Chapter 21 #2
You don’t seem to understand. Trouble will befall you should you remain in the company you keep. Abandon your false friends. Abandon the allure of the Hope Diamond before it’s too late. Your brother didn’t heed the warning, and look at him now.
I gasped. It was someone who knew my brother. Suddenly the memory of Julien asking me about a letter resurfaced again. He’d received notes, too.
Heart racing, I took the stairs in twos to the top floor and paused for a moment outside his bedroom door.
I hadn’t breached the sanctity of his room since his death—I couldn’t bring myself to do it—but I had to know.
I switched on the lamps and opened his window to let in the fresh air.
A breeze whisked inside, ruffling the curtains and blowing tendrils of hair across my face.
Inhaling a deep breath, I began my search.
I started with Julien’s dresser, rifling through an assortment of items he’d left there in his haphazard fashion.
A pair of cuff links, a hair comb, a tin of pomade, a clean and neatly folded handkerchief, a handful of coins, and a dried rose.
Frowning, I picked up the brittle flower and pressed it to my nose, inhaling the scent of dust and perhaps the faintest whiff of what was once a fragrant David Austin rose.
I wondered why he’d kept it. He wasn’t exactly the sentimental type, especially about flowers.
I mentally scrolled through the women he’d surrounded himself with from last summer and into autumn while working at the McLeans.
Many were beautiful; nearly all were married.
The only other explanation would be that he’d fallen for one of the hired employees.
I set down the rose. It couldn’t have been someone on the McLeans’ staff.
He’d cared too much about title and circumstance, as little as he’d liked to admit it.
Of the two of us, he would be the kind of person to seek out advantage, privilege, and status.
He wasn’t shallow, but he understood their value in furthering his business. In this, too, I was nothing like him.
I pushed aside the clean, folded clothes in his drawers and sorted through his wardrobe.
With each piece of clothing, a memory surfaced, and a ripple of pain followed.
I missed him. I missed him so much, I couldn’t breathe.
I plunked down on his bed to take a moment to come to terms with what I was doing—with the McLeans, with Father, with my life.
It was all so hard. I’d never expected things to be easy, but I’d also never really grasped how things could take a turn toward the darkest of places.
Eventually I forced myself to look through Julien’s bedside table. When I found nothing, I slid my hand beneath his mattress—and felt something, a rustling of paper. My pulse quickened. Could it be?
I lifted the mattress and scooped out a handful of letters onto the floor.
I bent over them, sorting through the pile, the bile rising in my throat.
Unlike the many threatening letters I’d found at Evalyn’s with no recognizable handwriting, address, stationery, or style, these were exactly the same as the notes of warning I’d received.
The same blocky handwriting, the same cream stationery on square cards with a light silver border.
Whoever had warned me had also warned Julien.
I sank onto the floor and read each of the notes, once, twice, three times.
Trying to make sense of it all and where I should go from here.
Someone clearly didn’t want the Beaumonts involved with the McLeans, which led me to believe it had to be someone within Evalyn’s acquaintance who had sent them.
But why? What had happened? Julien had clearly been up to something that someone didn’t like.
My mind kept circling back to the conversations about a potential business proposition gone awry, to the women, too, and the way they’d talked about him.
How they’d worn his jewelry, Evalyn’s comments and Bea’s and Carrie’s.
He must have been involved either in some scheme as Jerry had suggested or with a woman.
I thought of what Evalyn had said about Ned’s horse racing and terrible gambling habit.
Had Julien been caught up there? I shook my head.
It couldn’t be. He worked too hard for his money.
Our money. The last thing I could imagine was Julien throwing it away at the races or at poker tables.
Besides, Father and I would have noticed. I’d kept the books after all.
Heart aching, I glanced around his room a final time. Everywhere around me, I felt my brother’s presence. I wanted to reach out to him, to clutch at my memories and dip them in amber to preserve them forever.
There was only one person who could understand that.
In a rush of spontaneity, I dashed outside, allowing my feet to lead me until I stood in front of a house that had been as much a home to me as my own.
The Coopers’. Henry always knew what to say when I was struggling with a particular piece, when I’d argued with my brother, or when anything else had gone wrong for that matter.
This time, I didn’t know what to say, and yet I was here.
I’d been sucked into Evalyn’s complicated world, with her husband and the demands they’d all placed on me and my time.
I wondered if the numerous hours I’d spent with those silly women meant I was beginning to resemble them a bit more every day, and I wasn’t sure I could live with that, but to be cast out at this point felt unbearable.
Henry would be appalled to see the way I’d behaved with the champagne lunches and the fluttering of eyelashes, the flirtatious way I’d smiled at Ned McLean. Still, I was here.
A light flickered on inside. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
The chiming bell of a bicyclist sounded behind me, and I recovered quickly, turning on my heel to walk swiftly toward home again, hating myself for being a coward.
For ignoring Henry’s messages and flowers and invitations.
I hated myself, but I still felt the irresistible pull of Evalyn and the Hope Diamond and now the letters that I knew Julien had received, too.
Now more than ever, I feared his death wasn’t an accident.
Something didn’t feel right; it hadn’t for weeks before he died.
I had to find a way through this, to the other side of the madness that had gripped me since he died.
I raced home, kicking off my shoes the moment I stepped inside.
As I walked toward the kitchen, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror.
I hardly recognized myself. With the new clothes and haircut, the compliments, and the many days of being a part of the most elite circle in Washington, I had been reinvented.
Half in shadow, I touched my hair, my rouged lips, and watched the light spark and dance over the sapphire earrings I’d borrowed from the showcase in the shop.
As I gazed at myself in the shifting light, I saw him, my brother.
His beauty, his intense yet playful eyes.
I touched my cheek, the hollow of my neck.
He was here with me still, a part of me.
Why did he have to die?
Bitterness flooded my mouth. I steadied myself on the back of the armchair, squeezed my eyes closed, willing the pain away, forcing down the desperate sorrow clawing at my insides.
I might never recover, wouldn’t know how to live inside it or how to move past it.
I crumpled into a heap on the floor, unable to move, to breathe, to think for what felt like an eternity.
Some time later, the sound of cars and the tram and bicycle bells, of voices in the street, bled through the open window and under the door.
When a police whistle split the air somewhere in the distance, I pushed up from the floor for the second time that day, legs stiff and body cold, and locked myself away in the darkness of my bedroom.