Chapter Nineteen
Clementine slipped into a bathing suit while Lola and Kitty stood next to her in the bathroom, smoothing cream onto their faces and examining her line of toiletries.
“You have Mademoiselle Crimson?” Lola asked, grabbing for an ivory tube of lipstick ringed with copper.
“How did you pull that one? This isn’t available yet! ”
“Coco sent it over,” Clementine said. “She and Eliza Schiaparelli are always trying to one-up each other, it seems.” She spritzed herself with the lightest mist of perfume as Lola played enviously with the copper sliding mechanism on the lipstick tube.
“You can try it on,” Clem said generously, pulling a brush through her lush, honeyed hair.
She would wear a straw hat to keep the sun off of her skin.
Her body quickened at the thought of seeing Beau, and she tried to ignore it.
She didn’t really want to betray Truman.
She had come to feel fondly toward certain parts of him.
Fond, but that was it. It would be easier for her—easier, and much more dangerous—if she were madly in love with him.
She raised her pretty eyebrows and applied the Mademoiselle Crimson to her lips. She mostly just felt indifferent.
When she had grown into her teeth and her eyes and her body had filled out between fourteen and fifteen, it was as though she had inherited an unexpected fortune.
She had come into her beauty and Truman had come into his money, and they both relished the power it offered them.
She did whatever she could to enhance that fortune now.
Because, unfortunately, Truman’s fortune would continue to grow, compounding on itself, while she was all too aware that hers would diminish year after year.
Now she had to make it last as long as possible.
“I’m off to dress,” Lola said, examining the red in the mirror. Her skin was dewy, her eyes luminous. This was a woman who glowed even when she was sleeping. “I forgot the shirt I wanted to wear today.” She held up the lipstick. “Can I pop back in and reapply this later for the party tonight?”
“Of course,” Clementine said.
Lola gathered her own toiletries and planted a red air kiss just to the left of Clementine’s ear. “See you at the pool.”
Kitty moved sinuously. She was so lovely, with her dark hair and crystal blue eyes.
It was intimidating, threatening, and unusual to have someone else in the room who was as beautiful as Clem was, but she was also enchanted by it.
Sometimes she stole glances at her friends when they weren’t looking.
“Do you ever feel guilty about the wife?” Kitty asked as soon as they were alone.
It was an impertinent question that sent color flooding into Clementine’s cheeks. She knew well enough what her own mother thought about it. Disapproving. Judgmental. But Clementine actually loved Kitty a little for asking it. It was the deepest question anyone had asked her in months.
“No,” Clementine said. “Truman says she’s a horrid shrew.
Now she just wants his money.” She led Kitty into the bedroom, where she poured them each a coffee from the carafe on her tray.
The rest of the food remained largely untouched.
“But society being as it is, he has to play along.” She fed a piece of croissant to Snick and to Kitty’s terrier, Poppet.
Poppet licked Clementine’s hand in gratitude.
“If I play my cards right, maybe I’ll leave this week with a sugar daddy of my own,” Kitty said. Her lipstick left a red mark on the coffee cup.
Clementine smiled wickedly. “I’m in.” She rose and led Kitty out the doors. She loved the way the air came in through the opened windows. She loved the appreciative way Kitty looked out at the Castle grounds, the view of the sea, and with a touch of envy said I can’t believe you live here.
“I’ll talk to Truman about seating you with someone at dinners, if you’d like,” Clementine said. “Anyone you have in mind?”
“Beau, of course,” Kitty said, and it made Clementine’s stomach hitch the slightest bit. She hid it with a broad smile. “Of course. And second choice?”
“I wouldn’t kick Simon Leit out of bed for eating crackers. I like the way the tennis has shaped his calves. Meow.”
Clementine laughed.
“Actually,” Kitty continued, “I’ll move him to first choice. He has a more assured income. For now.”
First choice. Was she Truman’s first choice?
She couldn’t be—not as long as she still played second fiddle to Mabel.
She hated that she was wasting her golden years in a precarious position with little to no permanence.
She could be so easily replaced by any young up-and-coming thing.
