Chapter Twenty-One
~ Day Five ~
Clementine woke and dressed in tennis clothes: navy wide-legged trousers, a crisp cotton shirt.
She tied a silk scarf with a navy-and-persimmon pattern at her neck, poured a cup of coffee that Ella had left on the tray, and headed down to the clay tennis courts.
Clementine spotted Beau before anyone else.
She felt warmth grow in her body, as golden as the sunlight.
“Ladies,” said Simon Leit. He gave a slight bow to them, and Kitty sauntered toward him, laughing.
“Will you be on my team?” Beau asked Clementine, twirling the racquet that rested on his shoulder.
His eyes were the color of cloudless sky.
He had a million-dollar smile—the kind of smile that might make Clementine willing to give up a life worth more than that.
She grabbed a wooden racquet from the stand and gave him a smile in return that was unmistakably flirtatious.
“What makes you think we’d be a good one?” she purred.
He laughed. “For starters, the scenery is already infinitely more beautiful than it was last night.”
She laughed back. “Charmer.” She took off the scarf from her neck and tied it around his wrist. “A charmer deserves a good-luck charm.”
“And you’re going to need it!” Simon called across the net.
“We’re doomed,” Beau said conspiratorially to Clementine as he settled in behind her for a doubles match. “Rest in peace to my vanity.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said, expertly returning the first volley. “Mine’s still alive and well.”
Beau whistled behind her and it was all she could do not to smirk.
She bent down to pick up the ball in a way that made sure her pants hugged the curve of her backside.
The smallest, sun-kissed sliver of skin showed at her waist. Clementine knew how to tease.
Was she throwing away her chance at true love to be someone else’s side piece for a few short years?
A playful distraction during her golden years?
She needed to secure her own future, one way or the other.
She felt sorry for Truman, sometimes. No one could know the shrew that Mabel Byrd had become, the torture of being with her. He was a victim, see.
But Mabel still had the name Byrd. The permanence. And she didn’t.
Jack sauntered over after the game, twirling a racquet on his shoulder. Clem wiped a glisten of perspiration from her forehead.
“Maybe next time you’ll let me join them on the court,” Jack teased to Simon. “It might be a fair fight at three against one.”
Simon laughed good-naturedly and begged off to practice his serve.
Jack turned toward Beau and Clem. “What do you say about that ride? Meet you at the stables in an hour, then?”
They finalized the plans and Clem made her way toward her room to freshen her makeup and change into her riding gear.
But first, she climbed the stairs to Truman’s office with Poppet yipping behind her.
Truman loved to ride his Appaloosa mare along the sloping vistas, informing his guests about the features of the land, and he might want to join them for the afternoon.
Besides, she thought—it might be just the thing to get Truman on board with Beau as her upcoming costar.
She was about to knock on the closed door when she overheard his voice.
Something in his tone made her pause. She gave Poppet a treat to stay quiet and leaned in closer to listen.
Truman’s voice was elevated. She caught a snippet of Newport.
And what Mabel wants.
Mrs. Macready, the head of house, responded with something just out of hearing.
Clementine pressed her ear to the door.
“I haven’t told Miss Garver yet,” Truman said. “But cancel my June trip to Los Angeles.”
Clementine stepped back from the door. Inwardly, she seethed.
She stalked down the hall with Poppet at her heels. On second thought, she wouldn’t tell Truman about the ride after all.
Cora caught herself in the reflection of the mirror as she gulped down a cup of black coffee in the kitchen with Daisy, waiting for the caffeine to hit her blood. Her eyes looked tired.
Three days left.
“Mr. Conner hasn’t been feeling well and requested brunch in his room this morning,” she said to the cook. She was careful to avoid Daisy’s eyes, and Daisy loyally buried her face in her coffee mug to hide any expression. “Shall I take it to him?”
The cook sighed. “Macready’s still meeting with Mr. Byrd …
,” Dorothy said, clearly not wanting to make a decision without the head of household.
“Fine, go ahead,” she said gruffly, adding a cup of heavy cream to the pan where she was making a soufflé.
