Chapter Four
“You’re early,” the chauffeur said to Jack, glancing in the rearview mirror. He was a young man, polished in his black suit and brimmed hat.
Jack straightened his cuff links.
“I caught an earlier train,” he said, flashing a wide smile. “Do you think Mr. Byrd will mind?”
The chauffeur coughed. “This your first trip to the Hill?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Mr. Byrd doesn’t like early.”
Too late now, Jack thought darkly. He could hear a faint Mexican accent just beneath the chauffeur’s English.
For a moment, it made Jack think of an old friend, now long dead.
He leaned forward, banishing that thought.
“Is that—?” Jack craned his head as the car passed something by the side of the road. “Did I just see an ostrich?”
The driver just laughed. He wore impeccable white gloves. The automobile smelled new, like varnish and fresh leather.
Jack kept an easy smile on his face, but his stomach lurched as the car rounded a bend and he caught his first glimpse of Byrd Castle. It was perched high on the hill, with tall, thin palm trees shooting upward around it like sparklers.
How long had he fought for this chance? Jack concentrated on relaxing the joints of his fingers, the knots in his shoulder.
He tried to look like a man who was merely there to enjoy a week of parties at the most coveted invite in the country.
But beneath his pressed suit, his heart beat slick and hard.
“Best get your papers ready,” the chauffeur said. “You won’t be admitted to the house without them.”
“Of course,” Jack said. He reached into his leather bag for his identity papers and the invitation, its thick paper raised with embossing.
“I’d imagine the security Mr. Byrd has in place is first-rate,” he said carefully.
He studied the chauffeur’s face in the mirror.
“Is this road the only way on or off the Hill, then?”
The chauffeur caught his eye. “It is.”
Jack looked away and straightened his tie as the wind rippled through the espaliered trees. With a storm coming, the pine cones would be silently shifting, their scales tucking into themselves to hide.
Jack kept his expression neutral and his eyes out the window, looking for guards. For boundary fences and foot paths. For escape routes.
The Hill must have been able to see him coming, even though he was arriving hours ahead of schedule.
The thought made him uneasy. He could already see two butlers gathering at the top of the drive, holding trays of drinks and refreshments.
Sweat beaded beneath his tie as the car came closer to the security guards, who stood armed and waiting.
The house was even more like a fortress than he’d expected.
He cracked the joints in his hands one more time.
A sudden rap on the window made him jump.
“State your name,” the first security guard barked through the window glass. The second had a list ready to double-check his identity.
“Pleased as punch,” Jack Yates lied. He smiled. “The name’s Everett Conner.”
The chauffeur passed Jack’s papers to the security team. They examined them for a long moment. Jack watched the roses tremble in the wind as they snaked around the bases of the palm trees and he hardly breathed. There was no turning back now.
Then the chauffeur opened the door for him and said: “Welcome to Byrd Castle.”
Cora and Daisy dropped their dust cloths and moved to a better vantage point to watch the black car crest the hill.
They pushed open the door to the loggia and stood on the mosaic tiles between potted palms as the car curved around the arcing drive and came to a stop at the base of the boxwood maze.
Daisy took a step closer, and in her face Cora saw the same flash of curious excitement that she felt.
On their nights off, Cora and Daisy stayed up late, drinking cheap bottles of liquor pilfered from Byrd’s hidden cellar and playing cards with a butler named Liam who was sweet on Daisy.
Sometimes the chauffeur, Matias Rojas, joined them.
Over a glass of bourbon, Liam had once told them a story about a certain rising star named Oliver Luck.
“He drank one too many gin and tonics and swiped an ancient ceremonial headpiece from Byrd’s library,” Liam said, doling out the story like a hard candy.
“No!” Cora had said deliciously. She took a swig of wine and leaned forward.
“And then he wore it streaking through the Venetian fountain.”
“No!” Cora had crowed, covering her face with her hand.
“Byrd watched the whole thing coolly, smoking on a long cigarette, never saying a word,” Daisy said, jumping in to finish the story while Liam lit a cigar.
“But after that night, Mr. Luck was moved farther and farther from the main house.” It was one of Byrd’s nonverbal cues, his little games—if a guest displeased him, their accommodations were downgraded, their views gradually shifting from the endless vista of ocean to the ridged mountains and then to the gardens overlooking the servant quarters, until the message was painfully clear.
“Did Oliver leave then?” Cora had asked. She felt the alcohol bloom in a flush across her cheeks.
“Yes,” Daisy had said, “and he hasn’t appeared in Byrd’s films or papers since.”
Cora peered over the esplanade. This new guest was already starting off on the wrong foot, because Truman Byrd didn’t take kindly to being surprised.
He had an almost tyrannical need for control.
The entire estate was built to maximize it, designed with hidden doors and passageways so that he could come and go throughout the house in whatever manner he pleased—slipping in unnoticed, or commanding a dramatic entrance.
Perhaps if the staff decided they liked this guest, they would try to cover for him and hide his early arrival.
Cora shifted the palm vase for a better look, and she and Daisy took turns peeking between the balustrades. Though Daisy was afraid of heights, her curiosity got the better of her.
“Can you see who it is?” Cora asked.
Daisy stood and bravely leaned over the balcony. “It’s a man,” she whispered. “I don’t recognize him. He’s never been here before.”
Cora thought back to the notes she had scrupulously recorded in her diary. Only two guests had never been to the Hill. “It must be that Everett Conner, then, who Mr. Byrd recently met gambling—or that rising star.”
“Beau Remington,” Daisy sighed, leaning forward. “Who isn’t coming, last I heard. Which means I’ll never meet him—one declined invitation to the Hill, and he’s good as dead to us.”
Cora’s curiosity heightened. The man who was arriving was the one who, despite all her research, she knew the least about.
Everett Conner: a self-made man, some sort of cattle tycoon flush with new money, from Nevada.
His face was turned away from her, and all Cora could glimpse was the back of his dark head, the sloping curve of his shoulders, the smart cut of his suit as his baggage was unloaded.
He accepted a lemonade and commented on the hazy humidity, the darkening glass of the ocean, with the barest hint of a drawl.
She remembered then—humble Midwest beginnings—like Byrd and his father.
She could almost feel the ridged paper of her notes beneath her fingers.
Byrd had met Conner last winter at a “trade conference”—code for high-stakes gambling—in Reno.
And then the man stepped forward.
He turned in profile, and Cora let out an inadvertent sound. It was the handsome cut of his nose. The dark eyebrows, which used to be lighter. She froze, certain that just like the zebras on that first day, her eyes were playing tricks on her.
But then he laughed, and the color drained from Cora’s face. It was the very same laugh she still sometimes caught as an echo in her nightmares.
She saw her own girlish fingers, passing him a piece of her mother’s freshly baked bread through the whorls of a barbed-wire fence. How her skin had brushed the sleeve of his chambray prison uniform.
All the blood rushed to Cora’s head.
“Jack,” she gasped to herself.
And the convict looked up.