Into the Whirlwind (30 page)

“Just give me the names of three of your men who can read and write,” Zack said to Colonel Lowe. “I’ll need them to hunt down the
Marianne
. You won’t need to be involved at all.” Ralph Coulter, the redheaded lumber dealer, had disappeared from the church immediately following the attack. His ship had been called the
Marianne
, and if Zack could find that ship, it wouldn’t be long before he could hunt down Coulter himself. Coulter knew something about the men who had raided the church or he wouldn’t have made himself scarce after Frank was killed.

Colonel Lowe wouldn’t budge. “Now that the construction
work on Mollie’s new factory is almost complete, most of my men will be leaving soon. I have vowed to stay until the hoodlums have been apprehended.”

What kind of real man used a word like
hoodlum
? For all of Colonel Lowe’s vaunted accomplishments, he didn’t know the city of Chicago and was floundering at catching Frank’s killers. Zack didn’t need or want Colonel Lowe on the hunt. It was hard for him to even be in this man’s presence without seething in resentment. Colonel Lowe had had his path smoothed for him from the moment he had hauled himself upright in his cradle. With a railroad baron for a father and an education at West Point, who wouldn’t be successful? Richard Lowe was born with every natural and man-made advantage in this world, and Zack wanted him to use those advantages in finishing Mollie’s factory, not glued to Zack’s side as he tried to hunt down the
Marianne
. All Zack needed was a couple of Colonel Lowe’s men to do some grunt work, but Colonel Lowe was being an overbearing prig.

“I promised Miss Knox I would help apprehend the men responsible for Frank Spencer’s death.”

“Fine,” Zack bit out. “You can help by loaning me three men who can read and write.”

Colonel Lowe’s smile was artificially bright. “I volunteer my own services. Let’s go.”

Annoyance simmered through Zack as he strode toward the customhouse, Colonel Lowe matching him stride for stride. Zack’s plan was to pull the bills of lading for the past several months, making a list of every 106-foot lumber schooner doing business in Chicago. He had already confirmed that the
Marianne
had not been seen in Chicago since Frank’s death. If Ralph Coulter had an ounce of intelligence, he would have renamed and repainted the
Marianne
to alter its appearance, but Coulter
couldn’t change the basic structure of the ship. Zack was looking for any 106-foot lumber schooner that had no record of conducting business in the ports of Chicago prior to Frank’s death. If he could find such a schooner, the odds were good he would have found the
Marianne
and its absentee owner.

Colonel Lowe was annoyingly cheerful as he strode alongside Zack. As they neared the intersection of Randolph and Clark, the street was jammed with wagons and horses jostling for space with pedestrians. A train was stalled on the tracks ahead, backing traffic up for blocks. Zack shouldered his way through the crowd, pushing past a woman with an overflowing basket of bread on her shoulder and a newspaper boy anxious to get out of the snarl of traffic.

“What is going on?” Zack asked the newsboy.

“Something on the tracks ahead,” the boy said. “The trains are backed up for a mile. We’ll be here forever.”

Zack glanced down the tracks. Sure enough, trains were stalled as far as the eye could see.

“Let’s go see what the trouble is,” Colonel Lowe said as he set off to the north end of the tracks.

It was clear to see. A wagonload of cement had overturned on the tracks, mixing with the melted snow puddled between the railroad ties. Enough of the mix had been shoved up onto the iron railings, solidifying almost immediately and making it impossible for the trains to pass. A single railroad repairman was chipping at the mass helplessly, a wagonload of tools beside him, but no labor to help.

“What’s going on here?” Colonel Lowe asked.

The man stopped to swipe the sweat on his brow. “I’ve sent to the north side for more workers, but no one has showed up yet. There was a fire on the tracks at Taylor Street, so that’s where all the repair workers are.”

Colonel Lowe stripped off his jacket. “I can lend a hand,” he said amiably. “Kazmarek, are you up for it?”

Zack was thrown. “I thought your family owned railroads. Not built them.”

