The Hostage

Chapter Four

His head pounded like a fist-sized heartbeat. The ringing agony made him want to puke.

The woman with the yellow hair stood like Joan of Arc over him. Her image blurred and melted around the edges, and for a moment he thought he was going blind from the blow to the head. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again and let out a shuddering breath. His vision was sharp and clear once again, but he didn’t like what he saw. The woman’s mouth formed a red O of abject horror. This was no Joan of Arc. He could see the uncertainty flickering in her eyes, could practically read her mind. Should she scream and alert Sinclair, or keep mum so he could get away?

“Go ahead and holler for him,” he said, letting go of her dress and giving her a shove. “You’d be doing me a favor.” She stumbled back against the stairs, lost her footing and fell like a broken doll, sinking in a puffy tangle of skirts.

Standing up, he grabbed the newel post as his vision swam and reeled. He forced himself to focus on his goal: retrieve the pistol, pursue Sinclair, shoot him dead.

His boots crunched over shards of broken glass as he crossed the checkerboard floor. Bad shot. The woman had slammed into him at the precise moment he had squeezed the trigger. Damned revolver. Five-shooters were for killing folks, and until now that had never been his business.

Aware of the woman scrambling to her feet behind him, he bent, staggering with dizziness, and scooped up the Colt. Then he ran after Sinclair down a narrow hallway. A back door gaped open to the service alley behind the house.

He stepped out into an inferno. Every rooftop in sight was in flames. A brooding burnt orange stained the smoke-laden sky. Flaming debris flew in a hot blizzard over the city. A brickwork wall along the side of the alley had sustained a huge crack, and great chunks of brick and mortar rained down into the narrow roadway.

Arthur Sinclair had climbed to the box of a phaeton and sat holding the leather ribbons. There was no driver in sight. Sinclair had clearly been expecting the blond woman to follow him out of the house, for his face registered alarm when he saw Tom rather than the woman.

Tom strode toward him. There was no time for the confrontation he had envisioned during the voyage to Chicago. Sinclair would never know exactly what his connection to Tom was, what crime he would die for. No matter. Let the bastard burn in hell on general principle.

Tom stepped to the middle of the alleyway and raised the five-shooter, holding it steady with both hands. The roaring heat of the fire stole his breath. His world narrowed to a florid-faced, well-fed Arthur Sinclair viewed over the notch of a pistol.

“See you in hell, you son of a bitch,” Tom said in a voice he knew was too low to be heard. Just as he tightened his forefinger around the trigger, he caught a glimpse of the woman running out of the building.

Above her, a huge section of the roof gave way. A tarred sheet of flame wafted down over the unsuspecting blond head.

Tom swore between his teeth, moving even as he spoke. He lunged at the woman, knocking her out of the way just as the burning roof crashed down upon the spot where she had been standing. Beams and timbers rained down, filling the narrow alleyway. The wind shifted, and a geyser of sparks erupted. The horses reared and whistled in panic. The carriage surged forward, racing out of control.

Holding fast to the reins of the runaway team was Arthur Sinclair. Flaming debris filled the alley behind the cart, forming a giant pyramid of fire. The cracked wall across the way crumbled with a crash of dust and rubble.

The entire rear section of the house teetered on the brink of collapse. The service alley was impassable, and so was the house itself. Tom’s only option was to go in the opposite direction and hope the narrow roadway cut through to the main thoroughfare.

He barely thought of the woman, this shrieking blond banshee who had cost him his chance at revenge. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her to her feet, pulling her out of the way of burning wreckage. Only after he had dragged her to safety did his mind register the word she kept screaming over and over.

Father.

Deborah wrenched her arm this way and that, but the wild man held her fast. She kicked out, stubbing her feet on his iron-hard legs. He didn’t even flinch. It was like fighting a wall of solid rock.

The murderer was a force of nature, as determined and unstoppable as the marching fire she and her father had so foolishly underestimated.

Father.

