Chapter 12 #2
But that flash of revenge would see me spending the rest of my life in prison. However much I wanted retribution, that wasn’t the way to do it. I had to be smarter than him. I needed a plan.
About an hour after I had tucked myself into bed, the lights off and door closed, I heard Alice come into the apartment.
She walked down the hall to my room and knocked on it gently before whispering my name.
I didn’t reply, and she must have assumed that I was already asleep, because she didn’t knock again.
A few moments later I heard her footsteps disappear back to her own room.
The next morning, I managed to make a decent attempt at acting normal, drinking coffee for breakfast and being ready on time so we could head out to Liberty Island.
What Marcus had confirmed for me last night weighed heavy on me, and working to cover that up, to pretend to be normal in front of Alice, made everything even harder.
I wanted her to like me, even though I felt like the worst possible version of myself right now.
‘Did you sleep well last night?’ Alice asked as we walked to the subway station.
‘Yeah, good, thanks. I didn’t even hear you come home,’ I said, not wanting her to realize I’d been awake. ‘Who did you go out with?’
‘Oh, just a couple of friends,’ she said airily. ‘They’re going to be my roommates when we start college in a few weeks, so we were working out the final details of that.’
A nasty, jealous feeling twisted in my stomach.
‘Where are you going to college?’ I asked.
‘NYU,’ she said with a grin.
The nasty, jealous feeling untwisted. At least she was staying in the city and not going to California or something. I made a conscious effort not to examine why I cared so much about Alice’s plans in the fall.
‘You didn’t want to go to college?’ Alice asked innocently.
‘Why would I? I’ve already got a business and a career.’
Swiping into the subway took a moment, and I hoped that would be enough to distract Alice from that line of questioning.
Maybe if things were different, if life had turned out differently, I’d be making plans with my friends for starting my second year of college in a few weeks. But life had other ideas.
We had to go all the way down to Battery Park to board the ferry to take us out to the island, and Alice played with her phone as we rode the subway.
My timing was terrible – we’d managed to catch the tail end of the commuter rush down toward Wall Street and almost every seat was taken.
I let Alice take the last one and stood instead, rocking with the rhythm of the train and watching people get on and off.
I’d been replaying my conversation with Marcus last night over and over in my head, and even though I knew I was spiraling, pulling myself out of it would take an enormous effort.
The only thing I could do was to keep going – keep following the clues, keep Alice close and hopefully eventually find the jewelry and get justice for my mom.
When we got to the dock, a frowning man with a thick beard met us. ‘Tickets?’
‘I bought them online this morning,’ Alice said before I had the chance to ask him where the ticket office was.
The man nodded, reviewed Alice’s phone then waved us onto the boat.
‘Leaves in ten minutes,’ he said gruffly.
Alice walked a lap round the deck of the boat while I found a seat inside and hunkered down.
When I was a kid, I got travel sick, and even though I’d grown out of it as I’d got older, I was still scared of getting seasick especially.
It helped that the ferry was much bigger than a tourist boat, but I wasn’t looking forward to the trip.
When the ferry started moving, Alice came inside to find me.
‘You don’t want to watch the scenery?’ she asked, slumping into the seat next to mine.
‘Nope.’
Her face lit up with delight. ‘You get seasick, don’t you?’
I scowled, annoyed that she could see right through me. Or maybe I’d gone pale and clammy just from being on the boat.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said, sulking.
‘You do,’ she said gleefully. I glared at her and she laughed. ‘Why would your mom send you out to Liberty Island if she knew you get seasick?’
‘It’s not all the time,’ I muttered.
‘At least it only takes fifteen minutes to get over there.’
Still too long for my liking, but I’d cope.
I decided to risk a look over at Alice. She’d dressed in a long, white, floaty dress this morning, with sandals and her hair in loose curls over her shoulders. I envied the way she was so casually fashionable, never looking like she’d tried too hard.
‘Did you go to high school in the city?’ Alice asked, either distracting me or continuing our conversation about college. I appreciated the effort either way.
‘I was homeschooled through high school,’ I admitted.
‘Really? Did your mom teach you?’
‘Mostly, yeah. I did some online classes and took a few at NYU. My mom was determined that I’d get a good education even if I didn’t go to a regular high school. She made me do all the normal standardized testing.’
‘That sucks.’
I had to laugh. ‘It did at the time. My mom had very high standards for me – in, like, everything. When I started taking over some of her business contacts and going to meetings and doing jobs for her, she took me to Fifth Avenue and spent a fortune on fancy clothes.’
Not that I wore them any more. Not since she’d died.
‘Tell me more about her?’ Alice asked.
I’d already figured out that she was trying to distract me from the seasickness, and I couldn’t help but feel a rush of affection for her.
‘My mom was …’ I stopped and pressed the heel of my hand to my breastbone, trying to contain the sudden burst of pain. ‘She was amazing. Beautiful and kind and very intelligent. I always felt like I had a lot to live up to.’
Alice smiled sadly.
‘I miss her,’ I admitted.
She reached over and took my hand, carefully linking our fingers together. ‘Of course you do. She was your mom, and it sounds like she was an incredible one.’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do when this is all over,’ I admitted.
‘You’re going to do whatever you want to do with your life,’ Alice said grandly. ‘You’re equally as beautiful and kind and intelligent.’
My heart tripped. I hadn’t allowed myself to get close to anyone since my mom had passed, so having someone be so sweet to me now was making me feel dizzily off-kilter.
I cracked a smile. ‘Well, actually I do know. I’ll be getting Walker Antiques back up and running. My career was decided for me a long time ago.’
‘You don’t have to stick with that career if it’s not what you want.’
‘Of course I do. It’s my family business.’
