Chapter Seventeen #3
He still remembered the water, like icy knives.
In his nightmares, he dreamed of it pouring down his throat like ink.
He’d lost Leo right away. He couldn’t see anything but the rain, falling in pinpricks against the water and forcing it back up into his mouth and nose and eyes.
He kept kicking and swimming toward the shore, for what felt like hours, his side cramping and his thighs burning, until he finally came to a strip of beach and pulled himself up.
Retching into the sand, in exhaustion. Wringing out his clothes. Alone.
And then waiting.
And waiting.
The dread creeping over him like the coming sunrise.
“Jack,” Cora said softly. She suddenly seemed so far away.
“He drowned,” Jack said. “I was always the better swimmer. I should have known he couldn’t have made it. Especially not wounded.”
He felt the hold on himself slipping. Did he even deserve to be free?
He hadn’t ever pulled a trigger, hadn’t picked up that rock; yet, all the same, his decisions had cost more than one life.
He had felt the warning inside himself that night—but the pure temptation to be free was stronger.
So he had reached out and plucked the apple, determined to take back his own life, no matter the consequences.
The knowledge of it haunted him still.
Cora came near to him. She gently put her hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
The tenderness was too much. He was going to lose it entirely.
He turned away sharply.
She was close enough to him that he could smell her shampoo, rainwater and honey; see the downy hair on her ears.
“Guilt is worse than Pelican was,” he said. “Because you can’t ever escape it.”
She nodded wearily, as if she understood. “It’s exhausting,” she said. “Spending the rest of your life trying to account for the worst mistake you ever made.”
She took her hand away from his arm.
And in that moment, he realized what he wanted most of all was for someone to forgive him.
Cora didn’t say another word. She bent to the file cabinet and pulled the first drawer open. The silence stretched out between them.
Inside, she found a roll of papers.
She felt Jack’s eyes on her as she pulled out sheaves wound with twine; gingerly unfolded them, trying to clear her head of the picture Jack had painted. Of Leo reaching for the rock. Of its meeting Rusty’s head. Of his body going limp.
Or the thing that had shocked her most of all—that when she had glimpsed the depths of his grief, raw and aching, something in her had wanted to reach for him.
She was as surprised as anyone that compassion could reappear in a place long hardened with bitterness and regret.
Jack had never breathed a word of the truth about himself for more than a decade.
What did that do to a person? Cora’s unconfessed secret had rotted inside her, twisting her from that night on, like a gnarled tree.
If she was bent around her secret, what had the loss of Jack’s brother done to him?
She ran her thumb over her worry stone, feeling the grooves her fingers had worn across it over the years, and forced herself to focus on the papers in her hand. Anything to get away from that image on repeat.
Meet me at the fountain on 24th and Locust, she read.
I can’t stop thinking about the way you tasted the other night.
Like malt and chocolate ice cream.
Jack cleared his throat. “Find something?” he asked hopefully.
She shook her head. “Nothing that seems related to the mob’s frame-up files. The opposite, actually,” she said. “They’re love letters.”
“To who?”
“I’m not sure. They’re unaddressed and unsigned.”
Her heart skipped a beat. While she was looking for something else, could she have stumbled upon something to do with Clem?
She wondered how long ago the letters had been written. There was a set of directions at the top of the first one.
Main Street. Albany Drive. Broadview Lane.
Cora drew out her camera and snapped a few pictures.
“They’re not unsigned,” Jack corrected her, coming to look over her shoulder. She forced herself to stay and not retreat as she felt his presence, a breath’s distance behind her. He pointed. “See. There. An M.”
“An M?” she said, examining it.
He was right. There, in the bottom corner, was a small, inconspicuous M.
An M for Mabel?
Were these old love letters from Mabel that Truman had saved? Or had Mabel strayed first, and this was Truman’s evidence of it? Cora took another photograph so she could examine them later. Then she carefully returned the letters to the cabinet and started picking the lock of the next drawer.
She could feel Jack’s excitement. Smell the heightened, earthy scent of his skin.
“Does your mother know that you’re alive?” Cora asked, twisting the pin. She bit her lip. “Althea, wasn’t it?”
A muscle in Jack’s jaw flickered. “She doesn’t know anything for sure,” he said. “I send flowers every Mother’s Day, anonymously. I don’t want to put her in a bad position, where she felt like she was hiding something from the feds. But I give her just enough to hope.”
Again, Cora felt that throb of compassion.
She fought it. Helping him wasn’t about him, this time.
It was about her. About rewriting her story.
Perhaps she did deserve some semblance of happiness if he had once been innocent.
If she hadn’t been duped, if he hadn’t manipulated her—if, when she had done her part, she had truly been helping someone who had been wronged.
It was almost too much to hope for.
Cora felt the lock give beneath her fingers.
She pulled open the second drawer.
Jack leaned forward eagerly so that their arms grazed. Cora struck a match and brought it closer so that they could see the folders hidden inside. Jack’s excitement was contagious, and, despite herself, Cora felt her heartbeat pick up.
They began to search through the files. There were hundreds of papers inside. The first folder was filled with short, curt notes that appeared to be from Byrd’s father, Franklin—
Needs work.
Could be better.
Just give it to Elias.
It was an odd collection of things to keep.
As they went on, they found bad press clippings by rival newspapers, carefully cut out and gathered together.
