Chapter 59 Vivian
Vivian
February
“Paramedics are on the way,” Rose reports in a shaky voice. Her face is ashen as she pulls back the chairs, creating more space for Graham’s resuscitation efforts.
Peter, Michael, and the bartender alternate doing CPR, while Oliver simply stands there looking at his father with eyes bugged out like he’s on some acid trip.
It doesn’t look hopeful; Graham is as gray as Nantucket fog.
Others have gotten wind of the situation and are reentering the room in droves. The restaurant is now as full as it was during its dinner prime, perhaps fuller. No Xavier, though, Vivian notes. The air in Canton’s has become stuffy, suffocating.
“Likely heart attack,” someone murmurs.
“Second heart attack,” someone else adds.
“Oh my God,” says a man whom Vivian recognizes as a statehouse reporter for The Boston Globe.
He’s not much of a journalist, chasing stories that aren’t really stories.
She can almost see his wheels turning. Good luck with that, she thinks sarcastically.
Given the secrecy surrounding the Knox, she’s pretty sure they’d break him before he could break this story.
It feels strange to be gathered with these people, watching this like it’s some sort of performance art.
Vivian is reminded of when her mother abruptly fell on the street, the mask of the disease she’d tried to cover up finally slipping.
Vivian had felt useless then, paralyzed with the realization that something was seriously wrong, like Oliver must be now.
She almost feels sorry for him. The memory creates a heaviness in her chest—Vivian needs to leave, get some space.
She escapes into the hall. The air feels like a cool drink of water. Taking a deep breath, she looks around. She’s not alone. A figure is quickly absconding down the hall.
The girl with the blue hair.
Vivian instinctively follows. The girl is walking at a fast clip, blue locks bobbing with each step. She leaves a cloud of cheap perfume in her wake. Vivian holds her breath, trailing behind. As they near the grand staircase, a loud knock pounds at the front door. The paramedics?
The girl quickens her pace, disappearing around a bend.
Vivian follows, securing her Chanel purse in a cross-body style.
The hall becomes narrower, darker. She just assumed this hall dead-ended, but now that she’s thinking about the building’s orientation, she realizes there are whole swathes of rooms below—and above—her.
The place is disorienting. The night of her sleepover, when she wandered around searching for secretaries, she was one level up—at least, she thinks she was.
Right now, in the wake of everything else that threatens to turn her mind inside out, Vivian finds all she can focus in on, all she cares about at this moment, with an almost overwhelming desire, is figuring out who this girl is.
But she’s gone.
As Vivian turns the corner, the hall is frustratingly empty.
Did she disappear into one of the many rooms with closed doors Vivian now passes?
Or did she perhaps take this small elevator tucked into the wall?
Vivian pauses to listen; there’s no grinding of elevator machinery, but there is the distant padding of steps.
Vivian follows the sound; it’s coming from an adjacent door. As she cups her ear against it, the door swings inward. She nearly falls over, stumbling onto a landing from which a metal spiral staircase winds upward. The stairwell is dark, but from beyond, footsteps ricochet.
The girl must be climbing these stairs.
Where do they lead? Vivian runs her hand along the banister as she, too, starts up.
She keeps thinking of the way the girl clutched Peter’s shoulders, as if she had a right to touch him.
Vivian bypasses a landing and continues ascending the stairs to arrive at—if her calculations are correct—the fourth floor.
The way Peter was so quick to help her with the suitcase.
The stairs continue to spiral upward to yet another floor, but something is pulling Vivian to this one.
The way Peter leaned into the girl.
Vivian is faced with two doors; she tries the first, cracking it halfway open.
It’s a back entrance into a magnificent bedroom that feels like the inside of a jewelry box: deep-navy walls, a stunning Murano glass chandelier, copper-colored silk drapes, a brass four-poster bed with a deep rose-gold paisley velvet comforter.
Graham’s room? She does a quick scan; there are no secretaries, but on the wall hangs a large seascape oil painting that takes her breath away: It’s Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.
Christ.
Vivian backtracks, stunned. If the girl disappeared into that room, Vivian’s not about to follow. She tries the second door, wondering what might possibly be behind this one.
It couldn’t be more opposite: a long, darkened corridor.
At the far end, there’s shadowy movement—the girl?
—followed by the slow groan of a door opening.
Vivian hastens down the hall, but just as she reaches the door, it clicks shut.
She grasps the knob, desperately trying to turn it, but it’s no use. It’s locked. Shit.
She’s lost her.
Suddenly, Vivian becomes aware of how absurdly she’s acted. What is she doing? Peter must be wondering where she is. And where is she, anyway? A quick glance through the only window seems to indicate she is in between buildings, like this long hall connects the Knox with another entity.
Just then, her purse vibrates, and she startles. There must be a pocket of reception here, by the window. Her hands feel like putty as she combs through to find the phone.
Vivian’s text to Rachel about the “pigeons on the building” apparently went through because Rachel’s responded.
