Chapter Twenty-One
THAT NIGHT, Grace dreamed she was going to die.
She was next to Harriet in the fair’s roller coaster, but their harness was broken.
It crumpled away like tinfoil and as the coaster fell, there was nothing to hold her in.
She felt her stomach drop as her body jolted up into the air like a limp rag doll.
She tried to reach out for Harriet, but she couldn’t.
Harriet was screaming, then laughing.
And then Harriet turned into her sister Penelope.
“I met with her in the Tunnels,” Penelope said.
“Why?” Grace asked. Penelope was opening her mouth to answer, but it was too late.
Grace braced herself to hit the ground.
Instead she gasped and sat up in the small bed, sweating.
She reached out to the nightstand for her glass of water. Gulped it down to the dregs.
Her eyes focused and she forced herself to reorient to the small room. The desk and typewriter in the corner. Her clothes, where she had left them on the chair last night. The fireplace, and the smell of paints that always greeted her when she first opened the door.
She could feel how swollen her eyes were from crying herself to sleep.
She swallowed, listening to the sound of her heartbeat as it steadily began to slow.
Harriet was dead.
Oliver was imprisoned.
The Walt she knew was gone.
But she was alive, here. In this room.
And that’s when she heard it.
There was movement just on the other side of the door. A slight scratching sound.
Or was it?
She listened intently.
It sounded as though someone were trying to pick the lock.
She hurriedly pulled on a dressing robe. Then she crept to the door, her heart rocketing.
She heard muttering just beyond it.
Something told her not to cry out. She grabbed a heavy candlestick from the fireplace mantel and held it aloft, ready to strike.
The doorknob slowly turned.
She covered her hand with her mouth in fear.
But as the door tried to push open, the dead-bolt lock held fast. It caught the door with a catch.
The knob stopped turning.
Grace adjusted her grip on the candlestick, her hands sweating.
She stayed there like that, breathing heavily, straining her ears above the sound of her own heartbeat, until the footsteps finally turned and walk away.
She leaned her back against the door. Then she slid down it, dropping the candlestick with a thud, and cried muffled sobs into her hands.
In the morning Grace cleared off the desk and sat down to write her mother a postcard.
Doing well! she wrote. It wasn’t entirely the truth, but it sounded a bit more optimistic than Still alive!
So she scribbled, “Keeping busy with visits to the Colonnade of States and trying hundreds of different types of food. You’d be impressed by the pyrheliophor covered in thousands of mirrors—and perhaps even more so by Missouri’s elaborate temple display made entirely from corn. Give Papa my love. Be home soon.”
She slipped it in the postbox and returned just as Theodore came to her door.
“Brought you something you were looking for,” he said. He held out an envelope. “The complete guest list from the night of Harriet’s death.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking it from him cautiously. “Did you… come here last night?”
“What?” he said. “No.” She watched the realization as his face darkened. “Why? Did someone visit you?” he asked.
“Never mind,” she said.
“All right…” he said, studying her. “That’s the guest list from the night of the party. Lillie got it from Oliver’s lawyer, but she was busy with something this morning.”
“Thanks for bringing it by,” she said. “Have you seen it yet?”
“No.”
They walked a little and took a seat on a bench beneath a tree that was dropping pink petals like fat, lush tears. She opened the envelope and unfolded the list so they could look at it together.
There were a hundred names on it. Her suspect list just kept growing.
She snuck a glance at Theo, who was examining the list beside her. She could smell the mint of his breath. The cinnamon spice of his skin.
“You know, it’s interesting,” she said. “But Earnest is wondering whether he might have been the real target.”
She shifted to put a little more space between them. Could Theodore be the murderer? Surely not. Surely there was some good explanation for what he had been doing yesterday. Sneaking away to a nefarious place and lying about it.
“You’re kidding.” He seemed genuinely surprised. “Does someone have it out for him?”
“I’m not sure. We’ll have to ask if anyone comes to mind.” She paused. “How was meeting with a friend of the family yesterday?” she asked carefully.
“Tedious,” he said. His face remained blank.
She continued to scan the list and decided to push her luck. “Where did you go?” she asked.
But he merely smiled at her. “I got an address for Penelope up in Chicago,” he said. “A friend of a friend tracked it down.”
