Chapter Thirty-Six
Jack stepped inside the vault. It was a small room, roughly the size of Truman’s formal closet, made entirely of stone.
One wall was covered with walnut cabinets. Jack began to open the drawers one by one. He quickly took stock of what he was seeing: velvet pouches of diamonds. Gold bars. Bank bonds.
He opened the closets, looking for the mob’s incriminating files. But even more than that, he was looking for the painting. Growing more and more convinced that it was somewhere nearby. He parted a collection of rare fur coats, concealing another filing cabinet. He bent to look inside.
The drawers were full of statements. Insurance payments.
Records of sale. Blueprints for the house.
Invoices. Jack skimmed through them quickly, his heart pounding in his ears.
Nothing stood out to him. Nothing seemed overtly damning.
His heart sank. If only he had more time, he could probably make some sort of sense out of it.
The files were organized by date, and he forced himself to go back through and look at anything from around the time of the Bastion murders. There wasn’t anything of interest prior to then. But he paused over an invoice from Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Paid in full,” it said at the top. The patient treated was Truman Reginald Byrd. Jack looked at the date listed. Truman had been hospitalized as an inpatient during several days of Jack and Leo’s trial.
But Truman had always said that the reason for missing the trial of the decade was that he was busy traveling and overseeing the management of his paper. Jack narrowed his eyes. Why would Byrd lie about that?
He turned around in the vault, looking at it from every angle. Hoping to see some additional crack that would suggest more hidden doors.
But there were no more birds or puzzles that he could see. He fought back the feeling of desperation in his throat. Would the mob come for him, now that he’d failed to find those files for Virgil? They might, if they found out who had saved Truman from their bullet.
Maybe he was only meant to have come here for Cora all along. To redeem some part of himself that he thought had been buried with Leo in the Bay. Could he leave now and finally move on? Had he done what he came for? Even if it wasn’t what he was expecting, or what he had even thought he wanted?
He put his hand on the doorknob, knowing that he had found the edge of the road, and it was a dead end.
“I’d like to begin this last soirée with a toast!” Truman said. “To all of you.”
Mabel ate her olive. It had been soaked in vinegar.
Truman looked older to her. Flabbier. More tired.
His white vest strained at his belly. Mabel remembered the day they had married, back when things were simpler and wilder.
She had worn a white camellia in her hair, and she never in a million years would have imagined that this was how her marriage would end.
Mabel gave the slightest nod to the newspaperman on her right.
Slowly, he reached into his bag for his camera. The others were like echoes, unfolding less than seconds behind.
Truman raised his glass in the air. “And to my wife,” he said.
Mabel came to stand next to him, and felt him almost imperceptibly stiffen.
After all that she had done for him, and after all the years he had humiliated her.
Every time he put Clementine on the front page of his newspaper, that shrew Trudy would purposefully bring out a copy while they were out having brunch, open it wide to read while sipping her café au lait and pretend that she wasn’t watching for Mabel’s reaction.
Mabel never gave her the satisfaction. Twenty years ago, she would have lacerated her with a devastatingly placed barb.
Now she was cool and opaque, a one-way mirror glass.
Truman must have sensed something hiding behind her smile this time. The corners of his mouth tightened. He gripped his glass, but kept the look of fake pleasure plastered on his face. He knew her well enough to know that something was coming.
And she knew him well enough to understand just where to twist the knife.
She relished it all.
“We’ll end the evening with dessert and port on the esplanade under a sky full of—”
She saw the moment he noticed, too late, that one of Mabel’s newspapermen was brandishing a camera. For the first time, he tripped over his words.
Mabel took a step closer to Truman.
“What is this, Mabel?” he asked her through gritted teeth.
She drew out a sheet of photographs with a flourish.
She smiled broadly, her deep-red lips showing teeth.
“Excuse me, everyone,” Mabel said, cutting him off. “I have a present for Truman. It’s a surprise. I’m so glad you will all be here to witness it.”
“What are you doing?” he asked. He looked desperately around the room for Winston. For Rutherford. For anyone who could possibly come to his aid.
“A parting gift,” she said, handing the sheet of photographs to Truman. “The first look at tomorrow’s news. You’re seeing it before anyone else does.” She smiled wickedly. “I know how much you love that.”
The blood drained from his face.
He flinched at the first flash of a bulb.
It captured the look on Truman’s face as Mabel asked coolly, and one final time, for a divorce.
Cora entered the room just as a smattering of flashbulbs went off.
She raised her hand to shield her eyes from the brightness.
Some of the starlets had gasped in surprise.
Daisy was standing frozen in place, as though she didn’t know what to do.
Everyone else was watching the spectacle, either in delight or horror.
Ronald Rutherford moved toward Mabel, grabbing her by the arm to usher her out.
“Time to go, Mabel,” he said.
Clementine’s face was pale. She stood back, clutching Kitty. She had just the right look of concern, of curiosity. As if she couldn’t possibly imagine what was pictured on that contact paper.
