Chapter Ten #2
He nodded agreeably, as if she had merely commented on the weather. The longer this went on, he was feeling more and more confident, even though he had no idea what she was playing at. He shrugged. “Then turn me in,” he said. Almost as if he were daring her to.
She didn’t react. She still had the faint groove in her forehead from when she had fallen as a child and needed a stitch. At her silence, he said:
“It seems that you have your reasons for being here. And I have mine. So perhaps we can keep it that way. For a few short days.”
She laughed suddenly, the sound of it so bitter that it practically hit him in the face. “I’m not interested in making any more deals with the devil,” she said. “I did that once already, and I learned my lesson.”
He nodded and took a deep breath. “It’s only right that you should be the one to turn me in. Seems like my luck just ran out.”
“And surely you’re about to follow it,” Cora said.
“No,” he said grimly. “I won’t. I’m not leaving this house until I’ve gotten what I’m here for.”
“And what is that?”
“I doubt I’ll find it tonight.” He shook his head.
“But my lot starts and ends here. I’ve been on a path for so long, and it was always meant to end here, one way or the other.
” The sun was turning the skylight above their heads into a thousand colors, violet and gold and azure, as though they were inside a bubble.
Cora’s lip curled. She was no fool, he could tell.
She never had been. But now she had a hardened shell, the sort that only comes from getting burned.
How many lives were ruined in the wake of the Bastion? All because of one single, fateful decision he would do anything to go back and change?
“I do believe that I owe you, Cora McCavanagh, and someday I would like to repay that debt,” he said.
“But I will give up your real identity if you give up mine. I came here for something and I’m not leaving without it—even if it means I have to blackmail you into holding your silence just a little bit longer. ”
“Ella?” Daisy asked again. She was standing in the shadows, waiting.
Cora turned to him. “Find me at the party tonight,” she whispered. “I’ll hold my tongue as long as you give me the answers I want. And you’d do well to remember something this time, Jack.” She leaned toward him, her breath as soft as a kiss. “I’m not the na?ve little girl I used to be.”
She placed the Nevada Dunes matchbook she must have stolen from his own room into his palm, and closed his hand around it hard enough to hurt.
Two hours later, muscles aching, Cora scarfed down a cold lamb sandwich with weak tea for lunch.
What she wanted was a hot shower, and she felt the muscles in her shoulders tighten as she wiped her mouth.
She sensed Daisy’s eyes on her. Daisy had kept quiet while they scrubbed the ballroom’s floors, too loyal to say anything in front of the other maids—but she shot a look at Cora now that made her know she was going to have to answer for it later.
“I’ve got a call with my Da,” Cora said, and abruptly stood up.
She made her way to the wooden telephone booth that was tucked beside the morning room and pulled the sliding door shut tight behind her.
It smelled strongly of pine inside, and it always reminded her of the Pelican Island commissary.
Lost in thought, Cora felt absently for the small metal dog tag she hadn’t worn in years.
Cora picked up the receiver. Wrapped the telephone cord around her finger.
For the first time, she allowed herself to consider: What if she turned Jack in to her father?
Her stomach roiled at the thought. Her father had settled in Bitterlake, a painfully tiny outfit nearly ninety miles from the Hill, where he took orders from a boss who shined his oversized gold belt buckle twice a day.
Chief Bellanger was the sort of man who routinely missed the lettuce caught in his own front teeth but never passed up a chance to make cracks at Cora’s father’s expense—especially concerning the escape at Pelican.
“Don’t let McCavanagh handcuff the suspect, he might give him the slip,” he would joke in front of her father’s colleagues—and, at his most disgusting, sometimes even in front of the perpetrators themselves.
“Don’t let him watch the snack drawer, something might go missing,” he’d say with a smirk at Cora, just to humiliate him in front of his own daughter.
Cora had scheduled weekly check-ins with her father since taking the job for Mabel—a call that she always simultaneously dreaded and longed for. She had always hoped that her father’s love was unconditional.
But she had never had enough courage to find out.
Before Jack’s escape, there had been six other attempts in five years.
The one Cora remembered most was on a November afternoon in 1916, when the alarm sounded through the misty drizzle.
Normally she would have been at school, but that day she was home with a fever, and at first she wondered if she was having a hallucination.
But then her mother had appeared at the door, her face pale, and Cora had known that one of the prisoners had gotten loose.
Perhaps other people felt a similar fear when the sky warned of a storm front moving in.
Then they, too, locked their doors and windows, praying that something dangerous wasn’t heading right for them.
Cora stroked her worry stone ferociously as her mother ushered her into the closet and deadbolted the door from the inside.
Cora nestled under a worn blanket that smelled faintly of mothballs.
“We’ll make it cozy,” Cora’s mother said, giving her a tight smile.
She hummed “It is Well” under her breath and rooted out a candy bar wrapped in foil while sending up fervent prayers for Cora’s father.
Cora realized then that she didn’t really believe if those Pelican prisoners managed to escape their cells, it was because they wanted to hurt her.
They just wanted to get out.
The convict who tried it was dumb as a post. Dobran had been sent to Pelican for counterfeiting money and he didn’t make it very far that drizzly November day.
He decked a guard—Smitty, a friend of Cora’s father’s who loved cigars and Dixieland jazz—and climbed over a fence, shredding his hands on the barbed wires and falling to the rocks below.
The guards brought him back handcuffed to a stretcher, yelping about his broken vertebrae.
First he was bound for the medical ward, then a long stint in solitary.
“The new hire isn’t proving impressive,” Cora’s father said to her mother that night over beef stew.
He didn’t think Cora was listening, but she was, and she knew exactly where the new hire was stationed: to tower duty, as they always were when they first started out.
“If Warden Thomas wants to keep up Pelican’s reputation, he’ll need to start sweetening salaries and attracting better stock,” he had said.
“And don’t get me started on the damn fences.
There’s a whole section of it on the western side that you could practically crawl under when the rains turn everything to muck—. ”
Cora’s knife had paused.
He seemed to notice, because he cut himself off and gave her a long look. Then he glanced down at his beef stew and said, “Cora-thorn, tell us what you’ve got on for homework, will you?”
Cora took a steeling breath and dialed the Bitterlake police department, GS-8300, studying the whorl in the wood panel that always looked like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
The phone rang. For the first time, she hoped he wouldn’t pick up.
Her hope climbed as it rang twice, three times, with no answer.
“Bitterlake Police Department,” her father said.
Her heart fell. “Da,” she said softly. “It’s me.”