Chapter Two #2
“Cream, miss?” she asked, but Clementine Garver didn’t answer. She barely spared Cora a glance, and it struck Cora anew just how invisible her life had always been. Growing up amidst society’s lowest degenerates and now with its highest elites—a hidden cog, functioning at the periphery.
She supposed that was actually what made private investigators good at what they did. Until the moment the switch turned, and they suddenly became the wrench that changed everything.
She watched the zebras over Clementine’s shoulder, and she wondered whether Pelican or Byrd Castle was actually the more dangerous, in the end: when people who had nothing to lose—or everything to—gathered in a single, isolated place.
It wasn’t until two hours later, when Cora and her roommate Daisy were tidying the guest cottages down the hill, that Cora remembered the necktie in her pocket.
“Whose is that?” Daisy asked, smoothing her blond hair back as Cora pulled out the tie and examined it.
While Cora set aside her earnings each month, watching the creased envelope grow satisfyingly plumper, Daisy tucked hers into letters addressed to her sister Anette and baby niece Esther in Bismarck.
She talked incessantly and saved all her sister’s letters in a hat box that she kept on her nightstand.
She liked to stay up late eating black licorice and smoking cigars in her pajamas, telling Cora stories about her childhood pet rooster, Poppy Clarence.
Despite Cora’s best intentions, she had grown quite fond of Daisy.
“I’m not sure yet,” Cora said. The tie was fine satin, dyed a deep violet, with a clean, intricate diamond pattern overlaid on top. When she brought the tie to her nose and caught a whiff of cologne, her heart dropped. Peppercorn and black currant.
It was the scent Bobby had always worn.
Daisy gave out a short laugh, showing the slight chip in her bottom tooth.
“What? Does it smell rotten?” she asked.
Occasionally, and only when Daisy was relaxed and off-guard, Cora could hear the Polish lilt beneath her syllables.
It was one of the things that gave Cora begrudging respect for Truman Byrd—that he would hire Irish and Polish, and he paid good wages.
Ninety dollars a month, plus room and board.
“No,” Cora said, running her thumb over the soft fabric. “It just reminds me of someone I once knew.”
She’d received the letter from a mutual friend the day before she left for California.
Robert Connelly—Bobby, her Bobby—was marrying someone else.
The thought of him made her feel suddenly faint with unexpected grief.
She remembered the way she had smelled her clothes after coming home from their early dates, filling her nose with the scent of him so that her heart and her hopes took flight.
They had spent summers walking the avenues to window-shop for things they couldn’t afford, lying on blankets in Central Park, reading mysteries, and eating crisp, cold grapes that tasted like candy.
She loved his quick laugh, the way he could flip between accents as easily as a mimic.
She could still feel the grained texture of the letter, the blue ink of her friend Theresa’s secretary script.
Bobby and Helen are to be married in April.
Perhaps by now they already were.
She had given him up because it had been the right thing to do.
But she couldn’t escape the vision she’d had for half a moment of a bouquet trailing with myrtle and lily of the valley while her father walked her down the aisle.
Of finally letting even one person in the world know every part of her, every last, ugly secret.
But she had turned Bobby away and kept hold of it instead.
With that, she suddenly remembered the flash of purple tied around a neck last night. “This belongs to Mr. Cobb,” she said.
“The aviation pioneer?” Daisy asked.
Cora nodded. “Here, why don’t you hurry and return it to him before he leaves the Hill,” she said. “I bet there’ll be some money in it for you.”
“No, Ella,” Daisy said. “That money’s yours. You’re the one who found it.”
Cora tossed the necktie at her. “Didn’t I tell you? I’m an heiress. I just clean the jacks for fun. He’s staying in the West Oak suite. Go, before he departs at noon.”
Daisy wrinkled her nose at Cora in a look of gratitude, and grabbed the tie.
Cora was glad that it was gone, and that she couldn’t smell the memory of Bobby Connelly anymore.
Her chest felt empty, because she had loved him.
But what had happened on Pelican Island all those years ago was the insistent tap on glass, the shadow that passed over every happy moment.
Sometimes when Cora looked into Bobby’s eyes, she saw the convict she had once befriended staring back at her.
Taunting her. And then the guilt would come, as sure as the fog sweeping across the Bay.
No one knew her darkest secret but the two of them—the convict, and her.
And now it was only her.
Because he had drowned off the coast of Pelican Island when she was fifteen years old. But not before he had betrayed her, and killed again.