A Deadly Shaker Spring (13 page)

“D
ADDY, YOU PROMISED YOU'D PLAY WITH ME TONIGHT
. You
promised
.” Rickie Worthington pouted like the spoiled six-year-old he was.

His father forgave the pout and the tiny lie—Worthington had not promised to play that evening—as he forgave his child everything. Instead, he noted with complacency the boy's aggressive stance, chubby legs planted apart, fists on hips. The effect was enhanced by the surroundings, Richard Worthington's study, decorated as a man's smoking room. Worthington sat in one of two leather chairs, which glowed in the light of a fire stoked up to ward off the damp evening chill. His cigar smoldered in a glass dish on a carved cherry-wood table between the chairs. He inhaled the pungent smoke, the aroma of power.

“Daddy's a very busy man, Rickie. I have an important meeting tonight.” Worthington spoke in the gentle tone he used only with his son.

“Can I come? Please, Daddy?”

“No, Rickie, but soon. I promise.”

Rickie distorted his face into an angry frown. “I don't want to wait. I want to go tonight.”

“I said ‘soon,' Rickie.” A stern edge crept into
Worthington's voice, though his son's childish command pleased him as much as it irritated him.

The family's fat, orange tabby sauntered into the room, distracting the boy. He grabbed the cat around the middle and squeezed it to his chest. Used to such treatment, the tabby went limp, biding his time, then squirmed free and fled the room when Rickie momentarily loosened his grip. The boy giggled and raced after it.

Worthington watched his son's retreating figure. The boy would do well. He had the drive to conquer, you could see that just by the way he went after that cat. Worthington turned to his mirror to give his tie a final tug.

“You're meeting with
them
again, aren't you?” Frances Worthington watched her husband from the same stance her son had recently struck, hands on hips. Unlike Rickie, though, she remained in the open doorway, knowing she wasn't welcome in this male sanctum.

Worthington eyed his wife critically. The pose that had looked so admirable on Rickie made her look like a nagging fishwife, if an ineffective one with her slight figure and small-featured face.

“You know how much I hate it when you've been with those people. You come home all riled up, and sometimes I think you're going to kill somebody. It scares me, and it isn't good for Rickie to see you like that.”

Worthington shrugged into his custom-tailored coat and gathered up some papers from his desk, ignoring his wife.

“Well, I don't want you upsetting Rickie anymore,”
Frances said, her voice traveling up the scale to peevish. “Last time he couldn't get back to sleep for hours after you came home slamming doors. If you must go, I want you to promise to come home quietly—Richard, are you listening to me? Quietly! And I heard you promise to take him along soon. I want you to stop that. I don't ever want him near those people.”

Worthington whirled around, his eyes glittering with cold anger.

“
Never
tell me where I may take my son, do you understand? Never.”

“He's my son, too.” But the life had left her voice and she backed into the hallway.

Sensing victory, Worthington relaxed. He strode past Frances, barely bending to toss a kiss somewhere near her cheek.

He felt her eyes on him as he followed the long hallway to the foyer. He squared his shoulders as he passed under a portrait of his grandfather, one of several hanging in prominent spots throughout the twenty-room mansion. Other portraits of ancestors dating back to well before 1860, when the house was built, graced the remaining walls.

But there were no pictures of Worthington's mother, his grandfather's only child. Worthington's jaw tightened as the thought of his mother flitted through his mind. He'd loved her, in his own way, though he couldn't imagine that she had loved him back—not as fiercely as he loved Rickie. He could never willingly have given up his son to be raised by strangers.

And Frances was his wife, the mother of his child—even
if they weren't in love the way he'd once thought they were. He wanted her to understand. Pulling his hand back from the front-door handle, he turned to face her.

“Do you really think I'd do violence to anyone, Fanny? Is that what you think of me?” Frances lowered her eyes. “I only want to right the wrong that was done to me, to my family—for Rickie and you as much as me.” He sighed and swiveled back to the front door. “Fanny, we've been over and over this. It's got to be done. I've got to set things right.”