Colonel Lowe grabbed a large-handled wrench from the supply wagon and expertly attacked a bolt on the metal plate that fastened two sections of the rail together. “Same thing,” he said as he began twisting the head of a bolt loose. “My father didn’t believe in traditional schooling. He said if the railroads were going to pay for the roof over my head, I was going to learn how to make them.” The end of his sentence trailed off as he strained to force the bolt loose. “Instead of sitting in a schoolroom, I got my education on the Dakota plains, alongside the railroad workers. I slept in their tents. Ate their food. This seems like old times!”

Another bolt popped free. Zack grabbed a wrench and began working on the bolt plate on the opposite rail. He tugged at the wrench but made no progress. He tugged again, harder, and the bolt twisted a fraction of an inch.

Colonel Lowe kept working at a brisk pace. “We should be able to get these rails disengaged in about ten minutes,” he said without even looking up from his task. “I see everything we need in the repair wagon to install two good rails.” He glanced up at the exhausted railroad worker who was leaning on his shovel to catch his breath. “If you can get the rest of that concrete cleared, we can have this track operational within the hour.”

Zack tried to match Colonel Lowe bolt for bolt. It was getting hard to keep his resentment burning. Hauling concrete off the docks of Chicago was no one’s idea of an easy childhood, but neither was laying track in the Dakotas.

It took a little longer than Colonel Lowe had originally suggested. Some of the railroad ties were too heavily coated in
concrete to be salvaged, and they would have to be pried up and replaced, but after three additional repairmen showed up, the work progressed quickly. Colonel Lowe supervised the removal of the damaged rails, the insertion of six new railway ties, and then the fitting of clean rails.

By all that was holy, it hurt to work alongside the man who had captured Mollie’s heart. A man who had waltzed into her life less than a month ago and swept her so thoroughly off her feet she was ready to dash down the aisle with him. Zack hauled the oversized wrenches back to the supply wagon. Why had he let Louis Hartman’s rules keep him away from Mollie? During those first few years, it was enough to simply enjoy the sight of her as she flitted through the store, visiting his office every few months. It wasn’t until he saw her face by the light of the fire that he saw her true glory, and then he was hopelessly in love with her. He knew Mollie on a level Colonel Richard Lowe could never imagine.

“About Mollie Knox,” he said.

Colonel Lowe straightened immediately. “Yes?”

“It is probably best not to mention my involvement in getting justice for Frank. She . . . we . . . well, it’s best not to mention my name.”

“What exactly is your interest in Frank’s case?”

Zack met the Colonel’s gaze squarely. “Hartman’s did business with the 57th,” he said. “Of course I want to see justice done.”

“I’m sure your company did business with plenty of suppliers. Although I bet none of them were run by a woman as fetching as Mollie Knox.”

Zack did not bother to respond as he hoisted the last of the tools in place. He merely set off for the customhouse and began telling Colonel Lowe his plan. “I remember Coulter talking
about his ship,” he said. “He named it the
Marianne
after his sister who died when she was a baby. If we find that ship, Ralph Coulter won’t be far away.”

Finding the
Marianne
would be a challenge. Chicago was the world’s largest lumber market, with close to two hundred ships arriving daily at the dozens of ports along the shores of Lake Michigan. The forest products from Wisconsin and Michigan were shipped into Chicago, where they were transferred to the train depots and funneled throughout the burgeoning western settlements of the United States.

“Can the police help monitor the ports?” Colonel Lowe asked.

Zack shook his head. “The police are overwhelmed with keeping order and relief work. Half of them lost everything in the fire, and they are exhausted from double shifts just getting the city running again. They won’t waste manpower on something like this.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon at the customhouse, where they set up an indexing system to alphabetize the name and description of every flat-bottomed lumber schooner measuring 106 feet that had done business in Chicago. Colonel Lowe was indefatigable. Even after the sun went down, he kept plowing through records until they had sorted and indexed the entire file. Working by the light of a kerosene lantern, Zack matched him record for record until they were both bleary-eyed and exhausted, but they finally had their list.

