Chapter Thirty-Three
Truman’s private theater was nestled deep in the west wing of the second floor.
It was dark and windowless, and had lush crimson curtains hanging across the suspended screen.
The walls were filigreed with twenty-four carats of paper-thin hammered gold that made them look like they were smoldering with fire when the sconces were lit.
Cora stole inside for a chance to think. She paced through the dim theater, examining the framed film posters on the golden walls.
A moment later, Jack slipped in after her. She was somehow aware of his presence before she even saw him, as if her body were attuned to him, and she felt the rush he caused within her everywhere.
She pushed him roughly against the wall and kissed him, his hands running like lightning over her body.
“I found some more of the pattern yesterday,” she said, kissing down his throat.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice like dusk.
“The code, hidden all over the house.” She slid off him and turned to examine the frames again.
He traced a finger down her neck, sending delightful shivers down her spine.
“This is distracting,” she murmured as he lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck. “Do you want my help, or not?”
“I haven’t decided,” he said. “Right now, this is pretty much all I want.”
“Look,” she insisted, taking a step away. She smoothed her uniform, re-pinned her mussed hair, and tried to calm her racing pulse.
She pointed to the posters. “What do you see?”
He studied them, a frown drawing his brows together. “Ben-Hur, Yasmina, Radio Magic, Dante’s Inferno.”
“Yes,” she said. “They fit the pattern.” Her eyes traced along the wall. “But what about these?”
She pointed to a series of frames that held the posters Berlin, Robin Hood, Destiny.
“It’s missing the Y,” she murmured. “Isn’t it?”
“There are only so many films that start with Y, I’d gather,” Jack said.
“No,” she said, coming closer. “There’s something more.
” She stopped to examine it. “There’s a hidden door here into the projector room, between Berlin and the Robin Hood,” she said.
The gears of her mind were turning. “I think it’s not knowing the pattern that’s important—it’s being able to tell when something doesn’t fit. ”
“Riddles upon riddles,” he murmured. He looked up at her.
“You helped me,” she said. “Now I want to help you.”
The youthful light in his eyes returned. He took her face in his hands, cradling it. “Have I mentioned before that you’re brilliant?” he murmured. A beautiful smile crossed his face, breaking like the dawn.
Her stomach tipped.
“I’m glad I met you, Cora McCavanagh,” he whispered in her ear. “Twice.”
There were brass owls perched along the faucets in the pools’ guest houses.
Doves embedded in the circular plaques of the ballroom’s outer walls.
Carvings of herons in the bell tower. Blackberries, yucca, raspberries, and dahlias in the tiles in the bathhouses of the outdoor pools.
Jack strolled the path, eyes sharpened, as the gardeners brought in pots of white roses and golden-rayed lilies for the night’s final event. Clementine ignored him as he approached the clay tennis courts. She was finishing a round of doubles with Simon Leit, William Morton, and Kitty.
“Coming to the picnic?” Simon called, wiping his face with a towel.
“In a bit,” Jack said.
“Save me a card game tonight?” Kitty asked. She leaned against her racquet, her red lips curving into an inviting smile.
He smiled at Kitty, polite and non-committal, and kept moving.
The water in the outdoor pool was turquoise and brilliant in the sun, and he could see the black tiled egret in the center.
The water would be crisp and cold, unlike last night.
He tipped his head back and smiled, feeling the sun warm his face. Cora had tasted like apples.
He was headed toward the catacombs Florence had mentioned, left beneath the West Terrace where builders had built over the old ruins, and he examined the tiles and the greenery. He felt a sense of gamesmanship, a quickening in his veins while he searched for an entrance.
Look for the thing that was off.
He saw the same set of mosaic tiles that he had followed to the hidden entrance of the bell tower. He examined them now. Blue, yellow, red, green. Blue, yellow, red, green. He followed the pattern until two of the tiles changed. Instead of green, they were white.
BYRW.
No, Jack thought.
Dutch white. Florence had said that Truman only used Dutch white.
The BYRD pattern completed—that’s what Jack had to look for.
He pulled the greenery back and found an alcove hidden behind it. He stepped inside.
The catacombs were cool and stark. There wasn’t much to be seen; just old staircases and dust. Jack stood inside for a moment, breathing.
He thought of the missing painting of the Lazarus.
He’d studied the art incessantly following his years at Pelican, learning everything he could about the paintings that had stolen his life.
It had become almost an obsession. Because he knew they were the trail of breadcrumbs, leading both before and behind him.
The Raising of Lazarus was a depiction of Jesus, dark and shadowy.
Extending an outreached hand over a man sitting up in a tomb.
It would be roughly three by two feet in size.
He made his way deeper into the tunnel. The path slanted downward.
He glanced up at a dripping sound. Water, and perhaps some other liquid, leaked through the joints above his head to create stalactites, and Jack knew that no priceless artifacts, no paintings would be hidden here. It was too damp.
He stopped. The rest of the catacombs had been concreted in. A dead end.
Unease prickled at him with each new find.
The feeling that this wasn’t an obsession of a well-ordered mind.
Perhaps it was too strong to think of it as a sociopathic tendency.
Perhaps it spoke of a deep wound that had gone wrong somewhere—something that, instead of healing properly, festered along the way.
He turned back for the entrance and stepped out through the greenery.
“Everett? Is that you?”
Jack’s head turned, his heart rate spiking upon recognition of the voice. Truman was walking alone, toward him. He was dressed in white for the picnic and had a jaunty cane in his hand. It clicked methodically on the tile walkway.
“Where did you come from?” he asked. His voice was nonchalant but his eyes were sharp.
Jack smiled. “Just trying to soak up every last minute in this place,” he said easily.