Dear God, what would become of him? Her last glimpse had been of a runaway phaeton with its canvas hood in flames. Now the wild man was dragging her off in the opposite direction. “Please,” she sobbed, unable to keep from pleading. “Please, let me go. I’ve done nothing to hurt you.”

He thrust his gun in its hip holster and stalked on, showing no indication that he heard her.

“I can pay you.” She tried to claw off her blue topaz bracelet. “Take my jewelry.”

“Lady, I don’t want your damned jewelry,” he said between his teeth. The alley angled to the left. He hauled her down the center of it as stinging sparks rained down on them.

Deborah dug in her heels and leaned back, rebelling with every ounce of strength she possessed. Admittedly, that was not much, but fright and fury added power to her resistance. She had never before fought anyone for any reason.

“Woman, I’ll drag you if I have to,” her captor said, barely slowing his pace. “Your choice.”

Her strength ebbed fast, and she went limp. Before she crumpled completely to the cinder-strewn pavement, he caught her against his rough, smoky buckskin chest. “Damn it,” he said between clenched teeth. “You can come with me, or stay here and burn. What’ll it be?”

“I’d rather burn in hell than go with you.”

“Fine.” He let go of her.

She staggered back, catching herself before she collapsed. The heat from the inferno battered her head. Sparks and cinders rained down from every rooftop. She could smell the scent of burning hair, could see small blackened holes appear in her full skirts. With the fringe of her shawl, she beat out a glowing ember. Casting a frantic glance backward, she could see nothing of the mansion that had been her father’s house, nothing but rubble shrouded in a thick fog of eye-smarting smoke. On both sides of her, the buildings burned out of control, turning the alley into a tunnel of fire. Her throat and lungs filled with hot smoke.

In the roadway ahead, Paul Bunyan marched heedlessly forward, not even looking back to watch her burn like a martyr. She hated that he didn’t look back. She hated him for not looking back. Most of all, she hated having no choice but to flee the fire in one direction—toward her captor. After last night, Deborah reflected, she had not been able to stop shivering. She had pulled the covers over her head and, lying in the dark, reflected that she had reached the bottom of a black pit of despair. Now that she found herself confronted by a crazed murderer, she was beginning to think there were worse things than that pit.

When she reached his side, choking and sputtering on smoke and outrage, he barely acknowledged her except to seize her by the arm and yank her roughly along with him. She tried to demand what he wanted from her, what malice he bore her, but she was coughing too hard.

They emerged onto the main street, and finally she grasped the full force of the conflagration. A river of humanity flowed along the street, bobbing and surging forward like boiling rapids. She called to passersby for help, but no one responded. They were all too preoccupied with their own survival. Besides, the fire blazed with a deafening roar that made it seem almost alive. Deborah coughed and wheezed, starving for a breath of air. She staggered with dizziness, and only the oak-hard arm of her abductor held her up. Rushing people, smoke, cinders, flaming buildings, explosions—all filled her senses. But as she was pulled along, her larger view of the crowd narrowed and focused down to individual and heartbreaking detail. A mother holding a screaming baby and running down the street. A child standing on a street corner, turning in circles and crying until someone grabbed him and hurried off. A single shoe in the gutter. A tired old rag doll underfoot. Everywhere she looked, she saw the horrifying evidence of loss and destruction. A drunken man stood atop a piano, declaring the fire the friend of the poor man and exhorting people to help themselves to liquor. A thrown bottle struck him, and he stumbled and fell.

Armageddon had arrived, she thought. And Satan himself had come to escort her through the flames. To what purpose, she had no idea. Terror swept through her with the same swift and unrelenting fury of the firestorm.

Caught up in the flow of humanity, they surged with the crowd past grand buildings and residences with flames shooting out of the windows. Bundles of blankets were being dropped from upper storeys. To her horrified amazement, she realized that the hastily bound bundles of mattresses and bedding contained valuables. And some of them, insanely, contained children.

