Not loquacious under any circumstances, Bushell maintained a prudent silence now. Kathleen stamped back toward the Ribblesdale House, looking neither to the left nor the right. After half a block, Sam Stanley, who came as close to being neutral as anyone available, worked up the gumption to ask, “Er what did Rothrock do, exactly?”
“For starters, he chased his wife and daughter upstairs, and if he wasn’t a gorilla about it, I’ve never seen one,” Kathleen said, hunching over and clenching her fists to show how the miner had acted. “Didn’t Chief Lassiter say he beat her? I believe it, I’ll tell you that. The poor woman was terrified of him, and the little girl - a pretty little girl - too.”
“Did you learn anything from Rothrock?” Bushell asked again.
Kathleen continued as if he hadn’t spoken: “Then he sat me down on the filthy sofa in the front room, and then he sat down beside me. Right beside me.” Her nose went into the air. “He smells.”
“Go on,” Bushell said. She was going to tell the story her way or not at all.
“He didn’t - put his hands on me,” she said. “That much I give him. It is all I give him. He got up, went to a little alcove under the stairway, and came back with a bottle of whiskey. Just in front of the couch, he struck a pose like a circus strong man and said, ‘You like a real man, don’t you - not one o’ them toffs?’ I wanted to laugh in his face . . . but I was afraid.” She kicked at the ground; the admission plainly shamed her. “When I didn’t say anything, he sat down next to me again, even closer than he had before.”
She ran a hand down the right side of her skirt, as if to wipe away the memory of Rothrock’s presence. Bushell tried again. “Does he know Joseph Kilbride?”
“As best I can tell, he doesn’t know anything, the alphabet quite possibly included,” Kathleen answered.
“He would swig from the bottle, breathe cheap whiskey into my face, and tell me what a ladies’ man he was.” Even in the fading light, Bushell watched her turn red. “He went into some detail.”
“If you expect a coal miner to have the manners of a baronet, you’re apt to be disappointed,” Samuel Stanley observed.
“Did Rothrock say anything about who the miners’ treasurer was and where we can find him?” Bushell asked, persisting in what looked as if it were going to be a losing fight to get information out of Kathleen. She shook her head. “He said he saw me at the governor’s mansion, and that he fell in love with me then.” She flushed once more. “I’m paraphrasing.” She muttered something uncomplimentary to Anthony Rothrock, coal miners, and, by extension, the entire male sex. “I fear it was a useless and unpleasant conversation. He wasn’t interested in answering my questions, and I wasn’t interested in ... what he was interested in.”
“Thanks for making the effort,” Bushell said with a sigh. “I do appreciate it.” Everything she’d said had been in perfect keeping with what he’d seen of Anthony Rothrock: drunken, boorish, lecherous. Whether it had any relation to the truth, only she and Rothrock knew.
“Miserable, filthy place,” Kathleen said. “A monster of a husband, a frightened wife - God help their poor daughter, is all I can say.” She cocked her head to one side, fixing Bushell with that measuring stare once more. “Don’t you think there should be Daughters of Liberty, too, dedicated to getting women free of beasts like Rothrock? A movement like that might sweep the Empire, not just the NAU.”
“If you want men - and women - to stop acting like beasts, you need to talk to a priest, not a police officer,” Bushell said. “We don’t deal in miracles.”
“You’ve grown hard, Colonel,” she said after a moment’s thoughtful consideration. Bushell didn’t answer: what point to responding to self-evident truth? After a couple of paces, Samuel Stanley said, “If you don’t get hard on the outside, you can’t do this job.”
Kathleen thought that one over, too, then nodded judiciously. “But what if you get hard on the inside, too?” she asked.
“You have to be a little soft in the head to want to join the police in the first place,” Bushell said. But a quip wasn’t a real reply, and he knew this one was a shield to keep him from having to come up with a real reply.
They approached the train station and the Ribblesdale House close by. “You know,” Stanley said, pointing toward the hotel, “compared to the way the rest of Charleroi lives, we don’t have it so bad there.”
“You’re right,” Bushell said, “and if that’s not a judgment on the rest of the town, I don’t know what is.”
He paused, his gaze swinging back toward the station. “We ought to talk to the ticket sellers here tomorrow. If Kilbride wanted to get out of town, he’d have to have bought a ticket.”
“If, of course, he was ever here,” Stanley said with a heartiness he obviously did not feel. “He could have got off in Pittsburgh, say, instead of riding as far as his ticket would let him. If he did something like that, he could be anywhere in the NAU by now.”
“Oh, no!” Kathleen Flannery said; that chance evidently hadn’t occurred to her. It had to Bushell. “Yes, that’s a cheery thought, isn’t it?” he said. Now he looked toward the Ribblesdale House. “I wonder if the dining room has wild goose on the menu ?”
In the dining room, along with a few other patrons, sat Jerry Doyle and Michael Shaughnessy. Stanley eyed them with something less than delight. “I wouldn’t mind cooking their goose,” he murmured. Bushell nodded.
When he and his companions walked in, Shaughnessy sniffed ostentatiously, then said, “What’s that I smell?”
“Must be the odor of rectitude,” Doyle said.
“No, it’s Robin Redbreast, sure as the devil,” Shaughnessy said. He sniffed again. “Either that or polecat.” He and Doyle brayed laughter. They both had whiskey glasses in front of them. By their mirth, they’d already done some drinking.
Bushell took no outward notice of them, but found a table and sat down. Samuel Stanley sat across from him. Stanley’s face was calm, but a deep rumble rose from deep in his chest, as if he were a tiger reacting to the chatter of monkeys in the jungle. Kathleen Flannery said, “The job you RAMs do is harder than I’d thought.”
“Most people think well of us,” Stanley said pointedly.
“And as for the ones who don’t - “ Bushell shrugged. His eyes flicked to the reporters from Common Sense. “I’ll spend sleepless nights fretting over their good opinion.”
“Of course you will,” Kathleen said, in the same solemn tones he’d used. He raised a warning forefinger. “See what you get for associating with us low types? You’re in danger of becoming an ironist.”
Kathleen made as if to flee the table. Now she, Bushell, and Stanley laughed. Doyle and Shaughnessy stared over at them. No doubt they thought they were the butt of the joke. That make Bushell feel better than he had in some time.
After supper, he went up to his room and took a shower. He’d been relieved to discover the room boasted a showerbath; given the less than luxurious nature of the Ribblesdale House, he’d feared he’d find a single bathroom down at the end of the hall.
He was toweling himself dry when the telephone rang. He rubbed at his mustache in wry amusement; the way things had been going, the call should have come while he was in the showerbath. Wrapping the towel around his waist, he hurried over to the nightstand. “Hullo? Bushell here.”
“John Lassiter.” The local constabulary chief’s big, deep voice could hardly have belonged to anyone else. “I’ve tracked down the Michael O’Flynn you’re looking for.”
“So have I,” Bushell said. “Red Mike O’Flynn, on Colliery Road.”