Chapter Eighteen
~ Day Four ~
Truman awoke not to his alarm, but to his personal telephone line jangling next to his head. It was four minutes past six o’clock.
“Hello?” he answered, with a slight growl in his throat.
“Truman.”
He knew the voice instantly and rubbed his eyes, which had started to feel gritty.
Mabel knew exactly what she was doing. She knew he set an alarm every morning to awake at 6:16 a.m. It was a quirk he had picked up in his early twenties, an almost superstitious tick.
But Mabel was three hours ahead of him in New York, and she would love nothing more than to upset the balance of his day by starting it off on her own terms.
“Mabel,” he said. Even despite the distance, the telephone connection was clear. He could hear her breathing. Almost smell her perfume, nestled into the skin that was beginning to sag at her neck.
“Were you sleeping?” she asked. Her voice brimmed with polite animosity.
He stood and poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the washstand. “No,” he lied. The water felt cold going down his parched throat. He examined his reflection in the mirror. His skin was a little tinged with gray. He looked old and tired.
It made him angry.
“What is it, Mabel?” he asked, with irritation.
He heard the shift of the telephone against her cheek, the curve of her smile.
Truman had given her the satisfaction of knowing that she was the one person who could still get under his skin like no one else—no one, perhaps, other than his father.
Thirty years ago he had loved her for it.
They would dare each other on dusky fall nights riding on a sooty streetcar—how quickly she could get someone to give her a cigarette; buy her a drink, or even dinner, when their money was tight.
She would order enough for two and bring the rest home in a doggie bag, leaving the poor hopeful sot with little more than a chaste kiss on the cheek.
How he loved the scams and the games, when they were in on them together. Before they’d turned into something darker.
He had fallen so hard for her, he used to steal into orchards to pick her peaches and daydream of tracing the line down the back of her stockings with the tip of his finger. He used to love her laugh, throaty and wicked.
“I’ve got plans for you,” she said now. Her voice sounded hoarse and thick with smoke. “You might want to pull out your date book.”
He paused in front of the mirror, unbuttoning his nightshirt.
“I’m fairly sure you stopped making my schedule back in 1927,” he said coolly, stripping off his pajamas. He let the double meaning sink in like claws: neither planning his schedule, nor being found anywhere on it.
“Well, good news, darling, I finally found something we can do together that will give me a bit of pleasure and last longer than a minute and a half.”
“Mm,” Truman said. “I think I’ll pass, love. You know I never indulge in things past their expiration date.”
“It’s funny, Truman,” Mabel said, without missing a beat. “Do you remember those poor saps I used to hoodwink into buying things for us? How we would laugh at how pathetic they were behind their backs?” she said. She tsked. “How is Judy, by the way?”
“What do you want, Mabel?” Truman said sharply.
Truman had long been attracted to Mabel because she went toe-to-toe with him.
She never shrank back. He felt nothing like his father when he was with her.
His father had dominated his mother her entire life.
It struck him like a gong that perhaps he liked Clementine less for her gorgeous young languid body and more because he held almost every ounce of power over her.
Maybe, despite his best intentions, he had become his father after all.
Mabel let a long silence fall, as if to remind him who was in command of the conversation.
“Trudy is co-hosting a gala benefiting the General Education Board,” she said. “It’s the biggest social and philanthropic event of the season.”
“And let me guess. You don’t want to have to face Trudy’s sneer if you show up alone,” Truman said.
Mabel paused. “She is quite ugly when she sneers.”
“With girlfriends like these.…” Truman said, cocking an eyebrow.
“If you’re serious about holding an elected office some day, you’ll want to be there.”
He knew Mabel well enough to understand that this had nothing to do with him or his dreams. It was about control. He was a cat toy, being batted between swipes.
“When is it?” he asked begrudgingly.
“It’s at Trudy’s Newport estate. On the fifteenth of June.”
The fifteenth of June. That was the weekend he was supposed to be meeting Clementine in Los Angeles after weeks away. He had promised to take her to dinner to cement her role in a film with an old director friend.
