Chapter Eight
HORROR SPILLED ACROSS the crowd like a stain. The panic was thick enough to choke on.
The guests in their finery were being ushered downstairs by the St. Louis police to be questioned about what they had seen. There were sparkling pieces of glass scattered like rubies. The decorative punch bowl glinted eerily. The floor was littered with crushed flower petals.
Harriet’s body was splayed on the dark glass floor.
“But I don’t understand. How could this happen?” the woman in front of them asked.
Oliver pulled Grace aside. His eyes were wide with shock, his breathing shallow. His face was white. She felt frightened looking at him.
“Don’t tell them about what you saw in the Tunnels,” he said urgently. He held her arm a little too tightly. Like she was the last life raft, threatening to float away.
“Oliver, I—”
“Please.”
“You aren’t thinking clearly,” she protested. She looked over and saw a policeman watching them. “This… don’t you think this likely could have been an overdose?”
“It will make her look bad. I don’t want her to be remembered that way.” His voice caught. “Please, Grace.”
Grace’s head spun. She felt like she was caught in the middle of a turning kaleidoscope. She couldn’t promise him this time.
“What happens now?” he asked wildly. “She was going to be my whole life.”
He choked on a sob.
The police came to talk to him next.
“I can’t believe she died,” Frannie said. She was smoking a cigarette, her hand shaking. Copper was next to her, looking shell-shocked.
“What did the police ask you?” Copper asked Frannie.
“They asked me about Harriet’s relationships.”
Theodore was standing in the doorframe, a haunted look in his eye.
“I told them the truth,” Frannie continued. She took a drag of her cigarette. “That Harriet was seeing Theodore Parker, but that Oliver seemed jealous of that.”
“Watch your tongue, Frannie,” Grace said sharply. “You do more damage with it than a bayonet.”
She stalked away to find Lillie. Grace was done holding secrets on Oliver’s behalf. Especially ones that only threatened to hurt him.
So when it was time to talk to the police, she told them everything.
Two uniformed policemen brought her into the ladies’ sitting room, where she had just been not an hour before.
Her heart raced. It was the same wallpaper patterning the walls.
The same light scent of soap and lavender.
She sat on the edge of the armchair, leaning forward, eager to tell them what she knew.
As she was giving them her name and temporary St. Louis address, another man entered the room. He was disheveled, as though he had been pulled out of bed. But she recognized his face. It was one of the main fair organizers who had been in the papers.
The man exchanged a nod with the head policeman, then leaned against the wall. Listening.
“I saw Harriet Forbes this morning, you see. In the Tunnels,” Grace said. “And there was someone who threatened her about money the other night, at the restaurant.”
“Who was it?”
“I’m not sure. A man. Tall.”
“But you could recognize them?”
“Yes. I mean, I think so. It was dark.”
“Was there anyone else with you who saw that interaction take place?”
“No,” she said, faltering. “I was alone.”
“Were there any other secrets Miss Forbes might have been hiding? Any reason for someone to kill her?”
“But surely you don’t think she was killed ? You think this was murder?”
She felt a chill go down to the deepest parts of her.
The policeman ignored her. “What was the nature of her relationship with your cousin, Oliver Carter?”
Grace felt the blood drain from her face. “Why do you ask?”
“There are witnesses that said they appeared to be arguing shortly before her death.”
Grace’s breath caught in her lungs.
“We’ve also been told that he was jealous of her relationship with Mr. Parker.”
“No, but you see, it’s all a misunderstanding. That wasn’t a real relationship. They were hiding it on behalf of Oliver. He was the very one who asked them to do it, so you see, he wasn’t jealous, he—”
“He asked them to lie while he saw Miss Forbes in secret?”
“Yes, but—”
“And who was the person who served her the glass tonight? Did you see, Miss Covington?”
Her heart fell, tumbling like it had tripped over a stone in the road she hadn’t seen. “Yes. It was Oliver. But you must understand, he would never do anything to—”
“Thank you,” the policeman said. He smiled tightly. “That will be all.”
By the time Grace returned to her hotel room, it was two o’clock in the morning.
She could vaguely make out the fair lights still glowing in the distance.
She took off her necklace made of paste and stared at her reflection in the watery mirror as though it should have changed. Splashed cold water on her cheeks until the horror broke through the dam she had carefully erected. When the sobs came, she held herself until she was spent.
