Chapter Thirty
At a quarter to eight, Cora entered the bell tower. The sun was beginning to set.
“Daisy?” she whispered cautiously, pushing open the door. She saw the cushions, the cards, the bottles of booze. The last time she had been there was with Jack.
She wouldn’t think about that.
The room was empty, and she cleared out the ashtrays and readied her camera. She knew the guests were all settled in the dining room for warm beet salad with pear and walnuts, pommes de terre à la Sarladaise, mashed pumpkin, and duck confit with juniper berries.
But Clementine wasn’t with them. She sashayed out onto the mosaic tiles of the third-floor balcony, looking lovely in a dress that showed her entire back.
The satin was the color of pears, and a gold pendant traced down her spine to land a whisper above where the dress began. Then she disappeared inside again.
Cora’s risky decision to bring Daisy into the fold was going to pay off, apparently.
Cora brought the lens to her eye and adjusted it for the distance to the main house.
She kept seeing the way Jack had knelt beside her just a few nights ago.
The hope she had felt when they had examined the letters together and made the plan for the ball.
She was careful to keep her feelings about him at bay, locked behind a door, though her heart felt like a bruised piece of fruit.
She would not think of him. She had a job to do.
But jobs couldn’t fall asleep next to you at night. Nuzzle your neck. Give you children, or mourn you when you were buried.
And Cora understood in a new, raw way that she was just so damn lonely.
It reminded her of the morning her mother took her to pay a visit to Dina, barely two months before Jack’s escape.
They had ridden the ferry across the Bay and boarded the cable car, stopping by a general store along the way.
Dina had gotten pregnant and sent off the island, and was renting a dirty little room in the Tenderloin.
Cora stole curious glances at a belly just beginning to swell.
The baby’s father—presumably the lighthouse boy—was still living on Pelican; on the way, Cora saw him flirting with another girl near the Bayside pier.
Cora’s mother had stocked up Dina’s pantry with cans of food and supplies.
Cora knew she was being brought along to demonstrate a lesson in kindness—and also, perhaps, a caution.
Perhaps her mother had sensed how Cora’s heart was full and trusting and ripe with loneliness, like dry kindling ready to light at the first hint of connection.
The fog had already descended when they returned to the island later that afternoon.
Cora’s heart leapt beneath her breastbone at the sight of Jack outside.
She had slipped out the back door and gone to meet him as he weeded, and he had listened when Cora told him, haltingly, shyly, about visiting Dina.
How confusing it was. She had gathered dandelions as she talked, weaving them into an anklet that made her skin itch.
“Do you know how bridges are constructed, Cora?” he had asked.
He had explained how bridges were painstakingly built, piece by piece, over bodies of water.
How they each started on their own side to meet somewhere in the middle.
How the tension of the other was what held the bridge aloft, or else one side—or both—would crumble into the ocean.
“Do you get what I’m saying, Cora?” Jack had asked, and she had nodded, though she wasn’t entirely sure.
She just knew that she loved the cut of his jaw, the way his soft mouth pursed when he was concentrating.
He had thrown a dandelion over the fence to her, the last to complete her anklet, and said “Just be careful who you give your heart to someday.”
He’d had no idea the person he was warning her against was himself.
The bell towers began to ring eight, a deafening sound that made Cora crouch and shield her ears. And that’s when the light went on in Clementine’s room.
Cora crept toward it. With the rest of the party downstairs, enjoying their six-course dinner, Clementine opened the Astral bedroom shutters. She wasn’t in her peach dress anymore. Instead, she was wearing a white silk nightgown.
Cora’s heartbeat stuttered. Cautiously, she lifted her camera again.
And then Truman appeared behind Clem, cast mostly in shadow.
Cora’s pulse warmed in her ears. She hid behind the balcony of the bell tower, aiming her camera. She couldn’t make out Truman. He was too blurry.
She was hidden by the ledge, but the way Clementine and Truman were standing wasn’t going to work for a good enough shot. Move, she begged them in her mind. But they stayed just out of reach for her camera lens.
She swallowed hard. Daisy was the one with the fear of heights, but Cora was suddenly aware of how far the ground was below her.
She gave her worry stone one firm stroke and climbed out of the window opening.
Her view wasn’t quite direct into the Astral Suite; but if she dropped down a few feet onto the ornamental ledge, she might get the perfect shot.
There were no railings to guard her from plunging to the mosaic tiles below.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the bite of the salt air and felt the wind sweep across her cheek.
She squeezed as close as she could to the bell tower wall, shielding her camera, and crouched down.
There was barely enough room for her, and the distance was making her feel like she would faint and pitch forward.
