Chapter 11
‘You’re hilarious,’ I said as she joined me inside and pulled the door closed.
‘I was in the drama club in high school.’
‘No way,’ I drawled.
Alice pointedly ignored me. ‘What are we even looking for?’
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘Something that’s unobtrusive enough not to be thrown away. That is, if the clue’s even here.’
The building was bigger than it looked on the outside, and it was definitely a tech control room, so I’d been right about that.
I didn’t recognize most of the equipment and was scared to even touch it.
Theatrical lights were hung up on one wall, and a complicated-looking sound desk was placed in front of the window that looked out over the amphitheater.
Like the outside, the walls were wood-paneled, and they were covered in notes and diagrams, all things that were probably only understandable to people who knew theater terminology, which I didn’t.
In one corner was a tall fridge covered in magnets and more notes.
Next to it was a tiny round table and a sofa.
Alice had gone straight to the notes stuck to the wall with tacks and was flipping through them.
‘Does this mean anything to you?’ I asked, gesturing to the notes.
‘Some of it,’ she said, nodding furiously. ‘It’s lighting design notes.’
‘Well, that makes sense,’ I muttered to myself.
For just a second I made myself stop, to try to feel out what the next move my mom wanted me to make was.
Grand Central Station.
The New York Public Library.
Van der Hausen’s.
Pier 54.
They were all historical landmarks, places that were significant to New York. And Van der Hausen’s was the last stop the jewelry had made before it was stolen from Alice’s grandmother’s house – a bad idea on Alice’s mom’s part, in hindsight, since I was sure this was the trigger for the robbery.
I couldn’t imagine the next location would be completely random. It would be somewhere important to the city or connected to the journey Abigail De Lacy had been on with the Insect Brooch.
I focused my eyes and looked around the room again.
Alice had moved on to the fridge, where she was checking the pieces of paper stuck to it – flyers for concerts and plays. As my eyes landed on a magnet shaped like the Statue of Liberty, Alice picked it up idly and flipped it over, and something in my stomach twisted at seeing the obvious landmark.
‘Aha!’
‘What are you? Sherlock Holmes?’ I said, mostly annoyed that she’d got to the magnet before I had.
‘Found it,’ she said smugly, holding out the magnet. On the back someone had written my initials in black Sharpie. ‘While you were over there having your moment.’
‘I wasn’t having a moment,’ I snapped. ‘I was thinking.’
‘Well, it’s good that your thinking helped us find the next clue.’
‘Shut up, Alice,’ I muttered, and she grinned before turning back to gather up the flyers that had fallen to the floor when she took the magnet off the fridge.
‘Can I see?’ I asked, and she handed over the magnet and the papers.
Nothing significant jumped out at me on the flyers, so I presumed the magnet was the only clue.
‘What are you thinking?’ Alice murmured.
I turned the magnet over in my hands. It was only about three inches long, a green Lady Liberty with a flash of gold painted on the flame, the type of thing you could pick up in any New York tourist trap around Times Square.
‘Is it too obvious?’ I asked her.
All the other clues we’d found so far had required some working out, the codex and the Morse code particularly. This felt too … blunt.
Alice shrugged and held out her hand, and I handed back the magnet a little reluctantly. She turned it over, studying it carefully.
‘Maybe?’ she said hesitantly. ‘Perhaps your mom ran out of time to put together something more complex.’
‘Potentially,’ I agreed, holding out my hand for the magnet again. I wasn’t sure why I was suddenly feeling so possessive over it.
Alice gave me a look, like she knew exactly what I was thinking. She dropped the magnet into my open palm, her fingers brushing against mine. I couldn’t hold back my full-body shiver at the contact, and of course she noticed – anyone would have noticed.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything, the tension between us growing thicker.
I wasn’t ready to voice my attraction and feelings for her quite yet, to admit out loud what had been pretty clear to me since first meeting her …
that Alice was cute, and nice, and the perfect balm for my fractured, crumbling heart.
