Chapter 12 #2
Laurie touched his own brow. “This looks worse this morning.”
Of course it does. I was almost murdered! “Why, thank you. I would like for you to leave.”
Laurie was now before him at the buffet, which had been perfectly laid out. (Had he done that?) He poured from the silver coffeepot, put cream just how Chary liked it, and offered cup with saucer.
He must’ve done it. There was nobody else there this early. How curious.
“Sit down and have your coffee, Chary Wright. I wanna talk.”
“Telegrams are quite efficient. Invented just for the purpose.”
Laurie held the cup out farther. “And expensive. Not so private. No proof of life before my eyes.”
Proof of life? Chary should’ve been panicking. Instead, he felt still dulled from yesterday’s fatigue, floating on a raft of inevitability. This would’ve happened eventually, surely. “It’s my brother who’s dead.”
Laurie’s gaze was steady. “Yes. But someone tried to kill you, too.”
Chary’s relief was hot, tingling. Laurie’s concern had nothing to do with him. Well, something to do with him but not for the reasons he’d feared. Maybe things weren’t so dire after all.
Chary took the cup and saucer and sat. Laurie sat, too, and then was quiet; and it was strangely natural-feeling, to have breakfast sitting kitty-corner from the man who could ruin him with a few strokes of pen—indeed, one telegram would do it—the man who would find all of the scandal and answers he sought now within his reach.
By the time Laurie spoke again, the cream on Chary’s second coffee had risen to the surface and congealed, and a little breeze had begun clearing the fog away from the windows, promising a hot, dry afternoon.
“Nobody let me in, you know.”
Chary nodded. He knew this, if not only from the state of Laurie’s shoes but because Brasher didn’t spend his nights in the house.
None of the staff did, in fact. Mrs. Simon, the cook, was due a little later, closer to nine.
Chary hardly ever ate actual breakfast in the breakfast room.
He had maintained its Victorian superfluousness for the day he had guests—and he never had those.
“You’ve made yourself very free with the stove and icebox, too.”
“I can boil a pot of coffee, sure.”
Chary should not have felt like he ought to say thank you for doing so. That was absurd. “What is your point? That I’m not safe here after all? That anyone could come in and, say, poison the salt?”
Laurie fidgeted with his cup—a fairly plain bone porcelain, with a gold trim and plated handle only, so he couldn’t have found much objectionable there. “Not exactly, no. A source of mine was attacked yesterday. A gaffer at Brooklyn Glass. He didn’t make it.”
“No.” Chary set down his cup. It made a fragile, tinny sound. “My God. Another one?”
“Yeah. So, I don’t wanna let you out of my sight, not even way out here in Nowhere, Maine.”
“I am safe here. But I’m very sorry, Laurie. Truly.”
The man shrugged in a way that wasn’t a dismissal at all but an uncomfortable shift of thick shoulders.
“I’ve never had a source die before. Be killed.
I’ve written some things where I thought they might’ve been targeted, after publication, but never…
” He huffed. “In medias. In the thick of it. Never because I was poking around, asking questions.” He rubbed at his lips, and when he glanced over to Chary, his gaze was hot and upset. “And not finding any damned answers.”
“I…” Chary felt he had to offer something. “There are no secrets worth killing for at Wright Glass, I told you.” He flushed saying it, though it was perfectly true; there weren’t any—that he knew of.
“Mmm. At Wright Glass. There’s a qualifier if I ever saw one.”
Chary realized, under Laurie’s knowing dark-brown stare, that he’d thoroughly lost any ability to demand Laurie leave his home. The rich man doth protest too much.
“It’s the truth. I’m sorry. I have nothing more to offer you.”
“You know, I believe you.”
Chary spun his cup in its saucer, then pulled it close again. Laurie could not be there, demanding answers, turning observant, calculating eyes onto his home, onto him, but he was. He didn’t seem keen on leaving, and Chary couldn’t insist he do so without waving a white flag of suspicion.
Chary had better make the best of it. But how?
Of the two of them, August had—historically—been the one who could look at a situation and know how to mold it to his will.
To make it better. At first, Chary had seen it as nothing but a cheerful (and usually tipsy) bravado of the naturally confident, but August had escaped a children’s asylum, then the alleys of Paris, then London’s underbelly before finding his way back home to New York.
It hadn’t been optimism or bravado that’d carried him through all of that.
August employed a flexibility he’d been forced to discover in himself in order to survive. Make the best of it or succumb.
“Look, Chary,” he’d said two years earlier, standing in the Fifth Avenue foyer, far removed from his history—Fridays were theatre nights, and he would drag Chary along—applying red-rouge lip paint with a ring-finger pad.