By the time Richard Worthington knocked on the front door of the run-down brick colonial, he'd run through all the arguments again in his head, and he'd reached the same conclusion as always. He was right to do this. There was some risk. If he got caught, it would mean the end of his banking career, maybe even worse. It wasn't worth doing for hatred alone, though his hatred fueled his determination. No, it was for Rickie. Securing Rickie's future was worth any amount of risk.

The old house had once been a speakeasy and still had a tiny peephole in the door. Worthington heard the hinged cover squeak twice as it was moved aside and then swung back into place. Caleb Cox opened the door enough for Worthington to squeeze past him into the dark hallway. He didn't greet Caleb. The man was a pathetic drunk, a weak link.

Worthington made directly for the kitchen, also dark. He knew the house well. He'd foreclosed on it, and it had stood empty until recently. As far as the bank was concerned, it was still uninhabited.

Worthington entered the dark kitchen and ignored the light switch. The electricity was off, anyway. Instead he followed the dim outline of an old wood cooking stove to a door leading to the basement. All the light and activity in the house were downstairs. Black curtains covered the small, high basement windows, and dozens of candles supplemented the oil lamps. A large printing press dominated one side of the room. Fresh flowers always sweetened the air in Worthington's own home, and he wrinkled his nose at the harsh odors of cheap candle wax, printer's ink, and underground mustiness.

Across the room, three men and one woman sat in a circle. He took his place in one of the two empty chairs. Moments later, Caleb Cox slipped into the other one. Worthington knew three of the gathering from his youth, when they had all lived at North Homage. The other two, Floyd Foster and Ned Bergson, were not former Shakers but merely businessmen hoping to eliminate Shaker competition. The Shaker apostate who ran the group didn't want Floyd and Ned to be able to identify him. He and his wife went by the names of Kentuck and Laura Hill. Worthington thought the subterfuge doomed, but the fool had his reasons. If some of the older Shakers knew the two of them were in town, they'd suspect immediately who was behind the persistent attacks on North Homage. Since it was in Worthington's best interests, he had agreed to call them only by their assumed names, even to himself.

The man everyone had been instructed to call “Kentuck” leaned into the circle, his fists planted on his knees. His round belly rolled forward and rested
on his thighs. Flickering candlelight reflected off the balding spot on the top of his head. Worthington barely hid his distaste.

“We'll have the reports first,” Kentuck said, as if he were running a business meeting. “Caleb?”

Caleb straightened from his habitual slouch and cleared his throat.
Half drunk
, Worthington thought.

“Fine, everything's just fine,” Caleb said. “Sarah's been a real trooper, did just what I said, even though it—” Caleb twitched and shot a nervous glance at the group leader.

The woman called Laura leaned forward and her angular face sharpened. “What? What do you mean, Caleb? Has something gone wrong?” Her high, squeaking voice grated on Worthington's ears. To him, she looked more like a spinster schoolteacher, and he couldn't understand why she didn't make more effort to sound like one. It would help her stand up to that husband of hers.

“Shut up, Laura,” her husband snapped. “Everything has gone exactly as I—as we—planned. We've got those Shakers confused and scared now. When they see what's in store for them next, they'll crack.”

“Just so long as it isn't Sarah who cracks first,” she said, her voice growing shrill. “I told you not to use her. I warned you not to give her that journal page. Now she knows too much.”

“That's enough. One more word and you are excused from this meeting. We don't need you, anyway.”

They locked eyes like old enemies. A candle wick sputtered and dissolved into a spiral of smoke. No one stirred. Finally, her gaze fell to her lap. He smirked
in triumph and nodded to Caleb to continue.

“As I said, Sarah's been true blue, and she's set to do her part,” Caleb said. His eyes darted nervously around the group. “I gotta say something, though. There ain't no call for no one to go hurting Sarah. She done what she was supposed to the other morning, took care of the dog and all. It ain't fair to her. She's all upset because she didn't know the meat she gave to the dog was fixed up to knock him out. And then she gets knocked out, too. She coulda got killed.”