I took a breath, wondering what on earth would come out of my mouth when I opened it.
Then a radio on the tech desk crackled to life and we jumped apart liked we’d been tasered. Alice glanced at me, worried.
‘Security to tech booth. Is anyone there?’
‘Shit,’ I muttered. My heart started racing and I glanced around, checking for another way in or out.
‘Tech booth, this is security. Come in.’
‘Someone must have seen us,’ I said, and Alice groaned.
I tucked the Lady Liberty magnet in my pocket.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
‘Oh, for sure.’
We stumbled for the door, and I held it open a few inches, peering out first to see if anyone was coming, then pushing Alice through.
I tried to close the door behind me with as little noise as possible, not wanting to draw attention to us.
Then I grabbed Alice’s hand and dragged her off in the opposite direction to the exit of the park.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ Alice whispered.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
We walked all the way to the back of the park until we reached the barrier that separated us from the river. The sun hadn’t started to set just yet, but the heat and light were fading.
Leaning on the barrier with my forearms, I stared out across the river. Alice tucked herself in close to me.
‘Why are we still here?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘They’ll be expecting us to run,’ I said. ‘They’ll be looking for people acting shady, moving quickly, looking guilty. Not two girls observing the scenery.’
‘Oh,’ Alice said softly before nodding.
My instincts were screaming at me to run, to get out of here. That was why I didn’t trust my instincts. I’d been trained far too well to make a mistake like that – my best defense was always camouflage.
Alice turned sideways so she was staring at my profile rather than New Jersey across the river. I didn’t need to look at her to know she was studying me.
‘Kendra?’
‘Hmm?’
She fell silent again, like she wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask me.
‘Kendra, do you think …?’ Alice asked slowly, frowning, then she shook her head. ‘Never mind.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘It’s stupid.’
I shrugged. ‘I won’t judge you.’
‘I just had this thought. Do you think those guys who were following you are after the same thing we are? My great-grandmother’s jewelry?’
My whole body went cold.
‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, trying to keep as calm as possible.
‘I’m trying to make it make sense,’ she said. ‘The jewelry got stolen, then sold to your mom, who hid it as part of the scavenger hunt. Now someone’s stalking you, breaking into your apartment, even assaulting you. And someone took the Fabergé book from the library.’
She wasn’t stupid, not even a tiny bit.
Inside, my morals were at war with my survival instinct and clashing with the dumb little crush I was trying to pretend I didn’t have on Alice. When I looked up, Alice’s eyes were fixed on mine.
‘You already figured it out,’ she said, though it sounded more like a realization than an accusation.
‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘I did.’
I was too weary, in too much pain and too riddled with grief to say anything else. As soon as the words were out I felt the weight lift from my shoulders.
‘Your family,’ she said after a while. ‘Are they … I mean, how caught up are you in all of this illegal stuff?’ Her voice dropped to a whisper as she finished her sentence.
‘It’s not the whole business,’ I said. ‘If it did, I’m sure we would have been caught and shut down by now. It’s more like a side hustle.’
‘A side hustle,’ she echoed.
‘Yeah. Power ebbs and flows through this city. Corrupt officials, double-crossing gang members … The patriarchs of criminal families die and leave a power vacuum. It’s not just the organized crime world that feels those power shifts, though.
It impacts everyone, from mafia bosses to street thieves to politicians. ’
‘I get it. But where do you fit into all of that?’
I smiled. ‘A street thief steals a watch from an unaware tourist. But a stolen watch has no value unless it can be sold for cash.’
‘Right …’
I glanced over my shoulder, making sure the park’s security team weren’t closing in on us. Plenty of people were still milling around, watching the now-setting sun, giving us decent cover.
‘A case of jewelry can go unnoticed in the grand scheme of things, until someone steals it and sells it on for cash. A corrupt cop who takes property into “evidence” doesn’t have anything of value until he can trade it for cash.
