Chapter Fourteen
~ Day Three ~
“Truman.”
Byrd looked up from his mapled bacon and coffee.
He’d been breakfasting with Ronald and Clem in the morning room when his head of security, Dallas Winston, entered with a pointed nod.
Truman folded his crisp white napkin on the table, excusing himself, and led Dallas to his office. Rutherford followed.
“What’s the news?” Truman asked, taking a seat behind his desk. He gestured to the chair in front of him, but Dallas preferred to stand. Rutherford leaned against the wall, nursing a coffee.
“There’s some trouble,” Dallas said. “My intelligence picked up chatter that the mob is going to try something soon.”
Byrd remained silent, steepling his hands.
“How soon?” Rutherford asked.
“They might be planning to infiltrate the party itself.”
Rutherford groaned. “So they would try to hit the Hill.”
Byrd said “I’d like to see them try. It’s like Masada up here.”
“You do know what happened at Masada, don’t you, Truman?” Rutherford asked.
“I hate to tell you this, Rutherford, but if I run for a higher office, this is only the tip of the iceberg,” Byrd said.
He felt the stubborn tightening in his throat.
He refused to live in fear. He had secret bouts with paranoia, but that was much more about attacks from the inside.
From his estranged wife, from being cuckolded, from being robbed. Not this.
“Still. Have you welcomed any new staff in recent weeks?” Dallas asked.
Byrd shook his head. “No new staff for at least three or four months.”
“And the guests?”
“Most of them are long-time friends of mine, Dallas.”
Rutherford said quietly: “But not all.”
Byrd turned to Dallas. “Where exactly did this intelligence come from?”
“Our channels within the black market,” Dallas said.
Byrd nodded. Money was more than currency there: it was language, judge and jury, worth more than blood or loyalty.
It wasn’t the first time they’d gotten valuable information from their contacts inside, paid to keep track of and report on anything Byrd might be interested in.
Truman leaned back in his chair, feeling the give of the leather.
Of course, plenty of his guests had dabbled in the black market.
William Morton had from time to time; Truman knew that Albert Boyle was in deep with them, running his illicit drug ring.
The black market and the mob were often tangled in the same webs, their threads overlapping.
But surely none of those men would want to kill him. Why would they?
Still, he felt a hint of unease. Which he hated. He paid a lot of money to make sure he never had to feel worry. He desired, and purchased, the closest thing to complete control. Now he was seeing a threat in his guests and friends, his wife, his help, his own home. Annoyance flared in his gut.
He had dreamed of growing older and having money like this, particularly on the day his mother had wanted a simple pair of new gloves that his father had refused to buy for her.
His father held the purse strings and the power.
The first thing Truman had purchased with his paycheck was a pair of gloves for her, fine satin and lined with mink.
He wanted money to take away the discomfort of want or worry, of depending on anyone outside himself.
But no one ever talked about the way money brought so much additional weight to carry.
“Who is new to the scene, of your guests?” Dallas asked.
“Everett Conner,” Truman said. “And Beau Remington.”
Dallas raised a single eyebrow. If it were up to him, he would politely ask them to leave the grounds now.
“What do you know of them?” he asked.
“Beau is a rising star. There’s no benefit to him wanting to do anything but kill me with kindness. I hold the keys to his career.”
“And Everett Conner?”
Truman had met Everett gambling in Reno.
They had sat next to each other at a high-stakes table, and something about the man had reminded Truman of his brother Elias.
It was the way Everett kicked back his head when he laughed, and touched his cowlick, just like Elias used to.
They didn’t resemble each other much physically, but Truman had caught the movement from the corner of his eye and the familiarity of it had almost made him gasp.
From then on, Truman had liked having Everett near. He was a damn good card player. But more than that, sometimes Truman pretended he was playing with Elias.
“All right,” Byrd relented. “We were meant to have the costume party in the ballroom tonight. But let’s switch up the plans and flip the game. Keep people off balance, and guessing.”
Dallas nodded.
