Chapter 5
The world spun from behind her closed eyelids. Fern didn’t want to open them, not even when all she could see and hear was a kaleidoscope of blurred faces and sounds, of pops of light and bursts of laughter.
Ages passed, it seemed, and the question of why her arms and legs were numb played on a revolving loop in her mind. It could have been minutes or hours later, but finally, once feeling crept back into her body, she managed to lift one eyelid open.
The room held still despite her churning head. A green upholstered chair, a single window fringed by green drapes, a washstand with a porcelain bowl and ewer, and a shaving kit.
Not her bedroom.
A hot rush of panic sharpened her focus, and Fern dug one elbow into the bed on which she’d been lying. Her eyes caught on a pile of red silk crumpled on the floor.
Oh, God.
She looked down at herself and saw, to her horror, she wore nothing but her slip and stockings.
Another surge of panic sent her scrambling off the bed.
Her knees hit the floor, and she gathered the dress into her lap, searching frantically for the side zipper as her head kicked around and around.
God, it felt as if her skull was on a Victrola turntable.
The drink Vinny had given her. The cherry flavor and its strange aftertaste. Cal’s hand coming around her waist just moments before her vision distorted and her lips turned to stone.
Vinny had put something in the drink.
Fern found the zipper, already undone, and through a tremulous screen of tears, stepped into the dress.
A seam along one shoulder stretched and tore as she forced her arms into the tapered sleeves.
She didn’t care. She’d burn the thing as soon as she got home.
The steady heartbeat of music was more distant than before, but still present.
She was at the speakeasy. But where? Not underground.
She stumbled toward the window and swiped a clammy palm along the coarse twill drape. It was still dark outside, though not a single pair of headlights cut through the black pitch.
The thudding of feet came from beyond the bedroom door.
Fern whirled around so fast she lost her balance.
Slapping both hands against the washbasin to steady herself, her fingers knocked aside the shaving kit.
The leather case flopped open. A bristled lathering brush tumbled out, but the other things stayed in their places.
A pair of trimming scissors, a round of soap.
A straight razor.
Fern took hold of the razor’s smooth wood handle just as the door to the bedroom opened. She cut the blade through the air, holding it out in front of her.
Mr. Black stepped inside. No, that wasn’t his name. It was Cal. He closed the door behind him with a soft click and held up both hands, palms facing out.
“I’m not gonna hurt you, princess.”
He spoke slowly and clearly, as if he knew Fern’s thundering pulse made it difficult to hear.
“What…what did you do to me?” Her knuckles started to ache from the stranglehold on the razor’s handle.
“I haven’t done anything to you.” He took a slow step toward her.
“You lied,” she cried, the razor starting to shake.
He took a deep breath. His chest, already broad, expanded. With the barest trace of guilt, he nodded. “I lied. I’m not George Black. I’m Calvin. Cal Rosetti.”
Clean Calvin. Even though her mind was foggy and panicked, that came to her clearly, quickly. Red Rodney. Her throat closed off. The Rosettis are cracked.
“Put the razor down. I said I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Why should I believe that? I woke up…I woke up undressed and in this room. In that bed. I don’t know what happened, but I think… I …” She sucked in a shaking breath. Blinding pops of light, rough tugging on her limbs, the face of a man hovering over her, her eyelids half shut.
“Stanny took some pictures, that’s all,” Cal said.
Her arm holding the razor sagged. “Pictures?”
He made another step forward, and Fern straightened her arm again. He pulled back, but with a look of bored annoyance rather than apprehension.
“I could take that from you in two heartbeats, and you wouldn’t even nick me. So put it down. For the last time, goddamn it, I’m not going to hurt you.”
She didn’t doubt for a moment that he could wrest the straight razor from her hand. But he was wrong if he thought he’d come out unscathed.
“Pictures of me?” she asked. “Undressed?”
He ignored the razor and came across the small bedroom. Fern pressed herself against the washstand, but Cal only lowered himself into the green chair. He braced his elbows on his legs and nodded.
“But wh-why? What have I done to make you do something so despicable?”
He sat back. “You? Nothing. It isn’t about you.”
“But I was the one you undressed! I was the one you…you …”
Nausea curled through her stomach, threatening to cast up the fruity pink drink she’d so stupidly consumed. Panic drained all feeling from her face. Numb, cold, and sick, black dots scattered across her vision. He held up his hands again, as if in surrender.