Part of her knew this was ridiculous—that risking the fall wasn’t worth whatever Mabel could offer her.
But this was the thing that had brought Cora and her father together again—their minds, working a case, solving a puzzle.
They needed something like this, to cross all the complicated lines that had sprung up between them. She wanted so much to make him proud.
A strong wind whipped around the tower, momentarily costing her balance. Cora’s ankle gave out a little, and she caught herself just in time before the camera went tumbling out of her hands to smash on the tiles below.
She clutched the camera to her body like it was her lifeline—her very last shot at the life she wanted. She melted back into the shadows.
Then she brought the camera to her eye, her sheer determination blocking out any fear that was left.
“Hello, Truman,” Clementine said.
She had summoned him there, to the Astral Suite, while everyone else was indulging in the hours-long six-course meal.
And Truman had come, intrigued by what he would find.
Clementine kept him guessing, in a torturous way he rather liked.
He knew none of the guests would think anything of his absence.
They were used to his disappearing for work at all hours of the day.
She was wearing a nightgown that he’d never seen before. White. Leaving just enough to the imagination. She had scattered vibrant crimson rose petals across the sheets. It was meant to be romantic, but it looked like the bed had been shot.
His throat tightened. He could have spent last night in a morgue.
“We ended on a bad note earlier,” she said.
She turned. She had pulled her golden hair up to show the nape of her neck, and she was wearing a chain of violets that she took off, one by one, dropping them on the floor as she came toward him.
She was so lovely. So alive.
She slipped the strap off her nightgown. Down the curve of her shoulder.
He cleared his throat. A hunger stirring.
He saw the glint of the ocean shifting behind her and the white moon rising. The lights were amber and honey in the suite, and the teakwood carved window was open. It was never open. He started to object, and then she touched her finger to his lips.
“Everyone’s at dinner,” she said. She looked up at him with those large, yearning eyes.
As though she really saw him. Not what Mabel saw now when she looked at him, what his father had seen.
Not even what Truman saw in himself sometimes, when he looked in the mirror and remembered the terrible things he had done.
“I thought we could play a daring little game tonight, just this once,” she breathed, coming close enough for his hands to almost touch her.
“There’s nothing like the thrill of almost being caught. ”
Truman had been growing ever more paranoid, but perhaps it had been about all the wrong things.
Distrusting all the wrong people. When he sat without protest, Clem climbed onto his lap and made a sound like purring in his ear.
He traced his thumb down her throat and she shivered, as though he had set off a trail of fireworks across her skin.
A new, urgent desire stirred in him. He smelled the hint of violets.
He tightened his grip on her.
He had come so close to dying last night.
Tonight, all he wanted to do was live.
Cora’s heart pounded as she climbed back into the bell tower.
Three images, clear as day, were captured on the film in her camera.
A passionate embrace. Clem half-clothed. Byrd kissing her collarbone, her shoulder, her lips.
There was no denying it was them. Clem was almost looking at the camera.
Cora felt the excitement explode and fizz in her belly.
She had done it. After all those months of near-misses and hoping, she had done it.
But as she slipped back over the railing, her eye caught the slightest movement below. She abruptly dipped down and saw Jack, sneaking in the shadows of the bushes beneath her. He was holding a camera of his own.
The full force of the realization hit her in a wave.
Jack was going to try to steal her blackmail.
Of course. They were both getting desperate.
They both needed that shot for their own purposes.
She steadied herself against the railing and looked down to where he had been crouching.
A grim satisfaction dawned over her. She had scouted that area before, and her shots were undoubtedly better.
Unless the lighting hit with absolute perfection, he wouldn’t have gotten much.
But there was still a chance.
She tucked her camera away. She had never known one person to make her feel every spectrum of feeling the way he did—from magnetic attraction to schoolgirl crush to a cold, vibrant fury. But she would handle him, just like she had handled this job.
She hurried down the bell tower stairs and over to the main house, nodding at the guard who let her in.
Then she shut herself inside the telephone booth and dialed the number for the Fairmont Hotel.
“Hello,” a receptionist answered. “How may I help you?”
“I need to speak with a guest staying at your hotel,” Cora said breathlessly. “It’s urgent. Her name is Mrs. Mabel Byrd.”
“I’ll connect you,” the receptionist said. But a moment later, she came back on the line and said that Mabel wasn’t picking up.
“Do you want to leave a message?” she asked.
Cora hesitated.
“Yes. Please tell her that Ella Duluth called,” Cora said, glancing at the birds on the patterned wallpaper, “and the eagle has landed.”