Chapter Two
Six months earlier, Cora had arrived at a penthouse in New York City on a day heavy with threatening snow. Gray sludge had settled along the street corners, sloshing up from the passing trolley wheels and streetcars; it clung to Cora’s new leather pumps in wet grime.
High above the street, Mrs. Mabel Byrd blew delicate coils of smoke from the long end of her cigarette holder. Mabel Byrd was Truman Byrd’s first, and current, wife.
At least on paper.
Cora rang the front bell wearing her smartest suit: charcoal tweed with a cinched waist, gloves, a cream flat-brimmed hat she had spent a week’s salary on.
Not that it mattered. Cora realized that it was like holding a candle to the sun as soon as she stepped into the massive foyer and was greeted by a doorman wearing shoes more expensive than hers.
He pulled the golden elevator gate closed and they rode to the top floor.
The moment he delivered her into the sitting room and announced her name, Cora noticed the remainder of someone else’s chewing gum on the bottom of her pump.
“Miss McCavanagh.” Mabel Byrd greeted Cora warmly, coming toward her as if welcoming an old friend for afternoon tea.
“Mrs. Byrd.” Cora stole a sweeping glance around the room, her gaze a rake through silt, picking up details that she would clean off and examine later in the quiet of her room.
She’d never seen such flagrant, unapologetic opulence before.
The lush fabric of Mrs. Byrd’s dress whispered its own language whenever she moved.
There were clocks with bronzed swirls of Arabic; paintings thick with the texture of the original oils; tasseled curtains the width of a bound book.
Cora took a seat as the maid poured the tea, feeling a creeping sense of unease as Mabel made no pretense of examining her.
Cora’s dark auburn hair was pulled into a tight, imperfect chignon.
Winter had made her skin pale, with shadows beneath her eyes and freckles that should have been masked by makeup.
As soon as the tea was poured and the maid left the room, Mabel Byrd’s face sharpened. The warm welcome slid off like a second skin she could tuck into her pocket and wear as a mask.
“Everything we discuss here is to be kept in the strictest confidence,” Mrs. Byrd said. Cora nodded.
The two women eyed one another from satin chairs patterned with chrysanthemums. Cora kept waiting for Mabel to reach for the mini-cakes set in tiers on a porcelain tray.
She hadn’t tasted a cake like that in years.
They were smooth with pink fondant and dotted with immaculate little pearls, and they reminded Cora of ones from a bakery she used to visit with her mother.
But Mabel didn’t offer them, nor take one for herself.
Cora was tempted to break the silence, but she forced herself to wait. She sensed that the meeting would be a head game. She lived for those sorts of games.
And she almost always won them.
“I’d mind it less if it was a steady stream of them,” Mabel eventually said.
She nodded toward the paper, where Clementine Garver smiled coyly from the second page.
“That tart is an open secret.” Mabel took a long drag of her cigarillo, as if the smoke were filling an ache in her chest. Her eyes were cold and blue.
“But I need more than rumors and society gossip to grant me a divorce and ensure I retain the fair part of my fortune. I need proof. The sort I can bank on in court.”
Cora took a sip of steaming tea and listened, watching as Mabel fought to keep her voice level, but her cheeks flushed with a telling spot of red.
Cora had studied up on the Byrds before she came, taking crisp notes in her diary.
Truman Byrd had married Mabel young, when she was some second-rate actress.
She had been with him since the beginning, before the days when he launched the first Byrd paper.
They watched it soar to heights unseen in the tabloid wars, with a few juicy, timely breaks at the beginning.
Rumor had it that Truman Byrd wanted to one day enter politics himself.
And having his pulse on the world, to sway thoughts like dams and change currents, could only help.
They had wed twenty-five years ago. Now Mabel was nearing fifty, and Clementine appeared to be the understudy stepping into her role.
Cora reached into her handbag for a pen, hoping that Mabel wouldn’t dangle the assignment in front of her and then leave it unoffered on the tray.
Opportunities like the one she had hinted at on the telephone were rare.
At least for a woman like Cora, trying to sow a name for herself in a field owned solely by men.
“Her birth name is something tacky and low class—Judy Crump. She came from a Florida swamp,” Mabel said bitterly.