Cora quickly loaded up a tray before Macready could return.
She swept past Daisy without sparing her a look.
She quickened her step over the mosaic tiles of the esplanade, then paused outside Jack’s door. She balanced the tray and knocked. She supposed she should feel exhausted, but instead she felt strangely alive.
Perhaps Jack could actually help her get what she had come for. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to do this entirely alone.
Jack’s face registered the slightest surprise when he opened the door, his bathrobe barely concealing the skin of his chest.
“Breakfast?” Cora asked.
He stepped back to let her in.
Cora looked over her shoulder and then slipped inside.
Jack must have been fresh from a shower.
The bathroom was heady with steam, the mirror dewy.
The balcony doors were open toward the swath of ocean.
She could smell the fragrant wave of flowers beneath them.
The bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled. She slid the tray onto the table, and, on looking at the distant base of the hill, spied two zebras grazing.
“Did you sleep at all?” he asked.
“That’s what coffee is for,” she informed him.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. He gestured to the tray.
“I really shouldn’t stay,” she said, glancing toward the door.
“Are you sure …?” he asked, and, with a wicked look, uncovered the first silver dome with a flourish. Her resolve wilted the moment the greasy scent of bacon hit her nose. She saw the plump, flaky pastries nestled next to one another.
He moved to the edge of the bed and sat down.
“Sit and eat,” he said.
“Fine,” she relented. “But I can’t promise to save you any.” She uncovered the rest of the food, revealing blueberry hotcakes, fresh-cut mango, a ramekin of cheese soufflé.
She dipped her spoon into the soufflé, trying not to notice the way his bathrobe hugged his waist when he slipped into the bathroom to change.
She moved on to the mango; and when he emerged dressed in a crisp day suit, he suddenly looked young, a tuft of hair sticking up from his head.
For a moment, Cora could almost imagine what he must have looked like when he was a little boy.
He watched her with amusement as she spread jam onto a croissant and almost sighed with delight.
“You’re enjoying that,” he said, taking a croissant for himself.
“This is the most fun I’ve had in someone else’s bedroom for a long time,” she said.
He cocked an eyebrow and laughed the way he did when she surprised him.
“Does that mean you have a fella waiting for you somewhere, Cora?” he asked.
She eyed him. “There was someone, once,” she said.
“Not anymore?” he asked.
“I have trust issues,” she said lightly. “Imagine that.”
Jack nodded and let that sit for a beat. He handed her a cup of coffee and she felt the brush of his fingers.
“What about you?” she asked. “You have a doll somewhere, just waiting for you to finish your business here?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing serious, anyway. Intimacy is a bit tricky when you have to lie about every aspect of who you really are.”
She took a hasty sip of coffee that burned her mouth.
“So,” she said. “For tonight. I scouted the location.”
He nodded. “Draw me a map.” He fetched her a pen and paper.
“When I give the signal, you’re going to lead Truman up here.” She traced the route with the tip of her pen. “Jack—this might be my last good shot to get what I came for. Tell him whatever it takes to get him there.”
“Are you condoning deceit?” he asked, teasing.
She took another sip of coffee. “My mother always said ‘Wisdom heeds all rules and occasionally breaks them.’ ”
“Ah,” he said. “I like that.”
“You would have liked her,” Cora said.
“Oh, I did. I met her once,” he said. “She came out to the fence and spoke to me.”
“What?”
Cora set down her mug.
She could almost see her mother standing there, in her long cotton dress, the wind pulling at the pins in her hair.
It hurt to think of her mother’s touch now, and the certain things made only by her hands.
Sweet maple bread with hunks of cheese. The careful way she had tucked basil seeds into dirt.
“Cora?” she used to say, in a gentle voice a half-step above a whisper.
She’d sweep the fine hairs along Cora’s temple away with her fingers like they were spun floss.
