Katherine O’Neal (47 page)

“Well...”

“Please, Sophie. I dearly need a place to
hide.”

“I don’t want no trouble, you hear?”

Finally, they agreed, and Saranda shut the
door and fell into the dirty sheets, too exhausted even to undress.
Things looked so black, and the bed felt empty and huge without
Mace at her side. Still, she was so tired that sleep began to steal
her senses. She’d figure out what to do in the morning. Maybe
things would look brighter then.

As she was losing consciousness, though, she
was seized again by a feeling of doom. She was in a rat-infested
brothel, while her lover risked his life to save her. Mace...

* * *

She was dead asleep when the door to her room
was forced open, and she was dragged from her bed. Heavy with
sleep, feeling drugged, she was surrounded by men in the blue
uniforms of the New York police. It took her a moment to remember
where she was, to understand why they were speaking to her in that
surly tone as they shoved her out the door.

On her way down the stairs, she heard Sophie
talking to the officer in charge. “That’s her, Saranda Sherwin.
Wanted to stay here for free. Gave me some garbage about paying me
when she got her inheritance. Hah! Everyone knows she’s going to
hang.”

In her stupor, Saranda heard Sophie’s voice
droning on, claiming the ten-thousand-dollar reward. On the ground
floor, an inspector stepped forth and clamped handcuffs on
Saranda’s wrists. His mouth was moving, but she couldn’t understand
the words. She couldn’t concentrate on anything but Sophie’s voice
echoing in her mind.

She’s going to hang... she’s going to hang...
everyone knows she’s going to hang
...

She awoke to a foul smell of urine and decay.
For a time, she couldn’t remember where she was. Her surroundings
were cold and dark, fashioned from stone, small and cramped. She
lay on a hard cot with a ragged, dirty blanket her only covering.
Across from her was a heavy steel door. There were no windows, no
openings of any kind that would let in the light.

Suddenly, she remembered it all. Being
dragged from her bed in the middle of the night, handcuffed, and
shoved through the streets of the Lower East Side on foot. And her
terror as she realized where they were taking her.
The
Tombs
. Officially the New York House of Detention for Men, it
was so nicknamed because of its resemblance to an Egyptian tomb.
And, it was rumored, for the feeling of suffocation on being
incarcerated in the horrid place. Her old friend Stubbs the
safecracker had once done a three-month stint in the dreaded
prison, and he’d never spoken of his experiences there to a
soul.

Insensible as she was by sleep and shock,
she’d had the presence of mind to ask why they were taking her to a
man’s prison. They muttered something about there being no
maximum-security holding cell for women. One policeman grinned
nastily at her, showing a gold tooth. “Ain’t you heard?” he asked.
“You’re a desperate character.” His partner only laughed.

She didn’t know if it was day or night. As
she sat on her cot, with her feet propped up, her arms wrapped
around her knees for warmth, she began to shiver from more than the
cold. The walls seemed to close in around her. In all her
nightmares about prison, she’d never visualized such a closed-off
cell. It was truly like being sealed off in a tomb. No light. No
sound. No sense of her surroundings. Just alone in the dark with
her own imagination.

It was her worst nightmare come to life.

She didn’t know how long she sat, quivering
in anticipation. There was no way of marking the time save the wild
beating of her heart. The silence was unearthly. She began to
listen for any sound, a footstep, a creak of iron, anything that
would tell her she wasn’t alone in this purgatory.

She became aware of her hunger. She couldn’t
remember the last time she’d eaten. Her stomach growled softly. She
almost welcomed it. It was something real she could cling to, proof
that she was alive, and wasn’t, after all, losing her mind.

Finally, a key turned in the lock. The door
squealed open and daylight spilled in, forcing her to shut her
sensitive eyes. Then a figure stepped into the light. He was only a
silhouette, the light outside reflecting behind him like rays of
the sun. But she recognized the shape, the beloved form.

Struggling to her feet, she hastened toward
him, awash with relief and joy. “Mace,” she cried. But just as she
was about to throw herself into his arms, he raised the lantern he
held to his face and grinned.

“Guess again.”