“I only took off your dress, okay? And if you think I got off on posing the judge’s hermit daughter on my bed for my brother’s goddamned pictures, you’re outta your mind.”
His bed? Fern blinked, trying to erase the image of this man positioning her undressed body in any number of crude positions while she was unconscious.
Cal scrubbed his hand through his already disheveled dark hair and got up to pace the floor at the foot of the bed.
“You didn’t do anything else?” she asked.
He stopped his pacing and glared at her, as if the question offended him. “Nothing. No one did, all right, princess?”
There had been others in the room, though. She’d woken up with the vague, distorted memory of men’s laughter. Underneath her gown, heat crawled along her scarred arm and leg. They had seen her. Laughed at her.
“You’re repulsive,” she whispered as her throat closed off. Not with nausea, but with shame. Tears threatened yet again, and Fern’s arm, so tired, released its tense hold on the straight razor.
“I know,” was all Cal replied.
She stared at him another few seconds before her trembling hand finally set the razor back into the shaving kit. “What is he going to do with them?”
Cal continued to pace, his hands now shoved in his pockets. “Blackmail the judge.”
“He’s going to show them to my father?”
Cal stopped and looked at her. His eyes were empty of any emotion while her own pulse knocked in her throat.
“Just one picture,” he answered. “Probably the worst of them, with a promise that the others will hit the American and every other rag in the city unless he does what Rod wants.”
Her lungs shriveled. “What does he want? Money?”
Cal stopped at the window and flicked back the drape before turning to pace again. His caged energy filled the small, austere bedroom and seemed to creep inside her as well.
“Rod wants favors only a circuit court judge can grant,” he answered. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
“Don’t patronize me. And you’ll be sorry—my father isn’t corrupt.”
Judge Adair was notorious for speaking out and standing up against graft scandal and the overwhelming number of gang-led rackets in Chicago.
“Believe what you want.” Cal fished inside his breast pocket for his cigarette case. “You’ve been hiding in the attic of that house too long to know the truth about your pop.”
He lit his cigarette, and a cloud of white smoke billowed in front of his face. Fern made her hands into fists.
“You’re wrong.” Her voice trembled.
“No, I’m not.”
She gathered a breath and released her fists. She hated herself in that moment. Her father was a decent, upstanding man. He’d been appointed as a judge more than a dozen years ago and had a sterling reputation in the courts. No one doubted his integrity, least of all Fern.
Until right then.
Until hearing the bored confidence of this criminal’s tone.
She hiked her chin, trying to look as though she could not care less. “And you think he can be bought using lurid photographs of me?” Laughter unexpectedly slipped up her throat. “Maybe he’ll want them in the papers. Maybe then my mother’s ridiculous dinners will be overrun with potential suitors.”
She slapped a hand over her mouth, smothering her laughter. This wasn’t funny, not at all. Cal certainly wasn’t smiling.
“If those pictures reach the newsroom of the American, they’ll run for days, front page,” he said.
Her irrational amusement floundered. The soggy, heavy memories of the last few hours flooded back.
He was right. The papers would milk every last sensational drop out of those pictures, with their rabid reporters writing whatever sob story they could about her to attract sales.
From there, her father—the whole family—would be tainted.
Linked with bootleggers, criminals, vice.
A shadow would be cast over the judge’s reputation.
Fern touched the side of her still-aching head.
Her hair had come loose. Her fingers trembled as they searched the strands for stray pins and combs.
“That photographer was waiting on the off chance that you could convince me to come back here with you willingly, wasn’t he?”
He watched Fern silently as she shook out the pins and combs, her hair falling in unkempt coils around her shoulders.
Her hands shook too severely right then to manage restyling it, so she gathered the hair accessories in her palm.
Her head ached as it struggled to piece together things that didn’t make sense.
Was he supposed to have charmed her at dinner? Seduced her into leaving with him?
“But you didn’t. You didn’t even try,” she said aloud as the bits and pieces arranged themselves in her throbbing head. “You pushed me away.”
He’d all but told her to shove off. Either because he disagreed with his brother’s plan and had another of his own, or because he’d taken a good look at Fern and…