“That’s good,” she said. She smiled weakly back. “A telephone number would be even better. I’d love to talk with her in real time.”
“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, did you know that President Roosevelt is coming to town? It’s my last contractual event that my father expects me to attend at the fair. It’s supposed to be at least two hours of a banquet followed by dancing.”
“Sounds like your own personal hell,” Grace said. He had changed the subject first about his outing yesterday and then about Penelope, and she hadn’t neglected to notice.
“And no one appreciates my suffering more than you,” Theo said. He swallowed, his throat bobbing. “Would you care to go with me?”
“You do make a convincing argument,” she said.
“So is that a yes?” he asked.
But she merely smiled, arched her eyebrow, and stood.
Lord knows he was making her wonder about all kinds of things. At least he could wonder a bit now, too.
She walked back to the studio and locked the door behind her, sneaking one last look over her shoulder at him.
Because all his arguments were so smooth and convincing, and that meant she was starting to suspect him all the more.
Grace pored over the list in the studio, making notes until hunger began to gnaw at her.
They still didn’t know who Harriet had met with at the restaurant that night. That, along with the multiple threats for her to stop looking into that part of the case, still made her think that it was Harriet who was being targeted, not Earnest.
But none of the names from the list jumped out at her. Lillie and Oliver would know more about them than she would.
She could ignore her hunger no longer. She locked the door behind her and walked to the diner she had eaten at with Theo a few blocks away from the studio. She ordered the same thing, and then her gaze fell on an abandoned newspaper someone had left on the diner’s counter.
She stood and took it for herself, opening it across the table to read as she ate.
When she turned the fold, she gasped.
MAN FOUND DEAD IN THE MISSISSIPPI, the paper said.
Sylvestor Watson, age 30 years, was found floating in the Mississippi River early this morning. The victim was found with blunt force trauma to the head. The cause of death was drowning.
It is unclear whether he sustained the injury from a fall or if it was the result of foul play.
Beneath the article there was an image of his face. She recognized him immediately.
Her stomach turned. She delicately sat her spoon down on the table.
It was the man who had robbed them.
She looked for a waiter so she could ask for the bill. There were two people she wanted to talk to about this development, as soon as possible.
The first was her cousin Oliver, and the second was the newspaper man Sam Whitcomb.
She folded her napkin.
But the waiter had disappeared.
As well as almost every other customer in the place.
She glanced around. There had been several people in the diner when she arrived, but they were all gone now. It was eerily quiet.
And then the bell rang as the front door opened.
She looked inside her purse for cash to leave on the table.
A man slowly began to approach her.
She wasn’t paying much attention until he stopped at her table.
“Miss Covington?” the man asked.
She looked at him, suddenly wary. Her senses were on alert.
He was charismatic in a way that intimated great power. He seemed out of place in the diner.
“Yes?” she asked.
He gestured to the diner table.
“May I have a word?” he asked.
But his tone of voice, and the way he was physically blocking her from leaving, meant it wasn’t really a question.
She glanced around her.
The diner was empty.
There had been a cook behind the counter. He disappeared into the kitchen. The host had stepped outside for a cigarette.
“How do you know my name?” she asked.
“Word gets around when you’re a famous columnist,” he said. But his face was flat as he slid into the seat opposite her.
“And you are?” she asked.
“Someone who would prefer to stay off the record.”
She nodded. Her mouth had become bone dry.
“Do you have information for me, then?” she asked. She gripped her napkin under the table.
“Not information, not exactly. But I do have an offer for you.”
“An offer?” she asked.
“A deal to propose. To put an end to you publishing these salacious rumors.”
“They’re not rumors,” she said, frowning. “Everything I’ve written is the truth.”
“You’re stoking fear, and therefore tainting the experience of thousands of people. Maybe even millions. And that has its consequences.”
“Financial consequences, you mean,” she said. “For the fair.”
“And financial incentives to cooperate,” he said. “For you.”
He pushed an envelope across the table at her.
A thick-looking envelope.
She eyed it.
“Do you know who killed Harriet Forbes?” she asked in a low voice.
“No, and I don’t really care. What I care about is making sure this goes away. That’s what I do. I make the bad publicity go away.”
She saw the money, stuffed into the envelope. Just within reach.
It appeared to be enough that she could afford to live in St. Louis for years. Maybe even at the level that Lillie did.