The Ivory City

Prologue

CHICAGO

Approximately Five Months and Five Days Before the Murder

GRACE CARTER COVINGTON was dressed in layers of clothing—a fur coat and muff surreptitiously stolen from her aunt, a satin gown spun from her dreams, and even silk undergarments that didn’t belong to her—but she hadn’t realized quite how naked she would feel without her cousin Lillie there.

The mansion in front of her was intimidating, its carved limestone ablaze with lights against the winter night sky.

Lit paper lanterns and rose-filled votives floated in two pools that flanked the entry walk like outstretched wings.

Beyond it, warm strains of ragtime music beckoned them forward. A light snow was beginning to fall.

Grace took a step out of the carriage with her cousin Oliver at her side. He was utterly at ease, but this was his world, not hers, and it made her feel even more out of place. He must have felt her suddenly stiffen because his hand found hers within the fur muff.

“You’re understandably nervous,” he said sympathetically, squeezing her hand. “Given how the rich in Chicago select a guest at every party to be pecked to death by their pet geese.”

“Your attempts to relax me are alarming,” she muttered.

But he laughed and the sound did make her calmer.

She felt the tension melt a little from her shoulders as she tugged at the slip beneath her dress, one that Lillie had lent her before collapsing back onto her bed that evening.

Lillie, Oliver’s sister and Grace’s best friend in the world, was normally at her right hand, but she had suddenly come down with a fever and had insisted Oliver and Grace go without her.

“We didn’t come all the way to Chicago for you to sit at home with me,” Lillie cried.

“Especially not in that dress.” Lillie had ordered two gowns for herself but, unbeknownst to her mother, had one modified to meet Grace’s measurements instead.

It fit Grace like a glove: pale blue satin with panels of embroidered flowers and a curve of wisteria vines trailing down her arm.

It was without question the most beautiful thing she had ever put on her body.

“It’s the party of the century,” Lillie had said. She waggled her eyebrows, her face flushed with fever. “That is, of course, until the Ivory City next spring.”

And so Grace had given her cousin’s fevered cheek a kiss and arrived with Oliver on her arm.

“Mr. Oliver Carter and Miss Grace Covington,” the butler announced.

The grand foyer was filled with Chicago’s most elite society members, all of whom now turned to examine them.

Oliver whispered in her ear. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to share that I’ve never forgiven you for squashing that orange down my pants.”

She snorted as he bowed to the crowd. “Nor I you,” she whispered, “for the melted chocolate in my bed.”

“You really were a formidable eleven-year-old,” he said.

She curtsied to the crowd, and for a moment she thought of her older brother Walt, and what it might have been like to arrive on his arm.

But that was a dream for another life. She no longer knew where Walt was, a thought that pinched like too-tight shoes.

She hoped he was somewhere warm tonight.

Saying a small prayer under her breath for him, like she always did, she brushed the trailing wisteria along the skin of her arm and handed her borrowed fur coat to the butler.

“The Chicago rich pecking you to death was actually a bit of a metaphor,” Oliver said as they moved to join the crowd.

These were the people that Oliver and Lillie belonged to, as heirs of the Carter Merchant Company their shared great-grandfather had built.

Once, in a different world, these would have been Grace’s peers, too.

But her mother Nell had chosen the shame of falling in love with a working-class man and the disinheritance that came along with it.

As it turned out, all manner of heinous sins could be forgiven a person, except for the deliberate rejection of her own class.

“You don’t say,” Grace said, as Oliver took a flute of champagne from a passing tray. She followed his line of sight to a young stage actress she recognized from back home in St. Louis.

“Is that—?” she asked.

“Harriet Forbes,” Oliver said. “Yes.”

“Ah,” Grace said with a wry smile. “And here I thought you’d brought me along for my scintillating company and sparkling conversation.”

“Well that, of course, darling,” he said, suavely turning away from Harriet, “but if people are talking about you they won’t be talking about us.”

“Thank you, cousin,” she said. “I love being used as a decoy. Please remind me to decline your next hunting invitation.”

He laughed. “Let me reward your invaluable service with a punch.”

“And a petit fours, please, at the very least,” she called after him.

He raised his right hand in acknowledgment without looking back, shaking his head as though he were smiling.

