and a banging crash sounded from the front of the house, and then heavy boots were clumping in the hall.
Christina sprang nimbly to the doorway and leaned against the wall beside it, one hand in her handbag; Johanna snatched her knife out of the sheath inside her shirt, swearing softly as she gripped it in her greasy right hand; Crawford sprang toward the cabinet where the scalpels were kept and slipped on the wet floor and sat down hard; and McKee, shaking her head, crossed her arms and stood in the middle of the tile floor.
She was looking through the doorway into the dining room, and she said, “Tom, what the
“Don’t speak to me, whore!” yelled a big unshaven man who now reeled into the room. “Where is he?”
His face was red under a shapeless hat, and the old black coat he wore was stretched across massive shoulders, and in his gnarled fist he gripped a foot-long iron rod. He blinked blearily at the people in the room, and his watery gaze fixed on Crawford, who had hurriedly got back on his feet.
“Hah!” the man said to him. “You don’t even buy her clothes!
“Tom,” said McKee loudly, “go back home. You know I buy my own—”
Tom turned toward her and raised the iron bar—
And a short, sharp explosion concussed the air of the little room, and everyone flinched.
Crawford, still clutching a scalpel with a ludicrous inch-long blade, straightened and blinked around. His ears were ringing, and the reek of burned gunpowder now eclipsed the room’s ordinary smells.
Tom had stepped back, half lowering the iron rod, his face blank; Johanna had ducked under the counter; and McKee was staring at Christina, who was holding a smoking revolver in both hands.
Crawford’s gaze swept over Tom, but he saw no blood, and then Johanna, peeking up from under the counter, pointed behind him. Crawford turned and saw a ragged hole in the plaster of the wall.
McKee stepped forward and wrenched the bar out of Tom’s hand. “Well done, Sister Christina!” she called, without taking her eyes off him.
Abruptly a second gunshot shook the room, and this time Crawford cringed at the shrill twang of a ricochet and saw the pistol spin across the tile floor. Johanna darted out and snatched it up and pointed it at Tom, who now had his eyes clenched shut. The goldfinch was fluttering wildly in its cage.
Johanna briefly caught Crawford’s eye and nodded toward the cabinets in the dining-room side wall, where another hole had been punched through the white-painted wood of one of the doors.
Christina had evidently dropped the gun, and it had gone off when it hit the floor — and the bullet must have missed her by only a yard or so.
Her face was white, but after looking around at everyone, she managed an awkward laugh. “I’d dig those out,” she quavered. “They’re silver.”
“You get out of here,” said Johanna, straightening up but keeping the gun barrel leveled at Tom. “Never come back.”
“Johanna,” said McKee, “he’s your—”
“Stepfather?” said the girl calmly. “I’ll step on
This disrespect seemed to snap Tom out of his daze.
“Give me that,” he growled, stepping forward.
Johanna cocked the hammer with her thumb and smiled at him, and Crawford wondered if the child might have killed someone before.
“Bullet holes in the walls,” Johanna said, “respectable people menaced in their own home by a drunk vagrant, a little girl kills the man — you think I’d do any time? — even be arraigned?”
“Vagrant!” Tom sputtered. “Drunk!” But he had retreated to the doorway.
“Go home, Tom,” said McKee. “Nothing immoral is going on here. I’ll be along in an hour.”
Tom was breathing hard, and he wiped a grimy hand across his mouth. “Your front rooms stink of garlic,” he said gruffly, “and you got mirrors everywhere — and I know the uses of silver! There’s people who go the other way, drink out of purple glasses under London Bridge — I can bring your troubles to you, wait and see if I can’t.”
Then he had spun and was clumping quickly through the dining room to the hall.
McKee caught Johanna as the girl began to hurry after him. “Let him go, child.”
The front door banged loudly.
“We need to kill him!” Johanna protested, as McKee grabbed the gun with her thumb under the hammer and pulled it out of the girl’s hand.
“Johanna, he’s my husband!”
“Do you have any sherry?” Christina asked Crawford.
Crawford nodded and stepped past McKee, who was holding on to the gun. A moment later he was back from the dining room with a decanter in one hand and a small glass in the other.
“You won’t drop it again?” McKee was saying to Christina as she handed the gun back to her.
“No,” Christina said sheepishly, tucking it back into her handbag. “I hope I didn’t sprain my hand shooting it! I only carry it in case I should run into something like what Gabriel shot, that day in Regent’s Park.”
“The eighteen-hundred-year-old British queen,” said Johanna, still scowling toward the front of the house, “who looked like a dog.”
Christina stared in evident surprise at the girl.
Crawford mussed Johanna’s hair and told her, “You did very well there.”
“Not as well as Nancy would have,” said the girl darkly. “I think he broke our front door.”
Christina took the glass of sherry after Crawford had poured it and handed it to her, and she gulped it and held it out again.
“That was—” she began, as Crawford refilled it. “Uh,” she went on, “the child lives here, I gather? With her father?”
“That was my husband, yes,” said McKee with a defiant look. “And yes, Johanna lives here, for now.”
“Only one glass?” said Johanna. “I could use a bracer myself.”
McKee looked down at her in alarm and said, “Never mind, I think we could all use some tea. In the parlor, if my husband has verifiably left the premises.”
“I CAN NAIL IT shut,” Crawford said as they sat down in the parlor, “and we can come and go by the back door until I get a carpenter in.”
The garlic smell was, as Tom had noted, very strong in the room.
“I’ll pay for it,” said McKee.
“You didn’t do it,” said Crawford.
Johanna put in, “Let him sell a lot of
Crawford cleared his throat. “We imagine,” he said to Christina, “that you know your uncle is up again. Whatever it was you did at the cemetery worked for these seven years, but—”
Christina’s hand had flown to her mouth. “Has he … molested you people? His connections were all broken then, I’d have hoped—”
“Yes,” said McKee. “He seems specifically to want our daughter.”
“I’m so sorry! We’ve got, my siblings and I, a plan to stop him finally, kill him. We hope to—”
“How?” asked Johanna.
“When?” added McKee.
“Well — soon. Gabriel is getting permission to … to go to where he is, where his physical form is … “Her voice trailed off.
“And it’s a statue, the physical form, you said,” recalled Crawford. “Small enough for a fourteen-year-old girl to put under her pillow and sleep on.”
“And you rubbed blood on it,” added McKee.
“I’m glad
“Damn it, Johanna,” McKee burst out, “that old shit wagon is my husband!”
“Common law,” said Johanna.
Christina was frowning and had closed her eyes.
