The Quest of Brady Kenton / Kenton's Challenge Page 6

  Gunnison shrugged away from him, unable to bear his presence the way he was. People had gathered around while the fight was going on, and it was terrible to see Kenton humiliating himself this way.

  Gunnison glanced at the man Kenton had been beating. The fellow had risen and was heading in the opposite direction as fast as he could. Good. The fight, whatever it had been about, was now at an end.

  “Let’s go back to your room,” Gunnison said.

  “You know about my room? My new home? Why, Alex! You’re just full of surprises!” Kenton wheeled about to face the crowd. “My friend Alex Gunnison, ladies and gentlemen! A round of applause for him, all right?” Kenton began to clap. Others did the same, but mockingly, finding Kenton absurd and funny.

  Gunnison wanted to sink into the ground. He tugged at Kenton. “Come on! For heaven’s sake, get away from here before you humiliate yourself any more!”

  “Humiliate myself?” Kenton laughed. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Confound you, come on!” Gunnison pulled him so hard that Kenton almost fell over. Gunnison lowered his voice to a sharp whisper. “Do you want these people to recognize you while you’re like this?”

  Kenton seemed to wilt all at once. “What would it matter? I’m a man who no longer has a job, Alex. Did you know that? Your father has fired me. Cut me loose. Given me the sack.”

  “We’ll talk about it out of public view. Besides, as I hear it, you aren’t fired, only suspended.”

  A distant whistle caught Gunnison’s ear. “That’s the police, Kenton. They’re going to want to know who broke the window out of that saloon. And who tried to beat that man to death. And I can’t imagine why we’ve not already got the owner of the place screaming in our faces.”

  “Lead the way, Alex. I’ll follow. I’m in your hands.”

  Gunnison took him by the arm and led him away as fast as Kenton could stagger.

  * * *

  In Kenton’s stinking, filthy rented room, Gunnison took the half-full whiskey bottle and heaved it out the window, before Kenton’s eyes. Kenton winced like a bee had stung him, then staggered to a chair and sat down, leaning on the table.

  “I’m a ruined man, Alex,” he said. “I’ve been dismissed, sent packing, and all while I’m on the verge of finding my Victoria.”

  “Kenton, as I hear it, you’ve only been suspended. All you need to do is improve your performance and you’ll be welcomed back.”

  “There’s the rub, Alex. There’s the rub. I can’t improve my performance. The ability is gone. Look at my efforts there on the drawing table … look at them.” Kenton raised his hand. It trembled badly. “And look at this. I’m through, Alex. I’m through.”

  Gunnison walked over and stood looking sternly down at the seated Kenton. He pointedly handed him the emptied whiskey bottle. “There’s the reason you’ve lost your skill. There’s the reason your hand trembles. You’ve drunk yourself right past the point of control. No one can hope to do decent illustration when he’s got as much whiskey as blood in his veins.”

  “You’re like a scolding mother, Alex.”

  “You need a scolding mother. And tell me something: why in the devil did you heave that man through that window?”

  “He insulted a woman in the cafe. A most lewd comment, and I can’t abide that kind of behavior.”

  “That wasn’t a cafe, that was a barroom.”

  “They sell sandwiches, Alex. That’s close enough to a cafe for me.”

  “There’s every chance they’ll come looking for you to pay for that window. And the police may want to have a word with you.”

  “Let them come. Let them empty my pockets and throw me in the deepest prison. Nothing matters now.”

  “I can’t believe this, Kenton. You’ve spent your professional life with your nose in the air, acting as if your job hardly mattered to you, that you could walk away from it at any moment … and now you fall to pieces just because you might lose it. What’s happened to you?”

  Kenton looked up, and Gunnison studied his face closely for the first time since this reunion. He was startled. Kenton was unshaven, pallid, red-eyed. The left side of his mouth as well as his right eyelid had a vague but perceptible twitch.

