Bell juggled the tiller and field glasses, keeping one eye on an enormous lateen-rigged Poughkeepsie Club boat tearing after him and the other probing the fir trees that spread from inside the wall up the slope toward the gigantic barnlike building that housed Culp’s gymnasium. A thinner group of firs and leafless hardwoods speckled the slope outside the wall.
He cut upwind of the Poughkeepsie boat, challenging it to a race, which gave him cover for a closer look. He noticed a clump of rocks in the woods and swept them with the glasses. Intrigued, he nudged the tiller to steer too close to the wind. The sails shivered. The ice yacht slowed. The Poughkeepsie boat pulled ahead.
It was hard to tell through the trees, but the rocks appeared to be close to the wall almost as if the wall had been built on top of them. Bell glanced about. As luck would have it, a squall was dancing down the mountain. He waited for it to envelop Culp’s mansion and outbuildings, and when they were curtained by the swirling snow, he steered for the shore.
Isaac Bell ran the ice yacht off the river, crunched the bowsprit into the frozen bank, threw a line around a driftwood log, and jumped off. The wall was set back a hundred yards from the shoreline. When he ran toward it, he discovered that the trees had obscured a rough road that looped down toward the town of Cornwall Landing. It had been traveled recently. Hoofprints, manure, and wagon tracks in the frozen snow.
Bell spotted a line of footprints. Boot marks came and went from the direction of the rock formation he had seen from the boat, blended with the wagon tracks, and disappeared. Two men, maybe three. He knelt down and looked more closely. One man. All the tracks had been imprinted by the same soles. One man walking from the wall and back again repeatedly. Here and there, they were deeper, as if he had carried a heavy load on one of the trips from the wall.
Wind shrieked suddenly.
The squall that had enveloped Culp’s buildings had continued down the mountainside and struck like a runaway freight. Snow and sleet clattered through the trees. Blinding bursts of it filled in the footprints and covered the wagon tracks. Bell moved quickly beside the fading footmarks and traced them through the trees to the wall. It rested, as he had glimpsed earlier, on a rock outcropping.
A branch broke from a tree with a loud crack. The heavy widow-maker scythed down through the snow and crashed to the ground beside him. More cracking noises sent him diving for cover under an overhang in the rocks. Broken branches rained down on the space Bell had vacated. Moments later, the squall raced away, the wind abated, and the sun filtered down through the treetops.
Bell peered among the dark stones that had sheltered him. He lit a match. The orange flame penetrated the dark, and Bell saw that the overhang was the mouth of a cave. He opened his jacket to free up his pistol and crawled inside.
41
Isaac Bell’s second match revealed a masonry ceiling that arched over a narrow passageway. He moved in deeper, and before he needed to strike a third, daylight illuminated an opening. He emerged to find himself among the hemlocks inside J. B. Culp’s wall. A mere dusting of snow had penetrated the trees, and the footsteps were easy to trace up the slope.
The trees began to thin out. Lawns, lightly snow-covered, spread ahead and to the left for two hundred yards up to the pillared main mansion. The trees continued thinning to the right, toward the immense, barnlike building that housed the gymnasium. Bell saw the tracks veer toward it. Employing what little cover the remaining trees provided, he moved up the hill until he reached the ground floor side entrance to the servants’ quarters, where the boxers Lee and Barry had lived when he was here last.
He tried the door. The knob turned freely.
Two narrow beds were draped with muslin dust cloths. The steam radiator was shut off, and it felt almost as cold inside the room as outdoors. A rank odor hung in the air. The scent puzzled Bell. It was not quite a gymnasium locker room a
roma. Sharper than the stale stink of sweating boxers, it smelled more like a kennel than a locker room, but even ranker than a kennel. A decomposing body? he wondered fleetingly. But there was no body in the room. And, besides, it reeked of life, not death.
A recollection of something totally different flashed through his mind. It was so odd that he wondered was it a lingering effect of his long asphyxiation sleep. He did not smell shoe polish, but for some reason he suddenly had a vivid memory of blacking his hair to masquerade as a Hebrew needlework contractor in Little Italy.
Footsteps sounded directly overhead.
Out the interior door in an instant, Bell found stairs and vaulted up them silently.
He drew his pistol, held it at his side, muzzle pointed at the floor, and stepped through an open door. Another empty room, but considerably larger and more finely appointed, with a fur coverlet on an enormous bed, an easy chair, a carved writing desk, and a matching case full of books. A fire burned low in the hearth. A black kettle hung in the corner of the fireplace, and a pot for brewing coffee stood beside silver cream and sugar service. Pot, pitcher, and bowl were almost empty. If this was where Culp housed Antonio Branco, out of sight of the servants in the main house and near the Underground Railroad passage, the gangster had been here within the hour.
“Oh!”
A middle-aged housemaid had just stepped from the bathroom with an armload of towels. “You gave me a fright.”
Bell holstered his weapon as she squinted nearsightedly across the room. “It’s Mr. Bell, isn’t it? I’m Rachel. You stayed at the main house when Mrs. Culp was still here.”
“Who stayed in this room?”
“I have no idea, sir. They just sent me down this morning to clean up. Most everyone’s gone to New York City.”
“When did the man staying here leave?”
“I guess this morning. The fire’s still burning.”
“Where could I find Mr. Culp?”
“I don’t know, sir . . . I’ve got to get back to the house. Is there anything else you need, sir?”
“Wait one moment, please. What is that smell?” He smelled it here, too, but fainter.
Still holding the towels, she sniffed the air. “What smell? The coffee?”