Chapter Sixteen
Six Days After the Murder
GRACE STAYED UP late into the night writing the draft of her article, falling asleep just as the morning began trickling through the gaps of the curtains.
When she woke, there was ink on her cheek.
She scrubbed it in the sink until her skin was rosy but clean, and got dressed. She tucked her small notebook into her waistband along with the draft of her article, ignored the gnawing hunger in her stomach, and tied on her hat.
Then she strode down the street toward the fairgrounds to meet Lillie.
A lingering hope pricked the back of her mind. That maybe Walt would come today.
Lillie greeted her and after showing their ticket booklet for entrance, they crossed through the Exposition turnstiles. Lillie looked tired and a little gaunt. Her hair was pulled up beneath her hat, her embroidered gown and gathered skirts draped to accentuate her figure.
Grace’s stomach chose that moment to growl noisily.
Lillie laughed. “That was rather monstrous,” she teased.
Grace smiled, laughing it off. But Lillie caught something in her face. “Wait. When was the last time you ate something?”
Grace swallowed, her mouth dry. She had promised she wasn’t going to lie to Lillie, not anymore.
“Our lunch yesterday. I may have… recently run out of money,” she admitted. Her pride made the words feel like nettles on her tongue.
“Grace Covington!” Lillie said, looking horrified. “Are you saying that you would rather go hungry than ask your own flesh and blood for help? I’ve never been more offended in my life.”
“Be gentle,” Grace said. “My pride already feels quite wounded, and you know how beastly I get when I’m hungry.”
Lillie marched them through the fairgrounds to one of the two restaurants flanking the Cascades and ordered Grace a feast. They had steaming coffee and popovers with sweet raspberry jelly.
Thick slices of maple bacon, cinnamon buns, salty smoked salmon, and plates of fresh fruits arranged like flowers. Grace ate until she was stuffed.
When Lillie paid the check, she also slipped a coin purse across the table.
It was flush with cash.
“You’re looking into things for Oliver,” Lillie said. “Let me at least pay you for that service.”
Grace was drowsily full. “Lillie—”
“Please let me do this. Money is a small thing for me, but it’s a big thing to be able to help you.”
Grace sighed and tucked the purse into her bag.
“Thank you,” she said. “This will quite literally buy me several more days.”
“Good.” It was the first time Lillie looked truly happy in the last week.
They stood, and Grace took Lillie’s arm. With her hunger quenched and her cousin at her side, Grace could almost forget all the rest of their troubles. As they walked, her eye caught on the front page of the new Fair’s Fare.
The seller seemed prepared to repeat his threat from the other day, but she didn’t give him a chance.
She had already seen that Harriet Forbes would be buried tomorrow.
“The funeral is at First Lutheran,” Lillie said, noticing her interest.
“Will you go?” Grace asked.
“Mother, of all people, insists we should,” Lillie said, holding her parasol so that Grace could join her beneath it.
“She’s found her compassion at last?”
“I’m not sure that’s a bone she was born with. No, she thinks it will look worse if we don’t go.”
“Ah,” Grace said. Children were laughing and flying kites in the breeze.
As she passed the lagoons and the gondolas that were floating beneath the Cascades and Festival Hall, Grace made plans to be at Harriet’s funeral herself.
She wanted to say goodbye, to pay her respects to a girl who had been like a brief, bright flare in her life.
And because Grace had a sneaking feeling the murderer would be there, too.
“It does grow tiresome, living life not by doing what is right, but by the filter of how it appears to other people,” Lillie sighed. “Ah, Earnest!”
Grace’s face promptly heated when she saw Earnest. He was leaning against a lamppost, and he appeared to be waiting for them.
“Lillie,” he said, smiling. He gave a curt nod to Grace, his affect flattening. “Miss Covington.”
“I didn’t realize you were meeting,” Grace said, taking a step back. “Please go ahead, I don’t want to intrude.”
“Nonsense!” Lillie said. “We’re going to discuss the lawyer Daddy hired for Oliver. Earnest is talking with the aeronautics engineers at lunch, and Mother insists we’re seen out enjoying our lives, rather than holing up as though we have something to hide.”
“Please join us,” Earnest said, but it was without conviction.
Grace hesitated. Lillie took her by the arm and Grace followed Earnest, shame-faced, to a concert on the pavilion, shrouded beneath trees on a hill.
They sat on blankets and listened to the Mexican artillery band with Ricardo Pacheco.
The men were dressed in formal military regalia but bore instruments in place of weapons.
There were clarinets and trumpets and cornets that played lively polkas.
The breeze ruffled Earnest’s hair beneath the brim of his hat. He didn’t look at her.
Grace sat in awkward silence until she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I’m so sorry, Earnest,” she said, lightly touching his sleeve to draw his attention. “I should never have accused you of something so heinous. I was deeply wrong, and I hope you will forgive me.”
He shrugged. “Thank you for the apology,” he said. Which she understood was not quite the same thing as forgiveness. Especially when he glanced away, so as not to have to look at her. Whatever fledgling magic had once been between them was now entirely gone.
She sighed. She was sad that her tongue had ruined their friendship. Especially when he was one of the first of the group who had been kind to her.
But at least it made it a little easier to bear the way he looked at Lillie. He had engaged Grace before with interest. With flirtation. But the way he was looking at her cousin was something different.
It made Grace’s heart fall like a whisper, even though she couldn’t blame anyone for adoring Lillie. After all, she did.
Earnest leaned to whisper in the curve of Lillie’s ear. A pleased flush spread across Lillie’s cheeks and lit her eyes. She edged her hand slightly closer to his, where it was splayed in the grass.