  Gunnison had seen Kenton drunk before, and ill before … but never had he seen him so thoroughly broken down. From the inside out the man was a shell, a remnant. And in the watery eyes was fear.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to me,” Kenton said. “I don’t understand it. It’s as if … I think that maybe … I don’t want to say it.”

  Gunnison lost any anger or disgust he’d felt toward Kenton. His voice soft, he said, “It’s me, Kenton. You can trust me. You can tell me.”

  Kenton lowered his head and cried.

  Gunnison waited, saying nothing.

  After only a few moments, Kenton pulled himself out of his tears—the old, in-control Kenton just starting to reassert himself again—and Gunnison was relieved to see it. It was too unnerving to see a man who’d always been made of iron begin to turn to water.

  Kenton lifted his sallow face and looked squarely at Gunnison. “I’ve discovered there is a weakness in me, Alex. One that is very unexpected. I’ve become convinced that I’m on the verge of discovering at last what happened to Victoria, and I find that I can’t bear it. I can’t face it.” He swallowed hard. “God help me, Alex, I don’t know that … if ever I found her … that I could even face her.”

  Gunnison knew better than to patronize Kenton with false declarations of understanding, or unsolicited advice. He merely nodded.

  “I can’t comprehend it, Alex. What William told me, what he had me read in The Grand Deception, was like a jolt of lightning to me. I knew, Alex. I knew. The secret is in there. I could feel it. Sometimes, you just … know.”

  “Kenton, I met with William today. I read the novel’s opening chapters myself. I can see the similarities … but there may be explanations other than some sort of mystic connection between a cheap periodical serial and the actual disappearance of your wife.”

  “Yes. Rationally, I’d agree with you.” Kenton, despite his drunkenness, was sounding more like his old self. “But there are things there … one thing in particular that you can’t know. Because I’ve never told you.” Kenton paused. “Did you notice that the author used the name Brady as part of his pseudonym?”

  “I did.”

  “I think that means something.”

  “Kenton, I agree that there is an almost certain connection between Victoria’s accident and the novel. I think that accident inspired the novel. But it’s imagination beyond that.”

  Kenton shook his head. “David Kevington was not the product of anyone’s imagination.”

  “Kevington … a name you wrote in the margin of the magazine.”

  “Yes. It’s a name I hate to write at all, much less to speak. The name of a man I despise. One of the few men in the world whom I would have been glad to kill outright. Maybe the only man who ever lived whom I can honestly say I truly hated.”

  CHAPTER 13

  GUNNISON was surprised. He’d rarely seen Kenton express dislike for another person with such a pure and venomous contempt. “Is Kevington the counterpart of the mysterious French doctor who kidnaps Victoria … Candice, I should say?”

  “Yes. But Kevington wasn’t French. He was an Englishman.”

  “Are you telling me there was a real counterpart to this kidnapper physician?”

  “There was. And he was a physician himself. Just like in the story.”

  “Who was he? Why have you never mentioned him?”

  “Because it’s painful. Unpleasant. It’s not something one likes to remember … knowing that a man was following your own wife, like a hunter stalking prey. And knowing that you let your guard down long enough to allow him to climb onto a train on which she was a passenger, with no one to protect her but her sister … and me nowhere near.”

  “How do you know he was on that train?”r />
  “I know the name of every person on that train, Alex. I studied the passenger list, the crew manifest … I even learned the names of a couple of vagabonds who had stowed away in one of the back cars. So you see, I only learned that Dr. David Kevington was on that train after he and Victoria were both killed. But we know now that Victoria was not killed after all. Maybe Kevington wasn’t, either.” Kenton looked Gunnison in the eye. “I think they both survived, just like Candice and Dr. Lanval in the novel. And I think that Kevington took her away, just as Lanval took Candice off to California. And I think that whoever wrote that novel knows it firsthand, as a fact, and is revealing the truth in the form of fiction.”

  “Those are big jumps, Kenton.”

  “Yes. But sometimes a man knows.”

  “Or thinks he knows.” It was hard to speak this forthrightly with Kenton, who even after all these years—and even in this pitiful, drunken state—managed to somewhat intimidate Gunnison.