It was then that Jack noticed Dallas Winston stationed at a careful distance behind Truman, watching him as closely as Jack had ever been watched on Pelican.
Jack knew he had bought himself enough reprieve from Truman’s suspicion when he saved him from the bullet. But even that would only stretch so far.
“Shall we?” he said, gesturing down the hill toward the picnic. “I’ve heard the deviled eggs are so divine that they need a new name.”
But Truman made no attempt to move. He fixed his eyes on Jack.
“Do you like fireworks, Mr. Conner?”
Truman’s eyes were bloodshot. Jack stared back at the thin threads of red that webbed through the white and tried not to look away. “I’m not sure,” Jack said. “I suppose I still feel a little jumpy about the idea of sudden, loud booms.”
“Yes. Well. We couldn’t end your time on the Hill without some sort of grand finale, now, could we?”
“Didn’t we already have that?” Jack asked carefully.
Truman laughed; but to Jack’s ears, it sounded more and more unhinged. “Maybe so,” he said.
His cane scraped along the path like the point of a nail, with Dallas Winston following behind.
From the fourth-floor balcony, Cora saw Truman leading Jack down the hill for the picnic. When he was a safe distance away, Cora moved soundlessly toward Byrd’s room.
She paused over the photographs that hung in the hallway. At first glance, they were travel images. But upon closer inspection, she realized they were
Barcelona,
Yosemite,
Rome,
and Damascus.
She shivered a little and felt for the presence of false walls, passages, or panels in the walls behind them.
But there was nothing false there.
For once, everything was just as it seemed.
Cora hesitated outside the closed door to Byrd’s bedroom.
She had never stepped inside it before. She pushed open the door.
It smelled like him—expensive cologne and aftershave.
There was an antlered chandelier hanging from the ceiling; dark paneled oak walls; and a coffered ceiling plated with gold leaf.
She stepped inside, closing the door behind her, and made her way to the closet, where she rummaged through the shelves holding his leather shoes and silk ties.
She examined a carved box with engraved flowers and a small silver duck sculpted on top.
Inside were cigars, a pistol, and a deck of playing cards.
It made her think of Jack. She knew that they were running out of time to find the files, and the truth about the Bastion—but perhaps he would gain some satisfaction knowing that he’d played a part in taking half of Byrd’s fortune from him.
Maybe that was the cost of the future Jack had lost.
Maybe it was the closest thing to justice Jack was ever going to see in this lifetime.
Cora suddenly heard the creak of a floorboard just outside the door.
She held her breath, dropped to her knees, and crouched behind the Italian writing desk. She forced herself to breathe quietly and, like a child, she slipped her hand into her pocket and let it close around the worry stone.
Dallas Winston poked his head into Truman’s room and glanced around it. Cora stilled, waiting for what felt like an endless moment. Finally he closed the door again behind him and moved on down the hallway.
She rose, letting the worry stone drop back into her pocket. She pictured her father’s worn, tired face. The lines downturning at his mouth. About what her mistake had cost him. And about what Jack had said.
The way he had looked at her, his eyes like deep wells, when he said: “Redemption is only possible with the truth.”
That was out of the question. She would still rather live the rest of her life wearing a chain-mail jacket of guilt than ever let her father know the truth.
Which also meant that after tomorrow, she could never see Jack again.
The thought filled her with so much sadness that when she stood, she almost missed it. A tapestry, hanging on the wall next to Truman’s bed. It was a giant oak tree, covered in all different kinds of fruit. Oranges, apples, lemons, and persimmons. All except for one branch.
She drew closer.
There was a finch on it.
The tapestry was caught behind the massive four-poster bed, and she had to use all her strength to move it even an inch. The tapestry was thickly woven and was attached to rings at the ceiling like all the other tapestries, but this one hung loose at the bottom edge.
She stepped beside the bed and gently pulled the tapestry’s hem away from the wall.
Behind it, she found an enormous safe. A vault door. Large enough to possibly lead to an entire, secret room.
When the guests were beginning to drift away from the picnic, Cora waited in the shadows of a tree, hanging thirty paper lanterns at Macready’s direction.
She watched Jack make his way back up the hill.
She tried to judge by the way his head was turned down, the slope of his body, and the length of his stride, whether he had found anything.
“Keep moving, Miss Duluth. We need a hundred of these up by tonight,” Macready said, shoving another armful of paper lanterns at her.
Cora bit her lip and steadied her hands, using a pocketknife to cut the strands of ribbon and then tie the cream lanterns into the boughs of the trees.
She had decided that tomorrow, when the parties were done and the guests had departed, she would buy a ticket to San Francisco.
She would make arrangements to meet Mabel at her room in the Fairmont, and they could do the deal in person there.
Mabel would have her negatives and Cora would have enough money to start the rest of her life.
She felt a twinge. Whatever that was going to be.
Finally, Macready stopped observing her and moved on to her next task. Cora glanced toward Jack’s room, preparing to dump the rest of the lanterns somewhere. She was so engrossed that she almost didn’t hear the clearing of a throat.
She stepped down from the ladder, peering through the boughs, to find Matias Rojas, the chauffeur. He had slicked-back hair that always smelled faintly of verbena, and Daisy thought he looked a little like the actor Ramon Novarro.
He gestured to her with an air of not wanting to be seen, and she followed him to the shadows that the main house threw onto the walkway.
He thrust a folded piece of paper toward her.
MESSAGE RECEIVED.
EN ROUTE.
MEET AT THE AIR STRIP, 5 P.M.
“I’ll drive you,” he said. He walked away, leaving her to stare after him wordlessly as his steps echoed on the tiles.