“I highly doubt there’s a threat present from any of the women. I’ll have Clementine host them for a women’s evening, and I’ll keep the men close. And all of the security with me.”
“Good,” Rutherford said.
Truman waited until the men had left and then pulled out the small iron train on his desk. It was heavier than it looked, and the latches were a delicate clasp, securing the locomotive to the freight car. His father and Elias had built it together.
Truman had once tried to take an interest in the things his father loved—and the things that Franklin Byrd loved were fishing, hunting, and his first son, Elias.
On his mother’s insistence, one of the few fights she ever won, his father had taken them camping at Starved Rock.
The air was thick with pine, the water as cool and clear as melted crystal, and Truman felt as though he were trying to pass some sort of test. They played cards; and when he beat his father in blackjack, his father looked at him for the first time the way he looked at Elias.
Truman had tasted that hit, and he wanted more of it.
He wondered if that was why his mother liked her laudanum so much.
But then he had tripped over a stray root when his father sent him to gather firewood and landed hard on his right wrist. He knew the bone had broken, but he kept it hidden, holding it gingerly through the night from the pain.
His deception was discovered the next morning when Elias was trying to teach him to whittle, and his father wrenched his wrist so hard it made him yelp.
Afterward, Truman’s father had drunk deep from his flask and packed up their things in silence.
Franklin Byrd was a man of few words. But he taught Truman their power. Words were precise. Words could be wielded as a shield or a weapon. He knew that well. And sometimes the absence of words was the greatest weapon of all.
Truman ran his fingers over the metal of the train, feeling its crevices.
Truman couldn’t hope to beat his father or Elias when it came to anything with his hands, but he could beat them with mind games.
Elias had once painted a bird on the side of the toy freight car, gold and black.
Showed Truman the way the light hit the paint in the sun and flashed, so that it almost looked like it was taking flight.
“We’re brothers. We’re Byrd men,” he said, and gave Truman the train while his wrist was still healing.
Elias had contracted pneumonia shortly after.
He died at the age of seventeen, when Truman was twelve years old.
His father had gone on a bender that lasted for six months, and his construction business almost went under.
Franklin told everyone at the bar how Elias understood wood and grains and the way beams should fit together, understood it like a doctor understood how bones fit together in a body.
All of Franklin’s hopes were pinned on a boy who went underground before he turned eighteen.
And Truman spent the rest of his life trying to live up to a dead boy.
A lifetime trying to earn favor with a man he didn’t even like.
“I was going to name my company Byrd and Son,” Franklin said a year after Elias was gone. He had come home wearing grief that had settled into deep grooves on his face, pooling in the hollows of his words, and Truman didn’t realize how drunk Franklin was until it was too late.
“You still could,” Truman had said softly.
His father gave a short, cruel laugh. “My name is wasted on you.”
Truman ran his fingers over the old train, which had faded and chipped with age. The gold bird that his brother had painted looked dim in the fading light.
Whether it was to spite his father for stripping him of the name Byrd or to honor his brother for once wearing it, Truman still didn’t know.
But he had grown up and put it on everything.
Cora’s head swam.
She looked at herself in the mirror, her eyes bright with their haloes of gold, sleepless shadows gathering beneath them.
She had needed to get away from Jack last night.
She had felt the confusion starting to swell as Jack talked, the doubts planting themselves like seeds within her again.
He had a way of tricking her into thinking that things sounded reasonable.
Had she learned nothing from Pelican? The water ran in streams down her knuckles as she dunked her sponge deep into the bucket and scrubbed grit from the Astral Bedroom sink.
Soap bubbles gathered in the sink drain like translucent pearls.
She had found a single black-eyed Susan tied to the fence in the days after Jack’s escape.
It had wilted; and when she came upon it, something inside her had ripped, the way it does when a person grows up too quickly.
It happened in a violent instant, without the years to stretch and make room for passage.
She had loved Jack. Trusted him. Believed in him. And he had fled, and made her an accomplice to a crime she never could have imagined him capable of.