Chapter Sixteen #2
Cora paused. “I thought it was you as soon as you stepped out of the car,” she said. “But I knew for sure when I heard you laugh.” She met his eyes reluctantly. “You?”
“I wasn’t certain until the moment Lola dropped that glass. Initially, I thought I saw you in the Assembly Room. But I didn’t believe it.” He stole a look at her. “I thought I’d seen you a hundred times before.”
That made her stomach do a funny, unexpected little jump. She felt for the curve of her gun again.
“How has Byrd not made you yet?” she asked. “Are you certain he hasn’t?”
Jack shrugged and ran his hand over his chin. “The longer I stay, the more I expect that he’ll put it together. But you saw my mug shot—it was terrible. Luckiest break I ever had.”
“But he saw you in person all those days during the trial.”
Jack shook his head. “No. He never set foot in the courtroom. Sent someone else to cover it. Truman never saw me in the flesh before Reno.”
“How strange,” Cora said. “It was the story of the decade. He never came to see it himself?”
“I’ve always wondered why not. Maybe he didn’t have the guts to face us, knowing that we were innocent.” He rubbed his jaw ruefully. “If I get what I came for, maybe I’ll ask him.”
Cora hesitated. “I might know where to start with that,” she said roughly. She clutched the stolen keys tight in her hand, letting the edges cut into her palm. She didn’t want to admit to herself how badly she needed Jack to have been innocent during that time on Pelican.
The night guards were patrolling the grounds’ perimeters, carving through the maze of trees and marbled fountains on a scheduled gradient. There seemed to Cora to be even more of them than usual.
“The guards will pass by here at one fifteen, at two-thirty—” she whispered.
“—And switch out at ten after three,” he continued.
She gave him a curt nod of acknowledgment, then stuck out her hand to stop him at the crunching sound of boots.
Together they ducked behind a row of arborvitae.
He was so close, she smelled his skin. Citrus and pine.
The last time she had been that close to a man was Bobby.
She tried to breathe through her mouth.
When the sound of boots had moved farther south, she led Jack down the slope of the hill to the rear of the main house.
They crept along the shadows until they reached a slight clearing.
Above it, a fresco of Dionysus glowed white in the moonlight.
Cora pulled back the brambles. Beyond it was a door, mostly concealed.
It was the back entrance to the underground wine cellar—full of liquor, in case the cops ever came looking. Cora suspected that Byrd probably had them all on his payroll anyway. She stepped forward to get a clear shot at the lock and pulled out the key.
“On Pelican, we used to pick the padlock with hairpins,” she whispered. “That older girl who lived there, the cook’s daughter, Dina, you remember her?”
Jack cocked his head as he sorted through his memory. Squinting, he nodded.
“She taught me.” Cora soundlessly fit the key to the lock and turned it.
“What were you doing picking padlocks on Pelican?” Jack whispered, sounding amused.
“Stupid kid things,” she said. She hesitated. Cora had to use both hands to wrench open the door, leaving her gun unsecured and vulnerable. It was a calculated risk. “Dina wanted to meet up with the lighthouse keeper’s son.”
“And what about you?” he asked.
“Me?” She threw her hip into the door and felt it give. “I just wanted to see if I could.”
The door swung open into a gaping darkness. Her gun stayed undisturbed in her pocket. He hadn’t made a move for it.
The night would bring a hundred little tests.
Temptations to show who he really was, and who he had become.
Ways for Cora to regain the sight line, when Jack’s version of things always threatened to disorient her again.
Cora stepped inside the doorway, and the light vanished totally.
Jack followed behind her, his breath close enough to faintly tickle Cora’s ear.
They stood together on a level entryway before the steps descended into an even deeper darkness.
You’re being needlessly reckless, her father would say, fury building in his jaw.
I’m the one playing him, she would insist, her heart landing each beat with a heavy thud.
In this job, he would say, voice cutting sharp, you only play games when you know you can win.
“Careful,” she whispered to Jack behind her, feeling along for the banister.
She didn’t dare light a match until they were below ground.
Their footsteps echoed in the stairway, a gentle slap of sole on stone.