Horrified, she stumbled back. For it wasn’t
Mace who’d come to see her after all. It was Lance.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she
began to distinguish his features—the narrower jaw, the smaller
forehead, the grotesque stare of his blind eye. It gave him the
leering glint of a madman.

The door slammed closed behind him. He placed
the lantern on a hook at eye level, then turned back to her,
regarding her with a speculative gleam.

“So ye know who me brother is,” he commented.
“I wondered.”

She was trembling horribly. The cell seemed
suddenly too confining, too small to contain the both of them. To
her eyes, he was the very essence of evil. She couldn’t help
remembering all that had passed between them. Yet her pride surged
to the surface. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing
how he’d beaten her.

“I always knew it,” she said defiantly. “Why
do you think I went after him? To make him pay for what you’d
done.”

“By gracing his bed, eh?”

She couldn’t let him know the extent of her
feelings for Mace. In a contemptuous tone, she said, “I’d die
before I let another Blackwood in my bed.”

He came forward and took a strand of her
silver hair in his hand. It hung loose about her shoulders. She
didn’t know how beautiful she looked, or how vulnerable, with her
blue eyes wide with fear. Watching her face as her hair slipped
through his fingers, he asked, “Would you?”

Her hand lashed out to slap him. He caught it
midway and wrenched it back, causing her to cry out. “Where’s me
brother?” he growled, his cockney accent pronounced, his pretense
at civility abandoned.

“I don’t know. For all I know, he’s the one
who turned me in.”

He slapped her face so hard, her head snapped
back and her cheek stung. “Don’t tyke me for a fool, Sherwin.”

“You just answered your own question. Since
when did a bloody Blackwood ever do anything for a Sherwin but
murder and rape them?”

“Me brother’s only once risked his life for
anyone. But he was willing to die to protect you. So don’t try to
bugger me. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell
the likes of you.”

He slapped her again, this time jerking her
forward and back in a half-circle. She lifted her head, shook back
her hair, and stared at him defiantly. “Mace is right about you,
you know. You
are
stupid. Too stupid to be able to figure
things out for yourself. You’ll never be the man Mace is, and you
know it. It’s what eats away at you, isn’t it? Keeps you up nights.
It’s why you have to rape children. Because no woman in her right
mind would want you of her own volition.”

He lunged at her. His hands at her throat, he
shook and strangled her until she couldn’t breathe. Her eyes
bulged, and she clawed at his hands, desperate to pull free.
Finally, just as she was losing consciousness, he thrust her back
so that she fell sprawling onto the cot. Gasping and coughing, she
struggled to bring air through her burning throat and into her
lungs.

“I should have bleeding killed you when I had
the chance.”

When she looked up at last, she saw him
standing with his arms dangling at his sides, breathing like a
furnace. There was a look of madness about him.

“I know wot yer thinkin’,” he gasped wildly.
“Ye think I’m daft, just like Mace does. I can see it in his eyes
when he looks at me. Pities me, so he does. Thinks it’s his fault
I’m the way I am. It isn’t, y’know. But I let him think it. Keeps
him on me side. Thinks if he’d been better to me, I’d be
different.”

“You mean you were born crazy.”

“
I’m not daft!”
He took a lunge for
her but backed off a moment later, pacing the room with manic
energy. “But I don’t mind if Mace thinks so. Keeps him feeling
sorry for me. Keeps him wantin’ to help me. And all the while, I’m
tykin’ everything he ever wanted. Soon I’ll have it all. Including
you. I can’t wait to see the look in me brother’s eyes when he
finds out you’ve been hanged.”

“You’d do that to your own brother?”

“Me brother,” he spat. “Me sainted,
four-flusher brother. The man with the golden tongue. Butter
couldn’t melt in his mouth. Me brother Mace, who got everything and
everyone he ever wanted. While I had to fend for meself. While he
turned me away when I needed him most.”

“When he found Pilar, you mean.” She needed
to hear him admit it.

“Aye. Bleedin’ revolutionaries, wastin’ me
brother’s talents on balmy ideals. I put an end to that nonsense, I
did.”

“Very clever, turning them in the way you
did.”

“Bloody right. Worked too. Soon as Pilar was
tyken care of, Mace was free to go back on the con—with me.”

