Chapter Five
“Are you all right?” Daisy asked. “You just went whiter than this rag.”
Cora swayed, feeling the contents of her stomach threatening to come back up.
“Sit down,” Daisy said, forcing her to the floor.
Cora drew several deep breaths and concentrated on the cut tiles of the mosaic beneath her legs.
They were a wash of colors, sea-glass green, aqua, cream, like the mancala pieces she used to cup in her hands.
Daisy ran to get Cora a glass of water, and Cora gulped it down.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I just felt faint all of a sudden.”
“Here, let’s get you back to the room,” Daisy said, helping Cora to her feet. “You should lie down.”
“No! I’m fine.” Cora’s heart was beating a cacophony. She was hallucinating. She was mistaken. It couldn’t possibly have been him. “I mean—yes, I’ll lie down. But I’m quite sure I can make it myself. Cover for me, just this once?” she asked. “I’ll do the lavatory shifts for a week.”
“Of course,” Daisy started to say, her brow knit, but Cora had barely waited to hear her answer.
She hurried down the grand staircase and across the marble foyer, still feeling as though her legs might buckle beneath her at any moment.
Her heart was in her throat as she scanned the esplanade for the convict.
But the black car was gone, the esplanade clear. The butlers had already taken Jack to his room somewhere on the Hill.
Cora’s fingers were trembling as she inserted the key into the lock of her own room. To think, that very morning she had been brimming with self-congratulation over holding a bloody tray.
She should go to Dallas Winston immediately, or possibly even Truman Byrd himself.
If Jack Yates had arrived under an alias, they likely didn’t know who he really was.
He’d been merely seventeen when his mug shot was taken, and the copy that ran in the newspaper had been dim and grainy.
He was fifteen years older now, his hair dyed dark—all but unrecognizable to anyone who didn’t know him as well as she had.
To anyone who hadn’t seen him daily for two years on Pelican Island, and then in their nightmares ever after that.
Cora should call the police.
But she didn’t. Instead, she headed to the closet that smelled of rich cedar. There was a safe hidden within it, and a black lacquer box secreted within that.
Part of her had always wondered if he had really drowned like they said. But he had never once tried to contact her. A wave of anger flooded through her now like a riptide, strong enough to pull her out to dark places. She felt as though she had been duped all over again.
She opened the box, removed the hollow book holding her Leica 35mm camera, and lifted out her diary. Its lined pages were ridged with the texture of her handwriting. At the back, several yellowing, folded newspaper articles were tucked inside.
The first article was from a crime solve Cora had played a hand in.
With a bit of self-initiated detective work she had managed to track down the thief who had stolen a case of perfume from the department store where she was working as a clerk—and it was that article which had led Mabel Byrd to contact her in the first place.
Folded behind it was her mother’s death notice.
Alice McCavanagh, died 1920, after an illness.
Cora pulled out the final article and came to what she was looking for.
The paper was worn—as thin and brittle as insect wings pinned under glass—and so creased that its folds could dissolve in her hands.
It was the only article about Pelican that Cora had kept from the long, endless onslaught that followed the escape.
And she had kept it because of the picture that ran with it—Jack’s mug shot.
She took a sharp breath. She had to be absolutely certain.
Those very same eyes, staring soulfully at the camera. It was the same nose, though his hair was now longer, sleek and dark. There was no scar on his lip in the picture—the only shot of him that all the papers ran. That scar wouldn’t come until later.
INFAMOUS YATES brOTHERS ESCAPE PELICAN, the headline screamed.
Cora closed her eyes. If she went to Dallas Winston now, that’s when the questions would start. Questions she had no intentions of answering. Her own careful alias might unravel.
And what if Jack talked?
Bitterness surged within her again. Hadn’t he already cost her enough?
She had carried the shameful secret for years, as carefully as a blade beneath her ribs. She would do anything to prevent other people finding out about what she had done.
Especially her father.
Cora’s father had taken a job as guard when she was five years old, and they had moved to the narrow ridge of slate-and-rust-colored rock that rose up out of the Bay.
She could barely remember life before Pelican Island.
To her, and perhaps no one else, Pelican was beautiful.
Cora’s family lived with the other guards in converted military barracks that were turned into stucco cottages the color of taupe.
They were actually quite cozy, especially when it rained.
She had curtains, and tea time. Her mother played the piano.
A portrait of her grandmother hung on the wall.
But when ships passed, they kept a wary distance away, and Cora would watch the starkly curious faces of the passengers as they craned their necks toward the island.
She saw the way they took in the chain-link fences, the cell house painted blinding white; the guard towers dotting along the perimeter, the water tower pitching its distended belly on stilted legs high overhead.
But they never saw what Cora saw: the six other young families that lived there, or the way the wildflowers grew out of the rock—delicate Queen Anne’s lace and bright orange poppies bursting from the ridges.
The steep cliffs and seawalls where the Bay bashed against their sides like a lace veil some mornings and others, a foaming mouth.
She shared the tiny island with two hundred inmates, some of the worst criminals on earth, but they were separated across the fence and locked up behind bars.
Two thirds of the island were strictly off-limits—but she knew the side that was hers like the back of her hand, the clefts and crevices and the civilian commissary with its wooden crates of tobacco, salted caramels, and powdered milk.