A little girl in a red nightgown fought her way free of one of the bundles and raced blindly into the street, wailing in terror. Panic-stricken, she headed into the path of a careening express wagon.

The wild man made a sound of impatience. He dropped Deborah’s arm and plunged into the middle of the road, snatching up the child with a single bear-paw swipe. Moving quickly for a creature of such immense size, he bore the crying child to the walkway.

For a moment Deborah was so surprised that she simply froze, though rushing people jostled her. Dear heaven, a kidnaper. He was a deadly madman, preying upon helpless women and children.

Deborah watched as he set the hysterical child on his shoulder. With his free hand he grabbed a black wrought iron light post and stepped up on its concrete base, rising high above the throng. The girl in red waved her arms frantically, and a man with a sweat-stained face broke free of the crowd and rushed toward her.

“Poppa,” the little girl squealed as the looter surrendered her to her father.

Deborah gathered her wits about her, covered her bare head with her shawl to conceal her blond hair and plunged into the thick of the crowd. She had no thought but to flee, to lose herself in the ocean of humanity surging through the streets. The maelstrom of noise thundered so loudly that her senses seemed to shut down, filtering out the chaos. Her only awareness was of the thin, high-pitched sound that came unbidden from her own throat. She had never seen a rabbit hunted down by a wolf, but knew now what the rabbit sounded like, felt like, when fleeing a predator. Two days ago she had understood her life. She had known who she was and where she fit in. And if, from time to time, she had felt a small, traitorous prodding of discontent, she had quelled it easily enough by reminding herself of all the unearned privileges she enjoyed. The past two days had disengaged her from that comfortable spot like a snail being pried from its shell. And like the snail she was uprooted, lost in an alien world, longing to crawl back into her shell but unable to find the way back.

She forced herself to look ahead to the open square of the intersection. Hurrying in that direction, she slammed into a stout, screaming woman wearing a housekeeper’s black muslin dress and a white lace cap. With a feather duster clutched in her hand, she stood paralyzed by terror except for the misshapen, screaming mouth. Instinctively Deborah grabbed the woman’s hand and propelled her along the walkway. She felt a strong urge to rush away, but the frightened woman clung to her. Ahead of them, a man pushing a heavily laden wheelbarrow slowed their progress.

Deborah spoke aloud, but she couldn’t even hear herself. She gritted her teeth and sucked in breath after breath of the hot, filthy air. They reached an intersection where the crowd thickened. A runaway cart, driverless and pulled by a panic-stricken horse, careened into the crowd. Deborah felt the maid’s hand torn from her own, and for a moment a gap separated them. Then a flood of people flowed into the gap, engulfing the lost woman, and Deborah could only go on.

She recognized the street that ran along the edge of the Catholic cemetery. Two blocks beyond that lay the lakefront park. People hurried faster, eager to reach the safety of the water. Deborah kept her head down, the shawl pulled up over her hair. She darted glances here and there, praying the wild man would not see her. Perhaps she had managed to elude him. If so, it was the only lucky thing that had happened to her in days.

She wondered what in heaven’s name the man could have been thinking. What would prompt him to burst upon her father, intent on murdering him in the midst of a catastrophe? Her father had assumed the man was a looter. No doubt there was plenty of that going on in the city tonight. But the insane man had not shown any interest in robbing the Sinclair house. He seemed focused only on killing her father. He had known her father’s name. Had mentioned a place…an island?

The memory of the intruder made her recoil, and bitter bile rose in her throat. She fought down the need to be sick, wishing, not for the first time in her life, that she was made of sterner stuff. No one had ever taught her how to contend with matters such as how to escape an insane murderer in the midst of a fire of Biblical proportions. Or how to find her father, borne God-knew-where in a runaway carriage. Or how to survive the night.

Each time she heard the clop of hooves or the grind of cart wheels, she checked to see if it was her father. But she never saw him. She could do no more than hope he had brought the team under control and headed toward the lake. From there, he would travel northward to his summer estate. The trouble was, the streets were clogged with fallen rubble and fleeing people. Landmarks crumbled even as she passed.

