Chapter 30
TESSA
The blue comb lies on a white background in Alison's photograph.
For a moment I don't understand why it's so clean. I remember holding it above Beatrice's hair while she tilted her head for me, impatient to see herself. There should be a mirror behind it. There should be a woman complaining that she always blinks in pictures.
Instead, there's a little scale along the edge of the image.
I stop turning the cuff in my hands. One of my fingers is still inside the sleeve, caught against the copper bat I embroidered there. A thread has worked loose along its wing. Across the fitting table, Peggy sets her scissors down with both blades closed.
“That's mine,” I say. “I lent it to her.”
Alison leaves the photograph where I can see it. She hasn't brought the comb itself to The Ninth Masque. It belongs with the things the police took from Ethan's studio, and the thought of it lying among his possessions makes my skin tighten beneath my dress.
“We compared it with your launch photographs and your earlier description,” she says. “I wanted you to see it before I showed you the rest.”
Peggy comes around the table. Her skirt brushes mine as she takes the stool beside me, close enough that our knees touch.
Since Sunday, she's stopped asking whether there could still be an explanation.
I didn't know how much I'd been waiting for her to ask again until I hear only the scrape of the stool.
The three photographs Alison lays out next are ordinary portraits.
Beatrice is first. Her hair falls over one shoulder, and she's smiling at someone beyond the edge. I recognize Flora from the cropped picture we've already seen. The third woman has her mouth slightly open, as though Ethan caught her about to answer a question.
“Donna,” Alison says, touching the white border beneath her. “Autumn of twenty twenty-four. Flora was killed the following year.”
I look at Donna longer than I mean to. The date should put a safe distance between us. Instead, it gives him another whole year of buying coffee and telling women where the good light is.
Alison's folder rests against a stack of tissue paper on the table. Behind it, a child's borrowed storybook has been left open to the drawing I used for a cape clasp. The nonsense of those things sharing a surface nearly makes me cry.
“All three were photographed by Ethan,” she says. “The original files and booking records agree. We've verified belongings from the older cases with the families. This isn't just a resemblance between chairs.”
Peggy leans forward to look at the photographs. Her hand misses the table edge on its first attempt and finds it on the second. I put the cuff down before I can pull a stitch loose.
“You think he killed them.”
“Yes. We have an arrest warrant. We're looking for him now.”
The words are so plain that I wait for another sentence to change them. Alison doesn't offer one. The studio originals, the belongings, the things he knew about Beatrice, all the little pieces that seemed too strange to hold at once have become something the police can act on.
Ethan killed women, and we let him hang his coat beside ours.
Peggy turns her face away from the table. I can see her trying to swallow. On Sunday she'd cried into a hotel napkin until it came apart, furious at herself for remembering that he'd once brought her dinner. Now she presses her palms against her skirt and stays very still.
“He took pictures of me in that chair,” she says.
Alison moves the folder away from Peggy's elbow. “I know.”
“I liked them.”
My chest hurts at the smallness of her voice. I want to take her out of this room before she can put her own face beside those three. The door is open, with Matvei just beyond it, but leaving would mean standing up and admitting that I can't bear the table either.
I reach for her instead.
“Peggy. You were supposed to like them. He made sure you would.”
She lets me hold her hand. Her nails leave little crescents in my skin when she squeezes, and I'm grateful for the pain because it gives me something simple to feel.
Alison lets the silence last. Then she collects the pictures, turning them facedown before sliding them into the folder. I don't ask to keep copies. I want to remember Beatrice tugging at her mask and checking whether the comb sparkled, not the little ruler beside a piece of jewelry.
The women in the older photographs deserve memories somebody loved too.
Alison asks about fresh messages. There haven't been any. Peggy gives her phone a hateful glance, then pushes it into her bag. The absence of a new threat hasn't made her stop checking.
When Bogdan arrives at the fitting-room door, Peggy rises so quickly that the stool rocks behind her. He catches it before it falls and puts it back beneath the table. His coat carries a faint smell of rain, although his hair is dry.
For a second I want to fold myself into him and stop being brave in front of everyone. He looks at the empty space where the photographs were, then at my face.
“She showed us,” I say.
He comes close enough for me to lean against his side. His hand settles at my back, warm through the green wool of my dress. There's no satisfaction in his expression, no pleasure at having hated the right man.
“Fern's upstairs,” he says. “She brought what Klim asked for.”
Peggy takes her bag off the table.
I expect her to ask to go back to the hotel. Instead, she straightens the stool and looks toward the corridor.
“Then I want to hear it.”
We go upstairs together. I leave the unfinished cuff beside the closed scissors, its copper stitching bright beneath the work lamp.
Fern is sitting in Bogdan's office with her phone attached to its charging cable. Klim stands beside the desk. The familiar raven chandelier shows through the smoked glass behind them, black wings suspended over a room that will never look harmless to me again.
There's a paper cup of tea near Fern's knee. She hasn't taken the lid off. Her usual lipstick has worn away in the middle, leaving a hard pink outline around her mouth.
She starts to stand when we enter, but Bogdan directs her back into the chair. Peggy takes the sofa, and I sit beside her. Alison draws a chair closer to the desk while Klim turns the screen of a laptop toward her.
Fern watches the detective look at it. Whatever version of this meeting she'd prepared has stopped working.
“I sent him the schedules,” she says. “The full ones.”
