Chapter Thirty-One
Three hours later, Cora sat on the floor of the locked bathroom, squinting with giddiness at the developed photographs.
She had intentionally left the contact sheet a bit overexposed.
It would be just enough proof to show Mabel the goods, without giving up her bargaining power with the negatives needed for the newspapers.
Cora hid the evidence in her room, splitting it just in case by tucking the canister of negatives in her biscuit tin.
She hugged the tin to herself and locked it away.
Then she headed to the house, where the guests were streaming out from their raucous dinner to smoke cigars, play cards, and swim.
It was half past eleven. It was clear that the week of parties was coming to a head, with only tomorrow night remaining.
She felt the excitement swelling in the air like a heat wave.
The sensation, the nerves, that something big was going to happen.
She could feel Jack watching her over the rim of his cocktail. There didn’t appear to be a camera on him, and she felt a pinch of unease. The buzz of her initial triumph was fading. Even though her prints were better, she had to make sure that he didn’t get to use his first.
She ducked into Macready’s office and checked the latest schedule.
The night would be tricky. The guards were moving with more frequency, and covering more ground.
She committed the times to memory, then slipped across the esplanade to the guest cottages, determined to finally play things the way Jack did.
Dirty. And without remorse.
She picked the lock of his suite and slipped inside.
His room was just as it had been the last time she’d been inside it.
She searched it, again. Checked the hidden drawers and his nightstand, and riffled through his clothes.
She couldn’t find his camera or, more importantly, the damning negatives.
A troubling thought prodded at her. Where had he gotten the camera in the first place?
She looked everywhere she could imagine.
Was it possible he had it on him? Or that he’d hidden it somewhere in the main house?
Damn him. She scrawled a note for him and left it tucked into a book she put on his nightstand.
He would notice immediately that it wasn’t one of his own.
The Hound of the Baskervilles, her favorite mystery. They had discussed it once at Pelican.
Meet me at 1:45 between guard shifts, she wrote. I have something for you.
She shut away every part of her that felt tender. She was all done with mercy. Tonight, she was only her father’s daughter.
She returned home and stripped the boots off her aching feet. She put on a pair of warm socks, and checked that the negatives were still safely hidden away in the package of biscuits. Then she ate the biscuits alone, crunching in the silence, and tucked herself into bed.
When Cora awoke, moonlight was cutting through the window onto the crumpled biscuit packet she had dropped on the floor.
Daisy must have covered her with a quilt when she came in, and was now softly snoring in her own bed.
Cora wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and checked the clock.
Half an hour until her meeting with Jack.
She rose, washed her face as quietly as she could, and changed into something more strategic.
She put on fresh underwear and black stockings.
She pulled out Bobby’s favorite dress: ink-black and satin, it clung to her body much more than the uniform did.
She lined her eyes with kohl. To a security guard, she would look like one of the guests, and that would raise fewer questions.
She pulled her hair up into a chignon, so that it showed the long, aching curve of her back. Her eyes were more green than hazel tonight. She spritzed herself with perfume, rubbing it along her wrists and the backs of her knees. Her body was starting to buzz.
She stopped to examine herself in the bronze mirror. It had a small chip in the upper-right corner, and she could almost see the fifteen-year-old girl she used to be staring back at her, determinedly wiping the storm from her eyes. She was cheered by her indefatigable grit.
She had survived everything that came at her before now. And she would survive this night, too.
Cora threw on a coat, strapped her gun to her thigh, and locked the door behind her.
Her heels faintly crunched on the gravel walk, so she moved off the gravel to the ground, the soil still moist from the storms. She paused once, her heart climbing into her throat when she heard the sound of Macready’s voice, but she waited in the shadows and then crept on without being discovered.
The Roman Pools that had been built beneath the ballroom were dim, and she paused at the doorway to listen. The pools were kept unlocked, and she heard nothing but the gentle slap of water against tile.
She stepped into the temperate chamber and was hit with a wall of moist air.
The water glowed an unearthly aquamarine, warmed by the lights buried within it.
