Chapter Seven
When the carillon bells rang across the esplanade at five o“clock, the party was set to begin.
Cora’s heartbeat was a quick, light thing, pulsing in her ears as she changed into her evening serving uniform and followed Daisy to the house for their last-minute briefing.
They knew from their dossiers that rail tycoon William Morton liked ice-cold lime juice sweetened with honey and served in a chilled bottle with salt along the rim.
When the President’s press secretary came to visit, he enjoyed first editions of classic novels, particularly those by Jules Verne, and Byrd always made sure to stock the man’s room with them before he arrived.
Byrd was observant and meticulous when it came to his guests.
He would make for a good PI, Cora thought.
Which meant that she had to be an even better one.
Daisy slid closer to Cora. “What’s he doing here?” she whispered under her breath.
They were gathered in the billiards room, adjacent to the Assembly Room.
The time was generally used by Macready, the head housekeeper, and Mr. Rather, the head of staff, to remind them of specific guests’ preferences.
Instead, the man standing in front of them was the head of security, Dallas Winston.
He was an imposing man dressed in a three-piece vested suit the color of smoke.
He had close-cropped blond hair and eyes sharp enough to peel the skin from fruit.
“As I would suspect you are all aware by now, specific threats have been made with regard to the well-being of Mr. Byrd,” Mr. Winston said.
His gaze sifted through them, one by one.
Cora’s senses were unbearably heightened; otherwise, she might not have noticed the way that Liam took a step toward Daisy; the way her hand subtly found his in the shadows before dropping to her side again.
“You are the eyes and ears of this estate,” Winston continued, “and we are on higher alert than normal. You will report anything at all unusual. It is not your job to assess the danger or importance of a thing. No matter how small, you will find me directly and report it.”
A trickle of sweat made its way down Cora’s chest as she nodded her assent and began to circulate through the room with trays of aperitifs.
She could stay on the fringes of the crowd in the Assembly Room and still follow the orchestrated schedule.
Dinner would be held from seven to half past eight o’clock in the dining room, with films and a newsreel shown in the private theatre in the evenings, and alcohol flowing freely until the moon began to set and the guests were half-boiled from the gin.
The party would begin without Byrd’s presence; he would appear suddenly through the hidden door next to the fireplace like an apparition.
She stole a glance around the room, looking for Jack, but he hadn’t yet arrived.
This was a man who had gotten through life with skin under his fingernails.
He was the only one who knew her true identity—the only one who could unveil her two biggest secrets, and in one fell swoop destroy her past and her future.
She moved through the periphery of the room with her tray of appetizers and cocktails and thought of the alarms that had blared that night on Pelican.
Of the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Of the look in her father’s eyes—as if he knew what she had done.
“Drink, sir?” Cora asked the man to her right.
It was Simon Leit, the tennis champion. The guests were beginning to gather in the Assembly Room, mingling in their silk dresses and formal dinner jackets beneath vaulted ceilings.
The walls, paneled in dark walnut, made the room’s immensity still somehow feel intimate.
Cora eyed the grand fireplace set at the room’s center.
It was seven feet wide and tall enough to stand inside of, its stonework pared into life-sized herons, lions, and birds of paradise.
And to the right of it, invisible unless one knew just where to look, was a door.
There was a symmetry carved into the mantel, and only the sharpest of eyes would notice that a space remained to the right where a heron should go.
It was where Mr. Byrd himself liked to perch instead.
It was a little visual puzzle, and a hint that a visit to Enchanted Hill entailed more than just a week of parties—it was an invitation into a game of luxury, loose rules, and wit.
Cora kept her face relaxed and smiling, but her eyes sharp.
The room’s outer windows were thrown open onto the loggia, and a breeze sent a tremor through the pink roses that cloaked the bases of the palm trees.
It carried the scent of golden chickens roasting on the spit for dinner, hollandaise sauce, and buttery puff pastry.
The energy on the hill had ticked steadily upward now that the guests had arrived, and Cora marked each guest off on a mental list as she passed by them with her tray.
Theodore Gilham, the portly governor of California.
