Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Agreed. Especially seeing as tonight’s fête requires a costume.”
She shuddered.
“Yet I’m only here for a short time longer.
” He checked his watch again, leaning toward her.
“It’s terribly forward of me to ask you to be my deliverer, as we’ve only just met.
But—won’t you come? It would be the highlight of my day if, instead of dancing and making painful small talk tonight, I could have an architectural tour of the castle.
Behind the scenes. I promise to appreciate every last bit of minute detail you want to include. ”
She pursed her lips, glaring at him a little.
He felt nervous, waiting for her answer. That was the trouble with him: he had an end goal with Florence Abrams in mind, but he also genuinely liked her. She was sharp as a tack and perhaps, if he was willing to admit it, he found her even the slightest bit intimidating.
“No costume,” she said curtly.
“Unless it involves concrete boots.”
“Not even then.”
“Fine. I’m willing to wear something grotesquely frilly in your stead.”
“And I’m leaving if anyone tries to make me dance, discuss politics, or eat any food shaped like a swan.”
She gestured to the waiter to refill her coffee cup and snapped open her binder, as if dismissing Jack.
He grinned. “I’ll see you tonight.”
She waved him off without looking at him.
He paused at the counter on the way out. There were candies and truffles for sale behind the glass display. He remembered Cora once telling him through the fence that yellow candies were her favorite—banana, lemon. Somehow that detail had stuck in his mind across the miles and years.
He caught the waiter’s eye. “I’ll take some of those, please. The yellow ones.”
He felt a sense of elation as he climbed into the back of the chauffeured car, a white package of saltwater taffy tucked beneath his arm.
As the car wound along the coastal highway back toward Byrd Castle, for the first time he wondered if he might finally find out what had happened to him all those years ago.
And then what? He could never be Jack Yates again.
He would have to shed that name like he’d shed the boy he had once been, in order to survive.
But perhaps, once he’d found the person who had done this to Leo and him, he could finally become someone new.
“I’ve made some mistakes in my life,” he had once admitted to Lozada beneath a star-spattered sky. “Done bad things. Some real shit.”
Lozada had crouched and thrown a log on the fire, sending up a spray of sparks. “You know what they say about shit,” he had said as the dry wood caught.
“Afraid I don’t,” Jack said.
“You give it to a gardener, and you know what it becomes?” Lozada had grinned up at the heavens. “Fertilizer.”
Jack hadn’t believed it. That, somehow, anything good could grow up out of the soil of even the worst things he’d ever done, or that had been done to him.
He had downed too much whiskey that night and ended up lying out across the ground with his arms and legs splayed wide, a half-drunk snow angel in the desert. And he had let himself believe enough to pray, just that one night, that it might someday be true for him.
Nothing had happened, of course. Just as he’d expected.
He had almost forgotten it.
Until two years later, almost to the day, when he was playing the winning ace at a table in Reno and Truman Byrd walked in.
Mabel Byrd was sitting in the dining room, having a late lunch of tea sandwiches and chicken salad with her oldest friend, when the butler came with the telephone.
“A Miss Ella Duluth, for you, madam,” he said, standing in a golden strip of sun. The rest of the room was dim, with the heavy silk drapes pulled almost shut.
“Excuse me, Trudy,” she said, laying her napkin down.
Trudy waved her off with a manicured hand that glittered with rings of jade and opal the size of robins’ eggs.
Mabel had slipped off her leather mules under the table.
Now she put them back on and rose to take the call in her private sitting room.
She took her time, lighting a cigarillo and sitting down in a plush armchair she had furnished with peacocks.
As a girl, she had loved the show they put on.
She had seen them once at the circus—a simple brown bird with a dull tail trailing like a feather duster.
And then it had exploded into a fan of color.
It had delighted her, surpassing her expectations.
Those moments in her life had been few and far between.
“Hello?” Mabel finally said into the receiver. There was something powerful in making people wait. The smoke curled in plumes to catch in the velvet curtains.
“I received your message,” a woman’s voice said on the other end. “And I’m well aware that the deadline you’ve set is approaching.”
“Yes. Well. You’ve been a disappointing investment.” Mabel’s voice was clipped and exacting, and wielded to inflict pain. “And I’m smart enough to spot when a stock is going down.”
“I still have three days left to deliver what you’ve asked,” Cora said, and Mabel could hear the way her voice took on a blade of its own. “And an idea to ensure that you get what you want.”
Mabel sucked on her cigarillo. “And what is that?”
“I’m going to ask Mr. Byrd to let me stay on as Miss Garver’s maid during her travels,” she said. “So I will be there when they … reconnect after a long absence. I know that they have plans to meet in Los Angeles in June.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be happening anymore,” Mabel said. “And to be frank, I’ve run out of patience with you.”
She had really let herself believe that this girl could deliver what she had promised.
She was annoyed—mostly at herself. That was a vulnerability she hadn’t allowed in years.
People were nothing if not disappointing.
Full of empty promises. Especially the ones who had once held her highest hopes.
Weren’t dashed dreams a form of debt that should be repaid?
Mabel would be coming to collect on hers, one way or the other.
“I’m flying to San Francisco for a society function tomorrow,” she continued.
“I will be staying at the Fairmont with some of the most influential women in the country. We both know a man isn’t ever going to hire you.
But these women would. Give me what I want, and you’ll be the first name on a list of the most powerful and wealthy females with the sorts of discretionary private jobs you would die to get. ”
She hoped the girl wouldn’t try to apply to her sympathies by growing weepy or, worse, pleading. She hated that. Sadness, she had decided long ago, was a useless emotion. The one that got things done was anger.
“Or you can fail, Miss McCavanagh, and it would be easy enough to ruin you beyond repair.” The smoke turned her voice to gravel. “So don’t call unless it’s good news.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” the girl said pleasantly, and Mabel’s estimation of her raised a hair by the way she remained smooth as silk, without the hint of a waver. “We’ll speak soon.”
Mabel hung up the phone and put out her cigarillo. Everyone else thought they were running the show. But she was, even from across the continent, and it gave her an old thrill of satisfaction.
Truman had pushed her back into the shadows like an old forgotten doll.
But when the time was right, she’d come out.