Chapter Seventeen
“Truman seems to have a thing about birds,” Jack said from somewhere next to her.
The darkness felt thick and substantial, like Cora was being submerged in it. “You’ve noticed, too?” she asked.
She lit a match, and it flared to illuminate Jack’s face.
Cora’s heart rate kicked up a notch. She knew her father would kill her himself—with Chief Bellanger’s gold belt buckle and his own two hands—if he could see her then.
She watched the pulse on Jack’s neck beating more quickly as the elevator came to a stop.
She pulled the grate open and stepped out, feeling along the wall for a switch; and when she found one, the room flooded with light. Cora blinked, momentarily blinded. Jack shaded his eyes with his hand and took a step forward.
His jaw went slack.
“What is this place, Cora?” Jack asked.
Cora looked around in amazement. It was like being lowered inside a secret museum: solemn and cool, fireproofed and void of any natural light.
White sheets were draped over the carved arms of antique chairs, globes, and paintings.
Locked curio cabinets held bejeweled eggs and ancient books that looked as though they could crumble into dust beneath a single breath.
“This is where Byrd keeps his alternate furnishings,” Cora said. “They’re switched out every year or so, to keep the Castle feeling fresh. If those files are valuable, maybe they’re hidden down here somewhere.”
Cora eyed a massive trunk with bronze latches and a label noting ancient weavings.
Carved golden frames leaned against the walls, and bronze statues peeked out from beneath swathed sheets.
The shelves were lined with goblets and candlesticks.
She had heard whisperings once, about illegal jade and ivory.
Just hints. Byrd loved beautiful things. He loved the game of acquiring them.
Jack was looking at her with an unreadable expression.
“What?” she asked.
“This is brilliant,” he said. His eyes lit. “You are brilliant.”
She flushed with unexpected pleasure. She still felt the shimmer of a spark when he was near, and it made her angry. Because he had been the first to ever make her feel those things.
She stepped forward, running her gloved hands over the sheets, pulling them free like she was uncovering ghosts.
Beneath them she found a set of carved marble busts, and then a naophoros statue carved out of black basalt.
She thought of the Life magazine she had seen once.
The cover showed a flag drowning beneath a pile of money, accompanied by the line As wealth accumulates, men decay.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said, “of asking Clem and Beau to go on a private horseback ride with me. I’ll invite them, and then somewhere along the way I’ll lose them on the trails.”
“Good idea,” Cora said. “Just let me know when, so I can ensure that Truman is made aware of it at the right time.”
Her hope rose. And, with it, her courage.
She followed Jack toward the back of the room, moving through corridors of trunks and tables.
“I don’t have to tell you what a big risk I’ve taken, bringing you down here,” she said. “Now I want something in return.”
“And what would that be?” Jack asked, instantly guarded.
She caught her reflection in a carved bronze mirror. “Tell me about the night of the escape,” she said softly. “You didn’t have anyone helping you on the inside?” The color rose in her face, but she forced herself to go on. “Anyone else, I mean? No crooked guard?”
The muscles in his back stiffened. He met her eyes and shook his head.
She nodded. One night, one single night that entire year, the south side of the island went unattended. Everyone at Pelican—all but Cora—could hardly believe the luck of it: how had they possibly picked the one night that would give them that advantage?
“How did you manage to get out of your cells, then?” she asked. She’d always wondered.
“Cut through the bars.” He rubbed at the hint of stubble beneath his chin. At his elbow were a trove of ancient Greek vases, patterned with intricate geometrics in red and black liquid clay.
“Sure,” Cora said sarcastically. She sank her hands into a chest of antique coins. Let them trickle between her fingers. “With that machinery the guards conveniently lent you?”
It wasn’t the first time such a thing had been attempted.
Three inmates before them had tried sawing through the bars and fences with wire cutters, which resulted in the iron being steeled against those sorts of tools.
A year after that, two convicts had overpowered their guards and been shot when they climbed down the rocks.
They had been bleeding too much to attempt the one-and-a-half mile swim across the Bay.
“With string,” Jack said. “Coated with powdered kitchen cleanser. A makeshift saw.”
She glanced at him. “Clever.”
“It was Leo’s idea.”
Leo, she thought. She was making her way to Leo. Putting down strands, walking gingerly across them.
