Chapter Fourteen #2
Dr. May shook her head. “The onset is quick. It would have had to be administered in that room. And it would have had to be put into the victim’s drink specifically, because no one else at the party was affected.”
“Interesting,” Grace said.
“If I were you, I’d get a list of who was in that room that night. And then find out if any of them knew Harriet Forbes before.”
“Thank you, Dr. May,” Lillie said.
“You’re good sisters,” Dr. May said. She smiled at them with a tender understanding that touched something buried deep in Grace’s heart.
“It’s clear that you would do anything for your brothers,” she said, meeting Lillie’s eyes. “Both of you.”
Grace and Lillie hitched a trolley ride back to the fairgrounds.
“I’m meant to meet Walt for lunch,” Grace said with a glance at the beating sun as they walked through the turnstiles into the Exposition. They made their way toward the restaurant where she had seen Walt two days ago.
“A table for three, please,” Grace said.
This time, they were seated beneath an umbrella and Grace skimmed the menu—but really, she was glancing over her shoulder every few minutes, searching the throng of humanity beyond the fence of the restaurant’s outdoor seating.
There were women in long skirts and fancy hats, children in sharply tailored sailor suits; members of the Philippine Constabulary band and Indian women in gold-threaded saris.
Accents and languages wove through the air, intertwining like strands in a tapestry.
There were clusters of pigeons and bits of trash and scattered petals on the walkway.
But there was no Walt.
“Well, perhaps we should go ahead and order,” Lillie said with a forced brightness when they’d turned the waiter away for the third time. “We can pick something out for Walt.”
Grace nodded but worry gnawed at her stomach. Did Walt forget how to find the meeting place? Had something happened to him? Was he blacked out somewhere? Overdosed? Hurt? Too drunk or high to remember the plan?
Her brow knit. Grace’s mind had traveled down these paths so many times. She tried to stop her anxious thoughts from slipping like oil over the well-worn grooves.
“I can see why you love Dr. May,” Grace said instead, sipping her glass of iced tea. The wind blew the branches of a nearby tree and sent shadows spattering across her face.
“I just want to be around her,” Lillie said. “It’s like she has her own gravity.”
Grace agreed. When their food came, she half-heartedly ate her club sandwich and drank her sweating glass of iced tea, and Lillie paid for all of it, and Grace was grateful.
She no longer knew when her next meal would be.
She would need to find some sort of paying job at the fair if she was going to continue on like this.
She knew she could tell Lillie she was falling dangerously short and that her cousin would happily lend her the money. She knew she had promised Lillie no more secrets. But she’d rather feel the pinch of hunger and keep hold of her pride.
She eyed a bird pecking at a crust of bread, wanting to stall. Just in case Walt came.
“Where would one get rat poison, do you think?” Lillie asked.
“Vermin powders are sold at any drugstore,” Grace said. She knew her father kept them in stock for his restaurant.
She looked one more time over her shoulder for Walt.
“We can meet here again tomorrow,” Lillie said, quietly noticing Grace was upset. “Maybe he’ll come then.” She checked her timepiece. “I have to get back home. We’re going to visit Oliver this afternoon.”
They walked arm in arm to Grace’s studio, the hems of their skirts brushing together, and Lillie hailed a carriage to take her home. Grace kissed Lillie’s cheek and brought out her key to unlock the door.
When she pushed it open, she almost didn’t notice the folded piece of paper at her feet. As though someone had slipped it beneath the door.
She bent to retrieve it.
The message was from Santiago, the young man who worked at the wireless telegraph tower.
She read:
Mr. Parsons has returned to St. Louis and is expected back at work tomorrow.
She crumpled the note in her hand.
She was itching to find out what Mr. Parsons knew, to fill in the gaps between the man desperate for money and what that had to do with Harriet.
Sam Whitcomb’s press office was north of Delmar and overlooked the fairgrounds.
It was impressive, she would give him that: five stories and shaped like an octagon, with American flags gracefully draped from its windows.
The building was built on a hill, and before it he had erected a massive, temporary tent city.
“Camp Whitcomb,” it was called, with lodging for three thousand people.
It had been a brilliant strategy move: subscribers to Whitcomb’s publications could stay there for much cheaper than any of the surrounding hotels.
Grace felt the folded creases of Santiago’s note in her pocket as she briskly walked through the tent city.
The tents were almost like cabins, with wooden floorboards and potted plants and electric lights strung along their ceilings.
She could hear the distant roar of the crowds at the fair, the brassy sounds of marching bands.
There was a hiss of grease as she passed one of the many kitchen tents, and near the showering tent, she smelled the lather of soap.
For a moment, she paused with the prickling sense that someone was following her.
She slowed, then snuck a glance over her shoulder.
There was no one there.
Stop being silly, she told herself.
She clutched her hat to her head and quickened her pace. She spotted Theodore just where they had planned yesterday—leaning beneath the flags of the Whitcomb building.
Her heart started beating traitorously at the sight of him.
He arched an eyebrow when he saw her, and for a moment she thought of what it would feel like for him to slide his arms around her waist again, the weight of his hands grazing the curve of her rib cage, making her breath hitch—
She stopped, flushing. What was wrong with her?
