Galveston Between Wind and Water - By Rachel Cartwright Page 0,84
and pushed across the dead bolt. Caden walked back up the stairs leaving the pathetic, trapped creature below to the unforgiving, wretched howls of his cursed conscience and fate.
CHAPTER 21
Saturday, September 8, 5:00 a.m.
The knock against her bedroom door startled Gabrielle. The door creaked open on its hinges and she turned, fully dressed in her brown riding pants and shirt, to see her father standing with his walking cane staring at her with bleary, drunken eyes.
“What in the name of heaven do you think you’re doing, Gabrielle? You should be sleeping.” He jabbed his cane at her. “I know what you’re doing and I won’t allow it. The rain will pass in a few hours and we can enquire at the police station first thing in the morning.”
“I can’t wait. I won’t desert Bret like this. I have to know if he’s all right.” She finished lacing and tying her riding boots.
Her father tapped his cane on the floor. “Caden assured me the police will be there first thing this morning after the rain stops. He is safe and secure for the night.”
He stepped across the threshold, blocking the entrance with his body and cane. “Please, my dear. I must insist. We’re all shocked and appalled by what he did to poor Timothy.”
Her father’s vague self-assurance echoed his ominous insistence of remaining uninvolved. Still, it was as impossible to stay silent and do nothing. Every minute she hesitated made her feel cramped and sick of this mansion as if its expansive walls were contracting against her in breaths inhaled from the rising wind outside. Gabrielle rose, gathered her riding jacket and gloves, and stepped toward her father.
“I wish that bastard had been the one killed. Tim was a good man.” He raised his cane to block her way. “After the way he left you . . . the shame and the embarrassment he caused us, why would you want to help a man like Bret McGowan?”
Gabrielle stopped to gather her strength. She wouldn’t be worn down like this, not by fear of his rigid contol, or the weight of the past that had held her powerless to escape.
Determined to do what she must, she stared at him with ever once looking away. “Neither one of them deserved what happened even if they brought it upon themselves.” Gabrielle stood in front of her father’s raised cane. “We can’t help Timothy but Bret deserves at least a sympathetic friend who will listen because I know, in my heart, he would do the same for me.”
Gabrielle tried to find courage in her own words yet above every other hope there rose the cold, suffocating fear that she would see Bret suffer—perhaps hung if he was guilty—as her father had watched Bret’s father, William McGowan, so many years before.
The cane shook in his grip. “Bret’s father, William, convinced us all; Colonel Hayes, old man Foster and Dawson. Many families owe their fortunes to William McGowan. He owned two topsail schooners in the opium trade—one from India and one from the orient—made us all quite wealthy for such young bucks and it gave us the seed capital for our businesses.”
He lowered its ivory tip to the floor and stared off as though seeing a long, lost friend suddenly appear in the distance. “Yes. We owe William and his family that much . . . if the dark truth ever be told.”
Gabrielle paused and stared at her father.
“But when I watched William hang . . . I was glad.” His arm slackened and dropped to his side. He stared at the floor. “They were all traitors and they deserved it.”
“And is that what Bret deserves? The same justice you showed your good friend, William?”
Gabrielle and her father stared at each other. The night air had become uncomfortably clammy and still. Suddenly, a light rain fell pitter-patter on the window.
“I . . . I never told your mother where I got the money . . . and after William died, she never asked.” Her father wiped the sweat of his brow and stepped aside, seeming more astonished than Gabrielle by how his guilty heart had betrayed and shamed him.
He leaned forward, grasping the cane handle with two hands and sighed as if it was the only thing preventing him from falling to the floor. “He’s . . . in the cellar at the back of the Society building, unless the police have already arrested him.”
Far off, over the Gulf, a thunderbolt cracked and lit up the sky