Yes…remember when Xavier said one of the jewelers on the top floor in his building used to “bomb” aka clean the jewelry in a sink in front of his open window with a window fan blowing? And then there were all the dead pigeons of the roof…
It is slowly coming back to Vivian. She quickly sends a response, praying that Rachel is by her phone.
Yes…. now I do. But what was the reason again that the birds died??
Rachel immediately replies:
Bc the bombing process uses cyanide to clean the jewelry. So the fan would blow the cyanide out the window onto the pigeons and kill them!!!
Vivian gasps, and the phone tumbles out of her hands onto the floor.
Xavier’s note suddenly makes sense, though Vivian wishes it didn’t.
Send my love to Rachel and Claudius. Can’t wait for the common play. The Shakespeare play she, Rachel, and Xavier watched together on the Boston Common was Hamlet. Claudius is one of the characters in Hamlet. Claudius, who poisons his brother to ascend the throne.
We’ll raise a toast and clink our dirty martinis with extra olives.
This is a reference to both Oliver—olives—and again to poison.
Xavier was giving a nod to what Vivian previously taught him about clinking: It was historically performed to mix the contents of the two glasses, in case one contained poison.
Xavier’s message is as clear as that overhead Murano glass chandelier she’d spied in the bedroom: Oliver planned to poison his father with cyanide.
Christ. Vivian’s stomach drops. No, she thinks. No, no, no. She was there; she saw it happen. Graham had a heart attack.
Or did he?
What did she see, other than the man collapse over his food? It was possible. Oliver could have somehow slipped cyanide in his father’s food or drink.
But where would Oliver have gotten the cyanide from?
Dread slowly inches its way down her spine. Xavier. Oliver must have gotten it from Xavier, who holds that jeweler’s permit for cyanide.
Christ. What was he thinking?
Remember when I told you and Rachel about the pigeons on my building? I wish I’d known that was going to happen. Xavier likely meant he’d supplied the cyanide, but he didn’t realize it was going to be used to poison Graham.
Still—it doesn’t really matter if he didn’t realize. Graham is dead. Xavier is in way over his head at the Knox. And, right now, so is Vivian.
Michael witnessed her snooping around—and he knows about her ancestral link.
What if they have sniffed out her true intentions?
And what if they got to Xavier’s note before she did?
The envelope was unsealed—had it already been opened?
Even if they didn’t understand the note’s meaning, they would have realized Xavier knows Vivian—and that he was trying to deliver a message to her.
The Knox is far, far more dangerous than she’s given it credit for. They even have the fucking stolen Rembrandt! What to do, what to do, what to do? She knows, deep down, what she cannot do: return to Peter and pretend like everything is fine.
Rachel’s words about the Knox/Thurgood family plot now echo in her head, how everyone was buried there.
“Everyone except Margaret.”
The Knox clearly has no issues covering up their crimes; Vivian’s not about to be another job for their cleanup crew.
She needs to get the hell out of here.
Jabbing at the phone with a trembling hand, she deletes her messages with Rachel.
Then she rushes back the way she came, scurrying down the metal staircase.
Her feet feel, for once, clunky in Louboutins; her heart is in her throat.
Thoughts swirl maddeningly around her. Who at the Knox orchestrated Graham’s poisoning?
Oliver? Michael? Peter insinuated there was transition underfoot at the Knox and dissenting schools of thought.
Peter, she recalls, was Team Oliver. Is Peter in on this?
Did Peter off Graham to implement the desired change?
But Peter was doing CPR on Graham. He seemed genuinely shaken, unless that was an act.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she bursts through the door that deposits her back on the second floor. Luckily, no one is in the immediate vicinity, but she should have been more careful. She’s not thinking properly. Her brain is like the inside of a dated media cabinet, wires all askew.
She edges along the same hall that she confidently strutted down minutes earlier.
She’s finding it so hard to propel forward, so hard to think.
Fear clings to her, hot, sweaty. Each half step she manages toward the grand staircase—and the front door of the Knox—feels like a hard-earned victory.
She could really use one of her Xanax right about now. Or two.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she spots movement. She’s not alone.
She halts, hyperaware of the crack her hip makes just then. She draws in a breath and holds it as if that could make her disappear.
The figure does not move. It—he?—waits for her. Who is it?
They stay like that for a few solid seconds. Then, her eyes slowly adjust, taking in the gold filigree frame surrounding the person. It’s a mirror, for crying out loud. A large hanging mirror that she must have missed seeing earlier. She’s looking at herself. She almost laughs, she’s so relieved.
In a few more steps, the staircase comes into sight. Relief washes over her. She feels like she’s rounding the last corner of a marathon. The hall remains empty, faint echoes of the ongoing commotion in Canton’s Restaurant carrying down the corridor.
At the top of the stairs she pauses for a moment, wondering if she should find Peter before leaving. But then she realizes it’s a stupid idea, even if he’s not involved.
As she extends her foot, about to descend, she feels a sharp, strong shove from behind. She stumbles, missteps. The stairs come crashing at her, like a wave that entraps her in its current, pounding her over and over. There’s hurt and black and waves and surprise and and
and