Chapter Twenty
Her heart flickered as she eyed the height.
The fall could break her neck. Likely even kill her.
How badly did she want this? What was she willing to do in order to avoid leaving a failure?
Failure. It was like the dog tag she could never take off.
She tightened the soft threads of the shawl around her shoulders.
The bell tower was a hexagonal room formed by twelve arches of colorful polychrome tiles, with twelve carillon bells hanging suspended between them.
The moon was high and white-bright, throwing off enough light to illuminate the thin cushions, the decks of cards and row of bottles that Liam kept stashed there for their occasional game nights with Daisy and Matias.
She listened for the sounds of Jack approaching.
When they were on Pelican she had sometimes heard Jack laughing with his brother, their Dorchester accents emerging against each other.
Leo had a rich singing voice. Jack’s was rougher and sometimes a little off-key, but he was much better at handling people, and the flowers.
He had a gentle way about him that made things warm and soften.
Telling her how arches made of stone didn’t even need mortar to hold them together.
About the way his grandmother, Dearie, used to cut a cross in the soda bread she baked to let the fairies out.
Cora had donated her favorite mysteries to the penitentiary library so that he could read them.
“It doesn’t seem fair, though, that you have to lose the very ones that are your favorites,” Jack had protested.
“I don’t mind,” she had said. And she didn’t. She liked the way they picked apart the mysteries together, the way Jack’s mind tried to crack the lock of them.
She had felt a white-hot slice of satisfaction every time she made him laugh with clever jokes, a feeling that made her body feel strange and flushed.
Cora even stopped protesting and sat down with her mother to look through the Sears catalogue, and her mother ordered her two new dresses that she only got to show Jack once.
She glanced up with sudden nerves at the sound of the door creaking open.
Jack found her smoking a cigarette, her long legs folded beneath her.
“Were you followed?” she asked, rising.
“No,” Jack said. “I made a show of saying good night and retiring to my room. Then I climbed down from the loggia.” He didn’t mention that he was fairly certain Mr. Winston had posted a guard standing just outside his room, watching the front door.
“These won’t be missed,” Cora said, bending to rummage in a crate near her feet. “Take your pick.” She held out an ambered whiskey and a bottle of red wine.
He pointed to the whiskey, and she handed it over.
As he opened it, she placed a set of photographs on the table. “I found something last night,” she said. “Proof that Truman was in a lot of debt two weeks before the Bastion murders.”
Jack took a swig of whiskey and pulled the photographs closer to him. He noticed that her hair was down and loose tonight, cascading in waves.
“How did Truman get out of this debt?” he asked.
“I called the printers to inquire about that today,” Cora said. “Apparently Truman paid it off with a lump cash sum shortly after this notice.”
Jack looked up at her sharply. “It was the same story with the witnesses,” he said. “They were all paid off.”
“How do you know?”
“The eyewitness testimony from an unrelated man and woman was what really sealed the case against Leo and me. We had a fighting chance until that point. Well, I looked into the male witness a few years back. I paid handsomely, and one of my guys was able to dig up some info on him. Turns out he was already well known to them—in a ton of debt, gambling type of stuff, until he came into a big chunk of change and settled up shortly after my conviction.”
“Interesting,” Cora said. She watched him through her eyelashes as she opened the wine and took a drink straight from the bottle.
“The female witness who testified against us had an ill kid at the time. But both witnesses were sitting pretty by the time I escaped Pelican. The woman’s sick daughter was set up in a nice new brownstone and was being seen with the best doctors and care. You don’t find that just a bit suspect?”
Cora paused, her eyes narrowing. “What were the witnesses’ names?”
“Dean Fischer and Lily Davis,” he said.
Cora could double-check his story, and he knew she would, too.
He had fought hatred for those people for years. But how easy would it be to tell one lie if it would take care of you for the rest of your life? If it could get you out of debt with a mobster? Or save your kid’s life? He’d done the same. Exchanged lives for his own purposes.
He picked up a deck of cards and began to shuffle them, his mind quickening. “So Truman needed money. Perhaps someone approached him. Someone rich and powerful enough to bribe Truman and the witnesses. To swing the public opinion and the trial toward Leo and me.”
To cover someone else’s tracks. The cards fell in a waterfall between his hands. Who had Truman been protecting all these years?
Jack needed to find those powerful files, or something else that would get Truman to talk.
He wrenched the whiskey bottle open again, feeling the pungent alcohol hit his nose.
Cora was staring at him again with those hazel eyes, the ring of gold in them blazing like a corona.
Last night, he had tried not to notice the way the hem of her skirt skimmed her calf as she bent to go through the locked cabinet files.
He turned now to look at the rows of vintage clarets and bottles of bourbon, the decks of cards scattered amongst the cushions.
“So, Truman caused all of this destruction to gain a valuable ally while he was on the rise,” Cora said. She brought the bottle to her lips again. “He really is a bastard.”
Her eyes brightened with something like anger, and it ignited something in him that he had fought so hard to keep dormant.
Jack took a long drink of whiskey and tried to keep both at bay—the alcohol, and his desire to make someone pay.
For so long, he had wanted someone beyond himself to suffer, and he could feel the way it was turning his insides to rot.
“How did you get here, Jack?” Cora asked. She licked a crimson drop of wine from the edge of her mouth. “Rich enough to garner an invitation to the Hill, when you were starting with little more than your own shadow.” She studied him. “You must have had help?”
Jack took another gulp of whiskey. “I did. A man by the name of Luis Lozada.”
“Never heard of him,” Cora said.