It would take several more hours of scrutiny to track the records and determine which could be the
Marianne
, but this was Zack’s best chance of tracking down the wayward Ralph Coulter.

It irked him down to the bottom of his soul to admit, but Mollie’s new man wasn’t so bad.

21

K
eep your eyes closed, Mollie.”

Richard’s voice was warm against the side of her face. With her hands covering her face and her eyes squeezed tight, she was blind and helpless, but Richard’s hands were firm on her shoulders as he guided her toward the new workshop. Each step scared her, but she trusted Richard to guide her safely. A gust of cold wind tugged at her cloak, but nothing mattered now that she was about to see her new workshop for the first time. Three days ago Richard had banished her from the worksite as the finishing touches were added to the building, but today the suspense would be over.

“Turn to your left just a bit, and then you are inside,” Richard murmured in her ear. Instead of the crunch of gravel beneath her boots, she was now walking on smooth plank flooring. The shuffling of feet and murmuring of voices indicated the workshop was filled with people. All the employees and the able-bodied members of the 57th were on hand to celebrate the opening of the new space.

“Open your eyes, Mollie-girl!” Ulysses shouted from somewhere to her right. She held her breath and dropped her hands.

It was a miracle! Light streamed in from the windows, and
rust-colored bricks gave a warm tone to the oversized room. One wall was entirely covered in shelving for storage, and a dozen shoulder-height worktables were in tidy rows, but it was the smiling faces of over a hundred people packed into the space that most moved her.

“Welcome back, Mollie!” A cheer went up from the crowd, and she covered her mouth lest she burst out into tears. Not that she would be the only one crying. The employees of the 57th had brought their wives and children, and plenty of them were wiping away tears of gratitude and relief. Sophie and her father stood in the front. She recognized Charlie Frisch from the piano factory next door and the Kauffman brothers who were rebuilding their vinegar distillery across the street. Any building that reopened so quickly was cause for celebration for the entire neighborhood.

Colonel Lowe stood beside her, smiling down. She didn’t know what to say. How did she thank a man for saving her business? For saving the livelihood of forty people and their families? The workshop was larger and more spacious than the old one, with even more light flooding through the oversized windows.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said breathlessly.

Richard nodded to Moose, a towering presence in the front row. “They are the ones who did most of the heavy lifting,” he said graciously. She recognized the bricklayers and other volunteers from the 57th who had done the manual labor necessary for getting this building up in record time.

The scent of warm cinnamon rolls filled the air. A few of the children were standing by the shelves piled with cookies, cinnamon rolls, and a huge cake. She needed to say something, acknowledge her gratitude, but speaking before a crowd ranked somewhere near a public stoning as something Mollie enjoyed.

Still, on a day like today, she found it easy to simply open her
mouth and speak from her heart. “Two months ago, it seemed like the end of the world,” she said. The crowd settled down, and the faces sobered. The fire had only lasted thirty-six hours, but it would burn brightly in everyone’s memory for years. “I remember the night when I staggered into the ruins of a church. The fire was still burning, and I thought I had lost everything. I wanted to lie down and go to sleep and never wake up.”

A handful of people nodded. Only people who had lived through the horror of those thirty-six hours could really know what it was like. “I didn’t know how I was going to survive, and I was struggling along all right, but I know it would have taken me at least a year to rebuild if it hadn’t been for . . .”

The clog in her throat grew. Alice’s arm tightened around her shoulders, and Mollie drew a breath to begin again.

“My father used to tell me about a band of brothers he once knew. These men came from all over the state and had nothing in common except for serving in the same regiment and fighting for a common cause. He said that in normal life he probably wouldn’t even have
liked
some of them—”

“She’s talking about you, Moose!” someone hollered, and laughter bubbled up from the 57th.

She waited for the laughter to subside. “My father said he had nothing in common with most of those men, but by the end of the war, he would have given his life for any one of them. They were a band of brothers whose bonds were forged more strongly than they could have been by blood or money. And now I know that even after death, my father’s brothers felt the same way. You would not have come if it were otherwise.” A rumble of approval and the stamping of feet cut off her words.