Things about Truman—about his stake holdings, satirical pieces about his wealth and his looks.
What sort of man kept these reminders of slights, holding on to them like keepsakes?
Jack picked through the files with a fine-toothed comb, but the lists of names and dates from the frame-ups weren’t there.
He sat back on his heels, exhaling.
“I really thought we had something there,” he said.
He sat for a moment, then rose to his feet.
“Need a hand?” he asked, extending his arm to her.
She turned away. “I’ll just get this back in order,” she said. “There are a few more closets over there we haven’t checked yet.”
Cora waited until he’d left her side. She had spotted something that she wanted to get a second look at, without him there. She pulled out one of the final papers and examined it. A notice, for Truman Byrd.
You are overdue six weeks of payment, the notice said. The letterhead was from Turning & Blackburn Printing Press. We will be shutting down your paper and pursuing legal action if you do not settle your debt.
It was dated March 11, 1915. Roughly two weeks before the Bastion murders.
Cora brought out her camera and took a picture of the notice. She felt a thrill crackle through the fatigue that was beginning to gather at the base of her eye sockets.
“Find something interesting?” Jack called, and she jumped.
“No,” she said. She quickly tucked the notice back into the cabinet.
Truman’s paper hadn’t always been successful. At some point, he had owed a significant amount of money. Where did that money come from?
An idea was beginning to form. If she was going to find out what really had happened at the Bastion, she knew she couldn’t take Jack simply at his word. But maybe there was another way to find out for sure.
Cora shut the cabinet door and refixed the lock.
“We should go,” she said.
Jack looked tired, shadows beginning to gather beneath his eyes. It was three o’clock in the morning.
They were silent as the elevator rose. Perhaps it was the fatigue setting in, but Cora found herself so unbalanced that she almost felt drunk. Something had changed for her, she realized. A weight had shifted, one that she had carried for so long that it left her feeling vaguely lost.
“Are there any other places like this in the house?” Jack asked, and she could hear the desperate note of hope in his voice.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
There was someone who would know for certain. But she wasn’t willing to give up that bargaining chip quite yet.
“I’ll hold up my end of the deal,” he said. “Clem and Beau on horseback, together. Tomorrow.”
“Great,” she said.
She stared at him.
“What?” he asked.
“I need to see your pockets,” she said.
He looked at her like she was kidding, his amusement fading when he realized she wasn’t. He sighed. Slowly, exaggeratedly, he turned them out for her to see.
“Satisfied?” he asked, showing that they were empty, save for his room key. When Cora didn’t answer, he carefully reached up to unbutton his shirt. He pulled open his collar just enough to show that there was nothing hiding beneath.
She caught the slightest curve of his chest in the moonlight, the skin there tanned by the sun. She took a step closer, and he held up his palms and let her search him. She felt the solidness of his body beneath her hands.
A strange heat flooded through her, unbidden.
As he rebuttoned his shirt to the collar, a warmth kindled within her, like long-simmering coals. She didn’t want it. It was much less confusing to hold on to the anchor that had moored her for so long that it had become a part of her. Anger. Bitterness. Regret.
Now there were too many things to think about. Dead Rusty and drowned Leo. Anonymous flowers to Jack’s grieving mother. Truman needing money right before his paper mounted its case against the Yates brothers.
She opened the latch on the door, glancing quickly at her watch. The next guards were coming by at 3:10.
“Cora—” Jack whispered urgently. “Wait.” He reached for her.
But she was already out into the cool night. Away from the bewildering parts of her that threatened any empathy and that dangerous, stirring warmth.
And that’s when she realized that the guards were running four minutes ahead of schedule.
Jack saw her stiffen the moment she noticed the patrol guard. Barely ten yards away from her, and already turning back at the sound of her feet on the gravel.
Instinctively, her hand went to where she had hidden her camera.
And her gun.
He didn’t want to guess what might happen if they found her roaming the grounds, armed.
“Dammit,” he growled. “Get down.”
He started to sing loudly, drunkenly. She crouched and hid behind a dark clump of sagebrush.
“Now what of the wedding and the christening,
And the wake when your dear friends die.
Oh, How are you goin’ to wet your whistle,
When the whole darn world goes dry?”
Jack whistled and stumbled a bit, and the guard turned on his heel and marched toward him.
“Sir?”
He shone a torch in Jack’s face. Jack blinked, holding a hand up to shield his eyes.
“What are you doing down here, sir?”
Jack clapped him on the back a few times. “Fine and dandy, yessirree.”
“Are you a guest at the estate?”
Jack laughed.
“What’s your name?”
“Name’s Conner. Everett Conner.”
“What are you doing down here, Mr. Conner?”
“Would you believe I was trying to find the john?” He winked, and made an exaggerated gesture with his hands to indicate that by “john,” he meant liquor.
“Right. Why don’t you come this way with me, Mr. Conner?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Cora hurried away. Her shadow slid along the path, growing smaller.
Jack swallowed.
“Right this way, yes. That’s it,” the guard said. The man nodded to his partner, and together they stopped Jack and patted him down for weapons. When they found him unarmed, they made a motion to let him go.
Jack gave them a salute and turned on his heel, breathing a sigh of relief.
Until Dallas Winston stepped forward from the shadows, the moonlight cutting down his broad face. “Hello, Mr. Conner,” he said. “Looks like we meet again.”