Chapter Thirty-Five
Truman leaned against the stone railing on the esplanade, sipping a Gibson martini beneath the towering Mexican palm fronds.
He had requested white tie for dinner. It was the final evening of parties, and he expected his guests to pull out all the stops in glamour.
So far, they hadn’t disappointed. Clementine was wearing a satin dress in siren red that tied around her waist and found every curve on the way down.
Kitty had on some art-deco monstrosity that was likely the latest fashion, and Lola was dripping in silver sequins.
Clementine caught his eye and smiled over the rim of her drink.
A private, meaningful smile. He had a hard time not returning to the way she had been last night.
More passionate, more desperate. More like she had been at the very beginning.
Perhaps almost being assassinated in his own home did have its advantages.
He watched with calculated attention as Dallas Winston made his way through the party.
He stood out against the gentlemen’s white suits, dressed in a black tuxedo and bow tie.
The look on his face was pinched and urgent.
Truman took a long, slow sip of his drink. That expression was never a good sign.
Truman swallowed and looked behind Dallas.
The first thing Truman noticed about his estranged wife were her gloves. They were black satin. She was wearing a long black gown gathered with some enormous bow that probably cost as much of his money as a museum antiquity.
The look on her face was triumphant. A knowing smirk that set his veins on fire.
Mabel. That bitch.
He tried for another sip of his drink, but he had already drained it.
He felt the last drop of it hit his tongue as Mabel strode toward him. She knew she had him trapped—that he would have to be both civil and welcoming. It would have to be the best acting job of his life, pretending to be happy to see her.
“Mabel,” he said. He embraced her with a kiss on each cheek.
She smelled of menthol cigarettes and her perfume, which made his stomach turn.
Out of nowhere, he remembered the night in New York City when they had climbed into an abandoned construction project.
They had gotten drunk and dared each other to use the wooden scaffolding as a balance beam.
When they had both survived the feat, they had made love and then had coffee with chocolate pie at Lottie’s Diner afterward.
“How unexpected,” he said.
“Surprise,” she whispered in his ear, as if it were the most delicious thing she’d ever said.
He took her gently by the arm and smiled at his guests. “My wife, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and they all clapped and raised their glasses to her.
Clementine was watching intently, a flush rising in her cheeks. Her eyes were bright aquamarine. Kitty leaned forward to whisper something in her ear, then tittered and looked away.
Mabel took a glass of champagne from one of the servants and raised it to acknowledge the guests. Ronald Rutherford stepped forward to greet her.
“Mabel,” he said.
“Ronnie,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
“Are you going to behave tonight?” he asked grimly.
“Now, does that sound like me?” she asked. She pinched his cheek.
Truman guided her to a more private balcony on the esplanade, where they could pretend to be retiring for a smoke.
“You’ve brought additional guests.” He looked beyond her to three men who were helping themselves to canapes. None of them looked familiar. He leaned down to whisper menacingly in her ear, “Who are they?”
“They’re here for my own protection,” she said. She took a sip of champagne, then lit a match to flare against the end of her cigarette.
“Your own security?” he scoffed. “Good God, woman, do you actually think I’d try to kill you?”
“I think in your wildest fantasies you already do.”
He gave a nod of acknowledgment. “Perhaps. And now that you mention it, are you sure that you don’t have anything to do with the hit that was ordered on me?”
She didn’t pretend not to know of it, a fact that made Truman slightly uneasy. “Of course not, Truman. A quick death would be too good for you. I’d choose something more subtle.” She took a long drag. “Like poison.”
She shot him a wicked look, as if they were flirting. And strangely, Truman felt as though they almost were.
She had once told his father off when she was liquored up on Relsky and blazing mad as a cat.
Truman had actually wondered if she would try to scratch out his father’s eyes.
Franklin Byrd had been so used to treading up and down on Truman’s mother that for a moment, he’d actually been speechless.
Once he’d recovered, he had sneered and told Truman he’d better let Mabel go or he’d end up on the wrong side of the leash.
Perhaps his father had been prophetic after all.
But at the moment that Mabel had taken on his father and made him briefly mortal, Truman had never wanted anyone more.
“No, they are here for my security in other ways,” Mabel said.
“They’re from the newspapers that you don’t own.
Try to send them away and see what happens.
I’ll make a scene like you can’t imagine in front of all your high-profile guests.
” She tapped the cigarette so that the ash fell like dirty snow on the floral tiles. “And your mistress.”
“Why are you here, Mabel?”
“I missed you,” she said. “Am I not welcome here in my own home?”
Truman snorted.
Ronald Rutherford and Dallas Winston were watching from the shadows. So Truman did the only thing he could do. He summoned Macready and said, briskly, “Set the extra places for dinner.”
Cora stepped inside the magnificent dining room, wheeling a chest of silver.
The long oak table had been set for thirteen.
Roses spilled across it in bursts of tangerine and dusk pink between tall white candlesticks.
There were coral tea roses that smelled of cloves; deep pink Apothecary’s Roses that Jack said were bred in ancient Persia.
She and Daisy set out damask chairs and added four more place settings to the table.
Lights reflected in the water of fingerbowls, which held floating golden and peach Soleil d’Ors and scarlet camellias.
Cora used silver tongs to tuck freshly baked rolls inside the crimson napkins, but she was thinking of a grotesque with four plaques of monsters on one of the outer walls. One of them she recognized from the Welsh flag, Y Ddraig Goch. She was certain it formed the Y in BYRD.
Kitty wandered in, wearing a dress the deep color of blackberries. There were diamonds woven through her hair that almost looked like tears.