Alice made a face and shrugged. ‘You should still get a choice in the matter.’
‘It’s okay. It’s what I want.’
I had a feeling she wanted to argue back, but the boat was clearly coming in to dock and we’d have to move soon.
Up until my mom had died, I’d been totally on board with the idea of taking over Walker Antiques – mostly because it was something I thought wouldn’t happen for at least another decade or two.
My mom was happily in control of the business, and I was her sidekick, learning up close from an expert.
But finding myself on my own, having to take care of bills and taxes and do inventory and admin, as well as dealing with the public and the criminal underworld, had shaken my long-held conviction that this was the right path for me.
‘We’re here,’ Alice said, distracting me from that train of thought.
As we walked up the Liberty Island dock, I thought I was doing a good job of hiding how weak my knees felt – until Alice looped her arm through mine, and my humiliation was complete.
‘Any thoughts on where we should start?’ Alice asked as we stared up, craning our necks at the statue.
‘Not really. I’ve never been here before.’
‘Well, I was looking at the website last night and you can walk up inside the statue, but it’s, like, almost four hundred steps.’
I nodded.
‘There’s also a museum,’ she said, tugging on my elbow to get me moving again.
‘Which I think is the more likely location of the next clue, because where the hell would your mom have hidden something inside the statue without someone else finding it? But I bought us tickets to go up anyway, just in case. Do you want to start there?’
‘Sure,’ I said, unable to shake the feeling I was being steamrollered by her enthusiasm. Today, of all days, I didn’t mind. Having someone else take charge for just a moment actually sounded pretty nice.
‘Great! Let’s go.’
I followed Alice into the statue and peered around.
The inside felt more like the inside of a ship, with the metal rivets clearly visible.
The almost four hundred steps were metal, narrow, utilitarian and incredibly steep, and as I climbed each one I searched for anything that looked out of place, any sign that something was different.
By the time we reached the top, I was breathless and almost certain we were in the wrong place. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people came through here every day. Nothing would stay hidden for very long.
‘Do you want to go up to the crown?’ Alice asked after a few moments.
Not really. I hadn’t even caught my breath yet. ‘I suppose we should,’ I said instead, and she nodded.
At least then we could rule out the statue.
My thighs were killing me by the time we squeezed ourselves into the tiny, narrow space at the very top of the statue, and I was glad I wasn’t scared of heights because, holy shit, we were high up.
The view, though, was incredible – a bright-blue sky making way for the buildings at the southernmost tip of Manhattan and the edge of Brooklyn.
I could see why people made the effort to come all the way up here.
Even though from Manhattan the statue looked tiny, she was actually immense – an incredible beauty welcoming visitors by sea into America.
Visitors … or those rescued from disasters at sea.
‘I get it now,’ I said, turning to Alice. ‘The connection.’
‘Yeah?’
I pointed out at the ocean. ‘This would have been the first thing the Titanic survivors saw as they sailed into New York. The first thing Abigail saw when she arrived home.’
‘They must have been so relieved,’ she murmured.
Another surge of visitors appeared behind us, and we shuffled to make way.
‘I don’t think what we’re looking for is up here, though. Let’s check out the museum,’ I said.
The journey back down wasn’t much easier, and by the time we stumbled into the museum I felt like I’d been put through some kind of sadistic workout class.
Inside, it was totally different again – cool and calm, almost reverent as the various displays laid out the history of the island and what it had come to represent.
Alice stopped at one display, showing the construction of the statue in France.
‘Did you know there’s another Statue of Liberty? A replica. In Paris.’
‘I think I did know that, yeah,’ I said, peering into the glass cabinet. Then I glanced at Alice. ‘We’re definitely at the right statue, aren’t we?’
‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way to Paris.’
‘She wouldn’t have sent me to Paris for the next clue,’ I said with a confidence I didn’t completely feel. ‘It has to be here.’
We scoured the museum once, then went outside to do a loop round the island itself, before coming back into the museum.
By the third round, we had been on the island for several hours, and both of us were starting to get irritated.
I hated feeling like I wasn’t smart enough to find the next clue or that I’d missed something entirely – a hidden message within the magnet, maybe.
Liberty Island was huge, and the clue that I had thought was overly simple was turning out to be the one tripping me up.
It was a hard pill to swallow.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said, stopping for the third time in front of a photo of the statue being shipped across the Atlantic. ‘We must have missed something.’
‘It’s not a particularly cryptic clue,’ Alice said. She came to stand next to me and folded her arms over her chest. ‘Not like the Pier Fifty-Four one.’
‘I don’t know what I’m even looking for.’ I rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, then dropped my arms back to my sides. ‘You know what, let’s call it a day. We can go and do some more research and come back better prepared.’
‘Are you sure? I don’t mind looking around again.’
‘No,’ I said, already having made up my mind. ‘I need to think things through. Maybe the magnet wasn’t as obvious a clue as we thought. There could be something hidden inside it … I don’t know.’
‘Okay, Kendra.’
Alice brushed her hand down my arm reassuringly, then let me lead the way back to the dock and stew in silence on the boat ride to Manhattan.
I knew my mom, and how her clues were both logical and cryptic at the same time.
She didn’t mind me breaking into places – it was a skillset that sometimes came in useful in our line of work.
I knew how to pick locks and disguise myself if needed, or even charm my way into places I wasn’t supposed to be.
That opened up the possibilities of where I needed to look to find the next clue.
But this clue was just so broad. I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to be looking at the statue itself, or for something on the island, or in the museum, or if Alice was right and I should be thinking laterally, like Paris.
When we got back to Sienna’s apartment I attacked the magnet with kitchen utensils, prising it apart to check for something hidden inside. After finding nothing I went back to my bedroom to sulk, and Alice left me in peace.