The Assassin

—

Isaac Bell drove Edna Matters to Rockefeller’s Westchester estate.

They were building a fence around Pocantico. The man at the gatehouse said that a six-foot-high iron barrier twenty miles long would surround the entire property. There was talk of moving the railroad. Gunfire echoed in the woods. The gamekeepers had orders to shoot stray dogs.

The fence caught Edna’s attention. “What happened?” she asked Bell. “Has JDR gone mad?”

“He’s afraid.”

“He should be afraid. He should hide in terror. He drove my poor father mad.”

The house where Rockefeller was living while work continued on the main mansion came into view.

“Stop your auto!” Edna cried.

Bell stopped the Locomobile. She was deeply upset.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Edna said. “In fact, I know I can’t. Take me back to New York.”

Bell held her hands in his and looked her in the eye. “Why not?”

“I never suspected my father. I never suspected my sister. My own blood. Some ‘woman newspaperman’ I am. How can I trust my judgment?”

“The richest, most powerful business man in the history of the world is offering a unique opportunity to a wonderful writer. No one else can do it but you. You owe it to history.”

“How did you talk him into it?”

Isaac Bell took Edna in his arms. He held her close for a long time. Then he whispered, “I told Mr. Rockefeller that he would never get a better chance to leave an honest account of himself.”

EPILOGUE

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, 1940

POCANTICO HILLS, WESTCHESTER

Isaac Bell swept through the front gates of Pocantico Hills in a midnight-blue Bugatti Type 57C drophead coupe and raced up the long driveway. Silvered hair lent dignity to his natural elegance, but he still looked too rugged to be diminished by his years. If that threat hovered on time’s horizon, it did not seem to trouble him.

The Bugatti, a roadster with sculpted lines as smooth as oil, rounded the final bend, holding the road as tightly as if on rails, and Bell stopped in front of a mansion. Well-proportioned and solidly built, the house looked like it had stood overlooking the Hudson River forever, although he recalled passing by in his Locomobile when the stone masons were laying its foundations.

“Daddy!”

A flaxen-haired coed bounded out the door, juggling a portable typewriter, a bulging briefcase, and an overnight bag. The estate librarian followed with an armload of books. “Come back anytime, Amber.”

“How did it go?” Bell asked in the car. “Still want to be a newspaperwoman?”

“More than ever. The interview was amazing. I can’t thank you enough for getting me in. I read every day and stayed awake half the nights typing up my shorthand notes. Rockefeller told E. M. Hock stories no one’s ever read anywhere. No wonder they locked it up until he died.”

“Edna could get a rhinoceros to confess its life history,” said Bell. “She’d have made a great detective . . . As would you.”

“I don’t want to be a detective. I want to be a reporter like her. Did you know that when JDR was almost seventy years old, he personally negotiated a right-of-way for a pipe line across Persia right under the nose of the Czar of Russia?”

“I always wondered,” said Bell. “Very little of it made the papers at the time. They were all worried about a revolution.”

“Did you know that he traveled to Baku with Van Dorn detectives for bodyguards?”

“That’s an old Van Dorn legend . . . Did he happen to mention which detectives?”

“He told E. M. Hock he could not reveal their names in case they had to operate clandestinely on another case . . . Daddy, do you think Rockefeller deserved to be the most hated man in America?”

“What do the interviews tell you?” Bell countered.

“E. M. Hock wrote in her introduction that she had a personal prejudice because of JDR’s business dealings with her father. Having admitted that, she then said that she thought he deserved to be the most hated man in America. But he kept saying everything he did was right. And he really seemed to believe it. What do you think?”

Bell said, “He brought kerosene light to ordinary people, which allowed them to read and learn at night after work. He did it by imposing order on chaos. He thought he was smarter than most people, which he was. But he was not smart enough to know when to stop.”

“. . . Dad?”

“What?”

“Did you actually know Edna Matters?”

“Miss Matters and I were friends.”

“Friends?” His daughter’s inquiring eyebrow arched as sharply as a miniature Matterhorn.

He ran up and down the Bugatti’s gears while he pondered his reply. She would make a good reporter or a good detective; she was not afraid to ask hard questions.

“Before I met your mother.”

His fierce blue eyes took on a tinge of violet as he recalled trying to “save” Edna from blaming herself for not seeing something that would have somehow given her the power to stop her father and her sister from becoming monsters.

Bell downshifted to pass a New York State Police car.

After the siren faded behind him, he let go of the shifter to take his daughter’s hand and answered with the authority of a man who had known since the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake for whom his heart was spoken.

“I think you know how I feel about your mother.”

“You’re nuts for her.”

“From the day we met.”

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