Gangs who hijack sleek black cars coming out of JFK and rob the people in the back seat still don’t have anything until they –’
‘Sell it on for cash,’ Alice finished for me.
‘Exactly. What all these law-breakers need is a business that’s prepared to give them cash for those goods, and one that isn’t going to look too closely or ask too many questions.
A business with international connections, who can ship things out from one of the city’s seaports or airports quickly and quietly.
A business that can forge paperwork going back generations to create fake provenance.
Or break up jewelry, extract the precious stones and sell them on to designers. ’
‘And that’s what you do,’ Alice said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, refusing to look at her.
‘That’s what we do. But it’s not the whole business.
Everything that we have on display in the shop is legit because it’s not like we can advertise the fact that we buy and sell items that have been stolen.
We have a whole network of people who buy from us privately, though, which is how the stolen stuff gets moved on. ’
‘Oh,’ Alice said quietly.
‘There are two sides to the business – the corrupt side and the honest side, and we’ve always had both, right from the start when my great-grandfather founded Walker Antiques.’
Alice fell quiet again but didn’t turn back to the river.
She was too close. Both to my body, making me feel hyper-aware, and to the secrets I’d sworn to keep and was now spilling because I was exhausted from maintaining the facade and I hated the idea of lying to her face.
We’d only known each other for a short number of days, and I didn’t know whether it was because she was the first person I’d had around since my mom had died or because I genuinely had feelings for her, but I felt like I could trust her.
‘Is it dangerous?’ Alice asked, and a laugh startled out of me.
‘Yeah, Alice. It’s really fucking dangerous.’
‘Because it’s illegal?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not worried about the police. We’ve always covered our tracks, and we build in enough plausible deniability to our sales that it would be almost impossible to prove that we knowingly did anything wrong.’
‘Did your mom know that the jewelry was stolen when she bought it?’ Alice asked, and my stomach sank. I had a feeling she would ask me this eventually.
‘I don’t know for sure,’ I said. ‘It’s not like I can ask her. And it’s likely she didn’t even bother to ask where it was from. But, yeah, she probably did know …’
Alice clenched her jaw, then sighed. ‘I don’t know how to feel about that, if I’m honest.’ She fell silent for a moment, then looked over at me. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Kendra, but … your family business kind of sucks.’
‘You know, I’ve never really had to think about it from your perspective before.’
Alice gave me a downcast smile. ‘That’s sad.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, surprising myself as well as her. ‘I’m sorry for what your family is going through.’
‘Thank you for saying that. Aren’t you constantly stressed and worried, though? Your whole business would collapse if you get caught.’
‘It hasn’t so far, and we’ve been in business for the past hundred years.’
She didn’t seem convinced, and I didn’t feel the need to rectify that. Trying to justify decisions that had been made decades before I was born seemed pointless.
‘The danger comes from the people we work with. They aren’t exactly upstanding citizens.’
‘Neither are you,’ Alice pointed out, not unreasonably.
‘I’ve never killed anyone.’
‘Yet you carry around a gun.’
‘Because I deal with people who have definitely killed someone,’ I said with a shrug.
Alice finally turned round, mirroring my position by leaning on the barrier and staring out at the river. The setting sun was reflecting off the windows of the tall buildings on the other side of the river, making them glow orange.
‘If you want out,’ I said, ‘you still can. I’ll give you a call when I find the jewelry.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said, leaning in to press her arm against mine.
‘But what if we run into another of those not-upstanding citizens? I can’t promise you everything will be fine next time.
’ The mission was starting to split into three distinct branches: find the jewelry, keep Alice safe, find out the truth behind my mom’s death.
My anxiety around successfully achieving all three was growing with each passing day.
‘I can handle myself,’ she continued firmly.
‘Not against these people.’
‘Kendra,’ she said forcefully. ‘You’re not getting rid of me.’
I smiled, but I couldn’t help but feel conflicted.
‘Can we get out of here now?’ she asked.
I glanced over my shoulder again. There was still no sign of any security guards.
‘Sure. Let’s go.’