“Whatever happened to Sarah had nothing to do with us, Caleb,” Kentuck said. “As I hear it, she tripped and fell down the stairs. An accident, surely.”

Worthington, too, wondered how the “accident” happened. It hadn't been part of the original plan. Did someone besides himself have a separate, secret plan? He studied the faces around him. Caleb glared defiantly at Kentuck, who frowned back. Laura stared stonily at the floor. The others looked confused and embarrassed.

“I also heard that Sarah has recovered well, right?” Kentuck asked.

“Well as could be expected,” Caleb said.

“Good. Then we'll carry on. Just one question, though. That eldress, Sister Rose, somehow she got hold of a copy of our first
Watcher
. You know anything about that, Caleb?”

“No, sir, not me. Not a chance. I ain't that dumb.”

Worthington hid the arrogant smile he felt. Caleb may have been a moderately bright kid once, but the war and years of drink had wiped that out. He wondered, as he had before, why the older apostate used
Caleb as a go-between. Sure, they had been friends of a sort back when they had all lived in North Homage—at least, they had seemed to confer a lot in those days. Didn't Kentuck remember how unpredictable Caleb could be? Of course, he'd also make a perfect patsy should anything go wrong.

He felt the leader's eyes on him. “What's the news from your end, Richard?”

Worthington crossed his legs and watched the candlelight catch the high shine of his expensive shoes.

“I've made all the necessary preparations,” he said. He had no intention of revealing to this mangy group the details of his late nights of careful calculations, and changes in bank records that would give them the upper hand with those Shakers.

“If it comes to that, we can foreclose quickly and easily. I'm assuming, of course, that actual foreclosure will be unnecessary, if the rest of you succeed in your plans.” Worthington wanted to distance himself from their scheme as much as possible.

“We will succeed,” Kentuck said. “But we need to be prepared for anything. Floyd and Ned, are you set for the gathering tomorrow evening?”

The two men nodded. “I've got my lines learned real good,” Floyd said. He looked ready to leap up and demonstrate, but Kentuck only nodded and riffled through a few pages of notes.

“All right,” he said, “The next issue of the
Watcher
goes to press tonight. We've got people riled up enough about those Shakers so we'll get a good showing tomorrow night.” He raised his head and narrowed his eyes at the circle of listeners. “But it's important the Shakers not cotton on to what's happening
in Languor. Everybody understand?” Heads nodded, except for Worthington, who raised an eyebrow. The apostate leader's folksy style amused him. It wasn't real, just another role developed for this setting and audience. Even back in North Homage, Worthington had found him puzzling. He had seemed a devout Shaker, then he had left so suddenly, right around the time Worthington himself had finally gotten free, shortly after his mother died.

“Those Shakers are clever, especially that new eldress. If she catches on and starts contradicting us, folks'll get confused. They won't know who to believe,” Kentuck said. Heads nodded again.

“Now, that
Watcher
will be ready by three
A.M
. Caleb will pick them up for distribution—”

If he can sober up by then, Worthington thought.

“—and you'll all give copies to the parties we've listed in your assigned parts of town. We have to work fast but real quiet. Don't leave any copies out for the wrong folks to see. Warn people not to talk about the contents to anyone who is real friendly with the Shakers. Most folks won't get involved, but there's a few might take the trouble to call over to North Homage if they got wind of our meeting.”

Worthington couldn't contain himself any longer. “Do you really think the Shakers won't find out about this? They seemed to know about the first
Watcher
almost as soon as it came off the presses. Obviously, they have efficient sources of information. They probably have spies all over. All they care about is their own survival.” Worthington made himself pause. He had his own plans for survival. No need to give too much away.

Kentuck rolled back in his chair and laced his fingers over his skin-tight vest. “We all agree with you, of course, Richard,” he said. “They've likely got spies all over. Getting rid of the whole lot is the best thing we could do for this town, and I'm betting most folks will agree with us when they hear what we have to say. So, I'm thinking it's worth the risk of them finding out.”