Chapter Thirty-One #2
“Can you turn that down a little?” he asked. “I know you’re just being your charming detective self and all, but it’s starting to give me a headache.”
She acquiesced and shifted the light a little. He could see a bit of her leg and, despite the circumstances, it was driving him crazy.
“Start at the beginning,” she ordered. There was a delicate, faint pulse showing at the base of her neck.
He closed his eyes. The light from the bulb was still hot on his corneas and he could see it, blazing like a halo.
“Leo and I had gone for dinner,” he said slowly. “Leo was pretty dizzy with this dame he’d known from school. He wanted to ask her out on a proper date, but he chickened out, like I told you. So we walked the area of this flower shop where she worked while he tried to get up the courage.”
“This girl. She never saw you?”
“No.”
“So no one could verify your claims.”
“Right.” He shivered and looked away. Leo had never gotten over the shame of it. If only he’d had courage earlier that night, and not later. Their whole lives would have fallen differently.
“What was the flower shop called?” Cora asked.
“Forget-Me-Knots. Spelled like k-n-o-t-s—you know, like the kind you tie.”
“And the girl?”
“The girl was called Lila O’Malley. Leo and I were walking around that area until nine o’clock while he tried to get up his courage. Ever been there? That grassy strip along the Fens?”
Cora shrugged. “It was dark by then, I’d imagine?” she asked instead.
“Pitch-black. Hardly any streetlamps. It had just started to rain.” He could still remember the way the chill set in, seeping down to his bones.
“What did you talk about?” she asked. “Do you remember?”
“School. Architecture. Starlets. Stupid kid stuff.”
“And then what happened?” she asked. He heard the sound of a waterfall pouring into the pools, felt the heat of the room in perspiration on his lip.
“We were crossing the street at the corner just outside the museum. We were going to grab the streetcar home.”
“Leo had given up on talking with the girl at that point?”
“He knew he’d missed his shot. The flower store was closed and Lila walked right past us.
He mumbled hello, but she didn’t even hear it.
He was kind of glum like that way he’d get sometimes, and I was trying to cheer him, doing this god-awful impression of Charlie Chaplin.
We were waiting on the bench for the streetcar to come.
And then we heard this horrific scream.” He swallowed.
He still remembered the sound of it; how it had instantly turned his blood to ice.
Cora tilted her head. “What did you do?”
“It was late. The museum was supposed to be closed and the street was empty. Leo said to me: ‘Did that come from the museum?’ ”
It was as if Jack could see it playing out again on a screen in front of him.
Him and Leo, standing there hesitantly, those moments crystallized forever in time.
“You want to know the truth?” he asked ruefully.
His chest felt hollow. “In that moment, I didn’t want to help.
I just wanted to run.” He had never admitted that to anyone.
He was used to being the one who jumped off the highest branch into the creek, climbed the fence posts and got his hands cut up into ribbons with barbed wire, dared Leo to talk to girls.
Some nights, when Jack felt like being generous to himself, he wondered if maybe it had been less about cowardice and more of a premonition.
If they hadn’t gone—if they had just called for the police instead. …
“So, Leo was the one who went first?” Cora’s eyebrow arched. “Sounds unlike him.”
“Right. He always wanted to stop and think things over, weigh all the options before he made any big decisions.” Jack shrugged and sighed.
“He told me once on Pelican that he blamed himself for everything that happened to us. But he had been so sick and tired of feeling like a coward, after he chickened out on the thing with Lila.”
“What happened next?” Cora asked.
“We found the museum door set ajar with a crowbar, and a woman screamed again from somewhere inside. The sound of this woman was awful. She was hysterical, screaming for help. Saying something about her children.”
Cora’s eyes narrowed. “Why wasn’t she mentioned in anything I read about?”
“We told the cops and the jury, but somehow that part of the story never made it into the papers. Just another part of the slam job against us.”
“What was she doing when you came upon her?”
“I actually never saw her,” Jack admitted. “That was the thing. We followed the woman’s voice deep into the museum, but the whole thing was a setup. To frame us. There was no woman, no children. Instead, all we found were the guards, tied up and bleeding.”