The truth was, Earnest had proven himself to be worthy of her beloved cousin. Sticking close to Lillie when everyone else turned away.
Although, Grace thought pettily, she wasn’t sure any man would be worth a lifetime tied to that shrew Frannie Allred as a sister-in-law.
She closed her eyes and felt the sunlight spackle her face. She listened to the music, wondering what Walt was doing right then, and why he had failed to show up this time. Why Harriet had followed a path into the Tunnels that led to her death.
Grace opened her eyes with a thought. She extended it to Earnest, as an olive branch.
“I was thinking I’d head over to the wireless telegram tower today, if you wanted to come,” she said. “Follow up on that lead we were chasing before.”
“Oh,” he said. “Glad I could spare you the wasted trip, then. I received a note from the message boy just yesterday. He said that George Parsons decided he wasn’t coming back.”
Grace paused, confused.
“He’s not?” she said slowly. Her thoughts shuddered together.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess that lead turned into a dead end.”
Mind whirring, she felt the corners of her own note from the messenger in her pocket. The one that said the exact opposite information.
Why was Earnest lying to her?
She watched him carefully. “So I guess there’s no way to find out what he would have said, then…”
He shrugged. “I’m just passing along the message. I wasn’t there when it came,” he said, turning his face back to the music. “Frannie was.”
Grace was troubled as she parted ways with Lillie and Earnest.
She strongly disliked Frannie and knew her own biases. Grace thought Frannie was a terrible snob with no character and even less integrity. But that didn’t mean that Frannie was a murderer.
Right?
The spring breeze was heavy and hot as she felt the corners of her article in her pocket. What would murdering Harriet do for Frannie, anyway? What would she possibly gain from Harriet’s death?
Grace strode toward the wireless telegraph tower on the edge of the fairgrounds, but when she saw the line snaking and looping back on itself, she decided to head straight to Sam Whitcomb’s office first. She wanted to make sure she could hand in her article to run before the next paper was printed.
She exited the fairgrounds and made her way toward Delmar, where she wove through the neat rows of the tent city.
There was an area for babies to be left and attended to while their parents were visiting the fair; a barbershop where men could get a haircut and fresh shave.
She smelled bacon wafting from one of the kitchen tents.
And this time, when she rode the elevator to the top floor of the octagonal Whitcomb press building, the secretary waved her in.
Grace found Sam Whitcomb at his desk, sorting through stacks of paper. There was smoke curling from the cigar on the ashtray, and mottled light from the harp lamp on the desk.
“My article,” she said, retrieving it from her bag. “As promised.”
He took the article and read it in front of her, which made her feel surprisingly vulnerable. She shifted her weight, and he made a few sounds accompanied by strikes of words with his red pen. That slow, unnerving smile spread across his face.
“Good,” he said. “Very good. It will run tomorrow.”
She nodded. “You showed me the tape, I wrote you the article. We’re even now. If you want more, you’ll have to pay me for it next time.”
“Such a shrewd little reporter, aren’t we?” Sam Whitcomb said. His condescension was irritating. He picked up the cigar and ashed it in the crystal tray. “I think you’re getting more than enough benefit from my newspaper telling your side of the story.”
“I think you’re going to sell more papers than ever with this angle.” Grace set her shoulders. After all, she couldn’t live off of Theodore and Lillie’s charity forever. “And a girl’s gotta eat. Your choice.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“Keep bringing me the juice and we’ll talk.”
She pursed her lips and nodded. “I’m just about to follow another lead now.”
He smirked at her. “You’re a sharp one, aren’t you? Wouldn’t want to get on your bad side.”
“So don’t,” she said.
She picked up a copy of the day’s Fare for herself on the way out.
“Good day, Mr. Whitcomb,” she said.
Grace read the paper from cover to cover while she waited in the snaking line for the De Forest wireless telegraph tower. There was Harriet’s smiling face. It hit Grace anew like a punch to the gut. This bright, alive woman was gone. How could a life be snuffed out like a candle?
She jumped a little at the boom of cannons shooting from a distant battle reenactment, the screams of people riding the roller coaster on the Pike, and felt a fresh determination buzzing in her veins to find the person who had killed Harriet.
What were they doing now, while Oliver sat in prison and Harriet was going to be placed in the ground?
Grace rode the elevator up to the observation deck, tucking the folded newspaper beneath her arm as she asked one of the workers for Mr. George Parsons.
The man pointed her toward the separated room at the back of the observation deck, where there were warning signs displayed amid coils, levers, and sparks.
She knocked on the door and tried to appear confident.
This moment was going to prove key to the next part of the investigation, she could just tell.
A man she’d never seen before came to the door. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, with dark eyes and blond hair. He looked harried and irritable.
“Mr. Parsons?” she asked.
“Yes?” he said, his brow knitting suspiciously.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Grace Covington, and I’m looking into some background details about Harriet Forbes’s life in the days before she was murdered.”
Was it just her imagination, or did Mr. Parson’s face turn a grim shade of white?
“You were with a man last week at the Tyrolean Alps restaurant, the Luchow-Faust, on the second floor,” she continued. “He spoke to the actress Harriet Forbes. We’re trying to get in touch with him.”
The man shook his head, backing away.
She made to follow him.
“Please,” she said, pulling out her notebook. “It’s very important. A man has been wrongfully accused. He’s—”
“You need to stop looking into this,” Mr. Parsons said, his voice deathly quiet. “Or someone else is going to get killed.”
She stopped short. “What?” she breathed.
“Don’t come here again,” he said. “Or it is probably going to be you.”
He slammed the door in her face.