“It must have been a shock, then, to find
he’d taken up with the Van Slykes.”

“Well, he ain’t with ’em now, is he? He found
the perfect world, created the perfect con. Well, I destroyed that
world, and I put an end to his con. And like it or not, I’m tyking
his place.”

“What do you mean?” she asked leerily.

“Haven’t you heard? McLeod’s made me editor
of the
Globe-Journal
in Mace’s place. I convinced the old
sod that I’d make as good a rattlesnake for him there as I was in
the Van Slyke mansion.”

“You mean you
blackmailed
him into
it?”

“Let’s say I Blackwooded him into it.”

“What do
you
know about running a
newspaper?”

“Not a ruddy thing, lovey. But if Mace can do
it, so can I. And once he’s dead, it won’t matter. I’ll retire from
journalism on a hefty pension.”

She felt chilled. “You’d kill your own
brother?”

“I won’t have to. McLeod will, once he finds
him. You don’t think he’s goin’ to let him get out alive?”

Before she could reply, the key turned again
in the lock. “Time’s up, Mr. Blackwood.”

Lance came to her and rubbed his hand along
her cheek. “Too bad. I’d have liked havin’ another go. Maybe some
other time—before yer hanging.”

Chuckling to himself, he turned to leave.
When his back was to her, Saranda raised herself up on her cot,
full of loathing and a deep desire to cause him pain.

“I had your child,” she told him.

He stopped. There wasn’t a sound.

“He was a beautiful boy. Looked a great deal
as you must have before your—accident. But he died because I
couldn’t care for him. If you’d been there, if you’d helped, he
might be alive today.”

Lance stood frozen, still with his back to
her. She could feel his shock.

“But you know something, Lance? He’s not the
only child I shall ever have. One way or another, I’ll get out of
here. You can fool yourself as much as you like. But you know as
well as I do what a master Mace is. He’s going to beat you. And
when he does, he and I will replace your child with his. And he’ll
have something you’ll never have.”

He didn’t move. The guard finally prompted
him, but he waved him away. At last, he turned. He looked
shattered. He gazed at her more closely, as if visualizing her
pregnant with his child. As if imagining her holding the baby in
her arms.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said softly.

“Do you doubt Mace? Because I don’t.”

A cruel sneer turned his face ugly. “No,
lovey, I don’t doubt him. If what you say is true—if you do get out
of this alive—Mace is bloody well going to have a choice to myke.
You or me. When it comes to that, Mace will choose me.”

“You don’t know that,” she insisted.

“I know it, Sherwin. He always has.”

The next time the door was opened—days later?
She didn’t know—it was Sander McLeod with another man, portly,
balding, with a stubborn set to his jaw and an air of
self-important authority. With McLeod’s bulk, they effectively
filled the confines of the cell.

“Miss Sherwin,” McLeod greeted her,
scratching his red fringed whiskers. “This is a long-awaited
pleasure.”

There was a note in his voice of smug
satisfaction, of savoring the notion of rubbing her nose in her
defeat.

“May I introduce Warden Hull. You’ll be his
guest until your trial.”

The warden lifted a corner of his lip in a
crude sneer.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

“Because, Miss Sherwin,” explained the warden
with patronizing patience and heavy sarcasm, “you’re wanted for
murder.”

“Why the Tombs? Why a men’s prison?”

Why, she wanted to add, the worst prison in
the city?

Sander smiled. “My associate, Mr. Lance
Blackwood—I believe he paid you a visit, did he not?—is of the
opinion that your partner in crime is more than capable of breaking
you out of jail. Why he’d think so, I have no idea. He’s a
competent enough editor, I suppose, in his own way. But he never
struck me as one to risk his neck in the sort of daring theatrics
an escape would call for. Without the paper to hide behind, he’s
powerless.”

“You may think so, naturally, if it amuses
you.”

“In any case, we’ve taken the necessary
precautions. Your whereabouts are not being revealed to the press.
Even my own paper, the
Globe-Journal
, is professing
ignorance. But just to be safe, we’ll keep you here for the time
being. Even given the inclination, it would take a load of dynamite
for Archer to break you out of this hellhole.”