Jack grimaced, his chest tightening. He still saw it sometimes in his nightmares, the way they had walked into the gallery room and seen the two guards, pale as anything.
Tied with wires and sitting in chairs, their mouths bound, their blood spilling onto the floor like slicks of dark red oil.
One of them was clearly already gone by the angle of the way his head was tilted, and it had made Leo retch.
Jack had reached the one whose head was still lolling and ripped off the cotton binding around his mouth. “It’s going to be all right,” Jack had told him. “We’re going to get you help. Where is the woman who screamed?”
But the man was already fluttering in and out of consciousness.
“What do we do?” Jack had pleaded to Leo, but more to himself. He had been starting to back away. It had smelled like sweat and iron, a nightmare scene set amongst the silent, priceless art. Except for the pieces that had been cut clean from the walls.
“The guards were covered in blood, then,” Cora said. “The same blood that was found all over your clothes and hands when the cops showed up.”
“We tried to help stanch it.” Jack had taken the razor blade he found next to the chair and tried to cut the ropes free.
He still remembered the way the guards’ blood had been slick and warm.
How he’d slipped in it and tried to stay upright.
“We weren’t running when the police came.
We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. ”
“And the guards were dead by the time the police did arrive,” she said. “So they couldn’t tell what really happened. That might be seen as rather convenient.”
“I’d say that was actually pretty damn inconvenient for us,” Jack snapped. He knew, like any good investigator, that she was hunting around and pushing his buttons. It was working.
“You were the only two people still alive they found in the whole place.”
“And with none of the art. Don’t you think that’s pretty incredible, Cora?
We were two poor Irish youths from Dorchester, and they pinned it on us.
They never found the art. They convicted us without ever even finding it.
Where would we have put it? Come on. We would have run.
Why would we stick around with the guards’ blood on our clothes?
Why wouldn’t we have fled with this supposed accomplice? ”
“Your version makes sense. But the court’s does, too.” She swung the light away in reprieve.
“And then there were the photographs of us. Damning ones, coming out of the Bastion handcuffed and covered in blood. Someone who happened to be there at just the right moment to snap them.”
“The person who paid Byrd off to frame you,” she said. And then her face changed as she watched him. She had seen something in him that he hadn’t meant to show. “There’s something more, though,” she said. She studied him, her eyes bright and ringed with gold. “Isn’t there?”
There was. He’d had a growing suspicion that there was more to the story than he had guessed.
Cora was an even better private investigator than he had realized.
He tried not to notice the way the delicate chain around her neck slipped around her collarbone.
The way her full mouth was turning with that calculating look on her face.
It was surprising how fearsome she could be.
And even more surprising how attractive Jack found it.
“Jack,” she said. “Where are the photographs you took of Clem and Truman tonight?”
He raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t known she was there. She was full of surprises.
But then again, so was he.
He gestured toward the satchel on the floor near her foot. Cora nodded, eyes narrowing. But her hand stayed near her gun, at the ready, just in case.
He reached into the satchel and handed something to her.
It was a camera.
“Where did you get this?” she asked. Her brow knit in confusion, near the small scar on her forehead. “And how did you know where to be tonight?”
“I had an accomplice.”
Cora looked up sharply. “Daisy?”
“No,” he said. “Clem.”
In her eyes, he watched as the realization dawned. “These will cost Byrd the presidency,” Cora said slowly. “And perhaps half of his fortune. Why would she do that?”
“It’s self-preservation. She wants to be the new Mrs. Byrd.”
“And this gets Mabel out of the way,” Cora said.
“Right—as long as Clem doesn’t get caught as the source of the leak. I offered to do the dirty work of getting it to the competing papers for her. She has no idea you’re involved at all.”
“That I’m involved?” Cora asked. Faltering.
Jack loosened his tie around his neck. “I was only there tonight as backup,” he said simply. “In case you didn’t get my message.”
“Your message.…” She moved imperceptibly as the pieces clicked into place.
He felt a flush of warmth. Such a simple, stupid thing. To give someone a gift. To be the source of pleasure, rather than pain. “You didn’t trust me—understandably,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d come if the message was from me.”
“You’re giving up your leverage to blackmail Byrd,” she said, in disbelief. “For me.”