Cora walked around the lagoon-like pool to inspect the corridors and make sure that she was truly alone.
Ten thousand glass tiles were inlaid into the walls; incandescent golds and blues, the walls rippling with mosaics.
The moonlight shimmered across them, highlighting stars and mermaids and Roman goddesses, tridents and fruit trees and temples. Her steps echoed.
Wisps of steam rose from the heated water in delicate white mist. There were arched alcoves tucked on either side of the pool, where the rooms became more like private baths. The ceiling was a dome, covered with cobalt tiles. The clock on the wall read 1:43.
She checked her gun. The chamber was loaded with three bullets.
The steam was making her begin to perspire.
The clock hands shifted steadily to 1:55, and she wondered nervously if Jack had missed her message.
Or, more likely, simply didn’t care to come.
She adjusted the neckline of her dress, her anger growing as the minutes ticked by.
Then suddenly she froze as the door creaked open, letting in a bit of light.
She could feel a curl of cold night cut through the humid air.
Jack entered cautiously, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the dimness. He was wearing a coat over a three-piece suit. His shadow fell over the lapis lazuli tiles, darkening them.
“You’re late,” Cora said flatly.
She stepped out into the moonlight.
“Good to see you too, Cora,” he said. He closed the door and locked it behind him. She made her way toward him, her heels clicking with a delicate sharpness against the tiles.
She looked, and felt, dangerous.
Jack gave a low whistle when Cora stepped into the light. She stopped short.
“We’ve been playing a game, haven’t we?” Cora said. “I want it to end, now.”
“All right,” Jack said. He smiled. “Although I happen to find that games can be—”
He cut off when she showed him a bit of leg, the hilt of her gun. She gestured to the pool chair tucked into the alcove, which she had positioned out of sight of the door. He didn’t get to control this, for once.
“Sit,” she directed.
He whistled under his breath again, but the light had gone out of his eyes.
And when he moved, she saw that he had something with him. Something that looked like a satchel. She froze.
“Put that on the floor,” she said. “And push it toward me.”
He complied, setting the pack on the tiles and giving it a gentle shove in her direction.
Then he gave her a bow, the humor gone from his face, and made a show of sitting.
“I don’t know what you mean when you say we’ve been playing a game,” he said carefully. “I haven’t been playing one, Cora.”
“But you haven’t been completely honest, either. Have you?”
He was silent.
She was dying to have it out with Jack, once and for all. So she could finally leave him and this place behind on her own terms.
“I’ve noticed a pattern with you, Jack.”
“And what’s that?” he asked.
“That you’ve grifted everyone you’ve ever met. The Pelican guards, your contact in the underground. Florence. Me.”
“Is that why you brought me here?” he asked. “We’re back to that again? An interrogation?”
She turned on a flashlight and pointed it toward his face.
“I want to hear about the night of the Bastion heist. March 23rd, right?”
He squinted back at her. “All right.”
“Start with that afternoon. What did you do?”
If nothing else, she was leaving with answers to the questions that had plagued her for half her life. The questions that had kept her awake at night through the years, as she stared up at the ceilings of her apartments in California and New York, wondering what the truth had been.
He inhaled warily. “All right. Fine. It was a Saturday. I … played some baseball in the neighborhood. Picked up some scraps of meat at the butcher for my ma.”
“You remember that?”
“Of course. It was the last day of my life that was ever normal.”
Cora had made honey bread with her mother the day before Jack escaped.
It was one of the days that Cora felt itchy and irritable, and she had criticized the way her mother added the ingredients, the way the flour left a snowy print on her dress.
But her mother refused to break that day, and eventually Cora had relented and apologized, and they had eaten the honey bread on chipped china and drunk tea, looking at catalogues.
That was the last normal day of Cora’s life.
And it was seared like heated iron tongs in her memory.
She leaned forward.
“Now tell me. What were you and Leo doing on the evening you got caught inside the Bastion museum?”
Jack had kicked the can down the alley of that night so many times over the years. It was dark and painful, the stuff of nightmares. He didn’t want to go back. But she was standing in front of him, shining that bloody light in his face.