second passed, then another.
Phebe turned back to the steps. Grey started toward her. The device may have malfunctioned, he could still disconnect it. In his second step forward, the ground jumped. A sound like a cannon blast filled Grey’s ears as he fell to his side. He landed on his right knee, perilously close to falling into the reservoir. The broad expanse of water that had been deathly still now rippled angrily. Grey looked for Phebe. She’d fallen face-first on the pathway but was starting to get up.
The blast had been forceful but not devastating. It didn’t feel strong enough to puncture all the way through the wide embankment. Maybe it was only meant to weaken the wall after all, to force the city to drain the unsafe reservoir, and thus provide access to the bottom and the imagined treasure lying beneath. Even as he exhaled, Grey realized that made no sense. Phebe’s plans wouldn’t be satisfied by a small explosion. She’d already admitted to increasing the intended blast. Euripides Webster’s words, the day at the granite quarry, came shooting back into Grey’s mind. Not a single explosion but a series of smaller bursts, expertly placed, could inflict the same amount of power as a single, large blast.
“Hold on!” he called out to Phebe.
A second explosion, larger than the first, sent earth flying in all directions. Grey felt something strike his head even as the force of the blast lifted him off his feet. He twisted in the air, then landed, splashing into cool darkness. He tumbled under the surface, taking in a mouthful of water before his head emerged into the night air. The world spun around him as he struggled to fill his lungs and orient himself.
His eyes focused on the cloud of dust that hovered over the site of the second explosion. The air was slowly clearing. Phebe would be off to the side. She was there, edging forward on her hands and knees. Only a few yards separated Grey from the inside wall of the reservoir. But he could see a thin seam, an opening created in the wall in front of him. He aimed for a spot off to his right, closer to where Phebe was heading. His arms flailed, and though he was sure he was kicking his legs strongly, they seemed oddly heavy and slow in the water. He stared ahead, trying to focus on his target along the embankment. He just had to reach it.
Dark, blurry spots appeared in Grey’s field of vision, and he hoped it was only the water dripping into his eyes. His outstretched hand scraped against a hard surface, and he grasped for the wall. Fortunately, it wasn’t a straight vertical surface. The wall sloped away, the same as on the outside of the reservoir. Grey lunged forward, his hands finding purchase on the dry earth atop the wall. To his left, Phebe had risen to her knees and was trying to stand. In his confusion Grey had somehow managed to swim past her, moving farther down the wall than he’d intended. As he strained to pull himself up, a third blast rocked the embankment. Grey lost his grip and slid back into the water but managed to keep his head above the surface. Clumps of rock and earth rained down around him. One struck him on the upper arm, but nothing worse followed. He dug his shoe tips into the wall and pushed himself forward again, dragging himself up out of the water.
The effort was almost too much. The world darkened and swirled before his eyes for several seconds as he lay on his stomach. He pressed his hands into the flat embankment, drawing some sense of stability from the packed dirt. Above the thin, buzzing sound that filled his ears, Grey thought he heard muffled shouts and distant screams.
He brought himself up to his elbows and looked ahead on the top of the embankment.
Phebe was only five feet in front of him. A scattered layer of dirt had fallen over her back. She wasn’t moving.
“Phebe!” Grey’s own voice sounded far from him.
He listened for a response. The buzzing sound was being overtaken by a new one, a heavy, rushing sound. Then he noticed, below and off to his right, a wall of water cascading down the outside of the embankment. He looked toward the ground, expecting to see the grassy field lit faintly in the moonlight. Instead the whole area was swirling and churning in a frothy, raging mass.
Grey looked past Phebe. Behind her the embankment had fallen away on both sides of the blast site. Even as he watched, the breach continued to grow, widening in a V shape. The force of the twenty million gallons of water trying to rush over itself and escape the reservoir was undeniable. The top of the wall crumbled, washing away like a sand castle caught in the undertow of a receding wave. As the gap in the wall grew, the roar of the rushing water increased in Grey’s mind. He might as well have been beneath the ocean trying to hear over the waves.
The path atop the embankment fell away in chunks that left Phebe’s feet hanging over the lip of the evaporating wall. Grey lunged toward her and grabbed her by the wrist. The contact roused Phebe; her head moved. She looked around, and her eyes found Grey, who was also lying flat but trying to pull himself backward and drag her with him.
He stared into her eyes and shouted, “We have to move! Come on!”
Phebe had lost the wide-brimmed hat of her disguise. A line of blood ran down from her forehead. Her eyes were glazed and uncomprehending. Her lips moved, but the raging water flooding out of the reservoir swallowed her voice.