He didn’t use much, not enough to look painted for purpose, just a little to look pale and bitten.
“People will tell you whatever you ask. Even what they want from you. Well,” he’d smiled slyly, “as long as they know it. Just ask. An’ once you know what they want, everythin’s easy. ”
At the time, Chary had opened his mouth to ask about Raberding, if Raberding knew what he wanted from August, and what it was, if August knew, too. It was new between them, though, so, surely, there was not yet any making-best.
There hadn’t been. Yet.
Today, he wasn’t sure asking would work on Laurie, but he figured he ought to try.
“The staff should be arriving any minute. How am I to explain your presence here, Laurie Tulley?”
(He heard an imaginary August groan. “You can’t come at it sideways, Chary!”)
“You must have a plan, I mean,” Chary revised.
Laurie raised eyebrows. “Do I have a plan? I figured you’d explain me away the obvious way. You’re open with the domestics, aren’t you? Paid up to their eyeballs?”
“Yes.” Chary nodded stiffly. “I rather have to be, thanks to the papers. Men of your very profession.” He set down the cup. “You want to pose as my lover? Rather self-assured, aren’t you? What if I don’t agree?”
(“Better,” crowed imaginary August. Chary almost wished he had flesh-and-blood August in the room with him now.)
“Why wouldn’t you? If you’re open with them, doesn’t it make sense I’d be… y’know… that kind of friend?”
It did make sense. Not that they couldn’t merely be friends, but Maine wasn’t exactly the straight-shot of the Hamptons. It was a long way to visit with an unserious acquaintance.
But what could Laurie want from this, truly?
To be closer to him? The answers he sought wouldn’t be found doing that.
He’d already confessed he’d discarded the idea of seducing him for his story.
He didn’t want to do that. Chary didn’t want him to do it.
Furthermore, Chary was sufficiently insulated against it by now. Forewarned. Wasn’t he?
“Today, you don’t fear associating with me?” he challenged.
“Oh, geez. Chary, I said what those asshole reporters wanted to hear.”
“Yes,” Chary said coolly. “Precisely.”
Laurie drew back. “All right. It’s your decision.
It’s just more of the same undercover work for me.
Tell them I’m a hunting friend, then. Whatever.
” He feigned a stretch while Chary sat there, quietly, irrationally hurt, then bent to sort through the usual basket of periodicals that Brasher kept for him on the table.
Laurie walked his fingers through newsprint, gathering greasy ink-black. “Whoa. Chicago, San Francisco, London… Times of India? South China Morning Post? D’you do nothing but read? Or is there another copy of you here somewhere?”
Chary didn’t know what to say to this. Everything was damning. Yes sounded presumptuous and frankly privileged. No sounded defensive and was dishonest. To be unnerved by the question was worst of all.
“Aside from the fifty hours’ shiftwork, that is,” Laurie mused.
“Work… is a virtue?” Chary tried.
“No, it isn’t.” Laurie smiled. “You got me there.” He sat, having settled on Wall Street Journal, of all things. “You’ve not been taking in the success literature? It isn’t meant for you, y’know. Strictly middle-class fodder.”
“No?”
“No. Not meant for you at all. Funny enough, it didn’t go so well with workingmen, either. The powers don’t want us getting too above our station. Work too hard, make too much money, and suddenly, you’re where you’re not s’posed to be.”
Chary said nothing, as clearly Laurie found him to be the powers in this situation.
“You, Mr. Wright,” he said, “are who’s meant to put it on posters for your employees. Musclemen in jean overalls, shirtless.” He bit into a pastry and said, mouth full, “Improves morale.”
Chary laughed—unexpectedly—and then felt guilty for doing so, and suppressed it with a hasty hand.
But surely, Laurie had meant him to find it funny. Or was he being goaded into doing so? Would laughter be condemnation of his character? It wasn’t funny that people should be propagandized into working for some imagined and nonexistent glory instead of fair pay. Especially to a socialist.
Laurie was eyeing him, so he supposed either way, he’d gotten it wrong.
“It’s all right to find humor in bleak things, you know.”
“So long as both parties understand that it is bleak?”
“Sure,” Laurie said softly. “But I’d say that was implicit in the joke.”
If only Laurie didn’t have such dark, kind-seeming, deceptive eyes. “It wasn’t. I don’t know your faith in me—or lack of it.”
“Yeah. I can see that. It’s mutual.”
“Mutual? You’ve accused me of murder, espionage, union-busting—”
“You haven’t been honest with me, and folks have died. A source of mine.”
“You haven’t been honest with me!” Chary hissed. “And by the way, I find you very hot and cold.”