The leather beneath my legs creaks as I shift forward. For weeks we've been working around strangers knowing which door we'd use and when we'd be alone in a passage. Fern sits ten feet away with a coffee stain on the toe of her boot, admitting she helped make that possible.
“Which schedules?” Peggy asks.
“The launch. Bellquay. The ball. Anything he was photographing. He said he needed arrivals and fitting times, so I forwarded the whole attachments.”
Alison checks the displayed messages against Fern's phone. Klim has kept the original exchanges with their attachments, he says. The revised ball sheet is there too, sent after the change that evening. Ethan hadn't needed to guess when we'd come downstairs.
I remember the way he used to appear with a camera already in his hand, smiling as though he'd been lucky to find us. My stomach contracts. I press my shoe flat against the carpet until the heel stops wobbling.
Fern looks at me. “They were work schedules, Tessa.”
“With our movements on them.”
Her eyes slide toward Bogdan. He stays behind the desk, and the silence he gives her is worse than shouting would be. She turns back to us without an answer.
I don't believe she knew about the murders.
I can see how small she'd thought her part was, a forwarded attachment between conversations about publicity.
That makes me angry in a different way. She'd found time to use a photograph of me to sell cheap costumes, but never time to wonder what else she was giving away.
“You gave him everything because it was easier,” Peggy says.
Fern grips the paper cup. The lid buckles beneath her thumb, and tea darkens a line down the side. She sets it on the desk before any reaches her trousers.
“Yes,” she says.
Peggy sits back. She doesn't look triumphant. Her shoulders have dropped, and the bag she brought upstairs lies twisted in her lap. Getting the answer hasn't given her the afternoon at Ethan's studio back.
Alison asks Fern to keep the originals and supply the remaining account records.
Their brief exchange stays on the dates and files.
Nothing points to someone in Bogdan's house.
The schedules came from the work we were doing in public buildings, passed along by a woman who wanted every event to run smoothly enough to make her money.
Bogdan closes the laptop after Alison finishes with it.
“You won't promote another event at my venues,” he tells Fern.
She starts to object. He doesn't lean forward or raise his voice, and she stops after the first word. I watch her understand that there isn't a cheaper package or a better photograph that will get her another meeting.
“Finish giving the police what they need,” he says. “Klim will walk you out.”
Fern unplugs her phone. The cable catches beneath the cup, nearly tipping it, and she has to set everything down to free it.
I used to hate how effortlessly she could make me feel overdressed and underprepared in the same room.
Watching her struggle with a piece of white plastic gives me no pleasure at all.
At the door she looks at Peggy. “I'm sorry.”
Peggy nods once. She doesn't offer to make it easier for her.
Klim takes Fern downstairs, and Alison follows after confirming she can reach both of us. The door shuts. I hear the office clock for the first time, a small steady sound above the bookcase.
Bogdan comes around the desk. “I'm cancelling the public party,” he says. “Every ticket gets refunded.”
I look through the glass at the chandelier. Beneath it are weeks of work, the reason Peggy and I hired extra help and spent our September evenings with pin marks on our wrists. For a second I can hear the room full of people admiring everything we made.
Then I remember three portraits on tissue paper.
“Good,” I say.
It comes out more fiercely than I expect. Peggy reaches across the sofa and hooks her little finger around mine.
Bogdan calls Kirill while we're there. The instruction is brief and final. Refund the tickets already sold, publish the cancellation, keep the workers paid. No replacement public event, no private list of guests slipped in under a different name.
He ends the call and sits on the low table facing us. His knees nearly touch mine.
“You still get paid for what you've made.”
“We have orders to get out,” Peggy says. “People who aren't coming here.”
“Your escorts stay. Finish what you promised, then stop.”
I rub a tiny rough patch on my thumb, left by a needle earlier this morning. The work suddenly feels possible again when I picture it ending. Garment bags leaving with their proper labels, customers receiving the costumes they wanted, Peggy closing the order book instead of refreshing her messages.
The little supper for the workers stays on the calendar.
It was planned before the threat became a name, and most of them are already working here since the fire.
Now it will be a smaller meal behind locked public doors, with the people Klim has checked and the guards already covering the building.
No photographer, no promoter, no hired entertainment.
Bogdan will be downstairs with us. When the supper ends, the women and the remaining staff leave with their escorts. We won't be waiting for a party to finish or carrying boxes through a crowd.
I think of the unfinished waistcoat intended for him, the one I fitted on the afternoon he didn't tell me about Ethan. I still want to see him wear it. The wanting catches me by surprise, stubborn and painful beneath everything else.
He takes my hand off my thumb before I can rub the skin raw.
“Come here a minute.”
I move beside him on the table and lean into his shoulder. Peggy stays close enough that our skirts overlap. For once, nobody tries to fill the office with an answer.
When we go back downstairs, the tea I left in the fitting room is cold. I take a sip anyway. The peach flavor is faintly bitter, but it wets my dry mouth, and the smell from the open tin beside it reminds me that I made it before Alison arrived.
The cuff is still beneath the lamp.
I turn it inside out and check the last stitches. The little bat needs one more loop of copper thread to hold its wing flat. Peggy opens the order book beside me, finding the page with the final deliveries.
My phone lights up with the club's cancellation notice. A white box covers the old party photograph. I watch it until the screen dims, then set it facedown and reach for my needle.
On Saturday, I want to leave with everyone I came with.