“That’s not surprising, seeing as he was a cattle farmer,” Jack said. He closed his eyes. How much a single person could do to another: one man had ruined his life, another had saved it. “And he went by the name Hank Ritter.”
“He took you on?” Cora asked. “With no identification papers?”
“He must have suspected I wasn’t working under my real name, but he was an immigrant working under a new name too. He thought I was a hard worker. Liked my gardening know-how.”
“He … must have paid you handsomely, then?” Cora asked, and he heard the skepticism that crept into her voice. She was so much more guarded than she used to be.
“I worked for Lozada in the field for a few years, and then eventually I used the knowledge of his fields to help design an irrigation system.”
“You became an engineer after all, then,” she said.
He smiled, almost wistful. “Can you believe it? That time in hell on Pelican helped me after all. The system I came up with helped turn the arid desert land to grass. Revolutionized his acreage and managed to double Lozada’s fortune practically overnight.”
Jack still remembered the taste of the fried potatoes dripping with grease in the mornings.
Lozada was unmarried and had treated him like a son.
He had taught him to ride a horse bareback and fly-fish in the Nevada creeks.
For a few months, Jack had almost forgotten everything.
His dreams of returning to Massachusetts and seeing his mother again.
Of clearing his name. It was only the fresh fry of fish on a skillet over an open flame, of dirt under his nails, of the howl of coyotes at night under a sky littered with stars.
How Lozada had taken them out for a steak dinner with corn mash after the first pipe had gone in, already convinced that Jack would be a success.
“He died a couple of years later and left me most of his fortune. I gambled some of what he had left me and made it into more. And my expensive card playing found me a way to get in front of Byrd.”
Cora nodded, the delicate curve of her throat bobbing. Her skin was so smooth in the moonlight. It was so strange to see the echoes of her as a girl, now a woman, and the noticing of it was prompting things in him that he did not want to acknowledge.
He shut that down as hard as he could manage.
“And you grew up to become a private investigator,” he said. “Just like you wanted.”
“Yes. What a private investigator I am,” she muttered darkly, “drinking stolen booze with the most wanted con in the country.”
He laughed at that. “So, Mabel Byrd’s aware that Mr. Byrd’s been taking a left-handed honeymoon with Clementine Garver? And she wants her gone?”
Cora took a long sip of wine. “Clementine’s the worst-kept secret in Hollywood,” she said. “It’s a horrible sort of game he plays. Everyone knows, but Byrd still won’t grant Mabel a divorce.”
“And divorce law would always favor the man. Especially rich and powerful ones.”
“Right.” She paused. “And the only way that Mabel would have any leverage in the court is if she can prove beyond a doubt that Truman was responsible for the divorce due to his infidelity.”
“Ah,” Jack said. “So you’re not just looking to merely get rid of Clem, then.”
Cora hesitated. “No,” she admitted. “I need photographs. The only story Byrd can’t spin is one that people have seen with their own eyes. Especially if there’s something incriminating the rival newspapers could run and turn public opinion.”
“But Byrd has to know that too.”
“Yes. That’s why he and Miss Garver are so careful. It’s been difficult to catch them in a compromising, ah.…” She trailed off and took a quick drink of wine.
“.… position,” he supplied helpfully. He was trying to tease; but when he caught the lovely flush gathering at the base of her neck, something stirred deep inside him. He set the whiskey bottle down roughly.
No more drinking.
“What can I do?” he asked quietly.
“Take Clem and Beau on that ride and get them alone. There’s going to be a ball tomorrow night. And I need Truman to be made very jealous, and then for him and Clementine to be together as much as possible. I’ll scout out the location. And then I need for you to get Truman into it for me.”
“I thought you were done making deals with the devil,” Jack said.
“Perhaps I’m not sure who he is anymore,” she retorted.
There was a small tentative quirk at the corner of her mouth. She took another sip of wine.
He warned himself to be careful. Being around her was feeling dangerously good. The sleepless nights were leaving everything feeling a little blurred around the edges and sepia-toned. He never let his guard down like this with anyone, and something about doing it with her gave him a thrill.
She refolded her legs. “I’ve staked them out from afar, got myself situated as her private maid,” Cora said. “Gathered information to be in the right place at the right time, and give them little pushes as I could.”
“And?”
“I almost got something a month ago,” she said wistfully.
“You can tell it’s Clementine in the photograph, but the lighting wasn’t good enough, and Byrd’s too blurry to bank on.
” She ran the tip of her finger along the lip of the bottle.
“But my time’s running out. I only have a few days left.
I can’t afford to be as patient, or as cautious. ”
He watched her hands trail from the bottle’s lip to clutch its slim neck.
The same fingers that used to curl through the wire fence, often caked with dirt, almost always holding a book.
His mouth suddenly felt dry. He realized then why he might feel so drawn to her.
She was a slow-burning sort of lovely. But she had also known him when he was still partly himself—hopeful that justice would someday be served.
That he and Leo would make it back home someday.
The true him had been present in those moments with her, even though she had just been a kid. She had reminded him of goodness.
“And you found some sort of proof last night?” he asked. “That’s why you were taking the photographs?”
“I thought so. But I realized earlier today that these don’t have anything to do with Clementine. It’s a code. See this pattern? M is for Main St. and magnolia. They’re written to Mabel.” She tapped the photograph. “But from someone named M.”
Jack bent to examine the letters closer. He noticed that her skin smelled like gardenias.
“What if that’s not meant to be an M?” he said slowly. “What if it means something else?”
She looked again, and he noticed that she had drawn infinitesimally closer to him. “You’re right,” she said, the ends of her hair lightly tickling his arm. “I think that’s a symbol of a bird.”