She wondered what he thought had become of her. In the sudden confusion of the collapsing roof, the gunman and the spooked horses, he might be imagining any number of fates. She hoped madly that he had not tried to fight his way back to the house on Huron Avenue to search for her. The whole district, once a tree-lined bastion of fashionable mansions, was now engulfed in flames.

“I’ll be all right, Father,” she said under her breath, then nearly choked on the irony of her own words. “If tonight doesn’t kill me, I’ll be all right.” She intended to get to the lakeshore and work her way northward. Perhaps she would find a driver to take her to the summer place. She would find her father at Avalon. She had to believe that.

She hoped he would believe it, too. But there was no reason for him to consider her capable of surviving. Arthur Sinclair had raised her to be as useless and ornamental as a rose in a corn patch. All she was and all she knew were those things useful to the wife of a wealthy man. She was known to be accomplished, according to the glowing reports from Miss Boylan’s. But those accomplishments had to do with ballroom dancing or doing needlepoint or reciting poetry in French. None of which was likely to help her survive the fire destroying a whole city.

Her thin-soled Italian shoes were not made for trudging any distance, and her feet quickly grew blistered and sore on the rubble-strewn roadway. She had little sense of direction, having been chauffeured all her life, so she simply followed the general direction of the surging mob. A man leading a brace of horses thrust her aside. Something in the way he pushed at her shoulder made her jump back and scream with panic, slamming against a building. She shut her eyes as the horses passed, telling herself to calm down.

At a fork in the road, she saw people rushing along each branch of the split. A decision. She had to make a decision. What a remarkably novel notion.

She had no idea which was the quickest path to the lake. It was dark up ahead, indicating that the fire had not yet reached the north shore. For no particular reason, she took the left branch and found herself hurrying in a crowd of people, some of them in nightclothes, their arms burdened with hastily snatched possessions, their sooty faces pinched with fright. No one had been prepared for a fire of this speed and intensity.

Keeping her head down, she hurried along a street lined by older buildings that housed shops and saloons burning from the roof down. A street-level window shattered as she passed it. Ducking instinctively to avoid the flying splinters, she felt a rush of heat and the sting of stray shards of glass on her face. Choking, her eyes streaming, she wiped her bloodied hand on her skirt and moved on.

A high-pitched yelp pierced through the roar and din of the fire. She peered into the window of a dry goods shop and saw a mongrel dog scratching frantically at the glass pane. For some reason, in the midst of this rush of humanity, Deborah’s heart went out to the creature.

Darkness shrouded the abandoned shop, yet at the back of the room she detected the hungry glow. Within moments, the shop would be afire. She urged herself move on, but the dog’s frenzied barking caught at her. She tried the shop door and found it locked.

“Help,” she said, turning to the first man who came along. “You must help this poor creature!”

The man, burdened with a clock and a bottle of liquor, glanced into the window. “It’s only a dog,” he said, not even slowing his pace. “Best worry about saving yourself, miss.”

“Please—” she began, but he was already gone.

Deborah was not sure what to do. She had never rescued a dog from a fire before. She had never even met a dog before. Her father had commissioned her eighteen-year-old portrait to be done with her holding an ugly little pug dog, but she had posed with a porcelain model, not the real thing.

The trapped mongrel scratched at the window with undiminished vigor. Deborah gave a sob of frustration, then took off her shawl, wrapped it around her hand and pounded at the window. The panes rattled but didn’t crack. The dog feinted back and cringed in confusion, then started yelping again. Nearly weeping in desperation, Deborah shut her eyes, turned her face away and whacked the window with all her might. The glass shattered and a blast of heat exploded from the building. The dog came out as if shot from a cannon. She caught it in her arms, hardly able to believe it had survived her bumbling rescue attempt.

The dog leaped out of her grasp and shied away in a panic. She put out her hand, but the creature just snapped at her finger.