She didn’t test the full weight of them yet. “The sawing didn’t draw any attention?” she asked instead.
“We did it little by little, when Joey Vino was playing during music hour.”
Cora knelt to open a display cabinet that held a collection of candelabras and wax jacks. “Good old boy Joey Vino,” she said, “always playing that wretched accordion.”
“Sounded like a cat in a blender,” Jack said. “Cruel and unusual.”
“But still,” Cora said. “That must have taken more than an hour or two.”
“It took us a month, give or take. We waited to finish it off until …” He paused. “… the right opportunity came.”
Cora quietly studied the inside of the cabinet. Then she moved on to the next. A file cabinet. Locked. Her heart quickened. She stooped to examine the mechanism.
“The water was less than sixty degrees that night,” she said. “How did you get across the Bay?”
“Leo and I collected essentials,” Jack said. “Inconspicuous things that wouldn’t raise suspicion during a raid check.”
“Like string and kitchen cleaner.”
“And rubber raincoats. We had close to two dozen by the end, trading them with other inmates in exchange for packs of Luckies. We stitched them together. They were supposed to act as flotation devices.”
“Supposed to?”
Jack ran his fingertips over a ceremonial casket, with inlaid, interlocking pieces of agate, ebony, and crystal. “The waves were rough. Not sure they did much good.”
She knew the Bay was rife with riptide currents that could pull someone under with a frigid vise; and occasionally sharks made an appearance, their sharp fins cresting the waves like knives gliding through butter.
For weeks after their escape, the coast guards, the FBI, had searched the Bay and surrounding waters.
The official story that emerged was that the brothers had drowned and washed out to sea.
The problem was, no one had ever found their bodies.
And no one had ever guessed who had been helping them on the inside.
Cora pulled a bobby pin from her hair and set to work on the cabinet lock.
Jack yanked the edge of a white sheet to reveal a glass cabinet. Inside were triptychs and tiny icons, glass shelves of gold-and-jewel-studded Faberge eggs, painted with a brush as fine as a single strand.
He bent to examine the cabinet’s contents.
“Even if you were sent to Pelican with clean hands,” Cora said, her voice muffled around the pin in her mouth, “you didn’t leave with them.”
Jack stiffened. “That guard’s death was an accident.”
“He had a name.”
“Yes,” Jack said tiredly.
“Rusty—”
“Weathers. I know.”
“He should still be alive,” Cora said. She flicked her wrist, inserting the pin into the lock. Her movements turned sharp, angrier. “All this time, he should have been living his life with his wife, his daughter. How it happened doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” Jack snapped. He paused and gathered himself. “I’m not saying my story is tidy, or even that I don’t deserve some sort of punishment for what happened. But the truth matters.” He met her eyes as the lock caught. “Redemption isn’t possible without the truth.”
She held his gaze. “Then what is the truth?”
The cabinet door swung open beneath her hands, but she ignored it.
Waiting. Watching him. Jack braced himself.
His memories were a path littered with broken shells.
He dreaded reliving it, every step painful and tender.
She stared back at him, her eyes pools of green and gold.
He could tell she wasn’t going to let him see inside that file cabinet without an answer.
He sighed.
“Leo always blamed himself that we ended up on Pelican Island,” he began.
“Why?” Cora asked softly.
“He was the reason why we were outside of the Bastion that night of the murders. He’d wanted to ask a girl to go steady, and he chickened out instead.”
Jack had always been rash and bold, and Leo had been the tentative one.
The one who stopped and thought things through, to the point of agonizing over them.
He would spend a quarter of an hour picking through the potatoes at the market for their ma, making sure they weren’t eye-speckled or rotting.
He practiced the same song on the violin for hours, until the daylight was snuffed out and there was no time left to play kick-the-can.
It was the kind of thing that used to drive Jack crazy.
“If only I had got up the nerve to ask that girl out,” Leo used to say on Pelican. “If only I wasn’t such a bleeding coward, we’d both be free.”
And in his darkest moments, Jack had thought the same thing. Loving Leo and hating him more than anyone else on the planet. There was no one else alive who could understand what had been done to them, and what it was doing to them on the inside.
“I’m so fucking sorry, Jackie,” Leo had said.
“Stop it, Leo,” Jack had said.
“I swear I won’t let you down again. I hope I get the chance to make it up to you.”
Jack had shoved him. “Just stop.”