Chapter Twenty-Two
At a quarter past eleven, Jack met Clem and Beaumont at the stables. Clem was already astride an Appaloosa, and one of the stablehands was saddling a roan Arabian for Beau.
“You’ve chosen intriguing footwear for a trail ride,” Clem said.
“I’m afraid something’s come up for business,” Jack said. “You go on without me.”
He walked away just as Beau was climbing into the saddle. He saw them off, giving them a wave.
Then he arranged for a car to take him down the hill into town.
Cora had written out the name of the diner in Harmony where Florence ate every Wednesday without fail. “If there’s something else hidden here, she’ll know where,” Cora said. “She orders the same dish and sits at the same booth, like clockwork. She’ll be there at noon.”
“Then so will I,” Jack said.
The day was clear, but the air was pregnant with a coming storm when Jack climbed into the chauffeured car and watched the house recede behind him: the cypress trees, the bell towers. And somewhere hidden deep within the grounds, Cora.
There was a strange new crook in his gut, a filling where he had felt the daily ache of loneliness for more than a decade. So unfamiliar it bordered on uncomfortable. He watched from the window as the automobile snaked along the road, hugging the cliffs where the Pacific dropped dangerously below.
He envisioned the curve of her collarbone peeking out from beneath her uniform. She had a slow-blooming beauty that unfurled itself more each time he saw her.
But he knew he couldn’t afford to notice such things. He needed to stay the course he had made, of becoming strategic and cynical. It was what he knew. What he could trust. It filled the places where the hope used to live.
He had come to know despair in the coolness of the desert nights while on the run from Pelican, watching horned lizards skitter patterns across the sloping dunes after the sunset had scorched the sky.
He used to lie under a fringe of stars and think about how easy it had once been to turn the thoughts in his head into words to trade like smooth stones or coins.
Bantering with Leo over sausages frying on the stove; singing a clever, cheeky little ditty to May Rollins down the street while she swung her legs from a perch on the fence post. As a fugitive, he formed words that lay empty and dormant in his mouth and wondered if it was possible to go mad from loneliness, anger, regret.
What he learned was that those were places you could live in, realer even than the numbers of his address.
A deeper world. And sometimes he wondered if, for some people, hell started well before you died.
Jack straightened his cuff links and directed the chauffeur to stop at a small turnoff in front of the Harmony Diner.
The restaurant was situated on a cliff, where waves dashed into foam at the base of the hills and then slunk back into the sea.
Elephant seals gathered on the beach below like wet tires, and the air smelled of fresh grass, brim, and rotting kelp.
“Give me an hour?” Jack asked, tipping the chauffeur heartily. The automobile drove off, dust swirling into eddies behind it. Jack turned toward the diner, a bell tinkling over his head when he opened the door and stepped inside.
It was a tight, cramped space, made bearable by the vast views of the Pacific through the back wall of windows.
Jack stood in the doorway, hit with the scent of brewed coffee, grease, and fresh buttermilk.
There were ten booths, seven of which were occupied.
He recognized Florence immediately, sitting at the window in the back corner, just like Cora had said she would be.
She was examining what looked like rudimentary blueprints, her head bent over a half-filled cup of coffee.
But he didn’t go to her right away.
Instead, he asked to use the telephone.
“Muddy Dahlia,” someone answered on the fourth ring.
“Virgil. It’s Conner,” Jack said. He played with the matchbook that Cora had stolen and then given back to him.
Virgil’s voice immediately turned cagey. “Conner. You got the goods?”
“No. Listen, I didn’t want to call from the house. I don’t have it yet, but I’m … following a new lead.” His eyes landed on Florence.
Virgil sounded agitated. “Byrd put out another hit piece on our candidate today. The boss is fuming. I’ll try to hold him off a bit longer, but I can’t promise anything.”
“Hold him off from what?” Jack asked.
Instead of answering, Virgil hung up the phone.
Jack gently replaced the receiver.
“What’ll it be?” the cook barked.
“Hash with heat, please,” Jack said, and moseyed over to the back-corner booth. He tried to shake off the way the call had unsettled him.
“Miss Abrams?” he asked with a polite amount of hesitation. “Is that you?”