Grey read her lips: Perceval, help me.
He lurched backward, trying to pull her toward him, but he had no leverage in his prone position and her body was like deadweight. Still holding her wrist, he forced himself up to one knee and got the other foot beneath him. He grabbed hold of her arm with his other hand and tugged. She started to slide toward him. Then the wall gave out beneath her legs and abdomen. Her body dropped away over the side. The force of the water pulling on her almost yanked Grey forward as well. He fell back into a sitting position and dug his heels in on either side of Phebe, still grasping her wrist. The breach atop the wall kept moving toward him, inch by inch, and with every passing moment Phebe
dipped lower into the rushing water. It splashed around and over her, making Grey’s grip wet. She started to slip from his grasp. Her nails dug into his flesh.
His eyes remained locked on her as he struggled to pull her close.
Help me!
He saw the scream pass through her lips. In the moonlight her eyes, dazed before, now seemed perfectly clear, endlessly deep, and locked onto his as she fell from his hand. Her face hovered there for an immeasurable instant, then disappeared, engulfed by the raging waters.
Pieces of the wall gave way beneath Grey’s legs. He threw his body backward, fell onto his side, and rolled for several turns. As he got up onto all fours, he looked down into the avalanche of water. He could hear faint sounds of piercing screams and shouts filling the air. Phebe? He knew it wasn’t her. Lean: Where was Lean?
To his side all was chaos. Millions of gallons of water, black in the night, rushed forward in an endless torrent. What should have been solid ground was a seething, hurtling cauldron. He looked just above it, and for a moment his mind didn’t grasp what he saw. Large, blocky shapes floated above the water yet were a part of it all: houses. The few homes that lined Walnut Street were being consumed. They’d been two-story buildings before, but now the water and driving mud had risen in a wall to engulf the first floor of each
Grey looked away. He reached ahead, felt dry gravel and dirt beneath his fingertips, and clawed at it, pulling himself onward. He had no idea if he was beyond the danger of the wall’s collapse. The world spun uncontrollably before his eyes; he knew only that he had to keep moving. Desperate cries cut through the water, swirling about in Grey’s mind as he yielded his last tether to the conscious world. The ground seemed to fall away beneath him. There was darkness, heavy and tumbling, and then nothingness.
[ Chapter 57 ]
THE HOSPITAL ROOM WAS DIM, THE CURTAINS DRAWN TO keep out the late-afternoon sun. The weak light and the nature of the news he was about to impart caused Lean’s voice to drop to an almost confessional tone. “A young man from one house, though he was found inside the second. His father says he’d rushed in there to help get the neighbors out. But there wasn’t time. A woman and her two daughters were home in the second place. They never had a chance.”
Lean felt the unpleasant knot in his gut that he always felt when delivering this type of news to a victim’s family. He wasn’t quite sure why he felt it now, passing the information along to Grey. From his hospital bed, Grey watched Lean’s face as he spoke, then stared straight ahead. It wasn’t the first time Lean had ever wondered what was going on in the man’s mind, only this time he was concerned for Grey.
A bandage was wrapped around Grey’s head; he’d taken a cut near his left temple. The man’s expression remained flat. Lean couldn’t tell if he was just being his regular less-than-emotional self or if he was actually struggling to comprehend the full extent of what he’d just heard. The doctor had informed Lean, upon arrival, that Grey had taken quite a blow from the explosion and was likely to suffer lingering effects for several days.
“There’s to be a full inquiry into the collapse of the reservoir, I assume,” Grey said in a quiet voice.
“Not by the police. Euripides Webster has been busy. He’s on very amiable terms with at least half the city council. They’re very sympathetic to his tragic loss and listening to everything he has to say: that it’s such a horrific and unexplainable coincidence that his brother and niece just happened to be passing the reservoir at that time. He’s vowed to extend some rather generous charity to the families of the innocent victims in the houses that were destroyed.” Lean’s voice grew more sarcastic as he continued. “He’s even willing to pay to have engineers examine the reservoir and determine the possible construction flaw that led to this disaster. If he can understand how this senseless tragedy happened, it might just take some of the anguish away.”
“Most kind of him. The part about the charitable assistance anyway.” Grey’s tone was genuine and subdued compared to Lean’s. “I’m sure his engineers will be able to find evidence of structural defects to blame for the failure of the wall. All of it a small price to pay to keep his family’s name unblemished.”