“Covington,” he said shortly.
“Parker,” she said.
“Did you meet with Walt?” he asked. “What did he say?”
“He didn’t show,” she said. She pulled open the door to the publishing office before Theodore could frown or, worse, show her any pity. “Shall we?” she asked briskly.
They entered the foyer together, then rode the elevator to the fifth floor and announced themselves to Sam Whitcomb’s secretary.
“We’re here to see Mr. Whitcomb,” Theodore said.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.
“No,” Grace said. “But we have information about Harriet Forbes’s murder.”
The secretary ducked into Mr. Whitcomb’s office, then reappeared with a smile.
“You may proceed,” she said.
They stepped inside the large room, which was covered in mahogany wood and flanked with file cabinets. A wastebasket was overflowing with crumpled sheets of paper. The room smelled like stale coffee, and there was a typewriter and a dim, bronze harp table lamp on the desk.
“You have intel for me?” Sam Whitcomb said, rising to greet them. The windows of his office showed an expansive, bird’s-eye view of the fairgrounds and the stretch of his tent city below. “On the murder of the actress?”
“The police have made an arrest in the poisoning death of Harriet Forbes,” Grace said. “But we don’t believe they have the right man.”
With ink-stained fingers, Sam Whitcomb gestured them toward the chairs set before his desk.
He sank into his own chair, purposefully set above their eye level, and smiled at them with teeth that were big and overly white. He made Grace’s skin crawl a bit. Grace glanced at Theodore out of the corner of her eye.
For once, she was glad to see his unvarnished look of disdain.
Whitcomb raised an eyebrow.
“You’re friends with the accused,” he said. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” Grace said firmly. “And we’d like to talk to you. Off the record.”
Whitcomb set down his pen and gestured at her. There was a glint in his eye. “By all means. Proceed.”
Grace shared a look with Theodore, and he rolled out the caricature of the woman the fair artist had drawn.
“Do you know who this woman is?” Theodore asked.
Whitcomb gave him a skeptical look, then examined the sketch for a long moment.
“No,” he said. “Should I?”
“This woman was following Harriet relentlessly in the days prior to her murder.”
Whitcomb scoffed. “A caricature? You can’t be serious,” he said.
Grace scowled, rolling up the paper. “So that’s a no, then?”
Sam Whitcomb sneered. “This is what you’ve brought me? A woman who may or may not have been following Harriet, whose name you don’t know, and a sketch that could be of any number of the tens of thousands of women at these fairgrounds?”
He stood, as though dismissing them.
But Theodore remained sitting, his fist flexed on the table.
He spoke slowly, his derision matching Sam Whitcomb’s own.
“We have a mysterious woman who tailed Harriet Forbes multiple times in the days just prior to her death,” he said, his handsome jaw twitching as he counted on his fingers.
“A verbal threat was made to her about money, with some sort of message she was expected to deliver to someone else. Then, Harriet Forbes secretly met with someone in the Tunnels, all in the days leading up to her death—which I think we can all agree is unusual for a woman of her stature. There’s a bigger story here than a mere romantic tiff gone wrong. ”
Whitcomb leaned back in his seat, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “I’m listening.”
“Anyone could have put something in her drink besides Oliver Carter,” Grace said. “All we know for certain is that it was someone at that party.”
“And you were the only one filming that night,” Theodore said.
Mr. Whitcomb templed his fingers. “The trouble is, I’ve already watched the film from that night and shared it with the police. It doesn’t show much of Miss Forbes’s death, or anything that could exonerate Oliver Carter. It cuts to Miss Forbes right when she’s dying and then ends.”
Grace hesitated. “Could we see it anyway?”
Mr. Whitcomb’s lips parted in an amused smile. “I don’t think so.”
“What if we could give you something in return?” Grace asked.
“Such as?”
Theodore began shifting in his seat, but Grace shot him a look.
“What if I wrote an article about this for you?”
Whitcomb’s smirk deepened. “You’re hardly unbiased.”
“That’s the point. It will be an inside scoop detailing all the things we think the police missed. What we are doing to prove Oliver’s innocence, because we believe that the police got it wrong. Which means the real murderer is still out there.”
She watched as a calculating gleam entered Whitcomb’s eye. It was the sort of thing that would stoke public fear and sell out his newspapers, and they both knew it.
He stroked his chin and studied her. “Your ilk doesn’t usually want to be associated with my newspaper.”
That was true. If she thought Aunt Clove was angry with her before, this might be enough to turn her murderous.
But everything Grace would write was the truth. And it might help Oliver.
“I don’t live my life by what other people think of it,” she said.
It was a half-truth that she hoped might become whole someday, and she saw the quirk in Theodore’s eyebrow that, in some lights, might almost be mistaken for admiration.
He gave her an encouraging nod.
“So you agree to write up a piece for exclusive publication in the Fair’s Fare?” Sam Whitcomb asked. “You will raise enough questions in the minds of the public to sell papers and possibly force the police to take another look.”
Grace answered without a second thought. “I’ll do it.”
Whitcomb smiled and rose. “Let’s take a look at that film, then.”