She looked up through her blunt fringe of hair, examining him with shrewd, intelligent eyes.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, no. Everett Conner,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m staying with Truman up at Byrd Castle this week. Which I know you designed.” He sidestepped the waiter, who slid a plate of steaming hash across the table to Florence.
Since he was a kid, Jack had had an innate sense for the locks that people carried within them.
Locks that needed the right key to open.
He had never had trouble making friends, or getting other people to trust him.
That was how relationships were forged, and he had honed this skill with the same intensity as someone learning to sculpt bronze or brandish a carving knife.
But sometimes Jack knew his skill was wielded as a weapon.
There was a line between friendliness and manipulation.
There had been times in his life when he wanted something.
When he knew exactly what he was doing, and finding the right key was a surgical, almost violating thing.
He always sensed when he was nearing that line. As he was about to do now.
He flashed her a broad smile.
“I don’t want to interrupt your lunch. I’ll leave you to it—I just have to say, the engineering marvel of the water reservoir you designed, with the gravity-based system making use of the artesian wells. Well, it was genius.”
He took a step back to leave, gesturing toward her steaming plate, and she eyed him, her fork raised.
She used it to point to the booth opposite her.
“Sit, Mr. Conner,” she said.
“Coffee, please,” he said to the waiter, and slid into the booth.
“How did you come to know so much about the water system? Are you an engineer by trade?” she asked. Her fork bit into the egg next to the hash, sending marigold yolk spilling across her plate.
“Somewhat.” He spoke in detail, telling Florence about designing his own agricultural system for Lozada. She examined him with reserved interest as though she were sizing him up.
“I’m curious, though,” Jack said, tucking into his own plate of hash.
It was piled high with jalapenos, and he added Tabasco sauce to it, so that the first bite made his eyes water.
“Tell me about the choice to use Caen limestone for the exterior of the castle.” It was one of the first things he had noticed, and he had reached out to touch one of the outer walls.
It was so smooth that it looked like poured cream, ready to ripple beneath his fingers.
“Mr. Byrd had a penchant for Caen, and it withstands the elements quite well,” she said. “The high winds and the salt air.”
“The very same stone used to construct the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, isn’t that right?” He took another eyewatering bite of hash. “Formed in the lagoons of northwestern France.”
“Yes,” Florence said, cutting him an approving look. “And dating back to the middle Jurassic period.”
Jack relaxed into the booth and grinned at her.
She gave him a genuine smile back. There was something healing in that moment, sitting across from Florence Abrams, watching some of the time he’d spent on Pelican being redeemed.
He had used it to soak up all sorts of the information he would eventually need: To escape from Pelican.
To make the tributaries for the desert where he had made his fortune with Mr. Lozada.
And now to open the lock that was Florence Abrams. He had a niggling sense that she was going to be the key to the whole thing.
“There are rumors of a bridge project to connect the coastal highways north of Byrd Castle and make the travel easier to San Francisco,” he continued, pushing away his emptied plate.
“Yes. That bridge is necessary. But the falsework will be complex over Bixby Creek, to construct the span of that gulf amidst high winds and waves,” Florence mused.
Jack stroked the cut of his chin. “Would it make sense to use steel, then?”
“No,” Florence said decisively. “Steel requires more upkeep with its exposure to the elements.” She watched the waiter approach with her dish of strawberry shortcake.
“I’ll have one of those too, if you please,” Jack said, eyeing Florence’s plate.
“I’d employ concrete,” Florence said, her fork sending a strawberry to slide down the mountain of cream, “which could help stabilize the cost and perhaps allow for more profit to the laborers.”
“Interesting,” Jack said. “I can see why Truman likes you.”
“The jury’s still out on you,” she said demurely, licking her fork.
Jack laughed, and they plunged into an animated discussion on corbels and crestings, pilasters and crenelations.
Jack illustrated and smoothed lines through the air as though feeling the wood and limestone and steel beneath his hands.
And then he checked his watch. “Damn. I’m afraid I have to go.” He put his napkin on the table and paid both their bills. “Thank you for this enchanting hour, Miss Abrams. Will you be at the party tonight?”
She waved that off. “I’m not much for Truman’s parties.”
“Nor am I,” he admitted.
“Gaudy and awful, if you ask me. I’d rather pour wet concrete into my boots.”