Chapter Nine #2
“Rather,” Truman was saying into the telephone. “I’ve changed my mind about Beaumont’s arrival. I don’t want him in the main house. Put him in the Whitstone guest cottage down the hill.”
There was a pause.
“And tell Macready—” Truman said. He lowered his voice even further, so that Cora had to strain her neck to hear. “If Miss Garver were to receive any … special attention from another guest, I want to know about it. And it isn’t possible for me to be everywhere at once.”
Cora felt a faint stirring of exhilaration.
She had been looking for a wrench like this: a stress point to apply until something between Clementine and Byrd splintered.
And nothing made people splinter as easily as jealousy.
It dried out the marrow of relationships, making them so brittle that a mere twinge could cause them to snap.
She stood just as Truman hung up the phone. Quicker than she expected, he appeared at the door.
Cora smiled and curtsied, not quite meeting his eyes. On the wall just behind him, she glimpsed the framed copy of the very first edition of his paper, The Post-Courant, from 1913.
Once again she wondered—why would Jack take such a risk coming to Enchanted Hill, with its enhanced security and watchmen, its scrutinized, high-profile guests—to a news tycoon’s house, no less—a news tycoon who had covered his crime, arrest, and trial?
She glanced at the place where Clem and Jack had disappeared into the trees together and let her curiosity win out.
It had been Truman’s paper that broke the story of the Bastion theft and murders.
The Post-Courant had been merely a rag at the time, but its readership hit it big after that lucky break.
The paper ran incriminating photographs, salacious interviews that were either made up or embellished.
They heavily insinuated the brothers’ guilt, leaning on every sort of sensationalism to sell more papers and get the Byrd brand off the ground.
It convinced the public of the Yates’ brothers’ guilt long before the verdict came down.
The thought hit her with a chill: Was that why he had come?
She waited until Byrd had gone, and then she made her way to the main floor, across the esplanade, and down to the Pacific Suite.
After checking surreptitiously over her shoulder, Cora entered Jack’s room. Then she closed the shutters for privacy and locked the door behind her.
Cora surveyed Jack’s room. It was neat, the bed already made up and his leather shoes set in an even line.
Several suits hung in the wardrobe. Three books were stacked on his nightstand, on subjects of bridge architecture, the Eiffel Tower, and desert botany.
He had showered that morning; there were still beads of water on the tile, still the faintest hint of steam collected at the corner of the mirror.
She saw his Pepsodent tube, neatly curled on the sink next to a silver tin of mints.
He used to grow mint leaves on Pelican and chew them like cud, saying he wished for a pack of Lifesavers.
These were the things about him that were true, that Cora could trust. Inanimate objects couldn’t lie. Because otherwise, the truth always seemed to have a twisting way about it, shimmering and impossible to grasp, the nearer Jack was to it.
Jack had only ever mentioned his crime once to her. Once. But it was like a seed that went deep into the soft parts of her and planted something there.
“I didn’t do it, Cora,” Jack had said. The sea had crashed against the rocks behind him, as if it were trying to break itself apart. He’d cleared his throat and held her eyes. “What they said I did. I swear to you that I didn’t.”
The breeze had gone cold on her skin, the cruel way the chill haunted San Francisco summers, and she had shivered.
What she had noticed most of all was that he said “I didn’t do it.
” Not “we didn’t.” An investigative detail she marked down in the pages of her notebook that night in her bedroom.
Maybe Jack had had nothing to do with that horrible crime, just like he said.
The idea began to curl inside her, vining, using Cora’s mind as a trellis.
Maybe he was innocent. Unjustly imprisoned, sent to Ratite Rock in place of someone else.
Or maybe he had tried to cover for his brother.
Maybe Jack had even been willing to come, so that his brother would not be alone.
Maybe what he had done was the opposite of wrong.
Maybe the real crime was that he was on Pelican at all.
She had believed him so desperately. Perhaps because she had wanted to. But there was no denying now that the Yates brothers were exactly what everyone had said they were.
Because as soon as they got the chance, they had killed again.
She rifled through his toiletries, his undergarments, and his personal effects, careful not to move them out of place, looking for any hint as to why he had come.
His identification papers were folded neatly in the top drawer of the nightstand, next to a gold pocket watch, a deck of cards, and his wallet.
She found two hundred dollars of crisp bills tucked inside his leather billfold, along with a matchbook for a place called The Silver Dunes in Nevada.
She palmed it while she stole a glance at his papers.
Everett Conner, born March 1, 1898, in Des Moines.
It was a fake birthdate, of course. She knew that he was born in Dorchester, that his real birthday was in November.
Cora squatted down to knock along the bottoms of his bureau drawers, looking for the echo of a hollow space, and instead got a whiff of his clothes.
They smelled good, stirring something dark and yearning within her, which instantly made her irritated.
She tried to keep herself detached from the intimacy of being in his room, of being among his private things.
She continued to methodically knock along the drawers until she hit a dull sound unlike the rest and yanked up a false bottom.
Her heart quickened.
He did not appear to have brought any weapons with him—no pistols or knives, and no gold bars or velvet pouches of diamonds either.
There were no bindles of white powders tucked inside, no glittering, illicit needles that were sometimes hidden in the quarters of the other guests.
Instead, there was simply a small, flat book—some sort of diary or ledger.
Cora snatched it up and sifted through the pages. They were almost entirely blank, save for—
Cora froze at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.
She moved backward, tucking herself behind the bathroom door.
For a long moment, she waited. And then the footsteps continued on down the corridor.
She let out a long exhale and then riffled through the rest of the book’s pages, which all appeared to be blank, except for the very last one.
There was a list of names and dates, written in tiny handwriting.
K. Abernathy, 1/2/25.
L. Movignon, 7/8/28.
A. White, 2/22/29.
There were more than fifty of them. She studied them, wondering what they could possibly mean, and why Jack would have brought them in a book that he had tried very hard to hide.
She wanted to stay and solve it, knowing those names and dates held some sort of clue to why Jack was there.
She didn’t have the time to copy them all down.
But her eyes caught on something else. Small letters and numbers were written on the pages in the bottom corner, if she flipped the book the opposite way. There was one on every tenth page.
MU5275.
A set of initials followed by a date, like the others?
No—she realized. MU was a telephone exchange for east Manhattan.
It was a telephone number.
Cora found a pen in the nightstand and copied the number down on her thigh. She blew against the ink as it set.
Then she hid the book, opened the shutters, and swept out of the room as though she had never been there.
Cora made her way up to the esplanade, turning down the pathway toward the adjacent glass structure that Truman had made into a ballroom.
She paused in the shadow of a limestone relief of Saint Peter, and the wind swept through her hair.
Could Jack have come to the Hill to exact some sort of revenge?
Or—she let her fingers trace along the cool white stone—was Jack like a moth to the flame, drawn there by the irresistible temptation of more priceless art and the seductive danger of lifting it?
At the sound of approaching footsteps she tightened her breath, until all she could hear was her own heartbeat. She listened.
“Daisy?” she called quietly.
There was nothing but the swaying of the palm fronds in the breeze.
She could laugh at herself. She was getting paranoid. Just like she had thought those footsteps were coming for her in Jack’s room.
Not cut out for this job, her father’s voice whispered in her ear.
She was barely going to hold on to this week by the skin of her teeth.
She turned.
And then Jack Yates emerged from the shadows and grabbed her roughly by the arm.