  Gunnison went to the window and looked down onto the street. A sizable crowd was gathered around the front of the saloon whose window Kenton had ruined. The injured man was talking to a fellow with a notepad. Gunnison shook his head. He knew a reporter when he saw one. Just like almost every person in the United States knew Brady Kenton when they saw him, thanks to the excellent likeness of the man published in each edition of the Illustrated American.

  Gunnison looked Kenton over out of the corner of his eye. At the moment he didn’t look a lot like himself, thanks to his disheveled, unwashed, and unshaven state. With any luck, the people below did not realize that the big troublemaker who had thrown the man out the window was America’s most famous journalist. He decided not to mention the reporter to Kenton. He’d also not mention the fact that a uniformed Denver policeman was approaching the scene, walking at the side of a tall fellow in a long coat …

  Gunnison looked closely. Was that Jessup Best? Initially he thought so. When the man came a little closer, though, Gunnison saw that it was not Best. Just a fellow with a similar gait and manner of dress.

  If fortune smiled, no one had paid attention when he and Kenton entered this rooming house. Maybe the policeman would never locate Kenton, and once Kenton was sober, he and Gunnison could slip out of Denver unnoticed. Then, as Gunnison foresaw matters, it would be off to the head offices of the Illustrated American for a meeting with the senior Gunnison. It was time to take care of this problem with Kenton’s job status. Gunnison understood his father’s dissatisfaction with Kenton’s job performance, even his suspension of the man, but in the long run it was a rather absurd situation. The Illustrated American needed Kenton a lot more than Kenton needed the Illustrated American. Bad recent job performance or not, there were journals and magazines and major newspapers all across the nation that would pay dearly to have Kenton for their own. The man could make a living writing books and lecturing, if he ever chose to do it.

  Gunnison turned away from the window. Kenton was seated now, leaning against the wall, looking sick and weary. His heart went out to the man.

  “Kenton, are you afraid of finding her?”

  Kenton looked up at him. “My, my, Alex,” he said, sounding remarkably rational for a man very much drunk. Kenton had always been quick to shake off the effects of the alcohol that sometimes ensnared him. “Sometimes you are quite insightful. And a little too straightforward, diplomatically speaking.”

  “Why would you be afraid, Kenton? It’s what you’ve wanted for so many years.”

  “I know. I know. I think that … I think that I’m afraid I’ll find that, in the end, she’s no longer alive. And I’ll have missed my last chance to find her. Or, I’ll find that she is alive … and doesn’t want me.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “That’s the thing … there is nothing to say. I just have to face the facts as they are.”

  “Do you want to keep looking?”

  “Yes. I have to. I have to know. No matter what the truth may be.”

  “Do you really believe that novel carries clues? Or are you just clinging to a wild hope?”

  “Both. I understand how unlikely it all seems,” Kenton said. He rubbed his temples. “I’m beginning to not feel well.”

  “You should lie down.”

  “I think I will.”

  Gunnison had been ready to tell Kenton about Rachel Frye and Jessup Best. But it could wait. Either or both might be in Denver right now, but neither were likely to appear here. It could wait. Gunnison sat by the window, watching the crowd below disperse. The policeman and the long-coated man with him moved on, not approaching the boardinghouse.

  Kenton had been lucky this time. Unless, of course, that newspaper reporter had determined who he was. That sort of publicity could be fatal to Kenton’s career, if it got back to the Illustrated American.

  * * *

  Kenton was in bad shape when he woke up. He avoided the light and sat with his eyes hidden in his hands.

  Gunnison had gone out for food, but Kenton was having none of it. He did, however, take occasional sips from the coffee Gunnison had poured for him.

  “I need to tell you something,” Gunnison said. “I met a woman in Leadville. English. She said her name is Rachel Frye … and she claimed to be your daughter.”

  Kenton looked up at that. “What did you say?”

  “She claimed to be your daughter. She came to Leadville to find you. She’d seen the publicity.”

