Chapter Three #2
The week’s new spate of party guests weren’t scheduled to reach Enchanted Hill until three o’clock.
Most would fly in Byrd’s chartered puddle-jumpers to the dirt airstrip that had been carved beside a mountain a mile down the coast, or be met off their train in San Luis Obispo.
Byrd’s chauffeured car, a Rolls-Royce polished to a gleaming onyx, would then wind along the coastal highway and bring them up the hill on a switchback road that took ten minutes to crest. Antelopes, zebras, peacocks, and red deer grazed at the base, and the castle would grow steadily larger, the vegetation becoming lusher and more verdant, the higher the car climbed.
By the time they stepped into the vast quarters of the main house, reality would have completely receded.
Cora touched the worry stone she kept in her pocket and tried to ignore the trickle of sweat that was dampening her starched uniform.
It had taken her two months of work on the Hill to secure a strategic position cleaning the third floor, where the Astral Bedroom was located.
Since then, Cora and Daisy had thrown jacks each morning to see who had to clean the lavatories.
Cora felt a twinge of guilt that she had pretended to be hopeless at the beginning, and now won a carefully curated 62 percent of the time.
After all, she had come there to unearth Byrd bushwa. Just not that sort of it.
“What’s today’s question?” she asked.
Daisy dunked her sponge into a bucket of water. “Favorite game growing up?”
“Mancala,” Cora said. It was one of the days when she could answer truthfully. “I used to play it with my father.” She remembered the birchwood board, the way the smooth glass pieces felt like colored water droplets in her hands.
“Were you close to him?” Daisy asked, squeezing out her sponge.
Not as close as I wanted.
“Sure,” Cora said.
Most of the personal anecdotes she’d told Daisy over the last six months were either fabricated completely, or shaded with enough additional color to make them barely belong to her anymore.
Cora had even added a file to her diary for herself—to keep track of the embellished facts and memories she had spun, and to stop them from seeping in to alter any of her real ones.
“Mancala, huh? I never played that one. I liked Old Maid, growing up,” Daisy said. “I suppose it was prophetic.”
Cora whipped her with her towel. “Bli-mey!” she said, laughing. “You’re what? All of twenty?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Still practically a baby,” Cora said. When she had been twenty-one, she had moved across the country to New York in a desperate bid to reinvent herself.
For the first year, she had fashioned stories about her life, trying on new identities.
She worked at a department store for money and stayed in a boarding house.
She went dancing and flirted with sailors.
She laughed. She made girlfriends named Helen and Theresa, and she tried to forget all about the convict who had ruined her life.
She had managed to become someone else for a while, but only in part. She knew loneliness well—it was a tattered blanket, letting in every nip and chill.
“And how old are you, then?” Daisy asked. She wrung the sponge in the bucket and turned to look at Cora expectantly.
“Closer to thirty than I wish,” Cora said evasively. She pulled the jacks from her pocket. “Should we play for the lavs?”
In New York, she had no longer been the strange girl from the prison island.
She had told acquaintances that she was from San Benito.
She ran so hard from herself that for a brief time, it was enough.
But at night, she would dream of red alarms blazing, of her father reaching for his gun, and would wake up in a cold sweat.
HEAD GUARD TERMINATED AFTER BLOODY ESCAPE, the papers had crowed. Cora’s father had been a year away from his dream job as warden.
Cora handed the ball to Daisy. Those were the stories that she had kept from Daisy and from everyone else she’d ever met.
She caught her reflection in the immense brass mirror as Daisy threw for the jacks.
Her father’s eyes, sharp and hazel, looked back.
He had taught her how to disarm a man twice her size, how to duck out of meaty hands attempting to close around her neck.
But she didn’t know how to fight off this pernicious feeling of desperation.
Her time was running out. Byrd was leaving on a trip after the week’s final party, and by the time he returned Clementine was off to shoot her new film.
Cora could hear her father’s gruff voice in her head:
The first rule in work of this nature is if a job starts to go south, then you get out.
But Cora had inherited her father’s eyes and his stubborn inability to follow his own advice.
“Horsefeathers,” Daisy muttered under her breath as she missed the final two jacks. “I’m hopeless.”
“You’re getting better,” Cora lied. Daisy threw her a look and went in search of the vinegar.
But then she stopped and peered out the window. “Are we expecting someone early today?”
Cora came to stand at her shoulder. The arrival of a new guest always brought Cora back to when the Pelican ferry transported a prisoner to the island.
She would gather with the other guards’ children and wives at the fence, her fingers curled around the tendrilled steel, and watch as the boat cut through the gray waves toward them.
The guards would line up in their sharp gray uniforms, their batons at their hips, their arms behind their backs. Her father at the head of them.
“No,” Cora said. “Not for two more hours, at least.”
Yet there it was, undeniably: amidst the grazing zebras and mounting fog, a black automobile, moving toward them.
Cora felt her curiosity awaken. Few people possessed reputations large enough to precede them. After all, a soul had to have a certain amount of cachet to wind up on either Pelican or Enchanted Hill—and in both places, new arrivals always brought a certain sense of fascination.
Daisy whistled next to her. “Macready is going to cast a full-on kitten,” she said as the carillon bells rang out the hour. “Wonder who’s inside?”
Cora felt a prickling sense of foreboding as the car took the final switchback and the first drops of rain spattered the window glass.