After the expansive night, it felt small and enclosed.
The air grew chillier by degrees as they descended, and Cora’s nerves prickled with awareness of every sound.
Jack stayed close behind her, and for half a second she couldn’t help but think about how easy it would be for him to give her a hard push, and that would be the end of it for her. The only one who knew his secret.
She tightened her grip on the banister.
Perhaps she would never have closure, never be able to move on, without knowing what had really happened that night at the Bastion, and the night he escaped.
But first she had to gain his trust. Trust was a thousand tiny strands threading together over time, eventually twisting into a cord thick enough to hold a piano.
“Did I ever tell you I once rode the ferry across the Bay with Joey the mobster’s wife?” Cora said quietly. The first strand of trust was often a shared experience, some sense of familiarity. She laid it down between them like a single wire cable.
“Yeah?” Jack whispered back. “Joey Vino? I didn’t know he had a gal.”
Cora smiled into the darkness in spite of herself. It came so easy, with Jack. She stepped onto their shared memories of Pelican like a bridge.
“What was she like, then?” Jack asked.
“She wore a fur with gold-plated buttons, and she brought a cake that she held in her lap.”
Jack’s voice turned incredulous. “The guards let her bring in a cake?”
“Of course not,” Cora said. “They threw it into the Pacific.”
“A perfectly good cake!” he whispered, incensed.
“It could have had razors in it.”
“Or raisins,” he said, shuddering.
Cora snorted.
“I remember your mother once made a cake,” he said softly. “With candy buttons.” Cora almost stopped breathing. She couldn’t believe that he recalled that story.
He was laying down a cord of his own. Perhaps he was playing her back. Perhaps he was coming to meet her.
Either way, she let him.
“She died,” Cora said quietly. He was so near that when she turned, her shoulder brushed against the firm curve of his chest and she could feel his breathing.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. She was surprised how gentle his voice sounded in the dark. “I didn’t realize.”
“It was a long time ago.”
The air was cool and stony when they came to the bottom of the stairs. The door to the wine cellar was made of iron. Cora inserted the second key into the lock and then gave the door a hard shove.
Inside, moonlight cut through the bars of a small window at the top of the wall, illuminating a wine cellar filled with dry wooden barrels and rows of bottles that shone along the wall like ambered jewels.
Cora turned suddenly to make a crack about an aged whiskey that was older than both of them, and Jack jumped.
She had spooked him, she realized. He had followed her there, alone, into a buried room.
And though he was physically stronger than Cora, she was the one with the weapon, and a grudge.
“We copacetic?” she asked lightly, cocking an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he said. He held her gaze. “Sorry. Just a little on edge.”
She moved carefully around the room. She had seen the blueprints that Mabel gave her to study, and she knew there was an enormous space below their feet.
But there was no door or staircase that she could make out.
The moonlight glinted on the bottles. The walls were all fireproof stone, and the far one was covered with a thick hanging tapestry.
“You think the files are in here?” Jack asked uncertainly.
He glanced around, shifting his weight, and she knew in that moment that he trusted her about as much as she trusted him.
Yet, for a handful of days, they had come to unexpectedly hold each other’s fates.
And perhaps that was the strongest strand of trust there was.
“No,” she said.
Cora moved toward the tapestry. She examined it closely.
And then she saw it. Her eyes fell upon a small gray dove, holding a persimmon branch. Just behind it was a tie, fitted onto a latch. She stepped forward, unhooking the tie, and pulled the tapestry aside.
There was a door to a freight elevator.
“Bingo,” she said.
Without looking back, Cora pulled open the grate and stepped inside. She examined the button panel. It appeared that the freight-elevator shaft went up into the main house, where it likely hid behind a locked door that she had mistaken for a closet.
“This goes up to the main house, and down to a sub-level basement,” she said.
Jack’s eyes lit, and he gave a low whistle. The hair on her arms prickled.
“Shall we see what Truman’s been hiding down there?” she asked.
Cora didn’t let him see the pulse of fear she felt. She pushed the down button and kept her hand on her gun as the elevator began to descend into darkness.