Lower her lips to Cora’s ear. “The day is calling for you, dearest, and it’s time to answer her. ”
“She wanted to know what seeds I was planting,” Jack recalled. “I told her they were for a rose named Madame Butterfly. And then she came closer and asked for my name. She told me that ‘The Lord could restore the years the locusts had eaten.’ ”
“Joel 2:25,” Cora said, her voice almost a whisper. Her mother had had her memorize it out of the big King James Bible, though Cora was never quite sure she knew why.
So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten,
The crawling locust,
The consuming locust,
And the chewing locust,
My great army which I sent among you.
You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
And praise the name of the Lord your God,
Who has dealt wondrously with you.
“I never forgot it,” Jack said. “The kindness to give a promise like that to a prisoner whose life was all but already over. She thought I murdered guards, people like her own husband. She gave me hope like an object I could hold onto in my hand. ‘I will restore the years the locusts have eaten.’ ” He looked back at her.
“You grew up to look like her, a little,” he said. “You always had her kindness.”
Cora turned away, touched to the core. He couldn’t know that that was the thing she had most wanted anyone to say to her. That she was like her mother.
“I haven’t spoken of her in so long,” she said.
Her father never wanted to, always changing the subject right when Cora needed him not to.
When Alice had died, it was as though the tension of what held Cora together fell away.
There were no guardrails or ramparts left to hold her in place anymore, to bump up against and reorient.
And there was something about the knowledge that Jack had seen Alice alive—moving, breathing, speaking. Cora didn’t have to try to conjure her mother for him. Her memory could meet with something of his own.
Cora hesitated. “She used to pretend to crack an egg on my head.” The memory was so intimate that it felt like stripping pieces of clothing off of herself. “Too many gray days in a row would make her ornery and melancholy.”
“Pelican must have been hard, then.”
“Yes. Her moods were like a weather vane.” She used to read Cora books about little mice that drank blackberry juice and went on picnics.
She talked about prayer like it was a real thing that accomplished something.
Whispered words that could turn back pandemics like breakers and sea walls.
Each one was like a piece of glass, putting together a beautiful, intricate mosaic, built somewhere they couldn’t yet see.
Cora set down her cup. Something had broken inside her, a floodgate opened by the crack of remembering her mother and the almost unbearable intimacy of sharing it with him. And now she was stumbling backward, trying not to fall, but it was too late.
She felt the hairs on her skin prickle and rise.
Something awakened in her. A fierce wanting, reigniting something long dormant.
Her first love. She could feel it sweeping through her veins again, the dizzying yearning and pure shot of adrenaline of just wanting to be near him, like a drug that she knew would destroy her, but she didn’t care because she just wanted more of it.
She had told herself that she had felt the same things for Bobby, but here it was now, potent and electrifying, and she knew it had never quite reached what she had felt for Jack.
She wanted to feel more of that, and it scared her to death.
“In exchange for your help tonight,” she said, “I have something for you.”
“Oh?” he asked. “And what might that be?”
He looked unguarded. She smelled sandalwood and mint; was close enough to see the stubble shadowing his jaw like dusk.
Cora scrawled down a name, moving away from the unmade bed before she made a big mistake.
“The architect of this place,” she said.
“She’ll know of any secret places in the Castle.
” She held out the paper to him. “Her name is Florence Abrams.”
Albert Boyle was nursing a dull headache and a foul temper when he opened his door.
He leaned against the railing in the shadows, preparing for the sun to hit his eyes, still feeling the grime from last night on his teeth.
It was a longer walk up the hill to the main house now, and he felt the resentment stirring in his belly.
“A little change of scenery,” the butler had said when they’d escorted him to the guesthouse down the hill.
Albert lit a cigarette, preparing to make the trek to the main house for some coffee and greasy sausage.
He had watched Everett Conner at the party last night, wondering who he thought he was, anyway.
Some self-righteous, new-money, Midwestern blowhard who happened to be good with cards and … cattle?
And that Truman would listen to him anyway. It was insulting.
But then Albert straightened. He stepped back into the shadows, his lips cracking drily as he noticed something very interesting.
A young auburn-haired maid, trying very hard not to be seen as she left Everett Conner’s bedroom.