Most places, he turns up nothing promising. But at Mrs. Cowley’s, she leads him into an upstairs bedroom where there is a young girl who has been burned beyond recognition. As soon as he approaches the bed and sees the extent of the girl’s injuries, he wants to look away. The face is ruined, poor child, so he looks at the parts of her body the fire didn’t destroy—her wrists, her forearms, the curve of one of her shoulders. Louisa’s wrists are skinny—Sara always said she had bird bones—and this girl’s wrists have some meat on them. “It ain’t her,” he says to Mrs. Cowley, and they move out of the room quietly so as not to wake the girl sleeping in the other bed.
Mrs. Cowley gives him a few other homes to check, places where she knows folks have taken in the injured. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” she says as he prepares to go.
“Sure is.”
Once Gilbert works his way through the houses that sit in the immediate vicinity of the theater, he moves farther afield. It wouldn’t make sense to carry anyone down Shockoe Hill and across the creek, so he sticks to Court End, and eventually moves west through Madison Ward.
He is nearly to Court’s Addition when he rounds a corner and spies Kemp and three of his men on horseback.
Quick as he can manage, he draws himself up alongside a shed, holds his breath, and waits for them to pass.
But they don’t pass. They’re interrogating someone, over by the barn, across the way. A couple of someones he realizes, once he gets bold enough to poke his head around the corner.
Gilbert can’t hear what they’re saying, but it’s clear as day what’s goingon. The men lined up against the barn have skin as dark as Gilbert’s, which is all anyone needs to get stopped by the patrol.
Gilbert’s too far away to get a good look at the men, but one of them reminds him of his sister’s husband, Cecil, who is thin as a reed, with a long neck that bends like a blue heron’s.
Gilbert skirts the shed, trying to see if he can get himself a better view, but it’s no good. He looks around. A dozen feet away is a woodpile, and if he can make it over there, he should be able to get a decent look at what’s going on.
It’s risky to run for it. But Kemp and his men aren’t looking his way. Gilbert counts to three in his head, then starts to move—fast, but not so fast as to make a sound.
He was right. From the woodpile, Gilbert can see straight across the street, and his stomach drops when he realizes that the reed of a man is indeed Cecil. Kemp is in Cecil’s face, and he’s yelling loud enough that his words carry. “You mean to tell me that you were given free rein to search, but no pass to explain what the hell you’re doing?”
Cecil speaks softly and whatever he says to Kemp doesn’t make its way all the way to Gilbert’s ears. Who’s Cecil searching for, he wonders, and why? “What I think,” says Kemp, “is that the three of you were part of the plot to burn down the theater.”
The man next to Cecil begins to weep, but it’s like Cecil’s face is carved from stone.
Kemp gives an order to one of the other men on the patrol, who gets down from his horse and shackles all three men. “Take them in,” says Kemp. “We’ll keep pushing out, toward the slaughterhouse.”
Gilbert watches as Cecil is led away, then waits for Kemp and the rest of the patrol to head off in the other direction. Once the road is clear, he darts across it and takes off through the woods to the Price place.
By the time he arrives at the quarters, he is breathing hard, but he doesn’t wait to so much as catch his breath before he bangs on the door of his sister’s cabin.
It’s Moses who answers. Gilbert looks past him, into the cabin’s dark interior, but all he sees are the little girls playing near the hearth. “Your mama here?” he asks his nephew.
Moses shakes his head no.
“Where she at?”
He doesn’t say a word, just shrugs.
“I got to find her. It’s important. She at the mill?”
Again, nothing.
“Your papa’s been taken in,” Gilbert says finally. “And I need your mama to tell Master Price, quick as she can.”
Moses looks like he’s close to tears.
“What’s wrong, Mo?”
The boy stutters, “Nothing.”
Gilbert is starting to get concerned. “Is your mama all right?”
He nods.
“And your sister?”