“A good portion of the Senate and the president’s foremost political adviser are expected to be there,” Mabel said. “Or you can try to explain why you’ve found something better to do, as I’ve already RSVPed ‘yes’ for us both.”
He sighed. “Fine.”
“And for God’s sake, don’t wear anything green: it makes you look like a corpse,” Mabel said, and then he heard the phone click in his ear.
He couldn’t remember the last time someone had hung up on him.
To think that, once, that would have turned him on.
Now it felt like she had climbed into his lap and rubbed a piece of sandpaper into his eye.
Truman dressed, forcing himself not to hurry. He went to his wardrobe. Selected a green tie and examined it in the mirror. Then he snarled and tossed it aside.
At a knock on the door, he called “What?”
Dallas Winston poked his head in, looking apologetic.
Truman gestured him inside with a jerk of his hand. Dallas smoothed the cuffs of his shirt and set down a cup of black coffee on Truman’s bureau.
“I wanted to keep you apprised of a developing situation,” he said.
“What is it?” Truman asked. He selected a blue bow tie with hints of green in it.
“One of our patrols found Everett Conner wandering around the south side of the house in the early morning hours,” he said. “It was the second time last night that he was found somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.”
The back of Truman’s neck prickled in warning.
He watched his own reflection as he tied his tie. It was a rote motion, done a thousand times before, but he wasn’t really seeing it.
“Is that so?” He tightened the bow tie at his throat. “How interesting.”
Just before dawn, Cora stood outside her room, smoking a cigarette in the dark.
She could still feel the panic of almost having been caught by the guard, dizzying and electric behind her eyes. But, thanks to Jack, she had made it back to her room without being seen.
Jack had drawn the attention to himself. Sacrificed himself for her.
And not, she admitted to herself, for the first time.
She inhaled sharply and the cigarette bloomed with light.
She hadn’t thought of the Gasper in years, but she still remembered what it felt like to be in his presence. He would laugh at off times, an unnatural sound that would send a surge of ice water through Cora’s veins. It felt like seeing a broken limb that had been twisted the wrong way.
She remembered little flashes from that fateful day in late spring, sharpened to a crisp point. The way the Queen Anne’s lace shivered against the rock. Wearing her new dress with its dark plaid tailoring. She had tied a grosgrain ribbon in her hair.
When she had approached the fence, someone had been there. His head was bent, his back turned, in the Pelican blue chambray shirt. Cora had noticed his scrawny shoulders first, and the words “I’ve just read a good one, you’re really going to like—” died on her lips when the man turned around.
It was him.
Her breath had caught in her chest.
He looked at her with interest. One of his fingernails was long and sharp—the index finger on his right hand. A stringy dark hair was growing out of the mole on his cheek.
“Hi, little lady,” he had said. His voice was high and thin. “You’re a pretty thing. You remind me of a rabbit. What’s your name?”
Lightning-fast, he’d seized her wrist through the fence, bending it at an angle that hurt.
She had made a noise and thrown a panicked look toward the silent guard tower, with its dark, blank windows.
When she looked back, drawn by some impossible force, Gasper had cocked his head.
“Are you afraid?” he had asked, and smiled.
His voice had turned low and hollow. He looked pleased, relishing it, as if Cora’s fear had a taste, and he liked it.
Cora had tried to pull away, but his grip was too strong. Her eyes began to burn and water with terror that she tried to hide. She didn’t even blink.
“Your daddy a guard here?” Gasper sang. “5576. Head Guard McCavanagh, innit?”
He reached through the fence with his other hand and traced his index finger with the long nail across her cheek. He whispered “I could kill him if I wanted.”
And then he had smiled.
Cora had made a noise. Terror pressed a heavy foot at the base of her throat, cutting off her air.
And then she had heard a voice.
“Cora?”
Her head whipped around. When she saw Jack, a grateful sob erupted from deep in Cora’s chest. Jack took one look at her face and his body had gone rigid. He dropped the cluster of weeds that were in his hand.
“What are you doing?” he said, advancing on the Gasper, his fists already curling.