  “Daughter! Lord, what foolishness.”

  “So there’s no chance it’s true.”

  “Of course not.” Kenton buried his eyes in his hands again. “I’ve got no children, American, English, Chinese, Canadian, French, Irish, or otherwise.”

  Gunnison was glad to hear it. “I didn’t think it could be true.”

  “The woman is either a liar or insane.”

  “Also dangerous. I need to warn you about her. It’s one of the reasons I came to Denver to find you.”

  Kenton looked weakly at his partner. “Warn me about what?”

  “I met a Texas Ranger … well, a former Ranger … who is under the hire of a family in Texas, whose relatives she purportedly murdered. He told me she’d also committed murder in England.”

  “Must be one devil of a woman.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for murderous Englishwomen, then. Why did she want to find me?”

  “Well, she thinks you’re her father. I guess she plans to tell you she loves you. Or murder you.”

  “Whoever she is, she’s not important. What’s important is that I keep pursuing my quest.”

  “Last night you said you were afraid to find Victoria.”

  “And I’m also afraid not to, so one balances out the other. What tilts the scale is that I refuse to end my days without having tried, without having pursued every possible lead.” Kenton sipped his coffee carefully, wincing at the effort of swallowing.

  “No more liquor, Kenton. You’ve got to stop with it before it takes you over completely.”

  “I know.”

  “Then swear it: no more liquor.”

  “Oh, come on, now, Alex, what good is—”

  “Swear it, Kenton!”

  “Oh, hell’s bells, Alex.”

  “Swear!”

  Kenton stuck up his hand. “I swear. There. Swear on my mother’s grave. Swear on my grandfather’s pocket watch. Swear on my uncle Walter’s dead mule. Whatever you want.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kenton drank more coffee. “I think I’ll try to eat a little.”

  “Then what?” Gunnison had his eye on the sketching table and its surrounding heaps of poorly done drawings.

  Kenton followed Gunnison’s gaze. He stared at the failed attempts at his craft. “Well … not that. I won’t be doing that.”

  Gunnison realized the potential significance of what he was hearing. “You mean you’re not going to finish the assignments that the Illustrated American is waiting for?”r />
  “That’s what I mean.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “THAT could be a … costly decision…”

  “Then it will cost me. I’m willing to bear that cost. But look at me, Alex. I received a suspension and the threat of firing from your father, and what do I do? Like a fool I scramble and try to make up for lost time, worrying and struggling as if I were some newly hired neophyte artist who would go under if not for my precious job … bah! No disrespect meant to your father, Alex, but I’m not dependent upon the Illustrated American. If your father chooses to let me go because I opt to follow the strongest lead I’ve yet found regarding what happened to my wife, well, then let him fire me.”

  Gunnison, having already pondered Kenton’s lack of dependence upon the Illustrated American, could not argue with his point.

  “I’m going to devote myself to finding the truth about Victoria … and, if she proves to be alive, to finding her. Yes, I’m scared by the prospect of finding her, as I admitted, but a man must do what he must. I owe it to myself and to her to discover the truth.”

  Gunnison made himself ask the question: “Even if you find that she has been alive all this time, and stayed away from you by her own choice?”

  Kenton looked as if he’d been kicked, but only for a moment. “Yes,” he said quietly. “In fact, I’m expecting to find that to be the case, if she’s alive. Because why else would she not have returned to me?”

  “The Deception novel presents a kidnapping scenario,” Gunnison said. “And the female character being spirited far away. If something like that happened to Victoria—”

  “Even so, Victoria would have found a way back,” Kenton said. “She was a strong and self-reliant woman. If she lived, but didn’t return to me, it could only be because she chose not to, or is in such a terrible condition that she couldn’t. Even then, though, I think she would have found a way to get word to me of where she was.”

  “It may not be possible to find out the answers to these questions, Kenton.”

  “It’s my hope that the novel will provide the clues I need. And don’t look at me that way, Alex. I know it’s a long shot at best. But at the moment it’s my only shot.”