Emotion showed in the girl’s face for the first time. She clasped her hands together more tightly in her lap. “Yes, it is true,” she admitted. “But I did not mean for it to happen.”
Sabina said, “The kaiken is the traditional weapon favored by Japanese women. You took it with you when you went again to see Mrs. Egan.”
“Hai. For protection and self-defense. That is the only reason. She was a dangerous woman and I did not know what she might do.”
“Then why did you risk accusing her?”
“I felt that I must. I believed wrongly, foolishly, that my promise to remain silent would prevent her from another attempt on Amity-san’s life.”
“You recognized her in the garden Sunday night?”
“I was not positive it was she, but I thought it must be.”
Amity said, “But why not tell me or Sabina? Or the police?”
“I could not. I had no proof of her guilt.”
So young, so naïve to believe she could reason with the likes of Prudence Egan. Driven by guilt for putting her beloved guardian’s life in jeopardy in the first place. Seeking a measure of atonement.
“Tell us what happened Tuesday afternoon, Kamiko.”
In a barely audible voice, she told them. She had first gone to see Prudence Egan on Monday, twice that day, but the woman hadn’t been home either time. When Kamiko returned again on Tuesday, driving the Wellmans’ buggy after finishing her marketing, she arrived just as Mrs. Egan was leaving in a hansom. Kamiko followed the cab to Larkin Street.
Prudence Egan was furious to find the girl on the doorstep of her private hideaway. When Kamiko made her accusation, the woman grew even more enraged. She took her pistol from a table drawer and advanced on Kamiko, “the flame of madness lighting her eyes.” She came so close, her finger whitening on the trigger, that the girl, fearing for her life, drew the kaiken from her coat pocket and thrust out with it, not at Mrs. Egan but at the pistol in her hand. The knife struck the weapon with enough force to drive it from her grasp, leaving the long scratch on its surface and at the same time snapping off the tip. To Kamiko’s horror, the blade then deflected upward and into the woman’s breast. Death must have been instantaneous. As soon as the girl realized Prudence Egan was dead, she fled. Until now she had not been able to speak or even allow herself to think that she had taken a life, even that of a violent madwoman. She was sorry she had done so, so very sorry.
“It was self-defense,” Amity said emphatically. She went to sit beside her ward, gently placed an arm around her shoulders. “Sabina?” she said then. “I believe it happened just as Kamiko told it. You do, too, don’t you? You believe her?”
Sabina looked at the small figure huddled abjectly in Amity’s embrace, her almond-shaped eyes now wet with tears. “Yes,” she said, “I believe her.”
21
Quincannon
It was a long, cold ride from the Rideout ranch back to Kennett’s Crossing. But a dry one, at least, the rain continuing to hold off and saving him the misery of traveling muddy levee roads without a slicker to keep from being drenched. Not that the return trip was without discomfort. It had been some time since Quincannon had sat a horse and he was feeling a touch rump sprung by the time he neared Dead Man’s Slough.
Sounds carried far in the delta, particularly on days such as this one; even before he reached the ferry landing he could hear, strangely enough, loud music rolling out over the swampland from Kennett’s Crossing — a rusty-piped calliope playing an off-key rendition of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”
The calliope stopped its atonal caterwauling just before Quincannon reached the ferry landing. He took advantage of the respite to ring for the closemouthed ferryman and then board the scow, which was still moored on this bank. While he and the bay were being winched across, the calliope started up again. He could tell from mid-slough where the music, such as it was, was coming from — an old, weather-beaten steamer moored at the town wharf. Doubtless Gus Burgade’s store boat, the Island Star.
The wind was an icy breath on the open water. Overhead, darkening clouds moved furtively; the smell of rain had grown heavy in the late-afternoon air. The coming storm would break long before whichever Stockton packet Noah Rideout had booked passage on arrived at Kennett’s Crossing. There were possible benefits in a stormy night, Quincannon thought, but none where his first meeting with the wealthy rancher was concerned.
When he clattered off the barge’s landing apron, he had a better look at the store boat. The calliope was anchored to her foredeck, still giving forth, monotonously, “The Girl I Left Behind Me” — evidently intended as a clarion call to potential customers. If its piping had drawn many, there was no evidence of them now; the Island Star likely had been here for some time.
He rode to the livery, turned the bay over to the hostler, then allowed the wind to push him past the inn and along a grassy branch of the levee road toward the wharf. As he drew abreast of the gangplank at the battered little steamer’s waist, the old Civil War veteran, Dana, came hurrying out of the lamplit cargo hold, clutching a bottle of forty-rod whiskey. Dana glared at him in passing, muttered something, and scooted off to find a place to do his solitary drinking. He was evidently the last of the store boat’s initial wave of customers. No one was visible in the hold and the decks were deserted except for a kanaka deckhand lounging near the rusty calliope.
Quincannon sauntered across the plank, entered the hold. It had been outfitted as a store, with cabinets fastened around the bulkheads, a long counter at one end, and every inch of deck space crammed with a welter of sacks, bins, barrels, boxes, tools, and other loose goods. A barrel of a man outfitted in what looked to be a new linsey-woolsey shirt was perched on a stool behind the counter, a short-six cigar clamped between yellowed teeth.
“Afternoon,” he said around the stump of his stogie. His steady gaze was appraising. There seemed to be no recognition in it, but it was difficult to tell in the dim lantern light. “Help you with something, friend?”
“Would you be Gus Burgade?”
“I would. Owner, captain, and pilot of the Island Star.”
And the man who had spent the night in Pauline Dupree’s stateroom on the Captain Weber and sent her the message at the Yosemite Hotel yesterday afternoon. There was no mistaking the short, stubby arms, small head, powerful torso, and rough-hewn features.
“Flint,” Quincannon said, “James Flint.”
“Well, Mr. Flint. What can I do for you?”
“A tin of Navy Cut, if you have it.”
“Don’t. Never had a call for it.”
“Cable Twist?”
“Nor that, neither.”
“What kind of pipe tobacco do you stock?”
“Virginia plug and Durham loose.”
“The plug, then.”
Burgade produced a sack of cheap tobacco and named a price that was half again what it would cost anywhere else. Quincannon paid without protest or comment.
“Seems I’ve seen you somewhere before,” Burgade said.
“This is my first visit to Kennett’s Crossing.”
“Elsewhere, then. Walnut Grove, maybe. Or Stockton.”
Quincannon said cautiously, “Mayhap. Though I haven’t been to either town in several years.”
“Big gent like you, nice dressed, kind of hard to forget. Well, no matter. What brings you here?”
“Business. With a Schyler Island farmer, Noah Rideout.”
No reaction to the name. “What kind of business, you don’t mind my asking?”
“It concerns a lady friend he met in San Francisco.”