There was a handball court, a quarry, a playground, even a small two-lane bowling alley.
It didn’t strike Cora as particularly odd that she lived on an island penitentiary until the year she turned twelve and realized that no classmate had ever accepted an invitation to come to the island.
None of them had seen the inside of her bedroom, because their parents wouldn’t entertain the idea of it, even after Cora’s father ventured with her into the city, his gun and badges and hulking form on display for reassurance.
Cora had overheard her friends talking about it one overcast March day, congregating and giggling while they drank their bottles of Coca-Cola beneath the school’s awning.
It was the first time Cora had ever realized there was a difference between being in the shade and the shadows.
Cora examined every groove and angle of Jack’s face in his old mug shot.
High cheekbones, a cut jaw, hair that sideswept into his eyes.
Fifteen years, she thought. Fifteen years since the day they had met for the first time.
Jack and his brother Leo had been pulling weeds in the spindly garden just beyond the barbed-wire fence.
Cora could hear them talking to each other.
She had recently discovered a certain hidden spot on the eastern side of the island near the fence, where she could tuck herself into the ridge of a rock.
It smelled like rotting seaweed but was delightfully cool, and she could stretch out her feet and lean her back against the wall.
It felt like her own secret place, a virtual impossibility on a tiny island crawling with criminals and guards.
And it gave her a chance to spy on the inmates who were on outdoor duty.
She had climbed inside to read a book—her mother thought it was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but really it was The Hound of the Baskervilles—when she heard their thick Dorchester accents begin.
She had stopped to listen. A guard was patrolling the far end of the pitch. The watch tower was a box of blank glass above their heads.
“You know what they call this place?” Jack asked. He squinted into the waves, at the place where the sun turned them brilliant white and searing.
“Stop it, Jackie,” Leo had said, adjusting the button of his work gloves with a deep-set weariness. “I don’t care.”
Leo launched a pebble into the foaming waves and then promptly picked up his gloves to weed somewhere else.
Jack had stayed, squinting up to feel the sun on his face, and Cora peeked out from the rock as he peeled off his stained work gloves.
The skin on his hands was smooth, and she stole a glimpse of his tanned skin, his long, thin fingers.
Cora’s father always made certain that no large rocks remained on the prisoner side of the fence—none capable of being wielded to bash in a skull.
The job of sorting the rocks sometimes fell to Cora when she was earning pocket money or being punished.
When all the prisoners were locked safely inside their cells, she often collected the heavier stones to bring to the civilian side of the island or—when she was younger—to heave them off the cliff as though she were feeding her pet, the sea.
“Do you know why they call it Ratite Rock?” Jack had said again quietly.
Cora’s heart took off in a gallop when he cocked his head and glanced in her direction.
He knew that she was there. She had frozen for a moment, and then she had moved infinitesimally, sending out a shower of pebbles down the cliff face.
She glanced up at the blank windows of the guard tower, trying to gauge if anyone was watching.
Then she emerged from her hiding place and shook her head.
“Ratites are birds that don’t fly,” he had explained, his voice still low. He shrugged. “Ratite Rock. I guess because no one’s ever going to leave here.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that it made something in Cora sad.
Like he had wrestled it and accepted that his fate was tied to a millstone, only this one sat on the surface of the sea instead of sinking to the bottom.
Ratite Rock. Cora knew how badly all the rest of them wanted off of it, but she would have lived on Pelican Island all her life, if she could.
“Oh,” she said. “Ratite Rock. I get it.” She had stolen a glance at his eyes.
Gray and piercing, like silver. Jack was the youngest prisoner on the island, and she was drawn to him that day, with his hair the color of wet sand, tinting a little bit red in the sun.
He was skinny, with high cheekbones and long arms that made him look gangly.
He didn’t have the haunted look in his eyes, like most of them, or the pulling, vapid presence that Gasper did. He looked hungry and young and alive.
She knew good and well the horror of what he had done.
He and his brother Leo had stolen priceless art from a Boston museum to sell on the black market, Rembrandts and Vermeers—cut them right out of their frames with a razor blade, the papers said—and brutally murdered two guards who tried to get in their way.
BUTCHERY AT THE BASTION, the papers had shrieked.
The papers covered the trial in every salacious, gory detail.
Eyewitnesses testified that they had seen three masked men enter the museum.
Two of those men were Jack and Leo Yates, who were apprehended inside, still standing over the guards as they lay dying.
The guards’ blood was found on their clothing, their skin. Beneath their fingernails.
But they must have had an accomplice, who managed to squirrel away the paintings in a large briefcase and—perhaps—even on his person, beneath a coat or cloak. The rain washed away his footprints, and he vanished, along with the art, like mist. None of the paintings was ever found.
So the Yates brothers came to Pelican—maybe for life.
And at that point, Jack Yates still had a lot of life left.
“What’s your name?” he had asked.
She bit her lip. “Cora,” she said, the wind blowing her hair into a ratty mess.
The scent of flowers and brackish seaweed that carried on it were like smelling salts, strong enough to be a warning.
To remind her of sense. She thought of this man killing a guard in cold blood.
A guard who was just there, doing his job.
A guard like her father.
Over the years, Cora had wished a thousand times that she could go back to that day and erase it. The first pebble, starting a coming avalanche.
She folded the newspaper down its crease, cutting Jack’s face in half.