“So you are looking for …?” Cora had asked, pen poised.
Mabel blew out a plume of smoke. “Someone to pose as a maid at Byrd Castle. Truman tends to have as many connections among the sordid set as he does with the privileged, so I need someone fresh, with no track record in this sort of thing. But you’ll have to convince me to take that chance on you.
So, tell me. What was it like,” she said throatily, “growing up on that godforsaken island?”
Cora froze, and Mabel let out a small, dry laugh. “You think I don’t have private investigators to look into my private investigators?”
The thought sent a chill down Cora’s neck.
She hadn’t spoken of Pelican in years. People always wanted to know what it was like to be a young girl growing up at the most infamous prison in the country.
Their eyes went wide when they learned that Cora’s father had been stationed as head guard on the rocky island in the middle of the Bay where the only way off was by ferry—a ferry that sometimes came to port only once a day.
Cora was used to the look of hunger that would come across a person’s face as they waited for Cora to answer, imagining the horror of growing up so near to cutthroat murderers and thieves.
They wanted to know if she ever saw acts of brutal violence, if she had grown up in the constant shadow of fear.
The truth was, though Cora had never admitted it to anyone, that some of them had terrified her.
Like Samuel Mason. Everyone called him The Gasper.
His eyes were wild, as if there were something soulless peering out from behind them.
He’d been sent to Pelican after he lost a game of craps and stuck two forks through someone’s pupils.
“My background at Pelican Island gave me the training to be a perfect fit for this job,” Cora answered. She fixed her bright, hazel eyes on Mabel and did not blink. “I’m not easily intimidated.”
“It’s unusual,” Mabel agreed, sitting back, “to find a woman willing to do a job of this nature.” The ash trembled in a long, porous strip from her cigarette.
It was much more than that for Cora, though, and she prayed that her feelings of desperation didn’t show.
She had worn guilt and shame like a suit of armor, living beneath its weight for so long that she had given up all hope of escaping.
But then one day it came to her. She couldn’t spend her life merely working as a secretary or a shopgirl.
She needed to bring about some sort of justice.
It wouldn’t undo the things she had done, but perhaps she could tip the scales by making other wrong things right.
Unfortunately, the police force had found the idea of a female detective absurd, so Cora had been forced to strike out on her own—and her choice of assignments had swung on a pendulum between laughably impossible and morally unacceptable.
Her money and her hopes had been drying up, until Mabel’s inquiry had come in.
And finally—for the first time ever—being a woman PI would work to Cora’s advantage.
“Living in the house,” Cora said, “I’d be allowed and expected to go where others normally don’t.”
“You would need to be the most discreet,” Mabel said, tapping the ash away.
“My personal maid would train you here for two weeks, and then I would arrange for one of my moles at the Castle to recommend you for a job. He’ll ask it as a favor.
For you to be near your ailing father, or something of that nature. ”
Cora shifted in her seat. She hadn’t seen her father in years, and the thought sent a deep pang through her.
“You will sign whatever binding contracts and nondisclosures that my personal lawyer wishes you to sign. You will tell no one the true nature of your employment. Not a lover, not your closest bosom buddy, not your own mother.”
“Good thing I don’t have any of those,” Cora said briskly, and Mabel nodded cruelly. Because thanks to her private investigator, of course she already knew that.
“You will have six months to get the evidence. Photographic. Uncompromising. You are permitted to take any means necessary. And then you will bring it directly to me. No photographs, no payout. But if you deliver.…” Mabel scribbled down a figure—and when Cora glimpsed it, her knees went weak.
“And in return, you will pass my name on to anyone else in your circle who might be able to use a private investigator,” Cora countered.
Mabel smiled coldly. “You’ll have to prove yourself first,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette. “And Miss McCavanagh—I don’t take kindly to disappointment.”
Cora didn’t pause to think about it. She signed her name to the papers then and there, and finally reached for one of the tiny, pearled cakes. The frangipane melted in her mouth as she rode the golden elevator back down.
Now, almost six months later, the faint ticking of a second hand was starting to buzz like a gnat in Cora’s ear. She stood in the Astral Suite of Byrd Castle, running out of the time she needed to prove herself.