At Truman’s slightest whim, she could be moved down the hill as surreptitiously as his old friend Albert had been.
She loved this house, but she never let herself love it too much. It didn’t belong to her. And it this rate, it never would.
She gave a brittle smile. Perhaps, in the end, she was only a slightly longer-term guest there than Kitty was.
Cora slipped into the telephone booth and locked the door.
She pulled out the prints she had made. Her plan involved the notice threatening Byrd’s paper, but she glanced down at the love letters again.
Who had written Mabel Byrd these messages?
Someone who had wanted to remain anonymous, who signed them simply M.
Who had loved Mabel this way once, and how had Mabel ended up where she was now—bitter, alone, and nursing a grudge against her husband with the attentiveness one might give to raising a child?
That bitter resentment was the exact opposite of the way Cora’s own mother had been, and it made Cora miss her.
There had been a lightness about Alice McCavanagh as she walked through life casting blessings the way most people threw stones, even at those who talked down to her, who cut her in line for the tram or tried to cheat her at the market.
She would walk the craggy island on Pelican, the wind sweeping her hair, and Cora knew she was praying for the prisoners because of the way her cracked lips moved with silent words.
Cora wondered what her mother had thought after everything went so ghastly wrong despite all those years of her prayers.
If she had ever come to believe that they had been little more than wasted breath.
Perhaps she had.
But they still sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” from the hymnal at her funeral, at her own request.
Cora picked up the telephone.
“Hello,” she said. “Is this the number for Turning & Blackburn printing press?” She examined the photograph she had taken, the one that showed the threatening note Truman had received in the spring of 1915.
“It is. How may I help you, ma’am?”
“I was hoping to speak to Mr. Edwin Turning.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Turning doesn’t work here anymore. He retired a little over a year ago.”
“Oh,” Cora said, the disappointment shadowing her voice.
“But I’m his son. Can I help you?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Were you working at the company in 1915? I was hoping to speak with him about something that happened in the company’s history.”
“Afraid I wasn’t. Listen, doll, do you have a pen? I can give you a number to reach him at home.”
After thanking him, Cora hung up the phone and dialed the new number. Mr. Edwin Turning picked up after three rings. Cora affected a vaguely Southern accent and launched into her cover story.
“Mr. Turning, hello. This is Betty Campbell, with Reader’s Digest magazine? I was hoping to ask you some questions about a story I’m doing.”
“What kind of story?” His voice was instantly suspicious, and Cora took a deep breath.
“It’s a human-interest piece. About Truman Byrd.”
“Yeah?” He made a noise like he was spitting tobacco. “What about him?”
Cora forced a smile into her voice. “Mr. Byrd started his career printing papers with your press. He’s a millionaire now, but rumor had it at one point he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Is that right?”
He turned even more cagey. “I don’t know if I want to talk about that. Truman and I had our differences from time to time, but I don’t want to get on the wrong side of him now. It all turned out all right.”
“Oh, please don’t get the wrong idea!” Cora said, changing tactics. “This is meant to be a feel-good piece. Rags-to-riches kind of thing. Everybody wants to hear that story these days—how someone’s luck can turn on a dime. This is a story our readers will positively eat up.”
She heard the sound of Edwin Turning shifting. When he spoke, he still sounded wary. “All right. But I don’t want you to quote me.”
“Perfectly all right. This will be off the record.” More off the record than you can imagine, she thought.
“Mr. Byrd himself has admitted that his finances were in a rocky state at the beginning of his career. It sounds like for a while he was looking at having to shut down his paper. Stroke of luck when he broke that story about the Bastion murders. Readership must have started to soar after that,” Cora said.
Mr. Turning grunted.
“Was that the story that turned his fortunes, would you say?”
“His readership was growing, all right,” Mr. Turning said, “but that’s a slow business.”
“But it was enough to put him in the black, it seems?” she said. “So he could continue to publish The Post-Courant?”
Mr. Turning paused. “No, I don’t think so.”
“So if not for the increase in readership, where did the money come from?” Cora asked casually. “A business loan, perhaps?”