William Morton, the railway tycoon, wearing a bow tie and holding his chilled bottle of lime juice.
Albert “Berty” Boyle, a diminutive man with a small mustache, was a behind-the-scenes producer, beloved in Hollywood for the three surprise hit musicals he’d bankrolled.
He was rather less well known for his ties to the drug-trafficking ring that Cora’s father investigated five years ago near Santa Barbara.
The story, predictably, had been buried.
And now that Cora had seen how close Berty and Byrd were, she no longer wondered at why.
Cora approached the cluster of starlets and offered them drinks. Each declined the food, except for Lola Iris, famous tragedienne, who reached for the heartiest scallop wrapped in bacon. Cora instantly took a liking to her.
“I’ll have one of those, though,” Rita Blanchard said, gesturing toward Cora’s array of drinks.
Rita was impossibly beautiful, the kind of woman one couldn’t help stealing glances at.
She had enormous blue eyes that turned down at the edges so that she would almost look melancholy, except for the thousand-watt smile that was quick on her lips.
She was one of the highest paid actresses in the world.
To the side of her was Kitty Ryan, perpetually cast on the silver screen as an ingénue.
She slid a maraschino cherry into her mouth from the end of a toothpick.
The three starlets swirled around Clementine in their silks, all glowing skin, white teeth, excitement, and sexuality.
Clementine was lit up, laughing, the jewel gleaming amber on her forehead.
The other three were beautiful, but Clementine had a charisma that was weighted with a mass all its own.
Judy Crump or not, from a Florida swamp or not, the room was drawn to her, and she owned it.
Cora could see why Truman had wanted her for his own.
And then a man stepped across the threshold into the Assembly Room dressed in a debonair suit; and when the light fell onto his face, Cora instantly stilled.
It was Jack.
He was still hauntingly familiar to her, even wearing more than a decade of extra years.
He was clean-shaven, because any stubble would give away the fact that he dyed his hair.
She could see the same soft indentation he had across his upper lip.
The scar he’d gotten from the time he had faced off against Gasper.
But his eyes were darker than she remembered. She watched them sweep the room, turning his head in the direction of the card game. She saw the slightest tensing in his spine when someone hollered and threw their cards across the table.
The very way he moved was the same.
It was definitely him.
She could still remember the way he looked when the sun turned the rock face of Pelican golden, pulling the prickly strands of crabgrass and weeds from the scarps. The way he had turned to her, squinting through the fence, and asked: “Cora, do you have a favorite flower?”
She had traced the grit of the sandstone she was sitting on with her fingers, felt the craggy rock beneath the thin cotton of her dress.
“I like black-eyed Susans best,” she said after thinking for a moment. “Because they attract dragonflies.”
“Dragonflies?” he had asked. He’d given an almost comic shiver. “I don’t like the whirring sound they make. Like a fly crossed with a bat.”
“They are not!” she had said. “They look like flying rainbows.”
He had laughed, and warmth had bloomed in her chest at the sound of it.
He had been such a perfectionist, noticing every little weed, prattling on to the guards about fertilizer and deadheading, growing on terms that bordered on friendly with them.
They let him be the official gardener into the late fall.
Gave him kitchen scraps and even dirty bathwater for composting so the flowers practically burst from the rock.
Cora had seen, with her own eyes, how good he was at winning their trust.
Yet she hadn’t realized until too late that he had been doing the same thing to her.
Her grip tightened on the tray. She stole through the shadows now, watching him with a growing dread.
The castle was on high alert for someone who could slip inside its defenses on behalf of the mob. Someone aiming to kill Truman Byrd. Cora’s stomach turned.
Surely all the guests were thoroughly searched before they set foot on the property, she told herself.
But her hands were shaking so much that she sloshed a bit of the pitcher’s contents onto the floor.
She wiped another trickle of sweat from her brow.
She should turn Jack in right then and there, her own consequences be damned.
And yet she didn’t.
She would do almost anything to prevent her secret from coming to light.
Even, she was discovering, if it meant risking another man’s life just to save her own skin.