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 over the water with a dull rumble. Gabrielle brushed past her father, leaving him slumped and shrunken against the door, lost in the unconscionable regret of his own troubled memories.
Gabrielle rode her favorite brown stallion, Chestnut, at a steady gallop down the crushed shell streets leading to the Society hall. His hoofs splashed through the scant inches of sea water that seemed to be everywhere, covering city streets several blocks in from the beach.
Still no reason to be alarmed but people had to be more cautious when riding or walking. This had happened before and the water would recede with tide.
The first glimmering light of dawn would not be clear on the horizon for some time now. Gabrielle shuddered, her heart chilled by her father’s dark words and her growing worry about what was happening to Bret.
Father was wrong.
Bret was capable of doing many stupid things—visiting Ichabod Weems’s, throwing his money down empty oil wells, but murder was not one of them. Killing Timothy over her? No, that was impossible. Bret was too proud, too confident, even when under the influence of his bottled demons, to let himself be so fatally provoked.
Poor Timothy. God rest his soul. Something else happened to him. Robbery, business debts . . . something, but not Bret killing him in cold blood.
The men were wrong. They had to be.
Gabrielle rode past several buggies filled with families and small belongings, being pulled toward the western boundary of the city and Galveston Island. There, the longest wagon bridge in the country connected their city with the Texas mainland.
Some people never get used to the flooding. Come daybreak, the trains and hotels would be busy with nervous vacationers heading back north.
“Good boy, Chestnut.” Gabrielle gave the horse a slap on the flank and pulled at the bit a little more. “That’s it boy! Faster now! We’re almost there!”
She felt the muscles of the young stallion tense between her brown suede riding chaps. The horse picked up its pace, kicking up bits of white and pink shell, and sending the wind rushing by Gabrielle’s cheeks, streaking her tears against her skin.