“Can I help you, miss?” Cora asked.
She ignored Cora and nonchalantly strode toward the table. Leaned over to smell the roses, and palmed a name card. She switched it so that she was sitting by Beaumont Remington.
She took a piece of shrimp from one of the waiting trays and then sauntered back out of the room.
Cora moved to the table and did a switch of her own. She took the name card for Everett Conner and placed it at the other end of the seating arrangements, so that Jack would be as far away from Mabel as possible.
She reached into her pocket and felt the smooth lines of the worry stone. She had given Jack her gun.
All she had left in case things went sideways were the small pocketknife and a shred of ribbon left over from the lanterns.
Jack pulled a folded paper list from his pocket in the heart of the Gothic library.
He had made the initial list with Cora, and now he had an encyclopedia of birds spread open in front of him on the heavy oak table, scribbling down as many four-lettered names as he could find.
He could hear the distant sounds of the party beginning as the guests made their way from their rooms down to the foyer.
He started down the hallway, toward where Cora told him to find Truman’s room. He paused just outside the heavy oak door until he could hear the booming sound of Truman’s voice several floors below. Then he glanced over his shoulder to the left and right and let himself inside.
The room smelled of cedar wood and Truman’s cologne.
Jack eyed the tapestry, finding the finch just as Cora had described.
He strode forward and wrenched back the massive bed, moving it half a foot.
Then he moved the tapestry and inhaled at the sight of the vault door.
His fingers shook as he examined the bronze keys of the lock.
They were raised letters, almost like the strikers of a typewriter.
Thirty-six letters to choose from. Four spaces to enter.
“Almost there, Leo,” he whispered.
Jack placed his fingers on the bronze letter dial. He clicked through, trying first B-Y-R-D and then B-I-R-D. It hadn’t worked, just like Cora said. He tried C-L-E-M next. Nothing.
He felt a rush of anger, tinged with homesickness.
He wanted so badly to go home. To knock on the door, like he was just coming back from a long day away rather than almost half of his lifetime.
He wanted to see his mother’s face light up.
He didn’t want it to be full of fear or anxiety, shutting the door on him.
Feeling like she had to call the cops to turn him in.
He gritted his teeth and fiddled with the knobs. He knew, even if he could force Truman into printing a retraction, it would never be possible for him to truly go back home, not after what had happened with Rusty. Not without Leo by his side.
He moved to the list in his pocket, watching the ticking second hand of the gold clock on the mantel. The first ones were C-H-A-T and C-R-O-W.
He went through it methodically. There were forty-five options. All the way down to W-R-E-N.
By the time he came to the end, he was sweating profusely and his hand was starting to cramp.
The lock hadn’t budged.
Cora left the kitchens lit and steaming with dinner: vichyssoise cooking in an enormous copper pot on the stove. French bread, crispy and fresh from the oven. Lamb with mint sauce. Paté de foie gras.
The sky was a glowing yellow, the golden color of a comice pear, when Florence Abrams strode in wearing a tuxedo with a white bow tie and a white pocket square. “I’ll have a drink,” she said to Cora, and began to look around the room. As if she were searching for Jack.
“Wine?” Cora asked. “Whiskey?”
“Get me a Last Word.”
When Cora returned, sunset was filtering into the Assembly Room through the loggia.
It made the room feel cozier and striated with colors.
The crimson unfurling roses and peonies were enormous and bursting, about to fall apart, lending themselves to an atmosphere that already felt lush and unbalanced.
Clementine kept to the edges of the crowd, making her way along.
She smiled widely, and laughed. She truly was a better actress than most of her critics gave her credit for.
But Cora could sense the barest hint of nervous energy.
That aura of teetering balance, of looking over the precipice at a great fall.
Mabel was smoking a cigarillo over a chat with Simon Leit about the tennis courts in Monte Carlo.
She stared Clementine down without greeting her, and exhaled a stream of smoke into her face at the moment she passed.
It was clear that Mabel was toying with Truman.
Making him pretend to be glad to see her, parading in front of his guests in his own home.
A vein in Truman’s neck subtly throbbed.
For the first time that night, Cora felt afraid.
Jack stood in front of the safe in the fading light. He had taken off his necktie and sweated through his shirt.
He cracked his knuckles and thought.
What was important to Truman? He had his newspaper, The Post-Courant. That miniature train car that he sometimes played with. He had hated his father, and now, possibly, his own wife.
Jack wracked his brain. Truman had bested him years ago as a teenage kid.
But Jack had fought back. Beaten Truman first in cards and then by infiltrating his house.
Now there was one last battle between them.
“You remind me of someone,” Truman had once said to him. “My brother.”
What had his brother’s name been? Elijah? Elliot?
ELIAS. It was too many letters. Jack ran his fingers over the rim of the safe. He blew out his breath in frustration.
He had paid half of his life as a debt for stolen art that meant nothing to him.
The only art that had ever moved him at all was the stained-glass window at his home parish.
He’d thought of it often, and it had taken on new significance to him over the years.
The Return of the Prodigal Son. The son who left and came home again.
The son.
He imagined standing next to Truman in the Billiards room. Looking at the photograph on the wall.
THE ROWS, it was called. An art school, for his mother.
R-O-W-S, Jack tried.
The lock didn’t budge.
He swallowed. Closed his eyes. The clock was a faint ticking.
A play on words, Truman had said. On his mother’s name.
R-O-S-E, he tried.
And he heard a distinct click.
He broke out into a sweat.
Pulled the lever.
And it opened.