Dallas Winston picked up the telephone to call for backup. And at that moment, Jack slipped into the Assembly Room.
Her heart leaped at the sight of him.
She would still get a chance to tell him goodbye.
To find out if he’d discovered something in the vault.
She could hardly believe that a mere handful of days ago, she had surprised him by coming through the secret passageway.
Certain that he had come to steal something, when she caught him standing in front of those four paintings.
The four paintings.
Cora turned.
“You’re being escorted out of here,” Dallas Winston was saying to the nearest newspaperman. “And you’ll leave all your film behind.”
“I’m afraid that’s not how the free press works,” the newspaperman said.
Mabel was standing just beneath the looming portrait of Truman, looking pleased at what she had unleashed. Her face was flushed. She lit a cigarette. She was enjoying her victory.
“Stop them,” Truman thundered. “Do not let them leave the grounds. Escort them upstairs to my office. Now.”
Cora watched him still trying desperately to regain control. The man was almost unrecognizable, compared to the portrait of him on the wall. The one painted by Celeste Lourd. It was embarrassing now, how different he looked in the flesh. Sweating and purple. Straining. Veins bulging at his temples.
Her eyes sought out the pattern almost without thinking about it.
Blake, Jack had told her that night. Yeats. Lourd. Degas.
Four paintings.
Her heart began to thud dull and heavy in her chest. It didn’t fit the pattern.
Almost. But not quite.
She moved as if through water, watching as Dallas Winston and the other guards began to wrestle the rival newspapermen toward the door.
She had seen for herself how many people Truman kept in his pocket, managing every story the way he wanted it to be told.
His network of newspapers, magazines, media; the police down the Hill.
Who knew how vast his web was, or how far it reached now?
The only people who had no loyalty to him, who were for certain not in his pocket, were the rival newspapermen that Mabel had brought in.
And Cora suddenly knew what she had to do.
She walked toward Byrd’s portrait while everyone else was watching the struggle with the newspapermen.
She waited until she was right beneath it—the painting that didn’t fit in the pattern.
She took a deep breath, summoning her courage.
And then with one sharp movement, she knocked the massive frame from the wall.
It fell with a crash that made the rest of the room jump. Kitty let out a small shriek. For a moment, the struggle stopped as everyone turned to look at her.
Cora didn’t want to know what would happen if her hunch was wrong.
“What the hell is going on?” Truman shouted.
Daisy rushed over to help Cora as she struggled to right the painting.
She was the only one who saw the flash of the pocketknife in Cora’s hand.
“We need more security in here!” Truman boomed. “Now!”
“Can you help me?” Cora asked. She gave Daisy a meaningful look.
Daisy met her eyes. She held the frame steady, shielding Cora with her body. It was enough for Cora to strip off the back corner of the portrait.
Her fingers were shaking as she peeled it back.
For a moment, she thought she had made a mistake. Her heart sank.
But then she looked closer and saw something dark and shadowy, hiding in a layer beneath.
The guards were striding toward her. She used the knife as leverage to pop off the heavy, gilded frame. The guards were almost to her now.
“What is this?” she cried. “There’s something hidden here.”
She stepped back to see the rest of the room staring, aghast, at her. At the portrait of Byrd that was sliding forward, like the skin of a peeled fruit, to reveal something else secreted behind it.
Another painting.
She was counting on someone there to recognize it.
The guards reached her at the moment when she knew someone had. A glass suddenly dropped and shattered.
She closed her eyes.
“That’s a Rembrandt!” Governor Gilham cried.
“Is that—?”
“The missing—stolen—”
“The Bastion—”
The bulbs turned toward Cora, and she shielded her face as they started flashing. The guards seized her and pulled her away, wrenching her arms behind her back.
She looked over at Jack. His face was stunned as he looked back at her, his eyes burning with every possible emotion.
Governor Gilham strode toward Truman. “What is the meaning of this?” he barked.
“I have no idea where that came from,” Truman said. He was gripping his glass, stuttering to get the words out. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”
Mabel stood next to him. Her face, Cora noticed, had gone deathly white.
“I’ll get the police here,” Dallas said, making a move toward the telephone.
“That’s not necessary,” Truman said, stopping him. “This is all a prank, some practical joke of some kind. A different sort of assassination attempt, just on my character—”
Dallas hesitated. But Truman watched as Jack parted the crowd and moved to the panel in the wall with the secret telephone. He raised the receiver to his ear.
“Hello?” he said, his eyes meeting Truman’s. “I’d like to report a robbery here at Byrd Castle.”
Jack watched as the newspaper cameras turned to find a new source, the bulbs beginning to flash again in a cacophony. They lit up Truman’s face like the fireworks that had just started to explode in bursts of color and sound outside.
Jack was too busy watching Truman to notice the man who had slipped in through the doorway. The way that Cora suddenly froze, turning toward him in sheer panic.
When Jack finally looked up, he locked eyes with a policeman dressed in uniform. Former Pelican Island Head Guard Patrick McCavanagh, number 2667.
The fireworks outside went boom.