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Harriet falling. The ruby-red glass shattering beside her, scattering and crunching underfoot like pieces of a heart.
What if she had confronted Harriet yesterday?
What if she had told Lillie the truth earlier?
What if she and Theodore Parker hadn’t agreed to keep Oliver’s secret?
She felt a strange new terror, now that she knew life could change so drastically from one hour to the next. Harriet was alive, and then she wasn’t. Could the decisions Grace made, no matter how seemingly small, have changed something?
For the second night in a row, she hardly slept.
The next morning Grace hurriedly packed and checked out of her room. People were gathered in the lobby, crowding together and reading the newspaper. She glimpsed the enormous font on the front page of the Fair’s Fare:
DEATH AT THE FAIR
Actress Dies Under Suspicious Circumstances, Police Investigating
Grace turned in her key and half ran out of the hotel. On the corner, boys were holding fresh copies of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“Death at the fairgrounds!” they called. “Was it murder?”
An anxious crowd was starting to form.
Grace reached into her purse. The coins there were thin. She needed to save enough for her train trip home. But she used some of the last of the money she had to hail a horse-drawn cab to the Carter house on Westmoreland Place.
She stood on the sidewalk beneath the dappled leaves of two wide oak trees. Though it was almost eleven o’clock in the morning, the windows were darkened with drapes.
“Miss Covington,” the butler said solemnly, opening the door to greet her.
“Hello, Waters. I’m here to see Oliver,” she said.
Waters bowed to her. “I hope you realize that I cannot directly disobey Mrs. Carter’s orders,” he said. “But I shall let Oliver know that he might do well with some fresh air outside.”
“Thank you, Waters,” she said.
Her heart twisted within her when Oliver slipped out the back door to join her a few moments later. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night.
As soon as they were out of eyesight of the house, tears began falling down his cheeks.
“Do you want to talk, Ollie?” she asked.
She loved her cousin, and that love melted and found all sorts of new cracks within her to see him hurting.
“How can she be gone?” he asked. “I don’t understand. I keep waiting to turn and see her face.”
He let out heaving sobs, like the time as a boy he had fallen and impaled his leg with a stick and was trying to pull it out and also trying to be brave.
“Tell me what you loved about her,” Grace said.
“The way she laughed.” His voice sounded wooden, even while snot began to run down his face.
“I loved her voice. It could touch something deep inside of me. She made me feel like a different version of myself. One who wanted to be settled down, one who cared about people more than how much money they had. I didn’t want my parents’ life, their marriage.
I wanted her voice to be what I heard when I came home each night. ”
Grace’s chest ached. The what-ifs of what she had done and not done over the past few days haunted her. “Do her parents know?” she asked.
“The police are contacting them. They live in Illinois.”
“They think she was killed, Oliver.”
His hand tightened into a fist. “I saw the papers. Those vultures, circling around like they were looking for meat.”
“Do you think someone killed her?”
“She didn’t overdose, if that’s what you mean. I never saw her take anything, not once, the entire time we were together.”
“But who would want her dead?” Grace asked.
“I don’t have any idea.”
They circled the block.
“Oliver, I want to stay to help you, but—” Her throat closed with the embarrassment of it all. She gestured to the carpetbag in her hands. “I’ve imposed on your generosity long enough.”
“Don’t go,” he said. “Not now. I need you here. Your presence is worth more than a hundred days of hotels. I’ll pay for the rest of your stay tonight. Don’t worry, I’ll build you a whole new one if it comes to that.”
They looked up at the sound of a door slamming.
A group of black carriages were parked around the Carters’ front stoop.
“Reporters,” Oliver growled. “I’ll give them a piece of my—”
He wiped his face and began to stride toward them, but stopped suddenly. As if realizing that they weren’t reporters.
The man in front rang the bell.
He was wearing a police uniform.
Aunt Clove intercepted him before Oliver could.
“What is this?” she asked, frowning, standing in the frame of the front door. “Chief Harris? What are you doing here?”
The police chief sighed. He was a large man with pocked cheeks. “It’s probably better if we do this inside, Clove.”
Her voice rose in panic. “Reginald!” she yelled.
Grace could hear Lulu barking inside.
“Have you come for me?” Oliver asked.
The policemen turned around.
Oliver stood his ground bravely as they surrounded him on the sidewalk.
A neighbor opened their door, then abruptly shut it.
“Oliver Carter, you are under arrest for suspicion of murder in the death of Harriet Forbes.”