“Glad to see you haven’t suffered any great damage to your reasoning faculties after all.”
“Any problems with your bosses, the marshal or Mayor Baxter?” Grey asked. “How did you explain your presence? And mine?”
“Mayor’s not any particular friend of Webster’s, but he’s not eager to turn a horrible tragedy into a major scandal. Especially if no good would come of doing it. And I can’t see how it would. As for my being there, I told them the truth of it: I was supposed to meet an anonymous witness who might have seen Cosgrove get shot. You were there at my request.” Lean dug out a cigarette and put it in his mouth.
“As for the events of the evening, I have no proof that Jason Webster was there for any nefarious purpose. He never actually said anything of the sort to me. The marshal and the mayor have both agreed to accept that the man may have been there innocently and mistaken me for an armed assailant.”
“Very convenient,” Grey said. “And I take it you’re also willing to overlook the fact that this explosion was intended to murder you as well?”
Lean looked down at Grey with a mix of bewilderment and suspicion that the man was perhaps drifting into a confused state. “Me? What are you on about?”
Grey motioned to a small table beside his hospital bed. “There—inside the drawer. I had Mrs. Philbrick collect certain documents from my rooms and bring them here for safekeeping. Look inside. There’s a photograph.”
Lean opened the drawer and removed a folder. He pulled out a photograph of a young woman. He’d never seen the picture before. It was the one that Attorney Dyer had provided to Grey upon his acceptance of Horace Webster’s request to locate his missing granddaughter. When Lean’s eyes finally left the photograph, they were wide with disbelief.
“That’s her—the woman from Cushing’s Island last summer. Whitten’s crazed accomplice. The one who set herself on fire!”
“Madeline Webster,” Grey announced, his voice still restrained. “She was one of Marsh’s acolytes. And Jack Whitten’s mysterious female accomplice. The redheaded woman on the island and, I do believe, the same redheaded woman we briefly spied last year at the Salem train depot when we chased that impostor to his death.”
“My God, I believe you’re right. So that’s what you’d been doing, visiting all those cemeteries. You knew that the sister was dead all along?
“I had a suspicion.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Did Phebe Webster know any of this? Do you suppose it had any part in explaining her actions at the reservoir?”
Grey quickly summarized what Phebe had confessed to him about her sister’s connection to Marsh, Jason Webster’s role in getting the younger sister involved with Marsh’s occult society, and Phebe’s obsession with taking revenge on everyone involved with Madeline’s death—Lean included.
“She figured that all their digging in basements would come to naught. Eventually they’d have to look under the only other site owned by Old Tom Webster.”
“The pastureland on Munjoy Hill where the reservoir now stands,” Lean said. “No way to dig unless they could force it to be drained first.”
“I believe that was the original intent, only to weaken the wall, to present a danger that would require it be emptied, at least temporarily. Then Marsh could search for Count de St. Germain’s alembic, the key to the philosopher’s stone. But Phebe Webster supplemented the dynamite. She wanted a massive explosion. Lured her uncle there for the blast to kill him and do enough other damage to ensure an investigation that would incriminate Marsh.”
“At the risk of taking innocent lives—madness,” Lean said with a shake of his head. “How long did you know about her?”
“I was never entirely sure—until the end, that is. That’s why I never mentioned her possible involvement.”
“I am absolutely certain that no such item is buried anywhere near the reservoir. Marsh and Jason’s idea to drain the reservoir and gain access to such a mechanism was completely unfounded.”
“What if it wasn’t, though?” Lean suggested. “Wouldn’t that be something? A little device that … what? You put in lead or what have you and out comes gold dust. A lifetime of riches and an endless lifetime to spend it. Quite tempting.”
“Yes, even to a man like yourself. One who, under normal circumstances, is levelheaded. More or less. And so we see the full extent of the danger. There’s no firm proof that any such device ever existed. Just a bunch of wishes, lies, and rumors. Yet how many have died because of the ridiculous hope that it might be true? Even the idea of this thing is too deadly to be allowed to spread.”
“Well, Jason Webster’s out of the running now. But Jotham Marsh is still lurking about. And he obviously believes it. I don’t like the idea of that man walking around, free to carry out more of his schemes. Phebe Webster wasn’t wrong to say he’s at least partly to blame for several deaths. Including hers, after a manner.”
Lean’s mouth drew tight, and his brow furrowed. “Did you really not know before the end? Were you hoping Phebe Webster wasn’t involved in all this? Or did you suspect the truth, only you thought you could save her from her own madness? If you could have stopped her sooner.”