And she, without being asked, made her way through the crowd toward Harriet Forbes.

Grace loved her cousins better than anyone and would do anything short of murder to help them.

“Hello,” she said warmly to Harriet as she approached.

Outside of situations like this one, Grace normally had no problem making friends—she wasn’t the person concerned about her status, or lack thereof.

And perhaps because she wasn’t doing this for herself, but for her cousin, she found that her nerves were suddenly gone.

“I’m Grace Covington,” she said, curtsying.

“Harriet,” the woman said. “Forbes.” She wore her hair pulled up with ribbons, and earrings that were a cluster of dangling garnets. Her cream dress spilled over with dark roses.

“Yes, I saw you in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House last year,” Grace said.

Harriet had played the titular role and they had all been smitten with her—apparently none more so than Oliver—even though Grace knew that her aunt would rather burn off her own fingerprints than welcome an actress into the family. “You were luminous.”

“You’re too kind,” Harriet said. She had a deep, sultry voice, and Grace’s own heart lifted when Harriet took her by the arm and led her around the party.

She stole glances at the walls gilded with patterns of gold, the intricately painted ceilings, and the vibrant Gobelin tapestries.

Real, cascading flowers were strung in lines of blooming lace around the ceiling like crown molding.

“Are you from St. Louis, then?” Harriet asked. “I don’t remember seeing you at the last Governor’s Ball.”

Grace’s eye caught on a handsome man who was standing on the staircase landing, surveying the crowd as though he were observing a distant experiment.

Chandeliers hung above his head like webs strung with heavy water droplets of crystal.

When he turned his face to the side, she glimpsed a port-wine stain stretching along the length of his jaw, curling up toward his mouth like a shadow.

She thought his dark eyes were striking, even though his mouth remained clenched, and he didn’t smile.

It was as if a cloud hung around him, a concentrated rainstorm in the middle of a spring garden.

She stole another look at him as the guests took to the marble floor, dancing, and wondered what made him look so unhappy.

“No, I’m not from St. Louis,” Grace said to Harriet. “But I have family there.” She subtly guided Harriet toward Oliver. “Please allow me to introduce my cousin, Oliver Carter.”

Grace had been to all manner of parties before—backyard jigs with whiskey, harmonicas, and fiddles, and late-night after-hours piano concerts at her father’s restaurant (“shameful—it’s little more than a speakeasy,” her aunt had scoffed).

She was surprised that the electric energy she felt here was almost the same, even though the black-and-white checkered floor of her father’s restaurant had been traded for a marble ballroom overflowing with orchids and potted palms. It was a philanthropic event for a new botanical garden, and half of St. Louis’s elite society had traveled to Chicago for the verdant party amid a deep winter.

And yet Grace’s eyes kept sliding back to the sullen young man on the stairs.

His gaze met hers and she immediately looked away.

“Oliver,” a young woman called, parting the crowd toward them. She wore a ball gown made of silk and golden metallic thread, with an intricately embroidered front panel and a fan to match. Her dark red hair glittered with pins as she eyed Harriet with unmasked disapproval.

Harriet was undeterred, instead staring boldly back.

“Where’s Lillie tonight?” the red-haired woman asked, turning to Oliver.

“Under the weather, I’m afraid,” Oliver said. “Lillie is my sister,” he hurriedly clarified for Harriet. And then he offered her his hand. “Miss Forbes, would you care to dance?”

Harriet smiled.

“Grace,” Oliver said, shooting his cousin a look of apology over his shoulder. “This is Miss Allred.”

The woman snapped open her fan with a sharp twist. “Frannie,” she said.

But Oliver was already gone.

Grace bit back a sigh. If only Lillie were there, they would be eating chocolates while pretending to use the lavatory and secretly evaluating all of the women’s fashions and the eligible bachelors.

“Are you well-acquainted with Mr. Carter?” Frannie asked, delicately fluttering her fan. “I’m quite good friends with his sister, Miss Lillie Carter. Very close friends. Do you know her?”

“I do,” Grace said. We share blood, she wanted to add. In fact, at this exact moment, I’m wearing her undergarments.

Her eye caught again on the man who was standing above the crowd as if he owned the house, observing them all.

“Excuse me, but who is that gentleman over there?” Grace asked.